Poetics 17, 1988, 305-332 .

Quantum Aspects of Artistic Perception

Robert de Beaugrande

That the implications of quantum theory may fundamentally alter the status of science has gradually been recognized. But they can also be insightfully applied to art and to significant aspects of artistic perception. The undecidabilities of quantum reality provide an interesting parallel for those of aesthetic experience. Hence, a new opportunity for interaction between science and art can be envisioned.

1. Perception and determinacy

1.1. Many different views of perception have been adopted for various motives of research. Classic ‘experimental designs’ proceeded by treating perception as a relatively determinate and passive registering of an input. This set-up implied a maximum of control over test subjects, and observed variances were attributed to alternative inputs rather than to alternative perceptual strategies. In animal conditioning, for instance, the animal merely had to distinguish between a ‘good’ stimulus (e.g. food) and a ‘bad’ one (e.g. electroshock); exactly how the animal might have perceived or interpreted such stimuli was not an issue for research. For such animals, the response might indeed be all the interpretation we need to consider.

1.2. The role of perception was less straightforward in human experiments, because human perception is palpably more complex than that of animals. In the early years, this problem was contained by presenting test subjects with ‘meaningless’ arrays, such as nonsense-words, numbers, or shapes (e.g., Gibson 1942), evidently assuming that perception is most likely to be de­terminate, direct, and uniform when prior knowledge and experience are not invoked. The experimenter could train a subject to form novel’ associations’ varying only with the input under precisely controlled conditions.

1.3. Yet in real life, it is very disorienting to perceive something apparently meaningless, especially when under pressure to respond to it. You would have much lower chances of learning a list of 100 numerical arrays or nonsense words than of learning a poem 100 words long, because a poem is far easier to perceive in coherent ‘chunks’. In exchange, people can perceive the ‘same’ poem in a variety of ways, and the neat assumption of determinacy becomes problematic. That assumption may also be doubtful for the perception of non-meaningful material. Since humans seldom need to perceive such material, their strategies may be not uniform, but highly idiosyncratic.

1.4. In general, I suspect, any attempt to make perception determinate and uniform by minimising meaning entails a trade-off. The more determinate the experimental situation, the less determinate is its relation to everyday percep­tion. People are more likely to agree when they are perceiving, say, a sunrise or sunset, despite all variation of place and condition, than when they are perceiving a non-representative graphic shape, as shown by Rorschach’s (1921) famous tests.

1.5. Alter a gradual shift in psychological paradigms, perception carne to be regarded less as a passive and direct relay, but its determinacy was not put in serious question. In the approach known as ‘trace abstraction’ (cf. Gomulicki 1956), perception was seen as a process of extracting features from the input and storing them; when needed, this array of features is retrieved from mental storage. This ‘reappearance hypothesis’ (Neisser 1966) suggests that the contents of the trace-array were fully determined by the original sensory event. Since everybody would be perceiving and storing the same sensory experience, variances would be due not to indeterminacies among test subjects, but to incidental error. Hence, results should have general validity.

1.6. However, some situations prove that the same experience can be perceived in more than one way. For instance, chess masters can see things on the board that novices cannot. De Groot (1966: 47) concludes that ‘increasing experience and knowledge in a specific field’ ‘has the effect that things (properties, etc.) which, at earlier stages had to be abstracted or even inferred, are apt to be immediately perceived at later stages’; ‘a so-called “given” problem situation is not really given since it is seen differently by an expert than it is perceived by an inexperienced person’. A parsimonious account for such changes was J.J. Gibson’s (1966) notion of ‘the education of attention’: the perceiver learns to differentiate steadily more features in the input. This view ‘hopes to explain activity purely in terms of the environment’, whose ‘properties’ are ‘objectively present, accurately specified, and veridically perceived’ (Neisser (1976: 53, 19).

1.7. Such extreme models of ‘bottom-up’ or ‘data-driven’ processing still assume that perception is determinate at any one stage of the perceiver’s development. This assumption can be made plausible by a careful selection of tasks involving mainly visual discrimination. But natural language processing remains a stumbling block, because the input of sounds or graphic images is quite sparse and reveals no direct relationship with a ‘meaning’. In a Gibsonian approach to reading (E. Gibson and Levin (1975), the perceiver is believed to extract features from the text in this order: first phonemic or graphemic, then syntactic, and finally semantic. Evidently, the notion of ‘perception’ is being assigned several divergent senses here. By inspecting the printed page, one might perceive letters and words, and perhaps, in a more abstract sense, ‘syntactic features’; but how can a person ‘perceive’ semantic features or meanings by staring at the print with any form of attention? Despite popular locations like ‘I see what you mean’, it is far from clear how humans might actually perceive the meaning of a text in any manner compara­ble to visual discrimination.

1.8. In linguistics also, models of ‘semantic features’ show a singular fondness for imageable word-meanings. For instance, Pottier’s (1964) conception of ‘a modern semantics’ focuses on types of chairs and their shapes (back, legs, arms, and so on). In Katz and Fodor’s (1963: 174f.) ‘semantic theory’, the sentence ‘The bill is large’ is given two readings: ‘the beak of a certain bird exceeds in bulk those of most similar birds’; and ‘some document demanding a sum of money to discharge a debt exceeds in size most such documents’. Apparently, the obvious meaning — that the sum demanded, not the document, is large — was suppressed here because it was not as immediately imageable. Again, determinacy was borrowed from visual perception in order to mask the indeterminacy of meaning in natural language. In return, the relation of such deterministic semantic models to ordinary meanings became correspondingly indeterminate (cf. Beaugrande 1987c).

1.9. In sum, modern theorizing has little to say so far about how the meanings of texts are ‘perceived’. Determinacy has been routinely enhanced (1) in experiments using meaningless visual arrays or incidental lists of words; and (2) in linguistic models relying on imageable examples. Psychologists and linguists, wanting their findings and models to be as general as possible, share a lasting fear of indeterminacy, interpreted here as any aspect that could hinder people — whether they are experimenters and their test subjects, or linguists and. their informants — from agreeing about what is being perceived (4.1).

1.to. This issue has become more acute now that psychological and linguis­tic theories are more oriented toward the ‘top-down’ or ‘schema-driven’ mode of perceiving by means of internal representations (surveys in Rumelhart 1977; Beaugrande 1980, 1980-81). In the ‘constructive’ approach (e.g. Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972); Anderson and Ortony 1975), perception does not simply translate the forms of the sensory event into a memory trace, but applies the knowledge structure of the perceiver. So different perceivers need not have the same impression of their experience, and dif­ferences in recall need not be due to errors or omissions (cf. 1.5). Still, perception is believed to stabilize the experience. In the ‘reconstructive’, approach (e.g. Bartlett 1932; Spiro 1977), however, the representation of an experience depends not just on the original perception, but also on the current and varying state of mental storage. The implication is that people perceive events through their own changeable mental representations, and errors are due to discrepancies between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ perceptions.

1.11. Theories of artistic perception present a particular challenge, since they obviously require some far-reaching assumptions about internal represen­tations without which ‘art’ cannot be perceived at all. My discussion will examine this issue by focusing on a new look at determinacy and indeterminacy in both science and art.

2. Science and art

2.1. The relationship between science and art has often been portrayed as an opposition, on the grounds that the link between science and reality is more determinate than that between art and reality. Even partisans of ‘illusionism’ and ‘imitation of nature’ in art (cf. 5.2) did not demand that art perceive reality in the same way as science. Moreover, the history of art has a plainly different progression than the history of science. For example, the invention of photography was not construed as a signal that painting was obsolete in any sense comparable to that in which the invention of the X-ray machine displaced earlier means of inspecting the human anatomy. Similarly, renaissance art retains great validity today, whereas renaissance medicine, and alchemy are viewed chiefly as fabrics of superstition and error.

2.2. In an evolutionary perspective, scientific paradigms are largely exclu­sive, whereas artistic paradigms are largely inclusive. The dominant scientific paradigm is routinely expected to refute and eliminate its competitors. For example, recent discoveries have greatly diminished the supporters of the neo-rea1ism of Louis de Broglie or the steady-state universe of Fred Hoyle in favour of quantum reality and the expanding universe, respectively. But it’s hard to imagine any event or discovery in art that could persuade us to reject the symphonies of Beethoven or the paintings of Rembrandt as ‘invalid’. Instead, art has a powerfully preservative effect, sometimes providing the best records of a vanished culture. For this reason, outmoded science can survive by moving into art, as when the natural histories of ancient times are now treated as literature, or the ingenious renaissance mechanisms representing the motions of heavenly bodies (e.g. in the museum in Florence, Italy) retain an aesthetic appeal unimpaired by their scientific inadequacy.

2.3. Yet my tidy picture with science as the domain of exclusive alternatives and competing paradigms, and art as the domain of inclusive alternatives and concurrent paradigms, has now been complicated by the advent of quantum theory and high-level computing. Quantum theory has profoundly influenced the way scientists perceive the universe, but the expanded powers of computing have attracted vastly more public notice.

2.4. Though philosophers of science like Kuhn (1970) have apparently not realized it, quantum theory fundamentally alters the status of science, because quantum entities (‘quons’ is the generic designation proposed by Herbert 1985) fit several interpretations of quantum theory equally well. So far, no text or experiment has been devised capable of singling out one interpretation as more accurate than the others; yet epistemologically at least, the interpretations are literally ‘worlds apart’. In some areas, we seem to face the unprecedented situation — unexplainable in Kuhnian terms — of facts appearing before any paradigm is available for them. Moreover, the impact of quantum discoveries extends not merely to the established paradigms of physics, but to the very conditions for matching any scientific paradigm with our perception of reality. Even such basic concepts as causality and locality no longer appear beyond question (3.6).

2.5. High-level computing enables us to test alternatives by means of simulation. This capacity provides a new way to compare competing theories and explanations for domains whose perceptual observations is difficult or impossible. For example, Dick Miller’s simulations of the evolution of galaxies at the University of Chicago showed that a rotating disc with 100,000 or more mass points having mutual gravitational attraction does not develop the spiral arms we have detected in the shapes of real galaxies (reported in Disney 1984). Altering the masses, velocities, or number of points made no dif­ference; the only way to obtain the proper spiral shape was to add a large halo of invisible mass encircling the galaxy. And in fact, recent observations of gravitational effects have yielded evidence that our own galaxy and several others have just such a halo, in some cases ten times or more greater than the visible mass. Simulation resolved the obstacle that a real galaxy rotates far too slowly for anyone to observe even a single revolution, not to mention the time it takes the light from another galaxy to reach our own; and the invisible masses aren’t emitting light anyway. Simulation speeds up the process enor­mously, allows us to tinker with the parameters, and bypasses perceptual blocks. In effect, high-level simulation allows us to generate and examine alternative universes in order to refine our understanding of our own.

2.6. Art has not yet been noticeably affected by quantum theory, as far as I can judge. But simulation proffers a new technological intervention in the production of art,. So far, this intervention has con­centrated on the technique of producing art works; the conception still depends entirely on human participation, and I know of no plans for a program that could genuinely appreciate an art work. Hence, the computer production of art has mainly affected the modalities, such as graphics and music, where tech­nique is foregrounded, rather than literature or poetry, where conception is foregrounded. Even so, the computational power of recent programs greatly expands the potential for experimenting with alternatives and keeping the art work relatively fluid for extended periods of time. For example, a completed graphic such as that by Daniel Silva (1987) (figure 1) can simply distribute dots, black, white or shaded, to produce an illusion of a natural scene with a house on a mountaintop over the sea, and a flowery shore in the foreground.

An impressionist or pointilliste painter would have to laboriously experiment by working almost from scratch each time and mixing paints for every shade. Moreover, computer technology offers an option painting simply can­not duplicate: the image can be set to cycle through complex variations of colour schemes on the viewing screen, so that the progression and totality of chromatic change and contrast is made available to artistic perception.

2.7. I believe the time has come to fundamentally rethink the quality of both scientific and artistic perception and to resituate them in respect to each other. I shall argue that the two domains have much more far-reaching commonalities than have been widely recognized so far; for motives related to the operation of perceptual process, these commonalities have traditionally been given just the opposite interpretation from the one I shall propose (7.1).

3. The quantum challenge

3.1. We can start with some essential and well-known aspects of ‘quantum reality’ and their challenge to models of ‘ordinary’ or ‘classical reality’ (cf. Zukav 1979; Herbert 1985; Gribbin 1986; Beaugrande 1989). The ‘new physics’ is genuinely ‘new’ in its demonstrations that human perception stands in a much more complicated relation to ‘reality’ than had previously been acknowledged. Paradoxically, perception is both more constrained and more powerful than is usually imagined. On the one hand, perception is definitively limited by the parameters known as ‘conjugate variables’: the accuracy of one is purchased at the expense of the accuracy of the other. In Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, position and momentum were shown to be conjugate variables: you cannot exactly measure both at the same time. This ratio is due neither to flaws and ‘noise’ in our instruments nor to human carelessness, but to the basic laws of physics. The principle has some bizarre corollaries: if you could be infinitely certain of a entity’s position, you would become infinitely uncertain about its momentum, so that you would have no idea where in the entire universe it might be going to (Gribbin 1986: 234f). Since time and energy are also conjugate variables, an entity can ‘borrow’ enough uncertainty to come into existence for an extremely brief period of time, in seeming defiance of conservational law; you can bend the law if you just do it fast enough.

3.2. Such coronaries are not mere speculations or ingenious reductions ad absurdum. Most current explanations of the nature and behaviour of sub-atomic entities entail the effects of just such conjugate variables and the leeway of manifold uncertainties. Quantum entities also possess the most disconcerting capacity of transforming themselves into other entities and interchanging the few distinctive properties they do have, such as charge and spin. ‘Virtual’ entities do not ‘exist’ in reality, yet reality shows effects that make sense if we assume they are real. The ‘vacuum’, for instance, may figure as a region filled with virtual entities. All these aspects present unprecedented difficulties for ordinary perception.

3.3. On the other band, human perception has also been discovered to wield more power than classical science was inclined to grant. In a typical quantum situation, we have several alternatives, such as trajectories of a ‘quon’, and can observe some effects indicating that the quon is taking all of them. Yet when we make an observation, we always find justone possibility. This phenomenon, often called ‘the collapse of the wave function’ after Erwin Schrödinger’s famous calculations, shows the quon behaving sometimes like a wave (all alternatives) and sometimes like a particle (just one alternative). Apparently, the ‘collapse’ is triggered by our act of observation; yet classical science is firmly committed to the idea that human perception alone cannot select events, but only register them.

3.4. The ‘EPR paradox’ expounded by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (1935) envisions two quantum entities correlated in some physical way, such as two electrons emitted from the same source with correlated momentums. If we measure the position or the momentum of one electron, you instantly know that of the other without measuring. (Fig. 2).

How could that other particle ‘know’ the fate of the first? Two explanations are readily available, though Einstein rejected both: either our act of observation itself has transferred some information, or the two phenom­ena are in some counter-intuitive obscure sense ‘the same one’.

3.5. Crediting entities like electrons with the power of perception is a dubious step indeed. Even if they had any, they would still face the obstacle of ‘knowing’ instantaneously what was going on at another place. In a design worked out by Alain Aspect and co-workers (1982), superfast switches were used to change conditions so suddenly that any information leaking through from place to place would have to travel at speeds greater than the speed of light. Yet physics rests very heavily on the assumption, so far verified by every sort of measurement, that the speed of light is a constant upper boundary.

3.6. J.S. Bell’s (1964) ‘interconnectedness’ theorem derives from the EPR paradox a still greater challenge to classical science. Instead of electrons, Bell used photons and their attribute known as ‘polarization correlation’. He conjectured that the effects of manipulating the two apparatuses for measuring the polarization of each of the two photons would show some connections which were not merely additive, but which implied some special interconnectedness. His prediction was verified by Clauser and Shimony (1978), who had hoped to refute it, and Aspect’s superfast switches ruled out any conventional mode of interconnectedness (3.4). Bell concluded that reality is not always subject to the principle of ‘locality’, which limits connectedness to situations related in space and time. The findings suggest that events can be connected even where no physical mode of connectedness can be discovered between them.

3.7. Possibly, the challenge is directed not so much to locality as to dimensionality — specifically, ‘four-dimensionality’. Thanks particularly to Euclidian geometry, which is so reverently taught in school, we are accustomed to visualize things in two dimensions (‘breadth’ and ‘height’) perpendicular to each other. The third one (‘depth’) is a bit harder to visualize, relying on complex cues; in figure 3a, the same heavy line X seems to recede into the distance at the top, but to recede at the bottom in figure 3b (after Coren and Girgus 1978: 120; Silva 1987).

The third dimension can be (somewhat arbitrarily) imagined as a line neatly perpendicular to both of the first two. The scheme seems suspiciously tidy and abstract in relation to perceived reality, even to such fairly straightforward matters as the points of the compass. The north-south-east-west classification is best-behaved on a flat two-dimensional plane, where perpendicularity would be one angle among many others between two points relative to the reference point at the center, e.g., between due north and due east. When humans make mental maps of their environment, things aren’t so orderly. Lynch’s (1960) interviews of city-dwellers revealed that mental maps contain points of orientation, such as landmarks, paths, and districts, which are not formally organized in terms of points of the compass, but informally in reference to each other (cf. research survey in Downs and Stea 1973).

3.8. That totally different dimensional schemes can be used is shown for instance by the navigators of the Puluwat islands, whose conceptual approach (called ‘etak’ in their language), is sketched in figure 4 (after Gladwin 1970).

The navigator sailing from point A to point B often cannot see the destination, and sailing in a straight line is often impossible due to winds and currents. The navigator mentally selects a ‘reference island’ and its set of ‘star direc­tions’ relative to prominent heavenly bodies like the North Star, the Big and Little Dippers, Altair, and Vega. In the navigator’s perception, it is not the canoe, but die reference island that is moving as the journey continues, i.e., passing (backward) under a series of stars. If the canoe has to tack at an angle, then the destination island is perceived to pass under some star positions, and then back again when the opposite tack is taken. This scheme seems very abstract, but it works even when the islands and stars cannot be seen; and all the perceptual information the navigator gets from sightings, dead reckoning, wave patterns, winds, and bird flights is fed into it.

3.9. The idea of time as the ‘fourth dimension’ directly linked to the traditional three did not become fully acute until the beginning of the ‘new physics’, namely in the ‘space-time’ conception upon which Einstein’s special theory of relativity depends. Though space or time as such is different for every perceiver, the space-time interval is absolute — the ultimate recourse of determinacy. Gravity can be represented as a curvature of the space-time continuum causing objects to travel along curved rather than straight paths. But far more than three-dimensional reality, space-time and its curvature are exceedingly hard to visualize and still harder to perceive visually. In fact, comparable perceptual problems haunt much of the subsequent ‘new physics’ and impede our ordinary understanding.

3.to. Bell’s theorem and its experimental verification (4.6) could be con­strued as evidence that our established conception of dimensionality cannot cover all aspects of reality. If we view a ‘dimension’ not as some measure for size, shape, extent, duration, and the like, but as a parameter for plotting trajectories between alternative values, then we could view a dimension as a mode of connectedness. We can then say that Bell’s theorem pressures us to contemplate the existence of more dimensions than we have admitted so far. We might cite Kaluza’s intriguing computation made in 1919: if you add a fifth dimension to the representation of gravitational forces as a curvature of the space-time continuum, the added set of equations are exactly Maxwell’s field equations for electromagnetism (reported in Gribbin 1986). We might reason that electromagnetism is another dimension and mode of connectedness whose potential cannot be fully stated within the other four dimensions.

3.11. The prospect of additional dimensions seems bizarre because again, we have scant perceptual possibilities for imaging its meaning. Yet recent work deploying quantum theory to model the origins of the universe in fact makes considerable use of ‘superconnectedness’, sometimes explicitly postulating additional dimensions — as many as eleven in one recent estimate (cf. Gribbin (1986; Davies and Brown [eds.] 1988.). To demand an explanation of why we don’t perceive these other dimensions may be the wrong tactic. We might do better to ask how we manage to perceive any dimensions at all, and why the traditional four exert such uneven demands upon our perception.

4. A quantum approach to perception?

4.1. Plainly, the new physics signals that human perception has more aspects than the concepts of psychology and linguistics have tried to account for. The major obstacle to a new orientation, it seems to me, has been a widespread predisposition to regard determinacy as the base state and indeterminacy as the deviation, fluctuation, or accident. This trend is understandable in view of the aspiration of humans, both in science and in everyday life, to maintain stable frameworks of orientation and to shun uncertainty (cf. 1.9). The second law of thermodynamics, however, suggests something quite different when it stipulates that overall, uniformity must increase. Modern interpretations equate this uniformity with disorder, although commonsense reasoning may equate uni­formity with order — the ‘orderly’ situation having a minimum of exceptions and oddities.

4.2. If we accept the widespread notion in modern linguistics and structuralism that determination is a result of differences (4.11), then the second law of thermodynamics should mean that on the whole, indeterminacy will always increase as differences and constraints disappear. If so, determinacy cannot be the base state, but only the product of a transitory fluctuation or intervention (4.11). We can designate all events which limit indeterminacy (or are interpreted to do so) as control (Beaugrande (1987c, d). The usual sense of ‘control’ as an intervention in an event chain to influence the selection of outcomes is just a special case.

4.3. Plainly, human perception deserves to be classified as a control pro­cess, no matter which model of it we may prefer. Whatever the mutual contributions of perception and of the event or environment may be in a given case, the result is a field of information, and all information must have a determinacy greater than zero. Zero information or total randomness would be infinite uncertainty, a state just as impossible as infinite certainty (cf. 3.1).

4.4. It follows that perception is designed to favour determinacy over indeterminacy, as are all processes interacting with perception, such as com­prehension and interpretation. We might say that perception runs ‘in phase with’ determinacy, but ‘out of phase’ with indeterminacy (Beaugrande (1987f.). The ‘in-phase’ perception of determinacy would have an enhancing effect, as in ‘constructive’ wave interference, whereas the ‘out-of-phase’ perception of indeterminacy would have a cancelatory effect, as in ‘destructive’ wave inter­ference. For this reason, humans are not well adapted to perceiving indeterminate aspects, and ordinary reality retains the ‘classical’ character Bohr and Heisenberg ascribed to it. For the same reason, classical science seems to be the essence and foundation of ordinary, i.e., classical, reality.

4.5. The question now is whether classical reality and quantum reality can be reconciled within a single model of human perception. The neorealist view that all reality is made of ‘ordinary objects’ possessing attributes, whether measured or not, is clearly receding. The pragmatist view that quantum theory is a mere formalism, and its relation to reality is a meaningless issue, is equally unhelpful. In the predominant view, ‘the Copenhagen interpretation’ of Niels Bohr (1963) and his team, ‘quantum’ designates not a world, but an abstract description; ‘quantum reality’ can never be experienced. But epistemologically, this dualistic interpretation is hardly more attractive than neorealism and pragmatism. Classical reality certainly contains matter and energy, and these in turn must be composed of the subatomic entities whose nature and behaviour quantum theory describes. It is hard to see why scalar differences should justify a complete break at the dividing line between superatomic and sub­atomic. Besides, recent work fitting quantum-theoretical concepts to astron­omy and cosmology (cf. 3.11) shows that very big entities like galaxies an have non-classical properties, especially during their formative stages. So if there is a divider, it can’t be raw size (cf. 4.8f.).

4.6. An alternative is the ‘many-worlds interpretation’ proposed by Everett, Wheeler, and Wilcox (see DeWitt and Graham 1973). When alternative event paths are possible, this view says that they all occur, but in separate universes. At each decision point, the universe subdivides into as many parallel versions as there are alternatives. Epistemologically, however, this interpretation is even less attractive than the Copenhagen version. Except where pathways happen to merge again later, the universe would be exploding combinatorially in geometrical progressions whose totality is neither imaginable nor imageable. And since matter cannot be created from nothing, all these universes would have to share their material base. The proliferation would have to be purely perceptual, yet it is precisely what we do not perceive.

4.7. Yet another interpretation could be derived from Feynman’s ‘sum over histories’ model (Feynman and Hibbs 1965). The quantum entity may still take all possible paths, but interference steps in to keep it from flying all over the universe. Every ‘wild path’ of meanderings has an exactly parallel path of equal amplitude and opposite phase, and the pair of paths completely cancel each other through destructive interference. Only the paths close to the classical trajectory — the paths of ‘least action’, in Feynman’s terminology — survive and undergo constructive interference. The epistemological implication here is a bit abstruse, but not totally unpalatable: perceived reality (never mind ‘deep’ or ‘absolute’ reality) is an interference pattern projected by parallel alternatives. Whatever indeterminacy survives this process is reduced by the phasing of human perception toward waves of determinacy (4.4). In fact, this control function might well be the topmost goal of perceptual systems, especially in complex environments.

4.8. Quantum environments, on the other hand, are too elementary to support this perceptual enhancement. Instead, we perceive an abrupt jump or collapse of indeterminacy over into determinacy, with no easing transitional nuances. Since such a jump would require considerable agency in our own complex world, we naturally demand to know what could have intervened. For all their apparent oddity, quantum environments are in fact too simple, rather than too complicated, to suit our strategies of perceiving. The formative stages of galaxies are similarly elementary, despite the “huge sizes, masses, and energies involved, because the number and divergence of entities present is quite small compared to any terrestrial environment. For example, only a few extremely light elements, mainly hydrogen and helium, are believed to be present; all the heavier and more complex elements are cooked up later through processes of reaction, mainly in the superhot interior of stars.

4.9. So complexity rather than size or quantity must be the reason why classical reality and quantum reality seem so disparate. In non-complex environments, the sparse spread of alternatives produces non-integrative inter­ference patterns; in complex environments, integrative interference patterns result and determinacy rises through subtle gradations of information accrual rather than through sudden jumps or collapses. Quantum entities do not accrue information from each other, but in return, they interact through modes of connectedness which human perception is not adapted to perceive. Hence, it seems plausible that these unperceived modes — these ‘hidden dimensions’ — might be versions of connectedness which, from within the framework of the perceived dimensions, appear highly indeterminate. Perhaps too, those missing dimensions are absorbing indeterminacy and thereby mak­ing the perceived dimensions appear as determinate as they do to us.

4.to. Consider now the case of natural language. As noted before (1.7), the perception of letters (or sounds) is far more direct than the perception of meaning. We can, for example, notice and supply missing letters, but al/ meanings are supplied ones. To offset this factor, the meaning of a text (its ‘semantic’ aspect) is perceived with such elaborate controls that indeterminacy rarely enters the focus of attention (cf. 4.2). This ratio shifts abruptly when rich natural language contexts are replaced by artificially elementary contexts, as in the formalisms, language games, and mini-worlds of logicians and linguists. All manner of alternatives, ambiguities, and distasteful forced choices are suddenly noticed, and logicians and linguists struggle to build models that resolve or remove them all. Many such models are conceivable, as the history of linguistics reveals, but we might ask why such degrees of indeterminacy are so seldom registered in everyday communication.

4.11. If determinacy and indeterminacy are linked in a complementarity such that the former can rise only if at some other point the latter rises also, then the perceived determinacy of text meaning results from a dialectic — in which each entity is defined chiefly in terms of what it is not; and the set of things it is not is both larger and much less determinate than what it is. If after Saussure (1916), linguistics has viewed language as a system of differences (cf. 4.2), each sign would have has its place in the system by virtue of the features that render it distinct from all other signs. If so, then every sign must be perceived by reference to the signs from which it differs, and this cross-referral would defer determinacy rather than enforce it (cf. Derrida 1967). Saussure’s concept of difference was not a genuinely dialectic one, but could, be subjected to such an interpretation (Jameson 1972). Yet the dialectical recourse cannot allow us to define meanings for once and for all, for instance, by listing all their ‘correct semantic features’; we can only decide in each context what kinds of contrasts and backgrounds are needed to determine particular meanings in appropriate ways (Beaugrande (1987c). This factor indicates why determinacy of meaning requires the transitory intervention of a perceiver (4.2).

4.12. Nonetheless, this conception of language must seem puzzling to the degree that perception is not attuned to rises in indeterminacy. As the focus naturally goes to regions of determinacy, the rest gets ignored and one side of the dialectic process remains out of focus. The perceiver gets the impression that the determinacy is simply ‘there’, instead of being imposed and paid for with indeterminacy at other points. Yet even in ordinary experience, many entities are dialectically defined in terms of what they are not, and this method may be more the rule than the exception. The impression that a particular thing has its own essence and is only itself and by itself is mainly an artefact of the phasing of perception to favour determinacy. When forced to actually state and define such an essence precisely, we abruptly find how elusive it is out of context.

5. Artistic perception from a quantum standpoint

5.1. Although experimental psychology, particularly in America, has been reluctant to use complex materials, European research has extensively probed the perception of art works. Art would seem to be a very refractory domain, since few obvious sensory features identify a particular event as ‘an encounter with an art work’. Of course, the event is not devoid of features; but trying to sort out which ones signal an ‘art work’ and which do not would be a harrowing effort.

5.2. As Gombrich (1960) has shown, the theory of the graphic arts such as painting was long dominated by the tenet that artists should strive for illusion and ‘mimesis’, the imitation of nature. The ‘great’ work should provide the most exact and complete illusion of perceiving the ‘real thing’. But if that tenet were adequate, artistic representation could not have undergone such dramatic changes throughout history. As Gombrich also shows, each new school or style tended to be perceived as an abrupt distortion, even by experts on art, and became a success only as people learned to perceive its works in a suitable way. The inescapable conclusion is that external standards extracted from everyday sensory and visual experiences may be very powerful in determining what people perceive ‘in’ an art work, but only internal artistic standards can determine what is or is not an art work in the first place (1.11).

5.3. As noted already (1.2), early research in psychology proceeded on the assumption that test subjects could best be controlled by giving them novel and meaningless arrays. Presumably, a person who had no knowledge or experience regarding art might view, say, a Picasso painting as just such an array. So our basic question might be: how does artistic perception contrast with the totally untrained perception that would tend to register meaningless arrays? Or, to use the parallel with chess (1.6), how does the expert perceive differently from the novice? Putting the question this way favours an evolution­ary perspective on a complex interaction of factors, including both earlier ‘notions about the education of attention, the formation of images, and the strengthening of associations, ‘and more recent notions about construction and reconstruction based on schemas and “internal representations. Ideally, at least, artistic perception never ceases to develop as long as a person continues to experience works of art — not merely new works, but familiar works in new ways. An art work is judged ‘great’ to the degree that continued experiences cannot exhaust the possibilities for perceiving it; the art work is judged ‘trite’ or ‘mediocre’ if this potential is quickly exhausted (Beaugrande (1987a).

5.4. These considerations suggest that art is a good domain for encouraging us to understand perception as a dynamic, often developmental process. Just as a written word or text is a meaningless array for anyone who doesn’t understand the language, an art work could not be identified in isolation from the processes of acculturation upon which art in general is based (Schmidt 1982). However, the long emphasis upon illusion and mimesis has obscured this factor by suggesting that people somehow just compare the art work with the real world and reach a judgment in terms of perceived similarities. This dogma, which implies a static and external rather than a dynamic and internal process, was rejected only when technology gained the capacity for ‘exact’ reproduction, notably through photography, whereupon the visual arts soon became programmatically non-representational (cf. Gombrich 1960: 4f.). Evidently, the doctrine of illusionism was formally recognized as not merely detrimental, since it exalted the camera above the artistic process, but inappropriate in the first place. If art had no other function than to imitate reality, then people might as well be content with reality — as some philosophers since Plato had indeed argued.

5.5. The history of art tells a different story. Precisely because in most societies, reality is believed to be stable and unambiguous, art serves the necessary and complementary function of proposing alternative ways to approach reality — any reality, not just the prevailing one (Beaugrande 1987a, b, h). Where the logician judges the art work to be a falsehood because it is not reality (Plato did so), the artist sees the work as a true exemplar of a possible, though virtual or alternative reality. For this reason, art provides a unique opportunity for freeing human experience from whatever is construed to be ‘immediately given’. The greater the art work, the more it convinces us of its validity as a possible exemplar. Curiously, the art work can readily come to seem realer than reality, a more valid version than one based on ‘facts’. For many people, Shakespeare’s chronicle plays have displaced available historical documents about the fortunes of the Bolingbrokes and the War of the Roses. Despite their grim fates, Lear and Hamlet have an enduring reality in our ‘imaginary forces’ that most ‘real’ kings and princes could only envy, beyond all confines of time and space.

5.6. For similar reasons, attempts to judge the quality of art works by gauging their correspondence to reality eventually break down. Few people consider documentary art the best kind, and fewer still would say it is the only legitimate kind of art. Conversely, Romanticism, surrealism, and fantastic art, though not always appreciated, are seldom dismissed for ‘not being art’ at all. Art seems to undergo special rhythms of drifting toward and away from reality as a means of continually opening new perspectives. Hence, art history shows neither a steady perfecting of imitative techniques nor a steady dissolu­tion of all ties to reality, but a richly faceted palette of gradations, the totality of which constitutes the contribution of art to broadening human understand­ing far beyond the ‘givens’ (Iser

1978; Jameson 1981; Jauss 1982).

5.7. Yet the argument advanced in section 4 should suggest why art has traditionally been thought to have the function of imitating the real world. Human perception, being in phase with determinacy, responds to the art work by enhancing those aspects that assist a focus on some particular meaning. If the art work is representational, then its correspondences to non-artistic experiences of reality are an obvious preference region, whereas its divergences from reality is tolerated and attenuated. For instance, people accept portraits in all artistic styles, from early Egyptian to surrealism, as representations” of the human face and its features, because the face is such a familiarized entity of experience. Even the grotesque distortions of the expressionists cannot break this predisposition, though they may make viewers uncomfortable.

5.8. If the art is mainly non-representational, on the other hand, direct connections of this kind are not so effortless. Even so, audiences are likely to attempt some connections, and the means for doing so vary according to the artistic mode. Music, for example, is not representational in any way compara­ble to the graphic arts. Sometimes composers provide programmatic descriptions, as happened with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Berlioz’ Sinfonie Fantastique, and most ‘tone poems’. But a person who had no knowledge of those descriptions would certainly not experience the works as ‘meaningless’. Moreover, the specific forms of a symphony or even of the more program­matic tone poem are seldom relatable to specific objects in a scene or events in a narrative. Occasional ventures into sound-imitation are not valid counter­examples either. Storms have been repeatedly ‘portrayed’ in music by Beethoven, Rossini, Wagner, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Richard Strauss, Puccini, Grofé, and so on, yet aside from imitations of wind with scales or chromatic runs and of thunder with percussion, there is nothing specifically ‘storm-like’ about this music, and we tend to follow clues supplied in the composer’s ‘programme’ or, for an opera, by the events on the stage. Even Debussy’s majestic invocation of the sea in La Mer can be greatly appreciated without knowing its reference to the sea, in ways that paintings of the sea, from the early Dutch masters down to the impressionists, cannot.

5.9. Literature and poetry are complex intermediate modalities. As stated above (1.8; 3.9), the comprehension of language is greatly enhanced or supported by visual parallels, although the relation between vision and mean­ing is far from simple or widely understood. On the other hand, natural language is surely more representational than music. Except in unusual cases, a story of an incident (say, an adventure) or a description of an object (say, a sea) in language would be perceived to have a much less mediated reference to those things than a musical tone portrait. The doctrine that art should imitate nature has surfaced periodically in literature, notably in the ‘naturalism’ of the latter 19th century and the documentary art after World War II, but not with the continuity and insistence we find on occasion in the history of the graphic arts. The doctrine is held in check especially by the degree to which literature is not ‘visual’ or ‘imageable’ in character, though still much more so than music.

5.10. For precisely such reasons, literature has a much wider and more differentiated range of possible strategies for situating itself with respect to reality than does music. Terms like ‘realistic’ and ‘non-realistic’, hardly applied to music, figure prominently in discussions of literature. If ‘literature’ has the function of developing alternative worlds, then ‘realism’ is essentially a principle of selection and representation for drawing upon parallels with ordinary experience in a relatively explicit and straightforward manner. Yet the great ‘realistic’ novels of the nineteenth century (like Balzac’s) attain their effects not by reporting what ‘really happened’ in the world, but what might have happened yet didn’t. These ‘virtual’ alternatives are found to make ‘real’ events meaningful and relatable in much the way things are defined dialectically in terms of what they are not (4.11f.). We might even say that realistic art offers us the opportunity to perceive ‘our’ reality as an interference pattern projected by parallel alternatives from art (cf. 4.7). Since the set of things that reality is not is so large and indeterminate, even highly realistic fiction opens more possibilities than it could exhaust.

5.11. Literary ‘fiction’ reveals ‘fact’ as a mode of ‘framing’ information (cf. Goffman 1974). Within such a fiction, we can frame off a region as either ‘fact’ or ‘fiction’, depending on the context. Within classical reality, we are not allowed such easy prerogatives; yet there too, ‘facts’ are determined in all sorts of ways by ‘fictions’, namely by latent alternatives. Hence, literary fiction quite frankly invites us to undertake a constitutive role which, for the sake of orientation and social agreement, we are not explicitly allowed for classical fact. Fiction is in this way like simulation, enabling us to test ideas we couldn’t reach in direct experience (2.5).

5.12. The ‘truth’ of literary fiction is thus not the elementary factuality of the logician, but the ability to evoke alternative worlds in such a way that the principles of constituting worlds are foregrounded by relaxing the determinacy of our perceived environment. The author of fiction is granted the right to decide ‘what happened’ instead of just having to report ‘real’ events. Yet in the fictional world, the distinction of ‘real’ and ‘not real’ by no means disappears. In the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, for instance, we distinguish between what we know to be ‘the case’ and what the deluded lovers believe. If the myth is acted out, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we can also separate the lovers from the ‘real actors’ who are fictional on another level, Bottom the weaver and Flute the bellows ­mender. In the same play, we know that Bottom gets ‘translated’ from his ‘real’ self by a magic spell and then turned back; the ‘fact’ that he is ‘fictional’ in no way clouds the difference, nor does the ‘imaginariness’ of the spell-caster Pucl.

5.13. Literature is special also because its modality is language. The de­mand for referential veridicality can be imposed upon language only up to a certain point. To manage such wide ratios between determinacy and inde­terminacy, language is necessarily open, and even the most determined acts of closure cannot be definitive. This constraint is attributable to the higher complexity of language, as entailed in the greater amount of detailed prior knowledge schemas required for its successful use and the greater adaptability to multiplex contexts (4.to). Referrals to direct modes of sensory perception are extremely helpful, but cannot be a full substitute for a representation in language. Whereas classical science tended to deplore this factor as an obstacle to speaking or writing ‘the truth’, literature welcomes it as a reason to ‘tell all the truth, but tell it slant’ (Emily Dickinson).

5.14. All the same, literature constantly appeals to sensory impressions and vision, and such appeals strongly support its power to innovate. In a passage like:

 we think the eagle-winged pride

Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts

With rival-hating envy set on you

To wake our peace, which in oue country's cradle

Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep (Richard the Second, 1, iii, 129-133)

the more abstract concepts, like ‘pride’, ‘thoughts’, and ‘peace’, are so closely mixed with imageable ones that the novelty of the passage presents no special resistance to comprehension. Such mixings, so exuberant in Elizabethan art, can be encountered elsewhere in many other forms. MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ mixes in a self-referential way:

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit.

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown ­

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

The abstractness of absences (‘mute’, ‘dumb’, ‘silent’, ‘wordless’) is offset by concreteness of imagery, thus acting out the task the poet is setting for the ‘poem’: to bring meaning even (or especially) there where no words are. His conclusion that ‘a poem should not mean but be’ seems to me best understood in the sense that the poem can present beings as if they were already meanings and vice-versa.

5.15. the function of art to foreground the otherness or ‘alterity’ of things is most strikingly illustrated by the ‘found object’ or ‘objet trouvé’: some artefact not originally intended as an art work is presented and perceived as such. In ‘pop art’, this tactic was raised to the status of an absolute; household items and consumer products like soap boxes were treated as art objects, often with minimal transformations (chiefly in size). But a similar trend has always accompanied art. Even the most cunningly achieved illusion of nature — say, painted fruits being pecked at by real birds — was prized because the art object was not a real object; real fruits attracting birds would not have been remarkable at all.

5.16. My main point is that art and its fictional power to posit could be related to ordinary fact in much the same way as quantum reality is related to classical reality. Quantum theory destroys our hopes of finding a ‘deep reality’ with the same construction as classical reality, built of things with stable self-identities or essences and revealing tidy boundaries between real and unreal, or possible and impossible, or what did’ happen and might have happened. Art, on the other hand, never insisted on such tidy boundaries, opening instead a range of more options than even the most complex art work could encompass. The ‘realistic’ art work restricts its portrayal of what ‘might have happened’ by accepting commonplace limitations inspired by the real world; but its events are not thought to compete with what did happen there. Moreover, most of the better-known ‘realistic’ works differ greatly from ordinary reality in their selectivity and supercoherence (Beaugrande (1987b). Just as recent theorizing about quantum reality raises the prospect of ‘super­connectedness’ (3.11), the art work brings things into a structure of connections well beyond what ordinary reality is likely to provide (cf. 6.21). The extraordinary coincidences in say, Dickens’ novels, by no means disqualify them as realistic. Even Voltaire’s Candide, which pushes this tactic to abusive extremes, is intended as a sobering critique of non-human cosmogonies. We may of course be subtly challenged by fictional, possibly unreliable narrators (as in Turn of the Screw) or by conflicting points of view (as in Humphrey Clinker), but we do not then give up our belief that in the given fictional worlds, some things ‘actually did happen’ and others did not. Such devices merely highlight the alternativity and openness of art, which turns over to us responsibility of estimating what it may mean to be ‘real’.

6. Responses to a poem

6.1. For some time, I have been developing methods to encourage naive readers, as are often found among the students in American colleges and universities, to respond creatively to art, especially poetry (Beaugrande (1985, 1987g). For this purpose, the students should not run off to the library to dig up recover some already accredited ‘author’s meaning’ set forth in published criticism. Instead, they should reflect about anything in the poem that seems worth attending to and assign it as many meanings and motives’ as they can. The students present their reading to the group for discussion and then write up their ideas. During this process, I pose questions or make suggestions, but do not pretend that I ‘know’ the ‘right’ meanings any better than they do. The creative, self-reliant responses they report are often ‘impressive and reveal facets of meaning I had not perceived before.

6.2. After a semester (16 weeks) of training, one group of students recorded their immediate responses to the following poem by James C. Kilgore:¹

     The White Man Pressed the Locks’ (1970)

1   Driving down the concrete vein,

2   Away from the smoky heart,

3   Through the darkening, blighted body,

4   Pausing at clotted arteries,

5   The white man pressed the locks

6   on all the sedan’s doors,

7   Sped toward the white corpuscles

8   in the white arms

9   hugging the black city.

According to the respondents, this poem ‘describes the plight of the cities today’. It ‘sets up a system of haves and have-nots’, contrasting ‘the success of upper middle class whites’ with ‘the poverty of the lower class blacks’. It points to ‘the conflicts that result in the whites closing their hearts and locking their doors to what they consider bad’. ‘The white man is driving away from the problems of the inner city’. The setting was ‘a highly populated industrial town that is very dirty, and those who live in it are poor’. New York, Harlem, Detroit, Chicago, Oeveland, Pittsburg, and Gary, Indiana were all expressly mentioned.

6.3. In stating the theme this way, the respondents were using contem­porary urban realities and images as a reference point. Yet although most respondents agreed that ‘the poem deals basically with racism’, some made this connection less direct and more abstract. ‘Black may not even mean the black race but a black, dreary town-ghetto’. Or, ‘white and black here do not necessarily reflect races’; in ‘the white man’s viewpoint of himself’, ‘his kind are white, pure, clean, and upstanding, while the others are of questionable character, dirty, and set no examples for the rest of society’.

6.4. The poem is designed such that any simple illusionist reading as a story or description or a man locking his car is impeded by diverse yet imageable concepts. In line 1, for example, ‘driving down a concrete vein’ is such an unusual action that readers an hardly construe it ‘literally’ or ‘referentially’. The ‘vein’ has to be referred to something else, in this case a ‘road’ (9),² ‘street’ (5)-, ‘highway’ (6), or ‘expressway’. It might be ‘the busy main street or avenue of a large city’. The term ‘vein’ implies that ‘the street is vital to the life of the city’. Though ‘concrete’ was associated mainly with ‘cement’, four respondents related it to a ‘hardening’, ‘a sign’ of ‘sickness’ and ‘heart disease’. Another saw a signal that the protagonist is ‘cold and unfeeling towards the black man’. These interpre­tations were derived from the overall context and were thereby rendered determinate in ways that would probably not happen in most other contexts.

6.5. Some students referred to the reality of the human anatomy by pointing out that ‘ veins’ (in contrast to arteries) ‘usually go toward the heart’ (3), i.e., ‘bring used blood back to the heart to be replenished’. To account for the discrepancy of moving ‘away from the heart’, respondents suggested that this particular’ vein’ is turned to ‘concrete’, such that it ‘no longer brings in blood to the heart’ or ‘attracts others to the inner city’.

6.6. ‘The smoky heart’ (line 2) was referred to ‘the city’ (5) or ‘the downtown area’ (6). The area is now a ‘slum’ (5), a ‘ghetto’, a ‘poor section of town’, ‘run down and dirty’, ‘depressed and sick economically’. Its condition was caused by ‘pollution’ (to), including ‘smog’ (2), ‘fog’, and ‘dirt’ (2). It was ‘industrialized’ (4), that is, filled with ‘large factories’ ‘billowing smoke into the air’. More abstractly, the ‘smoke’ was viewed as a signal that the area was ‘hot, violent, and troubled, or seething with hatred’; a vision was reported of ‘a sick city filled with a cancer of violence’. ‘The heart has burned itself out’, leaving ‘a smouldering mass’.

6.7. ‘The darkening, blighted body’ was taken as further evidence of deteriorating urban conditions. The area was ‘destroyed and ruined’, afflicted by ‘poverty’ (3), ‘disease’ (3), ‘injury’, and ‘racism’. ‘Blighted’ was explained as ‘withered, destroyed, frustrated’, and ‘injurious to the environment’. The mood was one of ‘gloom, despair’, ‘hopelessness’, or ‘withering hope’. ‘Darkening’ was associated with ‘evening’ and ‘night’, ‘the unknown cir­cumstances of the night’, and ‘the thought’ ‘of death’; plus ‘the image of the Dark Continent’. Or, ‘the ‘color of the skin’ (3) and ‘a growing black population’ were invoked. Or again, ‘the humanity of mankind towards its fellow members is a darkening concept in the city’.

6.8. The ‘clotted arteries’ that make the protagonist ‘pause’ (line 4) were taken to be ‘stoplights’ (6), ‘intersections’ (4), ‘traffic jams’ (4), ‘barriers’, or ‘signs’. The area was ‘congested’ (2) with ‘traffic’ during ‘rush hour’ (2), or ‘clogged with the smoke and the heavy evening traffic’~ In the ‘slums’, ‘the streets are crowded’, ‘jammed or overcrowded with people’ and are ‘not well paved’. Perhaps ‘trouble spots’ or ‘areas with mixed races’ were further obstacles; one student thought of ‘blocked channels of communication’. Also, respondents remarked that ‘clotted arteries’ ‘can cause fatal heart disease’ and ‘lead to death’. ‘The city’ is thus indicated to be ‘slowly dying’ of its ‘sickness’.

6.9. The selection of line 5 to be the poem’s title foregrounds what might be considered a trivial act under other circumstances. The respondents agreed that ‘the white man pressed the locks’ out of ‘fear’ (7) and ‘prejudice”(4). More drastically, he may have ‘turned white with fear’. ‘He is stopped at an intersection and is afraid of being attacked’ (2), ‘robbed’, or ‘vandalized’ ‘in the bad neighborhood’. ‘This is a common action in many large cities’. He does not feel safe in the poorer part of town’ and ‘wants to make sure no one can stop him’ or ‘get in’ or ‘out’. He ‘fears the black city dwellers’ with ‘the irrational fear which causes racism’.

6.10. The motives for the white man’s act were scrutinized. ‘He thinks he will be safe’ ‘from the bad and sick environment’. He is ‘wary of the disease in the city — crime’. He is ‘trying to keep out the darkness, the filth’, and ‘shutting himself in’ from ‘the corrupt and sick society we live in’. ‘He is protected in his expensive automobile while he moves through the midst of the poverty and crime of the city and he does not want any of it to brush off on him’. ‘Out of hate he locks the black man out of his world’. Yet ‘he is pressed into or locked into combination with the black world’.

6.11. The concept of ‘lock’ elicited some additional interesting associations. One respondent remarked that ‘to lock is to hold fast or inactive’. Another thought of ‘locks of black pressed hair’. Since ‘lock’ ‘comes from’ a ‘Latin word’ ‘meaning’ ‘to struggle’, the image arose of ‘the white man creating a struggle’. ‘A lock is also an enclosure with gates that raises or lowers boards from level to level: a metaphor for the white man’s keeping the blacks at a lower level’. More sinister associations included ‘a person giving emergency aid for heart or long failure and pressing on another’s chest’; and the popular American form of ‘suicide where people lock themselves in their cars and choke on the exhaust’ —‘the white man’ was ‘killed’ ‘in his own means of escape’.

6.12. The ‘sedan’ in line 6 was seen as a ‘big’, ‘wide’ ‘luxury car’ or ‘a family car’ of an ‘enclosed type’. The man ‘can afford automatic locks, since he can press them all while driving’. The man was thus inferred to be ‘a family man’ of the ‘middle class’ (3), ‘a typical white collar worker’. ‘He is better off than those who live in the heart of the city; they can’t afford the car for transportation’ and ‘need to live close to their place of work’. Besides, ‘the car is very ironic because cars also cause pollution’.

6.13. ‘The white corpuscles in the white arms’ (lines 7-8), were identified as ‘the suburbs’ (19) or ‘outskirts’ (4). The man is ‘fleeing’ to ‘his neighborhood’ in the ‘clean, fresh ‘white’ part of town’. Or, the ‘corpuscles’ might be people: ‘his friends and neighbors’, ‘the free-moving suburbans’, ‘the white corps’ with its ‘strength’ of ‘sheer numbers’. ‘In the suburbs, where there is less fear of injury and a feeling of more security, people, like small cells’, ‘are able to move about more freely’. The man ‘is heading for his own kind — those of the same blood or breed’. He will ‘feel safe in his own white world where he doesn’t feel any responsibility to or have any concern for the blacks who are less fortunate’. ‘He can now relax in his own world, away from the blacks and other minorities’.

6.14. Or again, the ‘corpuscles’ might stand for ‘the streets of the suburbs’, being ‘the smaller offshoots of veins’ just as ‘suburbs are branches out of the city’. Or, they could be ‘the individual homes’ and ‘residences’, owned by whites’; or ‘small, isolated, and self-contained communities’. The man’s own ‘home is multi-cellular, has many rooms, and is not aggregated or close to others as are many homes in the slums’.

6.15. The anatomica1 fact that ‘white corpuscles’ are ‘antibodies’ and ‘attack’, ‘fight’, or ‘kill’ ‘disease’ was considered significant. ‘White blood cells usually attack and engulf bacteria and other diseases’. They ‘carry waste and attack foreign invaders’. The man hopes they ‘could save him from the infection that traps him in’ or ‘flight the infection of crime’ — he longs for ‘a healing place where his heart will be able to slow down’. Through a pun a sorts, the ‘arms’ reminded respondents of ‘armies’, ‘armed police’, and a ‘militia’, befitting the function of the ‘white corpuscles’.

6.16. The final image of ‘the white arms hugging the black city’ (lines 8-9) elicited an intriguing range of responses. The ‘hugging’ was equated with ‘surrounding’ (2) and ‘supporting’ the city. ‘Geographically’, the suburbs ‘surround the city’; but they can also be a place where ‘the white man’ ‘holds himself a prisoner’, or ‘a containment keeping the blacks from escaping’ ‘from a city which the white men control (hug) and pollute (literally as well as morally)’. If so, ‘the hug is not an affectionate gesture but an encagement’. ‘The hug is incongruous: the whites show no love to the inner city blacks’.

6.17. The anatomical aspect of the final image can easily be foregrounded. References to the ‘circulatory system’ may ‘insinuate that the occurrence is a circular one with the white man going away from the black city to the white suburbs and then returning in the morning to work’. The ‘arms’ form ‘an extension of the body’ and ‘cannot function without the rest’. Correspondingly, ‘the city is a closed system like the body’, the suburbs being ‘appen­dages as far from the city as possible, yet connected to the city’. The white man ‘tries to get out through the arms but he’s still stuck, like the arms are still stuck to the body’. ‘The white suburbs will keep moving farther away’; yet ‘once the disease, pollution, and decay’ ‘reach the hands, the whole body is going to die’, and ‘the white man is about to be engulfed by this disease’. The arms are ‘clinging to death’. The color ‘white’ also brought to mind that ‘in death and sickness the skin takes on this shade’.

6.18. From a cultural perspective, the final image was felt to be ambiguous. Neutrally, the image might symbolize how the whites ‘cling to the only thing they have ever known’ and ‘love the city because it where they make their living’. Optimistically, the poem may be pointing out ‘the dependence white culture in America has on black culture’ in order to advocate that whites ‘try to overcome racism and hug the black man’. It may ‘show that we are really one whole, and we can’t avoid it and should embrace this’. Pessimistically, the image may make ‘a comment about how dominant white culture subjugates blacks and black culture’. ‘The white man is living off the used blighted body of the black man’. ‘The suburbs are scared of the black or slum city, yet they control and support it’. Moreover, people ‘love the benefits we gain from allowing’ the ‘pollution’; ‘we know our industries create filth that our bodies must intake, and yet we continue to hug our black city’. ‘The white man is obsessed with the new technology and city-type things and ways’. He ‘is dependent upon the black heart of the city where he works’; yet he ‘may feel that he is driven down by doing so, that it is killing him’. People ‘expect to help the black city’ ‘to survive’ ‘when actually they are just helping to kill it’.

6.19. One student compared the pollution with the way ‘we know smoking is bad for the body’. Two others said the whole poem was describing ‘a bad cigarette habit’. ‘The poet is giving you a tour of a smoker’s body’. ‘The smoke has already affected the veins and made them hard’. ‘The first line represents tar and nicotine pushing its way down a hardened vein away from an unhealthy heart’. The ‘clotted arteries’ too indicate that ‘the person’ has been ‘smoking’ ‘for a while’. ‘The fifth line represents the brain locking all the valves shut that let blood pass through’. The action of locking was ‘a fatal step: the sedan is a funeral car’, and ‘he put the final nail in his coffin, probably lighting up the last cigarette which took him past his limit’. The next image showed the tar and nicotine ‘going through the branches in the lungs’. The ‘arms hugging’ suggested that ‘he was just asking for death by giving in to smoking’, though he ‘wanted to quit’.

6.20. The interpretations reported by these readers indicate how an inde­terminate range of diverse but thematically relatable meanings can be per­ceived in an artistic text. The potential indeterminacy arising from mixing themes elicited a wide spread of prior knowledge to support determinacy without reducing the poem to a single orderly statement. Due presumably to the contrast of white and black, a social message was nearly always recog­nized, though in varying detail or imagery. Readers identified a general experience of alienation, even for ‘the white man’, who has ‘the government and the establishment’ on his side, but ‘is a prisoner in his own city’ and longs to ‘get away from some meaningless task or from a responsibility’. He is insecure even in ‘the snuggling safety of a suburban sofa by the light of the TV’, and tries to exalt himself by ‘having weirdoes and negative example to co-opt and abuse’.

6.21. These readings bring out hidden dimensions of meaning in the sense that the perception of a text as a report about urban congestion or medical disease would proceed in a more determinant manner, e.g., would not see so much significance in the references to ‘blood’. This poem does not allow any similarly direct ‘illusion of reality’ or certainty about ‘what really happened’ (5.2, 10), yet was all the same used as an occasion to contemplate urban realities in broad and critical terms. Whatever perceptual schemas were brought to bear were adapted or updated for special use — a compromise between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ processing (cf. 1.7, to). Despite the mix of meanings and images, readers attained complex unities, illustrating the ‘supercoherence’ that might be compared to the ‘superconnectedness’ among quantum events (cf. 3.11; 5.16). The alternative schemas like ‘city layout’ and ‘anatomy’ interfered with each other to project an unconventional view of conventional reality, with ‘scientific’ terms of medicine being applied not to an organism, but to a whole social environment. The ‘meaning’ is the sum of paths used to create coherence — an effect greatly amplified when I synthesize and summarize the responses of the whole group.

6.22. For me, the most intriguing aspect is that these respondents were by no means experts in the usual sense, having no academic credentials for perceiving works of art. Most of them had hardly ever read a poem except as part of a school assignment, and even there, the ‘right meaning’ was usually supplied as a given by teachers or textbooks. Nonetheless, these naive readers evidently perceived differently at the end of our training than they had before. Apparently, the usual evolution of artistic expertise can be dramatically accelerated by creating a free environment for response rather than seeking some exclusive ‘truth’ or ‘right meaning’ (cf. 5.12). Poetry works well here because every participant can read the whole text, and because the modality, language, is already familiar and manageable (cf. 5.13). Yet what these respondents did was no ordinary use of their language, having passed beyond the early stage in the course where poems like Kilgore’s had appeared meaningless and incoherent. Perhaps we need to reconsider the commonplace ideas of perception and comprehension being strictly determined by prior experience. My efforts to offer an uncon­ventional setting were evidently conducive to engaging the resisting text with increased resourcefulness. To the degree that this engagement occurs, each text is qualifies as ‘great’ by inviting new possibilities for perceiving it (5.3).

7. Outlook

7.1. If the interaction of art and science is to assume a really powerful significance, quantum theory offers a special opportunity, provided two chal­lenges can be met On the side of art, we need to must recognize that the relation between art and reality (or ‘nature’) is not one of imitation and closure, but of dialectic interaction and alternativity. On the side of science, we must recog­nize that the relation between science and reality (or ‘nature’) is not one of classical determinacy, but of quantum multiplicity. On both sides, these challenges are made highly problematic by the phasing of perception, so much so that the main commonality between art and sciences has traditionally been seen in their joint commitment to ‘the real world’ (cf. 2.8). But as quantum reality demonstrates, our accustomed reliance on the classicalness of our world leaves us helpless in some domains, without even logic, locality, or dimen­sionality to fall back upon. Here, art steps in to show ourselves simulating other worlds without losing our orientation or erasing all boundaries between real and unreal.

7.2. A spate of commentaries has recently appeared about the analogies between quantum reality and ‘eastern mysticism (e.g. Capea 1975; Zukav (1979). We may not need to go so far afield, when our own tradition of art has been offering much the same message, had we thought to pay the proper attention. Today, art seems threatened less by the insistence upon realism as imitation than by the general failure to see the dialectical relevance of art for reality. Perhaps the popular tendency to meet the rising complexity of reality by denying its alterity is an understandable symptom, but an impoverishing and potentially dangerous one in times of rapid social change and the proliferation of knowledge. We would do far better to take both art and science as occasions to contemplate the implications of alterity and to simulate other worlds, some of which would surely be more suitable ambiences far human development than the prevailing one. 

Notes

1 For a larger sample responses to other poems from this group, see Beaugrande (1987e).

2 Numbers in parentheses ten how many readers reported their response in the quoted wording

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