The objective of this post is to establish speculation as an artistic activity. This obviously does not mean that speculation can only be practiced as an art; just as one can paint, sculpt or write with no artistic ambition, it is obvious that one can speculate with no artistic concern whatsoever. My point is rather to say that it is possible to develop an artistic mastery in speculating just as it is possible to develop one in the other arts. In particular, I wish to investigate how such a mastery is conducive to successful trading.
In order to do that, I shall first consider some traditional features of art and build some analogies with speculation. That will hopefully open new perspectives to thinking and practicing speculation
I-CONSTRAINING THE ART
Let me start by a quote from Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859:
“Car il est évident que les rhétoriques et les prosodies ne sont pas des tyrannies inventées arbitrairement, mais une collection de règles réclamées par l’organisation même de l’être spirituel. Et jamais les prosodies et les rhétoriques n’ont empêché l’originalité de se produire distinctement. Le contraire, à savoir qu’elles ont aidé l’éclosion de l’originalité, serait infiniment plus vrai. » [ Salon de 1859- Le gouvernement de l’imagination]
Which, in english, gives :
“Since it is clear that rhethorics and prosodies are not arbitrarily invented tyrannies but a collection of rules required by the very organization of the spiritual being. And never did the prosodies and rhetorics prevent originality to get produced distinctly. On the contrary, to say that they nurtured the occurrence of originality would be infinitely truer.”
Such a remark was inspirational for Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lyonnais when they founded the Oulipo in 1960. This movement may be superficially seen as a reaction against the trend of discarding traditional rules such as versification in poetry, figuration in painting or common practices (tonality, contrapuntal forms,…) in music. In this sense, it would closely relate to Baudelaire’s point in reasserting such rules on the ground that they coincide with “the very organization of the spiritual being”. Such is not the goal of the Oulipo however, it is, in fact, more in line with the questioning of the traditional rules and their replacement or improvement, as can be seen in the efforts of Schoenberg in music or in those of Kandinsky in painting. In my understanding, the Oulipo’s project is, first of all, to assert the necessity of constraints, and secondly, to reflect upon the nature of these constraints.
According to this conception, Art is not to be freed from arbitrary constraints and led to develop from a pure constraint-free intuition as some may have thought wrongly in the 20th century (with experiments such as some kinds of stream-of-consciousness, automatic writing, …); on the contrary, Art needs constraints, for intuition and imagination to be productive. The fundamental problem then becomes one of knowing which constraints are relevant, or even whether this question is meaningful at all.
In practice, Oulipo’s artists have often been led astray from their original goals by surrealistic believes, but these early objectives do retain, in my view, all their relevance. The presence of mathematicians, such as Francois Le Lyonnais and Claude Berge, among the founders, tends to credit the central concern about structures that underlies the whole enterprise. Many Oulipo’s constraints came therefore to be inspired directly from mathematics. The Oulipo’s work may then seem to be acquainted with what TA is doing in relation with speculation, provided that speculation is indeed an art.
II-THE BEAUTILESS ART
When considering art, we routinely turn our attention to beauty, as art is widely defined as the making of beautiful things. However, there is no beauty to be found in speculation, the speculator does mot produce any masterpiece that can be looked at and admired in an aesthetic perspective, the only judge of the value of a speculator’s action is the profit or the loss he made, and this judgment is as unaesthetic as can be since it solely is based on immediate usefulness. Art, from the romantic period onwards, is not considered as a mean for a material gain, or it becomes devoid of content and is abased to mere propaganda. Art is believed to be an end to itself (which was translated by Duchamp as “Art for art’s sake”), in that the search for beauty, is not the search of an external object in order to acquire or even unveil it in a mundane sense, it is more about creating beauty.
Speculation cannot be said to create anything beautiful, it merely is useful for the speculator and the system which it brings to existence: the market. However, art may also be said to be useful, just not directly so, I admit that art is an end to itself (but I contend that speculation is also an end to itself) but its creations have a purpose and even a cognitive content, the beauty is enlightening, it says some truth, albeit not one as formed and determinate as is normally considered to be a true statement.
I have written earlier that the market is evolving faster than mundane reality, and it is in this difference of speed that we must look for the reason of the absence of beauty in speculation. I believe that beauty simply has not the time to form in the market place, speculation can only display its utility, its efficiency, the enlightenment of the speculative art is at best confined to the mind of the speculator, and even there, it is only present for a fraction of a second, and it leaves no trace whatsoever. The closest to the art of the speculator is the performance of an amnesic improvisator with no public.
In that, I think I can say that speculation is an art, at least that it can be considered as an art in the way a speculator wishes to approach this activity, the speculator can, and I believe must, be an artist, even though he will never be recognized as one by any public.
III-THE FALSEHOOD OF TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
Baudelaire, again in the “Salon de 1859”, wrote this at the end of section 8 “Le Paysage”:
“I would rather return to the dioramas, whose brutal and enormous magic has the power to impose on me a useful illusion. I would rather go to the theater and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed and tragically concentrated. These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth.”
[translation from “The Arcades Project”, p.536 (Q4a,4), Walter Benjamin, First Harvard University Press, 2003]
Similarly to the dioramas, it is because TA is false that it may bring us closer to the truth of speculating, which is itself a production of truth (and that is similar to the status of truth in art as well). Many Technical Analysts are looking for low-lagging tools, conceiving no-lagging tools as the ideal they should aim at, but this is a mistake, the ideal TA tool is not one with no lag at all, since if such a tool were existing, there would be no market in the first place, the ideal TA tool is one that has a lag adapted to the given speculator and particularly to his relation to the conditions of the market (its speed). The TA tools therefore are not there to tell some truth about the market but rather, like the dioramas for Baudelaire, to “artistically express and tragically concentrate” the reality of a relationship between the speculator and the market conditions (the speculator’s dream), which, when witnessed by the speculator will allow him to be attuned to the market.
The point of the Oulipo’s constraints is exactly that as well, it is to pull the mind of the artist from the unconstrained immediacy of nothingness, from the passivity of contemplation, in order to force him to reconquer this immediacy by displaying his creative power to overcome the constraints. Like an Oulipo’s constraint incites/challenges the artist to create in order to overcome it, TA incites/challenges the speculator to speculate also in order to be overcome.
That view, in some way, gives credit to the contrarian philosophy, a speculator speculates against TA. Speculation to qualify as the activity I expose here, must always be done at variance with the market and with what the market is saying; speculation is the counter-proof of TA, and it is through this double-negation of the market (TA negating the market and speculation negating TA), that the speculator becomes the market (see The Logic of Place: not-not-a = A).
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Art. Show all posts
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Eternally returning to the virtual
On page 244 (Ch.11: The Narrative Adventure) of The Blank Swan, Elie Ayache wrote that "to capture (...) the singular 'how' of creation as such" will provide for "our perception of the creature as a result of the act of creation, our perception of it against the backdrop of the virtual it is emanating from, will allow us to read, in the static and actual and settled creature, a continual and eternal return to the virtual. As it actually, definitely, 'eternally' exists, the creature eternally returns to the virtual."
Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Return" is often borrowed by various thinkers and adapted to their need, which is fair indeed, because Nietzsche himself did not close this idea (that he himself borrowed from various sources: mythologies and poets) into a strict interpretation, leaving ample room for his readers to comprehend it in their own way.
A few years ago, I myself pondered over this idea, and came to consider it as a return to the materiality of the body, a necessary and eternal travel from the abstract to the material, where thought (I personally used the word "regard" in french, I don't know how to translate it in english, in order to convey its polysemy, associating the ideas of seeing, considering, thinking, caring, guarding, absorbing, mirroring, repeating, ..., Nietzsche would perhaps talk of "will to power") eternally returns to the body in order to reaffirm itself (by again moving away from the body, in order to later return to it) in its freedom, in acting. It seems to me that it adheres to the sense of the following sentence from Elie Ayache found on page 234:
"Thought wakes up with the body pushing it from behind, and it is soon to be itself literally pushed outside of the room."
This eternal return of the "regard" to the body from which it comes, is also the return, I believe, of the thought onto the creature from which it emanates. It eventually is through the consideration by thought of the negation of the body that is its origin, that body and thought are articulated into a relationship of eternal return. But the negation of the body can also be seen as the affirmation of contingency (and its necessity), it is therefore an eternal return of the actual to the virtual, which is the perspective described by Elie Ayache.
Furthermore, I think that this ability for us "to read, in the static and actual and settled creature, a continual and eternal return to the virtual" is particularly well-represented in chinese art. Calligraphy painting, for instance, is all about enabling the viewer to enter and to experience the process of painting, that is the virtual:
This is the character li, which means strength, but there is no depiction of strength here, nothing substantial differentiates this painting from 力. What is apparent however is the way this painting has been realised. We can easily imagine ourselves drawing this exact character, the brush strokes are clearly visible, Wen Shen, the author of this calligraphy did not do anything to conceal his technique, on the contrary, he's displaying it, we can imagine the tension of his hand, the speed of his strokes, even the angle of the brush on the paper. This painting does not represent 力, it represents itself, it is a painting of the painting.
Similarly, chinese landscapes do not represent a landscape, they again represent the painting of the landscape:
Again, Chen Jun here doesn't make any effort to conceal his technique, on the contrary, sharing it is the whole point of the painting.
This philosophy of art is further developed in the works of Zao Wou Ki, whose explicit ambition is to paint the Dao, which is nothing else than the virtual:
The stress on the process of actualization that underlies chinese art obviously has its counterpart in chinese philosophy and most importantly in the Dao De Jing (道德經).
Interestingly, just as virtue and virtual shares an etymological connection, the Dao De Jing relates both concepts quite closely in the first chapter of the De (德, virtue):
上德無為而無以為也 (shang de wu wei er wu yi wei ye) (1)
which translates literally (and according to Henricks whose book is referred above) as:
The highest virtue takes no action, yet it has no reason for acting this way.
Or, in other words: The highest virtue remains virtual
This idea is of course pervasive in all traditional chinese philosophy, it is sometimes referred as the "Wei wu wei"(為無為) principle, and it can be found to some level in the teachings of all Daoists, but also in Confucianism. The De Dao Jing (to use Henricks order), that is, the Book of the Virtue and the Dao, or to use a purely western vocabulary, the Book of the Virtue and the Virtual, is unique in linking both the notion in such an explicit manner. It indeed seems to say that to be virtuous is to remain in constant proximity with the virtual, at the edge, one could say, between the virtual and the actual.
It is, in this sense, that Art has an educative function, it is what formed the thought or the "regard", to remain virtuous, by not interrupting the eternal return to the virtual away from(and pushed by) the actual, by remaining not in the "can be" (The Blank Swan, p.437) which is already too much on the side of the actual (into an ontological beingness), but rather in the "also can". This expression which is often found in Singlish (Singaporean english) obviously comes from the chinese ye keyi(也可以), the "ye"(也), meaning also, acts as an untotalizer of the range of possibilities. Indeed, this expression often comes as an answer to a request, which assumes implicitely, that the demand was rather out of the range of what is normally requested, the interlocutor then replies that it can also be done (even though, in practice, this expression is more pervasive and exceeds this context).
也 is also found in the above verse (1) of the De, here it is widely believed to just be an emphasis, an affirmative marker, as it is only found in the MaWangDui version, and not in the more commonly used version of WangBi , its importance is therefore neglected. However, I believe that it should also be understood here as an untotalizer, a differentiating operator, that extends the meaning beyond its literalness. Far from emphasizing then, I think it may well be a de-emphasizing marker, a prompting to forgetting in the sense Elie Ayache is proposing on page 248:
"Forgetting is the point of inflexion and reversion to the surface that is necessary for writing. By contrast with the sum total of possibilities, clear and yet confused, forgetting makes the writing thread obscure yet distinct."
A lot could be said now of these ideas of clarity and obscurity, in relation with chinese thought, I leave it to the readers to appreciate for themselves, maybe through the works of Francois Jullien, or maybe by looking also at the works of Zao Wou Ki.
Nietzsche's idea of the "Eternal Return" is often borrowed by various thinkers and adapted to their need, which is fair indeed, because Nietzsche himself did not close this idea (that he himself borrowed from various sources: mythologies and poets) into a strict interpretation, leaving ample room for his readers to comprehend it in their own way.
A few years ago, I myself pondered over this idea, and came to consider it as a return to the materiality of the body, a necessary and eternal travel from the abstract to the material, where thought (I personally used the word "regard" in french, I don't know how to translate it in english, in order to convey its polysemy, associating the ideas of seeing, considering, thinking, caring, guarding, absorbing, mirroring, repeating, ..., Nietzsche would perhaps talk of "will to power") eternally returns to the body in order to reaffirm itself (by again moving away from the body, in order to later return to it) in its freedom, in acting. It seems to me that it adheres to the sense of the following sentence from Elie Ayache found on page 234:
"Thought wakes up with the body pushing it from behind, and it is soon to be itself literally pushed outside of the room."
This eternal return of the "regard" to the body from which it comes, is also the return, I believe, of the thought onto the creature from which it emanates. It eventually is through the consideration by thought of the negation of the body that is its origin, that body and thought are articulated into a relationship of eternal return. But the negation of the body can also be seen as the affirmation of contingency (and its necessity), it is therefore an eternal return of the actual to the virtual, which is the perspective described by Elie Ayache.
Furthermore, I think that this ability for us "to read, in the static and actual and settled creature, a continual and eternal return to the virtual" is particularly well-represented in chinese art. Calligraphy painting, for instance, is all about enabling the viewer to enter and to experience the process of painting, that is the virtual:
This is the character li, which means strength, but there is no depiction of strength here, nothing substantial differentiates this painting from 力. What is apparent however is the way this painting has been realised. We can easily imagine ourselves drawing this exact character, the brush strokes are clearly visible, Wen Shen, the author of this calligraphy did not do anything to conceal his technique, on the contrary, he's displaying it, we can imagine the tension of his hand, the speed of his strokes, even the angle of the brush on the paper. This painting does not represent 力, it represents itself, it is a painting of the painting.
Similarly, chinese landscapes do not represent a landscape, they again represent the painting of the landscape:
Again, Chen Jun here doesn't make any effort to conceal his technique, on the contrary, sharing it is the whole point of the painting.
This philosophy of art is further developed in the works of Zao Wou Ki, whose explicit ambition is to paint the Dao, which is nothing else than the virtual:
The stress on the process of actualization that underlies chinese art obviously has its counterpart in chinese philosophy and most importantly in the Dao De Jing (道德經).
Interestingly, just as virtue and virtual shares an etymological connection, the Dao De Jing relates both concepts quite closely in the first chapter of the De (德, virtue):
上德無為而無以為也 (shang de wu wei er wu yi wei ye) (1)
which translates literally (and according to Henricks whose book is referred above) as:
The highest virtue takes no action, yet it has no reason for acting this way.
Or, in other words: The highest virtue remains virtual
This idea is of course pervasive in all traditional chinese philosophy, it is sometimes referred as the "Wei wu wei"(為無為) principle, and it can be found to some level in the teachings of all Daoists, but also in Confucianism. The De Dao Jing (to use Henricks order), that is, the Book of the Virtue and the Dao, or to use a purely western vocabulary, the Book of the Virtue and the Virtual, is unique in linking both the notion in such an explicit manner. It indeed seems to say that to be virtuous is to remain in constant proximity with the virtual, at the edge, one could say, between the virtual and the actual.
It is, in this sense, that Art has an educative function, it is what formed the thought or the "regard", to remain virtuous, by not interrupting the eternal return to the virtual away from(and pushed by) the actual, by remaining not in the "can be" (The Blank Swan, p.437) which is already too much on the side of the actual (into an ontological beingness), but rather in the "also can". This expression which is often found in Singlish (Singaporean english) obviously comes from the chinese ye keyi(也可以), the "ye"(也), meaning also, acts as an untotalizer of the range of possibilities. Indeed, this expression often comes as an answer to a request, which assumes implicitely, that the demand was rather out of the range of what is normally requested, the interlocutor then replies that it can also be done (even though, in practice, this expression is more pervasive and exceeds this context).
也 is also found in the above verse (1) of the De, here it is widely believed to just be an emphasis, an affirmative marker, as it is only found in the MaWangDui version, and not in the more commonly used version of WangBi , its importance is therefore neglected. However, I believe that it should also be understood here as an untotalizer, a differentiating operator, that extends the meaning beyond its literalness. Far from emphasizing then, I think it may well be a de-emphasizing marker, a prompting to forgetting in the sense Elie Ayache is proposing on page 248:
"Forgetting is the point of inflexion and reversion to the surface that is necessary for writing. By contrast with the sum total of possibilities, clear and yet confused, forgetting makes the writing thread obscure yet distinct."
A lot could be said now of these ideas of clarity and obscurity, in relation with chinese thought, I leave it to the readers to appreciate for themselves, maybe through the works of Francois Jullien, or maybe by looking also at the works of Zao Wou Ki.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Blogs dynamics
As some of you may have noticed, from now on, I will publish all the posts that do not relate directly to trading or economics on two other blogs: http://thenomadicchronicle.blogspot.com/ for english, and http://chroniquenomade.blogspot.com/ for french (one will not necessarily be the translation of the other, the content may be different)
The posts which are directly focusing on mathematics will also be made on another blog: http://stochasticfractals.wordpress.com/
I however leave all past posts on this blog.
This is not to mean that my posts on the other blogs will not relate in anyway to trading, I actually believe that most of them, if not all, do relate to it in some ways. My intention in separating them is only for the purpose of clarity.
The posts which are directly focusing on mathematics will also be made on another blog: http://stochasticfractals.wordpress.com/
I however leave all past posts on this blog.
This is not to mean that my posts on the other blogs will not relate in anyway to trading, I actually believe that most of them, if not all, do relate to it in some ways. My intention in separating them is only for the purpose of clarity.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Fraternité
Some interesting remarks about fraternity came to my attention today, and I think it reveals an interesting difference between a social policy and Socialism, a confusion that many seem to make, in one sense or another.
First, here is a quote from Charles Péguy's "De Jean Coste" written in 1902 (first the original in french, followed by my translation):
I think it illustrates very well an aspect of our societies on which we can ponder with some profit. Fraternity is really at the core of humanity and humanism, and its difference with equality is precisely parallel to the one between a social policy and Socialism.
For the french speakers (and listeners), it is also interesting to listen to today's broadcast of Repliques on France Culture:
Repliques du 2 Mai 2009: Penser la fraternité
First, here is a quote from Charles Péguy's "De Jean Coste" written in 1902 (first the original in french, followed by my translation):
Le devoir d'arracher les misérables à la misère et le devoir de répartir également les biens ne sont pas du même ordre : le premier est un devoir d'urgence ; le deuxième est un devoir de convenance ; non seulement les trois termes de la devise républicaine, liberté, égalité, fraternité, ne sont pas sur le même plan, mais les deux derniers eux-mêmes, qui sont plus rapprochés entre eux qu'ils ne sont tous deux proches du premier, présentent plusieurs différences notables ; par la fraternité nous sommes tenus d'arracher à la misère nos frères les hommes ; c'est un devoir préalable ; au contraire le devoir d'égalité est un devoir beaucoup moins pressant ; autant il est passionnant, inquiétant de savoir qu'il y a encore des hommes dans la misère, autant il m'est égal de savoir si, hors de la misère, les hommes ont des morceaux plus ou moins grands de fortune ; je ne puis parvenir à me passionner pour la question célèbre de savoir à qui reviendra, dans la cité future, les bouteilles de champagne, les chevaux rares, les châteaux de la vallée de la Loire ; j'espère qu'on s'arrangera toujours ; pourvu qu'il y ait vraiment une cité, c'est-à-dire pourvu qu'il n'y ait aucun homme qui soit banni de la cité, tenu en exil dans la misère économique, tenu dans l'exil économique, peu m'importe que tel ou tel ait telle ou telle situation ; de bien autres problèmes solliciteront sans doute l'attention des citoyens ; au contraire il suffit qu'un seul homme soit tenu sciemment, ou, ce qui revient au même, sciemment laissé dans la misère pour que le pacte civique tout entier soit nul ; aussi longtemps qu'il y a un homme dehors, la porte qui lui est fermée au nez ferme une cité d'injustice et de haine.
De Jean Coste, Charles Péguy, éd. Acte Sud Labor L'Aire, coll. Babel, 1993, p. 55
The duty to lift the destitute off their misery and the duty to distribute wealth equally are not of the same order: The former is a pressing duty; the latter is a desirable one; not only the three terms of the republican motto, liberty, equality, fraternity, are not at the same level, but the last two themselves, have several important differences; by fraternity we are prompted to lift our brothers the men off misery; it’s a prior duty; on the contrary the duty of equality is much less pressing; as much as I am passionately disturbed to know that there are still men in misery, as much as I am indifferent to know if, out of misery, men have larger or lesser wealth; I cannot succeed to make myself passionate for the famous matter of knowing who will get in the future society, the bottles of champagne, the rare horses, the castles of the Loire Valley; I hope we’ll always find some arrangement; provided there really is a society, that is, with the provision that nobody will be banned from it, kept in exile in economic misery, kept in an economic exile, nevermind that this or that one is in this or that situation; many other problems will request the attention of citizens; on the contrary, it is enough that one man is kept knowingly, or, which is the same, is knowingly left into misery for the whole social contract to be broken; as long as there is one man outside, the door that is shut in someone’s face secures a society of injustice and hatred.
I think it illustrates very well an aspect of our societies on which we can ponder with some profit. Fraternity is really at the core of humanity and humanism, and its difference with equality is precisely parallel to the one between a social policy and Socialism.
For the french speakers (and listeners), it is also interesting to listen to today's broadcast of Repliques on France Culture:
Repliques du 2 Mai 2009: Penser la fraternité
Sunday, April 19, 2009
From D.H. Lawrence to Messiaen
Let me start this post by a quote from Lawrence's "Aaron's rod", towards the end of the chapter "Florence", wherein the hero Aaron plays a piece of solo flute for the Marchesa, who used to be a dilettante singer (contralto), but is now (after WW1) in a sort of downbeat mood, and feels nausea when listening to music (especially the orchestral one):
It is always difficult to discuss such a passage without, somehow, destroying its charm. I will therefore limit myself to providing a few directions through which its understanding may be deepened (or so it is for me).
First, I'd like to qualify a little the rather harsh judgment about the piano, by referring to composers such as Satie (one may also relate the mediaeval flavour of what Aaron plays to Satie's world) or Mompou, who found a voice for it that does not deserve to be called ponderous or nerve-wracking, and Messiaen, who seemed to echo the comparison of Lawrence with birdsongs, by composing his "Catalogue d'oiseaux", and that one was mostly composed for piano, even though, the first piece of this collection can be said to be "Le merle noir", itself composed primarily for the flute (with a piano accompanying).
On the other hand, the piano indeed has a tendency towards grandiloquence, from which the flute seems immune. One may think of Japanese music, and of the often central part played by the shakuhachi (wooden flute), and that may be the best approach to enter the "out-of-life" world (though I disagree with this characterization) Lawrence is talking about in this passage. The wonderful recording by Lily Laskine and Jean-Pierre Rampal came readily to my mind while reading these lines.
But before the "Catalogue d'oiseaux", even before "Le merle noir", there was Messiaen's "Preludes pour piano", whose first piece is called "La Colombe", already a bird, even if this one is a metaphor for Messiaen's mother. This piece, at least for me, particularly resonates with Lawrence's point.
...And there, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird's singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning--a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird's singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop. A nightingale is rather like that--a wild sound. To read all the human pathos into nightingales' singing is nonsense. A wild, savage, non-human lurch and squander of sound, beautiful, but entirely unaesthetic.
What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer.
After a little while, when he entered the smaller room again, the Marchesa looked full into his face.
"Good!" she said. "Good!"
And a gleam almost of happiness seemed to light her up. She seemed like one who had been kept in a horrible enchanted castle--for years and years. Oh, a horrible enchanted castle, with wet walls of emotions and ponderous chains of feelings and a ghastly atmosphere of must-be.
She felt she had seen through the opening door a crack of sunshine, and thin, pure, light outside air, outside, beyond this dank and beastly dungeon of feelings and moral necessity. Ugh!--she shuddered convulsively at what had been. She looked at her little husband.
Chains of necessity all round him: a little jailor. Yet she was fond of him. If only he would throw away the castle keys. He was a little gnome. What did he clutch the castle-keys so tight for?
Aaron looked at her. He knew that they understood one another, he and she. Without any moral necessity or any other necessity. Outside--they had got outside the castle of so-called human life. Outside the horrible, stinking human castle Of life. A bit of true, limpid freedom. Just a glimpse.
It is always difficult to discuss such a passage without, somehow, destroying its charm. I will therefore limit myself to providing a few directions through which its understanding may be deepened (or so it is for me).
First, I'd like to qualify a little the rather harsh judgment about the piano, by referring to composers such as Satie (one may also relate the mediaeval flavour of what Aaron plays to Satie's world) or Mompou, who found a voice for it that does not deserve to be called ponderous or nerve-wracking, and Messiaen, who seemed to echo the comparison of Lawrence with birdsongs, by composing his "Catalogue d'oiseaux", and that one was mostly composed for piano, even though, the first piece of this collection can be said to be "Le merle noir", itself composed primarily for the flute (with a piano accompanying).
On the other hand, the piano indeed has a tendency towards grandiloquence, from which the flute seems immune. One may think of Japanese music, and of the often central part played by the shakuhachi (wooden flute), and that may be the best approach to enter the "out-of-life" world (though I disagree with this characterization) Lawrence is talking about in this passage. The wonderful recording by Lily Laskine and Jean-Pierre Rampal came readily to my mind while reading these lines.
But before the "Catalogue d'oiseaux", even before "Le merle noir", there was Messiaen's "Preludes pour piano", whose first piece is called "La Colombe", already a bird, even if this one is a metaphor for Messiaen's mother. This piece, at least for me, particularly resonates with Lawrence's point.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Tuning up the mind
In The Nature of Risk, Justin Mamis concludes his sixth chapter with the following remark:
Intuition, although seemingly spontaneous, apparently emotional, stems from a form of "information" that has become built-in from past experience. Discipline means choosing what to do unencumbered by the fear of making a mistake. Confidence means trusting our intuition that what we "see" is what we "know." There's no escaping to the external, to the objective, and no standing on the shaky ground of emotions. So the question becomes, How do we create within ourselves the heroic condition of confidence wherein risk is not danger but life.[MAM99, p.80]
The condition of confidence, heroic or not, to be actual, must somehow not deceive too much, and it would be naive to think that intuition never deceives us. Nonetheless, Mamis is right, intuition is a critical component in any decision process, not less in a trading context.
Technical analysis is very nice, but if fractal geometry teaches us anything, it is that we cannot foresee the evolution of complex processes on the basis of objective knowledge.
Now, if intuition deceives us, I contend that it is because it is trained to do so: Our whole education has conditioned us to think in deterministic terms, the analytical mind is praised and rewarded, hard sciences have simply excluded complex systems from their scope for centuries, and these systems are hardly touched at all in a normal education before a specialized Masters level even today.
Despite that, hard sciences and the mode of thinking they promote, are the foremost influence we are exposed to during our formal education. We are all members of the church of scientism, those who are not are likely to be members of churches even more deterministic than this one.
And our intuition follows this fold, even when we lack information to make a decision (which is almost always the case), we will tend to over-rely on the ones we have, and decide solely on this basis, extrapolating linearly from this partial knowledge, because we are conditioned to rely on linearity. We are simply unable to recognize, acknowledge and take into account the non-linearity of a process. It is this ability that must be developed over time, and it is this one that shall be called an efficient intuition.
There is one domain of the culture that may provide us with a way to build up this intuition, and that is Art. To each his own, personally, I am more sensitive to music and poetry, and it is therefore along these lines that I will argue my point, but I believe it can be transposed to other arts.
Adorno's critic of Schoenberg's and Stravinky's music links them both to the political and philosophical problematic of their times:
Art, indeed, always happens in a context, and relates to it in a very essential way, furthermore, it always takes on a problematic and resolve it figuratively. When Bartok or Stravinsky rejuvenated classical music with peasants songs, they merely reacted to the standardization of the world along western romanticist lines. But more than that, they provide us with a solution to the problematic of cosmopolitism, the native cultures don't have to be erased, they can be consolidated within an evolving culture (civilizations don't clash, they merge, sorry Mr.Huntington) and contribute to a manifold society (see the cosmopolitanist philosophy of Kwame Anthony Appiah for instance). The european empires could have used a bit of insight from them in the 20s and 30s.
And the same goes for today, here is a piece by Iannis Xenakis: Metastasis
The 1st and 3rd movement deals with a relativistic notion of time, that is a function of energy and mass. Interestingly, in trading, Mandelbrot defines the concept of trading time, which is also a function of what can be compared to energy and mass, and that is volume. That is actually a reflection of the dependence of the Hurst-Holder exponent to time [MAN97, pp39-40].
The second movement is even more interesting since it gives a musical translation of Fibonacci sequence.
Xenakis also wrote pieces dealing with Brownian Motion, Normal Distribution and Statistical Mechanics, all very interesting pieces. What they provide us with is an acquaintance that goes beyond the mere knowledge of well-defined criteria, an intuition that may articulate our decisions in a more efficient way.
Intuition, although seemingly spontaneous, apparently emotional, stems from a form of "information" that has become built-in from past experience. Discipline means choosing what to do unencumbered by the fear of making a mistake. Confidence means trusting our intuition that what we "see" is what we "know." There's no escaping to the external, to the objective, and no standing on the shaky ground of emotions. So the question becomes, How do we create within ourselves the heroic condition of confidence wherein risk is not danger but life.[MAM99, p.80]
The condition of confidence, heroic or not, to be actual, must somehow not deceive too much, and it would be naive to think that intuition never deceives us. Nonetheless, Mamis is right, intuition is a critical component in any decision process, not less in a trading context.
Technical analysis is very nice, but if fractal geometry teaches us anything, it is that we cannot foresee the evolution of complex processes on the basis of objective knowledge.
Now, if intuition deceives us, I contend that it is because it is trained to do so: Our whole education has conditioned us to think in deterministic terms, the analytical mind is praised and rewarded, hard sciences have simply excluded complex systems from their scope for centuries, and these systems are hardly touched at all in a normal education before a specialized Masters level even today.
Despite that, hard sciences and the mode of thinking they promote, are the foremost influence we are exposed to during our formal education. We are all members of the church of scientism, those who are not are likely to be members of churches even more deterministic than this one.
And our intuition follows this fold, even when we lack information to make a decision (which is almost always the case), we will tend to over-rely on the ones we have, and decide solely on this basis, extrapolating linearly from this partial knowledge, because we are conditioned to rely on linearity. We are simply unable to recognize, acknowledge and take into account the non-linearity of a process. It is this ability that must be developed over time, and it is this one that shall be called an efficient intuition.
There is one domain of the culture that may provide us with a way to build up this intuition, and that is Art. To each his own, personally, I am more sensitive to music and poetry, and it is therefore along these lines that I will argue my point, but I believe it can be transposed to other arts.
Adorno's critic of Schoenberg's and Stravinky's music links them both to the political and philosophical problematic of their times:
Art, indeed, always happens in a context, and relates to it in a very essential way, furthermore, it always takes on a problematic and resolve it figuratively. When Bartok or Stravinsky rejuvenated classical music with peasants songs, they merely reacted to the standardization of the world along western romanticist lines. But more than that, they provide us with a solution to the problematic of cosmopolitism, the native cultures don't have to be erased, they can be consolidated within an evolving culture (civilizations don't clash, they merge, sorry Mr.Huntington) and contribute to a manifold society (see the cosmopolitanist philosophy of Kwame Anthony Appiah for instance). The european empires could have used a bit of insight from them in the 20s and 30s.
And the same goes for today, here is a piece by Iannis Xenakis: Metastasis
The 1st and 3rd movement deals with a relativistic notion of time, that is a function of energy and mass. Interestingly, in trading, Mandelbrot defines the concept of trading time, which is also a function of what can be compared to energy and mass, and that is volume. That is actually a reflection of the dependence of the Hurst-Holder exponent to time [MAN97, pp39-40].
The second movement is even more interesting since it gives a musical translation of Fibonacci sequence.
Xenakis also wrote pieces dealing with Brownian Motion, Normal Distribution and Statistical Mechanics, all very interesting pieces. What they provide us with is an acquaintance that goes beyond the mere knowledge of well-defined criteria, an intuition that may articulate our decisions in a more efficient way.
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