Shape

406 Notes to p. 389
artist’s hand is lost in impersonal line drawings on a computer. These are the things Langer considers:
(1) openness to novelty; (2) alertness to distinction; (3) sensitivity to different contexts; (4) implicit, if not
explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (5) orientation in the present.
My twin formulas for rule application guarantee number 5—‘‘orientation in the present.’’ Shapes
divide and fuse every time a rule is tried, so that all past distinctions are lost in the present. What I
see and do is what I see and do now, independent of anything that may have happened before.
Parts vanish without a trace—they’re gone and forgotten. Identities in the schema x fi x are nice
examples of this—try them as often as you like and see. But why stop when Langer’s four preceding
points describe shapes and rules, too? And maybe there’s more in my copies of Langer’s copies
of a few lines from the concluding part of William James’s third essay in The Meaning of Truth. Nitpicking
here isn’t idle. Langer first quotes James so—
Owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one. Every one is insufficient
and off its balance, and responsible to later points of view than itself.
—and then she quotes another passage to start a creative (design) process with rules in schemas
like x fi tðxÞ and x fi xA. There’s James, then Langer’s copy in her book that distorts this in a subtle
way, and then my own copy of her copy that changes it
The standard [for what’s right] perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of experience.
and also a third copy ends my second paragraph on page 58. What James says may seem more
important than how it’s copied, although copying what he says shows how it works. James sets
the original standard with his own words, but this isn’t rigid. Its structure varies as it’s copied.
The standard evolves and shifts—refined and distilled or changed entirely. And the preceding sentence
is a new copy of James in the same ongoing process. (It’s funny how copying is used, and
not just to design. In the Turing test for artificial intelligence, calculating machines are supposed
to imitate you and me. But my way of copying with shapes and rules, and a shifting standard may
alter this. At least copying—again in my way—allows for novelty and the reasoning it implies. All
of this turns on the question I asked in the early pages of this book—what would calculating be
like if Turing were a painter?) A permanent structure is an unproductive stricture. That’s because
the letters u and i are side by side—inverse translations on my computer keyboard. Taking orthography
too seriously only brakes/breaks the free flow of experience. I can derive the palindrome
ababaababa or spell it from memory to rotate the three squares in the shape
but does anyone really believe this happens before I erase and copy the squares, and what about
other parts of the shape and its successors with five squares, seven, etc. if everything is spelled out
ahead of time? Perhaps I can compile and use a dictionary of shapes with variants that are spelled
differently. But then are some parts of shapes missing? How do shapes look? What an awful mess
without embedding and mindful (visual) calculating! It’s lucky spelling is so easy to ignore, at least
for scofflaws like James. (On James’s distaste for ‘‘the authority of prior use’’ and ‘‘obsolete verbal
ritual,’’ namely, spelling—‘‘he didn’t even like the fact that everyone was expected to spell the
same way’’—see L. Menand, The Metaphysical Club [New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001],
88–89.) In fact, James tries copying, and our separate versions of it match exactly where they
should. Langer’s two quotations follow a few pages after this: