In my previous discussion of conflicting data, I mentioned the feature of ambiguity. Gestalt psychologists would claim that the inability to distinguish between figure and ground constitutes a sign of madness. Yet, the unintelligibility and indistinguishability of especially visual, written and auditory sounds is the norm in our world today. Everything is illusory with exception for those people in empirical professions such as namely science, engineering and education. Business intelligence analysts must discriminate ambiguous data reliant upon market statistics, which are far from transparent. They rely upon technology but must utilize analytical and intuitive problem solving techniques.
Typically, a person in such a business role would be thought to utilize the best of formal learning strategies. We think of those skills as mastered by rote memory with a sense of a growing tacit awareness of how to apply knowledge to an intentional task. The truth of the matter is that such learned abilities fail us in the face of ambiguity: where conflicting data present illusion of logical irresolve. When logic fails us, the mind freezes not knowing what to do.
Somehow when the mind becomes captured in indecision, we begin to feel the rise of various states of affect. The painter Wasily Kandinsky alluded to this possibility in his treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art. A self-proclaimed synesthet, he argued musical tones are no different than colors. His ideas followed the leading musicians of his time, such as Arnold Schönberg, who explored the possibilities of atonal music. To the Western ear, such ambient, irregular, and unpatterned sounds seem dissonant and lacking in harmony. Kandinky embraced this collision of tonal chromaticism in his paintings. Surely, we may think of these paintings as an expression of conflict, and in the eyes of Kandinsky, such as was the case of Wilhelmne Germany advancing to the frontlines of the First World War.
When Kandinsky brings to expression this condition of total nonsense as a cacophony of sounds, he found aesthetic resolve by building a pictorial system based on binarism. The most evident example of this is the way he utilizes either line or color. In the foundations of Western art, line is given a conceptual component of drawing out an idea whereas color is delegated to the realm of affect and experience. Visual systems, just like words and sounds, therefore may be reduced to a binary system of opposites, which are also themselves either rational or affective. This situation of how we may decipher signs therefore seems to say that at the basis of an expression is an interplay of both the logical and intuitive, haptic and optical, and visible and invisible.
If we think about the learning strategies required of business intelligence analysts, who enter into the domain of the subjective and affect, the example of art seems to tell us how we may deconstruct states of affect to an interplay of the binary relationship between mind and body, the objective and subjective.This is to say that affect both stems both from the subjective as well as objective states of mind.In other words, if we deconstruct a sensation or state of affect, we see at bottom it’s logical basis.
In the example of the chaos of Kandinsky’s pre-war paintings, the artist achieves this by the way he uses line and color to achieve a dialogue. Color creates a mood and flows across the surface in variable degrees of saturation. Together this colorful arrangement of colors the Germans would call “bunt” creates a plainsong of feelings of an auratic interiority. On the other hand, the forced black lines with their variability in thickness and length, boldly carve out a more formidable message. They confine and delimit the areas of color with a sense of tactile awareness. At basis, such compositions seem to say to us by this withdrawal into subjectivity and spirituality a denial of destruction or rather even the perception of such warfare ballistics as a spiritual rebirth. The two become the same.
Faced with an overwhelming mass of data like a cacophonic confusion, those involved in data analysis must learn too how to deconstruct states of affect. They answer may be found in utilizing intuition and inferences to build binary systems to deconstruct. Upon analyzing the data as such, the analyst may manipulate it to create a strategic model for a business.