[Nettime-bold] Shakespeare, NN, Brain Facts, and Sequentialism in G2K

[Nmherman@aol.com]

In a message dated 12/8/2001 4:09:28 PM Central Standard Time, klima@echonyc.com writes:


> i'm not talking about the study of the history of art, i'm talking about
> the history of art.  everything that any viewer has ever seen has an
> effect on the viewer's perception of the next thing seen.  the sum of
> all the art a person has seen has a direct effect on the perception of a
> new piece of art.  every work of art i have ever seen has an effect on
> the work of art i'm currently making. do you honestly think that it
> doesn't?


I agree with John Klima here, as far as it goes, but with serious reservations.  The caveman metaphor is pretty good for balance.  I would definitely qualify or temper any concepts of "sum" or "direct effect," as John phrases it.  Here's why:

NN ideas are applicable here.  She says that 80% of what we perceive is based on stored-up expectations, and only 20% on the immediately present situation.  So the "direct effect" is not always so clear and causal.  NN also says that the 80% of stored-up pre-perceptions can be changed and jumbled, sometimes radically or totally, depending on what goes in through the new 20%, and she calls that "learning."  

So, you might say that the "direct effect" is only 80% direct.  Lots of accidents and changes can happen.  Something that goes into storage via the 20% can change the whole character of the material already in the 80%.

This theory of 80/20 agrees better with brain science than the idea that our perceptions are created by our cumulative experience in a sort of 100/0 way.  

The uncertainty applies to individuals as well as groups.  "Zen and the Brain" won the best Neuroscience Book Award in 1998, and it argues that the brain is designed to "start over" so to speak after contemplation or meditation.  The incoming 20% of new, undefined information is stopped for a time so that the stored 80% can change its whole character, reordering the definitions of the material, redrawing the groupings and classifications, neutralizing or deleting some material and redefining what's left.  The change is what has for millennia been called religious experience--zen, enlightenment, divine inspiration, artistic imagination--but "Zen and the Brain" proved that particular brain structures/patterns/chemicals are where it happens.

So it's just as important to say some of the things we see, some of our individual or group art-history, do not have any direct effect on what we may see in the present.

I tried to express this paradoxical idea on one of my first pages, http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/code-pages/numberspage.html.   The point of the page is that there is sequential pressure on perception, caused by time, but the sequences can be rearranged or erased as far as their "stored" form.  It's one of the paradoxes of a time-based brain.  Unfortunately, you won't get this page unless you get G2K writ large.

This idea is very much a theme in "Hamlet", which is very much about the internal brain etc. despite the fact that Harold Bloom is more full of shit than can be imagined.  Hamlet sees his father's ghost, who says right before disappearing "Hamlet, remember me."  Then Hamlet says aloud to himself that he will keep the ghost's message alive "within the book and volume of my brain."  So the incoming 20% at times can lead to big changes or deletions in the stored 80%.  The whole brain-book can get re-written and tipped off its axis by volatile new info.

Walter Benjamin is also writing about this process when he talks about "rescuing criticism."  Maybe the idea is very intuitive and congruent with neuroscience:  stored data is simultaneously both very fixed and very fragile.  You can even draw comparisons to Imperial data-systems in economy and administration (like ancient Rome or contemporary USA), Greek tragedy, Brecht, fairy tales (which are about sweeping psychic change caused by violent singular events), narratives of apocalypse and renewal (which includes all monotheistic religion); basically everything to do with human brains in culture.  Certainly most religions and art-paradigms try to explain or account for this "blasting open of the historical continuum" as Benjamin put it.  

Societies in our primitive species' recorded past generally have had to put a taboo on this explosive potential in order to sustain hierarchies of genius and the caste-systems governing intellectual or expressive info-authority.  (For example, the contemporary museum-world hates G2K because it violently downgrades the future value of museums' storage architecture in favor of a cheaper, more sanitary peer-to-peer system.)  T.S. Eliot wrote about "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in a very insufficient, maybe even terrorized fashion.  NN is far superior to Eliot on that question.

"All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay", as Yeats said in the lovely "Lapis Lazuli" http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/777/ (nice url eh?).

Otherwise, that caveman would never have gotten up off his ass to let out a big "YAWP" as whoever it was, Whitman or some other American like Sandburg phrased it.  A grande fuck you to the given world.  Vis-a-vis colored pencils, Blake used corrosive chemicals to make his famous plates, and he thought of the technique as a way to liberate his mind by burning away the dross covering up the voice of God.  So there's a long precedent of satanic or hybristic drives forcing us not to settle for 80%.

Eighty percent,

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/777/
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/code-pages/numberspage.html

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