PLANET Teleconference (November 1978 - February 1979)

Page 5: PLANET messages numbered between 1187 and 1658
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Gillette

[1187]

Art said Zola is a "corner of Nature seen through a temperament." We have a "field" of temperaments (variously programmed) defining a spread of association and lateral interconnection. Each temperament is amply supplied with its own endemic assumptions and intellectual habits bred by unique and peculiar methods and requirements.

Among them, in this case, is a susceptibility to a kind of metaphysical pathos, but all this is self-conscious prologue to what follows (in part a response to Dator's remarks on the status of Western science and the role of synthesis in actively generating unexpected paradigms from ancient traditions, art, science, technology, poetic speculation, fiction, politics).

1.  Randomly the premise begins with the concept of resonance in form and in information. In art it is grounded in the quality of objective replica of the subjective (the privately felt). In science, the activity of replication equates with access to the structure of the thing itself, regardless of its division between subjective (privately validated) and objective (consensually validated) associations.
2.  Science is associated with repeatable abstract operations and their consequent logical reasoning, while art is the articulation--the perennial restatement--of experience through sensory observation. The issue is to further distinguish these separate ways of knowing, with their respective attributes keying the opposing essentials towards the evolution of heterogeneity.
3.  Paraphrasing Darwin--from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent (paradoxically integrated) heterogeneity.
4.  Providing freedom from blind instinct.
5.  Paraphrasing the classical criteria of evolutionary change--descent with adaptive modification and origination of new types. Type is employed as the strategic pattern of individuals.
6.  The pressure of constant modification effect differently the choice of "mode" and its subsequent methods. For example, in art: the evolution in sculpture through modification from Myron to Praxiteles. In painting, from Giotto through Raphael to Veronese. You cannot discuss these respective lines of development without, consciously or otherwise, commenting on certain aspects and attributes of, respectively, the Greek and Italian cultures of their times. The pressures of modification emerge from the outside to effect the eternal interior of subjective form. In science, there is, significantly, much less of this in the truths it articulates, they being somewhat immune to the context of specific cultures (Lysenko not withstanding), i.e., they are in some sense meta-cultural truths. Art (and its evolutions, senses, processes) is always imbedded deeply in its cultural conditions as it is effected and directed by specific individuals. Think of Galileo's problem of coaxing the Vatican to peer into his scope and observe the "impure" moons of Jupiter.
7.  Art lives off the presence of paradox, and science tries to eradicate it. But paradox is illusive and subtle and moves elsewhere, like the writing finger, showing up in the most unexpected places without an alibi or sense of restraint. Hence the eternal dynamic of science.
8.  In the highest expression of art the paradox is converted into a quality of mystery or awe or even enthusiastic wonderment (as in Blake, Rousseau, Rimbaud, Whitman). From the opposite side (according to Aldous Huxley) all art begins "with each artist" while science is externally dependent upon the evolution of evidence. Quantum changes in art are of a different internal character than science.
9.  From the perspective of the Nominalist, an art (or Art) can have no existence apart from its concrete embodiments drawn from the receptacle of traits by which it is defined.

[1201]

Science, concerned with processes and "processing" is not properly concerned with substance (that is, it is not concerned with "being" as poetics and certain strains of art are). Hence, it need not be concerned with motivation. All I need know is correlation. The limits of science, qua science, do not go beyond the statement that, when certain conditions are met, certain new conditions may be expected to follow. In art, motivation is imbedded in discontinuity--conditions be damned.

[1207]

To quote the indomitable Marianne Moore: "The power of the visible is the invisible." This is crucial to the art/science distinction. To quote her again: "dramatize a meaning always missed by the externalist." Too often weak "science" has to do exclusively with the external, while weak art has to do with the invisible having no apparent connection with the visible.

[1225] More on the art/science dichotomy: scientific explanation of phenomena does not necessarily diminish the mystery in the universe, but it does not actively promote it either. That is the domain of art. Religion cultivates respect for it, but only art revels in it, taking it on in all its grittyness.

Charles Frazier

[1330] The Paper Museum

Two images from Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi form the substructure of the following thoughts: the undefined physical structure of the game itself and the picture of the central character, Joseph Knecht, slipping beneath the glacial waters of the lake.

In a forward to the translation by Richard and Clara Winston, Theodore Ziolowski described the glass bead game as "an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are perceived as simultaneously present and vitally alive."

For Hesse the bead game was a symbol of the human imagination, not requiring a specific physical form, the game is the focal point of a province of the spirit called Castalia (the Parnassian spring sacred to the muses). Castalia is set apart from society. Culture is isolated from "reality" to develop in untainted isolation.

The fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism caused Hesse to reject the separation of culture from the existing social reality.

Joseph Knecht, central figure in the novel and living Magister Ludi--Master of the Bead Game, eventually rejects the game as overly linear. Tragically this decision came too late. His ignorant body was not prepared for nature. He leaves Castalia to find work as a tutor and, following his pupil, dives into a glacial lake, realizing too late that a life of meditation has not prepared his body for survival in the simple element of cold water.

The older schools of thought that developed in China and Central Asia were balances between linear and holistic thought. This balance was expressed within the landscape through crafts and architecture. I am particularly drawn to China and Persia. Their arts express an extraordinary unity that is yet unformed in the society that I live in. There is a language of surface older than written or oral language. It is spoken by the body.

Jalaluddin Rumi told of man evolving from the crystal, plant, fish, bird, animal, man to angel: storing within the flesh memories of all levels of life. In support of this holistic family tree is a basic proposition from Sufism: "In the realm of phenomena there are only connections without cause: no phenomenon is the cause of another. All causality is in the divine names, in the incessant renewal of their epiphanies. Thus identity of a being does not stem from any empirical continuity of his eternal hexeity. In the realm of the manifest there is only a succession of likes from instant to instant." (Henri Corbin, The Creative Imagination of I'bn Arabi)

Islamic cosmological doctrine is structured on a profound understanding of the psychological behavior of man. This sense of unity is a manifold of conscious patterns constructed to correspond to the physiology and internal geography of the body.

Gillette

[1581] The teleconference seems to possess all the seeds for an authentically new species of semiotic freedom. This stage represents (in its first primitive forms) the invention of "terms" for another kind of conceptual diversity. The oscillation from metaphor to metonymy and back creates the beginning of syntactics (intuitions of possible links and permutations) and synecdochic thinking (the mapping of transforms into motives of search which translate "objects" into "events").

[1658] Summing up cybernautics

1. In one fundamental sense the conference skirted with a dangerous mistake (made elsewhere often enough)--that is, to adopt or "take-over" a vocabulary from cybernetics or information theory and then apply it to problems and descriptive models derived from "mechanistic" sources and pre-existing motives. To adopt such argots and vocabularies is to adopt a different set of epistemological premises. If the "problem" itself were rephrased in cybernetic terms (and constraints) it may not exist (to be addressed) at all. Its mechanistic essence is resolved in the transition from one descriptive mode to another. It is a question of the relation between vernacular choice and a given perceptual belief, of disregarding assumption in the shift, of not clogging the transition with immiscible entities.
2. We "players" have glimpsed the potential for a transcontextual resource "bank." Everything comes into play toward synthesis without stop (metaphysical, informational, epistemological). All is mulch, any given recapitulation, in turn, also mulch for the next round of synthesis--paradigm, myth and symbolic system connected, disconnected, reconnected in permutating equilibrium. All is "post-ideological." No single set of conceptual boundaries is considered unalterable, or immune from the second-order change.
3. "A poem is the dance of an attitude," wrote Kenneth Burke, and the "players" are the chorus line.
4. Compared to Hesse's monks and their bead-computer, this system represents the advance of homo ludens over australopithecus. The curve is asymptotic. It ranges from Duns Scotus to the "cut-ups" of William Burroughs. From occult grammars (Kabbalah, I Ching) to particle physics (quarks, quasars), yarrow sticks and Tarot in one sentient ball of wax. From the fundamental Vedantic notion of Sat, Chit, and Ananda (Being, Consciousness, Bliss) to schemes for paying teleconference rent.
5. It is germane to note that the linguistic root of the word religion derives from "reconnect," i.e., from the Latin ligare and religare. We have barely scratched the surface on the issue of the contradistinct attributes of art and science. Their respective traditions, methods, and truths serve as a fecund nexus with which to begin again and fin again along the riverrun, whence it all begins again.

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