Why Doesn’t Laocoön Scream? Autopoiesis in Art

Abstract

Lessing famously poses the question "Why doesn't the marble Laocoön scream?" to draw the constitutive difference between painting and poetry as based on the specific nature of their media. I argue that while his reasoning is ill-founded contentwise, it is also structurally sound and, as such, might be extended to the whole of experience. Here, it establishes what might be called its narrative model. Focusing mainly on drama and music, I contrast this model with the causal model of experience employed particularly in the positive sciences and claim that they are not exclusive but embedded in a dialectical way. Against this background, I take the narrative model to manifest the autopoietic nature of experience and the joint role that both causality and narrativity play in it.