Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Kristen Letts Kovak
“Rational Implausibility”
I remember the day I discovered the color salmon. Staring at my 96 box of crayons, I found an anomaly that was neither pink nor orange, but an intense mixture of the two. By naming it, I noticed that the emergent color was greater than its individual parts. Each new label of turquoise, eggplant, or periwinkle claimed a nuanced position within the spectrum. I was learning a vocabulary of asymptotic distinctions that would inevitably outgrow the limits of its box. I wanted to explore every corner of the territory, and claim a new color for my own.
After years of studying color wheels and Newtonian models, salmon became a formula: Red-Orange, Value 7, 90% Saturation. By reducing color to degrees of hue, light, and intensity I could, theoretically, now produce an infinite number of colors. Yet, the visible spectrum has finite boundaries. My ability to perceive a color is biologically limited. “Infinite”, rather, refers to a tapering of discrete distinctions within the limits of the visible spectrum. I cannot perceive a fundamentally new color; I can only experience a more sensitive discernment of the familiar. Color theory both deepened and abridged my visual experience. By defining a framework, my experience of color was narrowed to its fundamental characteristics. I cannot logically experience a new color without first violating my acquired understanding of what color is.
I am left with an unsettling supposition that each new experience is increasingly limited by the accumulation of my previous experiences. Unable to process infinite stimuli, our thoughts are constrained to the recognizable. Every encounter with the familiar reconfirms our presuppositions and defines the parameters of our future understanding. Once formed, our ideologies subtly dictate our behaviors by limiting the categories with which we can process new information. Since categorizing the color salmon, I have lost the ability to experience it as something fundamentally distinct.
Still, I spend countless hours traversing the confines of the visible spectrum, hoping to find a new color to add to the box. I continue to search for the impossible because infinite nuance seems insufficient when compared to battling the boundaries of logic. I recognize the limits of my visual and mental perception, but assert the theoretical possibility of the rationally implausible. The closest that I can get to discovering a new color is to believe that it might exist.
Volume 1, Issue 3
“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology…we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Kristen Letts Kovak
“Rational Implausibility”
I remember the day I discovered the color salmon. Staring at my 96 box of crayons, I found an anomaly that was neither pink nor orange, but an intense mixture of the two. By naming it, I noticed that the emergent color was greater than its individual parts. Each new label of turquoise, eggplant, or periwinkle claimed a nuanced position within the spectrum. I was learning a vocabulary of asymptotic distinctions that would inevitably outgrow the limits of its box. I wanted to explore every corner of the territory, and claim a new color for my own.
After years of studying color wheels and Newtonian models, salmon became a formula: Red-Orange, Value 7, 90% Saturation. By reducing color to degrees of hue, light, and intensity I could, theoretically, now produce an infinite number of colors. Yet, the visible spectrum has finite boundaries. My ability to perceive a color is biologically limited. “Infinite”, rather, refers to a tapering of discrete distinctions within the limits of the visible spectrum. I cannot perceive a fundamentally new color; I can only experience a more sensitive discernment of the familiar. Color theory both deepened and abridged my visual experience. By defining a framework, my experience of color was narrowed to its fundamental characteristics. I cannot logically experience a new color without first violating my acquired understanding of what color is.
I am left with an unsettling supposition that each new experience is increasingly limited by the accumulation of my previous experiences. Unable to process infinite stimuli, our thoughts are constrained to the recognizable. Every encounter with the familiar reconfirms our presuppositions and defines the parameters of our future understanding. Once formed, our ideologies subtly dictate our behaviors by limiting the categories with which we can process new information. Since categorizing the color salmon, I have lost the ability to experience it as something fundamentally distinct.
Still, I spend countless hours traversing the confines of the visible spectrum, hoping to find a new color to add to the box. I continue to search for the impossible because infinite nuance seems insufficient when compared to battling the boundaries of logic. I recognize the limits of my visual and mental perception, but assert the theoretical possibility of the rationally implausible. The closest that I can get to discovering a new color is to believe that it might exist.