Color Theory

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RED

She tells me that it’s still there. Hovering somewhere behind it all— under the carnage and rubble. Just out of frame perhaps, past the shaky videos of murder, over the burning forests and industrial furnaces powering our techno-oligarch’s pleasure domes. Shimmering at the barely visible edge of the horizon, the faintest color of hope.

“It’s hard to make out, but if you look close…,” she tells me

I try. Sometimes I think I catch a glimpse, but it always slips out of view as quickly as it arrives. I wonder how it could be possible: for two people to look out at the world and see something so radically different. She’ll ask me what it’s like to live inside my head. I ask her the same.

•

The philosopher Frank Johnson tells the story of a brilliant polymath, who knew everything there was to know about human vision and the physics of light and the chemistry of color. Without batting an eye, she could tell you what wavelengths constituted the color red— what electro-chemical reactions took place in the body upon being struck by that unique form of radiation. She could recite Goethe, “Or when sun, veiled by sirocco // Royal red sinks out of view,” and tell you how carmine was made from the dehydrated shells of Dactylopius coccus, a small parasitic insect native to the Americas. She knew all the facts one could know. 

And yet, she lived in a world painted entirely black and white. Her home, her vaunted libraries, her delicately assembled lab: all of it was rendered in greyscale by some conniving devil.

One day, she’s wandering her grey gardens. Lost in thought, she comes to the edge of her property without realizing— to the edge of the dome that has been filtering the sky into its familiar colorless iridescence. Through a small crack, she notices something. A rose. No, not a rose exactly; she’s seen those before in old botanical diagrams and field manuals. This was new. A puncturing sensation, an intensity, a color!

Jackson then asks us a deceptively simple question: does the polymath learn anything upon seeing the rose? After all, she knows all the physical facts there are to know about red— its wavelengths, modes of production, histories, interactions with the body. Yet surely, something happens when she sees the wild flower, when she sees red. 

•

This something has been haunting me lately. We can know all the facts, even agree on them, and yet beyond (or perhaps underneath, just above) lies something else. Call it experience, sensation, feeling, phenomenology, consciousness, spirit. None of the words get it quite right. The source of an endless debate: is the dress white and gold, black and navy? Is there really something better out there? Is it all just an illusion, a trick of the eye?

I’m not sure what happened to the hope drenched hues that used to paint the world. These days, I can’t seem to make out much more than suffocating colorlessness ahead. The same conmen, the same warming world, the same spectacular cruelties and killing optimizations and bloody sins of the American dream— the same old shit continues to unfurl like the world’s dullest red carpet: sure as the heat death of the universe. I’m not the most hopeful person in the world, even under the best circumstances. Friends have described me as a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist, rarely stressing about my personal life because my anxiety is directed at everything else. Still, standard-issue cynicism doesn’t fully capture the growth calcifying inside me lately. I worry that I’m becoming cruel.

There are, however, those who haven’t fallen prey to this numbing resignation. People like Y. I met her in my early 20s, just a few months after moving to New York. She’d grown up here, which is maybe why she had such a knack for seeing the details I always missed in this dizzying fractal city: the favorite haunts of the neighborhood cats, the local deities on their daily errands of small miracles, all the ghosts who shaded the city blocks she’d lived in and lost over the years. It was through her eyes that I fell in love with this place, eyes that couldn’t help but take in the details that most people glossed over, or conveniently forgot, or never bothered to see at all.

She was an organizer then, as she is now, helping tenants resist the never-ending cruelties of slumlords and politicians in the pockets of scheming billionaires. As far as I was concerned, she might as well have been fighting devils. Yet her eyes also saw the suffering frothing up from a city going insane, and so the necessity of resistance was as obvious to her as that of breathing. Victories against these devils remain few and far between. They’re a covetous species, loath to cede even the smallest ground and eager to obliterate the opposition— or at least to make a big show of threatening to move to states with lower tax rates. But even after years of chipping away at the iron wall of capital and human apathy, she still sees it: the spectre of possibility, a crack past the dome that filters our sky into colorlessness.

•

WHITE

The human eye has around 120 million rods and 6 million cones, a fact that hasn’t changed much since our earliest ancestors first walked the Earth. Despite the fixity of our physiology, the viewing subject itself has changed dramatically over the ages. In his landmark book Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary writes that “there never was or will be a self-present beholder to whom a world is transparently evident.” The observer is not a generic type, but a “historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification.” Perception isn’t a standalone, biological process; it is always already entangled within the multiform social and cultural worlds we inhabit. Our media networks and modes of cultural production, scientific apparatuses and slick new technologies, justice and carceral systems— these all prefigure what it means to look and to be looked at.

During the Enlightenment fervor of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Crary tells us that the viewing subject was formed around an understanding of perception epitomized by the camera obscura: an apparatus made by creating a small hole in a dark room which projected the view outside into the interior. Just as someone in that darkened room could stand at a distance from the projected image and contemplate it, the observer was also thought to gaze at the world from the protected vantage of their enclosed mind, turning it over and subjecting it to scrutiny. It was an idealized model in which the world outside offered itself to the viewer as a stable, orderly projection— ready for mastery and control, for his dreams of empire.

The breaks of modernity would invert this paradigm. In his seminal 19th Century text Theory of Colours, Goethe begins with a situation quite similar to the camera obscura: a dark room with a narrow window, opening out into the world of light. He tells the viewer to “fix his eyes on this bright circle.” Yet where we once might have looked at the light to learn about truth—the radiant sun outside the illusory cave—Goethe reverses course by suddenly instructing us to close the aperture, and focus instead on the “darkest part of the room.” There, a “circular image will now be seen to float” before us, the ghostly residua of the real.

Where the Enlightenment saw the viewing subject as a cool observer of a world of meaningful solidity, the early modern subject was thus thrust into a liquid world where nothing was as it seemed. Perception was no longer the ratiocination of a coherent space by a Cartesian subject, but a phenomenon that emerged from energies that pulsed through our nervous system, isomorphic to our newly laid telegraph wires and power grids. The world was unmoored from “truth and immutable identities,” as Crary writes, ripped into a flurry of ruptured signifiers and inhuman signals whose main logic was “exchange and flux.” Meanwhile, our access to the outside world was clamped shut, enclosing us in our own increasingly electrified, mechanized bodies.

Today, we’re living through another similarly epochal change. If we were to look for the contemporary equivalent of the camera obscura, we’d be hard pressed to find a better inheritor than our screen-based smartphones. Whereas the camera obscura opened up to a stable external world, these devices open up to a digitized information-space that interpenetrates mind and milieu. Humans are no longer materialized as viewers capable of comprehension and mastery as they were in the Enlightenment, nor even self-enclosed bodies responding to electric stimuli as was the case in early Modernity; rather, they are transformed into manipulable nodes in a vast network of shifting intensities: points to be passed through and adjusted to better serve the network itself. Any reference to inside and outside disappears to make way for an undulating topology wherein we are simultaneously both observer and observed, in which our role is never set because the underlying code can always change.

In many ways, it doesn’t even make sense to think of us as individual observers anymore. If anything, we are materialized as infinitely divisible bundles of attention and engagement to be dismembered and sold to the highest bidder. It’s more accurate to say that the real observer is the network, the platform, the corporation—those monstrous entities engaged in the process of consuming the world and transforming it into excremental data within its bowels. Little wonder that it’s become so difficult for us to see past this hellscape. Our status as observers has been eroded to the point of total impotence. Sight and world and action have become hopelessly disentangled from one another. A new kind of observer is required if we’re to have any chance of charting a path beyond this sorry state.  

•

Y. will sometimes talk about dreams. 

It always catches me a bit off guard. Over the years I’d become skeptical of dreams. I was convinced that they were the stuff of holy fools, gullible saps that fell for snakeoil salesmen peddling the promise of sweet nothings that hid the realities of empire. I’m sure a lot of it had to do with my guilty conscience as a writer— the knowledge that my words were ultimately so insubstantial against the actual forces dedicated to making the world unlivable for everyone except the exalted few. I admired how clear-eyed the work of organizing was; it was a practice that had no delusion that the pen was mightier than the drone. I guess that’s why I figured that she, who lived in the day-to-day realities of execution and organized action, would be the first to reject dreams as insubstantial apparitions that distract us from material truths.

Yet whenever the slightest hint of self-deprecating cynicism about writing or dreaming or anything of the sort would seep out, she’d get annoyed. She generously tolerated the unceasing torrent of half-baked opinions I spouted all day, but this wouldn’t slide. It’s not that she was a stranger to disillusionment; far from it. Instead, it was as if the idea itself was simply unintelligible— like I was talking gibberish or scraping nails on a chalkboard. She’d insist.

“We need dreams. They’re real, as real as any other thing.”

•

The way that perception constructed reality was of great interest to the optical researchers of the 20th Century. In an effort to understand the “total field,” or “ganzfeld,” of perception— the sandbox bounding our experience— they aimed to reduce sight to its fundamental components and gradually add layers of complexity until the total range of vision had been reconstructed. The idea was that this exercise would reveal the inner workings of the sensorial mechanism, a lot like taking apart a watch and putting it back together again to see how everything fits together. 

Researchers began with what they imagined as the atomic building block of sight: white light striking the retina. They devised a series of experiments to test the experiential qualities of this baseline, fitting test subjects with goggle-like apparatuses to deliver pure white straight to the dome. Yet something strange happened when subjects encountered this setup. Instead of isolating the core essence of vision, these experiments appeared to obliterate it. In his book Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi writes that after a while “subjects would even report difficulty sensing whether their eyes were open or closed.” In an attempt to re-ground vision, researchers introduced stimuli through other sense modalities. Unfortunately, this made the disorientation even worse. Subjects started to hallucinate. Through a fog they saw “object-like impressions,” a “vaguely surface-like” field. 

Reflecting on these experiments, Massumi concludes that “only the unperceived… can in any sense be argued to be given.” Raw experience wasn’t actually experienced, as pure sight existed as the limit of sight—a point approached but never actually reached. What is “actually seen is productively added to it: overseen,” he writes. Though it might seem counterintuitive, Massumi isn’t alone in this line of thought. Writers like N. Katherine Hayles have similarly drawn on contemporary research from fields like cognitive biology and neuroscience to argue that most cognition “happens outside of consciousness/unconsciousness,” through cognitive nonconscious processes that operate outside our field of view. Perception is a dream, a hallucination birthed from memories we’ve had but never experienced, the traces left from our travels to unknown continents far beyond the Lethean horizons of awareness.

It can be tempting to conclude from these experiments that our connection to The Real™ has been irreparably severed— that we’ve been cast out of Eden and condemned to wander the wastes of unknowing solipsism. Yet Massumi urges us to draw the opposite conclusion from these facts. Hallucinations are “as real as any thing,” he insists. They don’t undermine reality. They are, in fact, the stuff of reality, “generative of reality,” capable of producing “more reality” if we let it. It’s our ignorance of this fact that has allowed our dreams and hallucinations— these reality-making forces—to be outsourced to machines and corporations, algorithmically determined feeds that project death into our retinas, the delusions of aspirant trillionaires and warmongers. As the slop keeps on coming it’s become harder to tell whether our eyes are open or closed in this dizzying dream-world turned nightmare.

The novelist Xita Rupert, reflecting on her own dizzying experience caring for her father with dementia, writes about the gradual process of escaping this nightmare by learning to “see” his hallucinations and sharing in the “truth of these shared delusions—these invisible, ephemeral worlds.” In her piece, she lovingly describes her father as a holy fool, which for her is not a figure of helpless naivete, but a rebellious trickster “attuned to things the rest of us cannot hear or see,” holding “a mode of being beyond selfhood.” For Rupert, being a holy fool means living within a topology that contorts any distinction between inside and outside, existing without existing as an individualized self. In short, it means living by the impossible demands of contemporary life while refusing to treat these demands as sane. It was only once she recognized the reality of her father’s hallucinations that she could receive what they had to offer, “intimacy, reinvention, and survival.”

Maybe what I took as the holy fool’s blindness is the only clear-eyed response one might have to our growing madness. Who else could see the phantoms that lay beyond the winnowing field of possibility? Who else would dare dream in dreamless times?

•

BLUE

Seeing like a holy fool isn’t easy. Maybe it was the lapsed Catholic in me— still just a kid looking up past the haze of incense at bleeding Christ, waiting for salvation— but I wanted revelation to come like thunder. I kept looking, hoping I’d catch it at the fleeting turn of a corner, arcing across the sky. I even started to wonder if it could be engineered.

I heard, for instance, that they’d contrived a minor revelation in a lab at Berkeley. The process was apparently pretty straightforward. Researchers begin by mapping your retinas so that they have a good sense of how the different cones in your eye are arranged; then, they shoot high-precision lasers straight into your pupil. Normally, even though different cone types are sensitive to different bands of light wavelengths, these bands overlap quite a bit—meaning that if you stimulate the medium-wavelength M-cone, either the L- or S- cones will also be stimulated. Thanks to the retinal mapping however, the lasers are able to direct light to solely the M-cones, which as the scientists proclaimed, “would send a color signal to the brain that never occurs in natural vision.” A new color, an epiphany! They named it Olo, after the pattern of cone activation (S=0, M=1, L=0) used to produce it. It apparently looked like teal. 

Perhaps this was what I longed for, a machine Christ capable of anointing me with new sight: a flash, followed by a previously unimaginable sensation. Unfortunately, the banality of this experiment’s real appeal became quickly evident when the artist Stuart Stemple joined the hype-cycle fray by creating a paint inspired by the color experience. A 150ml bottle of YOLO runs you about $10,000, though if you “identify as an artist” and enter the discount code “YOLO,” the price gets knocked down to $35 (a steep cut, but still more expensive than comparable acrylic brands like Golden). This wasn’t grace. Just a 21st Century update to the Roman Caesars’ monopolization of Tyrian purple— exclusivity under the guise of the technologized sublime, ready to join Jeff Bezos and Katy Perry up in space. The search went on.

•

Epiphany must have also been on William Molyneux’s mind when he wrote to his friend John Locke on July 7th, 1688. In his letter, he imagined a simple scenario. A person, born blind, has learned how to identify a sphere and a cube by touch. Suddenly, their vision is restored. Would this person, by sight alone, be able to identify which shape was the sphere and which the cube? The question was a product of both the intellectual community’s growing interest in optics at the time, as well as recent events in Molyneux’s personal life. Only a year or so after marrying, his new wife Lucy Domville lost her sight to illness.

The thought experiment, eventually known as “Molyneux’s problem,” spread far and wide after Locke included it in a version of his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Everyone from Leibniz and Voltaire to Berkeley would weigh in on the question. It became the site upon which a much broader ideological conflict would play out—a debate about whether logical reflection or sensory experience was the true anchor of our understanding of the world. I wonder if these arguments and speculations offered any comfort to Molyneux in his deeper moments of doubt. I wonder how often he looked past the shadow of this academic exercise and dared to ask himself the real questions that lay behind it: If Lucy were to see me again, would she recognize me? When revelation comes, would we even know it? 

•

The poet, artist, and filmmaker Derek Jarman was in the midst of losing his sight, and eventually his life, to illness when he made the film Blue in 1993. He had been diagnosed with HIV seven years prior, and Blue would be the last film he would ever make. It opens with a brief title sequence followed by 76 minutes of unrelenting blue— over which plays a soundscape of ambient music, narration detailing visits to the doctor, names of friends lost to AIDS, and poetic reflections on blue, that “universal love in which man bathes.” One way of reading the film, Peter Schwenger argues, is as an extended “afterimage.” The stuttering light of the film projector mirrors the flash of an eye exam (“the shattering bright light of the eye specialist’s camera leaves that empty sky blue after-image,” goes the narration) before the film delves into the blue depths of the residual glow. 

It’s hard to say what I expected entering into the film. My experience was colored by the fact that the night I watched it, the city was buzzing with news of Mamdani’s victory at the primaries. I was cautiously excited, but my brief experience canvassing for his campaign had also left me unsettled. I’d realized how many old friends had become old men, protective of the comfort and wealth they’d amassed over the past decade, done with even pretending to care. Despite the win, I felt like I knew less about the world than ever. I suppose deep down, I wanted someone to turn my present-day blindness into clarity, to comfort me with the promise that one day I’d be able to make sense of the senseless meanness I saw growing around me. I wanted a sign that having been delivered to death’s door by the world’s apathy and indifference, Jarman was still able to find some redemption in it all.

Yet as the film went on, it refused any such resolution. Rage, despair, sorrow mingled with this color that “transcends the solemn geography of human limits,” but it never treated the darkening blue of blindness as more than what it was: a loss, the impossible distance of the “cobalt river” separating us from him, the living from the dead. No clever insight or comforting wisdom would wrap up the injustice in a tidy bow. It hung like a loose end, an afterimage.

It was disturbing in the most literal sense— disturbing all expectations of genre, medium, and meaning I carried into the viewing. Some writers have emphasized this unsettling quality of the film, arguing that the absence of an image fuels a “constant state of hesitant agitation.” Admittedly, while the sheer facticity of the blue did mirror the agitating refusal of the film to resolve into easy cliches, I didn’t necessarily see an absence before me. If anything, there was too much there, an overabundance of figuration. The blue was haunted by ghosts— apparitions of the sort seen by the 20th Century ganzfeld research participants exposed to pure white. The color shifted as you stared at it, furrowing into new dimensions of almost-being as shape-like forms congregated in the periphery, only to disappear like mist when you looked closer. If Olo promised an encounter outside of natural experience—with its implied logic of conquest, perception following its Manifest Destiny outwards—then Blue confronted you with the depths contained within the territory of the familiar.

The most striking moment of the film, however, only occurred after the credits stopped rolling. As the lights came on, this blinding blue, which had all but faded into the perceptual background by the film’s end, created an afterimage that gave everything a soft orange hue. The world had changed, been marked by its fleeting encounter with blue—a color whose absence now took on the color of honey. This too-lateness echoes our historical relationship to the color itself, which Michel Pastoreau recounts in his book on blue. “Athough blue is present in natural elements that go back almost to the earth’s formation,” he writes “it has taken humanity many long years to learn how to reproduce and use it.” Despite its primordial origins, blue is named and carved out as a discrete color only recently in our history— long after our earlier conquests of red and white. It always comes to us late, after the fact. 

In his discussion of the film, Schwenger invokes the philosopher Ernst Bloch and his grand three-volume The Principle of Hope. Schwenger, by way of Bloch, writes how “all seeing is infused with the principle of hope, which yearns beyond the present moment. That present moment is always… a blind spot.” The present, like blue, always comes too late. It is indeterminate, a field of dormant possibilities and ghosts, meanings that only become clear through the afterimages still forming on the distant horizon— afterimages we might never reach, yet which call us forward anyway. 

•

The answer to Molyneux’s problem finally came in 2003 when Pawan Sinha treated five congenitally blind patients in India and tested their ability to distinguish objects by touch and sight. It turns out that while these subjects were able to distinguish objects by sight alone and touch alone, they weren’t able to connect the shapes they saw to their tactical sensations. In other words, if they felt a cube, they couldn’t reliably identify the same shape through just sight. Molyneux’s question was answered with a resounding “no.” New vision existed outside of the integrated matrix of perception. It hung, freefloating out there in sensorial space. Or as Massumi puts it, “the newly visioned blind do not see things. They feel a pain in their eyes.” Sight— as a discrete sense conferring extension, being, access to the world of things— didn’t properly emerge until it was integrated with the body’s other senses.

This idea that sight demands embodied, inter-modal integration to function properly corroborates a notorious study done with cats in the 1960s, in which researchers immobilized a set of kittens by placing them in harnesses (thus preventing them from controlling their own movements) to see how this might impact their vision. Whereas their siblings, who had been allowed to freely move themselves around a given space, reacted normally to administered visual tests— blinking when expected and avoiding environmental cues like cliffs— these immobilized cats showed no such response. They had become functionally blind. If we’re to see at all, we must move first.

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AFTERIMAGES

I’m feeling a pain in my eye. The optometrist had dilated my eyes earlier because it looked like I had a big blind spot and she’d wanted to check whether it was a sign of glaucoma. Fortunately, it was just an abnormally large optic nerve, but my eyes hurt from the sun regardless. Even so, I can’t help but open my phone to squeeze in a bit of doomscrolling while I wait for Y. to get off work in Chinatown. It’s still the immediate aftermath of the mayoral election, so the occasional talking head will materialize on my feed, offering up their inane analysis chalking up the win to savvy social media campaigning and branding. Though they don’t say it, it’s clear they see the political subject as an extension of the contemporary observer, a bundle of disaggregated attention, nodes in a network to be manipulated and engineered.

They couldn’t be more wrong. I saw how much toil went into earning every inch of progress, the years of struggle that all the holy fools I long-doubted dedicated to securing even the most remote chance of a better future for the rest of us. The dreams from which their actions emerged weren’t absentminded hopes or aimless aspirations that you could engineer in a lab and circulate through a disembodied network. They were born from lived experience— nurtured slowly from grueling work and repetitive failure, from staring at the monochrome wall of the impossible until, slowly, the flatness gave way to figuration. It took me a long time to realize what Y. meant when she said that dreams are real. I wanted a burning north star, but these dreams were more like dark matter: stubbornly invisible, felt more than seen. Still, they had a gravitational force that held things together, just long enough.

I suppose it’s not surprising that the pundits couldn’t see all this. Like the subject of Molyneux’s thought experiment, their vision remains free-floating, lost in the labyrinth of the hyperreal, seeking a frictionless world with frictionless explanations and frictionless politics. It’s easy to spend one’s life like a harnessed cat, feet never touching the ground, blinded by a life of inaction. Not to say that the holy fool escapes modern life unscathed and unblinded either; they’re also born with the original sin of existing here and now after all. Yet the blindness of the contemporary observer, which so easily stops the rest of us in our tracks, is only a point of departure for them. There’s a rare phenomenon called blindsight. Sometimes, people with damage to their visual cortex will still appear to take in visual information, allowing them to respond to stimuli even if they don’t experience it as sight. I think the vision of the holy fool must be like this: a not-quite vision, a movement more than anything— steps into the dark.

By the time Y. arrives, the sun’s started to set, so I recognize her by her moving silhouette before anything else. The blaze of autumn has given way to winter’s first chill, so we end up doing loops around the block just to stay warm, ending up where we started over and over again. She grew up here, and her work continues to revolve around protecting this neighborhood from further displacement, even as wannabe autocrats wage war against the city and the country continues its descent into fascist hysteria. We pass by stray election fliers laying trampled on the ground, reclaimed by the entropy of New York.

The real work is just starting, the worst disappointments still to come. But for now, she lets herself talk idly about all those other moments also still yet unmade, the daydreams that pull us forward despite our knowing better. It’s nice to be walking down these streets together, she says. Even with so much going to shit, she’s happy that the ghosts of her childhood can witness the brief joys illuminating this newest phase of life— they’ll know she did more than just survive. She says this last part softly, so her voice sounds distant, as if she were speaking to me from someplace just up ahead. Above us, the sunset has collapsed into blue twilight. The growing darkness is cool to the touch, and my eyes can finally relax now that shadow has replaced sun and screen. 

And then, at the border of experience where sight curves back into itself, I briefly sense it. Not quite a form with any discernable shape; absent any content too, or at least absent anything that might be put into words; not a thought or a memory or even a some-thing. Just a possibility. An afterimage still to come, hanging there like a loose end, waiting for me to move towards it.

“It’s hard to make out, but if you look close…”