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I find myself unexpectedly confronted with my beginnings as an art critic (which I no longer am; I call myself an “art writer” because I question the, uh, "foundational narratives" of criticism in general), which came at a point already well along on the concerns that later gave rise to the joculum blog (the dominant concerns, or at least the dominant opinions, that would form Counterforces came along much later).
At the same time, my pursuit of information on the career of Waite-Tarot-designer Pamela Colman Smith has led me to a 1987 book containing an essay on Smith by Melinda Boyd Parsons, Kathleen J. Regier’s anthology The Spiritual Image in Modern Art, taking “modern” to mean, for the most part, “early modernist,” late 19th and early 20th century. (Parsons’ essay, the best contextualization of Smith and not available online, deserves a separate post that I may not have time to write.)
The book also contains essays on such topics as Franz Marc’s color theory, an essay that includes extensive quotations from Kandinsky and others regarding the subjective-emotional and objective-chromatic impacts of red, yellow and blue and their combinations.
This would lead, decades later, to the famous satirization of same by the Barnett Newman painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, but though the abstract expressionists’ 1950s mixture of cynicism and spirituality would be worth re-examining, it is not where I want to go with this post.
I am reminded again of how much the experimentation and theorization of the early modernists was that of men and women working in the dark. Disgusted, some of them, by the Catholic Church’s denunciation of the challenge of modernism in its own ranks and in the world at large, and disgusted, some of them, by the psychological obliviousness and aesthetic crassness of their era’s positivists and occultists alike, they set out to create a science of art, a phenomenology of perception avant le lettre.
That some of their conclusions sound ridiculous today is not surprising. Red, yellow and blue have some of the emotional and perceptual qualities they perceived, almost universally (always “almost”), and others of their claims for them don’t even hold true for most of the people around them at the time.
Today we have far more sources of reliable information on almost everything, and almost no means of correlating all their contents. (I am playfully echoing the famous sentence by H. P. Lovecraft, but a similar sentence by Thomas Pynchon would be just as appropriate.)
Is it possible to construct an analysis of a Kandinsky painting and a composition by Thomas de Hartmann from the following? (I quote from John Johnston’s The Allure of Machinic Life, page 406):"The process of vision … occurs in different stages. Incoming signals from the optic nerve are first processed in a map called VI located at the back of the brain; then they are passed to other maps for further processing. Muscle movements are driven by a pattern of neuron activity in another map, the primary motor cortex, or M1. And so on. These specialized maps, which are largely self-organizing, carry out much of our learned but unconscious activity. At the same time, Grand notes, we are able 'to make voluntary decisions, and to initiate, alter or suppress our behvior at at will... [and to] perform mental tasks for which no specialized and rigidly structured circuitry is likely to exist.' ... One thing is certain in any case: the fundamental building blocks of the mind are neither the symbol manipulations of classic AI nor the simple pattern recognition mechanisms of its old rival, neural net research. The clue to the mystery of what generates intelligence, rthger, is to be found in the basic circuits (each composed of only a few thousand neurons) that make up the cerebral cortex."
Presumably our theorist and software designer Steve Grand (who likes titles such as "How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps") could describe the construction of a landscape by Constable and a geometric painting by Kandinsky using this method, since everything that the mind and body does is structured this way. (He could also describe the innovative making of what Americans would call a Dagwood sandwich, or the branding of a recalcitrant calf, or what have you.)
Our machinic arrangements, if that is what they are, take place in a minuscule corner of a cornerless universe in which, as the anonymous writer in the April 4 – 10 2009 issue of The Economist phrases it, it may be that “the gravity of dark matter … holds galaxies together” that ought to fly apart from the speed of their rotation.
The article does manage, most of the time, to avoid irresponsible lyricism in summarizing the latest reasons to suspect that “dark matter may provide the scaffold on which visible matter is arranged. …That the universe may be filled with matter people cannot see—matter that simply passes through everything undetected—is hard to accept. But evidence is now accruing to suggest that it is true.”
This fact, if it is one, has no impact (literally and figuratively) on anything—something that does nothing except provide extra gravity cannot be used to create networks or form physical bodies or do anything else except float or race around not interacting with almost everything that constitutes matter as we know it. (People who want something better than the anonymous writer’s not always intelligible metaphorizing and summation may find the actual report by Piergiorgio Picozza in a recent issue of Nature.)
Picozza hasn’t ruled out alternative explanations for his experimental findings, so we may actually have gotten no closer to learning why there is something rather than nothing in a universe where the antimatter and matter should have annihilated one another shortly after the whole operation got started.
And, remarkably, how this happened has no effect whatsoever on the computational models of the mind being argued over by the theorists described in Dr Johnston’s book. (A title-giving shout-out to John here instead of just “Johnston”: I sometimes like to give proper titles to the folks in English departments with whom I might have been colleagues had Dr. Cullum not decided to quit job-hunting, back in the day.) Neurons and neutrons are linked phenomena, but dark matter and its discontents seem not to be.
But both bodies of fact are part of the world in which paintings are made and in which computer programs and display devices have given us the “colored fire” that Helena Blavatsky said would be needed to give the real impression of what theosophic perceptions of invisible forces would look like. But of course what we see through such means is as physical a perceptual illusion as the images projected by Victorian phantasmagoria machines.
Since I can imagine (and discard) five or ten alternate explanations of the universe based on our present state of information or lack thereof, I must assume that sci-fi and speculative fiction has produced excellent stories that explore what would happen if each of these hypotheses were true.
But I lack the patience to make myself actually read all the stories to find the ones I think must exist. Hence I look forward to investigating such books as Rhetorics of Fantasy to get some general map of the structures within which such hypotheses are embodied, plus a few titles of stories that actually do hold astrophysics, computational models of the mind, and modernist painting all in mind at the same moment. Of course, such stories would not only deploy the standard tropes and narrative strategies of literature, but twist them as productively as J. K. Rowling did for her own purposes in wrapping up the Harry Potter saga.
It wouldn’t hurt if the speculative fiction writer of whom I am thinking had a thorough grounding in the history of philosophy and theology as well, and quite a few of them do. But the problem is that the stories become dated so quickly as the state of research changes; we knew that William Gibson’s early novels were absurd even as they were being written, and they have become artifacts that we read as we read Jules Verne or Dante Alighieri. Fortunately, Gibson is still plugging away at it, though I’ve never had time to read any of the newer ones.
By the way, I went back to The History of the Occult Tarot in search of the Pamela Colman Smith chapter and discovered some very intriguing things about the Holy Order of MANS that ran Brother Juniper’s Restaurant across the street from the Art Papers office in my first years as an art writer…but I digress.
At the same time, my pursuit of information on the career of Waite-Tarot-designer Pamela Colman Smith has led me to a 1987 book containing an essay on Smith by Melinda Boyd Parsons, Kathleen J. Regier’s anthology The Spiritual Image in Modern Art, taking “modern” to mean, for the most part, “early modernist,” late 19th and early 20th century. (Parsons’ essay, the best contextualization of Smith and not available online, deserves a separate post that I may not have time to write.)
The book also contains essays on such topics as Franz Marc’s color theory, an essay that includes extensive quotations from Kandinsky and others regarding the subjective-emotional and objective-chromatic impacts of red, yellow and blue and their combinations.
This would lead, decades later, to the famous satirization of same by the Barnett Newman painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue, but though the abstract expressionists’ 1950s mixture of cynicism and spirituality would be worth re-examining, it is not where I want to go with this post.
I am reminded again of how much the experimentation and theorization of the early modernists was that of men and women working in the dark. Disgusted, some of them, by the Catholic Church’s denunciation of the challenge of modernism in its own ranks and in the world at large, and disgusted, some of them, by the psychological obliviousness and aesthetic crassness of their era’s positivists and occultists alike, they set out to create a science of art, a phenomenology of perception avant le lettre.
That some of their conclusions sound ridiculous today is not surprising. Red, yellow and blue have some of the emotional and perceptual qualities they perceived, almost universally (always “almost”), and others of their claims for them don’t even hold true for most of the people around them at the time.
Today we have far more sources of reliable information on almost everything, and almost no means of correlating all their contents. (I am playfully echoing the famous sentence by H. P. Lovecraft, but a similar sentence by Thomas Pynchon would be just as appropriate.)
Is it possible to construct an analysis of a Kandinsky painting and a composition by Thomas de Hartmann from the following? (I quote from John Johnston’s The Allure of Machinic Life, page 406):"The process of vision … occurs in different stages. Incoming signals from the optic nerve are first processed in a map called VI located at the back of the brain; then they are passed to other maps for further processing. Muscle movements are driven by a pattern of neuron activity in another map, the primary motor cortex, or M1. And so on. These specialized maps, which are largely self-organizing, carry out much of our learned but unconscious activity. At the same time, Grand notes, we are able 'to make voluntary decisions, and to initiate, alter or suppress our behvior at at will... [and to] perform mental tasks for which no specialized and rigidly structured circuitry is likely to exist.' ... One thing is certain in any case: the fundamental building blocks of the mind are neither the symbol manipulations of classic AI nor the simple pattern recognition mechanisms of its old rival, neural net research. The clue to the mystery of what generates intelligence, rthger, is to be found in the basic circuits (each composed of only a few thousand neurons) that make up the cerebral cortex."
Presumably our theorist and software designer Steve Grand (who likes titles such as "How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps") could describe the construction of a landscape by Constable and a geometric painting by Kandinsky using this method, since everything that the mind and body does is structured this way. (He could also describe the innovative making of what Americans would call a Dagwood sandwich, or the branding of a recalcitrant calf, or what have you.)
Our machinic arrangements, if that is what they are, take place in a minuscule corner of a cornerless universe in which, as the anonymous writer in the April 4 – 10 2009 issue of The Economist phrases it, it may be that “the gravity of dark matter … holds galaxies together” that ought to fly apart from the speed of their rotation.
The article does manage, most of the time, to avoid irresponsible lyricism in summarizing the latest reasons to suspect that “dark matter may provide the scaffold on which visible matter is arranged. …That the universe may be filled with matter people cannot see—matter that simply passes through everything undetected—is hard to accept. But evidence is now accruing to suggest that it is true.”
This fact, if it is one, has no impact (literally and figuratively) on anything—something that does nothing except provide extra gravity cannot be used to create networks or form physical bodies or do anything else except float or race around not interacting with almost everything that constitutes matter as we know it. (People who want something better than the anonymous writer’s not always intelligible metaphorizing and summation may find the actual report by Piergiorgio Picozza in a recent issue of Nature.)
Picozza hasn’t ruled out alternative explanations for his experimental findings, so we may actually have gotten no closer to learning why there is something rather than nothing in a universe where the antimatter and matter should have annihilated one another shortly after the whole operation got started.
And, remarkably, how this happened has no effect whatsoever on the computational models of the mind being argued over by the theorists described in Dr Johnston’s book. (A title-giving shout-out to John here instead of just “Johnston”: I sometimes like to give proper titles to the folks in English departments with whom I might have been colleagues had Dr. Cullum not decided to quit job-hunting, back in the day.) Neurons and neutrons are linked phenomena, but dark matter and its discontents seem not to be.
But both bodies of fact are part of the world in which paintings are made and in which computer programs and display devices have given us the “colored fire” that Helena Blavatsky said would be needed to give the real impression of what theosophic perceptions of invisible forces would look like. But of course what we see through such means is as physical a perceptual illusion as the images projected by Victorian phantasmagoria machines.
Since I can imagine (and discard) five or ten alternate explanations of the universe based on our present state of information or lack thereof, I must assume that sci-fi and speculative fiction has produced excellent stories that explore what would happen if each of these hypotheses were true.
But I lack the patience to make myself actually read all the stories to find the ones I think must exist. Hence I look forward to investigating such books as Rhetorics of Fantasy to get some general map of the structures within which such hypotheses are embodied, plus a few titles of stories that actually do hold astrophysics, computational models of the mind, and modernist painting all in mind at the same moment. Of course, such stories would not only deploy the standard tropes and narrative strategies of literature, but twist them as productively as J. K. Rowling did for her own purposes in wrapping up the Harry Potter saga.
It wouldn’t hurt if the speculative fiction writer of whom I am thinking had a thorough grounding in the history of philosophy and theology as well, and quite a few of them do. But the problem is that the stories become dated so quickly as the state of research changes; we knew that William Gibson’s early novels were absurd even as they were being written, and they have become artifacts that we read as we read Jules Verne or Dante Alighieri. Fortunately, Gibson is still plugging away at it, though I’ve never had time to read any of the newer ones.
By the way, I went back to The History of the Occult Tarot in search of the Pamela Colman Smith chapter and discovered some very intriguing things about the Holy Order of MANS that ran Brother Juniper’s Restaurant across the street from the Art Papers office in my first years as an art writer…but I digress.
