No. 6 Aporia

Whole body like a mouth, hanging in space;
Not asking if the wind is east, west, south, or north,
For all others equally, it chatters prajñā:
Chin Ten Ton Ryan Chin Ten Ton.

I didn’t read your email. I could tell from the preview in my inbox that it was going to break faith with your intentions—your intentions to service the central inquiry of the exhibition by allowing me to proceed without exhaustive knowledge of the show. Why did you send me this? Why did you do this? Certainly it was because I hadn’t replied to your previous email, and under the weight of the unknown: you broke faith with it. You couldn’t bear to muddle in the same fog you blew at me. How discourteous. How disappointing. If you intend to undertake an art that sets mystery upon mystery, I suggest you fortify your convictions.

You mentioned you “especially liked [my] text for Manuel Schneider’s Boote und Wasser…”, which I can only take to be a suggestion that I write a text like that for this show. You said you enjoyed “the state of not knowing.” In other words, you want a text which gives you a familiar feeling of the unfamiliar: an unknown like the one you already know—comfortably befuddled. And so long as we’re swinging the axe of profanity, I’ll tell you that that text was no tea-leaf reading; I wrote it by way of frequent encounters with the work, a friendship and familiarity with the artist, and privileged insights into their thought and process. In fact it was a cypher for an indeed complex but fairly certain set of ideas. I could never write a text like that for you. This can only be a cypher on a cypher without a key—and if you haven’t read it as such until now you better start!

Uncertainty can be entertaining, but only with certain assurances. For demonstration, I love David Fincher’s 1997 “The Game”. It’s a hell of a thrill ride. In fact, the BBC’s Almar Haflidason called it exactly that in his movie review, saying, “...with all these wonderful, thrilling ingredients spiralling the viewer into a frenzy of tension, it's a little disappointing to see how it all ends. It's a hell of a thrill ride getting there though.” In the film, the wealthy Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is given for his birthday what the trailer introduces as the thing “you get for the man who has everything”. What unwraps is a deadly game of psychological manipulation that systematically strips him of his wealth, status, and sense of control. As the game plays out, Van Orton’s world disintegrates into an utterly frameless churn of panic. And meanwhile the audience, cushioned by narrative, delight in an artificial tremor of his terror. I suppose what Haflidason says about the disappointing end is the point. When it is finally revealed to Van Orton that his reality-shattering freefall, the one that brought him the boundless richness of his being, was a carefully choreographed experience theater, the disappointment he expresses is our own.

As a depressed person with family history, I find this disappointment, this collapse of anomaly into orchestration, is nauseatingly familiar. It’s the disappointment that one feels when surprise is smothered time and again by the fat ass of the usual. By “surprise” here I mean also possibility—fitting, as the depressed regularly report a feeling of impossibility; by “possibility” I mean also uncertainty; by “uncertainty” I mean also entropy.

As for “familiarity”, and as for “certainty”: it’s not that the doorknob is always at the same place that you reach for, but it’s not not that. I’ve spent—I can honestly say—my life (as many others, I believe) trying, in my way, to parse the pathologies of persistent psychological distress; synthesizing a metaphysics, primarily to provide me with purpose. It occurs to me to mention this because a particular idea about the brain and the known and the unknown has been sticking to me the last years.

Any physical system, any “thing”, will resist its own disintegration. A useful metric for disintegration is entropy, the measure of a system’s energy dispersal. Things resist entropy, and nothing resists entropy so well as life. Fundamental to the survival of the human body is homeostasis: that its internal order is maintained and energy use is minimized; a negentropic imperative. And as the brain is the body’s hungriest organ, it is essential that it uses energy in an efficient and orderly manner. While brain activities like intense focus or complex problem-solving also require significant energy, they generally utilize existing neural constellations. Instead, the creation and consolidation of new neural pathways - the physical process of learning and memory formation - stands as the brain's most energy-expensive activity. To conserve energy, the brain develops an elegant strategy of making predictions based on its beliefs about the world rather than continuously integrating sense data. Through an interplay of its innate structures and diminishing experiential learning, the brain builds a model of its environment, which is physically represented in networks of synchronously signaling neurons. The brain then relies on this model to make predictions about experience, minimizing the energy-intensive process of learning. Whenever the model doesn’t match well, error-neurons activate, and the model is updated. Over time, the model becomes an increasingly reliable substitute for direct perception, and only those things that are out of place, those inconvenient inconsistencies, are the short-lived objects of experience. As negentropy is pursued over the life of the brain, learning and surprise grow increasingly rare—plummeting in early development before tapering into a gradual decline.

Not only is the brain incentivized to create a thorough model of the world, but also to build and shape the actual world in a way that is more easily modeled or more closely matches its existing model. It’s not enough that your doorknob appears where and behaves as expected on every encounter, but every doorknob in the world should as well. That process, called “active inference” by its foremost proponent, neurobiologist Karl Friston, illuminates how deeply our insistence on predictability shapes our environment, our understanding, and ultimately ourselves. World-modelling and model-worlding begin with the individual, but proceed at greater and greater scales as the individual socializes. And as every door intuitively slides open on approach, the world and the model converge on a complete simulacrum. We see this manifesting all around us, as everywhere friction must be eliminated. A hole in the road; the wrong voice on the phone; a wild dog in the house; a leaf of another color: exactly the unexpected, unfamiliar, uncertain, and unknown. These things are threats to modernization, but moreover to the negentropic destiny of life itself: immortality, wherein energy efficiency is optimized, predictions are statistical certainties, and everything is at perfect peace [insert artist rendering of Dyson sphere]. Naturally, all uncertainty must be folded into the familiar—or expelled.

You can see how this must fuck with our dopamine reward system. Because as you know, novelty (surprise) is strongly linked to dopamine rewards. Unexpected and novel stimuli can provoke intense dopamine responses, and novelty-seeking behavior appears to be fundamental to healthy cognitive function. When our environment calcifies into predictability, the basic requirement of rewarding novelty goes unfulfilled; anhedonia. The world(-model) becomes a depressive place, or an anxious or obsessive place, and this has a mutually compounding effect on the world and the model. To compensate for this without compromising negentropy, we produce substitutes for surprise supported by frameworks of familiarity; take the art exhibition, for example.

In “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain”, a paper co-authored by Friston, a flight-line from this dilemma of manufactured uncertainty is nearly delineated. “REBUS”, or RElaxed Belief Under pSychedelics, proposes that psychedelic compounds temporarily relax the constraints that high-level beliefs impose on perception and cognition. By disrupting the brain's hierarchical predictive mechanisms, thereby disturbing the precision world-model, they allow sense-level data to ascend unfiltered. Perception and conception are permitted to mingle, and intermediate hypotheses about goings-on are entertained. The process has also been imagined as a neural-annealing, a concept borrowed from metallurgy. Like steel heated to white-hot malleability and cooled into a more satisfactory structure, neurons destabilize and synaptic pathways break, allowing new configurations to form.

I called this “nearly” a line of flight because psychedelic therapy as administered in a clinical setting will eliminate any opportunities for novelty beyond clinical requirements. Art, as I see it, is the sole human domain capable of cultivating frameless uncertainties. Although the interests of markets, institutions and schools make it nearly unimaginable, there have been genuine efforts at times. Don’t think that the only outcomes of unseating certainties are disgusting or violent—that idea is derived from the same negentropic project that has allowed certainty to run rampant, complicit in the homogenization of the human environment and the concentration of power.

I don’t suggest that art be a salve for mental anguish—rather, that it fulfill its mandate for wonder, which becomes impossible when every mystery is anticipated.

Therefore I didn’t read your email.