Playful Intelligence

Digitizing Tradition

Henry Sussman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472568830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities – and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

1

Reading Kandinsky

1.

The paintings, designs, and drawings of Wasily Kandinsky have always exerted an auratic fascination on me. I cannot exactly say why. I hope never to be in the authoritative position fully to do so. Even as a high-school boy, encountering a few of his works in the Arensberg Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I was drawn by their mystique: the singularity of their coloring, the uncanny equilibrium prevailing between their splotchy (or geometrical) shapes, and the dynamic motion initiated by their lateral strokes and flows. Kandinsky’s paintings set off from the premise of the indefinite: in form and representation, hence surely in significance. But this in no way impedes their intrinsic composition, tone, mood, and drift or tendency from seizing their viewers, those who find themselves, crossing their visual plane, susceptible.

An inexpensive reproduction of a Kandinsky oil painting, “Schweres Rot” (“In Dark Red”), adorned my college dormitory room, no doubt held up by cellophane tape. I return to Kandinsky on the far side of the sustained critical meditation that began in those days because his amazing productions materially aid and abet me in applying some fine points to my current thinking and writing about systems (not that I do this as a painter). Kandinsky’s power over me, the appeal of his visual style, vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, was a fait accompli, in place before it ever came under review or judgment. The aura of his compositions established itself to me with all the suddenness of recognition, as Hegel nurses this term in accounting for social relations and interactions.¹ In literature, the fateful magic of recognitions is a key to the chemistry between literary surrogates from Goethe to Proust, with a special lay-over in the novels of Henry James.

Our fate is reducible both to the staccato introjections that ricochet through our minds and to the series of recognitions that galvanize our lives; our most off-handed recognitions often become particularly fateful. What I have always found compelling about the constellation of compositional principles, colors, forms, and movements coinciding in Kandinsky’s visual productions now furnishes me with an occasion for thinking about what makes art, in whatever medium, so compelling. What is the satisfaction, the out, the relief that it freely offers—often, under the mystique of recognition, before the fact, before any fact? Can we conceptualize the tremendous affirmation and relief that the full panoply of art-forms has bestowed upon us—in narrative, pictorial, plastic, musical, and cinematographic media—in complete dissociation from the social institutions under whose auspices we encounter these artifacts in the first place? If not, as the case may well be, then accounting for art’s distinctive aftershock, whether as horror or enchantment, is indissolubly linked to an accident report or post-mortem on the critical mass, momentum, and gravitational pull impacting on artifacts within the compass of systematic organizations.

At an age when I was still impressionable and unschooled in my tastes and interests, Kandinsky’s paintings marshaled me to an unaccustomed degree of attentiveness. Within the frames of the few works of his that I could physically encounter, I was jolted into a hyperawareness of color, line, mass, shape, and composition that I simply didn’t access during my saunters even down my most beloved downtown Philadelphia street, Walnut, and that could not be frozen, “etherized upon a table,” during the showings of the first-run international art-cinema classics I was fortunate to be viewing during those years. It is of course a concatenation of many factors—some personal, some historical, though of course mediated by specific educational and cultural conditions—that made me susceptible to Kandinsky and that made Kandinsky radiate so auratically in Philadelphia, USA, circa 1962. It has taken until now for it to dawn on me that the heightened attentiveness I experienced under the aura and with the connivance of Kandinsky might have had something to do with the sequence of haphazard encounters and choices resulting in my activities as a literary critic. Proust might well have called the interstitial zone between the Kandinskys and myself in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (like the one separating “Marcel” from Vermeer’s “View of Delft”² and its “little patch of yellow wall”) a “magic circle.”³ This port or corridor of unfiltered attention became a place I needed to get back to, a home away from home in a lifestyle already congenitally transient. My encounters with Kandinsky were so crystallizing at the time that they “beamed me up,” as it registered in subsequent years, into the very engine room of critique. Critique, such as it outputs itself, can be nothing if not heightened attentiveness—to the prevailing systematic surround and to the view-finder and processes of seeing. This even if the amazing teachers I encountered afterwards, among them Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, Richard Macksey, and Allen Grossman, did everything they could to drum into me that attentiveness is not a matter of consciousness and its historico-metaphysical trappings: perception, understanding, insight. It is, rather, a writing-tablet or screen situated somewhere radically off to the side, in a back-up server.

With my rear-view mirror a long stretch down the road, I can further recognize the rapt hyper-attention that Kandinsky awakened in me at the time as a virtual experience. In its visuality, the encounter with his canvasses foreshortened and underscored absorptive fascinations that I was experiencing at the time in text media as well, above all, in the stories and novels of such “standards” as Poe, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and James; in the poetry, above all, of Stevens. It was indeed only for the “most special” writing projects—regarding these authors—and for college applications that I would trundle out the gigantic, already ancient Underwood upright we kept in storage. Even on the most sensitive touch-screens I persist in the laborious pecking I developed in those early official communications and literary mistakes.

In view of the breath-taking sequence of technological innovations that my accessing of texts and data, as well as my “word-processing” would undergo, I find it unavoidable to render some account of the virtual states of the critical bearing initiated by my haphazard collision into Kandinsky. On so many registers do the digital transcription of languages and media of information impact on the encounter with culture, even on the possibilities for “perception” and “concentration” themselves, that the unavoidable residue deposited by these processes on our writerly output is best, and fully in keeping with our ongoing task and responsibilities, rendered explicit.

2.

I’m strongly tempted here to establish a base-position in Kandinsky, to articulate sight-unseen, as it were, what is so fateful and inevitable about his long and varied project. Such a critical dry-run, as it were, would have the charm of arising in a vacuum or black-out area free from the weighty interventions of art history and philosophical aesthetics, oblivious even to Kandinsky’s own substantial writing on art in general and on his own specific practice. There is an obvious narrative appeal to an initial, putatively “naïve” take on an artist’s characteristic or signature productions. This scenario makes it possible to score upon the fictive virtual setting of critical phenomenology what has been disclosed or apprehended in the encounter with the artwork. By process of selection, this “discovery narrative” would then be in a position to go on to confirm which cultural materials (criticism, history, theory, philosophy) have been productive in the process of exegesis and elucidation and which have not.

As Proust reminds us, through the irreversible shocks seeded throughout the nostalgic recollection of “Combray” and in the futile hopes for recuperation implied in the process—moments including Françoise’s butchering a chicken⁴ and the love scene at Montjouvain⁵—there is no going back to an interpretative scene prior to critical knowledge. Each paradigmatic or exegetical wrinkle that we learn through the life of reading remains with us, an indelible mark of Cain. At the age of fifteen, when I first encountered Kandinsky—1962 was a fateful year, it turns out, because I also saw Fellini’s “8 ½” and Orson Welles’s adaptation of The Trial at the time—I truly couldn’t account in any sustained intellectual way for my abrupt fascination with his canvasses. But this doesn’t mean that I wasn’t already intellectually complicit, say through the overall surround of modernism available in the Philadelphia art world, or the tremendous attention devoted to Freudian thought in the Saturday Review and patent in much “advanced” cinema of the early 1960’s. As Derrida would go on to establish with unrelenting readerly illumination and finitude in the pages of Of Grammatology, a watershed intellectual moment for me of a later provenance, no less devastating in the best senses of the word, there is no putatively pure critical or cultural innocence that can be imputed to a “prior,” whether of an individual or a society.⁶

Anything I would have to venture, then, about Kandinsky during a survey of some representative works encountered at an early stage of intellectual development, is unavoidably tinged by subsequent critical recognitions that transpired under far more formal conditions. What follows, a read-out of a handful of canvasses themselves strikingly indicative of certain key contractual clauses in Kandinsky’s long-standing visual engagement with culture, may not float free from the gravitational field exerted by the critical bearings and approaches that have been of greatest moment to me. But they nonetheless compose a preliminary sketch, the base-position to an understanding of how Kandinsky’s overall experiment constitutes in itself a response to certain defining features of systems, and hence to the experience of systems over the pivotal decades of Kandinsky’s training and “watch.” One preliminary way of defining Kandinsky’s achievement and ongoing import would be as a performance—above all, at the level of technical as well as aesthetic mastery, in color, form, composition, and their dynamics—so masterful as to suspend the constraints of those systems, as encompassing and overpowering as they were and remain. In this sense, I am arguing, Kandinsky’s achievement can be taken as a case study in the clinical relief and even healing from the damage and insult sustained—systematically—in the course of systematic experience, in relation to systematic organizations. Through an approach to color and form that can only be characterized as systematic, Kandinsky furnishes the uplifting and edifying instance of the suspension of systematic abuses and constraints. It is the programs of art that open up the battleground and interstitial space (abyss, khōra) where the struggle between systematic abuses and their suspension takes place.

It turns out that the great Kandinsky retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City (October 25, 2008 to March 8, 2009) coincided with the finishing touches I was applying to my most recent book, Around the Book: Systems and Literacy (2011). That volume is the transcript of a shift of emphasis in my critical practice from figure to ground, from singular artifact to systematic surround. It moves from a cluster of subversive reading tactics at the level of immanent detail and anomaly within texts to surveying the encompassing architecture of the systems, of thought and social organization, within which the artifacts of improvisation at hand arose. (This move in no way exempts me or any other critic from excruciating attentiveness to the language, program, and coding constituting such compelling cultural products.) In ways beyond my initial grasp, the exhibition spoke illuminatingly to pointed questions that Helen Tartar, who edited that volume, was placing to me at that very juncture. These were largely with the purpose of getting me to specify with greater lucidity than I’d thus far managed the tensions, cross-over, and mutual influences between books, as I was re-articulating certain of the variables in their configuration, and those tenuous and hypothetical constructions known as systems. I was thus aided and abetted in my reprise of Kandinsky by the Guggenheim’s landmark exhibition.⁷ So striking was it to me on a first viewing that I returned to it on two other occasions. The current project sets off as an effort to answer Helen’s questions persisting from Around the Book, but also to shift the field of inquiry ever so slightly in a psychoanalytical and/or schizoanalytical direction. In this re-take, the constitution and program of systems serve as the very maquiladores of the restraints, dismissals, profiles, and eradications to which art and critique arise in desperate as well as conscientious gesture of remediation.

3.

European cultural conditions conspired, in the interstice between 1908 and 1912, give or take a few months, to allow a disqualification of prevailing aesthetic contracts and sub-contracts in an astonishing range of media and art-forms: painting and sculpture; narrative, dramatic, poetic, and even discursive script; music and its sub-genres. In The Aesthetic Contract, a book I published in 1997, I elaborated a contractual understanding of cultural and aesthetic history. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Convergence-Zone: Art, Theory, Therapy
• 1 Reading Kandinsky
• 2 From The Brothers K. to Joseph K.: The Digitization of Literature
• 3 The Calculable, the Incalculable, and the Rest: Kafka’s Virtual Environment
• 4 Urban Introjections: Berlin Alexanderplatz
• 5 Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time
• 6 Playful Healing: The Transitions of D. W. Winnicott
• 7 The Figure in the Network: Douglas Hofstadter and the Ethics of Intelligence
• 8 The Phenomenology of Jetlag
• Afterword: Healing, Systematically
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright