[NetBehaviour] The Process of Leonardo and Its Moving Center

[Max Herman]

+++

A network is not an object.  It is processes, paths and movement, forms and functions moving and changing through time.  Unless you want to call time an object, and space another, no network is one.  Maybe -- maybe -- a map of a network is an object, but would you therefore call a planet's mapped surface an object not a process?  Better you should call your reflection in a mirror you and the glass your body, blood, and bone.

What are the processes of the human network?  Our bodies and lives are processes much more than they are objects.  Our art and science production and consumption are processes.  Our poetry and painting are, which is to say even our words and images are not objects either but shapeforms of matter and energy moving and changing in space and time.

Lucretius was banned in Italy for saying this on the very same day in 1516 that Leonardo was painting La Gioconda (Esperienza) and Giorgione was painting La Tempesta or showing it to his friends.  They knew.

If they hadn't, why would Lucretius have been banned?  Of course they did.  They knew it all too well.

+

The defining principle of modernization, a better balanced term than modernity, is for art and science to have rights and freedom as peers of church and state.  Before modernization they are not peers, as we see when we look at La Joconde, but servants, tools, possessions, and instruments: indeed, they are like owned objects.  This distorts them to the point that they cannot function according to their true nature, having their own special qualities and agency, but only a kind of false and forged costume.

The rule of law, the principle of voting, and systems of rights since 1718 or so are all Enlightenment processes built on the premise of political science and art, as we can read obviously in the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, raised to a peer status with church and state which is another way of saying monarchy and orthodoxy.  Orthodox monarchy has no need or use for voting, rights, or a constitution.  Their processes are different, map them as you will.  In simple terms they rely on hierarchic control of physical force and information for self-preservation — like a military monopoly — rather than articulated network processes among peers, checks and balances, and separation of powers.

Modernization can go backward as well as forward; it can succeed and it can fail then succeed and fail again, all differing from place to place and person to person.  Its forward progress can push it backward and its successes can ignite its worst and most total failures.  It's like a blob.  Francis Bacon described its only solid foundation as "experience," the Latin "experientia," in 1920, the same word also used by Roger Bacon in 1267 to explain modernization: de Scientia Experimentalis.  Bacon said science must be continually "rebuilt," that is revised and renewed, error-corrected, not just increased status quo ad infinitum, and the base or basis of revision could only be one thing: experientia.  Modernization's curse and bane is WhateverTech t-minus-one, yesterday's winner, whose owner wants more money not correction or learning or revision, much less dealing with consequences ethically.  They react violently against the revision process which removed their predecessors and gave them life, hoping to stay king of the hill by stopping fortune's wheel.

Therefore they also hate revision's ground and medium of being, experience.  They hate it worst of all and insist, once they have got rich, that authority and tradition subordinate or even extinguish the very experience and experiment they once revered.  This makes them hypocrites, and in a sense matricides or fratricides of Shakespearean dimension.  See how he was warning us too?  Assassin Claudius is Machiavelli's intuitive grandchild unbeknownst, and the archaic atavist plots shrewdly against the life of sustainable process.

Dante, Leonardo, and Machiavelli each bisected both Roger and Fracis Bacon.  All three Fiorentini defined experience, experientia, esperienza, as the source of all art and science; but only Leonardo personified it and devoted himself to being a disciple of "the one true maestra."  Dante saw it as the human path to the divine.  Machiavelli saw it as the path to human power in the absence of anything higher, which path as conduit and vessel must be "beaten and bullied to be possessed."  One is much closer to right, to right makes might, and the other much worse and opposite in its reverse modernization — its deceptive portrayal of antique autocracy as apex and return to it as innovative renewal, all to aesthetically elevate the klepto-demagogue during times of crisis not unlike our own — by simply making two slaves rather than one, more slavery not less but costumed as revolutionary liberty for the mass market.  Modernization has this dark shadow, like Envy, which always stalks its salubrious hopeful version, like Virtue, in order to prey on it: the big lie of anti-modernity, which dresses up authoritarians as divine revelation and universal servitude as paradise.

Leonardo saw it all.  He saw Dante's modernity of civic and aesthetic virtue, dreamt of but not yet real; and he saw firsthand Machiavelli's modernity of evil rebranded as good, more real than anything else ever was and poised to assassinate all planetary conscience by means of clever PR.  Leonardo saw, and drew, the Medici, Savanarola, and Borgia, and a million miniatures of each type.  Given this menagerie Leonardo chose to defend what he loved and took appropriate action.

He designed, imagined, engineered, and built her defense, mobility, and information security, logistics, and network redundancy.

+

How are networks kept alive?  This is called sustainability.

Not all networks are alive and organic, though some verbalists say inorganic events are experiences.  Living networks stay alive when all their processes are able to function -- respiration, circulation, nutrition, immunity, reproduction -- and don't when they aren't.  They die, or can die, as Leonardo said the planet's "vegetative soul" (i.e. living system) could and would die if humans don't learn how to control two things: their own cruelty (in "Of the Cruelty of Man") and their buying and selling (in "Of Selling Paradise").

To learn this and adapt accordingly, not killing the planet, humans must follow experience, the path to all learning, and we all must follow it.  Those who would limit experience to servitude of church or state or both collapse its function inducing morbidity, cruelty, and wastage.  But how can we follow it in science and art when we are so confused, fragmented, desperate, and at war?  How can we stop our destroying and selling?  After all, the great fear and hatred of modernization, the fear that networks are process-fabrics not machines and art and science must be free to function within them, without guarantee of perfect success in advance only an ongoing journey attempting harmony with honest ideals, is the fear of losing control and the hatred of anything not subject to your own power.  Cruelty and selling are the preferred levers of desperate, morbid control, marketed by Machiavelli to Marx and Mussolini alike, yet human ignorance fails to see that these prescriptions kill the patient leaving only nothingness.

For fear of drowning we cling in our madness to the plummeting anchor.

How can humans immured in desperate fear and ignorant grasping change into wise calm agents of responsible conscience able not to desecrate ourselves and the earth?  How might we engineer a light and harmonious yet sufficient garment of technology for the planet and our habitation upon it?  What bridge might carry us to such habitation from where we are now?  For as Leonardo said, with great neurocultural prescience, "fear arises before anything else."  The fear, this fear which is undoubtedly older than our species, is the curse which must be countered by consistent imaginative behavior which fosters health and evolutionary adaptation.  This imaginative virtue was personified to Dante in the dark infernal forest of despair as Beatrice, the beautiful and true bringer and maker of blessings, whose favor and help he must earn by learning to improve his own actions through the practice of poetry and philosophy of conscience, learned and learning coscienza.  But how?

He, Leonardo, tells us with great simplicity, centrality, and kindness:  We are each at the center of the eye of the modernization millennium, La Gioconda, La Joconde.  We all can see and all can say, depict, speak, and hear.  This thread of sight, vision, which has no dimension -- like a line has no volume -- and is therefore spatially infinite, can connect every dot and weave every garment with the necessary lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.  We all have a portrait of experience in the mirror and in the painting, which is all we need.

This message exists in some form in virtually every tradition worldwide throughout human history (such as the Sufi, Buddhist, Vedic, monotheist, indigenous, and classical).  Every warring language has a word for it, and that word is the title of La Joconde for every people.  She is the missing teacher and all we have to do is pay a little attention and acknowledge.  That's it.

Then the wars can de-escalate for real and the planet's networks can heal up so it can keep on living.

+

In the sense of practical human engineering design and communications, public sector economics and private can cooperate in a hybrid garment.  Voting rights and property rights can cooperate.   All traditions can cooperate in their true shared mission, de pace fidei, abjuring Machiavelli's ruinous scorched earth and invidious spite.  Each being can have true dignity.  Technology can be shaped by conscience in harmony with living nature, which Goethe called the divine garment.  Every monarch can allow its elected parliament and rights to its people.

To each of these processes, which are in toto what we call sustainability, Leonardo's mottoes pertain: "sapere vedere" (to see wisely) and "hostinato rigore" (stubborn rigor).  His authorial quality is both Dantean and Shakespearean, in many ways surpassing both, and only our obstinate refusal to speak the visual image's proper name — even just once — obscures what we must learn.

Or to say it in other words, as the two halves of Ken Burn's new film on Leonardo are titled: "Discepolo della Sperienzia" and "Pittrice-Dio."

+++







-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20241201/2f689b4b/attachment.htm>