Introduction: Aesthetics of Perplexity Free

The multiplicity we locate within the judgment of perplexity mirrors how the term aesthetic is deployed in contemporary culture. The internet and social media are filled with an ever-expanding set of “aesthetics” with an ever-expanding list of names such as “goblincore,” “cottagecore,” “dark academia,” “ballerinacore,” “vapourwave.” These in turn expand to be both more vast and specific: “pastel goblin,” “Southwest cottagecore,” “light academia,” “ballerina sleaze,” and on and on.⁴ These so-called “microtrend” aesthetics, usually organized around a particular clothing style, sound, or vibe, are regularly integrated with a range of cheap and disposable commodities distributed through drop-shipping platforms such as Shopify and global clothing conglomerates like Shein or Temu, and displayed and hawked over social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. At the same time, cultural theory has seen a return to the “aesthetic” in the past several decades. This includes influential arguments about the political and epistemological dimensions of sensation and experience, from French philosophers such as Jacques Rancière and American literary critics such as Sianne Ngai.⁵ There’s something about the aesthetic sensibility of our time that warrants a multiplicity of debates, theorizing the political “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière) or the generation of new “aesthetic categories” (Ngai) beyond the traditional judgments of “beautiful” or “sublime.” Further, the term aesthetics in contemporary cultural theory is a common way for writers to link emotion, affect, and art, with examples including work by Mark B. N. Hansen, Erin Manning, and Jennifer Doyle. The “aesthetic” has become a key concept in linking the multiplication of forms today with the affective dimensions of culture that exist beyond language.⁶

There is, however, a central contradiction in how aesthetic theory is practiced today. On one hand there exists a range of seemingly insignificant, temporary trends linked with the political economy of identity and visibility on the internet: “aesthetics” online are a way of distinguishing oneself, linked with the desire to commodify oneself as an object of attention and, therefore, value.⁷ Then there are a range of academic discussions that often defer to “art” in an institutionally legitimate sense, using the traditional object of aesthetic contemplation as a route to theorize technology, the body, emotion, and beyond. Art has become a way for cultural theorists to signify the legitimacy of their arguments, even though today aesthetics more broadly points to a range of phenomena that are seemingly illegitimate because of their imbrication with, and thus “corruption” by, capital.

The problem of capital, its scale, and the ability to escape its subsumptions, seems, to us, to be implicit in any discussion of contemporary perplexity. “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill,” as philosopher Gilles Deleuze concludes his 1992 essay “Postscript on the Society of Control.”⁸ The sheer intertwining of technology and capital leads to a level of complexity that seems absolutely baffling, impossible to perceive or even make coherent at the level of human experience.⁹ When this complexity even appears it often does so in a form that seems banal, nostalgic. For instance, in his video essay Syzygy, artist Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman tries to make sense of the 2022 Superbowl ad for Meta Quest, titled “Old Friends. New Fun.” Horowitz uses the ad to work through a myriad of contemporary issues including the collapse of pizza chain Chuck E. Cheese, the history of Atari, the rise of virtual reality and the “Metaverse,” and, most significantly, the use of private equity to purchase and destroy formerly profitable corporations. Hurwitz-Goodman follows, in many ways, Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories of interconnected disaster and the “equivalence” of catastrophes. Nancy argues that

As if. We can think back, again, to the multiplicity of aesthetics that can be seen online, in which Gates’s dream of total personalization leads to a complete fragmentation of common sense and a proliferation of minor aesthetics. To be sure, digital capital seems to desire a “friction-free” exchange, in which capital circulates free of material attachment. But in practice, this has led to the undermining of countless businesses and corporations through private equity, environmental destruction, and, directly following Gates’s predictions, a shopper’s hell in which automated bots are buying all the products and ratcheting up prices on resale platforms. The demand to eliminate “friction” at the level of finance has increased the “friction” for human beings, increasingly locked out of a system not built for them but instead built entirely for the movement of capital. What does “frictionless” anything do? Does it provide the freedom Gates promises and assumes? There is, indeed, freedom. As Dial and Baker write, “At stake, here, is undoubtedly freedom—the freedoms of corporations to extract without consequence and conscience, to innovate beyond the human, to create an always ready and docile surrogate for labor, and to push aside, maybe forever, the annoying prospect of talent acquisition and retention.”

This is, perhaps, another form of perplexity—a separation of one from the world or worlds we were promised. This is further evidenced by reading Gates’s book today. Let’s take his 1995 position on the environment and climate disaster: “Environmental problems and resource shortages must be taken seriously too, but I think many doomsayers vastly underestimate the potential of technology to help us overcome these problems.”¹³ Gary Chapman, in a review of The Road Ahead in the Los Angeles Times says the book suggests, “The environmental benefits of this digital economy could also be significant. If computer users download their software from a network, instead of getting it on the nearly 1 billion floppy diskettes we use every year, the software industry could approach the ‘zero impact’ standard of environmental quality.”¹⁴ Today, nearly thirty years later, Gates has written another book, How to Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need (2022), and is currently (as of the writing of this introduction) breaking ground on a nuclear power plant in Wyoming in order to fuel the accelerating demand for power to operate generative AI.¹⁵

Friction, we claim, might slow one down and keep us curious. As we will detail, neither friction nor perplexity seem highly valued today. Ludwig Wittgenstein outlines perplexity as a condition of friction, which itself must be negotiated: “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”¹⁶

Perplexity, its rough, frictional ground, has a long philosophical history, appearing in Plato’s dialogue Meno as the condition brought about by Socratic questioning. Meno, named after the political figure from the city of Pharsalus, is initially a Socratic dialogue about the nature of virtue (aretê) and the ability to learn or teach virtue. The titular Meno confronts Socrates about how virtue is taught and acquired, to which Socrates responds by asking Meno to define virtue. One way of reading Meno is as an argument meant to show Meno what he doesn’t know—Meno can only define virtue in a contradictory way, and Socrates shows how Meno’s presumptions about virtue rest on a more foundational paradox: “A man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.”¹⁷ It is this paradox that drives Meno into a state of perplexity.

Perplexity, as the outcome of this philosophical method, unseats beliefs and garners additional puzzlement. But puzzlement is often solution-oriented, focused on intellectual reconciliation—Plato’s solution to the state of perplexity in Meno is to define learning as a remembering, or anamnesis, of eternal, transcendent forms, making perplexity into a process uncovering that which is always-already present before birth. Perplexity becomes a problem to solve, a state to be avoided or resolved.

These solutions themselves have a counterpart today in contemporary definitions of perplexity. In information theory and artificial intelligence, perplexity refers to a statistical measure of probability in a large language model. The higher the perplexity, the more confused or surprised a model is when given new text. The lower the perplexity, the better the model is at predicting. Perplexity becomes an instrumental measurement rather than a route to eternal truths. And this doesn’t even refer to the confusion an observer may have when encountering the uncanny output of an artificial intelligence. The attempt to reduce perplexity only generates more, and different, perplexities.

Perplexity then, instead of leading toward answers to oft-unasked questions, is most productive when seen as a time before the puzzling happens—a condition that remains deep in the mire and all that mire entails. It’s about process, the conditions that lead to an epiphany without the “Eureka!” moment, just the feeling of something there, about to be discovered and unveiled. Perplexity is like being in a state of sensory deprivation, and not knowing whether your eyes are adjusting to the dark so that you can see something out there, eventually, or if it’s just the Ganzfeld effect forming hallucinations as your brain compensates for the lack of sensory stimulation.¹⁸

The lack of ends, here, is essential. In his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin juxtaposes a myriad of texts, histories, lived experiences, objects, and images—not to “remember” the past, not to recall eternal truth out of confusion, but to awaken from the past in the present to produce something new. He writes: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”¹⁹ For Benjamin, this practice was not designed to form cohesive wholes, but to revel in non-synthesis. Samuel Weber writes that “all of Benjamin’s writing and thinking can be productively studied in light of the task of elaborating the ‘non-synthesis’ of…concepts in one another.”²⁰ Through these non-synthetic images, or “dialectical images,”²¹ Benjamin feels the past can be brought into the present (the “then” to the “now”), producing “awakenings,” resisting simplistic, incorrect, and teleological narratives of progress—or, we might suggest, harnessing the perplexity that comes from juxtaposition not to reveal eternal forms, but to free ourselves from their determination by producing a state of suspension without resolution. We embrace these connotations of perplexity: of mire with embarrassment, of bogginess with deep-woods bewilderment. How might it be possible to enter into this state? To live in it?

The classical strategy for evoking perplexity, or of wading through the mire, or perhaps, at the very least, bringing us closer to our definition of perplexity and its relationship to aesthetics, is aporia. This is the position that Socrates imposes on Meno. An aporetic argument, generally, is one that “generates a state of puzzlement…by way of the equality of opposite reasonings, that is, by way of a problem or difficulty…put forward in the course of philosophical investigation.”²² Defined in a variety of ways by a variety of scholars, any definition of aporia is slippery as well. Jacques Derrida, for instance, saw them as “knots” within institutions—including philosophy and the legal system.²³ According to philosopher Jeffrey Leonard Welaish, “The intellect is brought to impasse by its own flawed way of conceiving things. Aporia emerges as the motivating factor in the mind’s transcendence of the lower levels of the divided line. Hence, it is the necessary concomitant of properly dialectical thought.”²⁴ Yet, again, we have a problem: truth is too often found in the resolution of aporia. The state induced here is, we think, unlivable. It presents a barrier that must be lifted, and experience that cannot persist.

Although perplexity and aporia are comingled, we do not want to conflate them. For our purposes, we’ll define it thusly: perplexity names the experience; aporia names the object. One might point and say “yes, this is an aporia” (even though one could imagine a state in which defining an aporia is itself undecidable), but one does not experience the aporetic. Perplexity is the experience, the sensation, while aporia is that which causes the experience. Theorist Peter Schwankl, in a 1967 essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Perplexity,” writes that, “There are no actions of perplexity, only actions through perplexity.”²⁵ And, beware! As Wittgenstein—another aporetic philosopher known for arguing through his perplexity—warns, the sensation is not in the object itself, and so the aporia does not hold perplexity, does not cause it innately. In fact, the experience of perplexity is the fact that one cannot say the object caused the experience at all.

But what does this process feel like in practice? What is the experience? And what can we glean about aesthetics as experience versus aesthetics as collective judgement? Perplexity does not seem to be something one would seek out actively or enjoy greatly. (Unless one is, perhaps, a theorist or philosopher.) Perplexity and frustration are, at first, similar emotions. Schwankl describes a state of perplexity as an unpleasant “river…”²⁶ One is met with an object (be it an event, person, anything) they do not comprehend. Frustration, however, stops here. One becomes angry at their lack of understanding, sees no way out or through, and that is the end. Derrida places perplexity and irritation at about the same height, when writing of first meeting his friend Jean-Marie Benoist: “During our first encounters at the École Normale in 1964, I remember having felt some perplexity, along with a sort of irritated concern.”²⁷ He says this perplexity transformed to “complicity,” to “warm fidelity,” and doesn’t bother to detail the transition, the working through of the person whose memorial he writes in that essay.

The process of puzzling is the space of perplexity. As soon as one understands, they are through, done with this experience, this process. The perplexity disappears. If a problem has no answer, then one remains perplexed. (Additionally, if a problem is of such little consequence or exists only to perplex, or the answer would be unsatisfying, then even if an answer is found, one can remain perplexed. We’ll return to this later.) The epiphany after the perplexing incident, the other side of having worked through a great confusion or problem, that is where the satisfaction and after-exercise endorphins lie. And when one achieves this level of satisfaction, the state of perplexity is, more often than not, forgotten.

Is perplexity always unpleasant? What might it look like for a perplexing experience to remain unresolved? Here is an example of an aporia, perhaps, that I sought out and willingly paid for: a work of art by James Turrell entitled Unseen Seen + Weight of Darkness (2017). The work, the largest of Turrell’s perceptual cells,²⁸ delighted me, amazed me, changed me—I wanted to talk to everyone about it, and yet I couldn’t. When trying to explain why this piece was so significant, I found myself at a loss. I forced discussion of it into emails that had nothing to do with art, or work, or artwork—yet I never had the words to explain it to others, or the understanding within myself of why it mattered so much. And I probably, here, still don’t. The work is housed at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania, whose website simply explains “Take your neural battering lying down,”²⁹ and lets you know the work lasts about 45 minutes, and cost 25 dollars to experience, and has a “hard” and a “soft” setting.

Critics who have reviewed the work are also at a loss: “There’s no way of accurately describing the experience…and capturing its full richness and magic,” writes Ben Neutze. Brigid Delaney wrote that it, “seemed to rearrange my neurons, and completely still my mind.”³⁰ She went on to explain that the work was so overwhelming that she bonded with the stranger she experienced it with (Unseen Seen can hold two people, both lying down) for the rest of her museum visit, and they remain friends to this day. Curator Jarrod Rawlins says the work is, “life-changing,”³¹ and Seph Rodney called the perceptual cell work, “difficult to reconstruct in language, because I essentially entered a fugue state.”³² Most reviews, and even the museum workers, dressed in lab coats, who guided me through signing exhaustive waivers, tend to use the language of David Walsh, the owner of MONA who commissioned the work. “David said that when he first experienced this work, he could see the inside of his eyeballs, and also the color of his thoughts,” explained Dan, the docent helping me, who also recommended the “hard” setting and let me know that, while I couldn’t shut the work out by shutting my eyes to it—“you’ll still see it, even with your eyes closed”—I could put my hands over my eyes or push the panic button he then handed me.

The first stage of the work, the optical cell titled Unseen Seen, lasts about twenty minutes. From the moment it began I could, indeed, see the inside of my eyes, and began to giggle uncontrollably. Within the first fifteen seconds I was sure I would need to press the panic button and end the experience, but I did what I do when overwhelmed (I happen to love an overwhelming experience—hot yoga, cold plunges): I breathed through it, told myself I wasn’t dying, and eventually lost all sense of time. When the work ended, I was left with the realization that I had no idea what color was, and that it had only felt like two or three minutes, not twenty. The second half of the work, Weight of Darkness, consists of being led into a completely dark room, and then staring into darkness for another twenty minutes in an attempt to hallucinate.³³ When the entire work was over, I rushed to a seating area to decompress and discuss with my partner, who I had experienced the work with, and yet we had nothing to say. “I feel like I’ve taken two Klonopin,” was all I could muster. But that wasn’t true. I felt good and I felt happy. But it was also less those emotions and more in my body. Why did I resort to drug metaphors? It’s common, with Neutze writing that, “the technician told me this would be the closest…I would ever come to a 1960s acid trip…”³⁴ Margaret Gordon writes that, “Viewing this work is as close as possible to a hallucinogenic experience without substances.”³⁵ Why do we supplant bodily sensation with substances? Are they a way of universalizing phenomenological experience?

This isn’t a case of what you can imagine being greater than reality. It’s not the Pulp Fiction briefcase loot or Cthulhu, the aesthetics of the “weird” or the “eerie,” which, to use the words of Mark Fisher, has “to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience.”³⁶ It’s a matter of translation, the utter inability to translate one’s phenomenological experience to another medium that can communicate this experience from one to another. The explanations for the Turrell artwork are more perplexing than helpful—they can’t get to the object; the experience cannot be transmitted. And thus, a sense of frustration. Beyond attempting translation of experience, frustration also arises when we assume experiences do not need translation.

Like knowing what you don’t know, seeing one’s own eyeballs, the primary vehicle of sight, seems impossible. It’s like tasting one’s own tongue. Attempt to do either and you may fall into an aporetic exhaustion. In fact, the question of “can you taste your own tongue?” has become my favorite way to induce instant perplexity. (Whomever I ask it of immediately furrows their brow and frowns: perplexity-face.) And even if an answer can be found it is so absurd, or of so little consequence, that one could remain perplexed. The answer is not the point, it’s the puzzling. (I don’t want to solve this problem; I don’t want to taste my own tongue.)

While perplexity isn’t necessarily pleasant, it is necessary. Universalizing phenomenological experiences, especially through language, generally doesn’t end well or effectively and should be avoided. Luce Irigaray warns that, “If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story.” And, “If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other.”³⁷ And Schwankl writes, “A man cannot become perplexed, if he is confronted only with himself.”³⁸ Frustration, which is perplexity without a search for understanding, leads to anger and violence. But a lack of aporia (the object which brings about the frustration or perplexity in the first place) creates a failing, flattening sameness. If we’re not challenged, if we smooth everything over, how can we ever grow? How can we ever begin to know what we don’t know—which includes everyone else and their experiences?

Perplexity as an aesthetic experience saturates the context of an encounter between self and other. As Sara Ahmed articulates it, an encounter is a meeting characterized by “surprise and conflict” that involves “processes of inclusion and exclusion, or incorporation and expulsion, that constitute the boundaries of bodies and communities.”³⁹ Perplexity troubles the operation of social histories and political processes that determine and depend upon the ontological formation of a figure who is always already outside the bounds of subjectivity and sovereignty—a stranger, as Ahmed theorizes.

However, a rhetoric of confusion is often wielded politically to reinscribe these boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality and to construct strangers. In the context of proliferating attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, conservative and reactionary institutions and politicians have decried non-normative gender identities as confusing.⁴⁰ As part of fascistic policies to control LGBTQ+ folks and children especially, politicians advancing anti-LGBTQ legislation accuse teachers of “[delighting] in causing confusion” for their students; in these instances, Republican lawmakers describe these bills as “common sense” and position their self-proclaimed rationality against the purportedly chaotic confusion created and perpetuated by the so-called liberal gender ideologues.⁴¹ Here, that expression that is so central to Enlightenment (especially Kantian) aesthetic theory—common sense, sensus communis—is weaponized against marginalized groups.

But the senses have never been commonly held, and communality has been systematically denied to women, queer, trans, and non-white people. Following cultural theorists including Ahmed and Ngai, we understand that perplexity, as an aesthetic category, prompts feelings toward objects, people, and phenomena, but perplexity also creates specific modes of relationality that navigate the conflictual and exclusionary social structures that produce others. For Ngai, minor aesthetic categories “are compelling reminders of the general fact of social difference and conflict underlying the entire system of aesthetic judgment or taste, making that underlying condition transparent in ways in which many other aesthetic categories do not.”⁴² Certitude, if taken as perplexity’s opposite, was or is the province of those in positions of power, and nostalgia or anxiety about its supposed disappearance exposes the differential access to certainty as an epistemological option or guarantee and the fallacy of truth’s universality.

While perplexity is always at risk of cooptation or manipulation by power, contributions in this issue demonstrate that perplexity’s staging of a confrontation between self and other may destabilize the very ontological categories that define “us” against “them” and “self” against “other.” Dial and Baker’s articulation of the aural aesthetics of the scratch and mixing suggests how perplexity affectively works toward the halting of digital, racial capitalism and the extraction of Blackness for corporate profit. The scratch, as Dial and Baker argue, is a praxis of embodied touch, suspended mechanical operation, and sonic disruption that sustains relational links between those who are systematically othered while rejecting or remaking capitalist injunctions to reproducibility and hypervisibility. Perplexing and interruptive, the scratch binds and braids existing sounds to create new rhythms and invite connection beyond normative (i.e., white, capitalist) recognition. As Dial and Baker write, “When swift, agile fingers dance along jogwheels and vinyl turntables, twisting knobs and sliding levers, we hear it as vibes—an always fly, brush-the-dirt-off-ya-shoulders transgression and revolt against empire’s demand for incarceration within the cells of ordered grids.”

Perplexity as a protective condition and a mode of refusal is also addressed in Nina Peterson’s contribution, which argues that Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4 (1966) confounds imperialist inscriptions of race, gender, and sexuality in the discourses surrounding the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Audio in the film raises questions about its own representation of race, but the visuals respond with obfuscation. As a series of close-ups of buttocks that form constantly shifting quadrants, the film parodies the visual tools—the camera and the grid—historically used to construct the Western model of the human against the colonized or exotic other.

Against imperialist knowledge systems and visual regimes, which rely on logics of possession, extraction, and capture, Levin positions the embodied camerawork of Ana Vaz’s films. Sonic and imagistic buoyancy and narrative incompletion—the sounds of lapping water, pictures of inverted geographies, unresolved storylines and histories—characterize the aesthetics of perplexity that “entail ecstatic leaps, repetitions, reversals, evasions, animations, suspensions, and moments of profound uncertainty.” And how might rethinking long overused, co-opted, corporatized methods of protection and refusal aid in our call for perplexity?

The problem of perplexity strikes at the heart of almost all debates about aesthetic judgment since Immanuel Kant. As Kant writes in his third critique, the judgment of taste has something “strange and anomalous” about it, which is that the feeling one gets from a work of art “is not an empirical concept but rather a feeling of pleasure (consequently not a concept at all) which, through the judgment of taste, is nevertheless to be expected of everyone and connected with its representation, just as if it were a predicate associated with the cognition of the object.”⁴³ For Kant, aesthetic judgement demands that I must somehow communicate and make universal what I like or dislike. The sensus communis—to return to our themes from earlier—is a transcendental a priori for judgment, and it is this common sense that guides almost all liberal interpretations of the aesthetic descending from Kant. Art is important because the ability to sense and judge together, communicating our experiences and coming to the same conclusions, is that which guides our commonality and universality as shared members of the liberal public.⁴⁴

For this Kantian liberalism, the ability to communicate sensation is essential, even though Kant recognizes that the words we use are not equivalent to the sensation of the object. As he notes:

Here is where an aesthetics of perplexity comes into play most—through experience that cannot be truly converted into language, through experience that cannot truly be universalized. As one critic writes of James Turrell, “His work is the sort not seen, but instead experienced.”⁴⁷ As our discussion of Turrell above suggests, the impossibility of communicating the experience of his perceptual cell leads one to metaphors that may be more easily communicated—taking drugs, impossible bodily experiences like seeing one’s own eyeballs. “Perplexing” becomes a judgment that universalizes a particular experience, but permits the specificity of that experience to escape, groping toward the “universal voice” of Kant, but never reaching it. Sensation remains private, and the inability to reach the universal leads to frustrations. Kantian judgment is about agreement and negotiating the problem of perplexity. If we all agree that this is beautiful, then we all agree that this particular aesthetic experience can be judged as beautiful. Perplexity is not something that can be agreed on. It is, by its very nature, agonistic and without synthesis. If Kantian judgment is about universality, perplexity refuses this universality. Wittgenstein explains that perplexity is the gap between aesthetic experience and the communication of that experience. But how is this not just the space of affect? While affect is itself communicative, moving impersonally and circulating, perplexity sabotages this movement. It is confronting, but not confrontational. It sabotages, prevents, and cannot be located (thus opening gaps rather than smoothing movement as is the case with affective circulation).

The refusal of normative, universal categories of judgment leads us to suggest that perplexity is best understood as a minor aesthetic category. According to Rachel Longa, “the state of puzzlement necessitates some act of judgment. And…the active force of that judgment is the faculty of reason.”⁴⁸ But this would return us to the normative sense of aesthetic judgment provided by Kant. Perplexity registers more in line with Hayden White’s assertion: “Because the aim of interpretation is to create perplexity in the face of the real—not to clear it up. People who want the truth want to be able to wrap the event and put it away in the archives.”⁴⁹ White implies that perplexity may be used as an antifascistic force, something to remain elusive, or a mode of refusing the compulsions and delimitations of grand narrative versions of history. Perplexity is a condition for something to happen, a ground for epistemological—and political—transformation.

We’ve already introduced many of the themes from the articles collected here. But the arguments woven throughout this introduction—about having knowledge or refusing it as “property,” about the confusion induced by the contemporary scale of obfuscated technology and capital, about conceptualizations of otherness that refuse to position difference as a problem to correct or eliminate—are all given more treatment and analysis in the essays that follow. Throughout, we hope to provide numerous perspectives on our aesthetics of perplexity—without settling on a singular definition or without ending with a problem solved, a puzzle answered.

Barghouty, in “Subliminal Supplements,” examines wellness and “healing” through social media “subliminals” videos, which manipulate sound and images to link particular sonic frequencies with messages of self-affirmation and self-improvement. Barghouty argues that even though these videos may seem perplexing, they relate to the manipulation and conditioning of experience at a level prior to conscious awareness, integrating the body and perception into systems of technical control.

Blocker presents us with a beautifully evocative meditation on Abinadi Meza’s 2007 video and sound installation Beacon, an abstract depiction of snow encircling a streetlamp. Blocker’s “Beacon: Epistemologies of the Art Object” presents a provocation to challenge discussions of orientation and disorientation in contemporary art, a goal regularly found scattered among gallery wall text and artist’s statements, in which art is positioned as a means to help “solve” any range of contemporary crises through its power to unsettle. Blocker moves disorientation away from its function as an ideological correction to instead theorize contemporary art as a “beacon” that simultaneously warns and lures the viewer, a different epistemological goal than remedying the perception of the audience. Blocker’s “Beacon” wonders what it might look like to have disorientation that never truly settles—a perplexity that never resolves into an answer.

Peterson’s “Perplexity and Anti–Vietnam War Protest in Yoko Ono’s Film No. 4” examines how this work—a video of closely cropped posteriors walking on a treadmill—could serve as a form of antiwar activism, as Ono intended it to be. Drawing out a range of historical and contextual lines that come together in Film No. 4, Peterson argues that Ono’s perplexing antiwar intervention should be situated within a range of national, racial, and gender-based narratives that interweave larger protests against imperialist violence.

Erica Levin’s “To Assemble Is to Think Through This World” draws out perplexity as an alternative to attempts to “know,” as knowledge has been a perpetual tool in the history of colonial violence. Through an analysis of the Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz’s Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas [Amerika: Bay of Arrows] (2016), Há Terra! [There is Land!] (2016), and Apiyemiyekî? (2019), all short films concerned with struggles over land, Levin argues that Vaz’s cinematic techniques enable a refusal of knowledge as something one can own or possess. As Levin cites Vaz, what would it look like to make “a cinema that embraces the possibilities of other forms of experience-as-narrative to awaken our subjective, libidinal, and political imaginaries outside the inscriptions of the capitalist-colonial unconscious”? Levin argues that Vaz’s films attempt a kind of perplexity without resolution, and how an aesthetics of perplexity could be harnessed as a way to resist colonial dominance over knowledge as something one can possess.

Dial and Baker’s “Algo(rhy)thms” examines Blackness and its colonial appropriation through the case of FN Meka, a robot rapper, along with other holographic, digitized representations of Black musical production. They ask, what does it mean to technically simulate Blackness? And what can be done to resist this simulation? Dial and Baker attempt to answer this question through a critical making project in which DJ and audience interact in a way that does not only rely on the simulation of racial signifiers. What does it mean to transform Blackness into one of the “smooth,” exchangeable commodities we’ve described in this introduction—making racial otherness just another set of informational properties that can be applied and harnessed in the name of capitalist value? And what might it mean to create a project that, in the process of refusing the dominant articulations of digital culture, ends up also refusing norms of traditional academic scholarship and “acceptable” campus activities?

Bollmer’s “Perplexing Intelligence” examines the opposition between perplexity as this special issue has been generally defining it and perplexity as a statistical measure derived from Claude Shannon’s information theory. Emphasizing the statistical foundations of contemporary AI, Bollmer ultimately claims that the processes of today’s digital culture are about reducing and limiting the possibilities of perplexity as an aesthetic experience, attempting to ensure that humans will never have to encounter something that they find baffling, strange, or confronting.

What to do in the face of a world that demands answers, that desires smoothness and friction-free movement? “Back to the rough ground!”⁵⁰ This is the aim of the essays collected in this special issue.