Posted in Uncategorized on May 1, 2025 17 min read
The dominant ideas for cultural creation prior to feedback become visible through the adoption of the latter. The introduction of feedback as a process of cultural creation where origin and agency are at the very least confounded, accentuates, just how central they are to the ideas of cultural creation hitherto. Platonic aesthetics has an origin, a God and source that already contains all the ideal forms of art, agency is concentrated there, and the ability to create ‘true’ culture is dependent on one’s closeness to that eternal art, one’s knowledge about the eternal forms. The artist is not a free willing agent but ideally a vessel for the instantiation of the eternal forms in an earthly artwork. Equally, in Aristotelian Aesthetics, the artist performs ‘mimesis’ – imitation –through the techne, they are ‘craftsmen’ thus and can only bring about through mimesis what nature would achieve directly. Thus, the artist is not the original source of art, but the creation of art does have an impact on lived reality. Fundamentally, the artists mimesis can bring about two products, instruction through living an imitated experience and the pleasure thereof (Woodruff, 2009, p. 612-616). At last, there is the idea of cultural creation through the ‘culture industry’ proposed by Adorno & Horkheimer in the dialectic of enlightenment. This idea for cultural creation sets out to explicate that art has come to be created through an instrumental rationality, that market forces almost entirely are the agent behind the contemporary creation of culture. That art is produced for profit and the agential force is the market and consumer demand.
Feedback as a concept was famously formalized by Norbert Wiener in his work on cybernetics. It is, at its base the notion that the output of a system can serve as input to itself or another system. In colloquial use ‘feedback’ refers to the way that machines or other humans ‘react’ to our actions. Feedback is in its definition vague enough to be applied to almost anything provided we can close off an assemblage of reactions into a system. In fact, I would venture to say that feedback is the notion of a ‘something’ yielding a ‘reaction’ that is measurable. Feedback, therefore, seen as reactions of entities to stimuli, is little more than a rephrasing of grander concepts like time or change. I propose that if one tried one could find feedback in anything that changes over time, one must merely separate it into entities with inputs and outputs. That very fact is nonetheless interesting because it emphasizes that feedback is essentially married to a determinist worldview – actions (or inputs) beget reactions through black boxed systems that we do not know yet. Certainly, in the notion of feedback there is an agential act, that of the initial action, this one however is not considered the origin of action, as it is itself only the reaction of a previous system. Theoretically, then, that origin of action is displaced continually into the past. The ultimate reaction on the other hand, is endlessly displaced into the future. All other inputs and outputs and systems we perceive in between this origin and end, are contingently manifested by how we choose our focal level of analysis and how we choose to place our agential cut in our analysis. As feedback considers the output of a system to become an input to another, it is actually a circular description of the world. The output of any system can never disappear but must be the input to some other system.
But what does it mean to consider cultural creation as a feedback loop? I believe it akin to what in design is considered ‘ontological design’. Culture is not a set of knowledge in the form of a reflection or description, much more than that it constitutes practical performative acts which are equally inscribed in minds, as in tools, or theories (Willis, 2006, p.72). To consider culture as a feedback process and systems that share input/output, means that e.g., it is not a certain form of carving that is the cultural tradition, but that the carving technique forms a cultural feedback system only in conjuncture with the specific wood native to the region and the resistances and affordances of that material. Suppose that such a carved mug allows other performances, acts of drinking, sounds that only occur when hitting wood mugs of that form and shape together in certain drinking halls made out of other materials. This means that in every cultural artefact are inscribed horizons of possibility that get interpreted in conventional or new ways by other (mental/cultural) systems. By and large the point, here, is that culture is re-inforced or changed as a result of the interpretation and use of cultural inputs by systems, these systems can take the form of mental conceptions, tools, values, or social constellations. Importantly, however, this process is endless, iterative, and circular. Culture is a ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Willis, 2006, p. 72), in which:
If these according to the feedback worldview is the ontological state of the world, then, art’ considered as the re-evaluation of values, becomes indistinguishable from ‘culture’, and both turn from an original act into a practice that defines the structure of existence.
To elaborate on this, the ‘artist’, what in the realm of human social organization constitutes, the re-evaluator of cultural values, becomes merely a being that is in a feedback loop with certain artefact/tool systems. For example, someone who interprets Joseph Campbells “Hero’s Journey”, to create a new artefact system such as a ‘feminist hero’s journey’ whereby that person’s mental structure is changed as well as a new artefact/tool structure has come into existence. In a grander view that means, that the horizons of possibility of mental structures and artefact structures feedback into themselves and continually change. Cultural feedback is a “hermeneutic circling” (Willis, 2006, p. 86).
However at least conceptually the hermeneutic circling is continually interrupted, each system has places where it “stops processing” and expects an input. If the artefact system were, for example, a computer, it would at regular times be passing the baton to the user to supply it with input, such that it can keep on processing information. Usually, we consider the user to be the active part of that process and the computer the passive part, because our intellectual tradition demands we conceive of humans as agents. However, because in the framework of feedback, the user and the computer equally are but systems that share an input/output, and therefore qualitatively indistinguishable consider the following:
Whereas we usually may consider the user to possess the mental structure that makes them an ‘artist’, merely using a digital technology to express that art. We can now look at the other face of the coin. The computer is the system that creates art and culture as it receives inputs, performs interpretation thereof, and renders as output. The computer is the artist, it merely needs to prompt the user to yield their raw material, to carve away at that raw material of story e.g., their personal hero’s journey, to then render this as an image in the windows paint program, or as a personal document. The point put forward here and to be continued, is that when we employ feedback as an ontological paradigm, art and culture do not have a particular origin nor agential power in the world, they are merely an always present emergence of the interpretations of mental and artefact systems.
In other words, Culture (reinforced systems / “correct” interpretation) and Art (reinvented systems, differing interpretation) are both merely an emergence of ‘system’ interpretation. Neither have original acts, nor does Art have an outside, a newness, it is not an agent on the world, it is merely a reflection of culture. Culture and art are not even a ‘result of’ environment then, they are a function of change and time, inextricable of environment. They are cyclical interaction or interpretation, a continuous circle. No radical outside can be introduced to them, it would be interpreted, and misinterpretations would become part of the feedback loop. That is Art and Culture through the lens of feedback. Now, from a scholarly perspective this as it tends toward just a complete determinism would not be an insanely productive perspective, however, I believe that one variable emerges through that worldview which may be able to potentially result in some insights.
In fact, placing two feedbacking systems there and not deciding one to be the agent and the other the receiving object allows in my opinion one factor, a variable, to stand out between all feedbacking systems. That is to say, that all systems which interrupt, to demand input or serve output, must do so at certain intervals or rhythms that may differ from other systems. Whereas the paint brush requires input every possible moment, the computer consults the user for input only after certain fractions of seconds, when it has processed instructions. A letter conventionally demands a reply only after multiple days, maybe even weeks, the school system may request the input of presence every day, but the input of knowledge only periodically during exam season. The point I put forward here is that this sampling rate is a variable that defines the time span on which two or more feedbacking systems interrupt their process to render output which demands input for more processing. A higher sampling rate – more interruptions of processing – I conjecture generally means an increased reactivity of the systems to each other, and their tighter integration at least on a temporal scale. The two systems of player and online first-person shooter, temporally, demand input more frequently than the multistage application process for a university. On that basis, minutiae of actions come to matter more in the former. Additionally, I would like to emphasize that, if we consider that each round of processing changes the horizon of possibilities afforded at any instant, a quicker sampling rate between two processes means a quicker shift in the horizons of possibilities. (Note: I do not imply that this correlates with a perceived magnitude of the shift in the horizons of possibilities).
As I have at last, elevated, the sampling rate of feedback asa culturally determinant factor. Let me use the remainder of this essay to outline and give a glimpse of the kinds of things this theoretical elevation may be able to do for us in connecting and contextualizing ideas for cultural creation.
I do not argue for the sampling rate to be a cause of the effects outlined below, however, I do think that inquiring about the sampling rate of societal processes has a unique capability of connecting and correlating phenomena, especially those related to the economy, culture, and art.
Consider first, that since the 1970s we have seen a continuous increase in the cycles of capital turnover – meaning that generally capital aims to realize its returns quicker, as planning too far into the future seems too risky. With that have occurred a generally felt speed up of life, as well as what theorists argue a compression in the dimensions of time and space, which has at least according to Marxists created the postmodern culture (Harvey, 1990). Deleuze (2017) has already suggested to stop thinking of disciplinary societies and move the theoretical paradigm towards societies of control: who no longer test the individual to make them conform at times, but rather instantaneously react to the individual, to everything it does, at any moment. Meanwhile, since the 2000s at the very least, commodities have aimed to get closer to the consumer, to align their image with the consumers values, in other words they have become reactive to customer’s feedback (Thrift, 2006). In that venture, we have seen personalization employed in most areas of life, from screen backgrounds to personalized gifts. We have entire media like videogames, who are Duchampian in nature, they let the viewer complete the artwork, to choose their own path. They stop processing each frame to consider whether the player has made any input to the processing and react to that. In the political sphere, citizens demand more engagement from their representative politicians, to be answered in a timely manner, often instantly with a tweet.
Art, however, is proliferating, the media and entertainment industries are booming. On the other hand, art does has completely lost the notions it possessed in the 18th century (van Rooden, 2015, p . 170-176). Those concerning art being an autonomous thing, art today is often commercial, and if not that, it is decried that art is always political. It understands itself as changing social practice, not as apart from society, but as iteratively changing the distribution of the sensible, perceptions, and attitudes. All these things seem tightly connected with the sampling rate of consumers, citizens, and individuals. I, however, believe they are all tightly connected to the sampling rate of processes. Whilst explicating every one of these phenomena in terms of a paradigm of feedback with the variable being sampling rate, let me in the constraints of this essay at the very least do it for the autonomy v. politicalness of art.
In the 18th century, the sampling rate of an artist was much slower, there was not the expectation to post a blog post weekly, upload pictures daily and so on. Communication did not move at electric speed but at the speed of the postal network. The notion of the individual, as the artists saw themselves, contrary to popular belief did not mean that they saw themselves as apart from society, but that they recognized the ‘whole in the one’, that each part of society and its attitudes, beliefs, and feelings could be found within them and vice versa. They were a reflection of the whole (van Rooden, 2015, p. 174). The endeavor was to create monological art, art that expresses the self in its purest form and does not care about its witnesses. To me this is a prime reflection of a lower sampling rate of the artist, less performance, less necessity for art output from them. But through the increase of the sampling rate, which admittedly here I suppose without substantiation, art shifted more into ‘Art before Witness’, art that can anticipate the viewers feedback, and already has it in mind during production. This is the effect of feedback technologies such as upvotes, likes, comments, and the possibility of uploading works of art that had been under production in smaller time scales. Today, art consumers are sampled at such high frequencies and in a never-before-seen array of dimensions through the capture of data, that most culture and art has become more reactive and thereby less autonomous. Through systems with increased sampling rate, art and the commodity can come closer to the consumer than ever before. The point put forward, however, is that this is in the most part a reflection of the increased sampling rate from the romantic period until today.
Investigating cultural creation through feedback yields the view of a determinist system. Where the inputs/outputs of culture merely iterate on themselves. Art, that is change in culture, is a product of mis- and re-interpretations in the hermeneutic cycle, merely contingent without any teleological direction or necessary function. Art is an emergent property of a feedback system. However, one significant variable, close to considerations of the speed up of life, personalization, and other artistic economic tendencies we are witnessing, may demand further analysis: the sampling rate of the feedback process.
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