Engineering and the Mind’s Eye by Eugene S. Ferguson (review)

the apogee of structuralist discourse in the digital world, where binary code may represent mathematical concepts, images, sound or motion, each of 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 differentsensory streams. Flushed with the new wine of virtual reality (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 “musicis the fusion of form and emotion in sound” (p. 254) emotion itself is a structure, electroencephalic in nature. Hence, structuralist inquiry applies not only “toall systems of expression,” but to our experience of expression, too. Holtzman imagines that VR will one day “directlyevoke the experience of what we feel and what we emote” (p. 209). Perhaps so-but doesn’t art already dojust 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 that we transform to an interior meaning. Emotion, whatever its biological manifestation, is also a situation, an intentional state whose object is social . Structuralism has successfullyilluminated the morphological and syntactic aspects of symbolicsystems; it sheds lesslight 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 notjust 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 text) appears to be so bound to each individual act of interpretation that structural analysisalone 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 systemsmay 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 systemwe use to understand and produce music is not necessarily the fundamental structure or impulse from which music arises. Structures beget structures. The transformations that 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 points up one of the principal historical difficulties of structuralism, which has served not only as a method of inquiry, but also 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 easilyfall into Platonism, assigning to structures the role of archetypes. Historically,structuralism has resisted this temptation, rejecting models of knowledge (such as gestalt psychology) in which 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 an innate part of the brain, as Chomsky asserts, cannot adequately explain the cultural formation of symbolicstructures, 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...