Re: <nettime> Clarifying my thoughts about Leonardo vs. status quo & Vie

Hi Martin,

I am definitely only an amateur in Leonardo studies, but am operating on the presumption that sometimes a novice can stumble upon questions outside an expert focus. I could certainly be very wrong in this!

Your cogent and detailed reply is much appreciated. I made two errors in my post: first, I overlooked that Denzin's work has 4 volumes and I bought the wrong one (on indigenous culture). The one you cited on the arts is what I should look at. I also failed to answer what may have been your key question about Denzin setting norms about what kind of data is OK to use in research. At a gut level I think there are some ethical questions of relevance there, but I'm not sure how to quantify them. Norbert Wiener's thoughts in God and Golem Inc. have made sense to me over the last decade or so. For some reason Denzin's volume on the arts costs a lot; can you link to or post key excerpts, or paraphrase? The ethics around what is called "collaborative research" practices also relate to Denzin I would think.

My knowledge of indigenous thought and culture is very little, but I believe that the integration of art and science has quite a bit in common with Leonardo's perspective. Gregory Cajete writes in his 1994 book Look to the Mountain: an Ecology of Indigenous Education that "The story of science was integrated with all other aspects of Indian life. When you apply holistic thinking to interpret the symbolic language, art, dance, music, ritual, and metaphors through which the story of Indian science has been transmitted, you begin to realize that they reflect tremendously perceptive and sophisticated ideas about the processes of Nature and the Universe." This idea of integrating the disciplines is, for example, viewed as an urgent deficit in the medical field: https://www.aamc.org/what-we-do/mission-areas/medical-education/frahme. In fact, many of the traditional academic disciplines are realizing that they lack interconnection with broader spheres of knowledge and that this causes serious deficiencies. This is not an attempt to "go back" to some earlier time, but is simple network logic: the dots are not being connected well enough, and this diminishes the quality and effectiveness of knowledge.

Full disclosure, since 1993 or so I have tended to favor Habermas in several of the nuances of his jousting with Foucault. I have only modest education of their respective oeuvres, but I hope enough for at least a moderately informed opinion. I will try not to discuss this opinion much at all as it has been hashed out so much by others, so I mention it as kind of an FYI.

As to the human-centered certainties we often ascribe to Leonardo and his time, and later folks like Galileo, it seems to me there are meaningful exceptions to this in Leonardo's case (and arguably in others too). I haven't the skill or background to rewrite the history of the Renaissance, and how we engage with it, but I do believe that a new interpretation of the Mona Lisa may offer some clues. (John Shearman's theory of "transitive painting" in his 1985 book Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance outlines well this "network" methodology in artists as far back as Donatello.)

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the bridge in the Mona Lisa is a metaphor of the flow of the history of art, science, and engineering (thus technology). The bridge "flows" into the garment of the sitter, which is "woven" into the present state of that flow of history, and "worn" by the principle of human experience i.e. what Leonardo personified as "Esperienza." This persona looks us straight in the eye, unmistakably invoking the viewer's own embodiment of said faculty. The sitter also "points" to the fabric of the left sleeve, indicating that Esperienza is the creator, inventor, and discoverer of the garment which perforce continually evolves.

All aspects of the above metaphoric reading are echoed by statements Leonardo made in his notebooks, but the significance of the bridge is never discussed in the Leonardo literature and the garment is only viewed as a symbol of water flow in nature. (The omission of the bridge seems to me a too narrow reading, at least worth revisiting, but the field of Leonardo studies is understandably a settled doctrine in many ways.) I know of only one scholar, Robert Zwijnenberg at Leiden University, who has proposed in a 2020 paper in Incontri that the bridge represents a "connector" between the macrocosm of nature and the microcosm of the human, making it an "ahistorical" image that functions outside of normal time.

Would such a reading, based on the metaphor of bridge and garment, not amount to a much more nuanced worldview on Leonardo's part than the simple microcosm/macrocosm model that was already antique even in 1503? It amply accommodates what you say about practice-focus, which I believe is important to qualitative research in the form of collaborative research practices (CRP? sorry cannot find the reference for this). It does not presume humanity to be a "complete" whole; it's actually very Gödelian in the "missing" nature of that which it describes (i.e., the "Esperienza" faculty is not in the painting, but in the viewer). Leonardo makes many statements which have been compared to the pre-Socratics, such as Anaximander, even though he is often called a Neoplatonist.

I think it is more likely Leonardo saw something closer to what we are grappling with now, in which technology has advanced exponentially yet we are still at a relative loss as to how to "guide" it. He depicted the overproduction of junk in a remarkable image:

https://www.rct.uk/collection/912698/a-cloudburst-of-material-possessions

As to Bach, Hofstadter compares him very closely to Gödel in the GEB. That book is over my head in many of its math and computer science aspects, but the basic gist makes sense. Is not the principle of incompleteness in a fugue, and hence the morphisms of all imaginative experience, at least comparable to that in Gödel's theorem? Not that Bach is the be-all or should be to everyone's taste.

As an amateur fan of math 🙂 I have been interested lately in work on number theory that finds correlation between spatial dynamics and factors like the Riemann hypothesis you mention.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/with-arithmetic-dynamics-mathematicians-unlock-new-insights-20210222/

The math vocabulary available to Leonardo was basically a simple ABC's compared to today, but there are certainly comparisons to non-Euclidean ideas in some of his statements. There is a great 1968 essay by Giorgio de Santillana, "Leonardo: Man Without Letters," in Reflections on Men and Ideas, about the "kind of geometry" and "kind of math" Leonardo was trying to "get at." He disagreed -- albeit in rather inchoate terminology -- with all the mathematical certainties of his day. I can't sum this all up here but the essay is an excellent reference and has influenced my thoughts greatly about Leonardo and math. Leonardo also wrote about the central importance of irreducible remainders which to me definitely echo Gödelian incompleteness (sorry can't find the citation just now).

One illustration of this might be Leonardo's map of the cosmos with the earth not at the center -- though he did not loudly broadcast this for obvious reasons -- in contrast to Dante's. The "center" for Leonardo is not the earth's core but rather the axes of rotation of all the many flows that make up the universe. This is much more akin to current cosmology, so I believe with Santillana that Leonardo was in many fields "the first modern" and absolutely not a medievalist or an orthodox institutionalist like the Humanists of his day (who were also, incidentally, the political class and hence the deciders of many questions). Leonardo was quite arguably not attempting to reinforce a simple central cosmos but rather to apply full complexity as we do today.

As to your mention of models, and the cycles of their iteration and passing away, I think both Dante and Leonardo are interesting on this. This year being Dante's 700th anniversary such correlations may be discussed, though it is strangely said that Leonardo had "little sustained interest" in Dante. In Inferno VII.67-96 Dante praised the Roman deity Fortuna (who he describes as a being quite similar to the Mona Lisa in tone and bearing) calling her "the Lady of Permutations," established by the divine as the power over people's luck (in a strangely pagan assertion to say the least), saying "Man's mortal reason / cannot encompass her. She rules her sphere / as the other gods rule theirs. Season by season / her changes change her changes endlessly." Certainly this must be read as at least a complication of certainty. If the Mona Lisa as Esperienza is an idea formed in part by Leonardo's combination of Dante's Fortuna and Beatrice, this unknowable randomness is fundamental, highly modern, and far from static or simple. Also very importantly, Leonardo's imitation of geologic time and water flow in the garment brings in the slow processes of evolution to the "models" of knowledge we create and must constantly see afresh and recreate from new awareness. This is a difference from Dante, but in Dante's defense he was pretty darn iconoclastic relative to the models and certainties of his own time.

https://www.rct.uk/collection/912581/a-woman-in-a-landscape

Here is a fairly standard assessment of Dante and Leonardo in the context of the above drawing (one of Leonardo's last major works): "Leonardo had, it seems, little sustained interest in Dante, and most quotations from the Divine Comedy in his notebooks are on natural phenomena; though the background here is hard to read it seems rocky, and we know from the Leda that Leonardo would not miss an opportunity to illustrate a flowery setting (eg. RCIN 912424). The context and function of the drawing thus remain unknown." Given the obvious parallels between this drawing and Botticelli's illustration of Purgatorio XXVIII, the former having a bridge and the latter not, there do seem to be connections among Dante, the bridge metaphor, and both the Mona Lisa and the Woman Standing in a Landscape. Very oddly it is not even recognized that there is a bridge in the latter drawing!

My understanding of the discourse of posthumanism is woefully nonexistent so I won't even try, except to lodge a tiny protest that perhaps Leonardo was not such an orthodox humanist as is often said.

All this is still not addressing your question of "the X on the doorstep," so I apologize for that! In hopes of continuing a productive dialogue if possible, and please others do chime in as I have more than said my piece, I guess I understand the X on the doorstep to be in one formulation the rest of the century's understanding of the relationship between the human and the technological. We have a sky full of Machiavellians singing their lovely songs, who say there should never be any thought or time given to ethics just survival. They may prevail in a race to the bottom and a desert planet.

I think Leonardo's most basic intent was to argue otherwise, and moreover, to build toward something else that could actually be used. The relationship between humanity and its arts is hard to put into words, much less images, but a simple phrasing could well be "technology is a garment we both wear and weave, that derives from our engagement with nature and shares much in common with it despite some differences." One school will say that we are too unskillful and should not do any weaving and maybe there is a degree of that approach which is unavoidable and acceptable. I can accept theoretically that perhaps some kind of imaginative AI should do our imagination for us, yet if we are not doing anything then it's difficult to say that we exist at all. Leonardo felt such a path to have poor outcomes. Frankly I side with Leonardo, that humans have rights and responsibilities to act imaginatively, and in fact cannot do otherwise one way or another, but the "proof" of this is nothing more than the tiny synapse between the Mona Lisa's right index finger and her left sleeve.

Thanks again for excellent discussion! I have a blog about all of this at the links below.

All best regards,

Max

"The Mindful Mona Lisa"

May 14 - October 29, 2020

Leonardo.info/blog

https://www.leonardo.info/blog/2020/05/14/the-mindful-mona-lisa-a-bridge-garment-experience-hypothesis

https://www.leonardo.info/blog/2021/02/04/the-mindful-mona-lisa-fortunes-garment-in-dante-and-machiavelli

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Martin Donner <mail@martindonner.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2021 4:03 PM
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> Clarifying my thoughts about Leonardo vs. status quo & Vienna Declaration/Denzin

Hi Max (& nettime),

thank you for your thoughts! I have to admit that I´m not a specialist for the era of Leonardo but your insights and the idea of your book sound interesting. As well your comment about the kinda ‚premodern‘ indigenous view on the practices we divide into arts and sciences just as forms of ‚doing‘ which corresponds in a way to the practice turn in western science.

What I was thinking about in a quite speculative way are indeed rather the differences in circumstances and destination routes between that era of the awakening of ‚the human‘ and an era when the idea of this specific historical notion of humanity associated with modernity might blur again (quasi with Foucault´s image on that in the back of my mind). Just to note that I don´t think we´re on the way back to Leonardo´s times although it might seem so. Back then there was still an unfractured conviction of ‚wholeness‘ of the world that a bit later was considered as describable in mathematical ways and expressible in artistic forms derived from that domain. At least a bit later that was the case and Bach´s music you´ve mentioned is an example for that I´d say.

Galileo was sure that god has written the ‚book of the world‘ in mathematical expressions. Hence it´s all about finding those mathematical relations because they´re the warrantors of truth and as such also the warrantors of beauty. Western music theory was convinced of that since Pythagoras. But with Riemann´s non-euclidean geometries and other mathematical and physical questions this conviction was gone, so to say. This is i.a. reflected in the fast acceptance of the term „model“ that Hertz invented in physics/science some years after Riemann´s discovery. Finally, with Einsteins theories of relativity the three Kantian notions (possibility of apriori knowledge from maths/logic, apriori space, apriori time) were deconstructed.

So from Hertz on you can build different models for the same phenomena but you cannot say which one is the right or ‚true‘ one. You might measure which one fits better in experiments but that´s not always possible and of course it doesn´t back the notion of an apriori truth and beauty. However, the ones who invent those models with their research and creativity are humans, or with Descartes a special kind of immaterial ‚essence‘ called res cogitans in opposition to the rest of the material world called res extensa. The mentioned deconstructions which are a serious problem for epistemology became the more a boost for the Kantian notion of an autonomy of art and the exceptionalism of humans within the world (as the creators of models, artworks and so on). The world itself was still considered to be a machine describable in mathematical terms.That´s in short the basis of the political and institutional logics of modernity.

Hence if there is any chance to find a ‚well-ordered universe‘ again like in the days of old – or in other words: a timeless mathematical apriori truth and beauty as quasi-metaphysical ‚safety ground‘ – then you have to include human creativity and contingency within your mathematical/formal descriptions, at least in this kind of logics and ideology. Or in cybernetic terms you have to include the observer. No other way to get back to the vision of an all-embracing unity. Turing by the way has called that special skill of humans which machines cannot perform ‚intuition‘ in his 1937 paper which is the blueprint for digital computers. Another term closely related to the arts… If you succeed in cracking this hard problem of creativity or intuition you would be able to automate it and hence innovation as well. (In the DARPA there is an attempt to do so within the development of a special AI system as far as I know.)

Since Gödel we know that cracking this hard problem is not possible – at least not in a supratemporal mathematical sense. However a key promise of cybernetics was nevertheless to tackle that, now with probabilistic models and with regard to the specific situation and context someone is acting in. For this you best need feedback loops which allow continuous real-time measurement to then be able to derive models of creativity on the basis of massive quantitative data. Neuroscience may be one attempt, big data extracted from social networks, smart gadgets and so on another. The more people articulate and produce data the better for attemps to make them computable (and hence controllable). That seems to be the point where we are right now. And in addition to that creativity plays a key role in the western societies of our days in an economic sense. Reckwitz, a famous german sociologist, spoke of the „dispositif of creativity“ which is the basis of the economy in postindustrial societies.

So it is no coincidence that the arts as the representation of creativity are in focus – there are, as set out above, several reasons for this with utilitarian backgrounds and those do not always have liberating intentions but rather its opposite, namely negative post- and transhuman ones. This is a big difference to Leonardo´s times as I see it. I think it is important to have this in mind when being seized with questions about creativity and the research on it.

Of course it is at least equally important to emphasize that there are (and to the best of my belief will be) many examples for liberating intentions and examples in art. But as this is usually emphasized strongly I didn´t mention it in my arguments because I assume we all agree in that.

However, at exactly that point the dilemma which I stated with my question regarding Denzin´s approach appears on the scene. Because on the one hand under the conditions of modernity the autonomy of arts was always a guarantee for these kinds of possibilities and freedom. On the other hand that autonomy of art is deeply entangled with the conditions of modernity (see Kant) which are not only under pressure in the light of contemporary technological developments but which are also not sustainable in an ecological sense and on top of that tend to reduce humans to social atoms which in the end have to survive as individuals under the reign of all-pervasive markets.

The role of the artist in this picture can feel a bit like that of a court jester. In his existence the civic society insures itself traditionally about its liberty, so to say. And in recent times artists have become more and more a ressource for the development of new and ‚creative‘ technologies which are intended to perpetuate the economical and ideological status quo. What I want to say with that is that the arts may have to reflect themselves more in regard to the posed circumstances. That is also what Denzin (as a non artist as far as I know) is inviting us to do as I read him.

To taper it once more: the notion of an autonomy of art has itself a legitimization function for the conditions of an unsustainable modernity. It is not an innocent and purely idealistic playground like a sort of detached space. An example might be the success of Jackson Pollock which was a project of the CIA who arranged exhibitions in important galleries and so on to show how free and abstract the western world is in opposition to soviet realism.

But would I have liked a kind of institutionalized Denzin in the form of, let´s say, an ‚ethics commission‘ that judges my art if it is „ethical“ as related to the prevailing consensus and norms of their money sources? Of course not! To be honest I wouldn´t have given a shit on that kind of judgement. The transgressive and ‚visionary‘ power of art is not least rooted in it´s self-authorization to do and/or arrange things differently which can mean to break norms. And if you break norms you might potentially ‚insult‘ people. If this shouldn´t be allowed anymore within art/PhD projects because it´s ‚unethical‘ then art is wrapped up in cotton wool and looses its visionary power. It becomes negligible. Of course this is not Denzin´s desire (rather its opposite) but it may play out like this in institutional contexts. And needless to say that art should be ethical but this ethics cannot be decreed. Insofar it´s hard to defend the idea to surrender the autonomy of art like Denzin et al suggest it (in chapter6/7?).

On the other hand: Do I like the negative examples of artworks mentioned in Denzin which disrespect human dignity and then usually argue with the autonomy of art? Of course not! But in an „economy of attention“ (as Franck called the upcoming logics of the social in consideration of the internet society in the 90s) provocation for the sake of provocation is profitable even if it´s pubertal in a way. Under that circumstances transgressive powers tend to reduce themselves to pure effect/affect aesthetics, by all means necessary. Put together with the modern ‚regime of artist´s subjectiviziation‘ as a court jester to perpetuate the status quo and its known unsustainability it´s hard to defend the idea of an autonomy of art.

That´s the dilemma. – But I have to admit that this might be a very Eurocentric view or question. A short while ago I was on an online conference with artists from all over the world who make their (communal) art projects not seldom under the danger of real oppression without any idea about elaborated art markets. That felt so different and showed the strength of art in a way that really touched me. Very different situation!

However, all told I had the impression that both ambiguities – the problem with the Vienna Declaration Florian was writing about and the problem to defend or reject Denzin´s idea of two forms of art from which only one form is legit in institutional contexts – point to the same spot, namely that vision of Foucault that the modern notion of ‚the human‘ might one day blur again like a picture in the sand when the waves roll over it. Or in more concrete words it points to the questions of posthumanism, not so much back to Leonardo´s era. In my perspective Leonardo and the recent developments appear more as outer borders of an era that gave birth to the idea of an autonomy of art signifying the modern notion of humanity and its hyperindividualized subjectivization processes, its ethics and its tendency to develop into a world of all-pervasive markets. In opposition to the days of Leonardo there are (at least) perspectives of second order going on today which result from the desire to find a mathematically well-ordered universe again – the big story of western metaphysics so to say – and which therefore tend to „bypass“ the contingent and for any sort of power basically dangerous human experience and dignity in a technological manner as Adam Curtis might phrase it. The metaphysics isn’t just there anymore like in Leonardo´s times, we have to instantiate it and technology is the preferred key. (I write that as somebody who really loves technology and worked extensively with it!)

If posthumanism is standing on the doorstep let´s not deny but face it. How could it look like in an ethical way that doesn´t have to be decreed? There still seem to be different ways of development: on the one side a posthumanism that is questioning the dualities of modernity (then including notions like the autonomy of art, its idealizations and remnants of avant-garde thinking and court jester artists as Denzin et al argue with Barad and others). Or on the other side a posthumanism that shows up as solutionism and neo-metaphysics with the attempts to bypass ‚human factors‘ (that is communal sensemaking, embodied experience and so on) except for the calculable ‚wow-trigger‘ effect of an superficial affect aesthetics as just another ‚market gimmick‘.

When I thought about my own thinking reflexes I had the impression that one might intuitively tend to defend modernity in some cases (e.g. in case of the freedom to be visionary as under the ‚regime‘ of an autonomy of art) while at the same time disliking it in other cases (all-pervasive markets which govern the processes of subjectivization to their inner core).

But what about the x standing on the doorstep? And how to deal with it within institutional contexts? A defence of some aspects of modernity might not be enough in the long run although it´s surely a legitimate thing to do from an institutional point of view. (That was the reason why I´ve mentioned last time that the liberty of the arts in modernity is in fact quite enclosed within specific institutionalized contexts and social classes. With my education biography I didn´t belong to those classes and their subjectivization games felt always a bit strange to me as I didn´t learn them. Nevertheless [well paid] art was coincidentaly open for me and I’m thankful for that.)

To me that x is a hard question I cannot answer at the moment. When I was reading Florians posted article (whose texts I appreciate a lot) and your comment on it I thought I take the chance to state that question in here. Maybe an artist habit: state the question ; ) But I have to admit that I´ve never posted something in a mailing list, I even didn´t know how to when I tried first and I also don´t read along in here for so long. Insofar maybe a bit overdone. However it helped me to clarify my thoughts.

Regards,

Martin ✌️