Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds

by Steven R. Holtzman

MIT Press, 1994,
ISBN 0-262-08228-4

Reviewed by Paul Hertz

"What we hold for laws are perhaps only laws which permit us to understand, but not the laws which are the foundation for a work of art." -- Arnold Schoenberg, Harmony

  In Digital Mantras, author Steven Holtzman guides us through a labyrinth whose architecture continually shifts, appearing now as words, now as form and color, and again as music or binary code. He argues that "visual art, music, mathematics, mantra, numbers, and form are all investigations of structure," whose essential nature is linguistic. Without supplying a map, he nevertheless makes a convincing case that all these architectures might be a single labyrinth, a "deep structure" derived from the nature of language itself and its imbrications in the human psyche. From this insight he derives creative, aesthetic, and mystical implications where the computer appears as the ultimate manipulator of structures.
For the clarity with which it weaves together separate strands of discourse in the history of linguistics, musical composition, abstract visual art, and the evolution of computing devices, Digital Mantras deserves serious consideration as a work of intellectual synthesis. Holtzman begins with the and the evolution of computing devices, Digital Mantras deserves serious consideration as a work of intellectual synthesis. Holtzman begins with the work of the early Sanskrit grammarians and a concise introduction to Western music theory, then proceeds to the ground-breaking investigations of Wassily Kandinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Noam Chomsky into formal systems for visual art, music, and language. He sees in their work the foundation for later "structure manipulators," such as Terry Winograd, Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, and Harold Cohen. He places the apogee of structuralist discourse in the digital world, where binary code may represent mathematical concepts, images, sound, or motion, whose separate grammars can unite in a virtual world. Within virtual worlds, isomorphic structures can leave the realm of abstract symbols and become manifest simultaneously in different sensory streams.
Flushed with the new wine of VR, he dances from inquiry to speculation. We are pleased to accompany him, though a critical reader must revert to sobriety after the ball. He argues that if "music is the fusion of form and emotion in sound," emotion itself is a structure, electroencephalic in nature. Hence, structuralist inquiry applies not only "to all systems of expression," but to our experience of expression, too. Holtzman imagines that VR some day "will directly evoke the experience of what we feel and what we emote." Perhaps so--but doesn't art already do just that through its culturally acquired codes of interpretation? Even if an artist could present us with the very stuff of emotion, it would still be in the guise of language, an exterior form which we transform to an interior meaning. Emotion, whatever its biological manifestation, is also a situation, an intentional state whose object is social. Structuralism has successfully illuminated the morphological and syntactic aspects of symbolic systems; it sheds less light on their semantic and pragmatic aspects, which are the realm of meaning.
Aware that meaning is a tricky philosophical knot, Holtzman wonders if structuralist methods can untie it. Meaning emanates from the system, but meaning is not just a matter of form--or is it, he asks. Perhaps meaning derives from a cultural totality, or from transcendental insight. In post-structuralist discourse, the meaning of a linguistic utterance (a derives from a cultural totality, or from transcendental insight. In post-structuralist discourse, the meaning of a linguistic utterance (a text) appears to be so bound to the context of each individual act of interpretation that structural analysis alone cannot account for its emergence and evolution. The epistemological cut necessary to make a structure emerge as an object from its linguistic substrate may well leave the experience of meaning behind, within the subject. In the arts, formal systems may be no more than scaffolding and catwalks, dispensable once the architecture of an artwork emerges. Schoenberg suggested, in his monumental textbook Harmony, that the formal system we use to understand and produce music is not necessarily the fundamental structure or impulse from which music arises. Structures beget structures. The transformations which produce structure may themselves be structured by other transformations. Having once started the hare of meaning, we may pursue it ever deeper and higher, to ever finer granularity or to overarching totality.
Holtzman concludes that formal systems may be the vehicle for mystical insight, a form of mantra, leading us from surface appearances to deep structure and thence beyond structure to Brahman. In this conclusion, he insight, a form of mantra, leading us from surface appearances to deep structure and thence beyond structure to Brahman. In this conclusion, he points up one of the principal historical difficulties of structuralism, which has not only served as a method of inquiry, but as a critical assault on other tendencies. Structuralism rejected the atomistic approach of empiricism, with its emphasis on the accrual of motes of data that become schematized within a causal, diachronic frame. To this it opposed a model for the behavior of systems governed by constraints and transformations such that their internal, synchronic relations remain consistent--in effect, a cybernetic model. Within linguistics, psychology, ethnology, and mathematics this model has led to the creation of formal descriptions of the behavior of specific systems. While these formalizations frequently become identified with the systems they describe, they are built on the premise that structure exists independent of its formalization. But what then is the nature of structure? If we regard it as more than an abstraction, yet immaterial, we easily fall into Platonism, assigning to structures the role of archetypes. Historically, structuralism has resisted this temptation, rejecting models of knowledge (such as gestalt psychology) where the totality of possible forms assumes an existence beyond the this temptation, rejecting models of knowledge (such as gestalt psychology) where the totality of possible forms assumes an existence beyond the individual emergence of form. On the other hand, the assumption that linguistic structure may be innate, part of the brain as Chomsky asserts, cannot adequately explain the cultural formation of symbolic structures, or of the constraining processes that govern them.
Structuralism attempts to mediate between the atom and the totality. Holtzman swings for the totality. This may well be inevitable, when structuralist inquiry serves as a method for examining the arts, where structure and meaning are inseparable. Thus Kandinsky's formalization of abstract art in Point and Line to Plane develops meaning simultaneously with form: meaning is the resonance of form within the perceiving spirit. In appraising structuralism as a method of inquiry applicable to the arts, Holtzman concerns himself with its artistic rather than its scientific possibilities. His is a romantic structuralism, a poetics of structure, a formalization directed towards the production of art rather than the production of knowledge about art. Valuable though its survey of the process of formalization in the arts may be, Digital Mantras breaks new ground in pointing to digital technology as the realm where a grand unified theory of formal systems in the arts may be developed and applied. Like any poetics that has been put into practice (Holtzman's music is available separately on a CD), Holtzman's poetics of digital structure bears the mark of his personal experience, within which he strives for universality. His originality and scope, and the lucidity with which he musters both his arguments and his provocations promise to make Digital Mantras a core text in the development of an aesthetic for the digital production of art..

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