=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2811/Paper02
|storemode=property
|title=Complexities of Form: Thoughts on a De-ontologized Aesthetics of Recursive Processes
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper02.pdf
|volume=Vol-2811
|authors=Dimitris Ginosatis
}}
==Complexities of Form: Thoughts on a De-ontologized Aesthetics of Recursive Processes==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2811/Paper02.pdf
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
COMPLEXITIES OF FORM:
THOUGHTS ON A DE- ONTOLOGIZED AESTHETICS
OF RECURSIVE PROCESSES
Dimitris Ginosatis
Adjunct professor, Digital Arts Postgraduate Program, Athens School of Fine Arts Postdoctoral
researcher, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University,
dim.ginosatis@gmail.com
Abstract
The objective of what follows is –as explicitly indicated in the title– to present and
concisely discuss, in a simple and comprehensive manner, some preliminary thoughts
pertaining to a general, deontologized, processual aesthetics, i.e. an aesthetics based not
on fixed identities, closed substances and stable forms, but on an increasingly
complexified architecture of trans-forms of differences and entangled recursive
processes, i.e. processes that unfold and evolve by recursively folding back into (re-
entering) their own plane of processual activity, thus giving rise to high-level
complexities of self-reference, differ- entiation and transformation.
Keywords: aesthetics, difference, process, recursion, trans-form.
1.
What is so concisely being discussed here is immediately related to a general complexity-
oriented epistemology, bringing together two distinct modes of thinking-inquiring that,
in the course of modern and contemporary western rationality, with the exception of
certain few –literally out-standing– cases, have regretfully been standing in stark
contrast to one another: on the one hand, speculative-reflective ontometaphysics and,
on the other, positivist, exact-scientific formalism. Although thoroughly elaborated and
developed during the last five decades, the aforementioned generalized epistemological
thinking mode has not yet managed to “contaminate” the particular, “hard” and “soft”,
disciplinary sciences, thus remaining largely ignored. Be that as it may, its systematic
exclusion from the institutional canon does not by any means reduce its unquestionable
significance and major historical importance.
Indeed, when it comes to getting involved in (first-order) observing and
decomplexifying phenomena of “restricted complexity” (whether they be of a macro-
physical or of a mi- crophysical order), the particular sciences turn out to be exceptionally
loquacious. They do what they are trained to do best: they produce data by making use
of various novel methods and analytical tools of partialization, compartmentalization,
formalization, modeling and implementation. But, when it comes to thinking upon what
Morin (2008) calls “generalized complexity”, which entails a higher-order, recursive
Copyright © 2018 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) DCAC 2018.
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
observing mode, one that requires first and foremost their reflexive re-entering into their
own observational space (a process of incessant, critical auto-differentiation and
transformation or, alternatively, a process of reflecting upon their own reality and how
they construct it), the particular sciences suddenly start to stutter; they become aphasic.
That kind of generalized complexity-oriented thinking mode “requires… an
epistemological rethinking, that is to say, bearing on the organization of knowledge
itself” (Morin, 2008).
For the inquiring mind who shares the above epistemological concerns, a short, yet
exeptionally lucid account of the “Why’s” and “How’s” underlying the divide between
speculative-reflective and exact-scientific thinking mode, but also of the ironic twists
and the inescapable re-emergence of speculative ontometaphysics at the very heart of
“hard” science (as, for instance, in the cases of W. Heisenberg’s tackling the problem of
causality in quantum mechanics and E. Schrödinger’s inquiry into the physical basis of
consciousness and the matter-mind relation) has been handed down to us by Günther
(1962), eminent Hegelian philosopher-logician-cyberneticist and a colleague of W.
McCulloch and H. von Foerster at the renowned in the sixties Biological Computer
Laboratory of the University of Illinois-Urbana.
2.
For the sake of argument, let us proceed from the premise (our primary, founding
distinction) that what is termed “the observer” (that is, the state or act of observing
embodied in the form of a perceiving-cognizing subject coupled with a so-called
perceived objective reality), being itself a fabricated (symbolic-imaginary) construct
generated through an act of observation (that is, through a distinction-drawing process
engendering symbolic- imaginary world-forms, structured on the basis of observing
subjects and observed ob- jects that might as well be the very subjects that do the
observing), is not taken as some sort of incontestable Ding an sich or an a priori empirical
certainty, but as a mere convention: a general regulatory concept, principle or medium
for reducing –and yet, para- doxically enough, for generating further– complexity. This
paradoxical double gesture could be depicted as a Möbius strip: reducing complexity is
tantamount to inducing further complexity – a seemingly contradictory condition that is
immediately resolved as soon as we think of it in non-dualistic topological terms.
This is definitely not the place to point out the deep metaphysical origins of the
irreducible, systematic and systemic complexities resulting from the inherently
paradoxical onto- logical status of the circular causal relation between a whatever
(individual or collective) observing-perceiving subject and its observed reality. To get a
sense of the issue in question, one needs only consider for a while the Pascalian dizzying
insights (Pascal, 1958) into the cosmic “parts & whole” feedback loop, in which the
problem of the observer seems to find its utmost expression.
We define the “observer” as a general regulatory concept, principle or medium for
reducing complexity, insofar as it serves to do away with the puzzling contradictions
inherent in the scientific aspiration for an ultimate objective description of the world –
a description that would be completely independent of partial subjective worldviews.
These contradictions arise the very moment we reasonably assume that descriptions exist
only insofar as there is at least one observing subject who endeavors to describe: “To
remove these [contradictions] one had to account for an „observer‟ (that is at least
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
for one subject): (i) Observations are not absolute but relative to an observer’s point of
view (i.e., his coordinate system: Einstein); (ii) Observations affect the observed so as
to obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i.e., his uncertainty is absolute:
Heisenberg). After this, we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of
the universe) implies one who describes it (observes it). What we need now is the
description of the „describer‟ or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer” (von
Foerster, 1982).
On the other hand (which, as we have already suggested, is essentially the same
hand drawing itself as other), we define the “observer” as a general regulatory concept,
principle or medium for generating further complexity insofar as its introduction into
our thought-system gives rise to the possibility of an observer-dependent theory in
which complexity –generated by recursion, reflexivity and self-reference– prevails.
Paraphrasing H. von Foerster’s formulation (von Foerster, 1991), a theory of the
observer requires that an (individual or collective) observer assumes the task of writing
it. From this follows that if that theory has any aspirations for completeness, it inevitably
has to also account for the very writing of this theory. And even more fascinating and
complicating, the writer of this theory also has to account for her or himself writing this
theory. Which means that –contrary to traditional, orthodox scientific ways of
proceeding, in which (subject-less) objectivity is the rule– this theory demands that the
observer’s observing should necessarily be included in her/his observations; that the
observer must necessarily enter her/his own descriptions; that the properties of the
observer not only shall, but also must enter the descriptions of her/his observations.
Thus, as far as the relation between the observer and the observed (or the subject
and object of observation) is concerned, in the context of an observer-dependent theory,
complexity –manifested in the form of paradoxy, self-reference, recursion and
reflexivity– is unavoidably forever present. In search for completeness, an observer-
dependent theory (that wishes to remain committed to its foundational principle of
undecidability) will paradoxically (and yet, quite logically) lead to unending latency,
ever-growing complementarity and eventually incompleteness. However, the latter is
not raised as an issue to be resolved. To the contrary, it is invited insofar as it is the very
condition of possibility of completeness. At that level of epistemological thinking
completeness amounts by definition to deferred completeness.
Such an epistemological stance implies a different kind of bioethics and biopolitics
of time which might be called “second-order cybernetic deconstructive”, insofar as it is
fundamentally concerned with processes of infinite re-progression “in” and “out” of
nested –one into another– contexts, that is with processes of ever-growing recursive
contextualization. As noted by Rasch (2002), “what was once „the whole‟… that could
be seized… as a totality, now becomes an immanent field of observations, descriptions
and communications, a „totality of facts‟, as Wittgenstein wrote, that must contend with
the uncomfortable situation that any observation of a fact is itself a fact that can be
observed. The whole… is a whole that forever divides itself with every observation into
more and more „facts‟… a self-referential whole, thus an inescapably paradoxical one.
Accordingly, we are no longer in the realm of a foundationalist „first‟ philosophy, but
rather in the realm of a „second-order‟ philosophy of observations of… observations”.
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
3.
Reductionistic or over-simplistic as it may sound, it appears that these issues of self-
reference, reflexivity and recursion have been so deeply rooted in the very foundations
and course of development of our 2,300 year-long western rationality that the latter –
from its very inception, that is since Aristotle’s official laying down the formal logical
basis (laws and principles) of thought and scientific inquiry– might, in its entirety, be
treated as an unremitting, inescapable confrontation with the onto-logically problematic,
if not disastrous, implications of those (irremediably inherent in it) issues. Anyone with
a rudimentary understanding of the classic Freudian schematization of the psychic
apparatus‟ three-fold structure as well as of the unavoidable recursive loops resulting
from it, already gets the point: as in all dramatic tales of neuropsychotic systems seeking
to chase away some firmly embedded in their own structure, disorganizing element that
under- mines their sense of self-control and unity, what is systematically repressed,
inhibited, expelled, keeps coming back in through the back door reinforced, becoming
the very organizing principle of the system itself.
Having been exhaustively elaborated in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth
century (Kantian, Fichtean, Hegelian) transcendental idealist investigations into the
reflexive and dialectical structures of subjective perception in its relation with objective
being, the issues of self-reference, reflexivity and recursion were subsequently
“resolved” (that is, bluntly expelled, forbidden, repressed) by early-twentieth century
Russellian theory of types (van Heijenoort, 2002), then irreparably reinstalled by Gödel
at the very heart of rationality, as a sine qua non “defect” of any mathematical formal
system (Nagel & Newman, 2005), in order, eventually, to be reshaped and introduced
anew by a number of intricately related areas of scientific inquiry such as: second-order
cybernetics (that is, cybernetics of first-order feedback cybernetics or, alternatively put,
cybernetics recursively applied to itself), radical constructivist bioepistemology of
autopoiesis, social- communicational systems theory, as well as certain instances of
philosophically oriented cognitive scientific research, as in the cases of Hofstadter (1999
& 2008) and Dennett (1992 & 2017).
These areas and practices of thinking-inquiring share a common epistemological
ground in that they are expressly concerned with (the complications inherent in) writing
the above-mentioned strangely loopy theory of the observer: an observer-dependent
theory (a theory of observing observing), which accounts for its very own act of writing
and even for its accounting for the accounting for its act of writing. And in doing so they
all end up dealing with the fundamentals of circular processes: more precisely with a
wide diversity of interrelated (biophysico-socio-cultural) recursive processes that unfold
and evolve by recursively folding back into (re-entering) their own plane of processual
activity, thus giving rise to high-level complexities of self-reference, differentiation and
transformation.
By the terms “self-reference”, “differentiation” and “transformation”, we mean that
these processes (re)produce themselves from themselves by interacting with themselves.
But, in order to do so, they must first distinguish themselves from themselves. Each
process of distinction-making, performed within and by a system, marks off a difference
which, traveling through the circuits of the system, triggers further differences (trans-
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
forms of differences) that affect the very internal states of the system itself. This is one
way of interpreting G. Bateson’s famous notion of “difference” conceived as a product
of distinction-drawing that makes a difference (“a difference which makes a
difference”): “When you enter the world of communication, organization, etc., …you
enter a world in which „effects‟… are brought about by differences” (Bateson, 2000).
Such a world is the world of the reflexive domains in which we presently take
ourselves to exist. Following Varela (1979) and Maturana & Varela (1987), Kauffman
(2016) gives the following description of how a reflexive domain could be imagined:
“A reflexive domain is an abstract description of a conversational domain in which…
each participant is also an actor who transforms that domain. In full reflexivity, each
participant is entirely determined by how he or she acts in the domain, and the domain
is entirely determined by its participants. […] A Community of observers / participators
forms a reflexive domain D. By this term I mean that each person in the domain is also
an actor in that domain. Each one acts upon the others and each can be acted upon by
the others and by himself”.
Every choice, action and distinction taking place in the context of a reflexive domain
contributes to its expansion which, in turn, affects the internal organizational pattern of
the network of relations which constitute the reflexive domain. The domain unfolds and
evolves by recursively folding back into (re-entering) its own plane of circular
processual activity. In reality, the domain is not a Euclidean entity, but a dimensionless
pattern. It has neither outside nor inside. It is us, the observers, who introduce these
terms in order to capture it, frame it, describe it, shape it and make it intelligible. Yet,
even these secondorder descriptions and distinctions, insofar as they take place in the
context of the reflexive domain in which we exist as observers, actors and participants,
are not external to the domain, but an integral part of it. Such reflexive domains cannot
be understood in purely Euclidean terms, as if they were geographical entities, spaces
or territories. It is impossible to say where a reflexive domain begins and where it ends.
Reflexive domains are not measurable substances but interlacing organizational patterns
that produce them- selves. They can only be conceived in topological terms.
4.
Let us conclude, at this point, by asking ourselves: in what way does the term “aesthetics”,
featured in the essay’s title, enter into the discussion? How does aesthetics relate to
fields of scientific inquiry, such as Einsteinian-Heisenbergian physics and second-order
cybernetic epistemology, which appear to be alien to it? How is aesthetics brought into
play?
Aesthetics is invoked here only as part of a wider and deeper epistemology of
cognition. As a matter of fact, aesthetics has always already been from the start pure
epistemology. One might even go so far as to claim that there never was and there will
never be such a thing as “aesthetics” as a distinct discipline, independent from a science
of knowledge and cognition. Aesthesis does not and cannot have an existence of its own.
Since Aristotle and, much later on, since Kant, Schelling and Freud, we have come to
realize that what we call aesthesis is constituted as such through a whole array of
interconnected, primary and secondary, formal, transcendental logical, reflexive
Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology
and other (un)conscious mechanisms that function as a whole. Similarly, what we call
morphi is far from being some a priori given entity floating somewhere “out there”
waiting to be captured and processed: it is generated –through recursive processes of
distinction-drawing– within the system of the (individual or collective) perceiver, who
is actively constructing it, producing it, stabilizing it (Spencer-Brown, 1969; von
Foerster, 2003; Kauffman 1987, 2003, 2005, 2009 & 2016).
The core problem that keeps cropping up in every discussion about aesthetics,
aesthetic- sensory perception and experience lies, until this day, in the fallacious
ontological distinction between a perceiving subject and a perceived object; a perceiving
interiority (a cognizing agent) and a perceived exteriority (an object to be cognized by
the latter); an observer and an observed. In contrast to an ontological dualistic approach,
the objective of this essay was to point towards a constructivist mode of aesthetic
inquiry, which treats the subject and the object of perception not as distinct ontological
poles and closed substances, but as emergent processes generated within a common
operating framework: within the horizon of observation.
In the context of that mode of aesthetic inquiry, the emphasis is not put on the what
a thing is, i.e. on classic ontological issues of identity, substance and form, but on the
how a thing is constituted, shaped, objectified, becoming some-thing, i.e. in ontogenetic
issues concerning processes of mediation, differentiation and (trans)formation.
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