Why Steampunk? (Help me with my philosophy paper)

[Mad Miss Holmes]

So I need a bit of help. I've got a couple of lovely paragraphs about the delicate balance of form and function and the return to a more civilised way of life, but I need some help articulating exactly why it's necessary to balance the romantic with the classical mode of thinking. Why is it important that an article be beautiful as well as functional? Why is it important that some of the "old ways" be preserved? (I tried to be ambitious earlier and define beauty, but realised eventually that if Socrates failed, it doesn't seem likely that I'll succeed in the time I have left to complete this.)

[patron_vectras]

One never knows when an adventure might ensue. Integrating function into daily clothing mitigates the risk associated with appearing in public without the "more effective" pieces of wardrobe/armory ;]

Just look at the sword cane, opera top hat, and goggles.

• a sword cane lends a sizeable weapon to any occasion, even the most formal!
• opera top hats can be collapsed down to a size easily stored in any venue
• why wear sunglasses if you could have tinted lenses AND eye protection?

[Mad Miss Holmes]

Hmm. Sword canes, opera hats and goggles make me happy, but I'm not sure that's metaphysical enough for my professor's tastes.
What I'm trying to figure out (and failing, due to shortage of caffeine) is why that chance of adventure is necessary in today's society. Obviously it is; there's too much mental stagnation. A hundred years ago, society was cranking out great men and women who were recongised as great even in their day, authors, scientists, politicians... Today, we're lucky to find one every decade. Literature and science in particular have gone down the tubes, and politics has become far more a question of being re-elected than of actually accomplishing something to be remembered by future generations. It may be partly because we're running out of firsts, which makes it difficult to break the mould, but I'm inclined to think that it's also largely the product of epidemic complacency.
[/brainstorm]

[patron_vectras]

It may be partly because we're running out of firsts,

So the little adventures in life must be cherished and flushed to the fullest. Each conversation must be allowed its breath. Self-exploration is always there for us to pursue! Personally, every time I look in the mirror, I see a different person. The stories I write expose parts of my personality that I realize while writing. The conversations which occur in the night bring our inner working to the light of day.

better?

I built a gingerbread abomination just three hours prior with my roomies (all three of us are in architecture!), so there is quite a bit of sugar in these veins ;]

[Mad Miss Holmes]

That's very true. The little adventures train us for the big adventures. A society that avoids or ignores the little adventures is ill equipped to handle the truly important things.

[patron_vectras]

Why is it important that some of the "old ways" be preserved?

The structures applied to instances of human contact let all the awkwardness pass so real business and pleasure can be gotten to.

 "Would you like to dance?"
"Sure, we both now how because we are civilized."
 "I am having so much fun! If I was afraid of bumping in to you improperly, I would never be this open."
"If you bumped in to me awkwardly, there would be hell to pay."
 "Ha, yup... You're eyes are pretty."
"Thanks!"


 When the structure is not passed on, chaos ensues.

[Mad Miss Holmes]

So that's manners in a purely practical light. But again, balance is required. There are some instances when stiff formality, however aesthetic, is so time-consuming as to be irksome, or so formulaic as to be ridiculous. It is truly rude, for instance, to insist on opening doors for a feminist whom you know to be offended by the gesture, since the point of etiquette is to avoid causing offence whenever possible.

I apologise if I seem to be shooting down what you say, but the point is to present arguments and counter-arguments, so I'm trying to think from both sides of the debate.

[von Adler]

Adventure is necessary, because its lack breeds stagnation, which in turn saps the life out of both individuals and societies. Necessity is the mother of invention, but there is no necessity without the chance of (mis)adventure; a society where no chance of adventure occurs becomes fetid and will crumble both mentally and physically until it collapses (and the cycle starts over).

Old ways, or at least the knowledge of them must be preserved, because all knowledge must be preserved; either for it's own sake, because it forms the foundation of future knowledge, or because it may some day become necessary yet again.

[TimeTinker]

Good manners began purely as a social code to facilitate interaction between humans.  They are functional in origin but some have changed until they are only symbolic of their function - even so that symbolism can serve a purpose.

A soldier salutes a senior officer.  Originally this showed his empty hand and, that he was unarmed and thus no threat to his superior. Now it serves as a symbol of his acceptance of his superior's authority.

Because good manners are a social code they are however evolving as society evolves.  Holding open a door for a lady is a signal by a gentleman of respect for another person.  If a woman finds it offensive and patronising that shows how her social code has changed from the code operated by the other person. A woman actively rejecting the gesture says far more about her own feelings and attempts to assert herself than it does about the gentleman holding the doors attitudes or values.

Remember these codes are learnt they are not inate. If a teacher reprimands a student the western code is to demand eye contact to ensure the student is paying attention and accepts the point whilst the eastern code is to avoid eye contact so the student shows acceptance of the teacher's authority.

Good manners are the oil which allows the wheels of society to turn.  Steampunks actively seek to promote a different interactive code than their non steampunk peers. This serves
1. To bond steampunks together giving a sense of belonging.
2. To reject current manners as innefective or undesireable.
3. To present steampunks as non threatening and approachable (since the code is familiar to most even if not adhered to) which avoids the antagonsim usually faced by new and alternative movements.

Good manners therefore both have form and function.  The codes adopted by steampunks are a reflection of their philosophical beleifs.

Hope that is helpful. (I'm actually a psychologist rather than a philosopher by training but the crossover here is very clear.

[patron_vectras]

I'm not in meta-thinker mode, but you're supposed to be. Taking advantage of that by simply throwing out examples didn't hurt, I hope.

drawing a blank right now. I have to go to sleep ;]

[MechanicalMouse]

I believe you hit upon some good points, I like this comment about Politicians only looking to get re-elected rather than make a difference.

Here are some thoughts of my own..


Why the Old ways:
We don't want to keep the Old Ways. A lot of the old ways where bad, there are mistakes in our past and we recogise those, however there are ideals from our past that should not be discarded at the same time. These ideals have a place in our modern life. We want to take the best parts of our past to shape a better future.

For me the ideals from the past are Respect, Knowledge and Discovery.

Why Respect:
There are two factors that form a coherent society Fear and Respect. These two ideals are so entwined that Hebrew uses the same work for both. The original phrase behind "God fearing" can also  be translated as "God respecting".

Respect as a binding force in our society has slowly been replaced with fear. Fear of crime, strangers, terrorists, bird flu, pig flu, and so on. And fear breeds fear. While it may be a quote from a fictional character "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." is apt and true.

We wish to bring back respect into our society. Repect leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to Understanding. Understanding leads to Knowledge. And with enough knowledge anything is posible.

Why Knowledge.
We are in the information age, constantly surrounded by data. Its on tap and instantly accessable. But that is all it is, data. But are we any more knowledgeable for it? Many people let the information stream over them and wash around them, a quick "fix" of an information high.

To really have form and function we are having to learn and adapt. So we fish out what we want to know and use it, we have a purpose. Purpose turns information into knowledge.

Why Discovery.
We have focused on an age of discovery where science and advancement was open to the layman. Today discovery happens in tiny iterations, there are no leaps just a gentle shuffle forwards. We are rediscovering and reinventing, and in doing so learning. We may not change the world but we can affect our little world. And maybe, by going back to the basic building blocks that the modern world is built on, we might find something new.

I hope this helps

[Waterbug]

Why is it important that an article be beautiful as well as functional?

It's not important. A purely beautiful item can be important as can a purely functional item.

However, for some things function is another dimension of beauty.

Sitting in the open air on a warm summer evening watching a sunset on a beautiful landscape will always be more beautiful than a landscape painting of the same scene done by a master.

A single gear is beautiful. A gear meshing with another is more beautiful. It adds movement for one. But more important I think is why we think a gear is beautiful. I think it is those tiny little teeth. We know they do tremendous things, literally move mountains. It is a power we understand but can hardly fully grasp. And for anyone who has learned a bit about all the ways gear teeth are shaped, well it is art. The curves, the shapes. When you look very close and see how the teeth push at different points as it rotates it is sear beauty, at least to me. So when I see a gear meshing nicely I am reminded of that beauty happening just out of sight.

I do think understanding the steampunk aesthetic is the key to understanding steampunk. It is kind of amazing you can put an object in front of a steampunk and they can instantly declare it steampunk or not. And that many steampunks would agree. But yet there are no written rules, training, etc...

I think it must be like when the first impressionism paintings were being done. I doubt the painters themselves knew why they were painting that way, just that it seemed right. It's just reflecting something in society that was changing to allow lots of artists and patrons to all start to agree on a new look. A look that would have been totaly rejected even a few years earlier. As time went on it became much more clear what was changing as more and more changes took place.

It is like art is a leading indicator. I think steampunk is like that now. Something has change in us that all of this now seems right but we're not sure why and we don't know where it is going, if any place at all, but we're going there, pushing it.

[Sorontar]

Not everyone knows everything. Even a community with common interests (e.g. a football league, the plumbing industry, an automobile club) will contain many people of different knowledge and skills. If you believe approaches like Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave & Wenger 1991) then part of what makes a community like that sustain itself and its members is the "sharing" of that information through participation in the community. Part of that participation is sharing experiences to other members. The outcome is not only "training" members but also can change the community itself. This can include changing the expected behaviour of members in how to perform actions, but also in setting the social norms within the community.

So Steampunk in itself may be able to be considered such a community of interest. Arguing that in itself is essay (or maybe a PhD). I won't try that here.

Now, this is fine within the community, but can it be extended to the larger society? That is another issue too. The motivation for members of society to contribute and participate themselves is not as obvious. Steampunk is not influential enough yet to change the norms and practises of society. However, it can work on an individual level. The Steampunk community contains may people with non-standard skills and non-standard uses of knowledge. While we may not be able to change society, we can add to the experience of its members. By showing them something new by showing them something old, we change their personal list of experiences. This may not have an obvious affect, but it will enlighten them in some way which just might change a few of their future decisions.

After all, it is said that if you keep doing the same thing too much, it will become second nature but not open to change in how you do it. If you have new experiences every now and then, you will find that you are that little more flexible in how you look at the world when problem solving.

Well done if you have read this far :^)

[Waterbug]

Chicken and the egg. Something made us ready for steampunk.

Should steampunk ever become influential enough to change society I would say the change had already been completed. The end of the movement is then started as the group tries to push in directions, or freeze the ethos, and society keeps right on moving on its own course.

I am not aware of having any steampunk training at least before I became steampunk, which may be the best kind of training. Maybe watching 20,000 Leagues on TV as a kid? The first time I saw a steampunk object I was instantly (less than 10 minutes) steampunk. I've heard similar stories. I had never heard of steampunk before. Only after that has the group changed me.

But of course it is also true that a group can influence people into coming into that group. In the late 1960's I bought bell bottoms, a medallion necklace and grew my hair out. I had no idea what a hippie was or cared at all what that movement had to say and I never considered myself a hippie. I just wanted to get laid. I was like 14. So I don't disagree with Legitimate Peripheral Participation, but I think it only defines a segment of a group.

[Maj. Clive Hathaway]

So that's manners in a purely practical light. But again, balance is required. There are some instances when stiff formality, however aesthetic, is so time-consuming as to be irksome, or so formulaic as to be ridiculous.

Try getting ANYTHING done in Japan, for instance.

Its been awhile since i was in a philosophy class, but i remember a quote from some august sage that went "nothing truly useless can be beautiful". I disagree.

[Mr. Boltneck]

This touches on subjects that I have thought about often since I was a product design major 25 years ago. I was never comfortable with what I saw in many cases as a contrived dichotomy between function and form. With continued reading, research, and practice as a designer (mostly graphics, but since the rise of modern user interface, the division is increasingly fuzzy between product and graphic design), I got a better grip on the history of 20th Century design, and the origins of some ideas which were taught almost as fundamental principles.
The ferment of early 20th Century modernism produced a number of different movements and opinions, which later generations have attempted, ahistorically in my view, to mash together as a single "modern" viewpoint. While there are certainly overlaps and influences in all directions, the element which closest to being common in all of these movements is a reaction against the 19th Century.
Going all the way back to the Arts and Crafts movement, there was a response to the rise of mass production. Morris and his cohorts are often depicted as merely reactionary, but Morris himself designed wallpapers and other mass-produced articles. More exactly, and in retrospect, the Arts and Crafts movement aimed to separate the design decisions from the manufacturing ones, so that while designs might ultimately go into mass production, they were informed by the skill and taste of an artist/craftsman, not just a jobbing factory foreman. In a sense, this is where the modern notions of industrial design and graphic design begin.
By the early 20th Century, however, there was a growing desire to separate design from all quaint and extraneous elements, and celebrate the idea of a new "pure" art, which would strip away old ideas of ornament, pictorial representation, or prettiness, and instead have a dynamic art for an age of speed and power. This finds early expression shortly before WWI with the beginnings of abstract art, and in Italian Futurism. After the devastation of the war, which to many artists and intellectuals had called the "Old Order" and its culture into question, this expanded into Constructivism, the rise of the Bauhaus, Dada, de Stijl, Vorticism, and so forth and so on. The common thread was that ornament and decorativeness were obscuring the emerging purity of functional design, and that they were part of the old, despised culture which had ground millions of people into the mud of the war.
The subsequent decades, before and after WWII, only solidified this position, particularly as the Nazis, Facisti, and their sympathizers in other countries all wanted to declare modernism "decadent" and "degenerate." By the 1950's, an appreciation of International Style Modernism was more or less a pre-requisite for not being a yahoo in most circles. Several generations of designers, mine included, were inculcated with this ideal, and such slogans as "Less is more", "Form follows function" or "A house is a machine for living in."
All this is by way of a quick summary of "how we got there." The problem I started to have was that this approach seemed to produce a lot of glibly sterile work, far more often than it produced triumphs of beautiful form. I began to wonder whether form beyond the minimal and functional had a purpose, and questioning precisely what we actually mean by "function" in the first place.
If we look at the wider culture (i.e., the bits not approved and reviewed by Domus and ID and such journalistic bastions), it is apparent that these "decorative" and non- or a- functional designs in fashion, cars, furnishings, and print actually have a function. For better or worse, they declare group participation and exclusion, status and taste, wealth or a rejection of wealth, and so forth. In other words, I came to realize that what was being willfully neglected in the rush to be modern was that humans are social beings, and that design decisions beyond the functional canon were successful to the extent that they answered these wider dimensions.
I am, of course, far from being the only designer to think about this. I have written primarily in the first person for the sake of brevity and immediacy. But canonical modernism still has a grip on much of industrial design journalism and review, and I am tired of it. I believe that the way forward in the design professions is to admit that the older concept of function is restricted, embryonic, naive, and incomplete. I suspect that embracing social and expressive aspects as part of a broader definition of function will enhance both our designs and the wider culture in which designers participate.

[Maj. Clive Hathaway]

Yeah, if you want proof that useless things CAN be beautiful, just look at the Dada movement...

[Mr. Hatchett]

Its been awhile since i was in a philosophy class, but i remember a quote from some august sage that went "nothing truly useless can be beautiful". I disagree.

I would assert that the opposite is true - that nothing that is beautiful can be truly useless.

[patron_vectras]

Isn't

Inothing that is beautiful can be truly useless.

how it was originally said?

[Mad Miss Holmes]

You've all been extremely helpful, thank you so very much!

[Sgt.Major Thistlewaite]

to...I've waited all day to respond to this thread ...to allow others to respond, to take into account those observations, and to allow our Miss Holmes the broadest selection of viewpoints.

Why Steampunk?

Because Steampunk represents the last, best hope for the future of humankind.

If it were to "catch on," then the acceptance of good manners as a "fad" might literally save us from destruction.

Can't have a much better "why?" than that.

~Thistlewaite

[TheGumbieCat]

Terrance Mckinnah said something about nostalgia being the secret religion of the 20th century.

I also think Heidegger wrote an article on art that would be useful to you (if you can understand it, hard read).  It's about the thingishness of things, and how this thingish quality that exists in things is the root of art.  The value is in the quality of being a thing, and that thing is something that is beyond but still has the essential quality of the thing that it is.  This shows up in subcultures that orient themselves around an aesthetic, because they pay a homage to that thingish quality, and draw out the beneficial and superior qualities that the thing possesses.

I'm really not a philosophy major...I could be interpreting this really wrong however.

[Cubinoid]

[Vagabond GentleMan]

Old ways are preserved, recycled, and re-instituted most importantly, when newer ways prove less fulfilling or valuable.

Perfect example:  The embarrassing lack of manliness and more specifically gentlemanliness in contemporary Western culture.
So we look backward to look forward, because obviously we went wrong somewhere.

20/20 hindsight.