Issue No. 1

Black Box Romanticism: Borrowing into the Future and Past: MFA Thesis Part I

By Eric Hancock ⋅ August 30, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print this article ⋅ Post a comment

Black Box Romanticism: Borrowing into the Future and Past

What does it mean to borrow into the past and the future? It seems that the core of this notion deals with temporality. How is the concept of the present perceived within the discourse of cultural semiosis? The story follows the notion of the ‘now’ and what that entails, i.e. memory storage and retrieval, be it collective or individual, ideas of the self and it’s translation and transmission through art, and less obviously how the notion of ‘now’ is abutted and structured by notions of the future and past within human cognition. Importantly, the Romantic movement in Great Britain and Germany at the conjunction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides a starting point for a cultural narrative that culminates in the important contemporary interest in the ‘now’, or as in the case I am attempting to make, the conception of how the notion of ‘now’ is based on it’s strange re-doubled cousins, the past and the future. Specifically, the Romantics, by prioritizing organiscim, the authority of the self, and an uncompromising acceptance of seeming contradiction, laid the foundation for a story that results in the current contemporary nexus of ideas of Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, and Neurological studies. The Romantic notion of the organic artist is the foundation for a view of the artist as a Black Box, a physical phenomenon that effectively consolidates temporally mysterious notion of semiosis. Notions of the past, future, and the present have their neurological correlates in the opposing neurological terms procedural and episodic memory. Luckily, these terms provide a deep artistic impetus evident in the work of contemporary artists while simultaneously acting as under-girding principles in current definitions emerging for contemporary art.
The Romantic movement in Europe marks a moment in History when the trajectory of the cultural production was cataclysmically shifted away from enlightenment laden ideologies which incubated in Europe in the middle ages and on into the Modern era. Abrams describes the repressive reform that predominated at the time:
“Writers on pulpit and civil eloquence sometimes blamed the effectiveness of religious zealots, and even the recent civil war, on the inherent deceptions of metaphor, and demanded drastic remedy…In addition, the New philosophy in England, from Bacon on, quite properly incorporated a program of semantic reform which would eliminate verbal, as well as pagan idols form nature, and develop a language austerely adapted to the description and manipulation of pure fact.”

A similar movement predominated in Germany emerging roughly after the armies of Louis XIV decimated Germany during the Thirty Years War. The devastation wrought by Germany’s repression caused what Isaiah Berlin describes as an inner turn, a provincialism that would characterize even the most philosophical of authors and commentators of subsequent German generations. The inward turn that Berlin claims pervaded German scholarship is an important component in the Romantic embrace of contradiction and paradox. Schlegel, the seminal Romantic, presciently notes that “the world is in its essence paradoxical, and the only way to grasp its contradictory totality is to hold an ambivalent attitude.” This inward turn is a patent attribute of formulations of the self, the subjective ‘I’. If epochs can be defined in terms of their central antagonism, then Romanticism is a movement obsessed by the notion of the self. The concretizing of the notion of the Romantic self had a reciprocal effect of decentering the vision issuing there from. This Romantic crisis of the self manifested itself in literary production. William Butler Yeats stated, “That soul must become its own betrayer, its own deliverer.” Lars Elleström describes that for the first time in literary history a fragmentary collective consciousness warranted the onset of a Romantic literary irony that used the “conjunction of opposites: both/and…rather than either/or”, the classical method of irony . Additionally, poetry became a harbinger for the instability taking hold in Romantic culture. It’s exploration of ungrammaticality and revolutionarily decentered format represented a semiotic indicator for a better and more whole representation of the human experience. Jonathan Culler describes Samuel Coleridge’s position on the new poetic signification; Coleridge’s corpus exemplifies what most authorities consider to be at the apex of the Romantic movement:
“Coleridge [formulated] the notion of the poem as heterocosm, or self-contained universe, which must display organic unity and achieve the resolution of contraries; the conception of organic forms and the inseparability of form and content; and finally the conception of good poetry as the product of a unified sensibility, or imagination which fused together thought and feeling-in general, the notion that a poem must not mean, but be.”

This organic metaphor that Culler describes is often underestimated in descriptions of the Romantic sensibility. This organicism comprises a necessary philosophical stance that transforms the poet into a Black Box.
Although slightly unfashionable as a descriptive system, Black Box still has explanational power. In general, Black box theory is a phenomenon whereby inputs and outputs of a system are know while the inner-workings of the system remain mysterious. In the following diagram (figure 1.) ‘S’ represents inputs, ‘C’ represents channel, and ‘R’ represents output. The contents of the box are merely framed, not identified. Another way to conceive the Black Box phenomenon is to say that the interior is eternally deferred or blocked. Again, describing the organic aspects of Romantic ideology, Jonathan Culler indirectly alludes to a black box mentality: “Imagination, on the other hand, is essentially vital, undetermined, and originary; it exercises a creative freedom…the products of Imagination display organic form, which Coleridge says, ‘is innate’”. Here, Culler stresses the Romantic interior. This notion of boundary has several applications. Not only can the artist be said to be a black box, so the poem can as well. The essence of a Black Box system is that precise knowledge of the system itself, while being delineated by a channel, which serves as a boundary, remains unknown. Similar to a vector, the boundaries of the channel keep the shape, making the interior of the box scalable. Similarly, in poetic semiosis, distortion within the parameters of a signifying system, i.e. the poem, causes a reciprocal dilation of the horizon of modes of expression and relatedly a widening of contextual influence. This concept corresponds also the Romantic notion that as the voice becomes stronger, more personal, the more fractured and incomprehensive the voice becomes. The system has to rely on the assumption that ungrammaticality is not a means of mis-signification. According to Black Box theory, as long as a channel, or multiple channels are identified, e.g. a context and boundary, the signifying system can still generate semiosis. The Romantics began to understand this system of creative credit. The artist must believe in an eternally deferred future in order to continue working. Black box theory maintains that as long as a prediction is made, and faith is put into the system, there will be a system. Strangely, this system takes on that mysterious quality that the Romantics founded their ideas of the sublime. This system also takes on the spectrality of the Lacanian symbolic, a hovering fabrication that takes the place of the horrible real, a fabrication that isn’t fixed but continually changing in order to deal with the demands of a shifting past, present, and future.
In Brian Rotman’s influential book Signyfing Nothing: the Semiotics of Zero, Rotman describes the eternal deferment of the other. Rotman describes the Roman appropriation of the Hindu number zero and it’s effects as a Semiological phenomenon. Rotman describes the strange semiotic presence of zero in a complex passage linking zero to the vanishing point of a high Renaissance one-point perspective image:
“[Zero] acts as a depictive sign on the same plane as other such signs. Accordingly, like them it represents a definite location within the real physical scene witnessed through the window frame; a location that by being infinitely far in the distance, however, is unoccupiable by a person or indeed any physical object. Externally, the vanishing point is in a meta-linguistic relation to theses signs, since its function is to organize them into a coherent unified image. Its meaning, in other words, can only be retrieved from the process of depiction itself, from the way the original subjective act of witnessing is represented via the rules of perspective as an image addressed to a spectator…”

The form of signification that Rotman describes parallels the originary process, the mysterious semiotic moment. However, the moment that Rotman describes is always ahead. This split between the real and signification of the other, or as Rotman uses, Zero, parallels the split between signifier and signified. Again, Rotman describes:
“The result is a reversal of the original movement from object to sign. The signs of the system become creative and autonomous. The things that are ultimately ‘real’, that is numbers, visual scenes, and goods, are precisely what the system allows to be presented as such. The system becomes both the source of reality, it articulates what is real, and provides the means of ‘describing’ this reality as if it were some domain exterior and prior to itself; as if, that is there were a timeless, ‘objective’ difference, a transcendental opposition, between presentation and representation.”

Again, framing is crucial in the signification inherent in expression, as mentioned in our discussion of Romantic poetry. In a sense, the Romantic treatment of the organic nature of the artist, e.g. a Black Boxed artist, corresponds exactly to the meta-semantic breach that Rotman describes is necessary as the original movement out and into creation. Additionally, and remarkably, Rotman proves that the signification inherent in algebraic representation correlates to the idea of infinite sets, an idea that only works if the range represented within each algebraic variable remains as potential as possible; they represent a meta-reality, a fiction, in fact, every possible fiction, the future. In order to solve an algebraic equation, the mathematician manipulates the symbolic, the fictional, and the future, a Black Box.

The future is one side of the duality inherent in the nature of semiosis. When borrowing into the past, the semiotic model of expression rests on the assertion that a pre-established compendium is the base for a pre-established linguistic apparatus at work in the brain. What about the concept of now? How does it play into our story? Via a neurological explanation, the concept of now would probably best be represented by real time sensorial data coming into the brain. A problem arises however, when one thinks of how the body and mind process the notion of simultaneity within the present. Daniel C. Dennett offers the example of how the somatosensorial system does not offer the most reliable conception of the present. If someone were to be tapped at the ankle and at the knee at the same time, the information is perceived simultaneously by the brain. After first blush, explaining this phenomenon becomes difficult. If somatosensorial information at staggered lengths reach the brain at the same time, what accounts for the spatial gap that was consolidated and compressed? Dennett proves furthermore that the mind perceives sensorial data that is referred back in time, at least at a micro level, proving that traditional notions of the present are problematically simple. Additionally, it is accepted that the cognitive process is not as democratic as has been thought in the past. If the brain does invoke a pre-emptive editing or administrative process, as some neuroscientists have postulated, to what criteria does the brain institute for information to make it into consciousness. John Onions describes that visual region of the brain which at some point in history was postulated to be in one area can further be subdivided into multiple regions (V2, V3, V4, V5, ect.) that each deal with their own specialized processes of reception and transmission. Does the brain have agendas that we as receivers of consciousness are not aware of? And if so, how are these parallel processing regions coordinated into a unitary consciousness? Part of the solution to the temporal problems with perception is to accept that our notion of the present is more fractured than we would like to think. In fact, philosophically, the ‘present’ is a phenomenon that is difficult to think about without encountering the paradox of its elusive spectrality, it’s elusive recession into the past. This fractured quality, this unitary consciousness that is in fact multiplicitous can be described in terms of the brains prodigious use of memory. On closer look, memory is in fact used to navigate our sensorial world. Neurologists Crick and Koch go partway to describing a type of all encompassing memory that deals with not just the past, but the most recent present that has become the past. As will be illustrated, a discussion of temporal ambiguity will not make it far without addressing the notion of speed. The speed or efficiency of different parts of the brain seems to be inherent in the specialization of different parts of the brain and their competence in processing multiple spatio-temporal streams of information. Several categorizations of memory have been conceived that accommodate this idea; two subdivisions will be particularly interesting as they relate to spatio-temporal ambiguities.
Procedural memory is that part of memory responsible for highly automated procedures, such as typing or swimming, which are considered largely unconscious. Procedural memory can be thought of as a performance-line system. It is responsible for learning various kinds of behavioral and cognitive skills, its ‘view of the world is non-narrative, non-representative; it operates at an automatic rather than consciously controlled level, its output is not registered in the traditional way that we think our mind ‘registers’ information to us. Procedural memory is characterized by “gradual, incremental learning and appears to be especially well suited for picking up and dealing with invariances in the environment over time.” Squire calls procedural memory Undeclarative, which pertains to its non-episodic non-narrativizing role. Again, the paradox of a part of the brain processing information in a non-declarative way is somewhat confusing. And again, Procedural memory can be contrasted with episodic memory in that spatio-temporality is somewhat repressed because of its automated, non-declarative nature. But, paradoxically, episodic memory, dealing in its ‘declarative’ way with the personal, the extended, the unitary, and the complete also works in a manner filled with temporal ambiguity. Episodic memory is more akin to the traditional notion of memory as a place of storage, a compilation of temporally unspecified discreet units of data. This narrative, episodic memory because it is essentially iconic and relational to its own contents, retains a hermetically iconic quality, irrespective of the actual real time that it was recorded in. Additionally, because these episodic units are compilations of units that may be temporally disparate, they assume the quality of unitary, static entities, but inherently mutable. The difference between procedural and episodic memory mutability, again, can be attributed to the notion of speed, and adaptability. Procedural memory has the ability of exist irregardless of lies. Episodic memory merely has the ability to consistently construct its lies. Again referencing Daniel C. Dennett, the brain can be broken down into two types of deception, Stalinesque and Orwellian. In his text, Dennett mentions the two types of memory revision in order to refute them; nevertheless, I will re-appropriate and re-contextualize the two memory types as they correspond to the distinction that I have made above. Orwellian revision has the capability to rewrite history over and over again just as in Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in 1984. Stalinesque revision, on the other hand, re-appropriates information into it’s already existing corpus of data; it rearranges the parts in order to fit into the whole picture. This dichotomy corresponds exactly to the picture of procedural vs. episodic memory that Dennett’s antagonists put forward. From a narrative standpoint, the episodic story constructing part of the brain warrants that the information seem complete. The parts of the story however disparate are absorbed into a unitary story or multiplicity of stories. In essence, the declarative part of the brain, by virtue of its narrativizing role assumes the role of a Black Box. Inputs, however disparate are re-appropriated into the story. The explanation that both types of memory are essentially based on continually revised fictions belies the question of how and why the brain would have several intermediary check points, or an administrative system that would mediate incoming sensory information. Ostensibly to, the ambiguity of the brain’s criteria for entrance into ‘consciousness’ has been at least partway elucidated. If the brain’s collecting and receiving apparatuses are building on an eternally shape-shifting system, it seems that the criteria for interest in parts of the brain should be self-perpetuating, especially if the opposing procedural and episodic regions of the brain are linked. This neuro-semantic system not only influences physiological activities of the expressive agent, i.e. the artist. The cognitive functioning supplies deep imperatives for the artist who is working intuitively, borrowing from the Romantic Black Box imperative. In fact, Endel Tulving and Daniel Schacter state that “the four other major systems are concerned with cognition. That is, the final productions of all these systems can be, and frequently are, contemplated by the individual introspectively, in conscious awareness. Any conversion of such a product of memory into overt behavior, even symbolic behavior such as speech or writing, represents an optional post-retrieval phenomenon, characterized by considerable flexibility regarding the behavioral expression.”
One such artist whose work illustrates the mystery of cognitive semiosis is Los Angeles based painter Lari Pittman. Pittman constructs images based on snippets of information. His graphic paintings are supremely fractured, largely due the kinetic tumult of the abutting images. As soon as the viewer’s eye saccades enough to make out an exhaustive image, the image flattens into process. Further scrutiny by the viewer only yields a Gothic plurality of vaguely recognizable forms and relationships between buttressed forms and cubistic subtleties of color and shade. Stepping back, the images begin to gain cohesiveness again. Pittman likens his process to decoration. His paintings are typically suffused with an astringent precision, which ordinarily results from straining images through the simplified process of graphic compression. Pittman resuscitates the Gothic ambivalent between the highly symbolic and the copiously ornamental. The multi-faceted complexity of Pittman’s images illustrates a predisposition of modernism towards abstraction in the form of fracture. This presentation of fragmentary existence simulates the flat ornamentation due to the graphic and computer revolutions; however, as a cultural and conceptual entity, the piece’s heritage can be located in the fragmented experiences of Cubism and the Gothic before it. Cognitively, this conglomeration of pieces serves as an analogy for the highly efficient systems at work in the procedural memory. Pittman’s paintings represent a slow, methodical simulation of the neural and non-declarative apparatus in the brain. Here, Pittman not only constructs original images, but also addresses the notion of time. The timeless realm of the procedural replicated through the torpid accumulation of subjective positioning within the canvas, an unlikely compliment to the rapid efficiency of the procedural memory.
Pittman’s fracture represents a subversive attempt to come to terms with a view of nature that brings Kantian rationality and cognitive priority into the imperative for constructing images. The episodic is trained on the suspended temporality of the procedural. Indeed, Picasso and Braque hazarded their first attempts at Cubism in response to the pressures of a dizzyingly progressive Modern world where the intuitive was prized and touted as a necessary supplement to the Enlightenment brand of rationality that painting originated from. As discussed by Brian Rotman, High Renaissance painting with its inherent signification of the viewer/maker, a supreme agent of Enlightenment and rationality, prioritized the static position of the viewer/maker as the ultimate beholder, a place where the self highly stabilized. Alternatively, the Romantics believed a notion of the other, the future, the un-stabilized, the whole, the spiritual, and the organic, in a view of the arts where the ambiguity and temporal uncertainty of the black box was central. Slavoj Zizek uses interesting wording in describing semiosis as a “leap of faith” and as a “jumping ahead into fiction.” (parallax 52). In addition to inspiring Romantic ideology and the abstract styling of Lari Pitman, the temporal uncertainty intrinsic to black boxes have inspired researchers at Princeton to explore there novelty. REG’s or black box random event generators are use algorithms to generate random series of binaries. Researchers claim that spikes in the binary readings from these generators coincide with major upheaval within the world. (http://www.redorbit.com/news/display/?id=126649).