Influence: That Misunderstood Word

Ian Leslie starts of his article with something everyone experiences:

“Being influenced by others is inevitable and essential. But it’s also true that when we over-conform to influences, we surrender individuality.”

A balance is needed. Easier said than done:

“Be impervious to social influence and you get closed off from the best that your fellow humans have to offer. Be defenceless against it and you become easily manipulable, boring, and unhappy.”

 

But do we have the term “influence” all backwards? Consider this long (but totally worth reading) passage by Michael Baxandall:

“If one says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than that Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality…. If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneself of, appropriate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take on, engage with, react to, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform tackle… — everyone will be able to think of others. Most of these relations just cannot be stated the other way round — in terms of X acting on Y rather than Y acting on X.”

 

Leslie agrees with that view. And wonders whether the right balance wrt being influenced has been struck by one category of people throughout history:

“Artists (in the broad sense - painters, novelists, composers, etc) are pretty much defined by the struggle to be themselves; to absorb influences without surrendering to them; to be open others and stubbornly individual. Consequently, artists have a different relationship to influence than the rest of us do. The core difference is this: artists do not absorb their influences passively. They choose their influences, and they choose how to be influenced by them.”

 

Perhaps we should all try to be like artists when it comes to influence.

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