Art as Compression

An enthymeme is a syllogism with one term missing. A = B, therefore A = C. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that metaphors are basically like enthymemes.

I got to thinking that an enthymeme was a compressed syllogism, in the same way that a zip file was a compressed file. It has a bit of information removed.

This means that on Aristotle's view, art is a kind of compressed logic. It's not a total lie (The Republic) or a demonic force (Ion): Plato's views. It's a specific substance whose qualities reside in the fact that it's a dense, compacted form of thinking with some bits missing.

Of course this doesn't mean that enthymemes (and poems and plays) are true. But it also doesn't mean that they are total fictions. They refer to reality in some meaningful way. Now that meaningful way might be incorrect or deceptive. But they are oriented to reality.

For Aristotle, then, a play is not a bad photocopy of reality, but a richer version of some proposition about reality. The idea that art is compression implies that there is a real world and that there can be good and bad art. It also implies that rhetoric isn't just candy: it can also be protein. It might be deceptive protein, but the problem is not that it's superficial, but dense.

OOO is inspired both by the mystery of Plato and the workmanlike quality of Aristotle. On the one hand, art is a parody of things, just as any causal interaction is (Plato). On the other, art has a specific texture, as it compresses truths (Aristotle).

On Aristotle's view, poetry is dangerous, not because you might imitate bad or stupid stuff, but because it might very effective. This effectiveness derives from its compressed state.

Here's a good example: Palin's tweet, “Obama's nuclear treaty is like saying ‘Please hit me’ to bullies.” Before you have time to figure out the vulnerable, suspect term that she's cut out, you get the full force of the compression.

A strange conclusion from this is that poetry gets its power from having less information than logic! This is counter-intuitive to those of us who studied structuralism, whose ultimate aesthetic idea is that “information is beauty” (Yuri Lotman). On my view, beauty has to do with information loss.

We're used to thinking of logic as dry and thin, while poetry is rich. What the compression theory tells us is that this richness doesn't tell us more about the world. It tells us the same about the world, in a more compact way.