“Economy” in the sense of making spare use of things, our minds being by nature frugal. With finite mental resources, it’s natural that we should try to conserve them. When we encounter a bunch of new things, we would rather add them to what we already know than overturn any existing knowledge.

So, whenever we can, we try lumping similar things together — thereby gaining as well a big future advantage, for now we don’t need to dredge up all the specifics, but can simply recall to mind their rough sum total — our general impression. What’s lost in precision is gained in flexibility and speed.

Of course, to find similarities means to detect differences: and what we reject from one group, we often lump together, by opposition, into another.

— A poor man’s theory of mind, perhaps.

Well, I know I’m conscious of my mind’s limitations more than most, having puzzled over this since I was quite young. And later, when as a special education teacher I encountered so-called clinical cases, my awareness expanded.

But now let’s head into territory more idiosyncratic and, I hope, more interesting.

 

Lenses

For a long time now, since I was twelve or perhaps even younger, I’ve tried to bring certain other minds into my own: not assimilating them there, but instead keeping them slightly apart as semi-separate beings within me. As such, they offer different lenses — virtual eyes — through which I can peer out at the world.

This can’t be so unusual an experience, for surely you too have stumbled out of an art exhibit, a movie, or a concert to find the world utterly transformed, at least for a while. My goal has been to somehow preserve these kinds of transformations within me.

A few examples, as disparate as possible, might help here:

1. Stan Brakhage, whose experimental filmmaking I first encountered when I was fifteen. I tried to memorize as many of his films as I could find over the next five or six years, bringing his vision very deep into my consciousness — so that even now, many years later, I can glance at a negligible patch of light and transform it into something immense and mystical, connected to my very soul by the intricate pathways of optic nerve and visual cortex. (Such exalted language comes in part from Brakhage as well.)
2. Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer I resisted reading for years, unable to overcome my distaste for the awkwardness of his sentences. My old rule was that you can judge a book in a flash — not by its cover, but by any one of its sentences. Almost invariably true, but not for Dick. The throwaway quality of his prose is a perfect match for the disposable realities he conjured up — and that we now live in. Every brand new product — or idea — that I pick up reveals, through his eyes, telltale signs of its already starting to fray, to fade, to obsolesce. (Even this passage has a limited shelf life, for Dick himself is increasingly over-exposed, turning into a cliche, & is thus due for steep discounting.)
3. Nora, a month-old dwarf bunny we once acquired for our two daughters, but who died a scarce two weeks later (though persisting inside me ever since). Who taught me to regard every expanse — lap, bedspread, carpet — as a possible meadow. And every window as a possible menace, as if at any moment a hawk might swoop down from the blinding sky.

I could multiply these examples many times over, for my interior lens collection isn’t small. I do take care, though, to limit its size, a point I’ll come back to.

 

Guides

But first let’s dispel my visual bias. Rather than lenses, the other minds you select could serve as interior guides, suggesting ways of acting or moving or just being.

Many times people place themselves in the thrall of another person — most often larger-than-life figures — movie-star, athlete, saint — whose stances, movements, expressions they can use to mold their own.

But beware: let no single guru monopolize you — a mental economy thrives on free competition.

Another guide, Wittgenstein, can help us advance further here [in considering the role of guides in one's mental economy]. In Zettel, he observed:

It is very difficult to describe paths of thought where there are already many lines of thought laid down, — your own or other people’s — and not to get into one of the grooves. It is difficult to deviate from an old line of thought just a little.

This explains why it’s so important both to limit your collection of other minds and to delimit their domains. Their value lies in the degree of their difference: you use one to jar you away from the other, and in that displacement to spot the wide open spaces in between, spaces where you can forge new paths of your own.

Atlanta airport is a major hub not only for business travelers and tourists, but also for soldiers — many presumably on their way to or from hazardous military duties in Iraq. Lengthy lay-overs often protract their time in the airport, and so, looking up from the bright atrium of the main terminal, you can see them come to roost on the encircling balconies of the upper floors. There, distinctive in their desert camouflage fatigues, they sprawl against their matching duffel-bags.

Every so often, a large group of soldiers will muster and descend to the main floor, where they then proceed in single file towards their departing flight, often accompanied by one or two smiling sro volunteers who wave small American flags. This prompts a spontaneous round of patriotic applause on the part of nearly everyone in the atrium..

You, however, might hesitate.

What exactly are you applauding? Are you simply signaling encouragement to these poor men and women, who may soon be in grave danger? If so, then, yes, clap. But could you also be clapping, against your wishes, for that tragic war itself? In which case, no, you decide to sit on your hands. But what about that particular private, who happens to have glanced your way — how will he read the message that you can’t help but send him, since invisibility is not an option here and the comparative complexity of your reflections can find no means of expression?

And so you bounce back and forth between yes and no, until suddenly you make up your mind one way or the other and do something — a unified act that betrays the divisions inside you.

 

Gerrymandering

If in that Atlanta predicament you can be said to be of two minds, then that represents the simplest of situations, that is, of divisions. Far more often, you’re of many minds, though you may sense these only vaguely.

Marvin Minsky looked at this in one of the quirkier texts in Society of Mind. He imagined your asking yourself whether you had enjoyed buying a present and wrapping it up for a friend. A task analysis of the activity would yield numerous sub-tasks, including such things as selecting the gift, choosing the paper, finding the ribbon, tying the bow, etc. He goes on to provide an admittedly pathological but hilariously crude diagram of what would happen if every sub-task reported its degree of satisfaction, with the final determination calculated by a series of votes.

As you can see, the process is as potentially corrupt as our representative democracy, at least from the point of view of the lower levels in the hierarchy.

 

Suppression

But as Minsky points out all this complexity is largely suppressed — these internal divisions are shielded from you, and a good thing, too, since you’d be completely paralyzed should they rear their heads with every one of your thoughts and actions.

And yet there are times when you want to shake off this kind of suppression — a mental hygiene of sorts — and attend to the contradictory complexity inside you. A complexity that gnaws away at the very idea of you as singular self.

 

Introspection as method

What has long fascinated me about The Society of Mind is that so many of its propositions — developed after all as part of Minsky’s life-long quest to develop artificial intelligence — can be verified by you the reader simply by thinking them through. In this respect, Minsky’s methods are nearly the same as those of William James a century or so earlier (in, for example, Principles of Psychology). Or to those of another hero of introspection, Paul Valery, whose daily pre-dawn reflections led to such insights as this:

If you set your microscope to the first magnifying-power, you get “Man is free.” If you step it up to the second, you get “Man is not free” — and then, maybe, it’s no longer Man that you are seeing.

But to return to Minsky, it seems that his approach to artificial intelligence — his attempt to base it on a deep understanding of human intelligence — has gone by the wayside. I’ll ask Marc, who knew Minsky at the Media Lab, to take this further. There’s a tragic side to this, having to do with both individual lives and institutional structures.

Often we praise a given work of art by calling it unforgettable. We say that it’s impressed itself on us indelibly.

But I wonder. Am I alone in finding that some of the most spellbinding experiences I’ve had are precisely those whose spell is so easily broken in the aftermath? that the memory I have is not so much a vivid recreation as a kind of sign or placeholder, marking the significance of the event without preserving nearly enough of its detail and power?

When you are in the grip of such experiences, you feel as if they’re changing you forever. But afterwards, as you revert inexorably to the everyday, you can count yourself lucky if they’ve shifted your outlook by even a degree.

While this holds true for any kind of exaltation — spiritual, erotic, chemical — perhaps certain aesthetic experiences are best treated as a special case. For one thing, they are less the direct result of an immediate physiological rapture. And they often have an intricacy of internal relations quite different from other kinds of transports.

If that’s true, then perhaps it’s in the very nature of certain artworks to defy our efforts to maintain them in memory. For if memory can do no better than to make a selection and choose parts to stand for the whole, it makes sense that this operation will sometimes fail, that the act of remembering cannot quite manage to put all the balls in the air again.

To get what I mean, think of a great novel within which you once seemed to come to life fully, with new connections, recognitions, and realizations triggered all around you in the depths of your reading. Now imagine your later seeing even a mediocre film of the same story. Undoubtedly, the film’s images (no matter how impoverished they are or how much you resist them) will be more vivid in your memory than the parallel scenes from the novel. Even when you go back to reread and regain the novel, you can’t help but keep seeing it through the simplifying lens of the movie.

All sorts of things force themselves into my memory against my will — jingles, ads, trivia — even reductive ideas (formulas, stereotypes) that I know are wrong.

It’s an odd predicament to keep searching for what I know I will most likely forget.

 

Do you like X ?

Questions that take the simplistic form of Do you like Wagner? once prompted Marvin Minsky to elaborate his notion of the mind’s technique of gerrymandering (discussed in this previous post).

When asked a yes-or-no question,yes and no should be your only answer. Why reduce a whole complex of observations and judgments to a single word?

Just as foolish is to try summing up someone’s intelligence in an iq number — a measure whose only use is in disproving the intelligence of those who administer or submit to it.

 

The long & short of it

Marc (sitting next to me) remembered the following witty exchange at the Media Lab:

[The question is posed ]

— Do you want the short answer or the long?
The short.
— No.
And the long?
— Yes.

Let’s follow that pattern here.

 

Do I like Duchamp?

The short answer is no.

I’ve often wondered whether Duchamp should be blamed for his many followers (a good question in general — should Christ?)

But the more specific and trickier question that I should have been asking myself is whether what I deplore in these followers I should also find and then deplore in the man himself.

What’s really at stake here is this: how, when, and why did the artwork-as-one-liner gain its dreadful currency?

No need to look far. A well-known early example is Duchamp’s goateed Mona Lisa with its schoolboyish pun of a title (“She has a hot ass.”) This piece sticks in your mind for the same reason that an advertisement does — both have the same form: they’re designed to be taken in at a glance, but with a double-take at the slight transgression.

Duchamp’s titillating anti-art gesture set the pattern for much that followed, though he wasn’t the only culprit.

Far worse was Magritte with his Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which proliferated as far and wide as Duchamp — paving the way for all the forehead-slapping profundities of conceptual art.

 

Do I like Duchamp?

The long answer is yes. But yes only to those of Duchamp’s works that themselves demand long answers.

Duchamp made the point best himself, in this note for the Large Glass:

The idea of a deliberate delay in understanding goes in the opposite direction of the one-liner. As does the idea of an indecisive reunion of meanings, which leads to works that refuse simple resolution.

And so you have The Large Glass, a complex and peculiarly beautiful visual object, which is itself part of a larger network of meanings. These Duchamp made available to you in portable form — the Boite-en-valise and the Green Box.

You can’t grasp the whole without closely examining all the parts, which you must keep juxtaposing in a variety of possible relations — holding them up to the light, so to speak, again and again.

(Equally important is that Duchamp shows that you can’t rid an object of words — and better for the artist to supply them first than to wait for the curator or critic. This is worth expanding on, but some other time.)

 

And yet

And yet Duchamp (like Joyce) is willfully obscure, demanding more of you than he should — you have to delve into and decode an essentially private world. What a shame that he ended his career on this note of secrecy and obscurity with the Étant donnés.

He could have gone in a different direction, and fortunately someone else did so for him.

When Duchamp made his portable boxes and suitcases, they were still essentially hand-made — limited editions now set behind glass in museums where in fact they can’t be handled or read.

For a detailed account, see this Tate Paper.

It was one of Duchamp’s followers, the English artist Richard Hamilton, who improved on the original. Hamilton published a perfect transcription/translation of the Green Box, not only helping to render the French text into English, but also setting Duchamp’s handwriting and hand-drawn diagrams into much more legible (and beautiful) form. Duchamp approved the result, but never followed its example.

Unfortunately it is Duchamp’s rather than Hamilton’s action that has remained the model in the art world, for obvious market reasons. You see this in Warhol (another Duchamp descendent) whose work flirts with the idea of factory-made reproducibility while stopping well short of it, for no other reason than the mercantile.

And so to the original question of value, we have only an indecisive answer.