Exploring Stone : A Behavioral Analysis Betsy J. Constantine [email protected] www.bjconstantine.com

“In every block of I see a as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” Attributed to Michelangelo

I have been spending much of my time recently engaged in a challenging activity that heretofore has seemed remote from behavior analysis – carving stone sculpture. Although nothing we do can be truly resistant to a behavioral analysis, there are some interesting challenges associated with analyzing in behavioral terms. Creative behavior is certainly not beyond the pale of behavior analysis, and indeed was discussed off and on by Skinner. In About Behaviorism, he likens creative “thinking” to the production of “mutations” that are selected by their reinforcing consequences: Operant conditioning solves the problem more or less as natural selection solved a similar problem in evolutionary theory. As accidental traits, arising from mutations, are selected by their contribution to survival, so accidental variations in behavior are selected by their reinforcing consequences.” (Skinner, 1974, p. 126) Artists and other creative people, he says, use various strategies to produce these “mutations:” Explicit ways of making it more likely that original behavior will occur by introducing “mutations” are familiar to writers, artists, composers, mathematicians, scientists, and inventors. Either the setting or the topography of behavior may be deliberately varied. The painter varies his colors, brushes, and surfaces to produce new textures and forms. The composer generates new rhythms, scales, melodies, and harmonic sequences, sometimes through the systematic permutation of older forms, possibly with the help of mathematical or mechanical devices. …” (Skinner, 1974, p. 127) As Skinner makes clear, the concept of selection is key to our understanding of creative behavior. For selection to be effective, it is necessary to have plenty of variation in the behavior. Highly creative people thus develop various strategies by which they introduce variations into their behavior. There may be another factor important to the control of creative behavior. Variation is critical to selection, but too much variation may not be beneficial. The existence of some limitations on the huge set of possible responses may act in concert with the mutations Skinner proposed to control more effective creative behavior. One of the reasons I find stone carving so attractive is that the many constraints imposed by the characteristics of the stone serve to limit my options. As I have stated in my Artist Statement, a public document on my website written in decidedly non-behavioral terms: Each stone, created deep in the earth through ancient geological processes, has unique variations in texture, color, and consistency. The intriguing challenge is that these variations in the stone impose constraints on what you can do, forcing

1 a kind of discipline that seems to be the key to my ability to create art. Too many choices paralyze me. In fact, when I work in other media, I find myself looking for similar constraints. (Constantine, 2010) The constraints serve an important, although not well understood, role in my stone carving. My guess is that the stimulus control is tighter and more specific, limiting choices and thus making fewer but stronger responses possible.

Reinforcement Contingencies that Maintain Art Making The products of such mutations are the reinforcing consequences that maintain the artist’s art making behavior. Skinner said, “Paintings are by definition reinforcing in the sense that they are responsible for the fact that artists paint them and people look at them,” (Skinner, 1970, p. 64). Much of the reinforcement that sustains art making is automatic, that is, not mediated by the actions of a social community. As Flora points out, …when a painter has a blank canvas and paints a picture, the picture painted is a consequence of painting. If, as a result of that painting, the painter paints on more canvases, then the picture was a reinforcing consequence of painting. … This is true ‘intrinsic reinforcement,’” (Flora, 2004, p. 83). In accounts of creative behavior in the behavior analysis literature, the distinguishing feature of creative behavior is its novelty (Epstein, 1991; Kubina et al, 2006; Pryor et al, 1969). Creative behavior is behavior that is different from any previously reinforced behavior. But are creative behavior and art making the same thing? Whereas creative behavior has often been defined as novel behavior, an artist does not emit completely novel behavior each time she produces a painting or sculpture. Indeed, if this were so, we could never recognize a piece of art as being the work of a particular artist, because every piece that the artist made would be novel and, by definition, unlike anything else she had made. As Flora so cogently stated: The reinforcing consequences of different variations select the artist’s ‘style.’ If the creative artist were to remain indiscriminately variant, unaffected by the differential consequences of different variation, then it is unlikely we would call the work ‘creative,’ much less ‘important,’ or ‘significant.’ Instead the work is likely to be called ‘scattered,’ or ‘confused.’ Only novelty, not the criteria of utility, would likely be met. If creativity were not a function of reinforcement, then the cubism of Pablo Picasso, impressionism of Claude Monet, or stoicism of Hemingway would not be recognizable as such. Instead their cubism, impressionism, or stoicism would exist as a single variation among many variations, and subsequent works of creative activity would be unaffected by the consequences of previous creative activity. As a result, the work of any artist would be unrecognizable as the work of that artist (other than by signature). If creativity were not a function of naturalistic environmental consequences, but instead originated solely within the creator, then it is just as likely that a cubist work of art would have been produced by Ernest Hemingway or even Skinner as by Picasso! (Flora, 2004, p. 86-87) It seems apparent that the reinforcement of art making has both automatic and social components. Although most of my stone carving behavior is reinforced automatically by the product of that behavior, it is also reinforced by my social community. For example, I

2 continue to sign up for stone carving classes, not so much because I have specific skills to learn, but because there is a group of “students,” also signing up for the class over and over, who form a community. In this community, there is an abundance of mutual reinforcement, most of it associated with intermediate stages in the development of the sculpture. Upon completion, when I’m fortunate, my stone carving is reinforced when a sculpture is accepted into a gallery show. But there may be even more interesting aspects of this stone carving behavior that may bear analysis.

What Do I Do When I Carve a Stone Sculpture? Four years ago, at the urging of several of my artistic friends, I began to take art classes. From almost the first moment, I became enamored of stone carving, although I continued to take classes in other kinds of art making, such as painting and printmaking. But I was hooked on stone carving. Most of us have some idea of what it’s like to mold a clay sculpture, having had some childhood experience in manipulating clay-like material to achieve a form. Making a clay sculpture is at least partially an additive process; you may add more clay to the form until the result is satisfying. Carving stone is a subtractive process. You start with a natural stone. It has irregularities, veins, faults, and various lumps and bumps. It may have mud embedded in it. Stones are very different from one another, even within the broad class of stone called . They have different hardness, different granularity, different translucency, different colors, different veining. They also present very different initial shapes to the sculptor. When I begin a new sculpture, I turn the stone this way and that, looking for – what? After I have lived with a new stone for a while, I begin to “see” a form inside the stone. I have the sense that inside the stone is a form just waiting to emerge. When I talk with people who are not behavior analysts, I tend to describe the initial phase of making a sculpture, when I turn the stone this way and that looking for a form, as a “dialogue” between the stone and me. In my Artist Statement I describe my experience this way: When asked how I come up with a design for a sculpture, I can’t help talking about my dialogue with the stone. It sounds mystical, but the sense of dialogue probably just comes from acknowledging the constraints imposed by each particular stone. The result of this dialogue is a clear idea of what the stone can do and where I need to go with it. Sometimes an image leaps out at me, and sometimes it takes a bit of coaxing. I do all my stone carving by hand because I love the tactile intimacy of slowly uncovering the form with my hands. For me, the joy in making sculpture comes from sharing with others my vision of what’s in the stone. (Constantine, 2010) When I have found the form I will pursue, I pick up my and and start to pare away the excess stone, chip by chip. This is a long, arduous process, with each incremental modification of the stone directed toward matching the visualized form. Multiple comparisons are made with the visualized form, which I turn around in my head to get a different view for comparison with the actual stone. Each hammer strike chips away a particular piece of stone, bringing the stone closer to congruence with the desired

3 form. This process is repeated thousands of times until the form comes close enough to the visualized image that more subtle tools are required. I then pick up my rasps and files and scrape away at the remaining differences between the shape of the stone and the visualized form. After using the rasps and then the files, I make a final judgment of the form. How close is it to the visualized form? How pleasing are the lines and shapes to my eye? Do I need to carve away more stone? I cannot add to the stone; every action takes away stone. While taking away stone, especially in the early stages, one has to be very aware of the locations of the high points in the visualized form; you don’t want to whack off a piece of stone that was destined to be a nose. When the form is satisfying, the surface is polished with sandpaper, starting with coarse and progressing to very fine grit. Finally, coats of wax are applied and polished. To provide some insight into the transformation of a raw stone into a sculpture, Figure 1 shows a set of photographs documenting the development of a sculpture, beginning with the original raw stone, progressing through several stages in the development of the form, and ending with the final sculpture. Each sculpture requires something like fifty to one hundred hours of work to complete. I use hand tools exclusively, because I like the “clink, clink” sound of the hammer on the chisel as it hits the stone, and I like the slow pace of the development of the form.

A Behavioral Interpretation of Stone Carving What do we make of the inconvenient idea that a covert, “visualized image” is important to stone carving? Skinner said, “Seeing in the absence of the thing seen is familiar to almost everyone, but the traditional formulation is a metaphor. We tend to act to produce stimuli which are reinforcing when seen,” (Skinner, 1974, p. 91). Donahoe and Palmer, on the other hand, address the use of imagery in the context of problem-solving: Thus the use of imagery appears to be like other problem-solving behavior: It is guided partly by the stimuli defining a problem, and partly by other (often covert) responses that provide supplementary stimuli. It terminates when a particular target response has been emitted—that is, when the goal has been reached. For present purposes, then, we can define imagery as conditioned perceptual behavior and the use of imagery as perceptual problem-solving behavior—perceptual behavior that occurs when a problem contingency is in effect. It terminates when the target behavior has been emitted—the problem is solved—or when other contingencies become dominant. (Donahoe & Palmer, 1994, p. 338) How does the visualized image function in the control of stone carving behavior? Is the visualized image reinforcing in itself, or does it constitute problem-solving behavior? Probably both.

Conditioned seeing When I look at the stone and turn it this way and that, I’m opening up the opportunity for a kind of “conditioned seeing.” I clearly “see” a form in three dimensions as though it were fitted within the external perimeter of the stone. This seeing behavior is under the

4 5 stimulus control of the varied characteristics of the stone – its shape, its color, its veining, and translucency. I look at the stone with all its particular characteristics, and what I see is another form, perhaps a familiar one, such as a figure, or perhaps a form I’ve never seen before, an abstract form that has no real world reference. Skinner addressed conditioned seeing as follows: A private event is not wholly without practical importance. Stimuli which generate conditioned seeing are often reinforcing because they do so, and they extend the range of reinforcing stimuli available in the control of human behavior. The practical task of generating conditioned stimuli of special effectiveness is an important one, as the artist, writer, and composer know. If it is possible to reinforce a man with the “beauties of nature,” it is usually possible to reinforce him also with conditioned stimuli which evoke responses of seeing the beauties of nature. It is the function of the “word picture” to generate such conditioned seeing. By fusing conditioned and unconditioned seeing the artist makes the observer see the same thing in another way. Nostalgic music is effective if it “reminds one” of happier days, a return to which would also be reinforcing. The extent to which this process is used in art varies from period to period but is always considerable. It is not to be identified with realism or naturalism since the responses appropriate to the effect of pure design are also largely dependent upon experience. (Skinner, 1953, p. 270) How might this work? I see the actual stone, with which I have no history, positive or negative. But as a result of my history with sculptural forms, I respond to it as though it were another form, a figure, perhaps, with which I do have a history, or an abstract form, Or perhaps the seeing behavior consists of seeing fragmentary bits, each of which has a history of reinforcement. It seems possible that each different aspect of the visualized form has a different history and that the creative part is combining these previously reinforced instances of “seeing in the absence of the thing seen.” This view is consistent with Mechner’s take on visualization. He said: The proposed conclusion is that such “visualization” behavior actually consists exclusively of the recall of previously acquired concepts drawn from our preexisting behavior repertoires. Our subjective sensation of internally “seeing” this type of “mental image” is purely an introspective illusion whose compelling power may be due to a kind of fusion or blending phenomenon – perceiving continuity where the stimulus elements are, in fact totally discrete (emphasis in original). (Mechner, 2010, p. 376) The thing seen, or the combination of all the component bits, is perceived to be pleasing or beautiful, hence the complex is reinforcing. Not only is the form seen inside the stone reinforcing in its own right, the visualized form also makes possible the subsequent carving behavior that results in a sculpture, which may be reinforcing to me and which also may prompt my social community to provide further reinforcement. As Skinner said, “We may also see a thing in its absence, not because we are immediately reinforced when we do so, but because we are then able to engage in behavior which is subsequently reinforced” (Skinner, 1974, p. 92). He was clear about the utility of such covert responses, saying: Operant seeing at the private level may be reinforced in other ways. The private response may produce discriminative stimuli which prove useful in executing

6 further behavior of either a private or public nature. In the following problem, for example, behavior is usually facilitated by private seeing. “Think of a cube, all six surfaces of which are painted red. Divide the cube into twenty-seven equal cubes by making two horizontal cuts and two sets of two vertical cuts each. How many of the resulting cubes will have three faces painted red, how many two, how many one, and how many none?” It is possible to solve this without seeing the cubes in any sense – as by saying to oneself, “A cube has eight corners. A corner is defined as the intersection of three faces of the cube, …” … In this example one may see the larger cube, cut it covertly, separate the smaller cubes covertly, see their faces, count them subvocally, and so on. (emphasis in original) (Skinner, 1953, p. 273)

Parity My stone carving behavior appears to be under some kind of joint control by both the visualized image and the actual stone with its particular shape, color, veining, and translucency. Specifically the controlling relation seems to involve a comparison between the covertly seen form and the form of the actual stone as received on the retina. Further, I propose that the comparison between the covertly seen form and the image on the retina of the actual stone is analogous to Palmer’s formulation of parity (Palmer, 1996, 1998). Palmer described the essence of his notion of parity thus: One’s own utterances can shape and maintain one’s behavior, not because of the specific stimulus properties of the verbal stimuli, but because of the parity of such stimuli with practices of the verbal community. That is, a speaker who is already an accomplished listener can detect when he or she conforms or deviates from typical verbal practices. Under most circumstances, people find parity of their speech with that of others to be reinforcing and deviations from parity to be punishing. (Palmer, 1996, p. 289) Parity describes the comparison a speaker makes between her own utterance and her perception of typical verbal practice. This description can fit the stone-carving situation if we translate the sensory modality from auditory to visual and the response modality from verbal utterance to hammer blows. I have a clearly visualized image of a form residing inside a stone. I compare the current form of the stone to that covert image. If we draw an analogy between my response to a form within the stone and the perception by an accomplished listener of typical verbal practice, then in both cases, the more closely the overt behavior (utterance or hammer blow) matches the model (verbal practice or covert image), the more reinforcing the consequence. As I hammer away with my chisel, the actual, seen perimeter of the stone gets closer and closer to the visualized form. Achievement of parity is getting closer. Each hammer blow is reinforced by the progress toward parity. Although the analogy seems strong, introducing the notion of parity into an already difficult analysis of a complex behavior may not provide a complete solution to the problem of defining the reinforcement contingencies. As Palmer said: Achieving parity is a conceptually awkward sort of reinforcer It is not a stimulus. It is a particular kind of response, a recognition that one has conformed. It is difficult to measure, even to operationalize; thus, in our interpretations of the acquisition of verbal behavior it is seldom given the emphasis it deserves. But,

7 although difficult to measure, the reinforcement is real enough. The effects of achieving, or failing to achieve, parity are particularly conspicuous in endeavors in which social reinforcement is clearly absent or irrelevant. (Palmer, 1996, p. 290) I would argue that in the stone carving realm, not only is the increasing approach to parity between the visualized image and the actual perimeter of the stone highly reinforcing, but discrepancies between the image and the actual stone may even be a mildly punishing stimulus, the escape from which is more carving.

Conclusion This interpretation of behavioral contingencies controlling a particular kind of complex behavior – stone carving – is inadequate, imprecise, incomplete, and probably confused, especially in its treatment of covert behavior, but I take solace from Palmer’s statement: Hard facts are elusive, but offering interpretations that exploit only familiar principles can serve to bring the unfathomable into the domain of the merely marvelous. Behavioral interpretations of complexity need not be correct in every detail; they serve us well if they show that our conceptual tools are adequate to resolve the most formidable problems encountered in the field of interest. (Palmer, 1998, p. 15) We can hope that with further analysis, some progress can be made in analyzing some of the complex behaviors that the creation of art entails.

References Constantine, B. J. (2010). Artist statement. In www.bjconstantine.com. Donahoe, J. W. & Palmer, D. C. (1994). Learning and complex behavior. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Epstein, R. (1991). Skinner, creativity, and the problem of spontaneous behavior. Psychological Science, 2, 362-370. Flora, S. R. (2004). The power of reinforcement. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kubina, R. M, Morrison, R. S., & Lee, D. L. (2006). Behavior analytic contributions to the study of creativity. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 40, 223-242. Mechner, F. (2010). Chess as a behavioral model for cognitive skill research: Review of Blindfold chess by Eliot Hearst and John Knott. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 94, 373-386. Palmer, D. C. (1996). Achieving parity: The role of automatic reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 65, 289-290. Palmer, D. C. (1998). The speaker as listener: The interpretation of structural regularities in verbal behavior. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 15, 3-16. Pryor, K. W., Haag, R., & O’Reilly, J. (1969). The creative porpoise. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 12, 653-661. Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York: MacMillan. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Skinner, B. F. (1970). Creating the creative artist. In On the Future of Art: Essays by Arnold J. Toynbee, Louis I Kahn, Annette Michelson, B. F. Skinner, James Seawright, J. W. Burnham, and Herbert Marcuse (pp. 61-75). New York: The Viking Press. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism. New York: Vintage Books.

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