"The leap of thought in the unimaginable is […] an act of destroying our perceptual barriers. This is a moment when human detection reaches its boundaries. Sorcerers practice the art of spying, of sending front posts to explore the boundaries of the perceptual. This is another reason why I like poems. I think of them as front posts."

Carlos Castaneda, The Power of Silence

     Modern, and especially Postmodern, art has been criticized for reducing its aspirations to the superficial aim of simply shocking its audience. While it is evident that the contemporary artist, for quite some time now, has been indulging in demonstrations of originality more often than not, shock as a dynamic principle of art is not to be dismissed so lightly.
     Ab-use (in the sense of over-use) is inherent to human nature. The postmodern era of high specialization and autonomization is a fertile ground for the unequivocal manifestation and methodological reign of this peculiarity of human nature. Furtively abusing a single idea, concept or element of human thought has become a dominant social approach. Segregating, dissecting and overproducing elements of social or biological being has taken place as a direct result of a socio-economics oriented towards mass production and of a new ideology of science oriented towards analysis of the ‘mechanical’ world.
     Art as a social practice wouldn’t deviate from the flow and the audience witnessed the break between form and content, the segregation of aesthetic, conceptual and functional, and the over-exploration of their very elements. There is barely any aspect, basic or superstructural, of art that hasn’t been abused during the past century and, in doing so, art didn’t just indulge in its secular fantasies, it joined the other spheres of social production to manifest a zeitgeist that was there to stay.

     “…there are situations in which art, in the interest of its own health and perhaps survival, must reduce itself to its barest elements, just as a stomach sometimes needs the blandest diet and a distraught mind must take refuge in the emptiness of the desert.”
(Rudolf Arnheim, 1986, pp.232)
     

     An aspiration towards shock as a dynamic relationship to the audience was not an invention of the postmodern artist desperate to draw attention in a world jammed with information. Shock, as an aesthetic principle was already there when the postmodern artist found himself in need of attention, tool or aesthetic objective. (Probably it was due to this mechanical separation of shock that beauty as the ontological argument of aesthetics was suspended, avoided and perpetually perverted in modern theories of social relativity. While it is not my aim to discredit such theories, since as a postmodern individual I personally subscribe to many of them (yet I do so with respect only where it is due), it is important to draw attention to problems of ontology which have been continuously disregarded and confused within the pluralistic postmodern discourse.) Ideological twists and theoretical bending of a term or a word cannot ultimately affect its provisional meaning; a term’s relation to different catalogues is by definition determined through its basic significance.
     As a curious mind I have delighted in the crisp intelligence and dramatic profundity of innumerable theories, digging into the darkest secrets of the mind and the human condition. As a practicing artist I have never encountered an account of aesthetic dynamics more precise and truthful than that given by Carlos Castaneda in The Power of Silence. This is how Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, experiences the art work:

     “There are many reasons why I like poems… Through them I shock myself. While you are reading them to me, I switch off my internal dialogue and allow my inner silence to gain power. Combined, the poem and the silence give me their surprise and this is my shock.
     When I hear the words I feel that the person has seen the essence of things and now I can see with him. I am not interested why is this poem written. Of significance is only the sensation that is given to me by the dream of the poet, and with the dream – the beauty.”

     Every sphere of human activity aims at its ultimate state of existence. In other words, it aims at perfection in the provisional sense of the word. The cognitive discipline, being disciplines ontologically concerned with aspects of the human condition, aim at exploring the boundaries of human capacity. Science is concerned with functional meaning of phenomena, positive understanding, i.e. with logically and empirically provable knowledge that can be re-demonstrated independently from the subjective condition. In other words, it is interested with those categories of human mind that can establish objective truth, thus necessarily employing logic as its conceptual methodology. Art, on the other hand, is concerned with understanding form, the semiotic meaning of phenomena and since this understanding is ultimately related to perception, aesthetics is art’s methodology, beauty – its ultimate expression. A scientific argument can be beautiful in the elegance of its flow but its logical plausibility is what determines its validity, what constitutes its criterion of truthfulness. A piece of art can be logical in its construction but only its aesthetic plausibility can determine its validity.
     The exploration of form is primarily related to perception and respectively to the mechanism of conceptualizing information. It is through perceiving that form as such is evaluated and allowed to communicate meaning: the more coherent the form, the more immediate and complete the information processing. Thus perception and conception operate inseparably and art is largely concerned with the dynamics of their integral relation.
     Exploring the boundaries of human perception within the complex of the human condition as a subjective state is thus a prime objective of art as a cognitive discipline. Art is not interested in the mechanics of vision, for example, but in the total implications of vision, in its place in the sensorium, in the construction of semantics, in its internal, intuitive and highly subjective space, in its capacity to overgrow its own mechanism.
     Dismantling social perceptual constructs is the first level of approaching the problem of perceptual boundaries and form’s noumenal nature. The cliché is the most apparent and easily identifiable such construct that can illustrate the argument. But the formal cliché, like a phrase for example, is far less complex than a structural cliché subliminally imbedded in the way form is interpreted. The social, however, is preceded by the natural imperative determining constructs far more complex to identify and deconstruct for they occupy the borderline of our very identity as human beings.
The phenomenology of Kant and later of Husserl represents a conceptual methodology of systematic deconstruction of cognitive structures toward pure thought/conception and the unprejudiced study of noumena. Merleau-Ponty extended the phenomenological method, identifying its practical application in artistic creation and aesthetic production. In doing this, he stressed out the prime importance of perceptual deconstruction since perception serves as the front guard of the order of processing information. To the visible space available outside the individual to his/her optical vision, Merleau-Ponty opposed the visionary space inside the individual that corresponded to an inner vision independent from optical mechanics and capable of grasping the essential form of the phenomenon observed.
     Accessing the visionary space is another way of identifying what I refer to as reaching the perceptual boundaries. An art form that walks the line of those boundaries is profoundly shocking for it surprises the habitual sensory perception and the habitual sensory interpretation yet it addresses a faculty of pure conception that is present in all humans. Such an artwork evades categorization in the established order of interpretation and there the undefinable category of beauty comes in. It is therefore no surprise that in the current age of high definition, such a category of liminal nature as beauty is getting conveniently out of currency.

     When, some time ago, I started invariably seeing black dots flying in front of my eyes, I got sick with fearsome bewilderment. It turned out this was an effect produced by my defective eye and it was there to stay. Watching those dots flying around made me feel like viewing the world through a defective camera lens or watching it on a worn out monitor. It was then that I fully comprehended the meaning of Descartes’ Cartesian Man. I was, after all, a mechanical man, a complex machinery that could go wrong or break, or eventually be repaired, but which was ultimately a device to record, process and produce information in a certain, quite confined, range of ways. Or was I? Was I that sum of elaborately related mechanical parts or was I one trapped into them? Where did my being start and where did the machinery end? And much like Descartes himself I had to resort to a meta-physical solution to pull myself together.
Eventually, my mind learned to disregard the defect in recording information. It proved to be more versatile and adaptable than a primitive recording camera. But technology promised to catch up with humanity.
     Through the constant interrelation of a number of brain functions, visual perception never occurs in a pure state, it is invariably accompanied by interpretation that aims at the simplest, most coherent form of producing meaning. As it was already mentioned, perception and conception are inseparable. However, the solidity of an image perceived is not necessarily equivalent to its validity. Our eyes constantly betray reality. It is sufficient to put one’s finger vertically at a short distance from the eyes and focus behind it to notice that the change of focus invariably splits the finger into two identical ones where in reality there is only one. The mind, however, takes care of that deviation by disregarding the split and detecting only what’s plausible and confirmed by previous information (knowledge) and by collective sensory effort (tactile/visual and often aural rather than visual alone). This ability of the eye to split or fuse an image depending on the control of focus is the basis of stereo effects achieved by superimposing two identical images of slightly differing angles (corresponding to the angle of the two eyes). Apart from being unfaithful to reality, the eye proves to be capable of constructing an alternative reality and thus of redefining its relationship to brain information processing. The persistence of vision is another such faculty of the complex of visual perception that allows for constructing a reality of movement out of rapidly projected still images like in film, for example. This demonstrates that human being is more than the sum of its parts and, implied within the innumerable varieties of capacitating relationships lie unknown, barely explored fields of cognitive abilities.
     By virtue of its ontology, art has always challenged the senses, calling for re-examination of human conception of the world, of the methods and processes through which an idea is established. By addressing the mental senses (the senses that deal with the forms we think in), art has constantly strove to push the boundaries of the human condition as a whole, to manifest human capacity at its best and even to probe beyond it. But in order to do so the work of art has to sustain on its own, it has to abide in its own integral realm. It has to be irreducible, untranslatable, or uncomplimented by other forms.This is precisely where its social function lies and where the paradox of art vs. society dwells. Being a form of communication, art is by definition a social form. Society needs it to define and identify the boundaries of human condition (as they are understood within the given spacio-temporal parameters) in order to set an ideal goal of cognitive development. However, being a ‘front post’, a device for pushing the boundaries of human capacity, art is necessarily subversive to the established order as manifest in basic structures such as sensorium, value system, etc. Thus art within society is always in a state of flux, its right to existence is always censored; yet its practice is encouraged and preserved from disappearing altogether. The argument that art is a luxury in hard times like the ones ‘we live in’ is an empty one for art has never constituted a basic and immediate necessity to ensure existence and times have never been unproblematic enough so that transcendental and abstract problems remain the sole problematics of society. It is not that art does not meet immediate necessities what is bothersome about it. It is the threat to immediate necessities that terrorizes the social man.
     In order to bring together the ideal self with the mechanical one, Descartes had to resort to a metaphysical solution. Today, the rapid advance of science and the establishment of a ‘scientific ideology’ has discarded the need for an idealistic argument (expand), in the name of a frenzied hope for human supremacy over nature and its secrets of creation. Significantly, it is more often than not that scientists who are working on the verge of their discipline’s borderlines are the ones least subscribing to this new religion. For one, they know only too well that science is only a discipline aimed at empirical knowledge, that empirical knowledge is only a facet of cognition and logic – only one way to go for it.
While science gains social grounds by perpetuating the myth of human omnipotence and the illusion of control, art, by nature subversive to the established order of social semantics, more than ever recedes in the social margins. While science gains ground in a market society where tangibility defines the value system and thus automatically validates empiricism, art as a sphere of abstract production inevitably looses its credibility.
     In addition to the objective mechanical view of physical nature, Descartes has given a complementary subjective one summarized in the famed sentence “I think, therefore I am.” This latter, subjective aspect of human nature he attributed to the soul. Today the thinking self has become nothing more than the mechanical one. Exemplary is computer representing such a mechanical abstraction of the thinking self, proving that thought can be independent of a self and fully mechanical. Freud suggested a mechanism of the social construction of the self that joined the short list of scientific ideologies that stayed to rule. From here on a fantasy about a computer equipped with a human body to move around in space and perceive information autonomously in a humanoid condition would seem dangerously plausible. Today the Cartesian man is a fully mechanical one.
     To strip the human condition to its mechanical minimum is a convenient way to give plausible explanations to human questions and problematics thus paralyzing the individual search for answers while at the same time supplying an almost empirical hope, a certainty, about human supremacy over nature. This hope, this illusion of control would give confidence in a relative autonomy of the human being while keeping the individual on a tight social leash. Given all this, which society wouldn’t choose the Cartesian man as its hero?

     Years ago, when I first started having problem with my eyes, I told a friend of mine I needed glasses for I couldn’t see well from a distance. “If you want to learn how to see”, he replied, “you should never resort to glasses.” I’ve always had a distaste for parabolic talk but, probably out of indolence, I listened to him. Today, I don’t regret my decision. I move around fluently, using only my bare near-sighted eyes and they are truly enough. More importantly, to tap into the visionary space and see, I would hardly need mechanical devices.
     It is this art’s interest in the undefinable that lies behind the highly defined mechanical that defies contemporary ideologies. The Cartesian man is within the aesthetic scope as far as it needs to be systematically overgrown. It has always been there and it has always been terrorized in pushing the boundaries of its very existence. This has been a prime social objective of artistic creation. An objective that starts with the individual artist and his/her own cognitive trip into the unknown and ends with the work of art – a trophy of another world, a semantic organism of form that allows the viewer a glance in the unknown. To peep into that world however, one has to wave a mortal farewell to his/her established order of perception/conception and to inevitably emerge a little skeptical about the mechanical world of social conventions. And this is not an explicit process but a deep subliminal one that worms down the conceptual structures from within. It may be, as it is in the greatest of artworks, an inherent unconscious development. This is the mortal appeal of beauty as such and it is a fatal attraction since it endangers all that the social imperative strives for – security, control, predictability.
     The unpredictability of artistic creation is its most terrific weapon and the most terrible phantom to social order. Beauty becomes the Gorgona Medusa for society. But, as it was already discussed, society needs the ‘front posts’ not only to identify its achievements but also to pinpoint the extent of realization that the human condition has achieved on the individual level and to learn to incorporate it and control it. Max Weber said that if a society did not have deviants, it had to create them. Thus it could detect the shortcomings and take measure to straighten them.
     There was no difficulty in sustaining art as a (deviant) barometer until the establishment of democracy, the inevitable liberation of information and the subsequent liberation of the market in a technologically advancing society. Pluralism posed new threats to social control and society had to invent new methods of securing information. Its new ideologies were to desacralize information but by doing so, it made it widely available, so it had to go further – it had to discredit it by marginalizing it and by gradually profanizing it. Thus the notion of beauty would dissolve in the debris of social relativism, the artistic practice would be reduced to a therapeutic device and the semantics – translated into the simplistics of a message. What was once an integral whole (?) would be mechanically separated and stripped down to a bare element accessible to all and transparent in its nature. Once transparent, art automatically became its own surveillance system. In the age of proof equals truth, logic reigned supreme and, as Unamuno observed, “logic tends to reduce everything to identities and genera, to each representation having no more than one single and safe-same content in whatever place, time, or relation it may occur to us.”
This unfavourable social condition of contemporary art does not mean art has lost itself in the battle. It simply means that, to endure it has to fight new enemies – its own social phantoms lurking in its very midst. It has to fight against loosing its ontological arguments in the confusion of pluralistic ideology. For pluralism should never be allowed to become an ideology in the practice of the artist. Pluralism should remain what it is by nature: a state of affairs, a pool of an infinite variety of information that stimulates the imagination, keeps the mind sober and constantly reminds that there is no absolute authority in human affairs.
     Pluralism should also be a principle that constantly reminds the individual artist that there is a variety of experiences, information and ways of interpreting that should never give way to a single fixation even when it comes to biological imperatives, even when it comes to the mechanical man or rather, especially when it comes to him. Are the dots I’m seeing real? Are they more real than my split finger or is my focus on the background the veritable one? Each one of those has its plane of reality: the dots are projected from the back of my eye’s apple where they really exist in the form of a fluid, the split finger is the true projection on the retina and the gas station in the background is only a gas station in the background. I am not to believe any of those sights for they really exist someplace or another in physical reality and believe is only about what we don’t know that exists for certain. Yet I am to believe all of them because the same way they twist and evade a single state of perceptible being (now my finger is one, now it’s two), they most certainly evade the visionary space where they defy all laws of physics in a manner unidentifiable with them and how can I be absolutely certain about their true existence.
     Science is ruling as social ideology of the day but within its own boundaries the quest for knowledge remains unquenchable and systematically attacks the boundaries of conceptual order. It is precisely thanks to this restless urge toward the unknown and the unimaginable that science, secured by the unsuspecting social blessing, is groundbreaking at an incredible speed. The Cartesian man is a social projection that has little credibility in the front echelons of scientific research itself.
On the other hand art, segregated and preoccupied with its social validation and demarginalization, is leaving behind its epistemological imperative thus sustaining the subtle impression of a victory of the mechanical man over the meta-physical one. Leaving behind its epistemological imperative however means leaving behind its service to humanity for the sake of the survival of a discipline deprived of its very nature. It also means leaving behind its social function as a detective of stagnating orderly fixations so that it can become a tribune for social criticism where there is no shortage of tribunes, thus denying itself the exclusivity of a reason to socially exist.
     Driven by the imperative for self preservation art, more often than not, mimics theories already existing in other fields thus becoming a mere illustration of intellectual property that belongs elsewhere. Desperate for acknowledgment, it resorts to the shock effect as an end in itself thus perpetuating a negative social attitude. Desperate for social legitimization, it resorts to a degraded understanding of beauty as a form of pleasing the senses through commodifiable entertainment and to rejection of beauty as an elitist category in the profinization of artistic practice so it can multiply itself in a widely accessible way of personal expression, of psycho-social relief. In doing so, it becomes disintegrated and abandons its responsibility of creating ‘front posts’ of human awareness thus serving, rather than attacking, a social order surreptitiously penetrating its very fabric.
     The persistence of vision, the quality of the eye to sustain a still image for slightly longer than the actual duration of the visual contact, is responsible for the illusion of movement created in cinema projections. But cinema only reminds us about a quality of human physiological system of vision that allows for credible but untruthful account of phenomena. How can we be certain then that the reality we systematically perceive is not altogether an untruthful or partial appearance of only those of its aspects that are accessible to our sensorium with its apparent and hidden limitations?
     
     “Truth is coherence. But as regards the whole system, the aggregate, as there is nothing outside of it of which we have knowledge, we cannot say whether it is true or not. It is conceivable that the universe, as it exists in itself, outside of our consciousness, may be quite other than it appears to us, although this is a supposition that has no meaning for reason.”
(Unamuno; 1921, pp.104)

     Let us imagine a society of blind-born people. They don’t miss visual reality since they don’t know what it is. Systematically, they organize their knowledge and understanding with the tools available to them – through their empirical methodology they reveal truths that describe the world as one completely lacking a visual aspect, a quite different world where the sun never rises and it also never sets (? Warmth). And those truths are perfectly valid and satisfactory within their contrived reality.
But some people, whose senses are perhaps keener or whose rationality more easily disposable, notice that there is a certain regularity in the recurrence of warmth in nature (one source as opposed to spread out). They start suspecting something is out there, unreachable by their tools. If only they could understand what it was, if only they had one more tool, they would probably not need travel unimaginable distances to touch it and thus know it. Those people develop an irrational longing for a universe where they can perceive the shape of warmth. And the shape of warmth becomes a poetic concept that captures the imaginations of those restless in spirit.
To grasp that form, to access the visible, they cannot empirically construct a device since they don’t have the faintest idea of what exactly they are looking for. Scientists don’t give the idea much credibility although they too have noticed the now famed regularity. They can construct a hypothesis of a distant fire producing that warmth but they can hardly prove or verify it. It remains a loose and farfetched hypothesis.
     But the unresting, the poets, start searching for their own way of accessing that elusive aspect of being that ignites the imagination with paradoxical poetic notions. To do so, they have to deconstruct all they have been thought of and all that they’ve been biologically compelled to assume as true. They have to strip naked their perception and their conceptual mechanisms in order to access a primary deeper space where the visionary lurks in the form of an intuition of vision, of an elusive understanding, of an incomprehensible sight.
The artist is like the blind man who, unlike the rest of his kind, is constantly longing for a knowledge of reality, a realm on the verge of human capacity that can only be touched by the beauty of a poetic impossibility. The mechanical man, the one that is positive, reproducible, known and controllable has to die so that the absurd, the elusive, the unknown can stretch to that realm and bring the work of art from there. The artwork that commemorates the point the absurd man has reached and can transport new visitors to that point again and again. Thus sustaining itself by its own power, the work of art remains free: it does not belong to the artist, or to society, or to a particular moment and context, it belongs to its own realm where laws of physics, laws of society, even laws of nature may not hold true.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Arnheim, Rudolf; New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 1986, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London

2. Castaneda, Carlos; The Power of Silence, 1987, Pocket Books, New York

3. Descartes, Rene; The Passions of the Soul, 1927, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York

4. Unamuno, Miguel de; Tragic Sense of Life, 1954, Dover Publications, New York

1998, Concordia University, Montreal