Another paper of mine entitled “The Destabilizing Cybernetics of Implausibility: The Anti-Anthropocentric Crisis” was published this month in Cybernetics & Human Knowing (CHK) 26, nos. 2-3: 169-190. In it, I use an analysis of my own creative process to formulate the hypothesis that a feedback loop connects the music composer, the composition, and its percipients, moving them gradually away from humanocentricism. Certain works of art are considered to be implausible (i.e., an affront to the moral and aesthetic norms of the public), and a means of reconnoitering implausibilities – a feedback loop – postulates anti-anthropocentrism as a factor because it deals with composers acting according to an impulse to shatter human-centered, dualistic metaphysics. Yet the dynamics involved in the creation of such an artwork are determined by both human as well as anti-human compulsions. So why should one pursue only a single description of the origin of implausibilities either by only following anti-humanistic explanations and ignoring humanistic ones or by only following humanistic explanations and ignoring anti-humanistic ones? I have been pondering this question ever since CHK accepted my paper for publication. What follows is an attempt to formulate an answer, and has NOT been excerpted from “The Destabilizing Cybernetics of Implausibility,” which one can purchase by clicking here.
In the study of complex systems, the view of technology (analogous to art) as having both human and anti-human potential is typical of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, and the view of evolutionary biology as simultaneously anti-humanistic and humanistic is typical of Stephen Jay Gould’s philosophy of nature. From the arena of musical aesthetics we can include philosophical attempts, which try (in various forms) to represent music as a reification of a metaphysical, inhuman “will.” The fundamentalist debate over the kind of metaphysical entity musical works are, the Platonist idea that musical works are eternally existing types, set theory’s Platonic-Cartesian thesis that the musical work is separable from and logically prior to its human instantiations, the sharawadji effect involving an inhuman sonic discordance in relation to its ordinary, human context, and the exclusively non-human origin and use of music in religion offer powerful conceptual frameworks for theorizing about implausibility, without, however, considering the implicit interaction between the anti-anthropocentrism of the implausibility and the composer’s own humanity. In particular, Platonism provides an exogenous signifié for implausibilities without entering into what makes them implausible or examining the human and anti-human dynamics from which they originate. Very interesting is W. Ross Ashby’s Every Good Regulator Theorem (EGRT), an analogical application of which would interpret a composition as the result of human creative urges, which must be isomorphic with what is being composed. The creative urge, understood as a meta-structural mechanism, is the maximally successful and efficient regulator guiding the composer’s subsequent compositional decisions, which, in the case of anti-humanistic urges, together produce a relevant model of those urges, namely, the implausibility. The EGRT is, however, explicitly humanistic, as Ashby primarily considers the behavior of the human brain, as a corollary of the control of complex dynamic systems, that necessarily forms a model (or models) of its environment.
Kant’s musical aesthetics deal with our interactions with music, with implications for implausibility, that depend on the agreeability or disagreeability of a musical composition, with no regard for anything like a feedback loop. The most widely-observed individual and/or social interaction with music concerns this distinction in its many forms (roughly speaking, music that does or does not have mere enjoyment as its object. For example, music that is not attended to and so promotes a genial spirit between party guest and party guest, and music that is attended to, thus taking it beyond the agreeable (perhaps even to the disagreeable)).
Heinz Von Förster’s second-order cybernetics is useful for examining the behavior of deterministic systems, called “non-trivial machines,” that exhibit self-referring behavior and so have a non-invariant input-output relationship, defined as recursively organized systems. While such a mechanism is not itself an implausibility, implausibilities may be considered, for all practical reasons, to be unpredictable results of the development of the non-linear and recursive dynamics of a composer’s creative process. According to Wolfgang Krohn and Bernd-Olaf Küppers, “Due to recursion, even very small deviations in the initial conditions are reinforced in such a way that similar starting constellations lead after a very short time period to totally opposite system developments.”
Regarded nominalistically, implausibilities in art, like any sculpture of sound and duration in music, would only be interpreted as a repeatable artifact, the adequacy of which cannot be judged by reference to human emotion, yet with a recursive capacity to provoke an emotional response to its capacity to provoke an emotional response to some value it possesses, and which exploits an intrusive defamiliarization that may remain beyond rational explanation. Implausibilities paradoxically show the implausibility of human concerns through mimetic mutations that exaggerate reality, or through abstractions that explicitly subvert reality on the basis of frustrating charitable percipients in their attempt to exercise what William Desmond calls an “agapeic hermeneutics”; implausibilities also defy all quasi-prescriptive analyses which attempt to reach to a work’s inner structure as well as undercut any Schenker-esque conception of music theory as both descriptive and beyond-descriptive. A sociomusical approach to the development and refinement of a pancultural theory of music, for example, seeks only to illuminate human beings’ immediate experience of music, to immure us in a perception of auditory phenomena strictly limited to pitch, to legitimize only provisional analyses constructed upon and supported by a considerable weight of comparable occurrences within a describable context of intersubjectivity, and to defang compositions which horrify, in the words of Herbert Brün, “the conservative who reads reality by the flickering light emanating from putrid communication systems,…and who hopes to bask delightedly and soon among the lifeless residuals of today’s unanswered questions.”
Traditional analyses of artworks assume a certain disembodied sender-receiver metaphor although there is no biological precedent for the notion that information is transmitted in any communication; the logical extreme of this mindset can be demonstrated as a holarchic relationship (e.g., pitch ↔ duration ↔ loudness ↔ timbre ↔ intervals ↔ melody ↔ harmony ↔ musical composition ↔ performance ↔ human perception ↔ perceptual, affective, and social responses) – one which prima facie seems to suggest that percipients are able to causally influence the past. Furthermore, people take this holarchy for granted, and do not risk even the most elementary scientific behavior: looking for experimental instances that might falsify it. It is important to note that the most outstanding feature possessed by human beings is perhaps a kind of pareidolia or apophenia, in the sense that we have a weird capacity and inclination to see more than there is in the design of a machine and, by extension, a painting, or a musical composition, etc.
Following orthodox epistemic logic, however, it is easily arguable that aesthetics can neither be assimilated to the sciences nor philosophy. Yet the most well-known shapers of the Scientific Revolution from Descartes to Newton also contributed to the field of music theory, and there is experimental evidence showing that listeners largely hear music in the same way, although this may be due to the perennial human tendency to listen introspectively instead of attending to the musical work itself with the same rigorous standards associated with the scientific method. This implies that the artwork is inexhaustibly interpretable – and the implausible artwork much more so – by autonomous, reactive, human agents. As Giles Hooper attempts to demonstrate, the most powerful approach to dealing with this inexhaustible interpretability is to dispense with music as an epistemological entity along with any prohibitions against understanding it in any given way thereby preventing any language of discourse from empowering elite individuals or groups.
