Remediating Orientation DISSERTATION Presented In

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Depth Technology: Remediating Orientation

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Peggy Eileen Reynolds

Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

The Ohio State University

2012

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Brian Rotman, Advisor

Professor Philip Armstrong

Professor Barry Shank

Peggy Eileen Reynolds

2012

Abstract

According to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, "The 'blind spot' of each observation, the distinction it employs at the moment, is at the same time its guarantee of a world."

To make a distinction, in other words, is to build a world, to establish a boundary, a bounded interior, a self. It is to orient oneself by separating inside from outside and to further the possibilities of one’s persistence by incorporating into this newly formed interior a sign or map of this initial distinction. Tracing the originary orienting gestures of the human and the form these take as sign or map then constitutes the central theme of this dissertation, one which opens onto an exploration of how the new digital economy contributes to the radical reflexivity which characterizes the current material- discursive milieu, even as, by expanding access to the virtual, it increases the potential for an immanent orientation of the human.

My method, then, is to investigate the co-constitutive orientation strategies of the human and those forms and patterns which help it construct and distinguish itself from its material-discursive environment. Such forms as grids, circles, hierarchies, vortices, spirals, vortex rings and fractal structures are regarded as little machines; each works in and on the human in unique ways, and each has developed methods to insure its continued survival, collaborating with entities at various scales, including the human,

to replicate its morphogenetic program. I argue that as the human shifts from a vision- centered to a body-centered model of perception, we should expect to see certain of these forms – static, bounded, Euclidian – being supplanted by those which convey something of the human’s newly legible reality – dynamic, non-linear, topological. The grid, for example, which, together with the human, laid out a spatial plane of thought, now becomes, in the new economy, a fractal network of links and nodes. The hierarchy, the dominant model for social relations (reified, as it is, by the mediating effects of stereoscopic vision), gives way to a flat ontology, or one in which all entities, regardless of scale or material-discursive status, are understood to construct equally the space of relations. And the dialectic, rightly employed by critical theorists to model time as neither circular nor linear but as a spiral, gains dimensionality and becomes, like a Klein bottle, a self-enfolding, topological manifold.

An investigation into the geometric forms employed by the human in its originary orientation then forms the hinge, cardo, or cardinal points of this dissertation; the shift from a visual towards an affective rendering of spatiotemporal coordinates, its narrative unfolding; and a flat (fractal) ontology, its material-discursive milieu.

iii

This document is dedicated to my mother

Sheila T. Reynolds

and

in loving memory of my father

Paul G. Reynolds.

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank my colleagues Dr. Sandra Garner, Dr. Kate Dean-Haidet and

Rita Trimble, whose unflagging support over the years has made this dissertation possible. I would also like to thank Dr. Margaret Lynd and my committee members Dr.

Philip Armstrong and Dr. Barry Shank for guiding me faithfully towards completion of my degree. I owe a debt of gratitude to my sister, Jill Reynolds, for supplying some of the illustrations included herein, and to Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, Dr. Eugene Holland and Professor john powell who have provided me with various opportunities for pursuing and deepening my research. I most especially want to thank my advisor, Dr.

Brian Rotman, whose work has greatly inspired my own and whose encouragement and wise council have given me the confidence to complete this dissertation. And no one has done more to make sure this dissertation was brought to completion than my partner and untiring editor, Dr. Marie Cieri, whose patience and fortitude know no bounds.

Vita

1976 ...... Francis W. Parker High School

1997 ...... B.A., Honors, Hunter College, CUNY

2005 -2006 ...... Graduate Research Associate, Department

of Art, The Ohio State University

2006 – 2009…………………………………………………Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State

University

2007 ...... M.A., Comparative Studies, The Ohio State

University

Publications

“Reconfiguring the Space of Agency in the Digital Age,” Saint Louis University Law

Journal, Childress Lecture edition, Summer 2010.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Comparative Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... vi

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Figures ...... viii

Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1

Chapter Two: A Genealogy of the Grid ...... 34

Chapter Three: Artifacts of Vision...... 95

M-set Interlude ...... 142

Chapter Four: A Topological Dialectic ...... 164

Chapter Five: Strategies of Persistence ...... 201

Figures ...... 235

References ...... 237

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List of Figures

Figure 1. Phosphene groups...... 42

Figure 2. Diagram of reflexive closure and reentry ...... 46

Figure 3. Cross-sections of smoke rings ...... 47

Figure 4. Time lapse images of interacting smoke rings ...... 53

Figure 5. Cross-section of a vortex ring ...... 59

Figure 6. Hippodamian plan: Miletus...... 64

Figure 7. Eratosthenese’s map of the world ...... 67

Figure 8. Aristarchus’s diagram of sun, earth and moon ...... 70

Figure 9. Ptolemy’s conic projection...... 74

Figure 10. The grid employed in perspective drawing ...... 79

Figure 11. Descartes' vortex theory of matter ...... 86

Figure 12. Aristotle's scala naturae ...... 107

Figure 13. Cross-section of eye cup morphology ...... 166

Figure 14. Time lapse images of lens placode folding ...... 166

Figure 15. Menger sponge ...... 190

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Chapter One: Introduction

Orientation can thus be said to be originary, invariable, irreducible, so constantly physical that it becomes metaphysical.1

– Michel Serres

To judge from the number of journal articles produced in the last decade which invoke the term “mapping,” one might think that a new spatial dimension had been discovered. Topping over one and a quarter million entries, a nearly three hundred percent increase from two decades prior, it also would appear as if researchers have been laying claim to this newly revealed territory at a ferocious pace. But where, exactly, is this new dimension to be found? Surveying the range of topics on which these articles report, one finds researchers mapping everything from “growth and gravity with robust redshift space distortions” and “surface plasmons on a single metallic nanoparticle” to the “discursive inquiry into the self.” Clearly, the computational revolution has played a role in the furtherance of cartography, making it possible to map the terrain of the exceedingly large as well as the infinitesimally small.

Through such methods as the scanning tunnel microscope (STM); remote sensing; geographical information systems (GIS); and functional magnetic response imaging

(fMRI), the human has managed to push its way into what artist Marcel Duchamp describes as the “infrathin,” spaces the “thickness of a shadow”2 as might be found between two casts from the same mold. But in what way might the development of 1

such techniques explain the growth in efforts to “map” the subject itself, or what we might think of as an emanation of the infrathin? Or are we to understand the use of such cartographic terminology within the humanities to be strictly metaphorical?

Generally, when one speaks of “mapping,” one is announcing one’s intention to convey graphically, through the use of something resembling a coordinate system, an overview of one’s subject matter. One is promising to lay out a spatial field which will bring disparate elements into relationship and reveal something of the latter’s dynamic.

Implicit within this scheme is the notion of orientation; a map, for example, conventionally has north at the top and south at the bottom while small-scale navigational charts tend to impart bearings by use of local geographical features. But how are humanist cartographers to orient themselves with respect to their subject matter when its field of operations is saturated with reflexivities at every level? That the mapmaker is herself a subject in need of mapping only begins to gesture towards the plethora of paradoxes involved. The sciences traditionally have been understood to operate free from any such constructivist conundrums, but, increasingly, their orientation, too, is coming under review. Under the withering gaze of anthropologists of science such as Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, science is shown to be less an establishment of a timeless truth than an effort to build political constituencies between human and non-human actors. Facts are made, not found; certain subjects are granted hearings while others are silenced; and the entire scientific enterprise is revealed to require an enormous amount of throughputs in order to keep its networks of power and 2

knowledge intact. The thought of science, then, is not neutral, but is, rather, in the first instance, as Michel Foucault tells us, active: "it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave....[it] is in itself an action – a perilous act,”3 which suggests that we might want to inquire into the implicit orientation of the cartographers of the material as well. How do they coordinate their respective investigative fields? Which entities are permitted to speak?

Do the different sciences assume unique frames of reference? Do their methods differ from those involved in mapping discursive structures?

But regardless of what differences might arise between disciplines in terms of orientation, coordinate structures, or subject matter, it seems there is one frame that all share, and it is that orientation is possible. To make a map is to project a point of view, a being-in-relation-to. It is to assert a set of bearings linking one’s being to the set of relationships one has described. In sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s terms, "The 'blind spot' of each observation, the distinction it employs at the moment, is at the same time its guarantee of a world."4 To make a distinction is to build a world. It is, in other words, to enact orientation and to further the possibilities of one’s own persistence by folding the world into oneself. It is not simply a demarcation of east and west, up or down, an establishment of directionality; it is the originary separation of inside from outside, the identification with something rather than nothing, the establishment of a boundary, a bounded interior, a self. It fulfills what Foucault refers to as the “double theory of the sign.” 3

It must represent; but that representation, in turn, must also be represented within it…The signifying idea becomes double, since superimposed upon the idea that is replacing another there is also the idea of its representative power…It is characteristic that the first example of a sign given by the Logique de Port-Royal is not the word, not the cry, nor the symbol, but the spatial and graphic representation – the drawing as map or picture.5

Tracing the originary orienting gestures of the human as sign or map then constitutes the central theme of this dissertation.

Originally, of course, the human oriented itself by discovering patterns of relationship between its own cycles and those of the stars and planets. Earlier forms of life, such as planaria, accomplished something similar by creating concavities known as pit eyes capable of determining relative position through shadow. And prior to either of these, ferrous materials inscribed themselves on the earth by aligning their bodies with the electro-magnetic impulses of the earth’s core. We might even say, along with

Michel Serres, that all entities by definition distinguish themselves from their environments and should be supposed thereby to have an orientation.

Things are also symbols. There is more than chemistry in chemistry. Why does this element react or not in the presence of some other element? Why does it choose it in this way? What ‘faculty’ in it makes election? Large masses write, molecules read. And, even more than inert matter, living matter writes, reads, decides, chooses, reacts – one would have thought it long endowed with intentions. An hour of biochemistry will quickly persuade one of the exquisite astuteness of proteins.6

Orientation, then, is primary and requires in the first instance only an unmarked space by which a distinction might be drawn. This space then gets folded into the entity as sign forming the very core of its being, a double movement by which a primary distinction begins to map or elaborate a world within itself. The worlds so devised then

become as varied as existence itself, though certain patterns and forms repeat, a second articulation of this dissertation.

But the modern human now finds itself in a strange time, “a time out of joint,”7 as it were. Always it has been able to establish a boundary, a distinction between itself and that which it was not. Always it has had at its disposal an unmarked space by which it might establish its orientation, draw a map and move forward. Always there has been a space into which it might project itself progressing or enfold as a ground of possibility: the new world, outer space, the frontier, the genome, the Other, the future. Always, that is, until now when, with an almost palpable sense of dread, the human begins to realize that there no longer exists an outside to its orienting frame and that it is trapped in an infinite regress of its own reflections. While this postmodern condition has been percolating for some decades, its effects in the material register are beginning to be felt in earnest, manifesting most urgently as climate change and ocean acidification; these impending crises make clear that there is no place outside the frame, no space into which by-products of progress might be offloaded. And in the discursive register, the human finds itself able to do little more than observe itself observing in the manner of a second-order cybernetic system. Having mapped everything already, it can only comment on the results of its own orderings. The human has become the subject and object of its own observations such that “The visible order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter above an abyss.”8 The bottom has fallen out of the search for the Good and the True, and yet, like an amusement park ride or the 5

global financial market, the momentum of its dynamic keeps it spinning in place with the human pinned, as if by centrifugal force, to its interior, gazing down into the yawning cavity that has opened below. As economist Yanis Varoufakis observes,

“scratch the surface anywhere on the planet and what you will find is justified uncertainty, legitimate insecurity and potential insolvency…an equilibrium of fear.”9

Given the seemingly inescapable logic of postmodernism and the foreclosure of the future it seems to portend, how does one explain the burst of activity on the part of mapmakers? Are they deluded in believing their efforts capable of helping the human find its way out of its self-constructed labyrinth, or simply too focused on the task at hand to give their conceptual frames much thought? The position I take in this dissertation is that the new mappings are indeed capable of helping the human orient itself within its new involutionary matrix, though only if it is willing to give up much of what it thought was essential to its nature – only if it is willing, as cultural theorist Sara

Ahmed suggests, to experience and perhaps even revel in its “disorientation,” for “it is by understanding how we become orientated in moments of disorientation that we might learn what it means to be orientated in the first place.”10 The human, in other words, would do well to experience fully the new models being introduced by scientists and humanists alike, which require of it a radical decentering and redistribution of its affects across a range of networks, or, perhaps better, vector fields, both material and discursive. Currently, for example, the most credible “theory of everything,” or “TOE,” in physics is M-theory. Championed by physicists at Columbia and Stanford 6

Universities,11 it posits that black holes and the universe, more generally, are structured like a hologram, which is to say composed of a collection of diffracted one-dimensional points or “strings” thoroughly imbricated within each other – a cosmos sewn inside itself at every point. At the same time, humanists are dismantling the atomized model of the subject, or one which essentializes the subject, confining her to a gridded format of race, class, gender, ethnicity, genetics, or ideology. In new mappings, these distinctions instead become potential performative strategies, degrees of freedom that might be exercised or repressed in response to signals from other entities both internal and external to the entity, based on involvements from its past, present and, in some cases, future. The entity is no longer essentialized but understood to be constitutive of and constituted by these various intersubjectivities and intersectionalities. At the same time, within the social sciences the subject’s ontogenesis, or distributed temporal status, increasingly is being made legible by the tracking of its incremental entanglements with other entities such as viruses, jobs, institutions and other subjects.

Everything begins to flow in the new digital economy. Discrete events become animated, and the social becomes visible as an entity in its own right. It becomes, in fact, increasingly difficult to maintain the illusion that the human is not surrounded by and imbricated within other intelligences, a party to what object-oriented ontologist Ian

Bogost refers to as an “alien phenomenology,”12 with each superposed on and bleeding into the other. Increasingly, it would appear that entities – institutions, organizations, organs, cells, galaxies – are separated from each other, yes, surely by space in the 7

extensive realm, but in the affective register only by their unique temporal signatures, their own specific combination of oscillations, frequencies and amplitudes collectively ramifying and dampening outcomes at any given moment.

Where it might once have been possible to keep entities and their observations of each other separate from one another, subject and object, knower and known, they now can be seen to be folding into each other in real time. In the media13 and financial markets, this has resulted in what might be likened to a destructive fibrillation, a tightly coupled feedback loop incapable of distinguishing itself from its environment, quivering unproductively as the system collapses. This is Varoufakis’ “equilibrium of fear,” and it accentuates how difficult orientation becomes under the new temporal conditions introduced by the computational revolution, where incipiencies latent in the psycho- social registers can amplify into full-scale cascade events before the collective body, at whatever scale, can react.

While orientation is no doubt difficult in such an environment, the evidence I present in this dissertation indicates that it is not impossible. What is required for its establishment is the development of a sensitivity to one’s own time signature, or what

Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari might call one’s own “Body Without Organs;” not a hierarchically nested body but one revealed for what it is: a “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities…your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines.”14 Where historically the

(especially Western) human has looked outside itself to get its bearings, differentiating itself from other entities spatially, it must now begin to do so immanently, at the intensive, temporal level. Like a gyroscope, it must learn to use its own “spin” (what we might think of as its articulations of the cogent moment) and the angular momentum and precessions this provides in order to persist in its personal orbit. With the world around it fully mapped, it no longer needs to think concepts such as direction or distance, space or time, for these problems have been offloaded onto the technological scaffolding that supports the newly fluid human. Neither does it have to worry about navigation more generally because, increasingly, as it happens, there is nowhere to go.

No, what is left to the human, and it is no small feat, is to learn to stand in place and experience the world in all its temporal specificity moving through it. It needs to turn itself inside out, internalizing orientation and externalizing affect. In this sense, it needs to become more like its technology, more like an iPhone or Wii game controller, which knows neither right from left nor up from down, but can still sense when it is tilting, turning, flipping or leaning. When these sensitivities to pitch, roll and yaw are coupled with an ability to sense acceleration, the technological entity becomes its own inertial frame. It is able to judge its location not in reference to a stable point or datum

(of which increasingly there is a dearth in the human register), but in relation to its own parts. This is the haptic versus the optic approach to orientation, one explored by

Deleuze and Guattari in their concepts of “nomadism” and “smooth” and “striated”

space and one which marks the difference between object-oriented and procedural computer graphics programs:

According to D+G [Deleuze and Guatarri], haptic [smooth] space exists as a space of object-to- object contact, in which space is mapped by moving nomadically through various points of occupation. Optic [striated] space, on the other hand, is a space that exists in reference to a single, fixed, external, “objective” perspective that orders the space according to a unified whole, as in the case of the top-down main program space of procedural programming.15

The similarity between moving through locally-oriented, haptic space and that employed in object-oriented programming, then, is that elements are not grouped together and manipulated by an overarching coordinate structure or all-seeing eye, but rather each programming “object is a recursion of the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked up by a very fast network.”16 Objects are fractal, self-similar yet self-differentiating, capable of demonstrating their own unique and immanently derived qualities even as they affect the properties of other objects at the local level. This is descriptive of a “flat ontology,” or the metaphysical ground of being that characterizes the posthuman, where all entities are understood to participate equally in the constitution of the world. Each is a map of the whole and yet in possession of, or expressive of, a unique orientation.

Methodology

This dissertation, too, is a map. It has folded into it the arrhythmias of the current cultural milieu and is written in anticipation of greater still. It attempts to understand what it might mean to orient under turbulent conditions, spinning along

with vortices within vortices, and even what the value of orientation might be. It is a mapping of the possibilities for orientation, in other words, within the moving frame that is the metamorphosis of the human. It is, then, as with any map, an attempt to create a sign, an origin, a distinction, a possible leaping off point, an enactment of orientation. Its method is to investigate the orientation strategies of those forms, patterns and morphologies which have demonstrated a particularly artful persistence in the history of the cosmos and to explore how they might be applied by the human as it attempts to enact a world differently. Complicating this investigation is the fact that the human encompasses all of these forms and is, for all intents and purposes, inseparable from them, but, in delineating their respective dynamics, I attempt to disentangle their geometries from the topology of the human and fashion them as tools for its reengineering.

We might, then, consider the grids, circles, hierarchies, vortices, spirals, vortex rings and fractal structures that I present in the chapters to come to constitute little machines. Each works on the human and world in unique ways and each has found ways to insure its continued survival, collaborating with entities at various scales to replicate its morphogenetic program. These are the elements that will be used to compose the maps of the new posthuman terrain in addition to, or in lieu of, the (what increasingly appears to be superfluous) grid structure which has been coordinating the movements of the modern era. With the connection between progress and forward movement now in doubt, there is need not for an optics of control but for a haptics of 11

orientation. Just as the grid all-but disappeared as an organizational schema during the medieval period when local conditions dominated the cultural imaginary, so might we expect, with the decentering of the human, other material-discursive forms to come into play. I argue here that fractal structures, in particular, will prove useful on the human’s nomadic journey of remaining in place as they communicate visually the paradoxical relationships that define the new posthuman, flat (fractal) ontology.

Three themes then thread their way through the chapters that follow. The first is an investigation of the originary orienting gesture of the human, the inscribing of the sign or map as it draws a distinction between itself and its environment. It is coincident with the construction of the spatial and the infolding of the unmarked space, the unthought, or the Other. In this sense it is also mediation (between inside/outside, self/Other, thought/unthought) and the temporal (an enclosing of an intensive marked space). The second is a tracing of the technogenetic move from a representational, geometrical optics understood to be an artifact of the modern era to a performative, topological haptics understood to characterize the unmediated, embodied, enactive posthuman milieu now coming into view. This is the narrative arc of the dissertation, and, following its path, we encounter questions of agency, causality and superposition and the limitations of hierarchically structured organizational models of reality such as that which characterizes scientific naturalism. And the third is the concept of a “flat ontology” which is being invoked by speculative realist philosophers, geographers and feminist scholars as they attempt to map out the terrain of the posthuman. Manuel 12

Delanda, Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Karen Barad, Sallie Marsden and Jane Bennett are among the theorists currently engaging critically with the generally accepted scalar, ontological model. Each endeavors in some way to redefine the “object” or “entity” such that it is understood to be imbued with capacities which exceed any instrumentalist designs other objects, including humans, might have on it. Some theorize this increase in the object’s autonomy in terms of agency and some in terms of affordances (or the varying capacity of each object to interact with other objects), but all have shifted their focus from examining the cause-and-effect dynamic within the inherently hierarchical subject/object binary to exploring relations between objects understood to occupy (and, in some versions, create) the space of relations equally. In this respect, each is involved in elaborating an ontology which insists on objects differing in their existences, regardless of the scale at which they manifest, only in degree rather than kind.

The Hinge

Artist/philosopher Donald Judd, known for his viscerally-powerful, rectilinear constructions, has described geometry as “thought and feeling undivided.”17 Though

granting affective efficacy to an abstract system of thought seems curious, it becomes more plausible when one considers that geometrical relationships constitute not just a phenomenon one can visually perceive among “things” of the world but also the context for visual perception itself. Geometrical abstractions are arguably woven into the fabric, that is, the material or “matter,” of our beings. This becomes more apparent when we consider that we necessarily perceive the world as a set of geometrized spatial relations because we visually access it and them through a curved lens, a triangulated field of vision and an orthogonal frame of reference. In this sense, we might say that geometry constitutes a system of thought/feeling (albeit a learned one) prior even to that of writing or number, one that both structures our visual apparatuses and access to the world of spatial relations and then leads us to naturalize and (re)inscribe the angles, vertices and circumferences so perceived onto the world in ways which reflect whatever stage we happen to be in in our ongoing technogenesis. Evidence of this reflexive dynamic can be found in the formal structures and material configurations of human intercourse: in, for example, grid technologies employed in weaving, urban planning, perspective drawing and parallel computing; in the social hierarchies of caste systems and supra-national corporations; and in technologies of time which favor the unbroken circuit of the circle. Thus we might say that the matter of the body “matters” in how we conceive of and construct the world, both in the intransitive sense in that it is important and in the transitive sense in that matter is agentive in ways that our discursive analyses all too often overlook.18

Two potential problems with this analysis immediately present themselves, the first having to do with underdetermination and the second with overdetermination.

First: if, indeed, through an on-going, co-evolutionary process, our systems of geometry come to reflect and co-determine the architecture of the body/environment interface, how do we explain instances within the material-discursive environment which do not admit of description by invoking either the formal or abstracted elements of vision?

How might this theory account, for example, for the sinuous streets of medieval cities or the network topologies of the digital economy when neither of these is given by the axioms of Euclidian geometry or the formal structure of the eye? And, in a similar vein, how might such a theory explain the development of more recent geometrical systems such as topology and the related fractal geometry?

One possible response to this tri-partite question is that the architectures of medieval cities and digital networks are indicative of the existence of other geometrizing resources within the body in addition to those provided by the exteroceptive senses such as sight or hearing. For example, both medieval and network architectures have been shown to exhibit fractal qualities such as self-similarity and scale invariance, properties which also describe various internal and external ratios of the body. In addition, the form of these towns or networks – distributed, self- organizing, byzantine – and their function – the concentration and amplification of intensity and duration at both the individual and social levels – is more redolent of the

proprioceptive sensing system than of its exteroceptive counterparts. Thus, science writer Clive Thompson describes his experience of one such digital network as being

… like proprioception, [or] your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation [which] makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity…Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination… It's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself… [a] tactile sense of your community — and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts.19

Proprioception monitors the position of the body from the inside-out, making it possible for interactions between muscles, joints and the environment to direct most of the basic movements of the limbs without recourse to conscious control. As such, it can be credited with evoking the body’s “I” function, or sense of its own depth and boundedness, affects which it achieves through putting the body into motion.

Proprioception, then, constitutes one of the body’s primary resources for its enactment of space and time, with the understanding that the meaning conveyed by these constructs is inaccessible absent the body’s ability to locate itself within the coordinates they and it co-establish. The somatic schema proprioception instantiates and deploys – distributed, self-organizing and massively interconnected – differs significantly from that of the exteroceptive in its use of feed-forward as well as feedback looped architectures.

Called to react within milliseconds, this entwined, looped architecture creates subperceptual zones of indeterminacy where past and future states of the system implicate one another and the muscle or limb stiffens in response to a signal that has yet to be sent.

Such a schema offers a potentially rich resource for intuitions of other possible geometries, geometries such as topology whose transformations and morphisms have proven useful both in developing the concept and in exploring the qualities of the spacetime manifold, thus making possible quantum theory and the related technologies of the digital economy. Born of the reflexive dynamic of the topological, we should then not be too surprised to learn that it is precisely the arrival of this new economy which theorists such as Mark Hansen credit with causing the on-going “shift from a vision- centered to a body-centered model of perception,”20 that is, to a proprioceptive model whose dynamic is best described topologically.

In response to our first question, then, it would appear that the body does, indeed, offer resources other than those provided by its visual apparatuses for geometrizing our world, but these are more readily available at times and in places which are (or were) not dominated by the Western ocularcentric worldview – a worldview whose primacy is being challenged at both the macro and micro-physical levels by technological developments in the field of digital media.

Turning to the theory’s second potential problem, though there is compelling evidence to suggest that our visual apparatuses predispose us to project onto the world geometrical forms and relationships which are not necessarily there, and that they then lead us to (re)inscribe these forms, perhaps unwittingly, on the world through our material-discursive constructions, it might be overstating the case to say that they are

the sole or even primary causal agent behind the geometrized world in which we find ourselves. It might, in fact, be more accurate to say that such perceptions and their

(re)inscriptions are overdetermined by the countless numbers of other “natural” forces and formations which impose themselves on the consciousnesses of humans – from gravity, mountains and watersheds, in the case of hierarchies, to centripetal force, the revolution of the earth and heavenly bodies, in the case of time represented as cyclical or circular. (The exception to this argument is the quadrangle and its attendant cubic and grid formations. So little represented in the natural register is this form that it constitutes a special class of its own, one we shall investigate more thoroughly in the second chapter).

Carrying this thought further, it could be said that the body is as much a product of its material environment as is any feature or artifact to which it might be exposed.

This would suggest that drawing distinctions between that which is inside the body and that which is outside (between invention and discovery, for example) is somewhat arbitrary, an observation which nicely sums up the dilemma facing those who would try to grasp the dynamic of the current cultural moment defined as it is by intensive/machine time, or what Hansen describes as “the time of e-mail and surfing, the time which eliminates space [and where] arrival and departure occur in the same moment.”21

In an environment such as this, where time or the notion of forward movement has effectively come to a standstill as at the center of a vortex, we find the entanglement of subject and object, inside and outside, past and future to be at its peak. And we find that we, ourselves, occupy a metaphoric subperceptual zone of the proprioceptive, reacting to events before they’ve even happened. While such a dynamic is potentially productive in isolated instances, as when used to stabilize, for example, the body in space, a company’s reputation in the public eye, or the financial markets in a global economy, it can prove catastrophic if allowed to cut transversally through multiple scalar levels simultaneously. Such a scale-invariant dynamic is the very definition of turbulence as described in the literature on fluid dynamics and as captured in Deleuze’s description of the cosmic maelstrom where, “Dividing endlessly, the parts of matter form little vortices…and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another.”22 Such evidence of synchrony among differently-scaled elements within a system often indicates the onset of a phase transition from one state of matter to another.

What form such a shift might take at the social level, and whether we should expect to experience one ourselves, even metaphorically, remains to be seen, but returning to our discussion of the co-evolutionary dynamic of the material and the discursive, we find that some things can be stated with confidence: not all peoples at all times have privileged visual modes of perception and the ratios they inscribe in the 19

same way as do modern Westerners, a fact which would suggest that physiology is not destiny; however, there also appears to be a nearly universal “alphabet” of geometrical form (circle, square, triangle, for example) whose articulation into a social “grammar” is determinate upon differing paths of socio-historic technogenesis. It would also appear that modes of geometrized perception associated with the West (perspective drawing, for example) exert a powerful hold on those who have experienced their ratios, a fact which suggests they be understood to constitute, in this sense, one of perhaps but a few basins of attraction in the domain of visual perception.

The point in drawing attention to our geometrized material reality, in any event, is not to make a strictly causal argument about our modes of perception and the forms they necessarily lead us to reproduce. The goal is, rather, twofold. First, such an argument is meant to make us aware of just how deeply embedded in our psyche/somas, in our thoughts and feelings, are certain geometries, proportions, ratios and their resulting social and technological counterparts and how this magnifies the difficulty of imagining how our material-discursive reality might be otherwise constructed. And second, it is meant to suggest that the move towards a “body- centered” rather than a “vision-centered” understanding of the world, a move which our technologies are making possible, if not inevitable, means that we might be freed in some small way from these long-lived ocularcentric geometrical constraints, a move which promises to remove at least one barrier to “envisioning,” or perhaps we should say, “enacting,” reality as a material-discursive matrix of “constantly shifting relations 20

between open-ended objects… reciprocal enfoldings gathered together in temporary and contingent unities”23 as flat ontologists Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember and Celia Lury would have.

To be clear, were the reigning, geometrized framing of reality to be displaced in favor of an episteme which recognized, as the above scholars put it, “the sensitivity of the world to our interest in it, and to the forms in which it is expressed,”24 it should not be heralded as an example of the progressive nature of evolution. Various peoples, cultures, tribes, etc., have for millennia maintained something close to this understanding of reality as their cultural/technological artifacts might attest. But were our technologies to grant us greater access to, and a better understanding of, the post- visual topology that links our inner and outer worlds and which, in fact, calls this distinction into question, then it should certainly be characterized as an improvement in our modeling techniques, if not as an instance of outright progress, albeit of a local sort.

I argue that topology and the related fractal geometry help us visualize the non-linear dynamic that animates all matter, thus offering us the means by which we might bridge the divide between moribund binaries of the inside/outside, vitalist/positivist sort. In short, these geometries would seem to offer the rational mind access to knowledge the body already possesses, knowledge best summed up, perhaps, by cognitive scientist

Francisco Varela, who maintains that “we exist not simply in time but of time,”25 a shift in perspective whose radical nature is difficult to overstate.

In order to grasp something of what this might mean, I argue that we would perhaps do well to employ a fractal/embodied understanding of the organization of reality as revealed through the use of digital simulation technologies. This technology- enhanced understanding has made it possible for us to visualize how complexity does not diminish with scale and how scales of organization might be considered both to be an artifact of the observer’s locatedness in spacetime and to extend indefinitely along what appears to us to be a scalar axis. Our bodies and world, in other words, consist of nested realms of equally complex entities differentiated “vertically” by the speeds at which they operate. Looking out we also look in, recursively, at an indefinite multitude of entities, each of which carries within itself the whole of that which it regards. Time and scale become as if two sides of a coin in such a reconfigured spatiotemporal environment, the uniqueness and complexity of entities existing at “smaller” or “larger” scales, diminishing as they graduate away from us or us from them in “time,” not absolutely or essentially but only relatively as a result of our own spatiotemporal locatedness.

If our digital technologies are indeed capable of altering our understanding of reality at this sort of fundamental level, then we are likely to see the discursive power of

Euclidian-inspired rationalizing structures diminish along with that of the ocularcentric worldview which stabilizes them in the cultural imaginary. Such a shift seems to imply a syncretic melding of traditionally introspective Eastern and extrospective Western technological practices, an implication I hope to explore at a later date. Additionally, 22

however, and of greater importance to the current discussion, this shift also signals a material-discursive move away from geometrized representations of subjects and societies that have more to do with Euclid and Democritus than with Mandelbrot and

Bohr (geometers and physicists, respectively). Bounded atomic spheres and static relational hierarchies have little to tell us about the labile world of which we feel ourselves to be a part. We need ways of accessing and communicating the post-visual topology that is unfolding/enfolding before and within us. As Latour and others have noted, the moderns’ over-reliance on visual sources to establish empirical truths led them and us into what Barad terms a “representationalist trap of geometrical optics,”26 one which stems, at least in part, I argue, from the material constraints of the body itself. But other sensibilities of the body, the haptic and proprioceptive, for example, which the new digital technologies are allowing us to explore and better model, seem to offer us (Westerners) a way out of this particular trap. Accessing these we might be able to override our obsession with the solid geometries of the visible world which reinforce discourses of separation and hierarchy to enact the fluid boundaries and connections that the new post-visual topology in/de-scribes. Tracking this move from what Barad calls a “representationalist geometrical optics” to what I call a “performative topological haptics” should help us think beyond the human condition, a move Bergson and Deleuze deemed essential in any attempt to develop a new philosophy of nature, as

I believe it is necessary we do now, more than ever.

Chapters

The body of this dissertation consists of four chapters and one interlude. Each of the first three chapters takes as its object one of the geometrical figures which mediates sight – the rectangle/plane of vision, the triangle/stereoptic triangulation, and the circle/eye or lens. Each of these then elaborates on how this particular form and the human co-construct a material-discursive field – the grid, the hierarchy and the dialectic, respectively – one which varies culturally based on local conditions and the presence or absence of recursive, technogenetic factors. These chapters also move from the optical/outside to the haptic/inside by examining, in order, forms that correspond to space, mediation and time, with the temporal being understood as the mode of auto-affection, or the “affection of self by self” which gives rise to a “pre- reflexive self-awareness.”27 The move traced is then also one from the Euclidian to the topological, that is, towards the more inclusive geometrical system, one capable of diagramming not only the visible, extensive register but the intensive as well. In- between the chapters on mediation and the temporal/topological we find a fractal interlude, a meditation on orientation, navigation and ontological paradox. And the final chapter, in addition to summing up the material covered in the others, examines possible strategies for achieving orientation in a topological manifold with a focus on those employed by artist/amateur mathematician Marcel Duchamp.

The Grid

The second chapter, “A Genealogy of the Grid,” traces the origins of this anomalous construct to the boundary-drawing operations of the human and explores how together the (especially Western) human and the grid lay out a spatial plane based on reflexive thought. The grid is posited in this analysis to be the result of an originary orienting gesture of the human, constituting both a sign it makes to distinguish itself from its environment and a map it draws by which it might fashion a world. But the grid is revealed to have its own dynamic too, one which it exercises through its preferred

(and only) medium, the human. After being excavated from the latter’s visual pathways, we follow as it explores opportunities for dichotomizing and ordering the world. A series of technological discontinuities ensue: the loom, the gridiron, latitudes and longitudes, perspective drawing and Cartesian space, each of which alters the human’s understanding of itself. Each of these technologies then effects a closure and reentry as it modifies the conditions for the construction of the subject, and the newly reformatted subject reengineers the conditions of the grid’s unfolding. Thus the gird is shown to remediate itself through the human and the human to remediate itself through the grid with neither being aware of the other’s role in its own evolution, a necessary condition of their mutual advancement. For as with all media, the power of the grid resides in its imagining its operations to precede its arrival; it must believe that it is not producing effects but discovering them. It, and the human, must remain ignorant of its origins if progress it to continue.

This remediating dynamic of the grid is mapped onto the vortex ring familiarly represented by the smoke ring. Though the smoke ring is the result of a simple wave impulse interacting with a slower-moving matrix, it exhibits some very unusual and complex behaviors. It is revealed, for example, to have three axes of rotation and to advance in a forward direction by virtue of convection rather than propulsion. The grid’s dynamic is similarly complex: looping elements into stable assemblages, remediating itself reflexively through the human and convecting itself forward by virtue of the unmarked space, or “uncanny ghost,” at its core. This complex topological figure is carried through to other chapters as well, where it illuminates an involutionary dynamic characteristic of systems more generally.

The Hierarchy

The third chapter, “Artifacts of Vision,” examines how the triangulating operations of stereopsis encourage hierarchical figurations of space and ontological relations. Investigating the origins of Aristotle’s concept of the scala naturae, or “great chain of being,” a discursive construct dominant in the (Western) cultural imaginary for millennia, we find a connection between the forced perspective of the latter’s gridded urban environment and his evocation of a hierarchical arrangement of material forms.

This is the organizational plan adopted by the sciences and as such its effects ramify in almost every object and action associated with modern life. Investigating contestations of this plan’s hegemony, this chapter finds in the articulations of time made possible by technological innovations such as film and computer-assisted mathematical modeling 26

the potential for change. The digital economy facilitates exploration of the body’s affective dimension, revealing its ontological grounding in the virtual. It begins to turn the body inside out, exposing the aporia lodged at the center of its gridded logics, effecting another step in what Foucault describes as “…modern thought[’s] advance towards that region where man’s Other must become the Same as himself.”28

The triangle/hierarchy is also the form mediation takes as with the transmission and collection of sound or light waves. This chapter then also investigates what it means to mediate and explores whether a non-mediated reality is possible or desirable.

Tracing the ineluctable move towards a diagramming of the body’s haptic and affective registers, it explores what it might mean that the map and territory are being drawn ever closer together.

Interlude

Between the third and fourth chapters (on mediation and the temporal/ intensive, respectively) we find a meditation on the mathematical object known as the

Mandelbrot set. This infinitely complex and inherently paradoxical object is presented as a map of the posthuman terrain. The path it traces both enfolds and is enfolded, both closes and remains open, forms patterns but never repeats and though of infinite complexity is derived from a simple iterated algorithm. More interesting still, the complexity of its “parts” at a smaller scale never seems to decrease relative to the complexity of the whole. It graphically displays the relationships between the local and

the global, the interior and the exterior, the bounded and the unbounded, the simple and the indefinitely articulated. It is, in fact, a study in pure relationality illustrating how randomly-generated points can coalesce to form an object, an object which, in turn, derives its seeming solidity only by virtue of its spatial and temporal relationship to the viewer. The “object” is revealed, in this sense, to be an artifact of the viewer’s own positionality relative to a scalar hierarchy, a revelation which calls into question both the ontological and empirical instantiation of the hierarchical model itself. It thus implicates the viewer within its folds, forcing him to confront his agentic participation in the actualization of the real. If geometry forms the hinge of this dissertation, fractal structures and the paradoxes they embody form its pin.

The Dialectic

The fourth chapter, “A Topological Dialectic,” explores Walter Benjamin’s anticipation in his work of the current move from an optics of time modeled as a circle or line to a haptic sense of the temporal better conveyed as a spiral or self-similar, self- enfolding manifold. Its central focus is on his intuition of a topological dialectic, or a multi-dimensional un/enfolding of time, and his attempt to convey this intuition in his unfinished text The Arcades Project. Modeled on the nested architecture of the Parisian arcades, the Project’s elements – folios, folders, pages and citations – relate to each other fractally like the fronds on a fern; each recapitulates the whole in microcosm even as it elaborates a complex, interrelated structure. Entering into this scale-free collection of passages, the reader, in Benjamin’s plan, moves randomly through its constellations, 28

exhausting himself in discovering among them resonances and convergences until, with no narrator to guide him, he becomes disoriented, distracted, and finally brought – with a shock – to a standstill, in the center of his own being. The Project is likened in this analysis, then, to a performative algorithm, one which attempts to effect in its readers a non-mediated encounter with “now-time,” or that temporal dimension which runs orthogonally to progress and which is the actualization of a “dialectics at a standstill.”

Benjamin thus anticipates the efforts of artists in the digital economy who are employing its technologies to effect in their audiences a similar encounter with their ground of being in the virtual as analyzed in the third chapter, and follows in the footsteps of artists such as Marcel Duchamp who accomplished with his “ready-mades” something very similar, as recounted in the last chapter.

Origin

The fifth and concluding chapter is a summarization of the material covered in the preceding chapters. The role of geometry as hinge between extensive and intensive, optic and haptic realities is reviewed and its double articulation as

(re)mediating sign and origin reiterated. In addition, however, this chapter introduces another example of what it means to orient within moving movement by analyzing

Marcel Duchamp’s strategic non-showing of his sculpture Fountain in the Society of

Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917. Having familiarized himself with the radically new geometries of his day, Duchamp was able to deploy these to invert the cultural field and harness its energies to further his own purposes. Some of these 29

include a democratization of the art world, a “de-deification” of the artist and a foregrounding of relationship over and above the object. But in addition, as suggested here, he was interested in broadening the concept of agency to include non-human actors, a view fundamental to the philosophy of today’s flat ontologists. Duchamp’s expansion of the space of agency might then be understood to have anticipated the latter’s efforts by almost a century and to have laid the groundwork for its future realization. Studying his successful strategy for subverting the social field of his time then provides us with clues for how we might accomplish something similar in our own.

Endnotes Chapter One: Introduction

1 Michel Serres. 1997. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor. p 15. 2 Hector Obalk. Feb., 1996. Paper on ready-mades, given at the College Art Association, Boston, MA. p. 2. 3 Michel Foucault. 1994 (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books Edition. Random House: New York. p. 328. 4 Niklas Luhmann. "The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality that Remains Unknown." Self- organization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution. Ed. Wolfgang Krohn, Guinter Kuippers, and Helga Nowotny. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990. 64-85. p. 70. 5 Michel Foucault. Ibid., p. 64. 6 Michel Serres. 2003. L’Incandescent. Le Pommier: Paris. p. 73. 7 Deleuze speaking on Kant’s synthesis of time. ”So I take Hamlet’s formula literally to apply it to Kant: “the time is out of joint”. It’s with Kant, from the point of view of the concept of time, that we can effectively say that time is out of joint, which is to say has ceased to be subordinated to the measure of movement, and on the contrary movement will be completely subordinated to it. And time will be this sort of form which is also pure, and this kind of act by which the world empties itself, becomes a desert. This is why one of Kant’s best disciples - it won’t be a philosopher, we never find those who understand philosophers among philosophers - is Hölderlin, and Hölderlin who, drawing on Kant against the Kantians, understood by developing a theory of time which is precisely the pure and empty form in which Oedipus wanders. 8 Michel Foucault. Ibid., p. 251. 9 For more commentary on the fragile stateof the world and its economy see (http://www.naked capitalism. com/2012/10/yanis-varoufakis-the-euro-crisis-as-a-spectacular-political- failure.html#1YlhzwJAGAW1PRL7.99). Accessed 10/18/12. 10 Sara Ahmed. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 6. 11 “Think of any region of space, such as the room in which you’re reading. Imagine that whatever happens in the region amounts to information processing—information regarding how things are right now is transformed by the laws of physics into information regarding how they will be in a second or a minute or an hour. Since the physical processes we witness, as well as those by which we’re governed, seemingly take place within the region, it’s natural to expect that the information those processes carry is also found within the region. But for black holes, we’ve found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there’s a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard ’t Hooft stressed that the lesson should be general: Since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there’s reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three- dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggest, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.” Brian Greene. June 2011. “Our Universe May Be a Giant Hologram.” Discover Magazine. Published online Aug. 4. 2011. Accessed 10/10/12. 12 “In Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being; a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else; in which humans are elements, but not the sole or even primary elements, of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, Bogost's alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with, perceive, and experience one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and only becomes accessible

through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.” Ian Bogost. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press: Minnesota. Back cover. 13 David Hockney. Oct. 26, 2012. “The mass media has lost its perspective.” Financial Times. 14 Casey Alt. 2002. “The Materialities of Maya: Making Sense of Object-Orientation.” Configurations. 10. pp. 387–422. Citing: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “November 18, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” in Thousand Plateaus, pp. 149–166. p. 161. 15 Ibid., p. 415. 16 Ibid. p. 412. 17 Taken from an information panel at a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. “Artists in Depth: Liam Gillick, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt.” October 17, 2009 – January 10, 2010. 18 For more on processes of “mattering” see: Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press: Durham. 19 Clive Thompson. June 26, 2007. “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense.” Wired Magazine: issue 15.07. 20 Mark Hansen. 2006. New Philosophy for New Media. MIT Press: Cabridge, MA. p. 103. 21 Ibid. p. 234. 22 Gilles Deleuze. 1992. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 5. 23 Fraser, M., S. Kember and C. Lury, 2005. “Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism.” Theory, Culture & Society. SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. vol. 22(1). pp. 1-14. p 3. 24 Ibid., p. 2. 25 Mark Hansen. Ibid. p. 250. 26 Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 135. 27 Gilles Deleuze. March 14, 1978. “Kant: Synthesis and Time.” Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Trans.: Melissa McMahon. 28Michel Foucault. Ibid., p. 327.

Chapter Two: A Genealogy of the Grid

Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.1

– Michel Foucault

The grid, a long-lived human construct, has initiated some of the greatest changes the species has undergone since first it wove a fabric or tilled a field. This orthogonal arrangement of thread or lines on earth, plan, map, canvas or in abstract space has, with each iteration, proven instrumental in helping humans (re)orient themselves in a world it has helped them to (re)configure. Found nowhere in nature, traces of its presence, as found in a series of novel technologies, can be taken as an indication of a group’s or culture’s incipient or shifting awareness of self, of its move toward seeing itself as other than that within which it is embedded. To dress in woven fabrics is to be other than animal. To live in a gridded city is to exist outside of nature.

It is the quintessential, rationalist technology, paradigmatic of a modern impulse that runs throughout the whole of human history.

And yet this technology, especially with respect to its unique formal qualities, remains surprisingly under-theorized. This remains true in spite of the fact that the grid has operated as an ordering device in both the discursive and material registers for thousands of years, its intuitively simple, orthogonal design continuously and iteratively 33

shaping our (especially Western) mental and physical landscapes over that time. Not only has it structured the streets we walk, the spatiotemporal coordinates we follow and, since the classical era, the classification systems we use to organize reality, but, in all its many guises, it is one of, if not the primary, means by which subjectification has been effected since first the loom (likely the first example of a formal orthogonal technology) made its appearance in pre-historic times. In its optimization of material and discursive flows, it is the grid in the guise of the table, as Foucault convincingly argues in The Order of Things, which has served as the primary technology for the concentration of power and knowledge and the internalization of regulatory forces formerly imposed from the outside.2

Though little is known about the origins of this utterly human construct, it continuously channels flows of information and bodies according to a logic that sets it apart from, and marks the limit of, the natural world. As art critic and theorist Rosalind

Krauss notes, the grid supersedes the real, substituting for the latter’s characteristic irregularities its own immaculate, originary aesthetic.

In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final.3

In myriad ways then, the grid enacts a reality alien to the human. Its coordinate structure, having no referent in the natural world, can be said to refer to nothing other than itself. Timeless and static in its perfection, the latter evokes the existence of an

ideal order underlying the chaos of the merely real, of an abstract plane holding in tension the latent forces of figure and ground, warp and weft, inside and outside. It represents and enacts, in other words, an all-encompassing, positively-given, logically- accessible reality, one invisibly supported by the cuts it makes and the differences it thereby establishes between formerly non-existent domains.4 And, as with any successful remediation, it folds back on itself, effacing any trace of its origins, effectively appearing to antecede that from which it emerged. Operating in the discursive or material register, at the social or individual scalar level (urban plan, map, table, coordinate space), it isolates the object of investigation (individual, region, species, curve) from its constitutive field of relations and instantiates, thereby, in a single gesture, both the concept of object and field and the dichotomous relationship as such.

At the same time, it creates a framework by which a new set of reifying relations

(citizenship, nation state, Homo sapiens, analytic geometry), relations which determine the boundary of the object, might be discovered/invented. To sum up, the grid simultaneously instantiates such dichotomies as inside/outside, observer/observed, nature/culture;5 creates a logic in which these newly minted categories legislate entirely novel relations between the proliferating object-entities to which the logic gives rise; and furthers its own evolution by so doing. And it manages to accomplish all this while remaining invisible to itself so that its logics might be imagined to have preceded its arrival.6

But how did we come by this most versatile of tools? From whence does the force of its logic derive? And why only in certain times and places did its orthogonal relationships come to dominate a given cultural imaginary? These are some of the questions we will explore in this chapter, though ultimately the focus will be on tracing the dynamic of this largely invisible, because ubiquitous, technology. It is my hope that by determining its mode of operation we might be able to anticipate its next evolutionary move and perhaps learn to appropriate its successful survival strategies for use elsewhere, such as in the socio-political realm.

To understand more of how the grid’s dynamic operates and how (especially

Western) material-discursive processes have been colonized by its logics, we will have to come to know something of its origins. These are murky at best, but, as we shall see, still serve to illuminate what appears to be an underlying, topological dynamic.

Origin of the Grid

The organism and the environment are not actually separately determined. The environment is not a structure imposed on living beings from outside but is in fact a creation of those beings. The environment is not an autonomous process but a reflection of the biology [and culture] of the species. Just as there is no organism without an environment, so there is no environment without an organism.7

– Richard Lewontin

If the collection of right angles we call the square or rectangle is the frame we don’t see when we see the world (and such appears to be the case when we consider that almost all visual media – books, movies, paintings, photographs, television, computer screens, windows, plays – is presented in a rectilinear format), then the grid is

the means by which we align, rank, order, juxtapose and otherwise organize the information contained therein. Which begs at least two questions: which came first, the largely invisible rectangular framing of space through vision,8 or the organizational logics of the grid; and does the ubiquitous rectilinear framing of reality reflect a physiological predisposition, or is it a learned behavior based on exposure to grid technologies long- built into the material-discursive environment? There is a third option, of course, which is that these opposing pairs spontaneously arose together, resonating with and reinforcing each other as with Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the co-determining structure of the orchid and wasp,9 another possibility we will consider.

The only reason either of these issues even present themselves as something of a puzzle, of course, is because there exist so few examples of rectilinear structures in the natural world to which we might point as the initial catalyst for breaking the quadrangle/grid, rectilinear/organic symmetries. All other primary geometric forms – circles, triangles, pentagons and hexagons – are represented repeatedly in nature’s products. They have their own structural integrity derived from parsimoniously delineating or distributing forces (tensional, compressive, attractive) of the system in which they exist. They thus require no explanation because they are simply there, a facet of the natural world which humans often unthinkingly mimic and incorporate into the one they build or imagine for themselves. But the square or rectangle is different; nature has found it to be neither structurally nor economically useful.10 This helps explain why its representation among natural phenomena is limited to a single instance, 37

that of a small number of crystals from the cubic and tetragonal groups, such as pyrite, fluorite and halite.

And yet, from a formal perspective, it is probably the single most commonly used technology among sedentary human populations. One need only look around one’s environment to ascertain such is the case. By contrast, it would seem that examples of a rectilinear grid fail to appear anywhere in nature.11 Odder still is the dearth of examples of the 90-degree angle in the natural register, it, too, being limited to an appearance in the latter group of crystals.12 Little wonder then that the first evidence of any kind of rectilinear structure does not appear in the archaeological record until the late Upper Paleolithic period (c. 26,000 B.C.E.), when clay imprints of woven textiles indicate humans first to be in possession of loom technology.13

So, is the grid an invention or a discovery? Did humans discover the cube through encounters with, for example, salt crystals and then mimetically transfer its form to their technologies, or were they inspired to invent its unique relationships through an abstraction of the act of framing that sight engenders? Or were there other possible sources of inspiration for its relatively sudden eruption in the archaeological record? Is it possible, for example, that the construction of reality by the body itself might present one such alternative? As biologist Richard Lewontin stated earlier, and

Walter Benjamin articulates in another milieu, the search for origins is always a fraught and inconclusive exercise.

Origin, although a thoroughly historical category, nonetheless has nothing to do with beginnings […]. The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool […]; its rhythm is apparent only to a double insight.14

So though we might find the origin of the grid to be like a whirlpool, an object/process which forever eludes our grasp, Benjamin holds out hope that we might at least learn something of its rhythm. But to achieve even this we must effect a double insight, a trick best accomplished perhaps by making its rhythm our own, something which, as we shall see, should require very little effort on our part.

Despite these difficulties, three possible scenarios for the origin of the grid come to mind, each offering at least a partially viable explanation without ruling out the influence of the others. Given that the wide variety of life forms on this planet express in their morphologies the field of forces in which they exist, one could argue that the novel arrival of the grid represents a remediation of these forces, one inspired perhaps by human’s upright posture and perpendicular orientation with respect to the horizon.

Abstracting from this, one might arrive at the primitive unit (the right angle), which, in repetition, forms the grid. Another possible, closely related proposition is that human bipedalism and the improved ability to manipulate materials it provided inevitably led, through a process of trial and error, to the invention of the lattice, as in the weaving of mats or nets, and then to the grid.15 And finally, researchers have confirmed only in the last year that the wiring of the human brain and indeed of all primates takes the form of a three-dimensional grid.16 This orthogonal arrangement of neurons is found,

definitively, only in the deepest parts of the brain and is only visible using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Nevertheless, the simplicity of the arrangement comes as something of a shock to neuroscientists who had always imagined the operational complexity of the brain to require an equally complex physical architecture.

Because the neurons, arranged as orthogonally interlaced sheets, follow the contours of the brain’s folds (especially as they move away from the deeper structures), they might not qualify within some classification schemes as “true” grids; however, the fMRI images suggest that, at the very least, they mark the only other known example of a naturally- occurring, right-angled phenomenon.

The idea that the origins of the loom; gridded urban plan; graticule (longitude and latitude); single-point perspective; Cartesian space; and parallel computing can all be traced to what has until now remained an invisible, three-dimensional, orthogonally- interleaved wiring system in the brain seems a somewhat strained concept. Function often does not follow form (electricity, for example, bears little resemblance to, and is little affected by, the way electrical wires are run in walls), especially when, in the context of human development, form is unavailable for visual inspection and mimesis.

But what if all that was required to start a positive feedback loop of lattice-inspired design was an initial impetus from this system, a push from the inside to the outside such that the grid might be made legible and thus available for translation into technological form?

This concept gains support from an unlikely source – the wall paintings in the caves at Lascaux (c. 17,000 B.C.E.). Interspersed among the hundreds of figurative elements for which the caves are famous are a number of enigmatic geometrical designs. Included among these is a vertically-oriented, three-by-three grid which seems to float above two mirror-image ibexes and, in a gallery nearby, a similarly oriented, simple rectangle, flanked by two incised, two-by-three, horizontal grids or “blazons” painted purple and blue. Theories abound as to the meaning or purpose of these and the other geometric forms found in the cave complex, but one particularly compelling and well-supported argument is that they represent entoptic phenomena, or images reflective of the physiology of the eye and/or brain. The latter include both

“phosphenes,” images from inside the eye itself due, for example, to pressure on the eyeball, and “form constants,” or groups of patterns whose distinctive shapes are thought to reflect the architecture of the neural connections between the eye and visual cortex. “Evidence suggests that the form constants of phosphenes are directly related to spatial relationships between the ring-like structure of the retinal cells and the grid- like or columnar neural structures of the visual cortex.”17 Elements from one or more of the four known phosphenes groups -- grids, spirals, cobwebs and tunnels -- regularly appear to those experiencing sensory deprivation or psychoactive substance-induced

Figure 1. Phosphene groups: grids, spirals, cobwebs and tunnels.

hallucinations. The theory in connection with the geometric cave paintings of Lascaux then, as put forward by a number of neuroscientists and neuroaestheticians,18 is that the site was used for ritualistic practices perhaps involving the utilization of one or both of these trance-inducing methods and that one or more participants transferred to the cave walls the images they “saw” while in an altered state. And what they saw would appear to be unrepresentative of the world outside but rather reflective of the structure of the brain itself (or, at least, the link between the eye and visual cortex). We might then judge the grid to be an example of a Kantian synthetic a priori, or that which is both empirically real and transcendentally ideal.

With respect to our own investigations into the origins of the grid, I think we can say that the entoptic theory looks very promising, though it is not without problems. As we learned earlier, evidence for loom technology dates to c. 26,000 B.C.E., pre-dating the Lascaux paintings by roughly ten thousand years.19 This suggests that we cannot

immediately discount the likelihood of our other hypotheses. Perhaps it was an upright posture and horizon line that led, through the (intuited) rectangular frame of vision, to the grid after all. But, then again, it is known that apes and monkeys and even dogs and cats are exposed to “form constants” through spontaneous hallucination, so, even though the evidence is lacking, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that entoptic imagery experienced by Paleolithic humans prior to the invention of the loom was the initial inspiration for the grid. Supporting this further, of course, are the recent discoveries of the brain’s orthogonal wiring plan and the “grid cells” in the visual pathways to the brain which integrate three-dimensional spatial information by following the contours of a self-organizing, triangular grid.20 The brain and links between the eye and visual cortex, it would appear, are hard-wired for rectilinear perception and perhaps cognition, at least in part. So then why did the potential of the grid and rectilinearity, more generally, lie dormant for so long? And why once it appeared, did it take at least another 23,000 years to remediate itself as the urban plan?

These questions can be more properly addressed by examining the grid’s dynamic, the topic of our next section. But before moving on we can sum up what we have learned about the grid’s origins so far. Though it will likely remain impossible to say whether one or some combination of the hypotheses given here will suffice to explain the appearance of the grid, it is reasonable to argue that, in all likelihood, it precipitated from an exchange between the internal and external environment of the human. Whether this movement was from outside to inside, inspired by crystal 43

structures, or inside to out, inspired by structures in the neural pathway, cannot be stated definitively, but the entoptic and neurological evidence seems to point towards an emergence from within, a sort of bodying forth of the visual/cognitive infrastructure.

Either way, however, there would appear to be a reflexive dynamic at work, one which suggests the spontaneous appearance of the grid originated from an enfolding between the two seemingly autonomous domains of inside and outside, two concepts for which it might be largely responsible for instantiating.21 It is also a dynamic that feeds on itself, as we shall see, deriving energy for its unceasing, if punctuated proliferation from each subsequent instantiation of the grid in the material-discursive environment.

Grid Dynamics

As Krauss articulates in her earlier quote, the grid exists not so much as a ‘thing’ but as an “order of pure relationship.” This allows it to retain its distinctive orthogonal character and attendant tensional force even as it manifests differentially in various substrates. Acting through its preferred medium, the human, it moves through the millennia like a wave impulse, serially heaving up out of a material-discursive matrix textiles, the gridiron, the graticule, single point perspective and Cartesian space. It actualizes these phenomena even as it reveals them to possess not “an order particular to themselves” but to exist as singular instances in a dynamic of differentiation. In this sense it resembles the computational revolution which revealed such formerly distinct platforms as photography, music, painting, writing, gaming and warfare to exist, in part, in a shared, purely informational virtual dimension. Philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson, 44

drawing on Deleuze, suggests we understand the process of evolution to be “not only one of change but of invention, since the forms do not exist in advance. The process involves not a realization of the possible but an actualization of the virtual, in which the virtual enjoys its own ‘consistency’ as a productive power of differentiation.”22 We might then think of the grid as an example of the virtual’s “consistency”23 in that it creates (through imposing the “basic axioms of the calculus of indication”24) domains of proliferating differentiation wherever it manifests (most recently in the area of computation) even as it retains its own order of relationship. Interestingly, given the origins of the programmable computer (and by extension, digital media) in the Jacquard loom, we could say, accepting the entoptic hypothesis (the grid’s origins being traceable to phosphenes or ‘form constants’), that with the advent of parallel processing, the grid has come full circle; it has thoroughly remediated the material-discursive landscape such that the (modern) human exists inside of what formerly existed only inside of it.

The circuit, in other words, is complete; the modern human has turned itself inside out, mapping its interior logics and perceptual constraints onto its external environment. But not for the first time are we witnessing such a dynamic. We have been here before, at least in part, as a brief genealogy of the grid will attest. Each iteration of the grid, as we shall see, represents or enacts a closure25 and a self-reflexive reentry of what we might think of as the grid/human dyad (the one being so thoroughly implicated in the other as to be inseparable).

Figure 2. Reflexive closure and reentry: the dotted line represents the human, and the bold line the grid remediating the human with each completion of the circuit. Alternatively, the dotted line could represent the grid and the bold line the remediating human.

From the first moment the human began to cloth itself in (especially woven) fabrics of its own (and the grid’s) making, for example, the human reflexively, if gradually, began to recognize itself as “other than,” to exhibit an aesthetics and the recognition of the self this implies. From the obvious pride taken by weavers in their handiwork, as demonstrated by its detailed modeling in the earliest extant clay figurines,26 to the association of Paleolithic textiles with important rites of passage, it is clear that grid technologies have played a critical role in the development of Homo sapiens sapiens. The form of self-recognition it initiates and heralds then attains closure in the manifestation of the gridded urban plan, the next in a series of grid technologies to trigger new forms of self-reflection and ultimately subjectification. The dynamic of this closure/reentry describes less the completion of a circle, however, than the enfolding of an involutionary vortex. Insides and outsides not only implicate each other along a vertical axis, as with stirring tint into paint, but around a horizontal axis as well, 46

as interior and exterior circulate and implicate from top to bottom. At a finer level of analysis, however, scientists have discovered that these two orthogonally-oriented movements have a torsional effect on each other such that they not only circle but spiral around their respective axes, interpenetrating to form a stable, torsional core within a vortex ring. Given the central importance of this dynamic to the overall argument being made here, I want to examine a graphic example of the latter’s operation as found in the familiar object of the smoke ring.

The Vortex Ring

The morphogenesis of the grid/human as well as that of the smoke ring, then, combines three independent movements: propulsion, or forward progress; involution, or creatio ex nihilo (rolling or poloidal rotation); and ring rotation (orbital or toroidal rotation).

a. b. c.

Figure 3. Three images of a vortex ring: a. Cross-section of the initial phase of a smoke ring: impulse of air rolling up into a poloidal spiral and entraining surrounding material. b. Ring translating forward while exhibiting poloidal rotation. c. Cut-away showing interior toroidal rotation at the ring’s core. 47

The initial impulse of a smoke ring consists of a zone of high pressure, or pulse of air moving faster than the air around it. Meeting resistance, the lead surface curves at the sides, resulting in the formation of a ring of lower pressure around its edges. This ring then behaves like a vacuum, causing both high and low pressure air to fold into each other and spiral under its leading edge, such that they resemble the shape of a mushroom in section. Trapped in the core of the resulting vortex ring is a low pressure zone much like that which forms behind the sail of a boat turned into the wind. And as with the boat attached to the sail, the ring is pulled forward by the surrounding atmosphere’s attempts to fill this negative space. More precisely, each element of the vortex system is “propelled forward by the induced velocity fields of all the other elements of the ring vortex, [such that] the whole vortex is thus convected by itself.”27

By continuously turning its outside in, in other words, the ring, like a self-penetrating tornado turned on its side,28 furthers its forward progress, a progress which, in turn, sustains its involutionary movement. This sustained movement and identity appear to manifest out of nothing (continuing indefinitely in a frictionless environment),29 lending the smoke ring the air of a magician’s trick. Adding to this magical effect is the

“toroidal” or rotational “vortex lines” of the ring, which move orthogonally to the

“poloidal,” forming a robust, differentiated yet integrated, spiral flow at the ring’s core.30 As the outside of the ring or “velocity field” spirals along “doing loop-the-loops in a progressive direction,”31 the circulating axial current helps prevent the particles entrained within the core from colliding with each other, enhancing, thereby, the ring’s 48

continuity and lifespan. As we shall now see, the evolution of the grid (and human) similarly advances by incorporating into its dynamic these propulsive, involutionary and toroidal movements.

A Brief Genealogy of the Grid: From Textiles to Urban Plan

As with the origins of the grid itself, those of the orthogonal urban plan remain obscure and are likely multiple. Evidence for the existence of loom technology,32 of course, long pre-dates that of even the earliest proto-gridiron settlements (Catal Huyuk c. 3,000 B.C.E.), though the cultural uptake and importance of the former seems to have varied widely by region. Crucially for the argument being made here, however, it would appear that no non-weaving culture ever developed either a proto- or true gridiron settlement, which suggests there exists at least an affinity, if not a causal relationship, between these technologies. True-gridiron plans rarely delineate ancient (c. pre-700

B.C.E.) city streets, but when they do their epicenter is generally dominated by monumental architecture, evidence of strong monarchical, state, or religious control.33

This control does not necessarily mean that the inhabitants of ancient cities were oppressed. Participation in the construction of gridded streets and monumental architecture was, at least in some instances, part of a social dynamic based on reciprocity. In exchange for their labor, individuals gained a sense of participating in something larger than themselves, of connecting with their city and community and of being bound to their rulers with whom they identified.34 Cities which featured orthogonal planning (either true or semi-orthogonal) arose in concert with, and 49

facilitated the transition to, agrarian settlements. Whereas some agrarian cities developed without benefit of an orthogonal plan, but no true, or even semi-orthogonal plan is believed to have predated agrarian-type settlements, it seems logical to suggest that the grid is in some way connected not only with the earlier technology of the loom, but with the jump in scale (from an upper limit of 10,000 to that of as many as

1,000,000 inhabitants) that distinguishes these settlements from their ancient precursors.35

Though the form of the grid might initially have precipitated out of humans’ remediation of the “form constants” of their visual cortex pathways and often, it is speculated,36 became of central importance to communities once translated into the technology of the loom, we can imagine that it became a technology of a different order, a sort of meta-technology (or what mediologist Lev Manovich might call a “meta- medium”)37 once people’s everyday movements and social interactions were dictated by its form. Newly-minted subjects of the gridded, agrarian city would have become entrained by its spatiotemporal rhythms and logics, reinforcing and amplifying those provided by the neural pathways of visual perception. The grid, in other words, as the epitome of ratiocination, enacts a radical break from all prior ordering structures (all of which resembled, more or less, their “organic” counterparts in nature). It represents a discontinuity, one well captured by mediologist Brian Rotman in his description of the changes wrought by the invention of writing.

…like any medium, [it] is a re-mediation; it engenders a clutch of interconnected discontinuities in the milieu of what preceded it: a disruption of the previous space-time consensus of its users and an altered relationship between agency and embodiment giving rise to new forms of action, communication and perception.38

This description of how the introduction of writing affected humans’ conception of the self transfers readily to the introduction of the urban grid (a phenomenon we should find perhaps not too surprising given that, as media archaeologist Friedrich Kittler notes,39 writing itself takes the form of an abstracted grid). For there can be little doubt that the gridiron, among other things, represented/enacted a major disruption of the

“spacetime consensus” of its users. The first uniformly gridded cities such as Babylon,

Borsippa and Kahun (c. 1,800 B.C.E.)40 and even the semi-orthogonal cities such as

Harappa and Mohenjo-daro (c. 2,500 B.C.E.) must have overwhelmed visitors and inhabitants alike with unfamiliar abstractions such as the endless repetition of the same

(90-degree angles, uniform spacing of streets, buildings, lots and blocks) and internal viewsheds with, in some cases, seemingly infinite sightlines.41 With the way these conspired to order space and orient the populace it must have seemed to the latter as though they were inside and part of a larger, organizing entity or machine, one which, through the “soft control” of the grid, coordinated their movements, actions and thoughts. Such larger-scaled entities could only arise and sustain themselves through the creation of a division of labor. This would have manifested as an articulation of various essential functions (ingestor, distributor, converter, producer, extruder, motor, supporter)42 whose performance, in turn, necessitated and fostered the rise of increasingly individuated subjects. Emerging out of this newly articulated leviathan,

then, would have been not only an economy of scale capable of producing commodifiable goods, but a collection of individuated subjects which functioned as variables within an infinitely repeatable algorithm. Which is not to say that the more common and traditional “organically” laid-out cities did not produce individuated subjects, but only that the efficiencies generated by gridded cities might arguably be expected to have amplified and expedited, for better and for worse, the rise of the rational subject.43 For, as historian Robert Artigiani points out, there is a recursive and, to some degree, synchronous relationship between scalar levels of organization:

More individualized humans sustain more complex societies. Thus, self-conscious humans emerge in concert with advanced social systems. Theirs is a complementary relationship, and neither can be imagined independently of the other. Nor can one be said to be more fundamental than or to dictate to the other.44

Returning to and continuing with Rotman’s earlier quote, we find that writing:

… introduced a domain of virtual, seemingly ‘unreal’ objects, entities that are without context, endlessly repeatable, and free to be reproduced at any time, place, and cultural situation. For the medium of writing these virtual entities are texts. To engage with them writing posits, as does any medium, a virtual user, an abstract reading/writing agency who or which is as distinct from any particular, embodied, and situated user as an algebraic variable is for the individual numbers substitutable for it, an agency who/which accommodates all readers and writers of texts regardless of how and when in space and time they might have appeared.45

Rotman brings out another useful point of comparison between writing and the grid which helpfully leads us back to our smoke ring model/metaphor. Where the “endlessly repeatable” and freely reproducible “virtual objects” of writing are “texts,” those of the urban grid are coordinates (which act not as signs but at the level of a Kantian synthetic a priori); and where the “virtual user” or “abstract agency” implied by these texts is a reader/writer, that evoked by the gridiron (as becomes more apparent, as we shall see,

with the Greek iteration of this scheme) is the subject/citizen. The latter implies the transmutation of the agent from an individual generated by local relations to the function the agent performs in an economy of scale, the equivalent of an algebraic variable in the algorithm of the urban grid. The virtual agent, represented in this case by the subject/citizen, of course, changes with each iteration of the grid, the latter, I argue, occurring each time the grid re-encounters itself within the topological space of its preferred medium, the human. This re-entry of the grid into itself also results in the remediation of the human, the two leapfrogging their way through the historical record in much the same way as do two smoke rings issued from a single source in quick succession.

Figure 4. If two parallel vortex rings of equal size and equal moment move coaxially behind each other, they interact: The vortex elements of the one ring are influenced by the stream lines generated by the other. The ring ahead therefore widens and slows down; the ring behind narrows , accelerates, catches up with and is drawn through the first ring. Then the process reverts: the ring which slipped through widens and slows down again, the one behind narrows until both are again equally large and their distance has become as before, etc..46 53

Mapping the Grid/Human Dyad

Mapping this dynamic of the grid’s multiple remediations onto the image of a self-propelling smoke ring should help us visualize this complex process. As we will remember, the wave impulse or smoke ring materializes at the intersection of three forces: propulsive/convective, involutionary/poloidal and orbital/toroidal. In the argument being made here, the initial impulse for the grid comes from a vision, not of an external but of an internal reality. It thus constitutes not a representation but a propulsive, bodying forth of an enigmatic geometry of what we might think of as a rectilinear force field seen through inverted eyes. Once made legible, humans were able to exploit the grid’s algorithmic potential to transform themselves and their milieu.

Through the simple iterative process it describes, a series of orthogonally-structured, self-reflexivity-inducing technologies47 began to appear in relatively quick succession.

The evolutionary process described here of the grid moving, over millennia, from inside to outside and back again (from phosphene to net/loom to urban grid), remediating the human with every re-entry (through introspection, individuation, subjectification), can be mapped onto the involutionary spiraling of the smoke ring. This involves the coiling together of outside and inside and a permanent circulation of low pressure (or that from which the faster-moving, high pressure exterior of the ring distinguishes itself) at the ring’s core. It is this involuted, circulating distinction between high and low, fast and slow, which convects the ring forward, facilitating its self-perpetuating cycle.48

Though the grid demonstrates a complex dynamic, its operational strategy is, like that of the smoke ring, simple – by virtue of an initial, propulsive impulse, it makes a cut or distinction within a uniform milieu (entoptic phenomena distinguishing between inside and outside; textiles/loom distinguishing between human and “other;” urban plan distinguishing between culture and nature), harnessing the energy released thereby to further its ability to make additional cuts (cultural evolution) ad infinitum without ever having to acknowledge that it is inventing, not discovering, the dichotomies that its advancement furthers and requires. Though, of course, as with the smoke ring, coiled up within each of the grid’s products is the equivalent of a low pressure zone or that which invisibly works to distinguish the grid from its milieu and by so doing guarantees its continued existence/forward progress. So, for example, though the origin of the entoptic grid is said to be internal to the human, it should be noted that it emerges out of an interfacial, perceptual system (the neural pathways between eye and visual cortex) tasked with making precisely this distinction, that of an absolute difference between inside and out. In other words, to claim for the grid phosphene or formal constant an endogenous origin is to presume the prior existence of that which the visual system (from which it originates) is tasked with establishing, that of an operationally- closed, bounded, entity.49 The tendency is to ignore that the entoptic grid image and formal constants, in general, are part of the boundary-drawing operation the human pursues in its attempt to differentiate itself from its environment. But the possibility that the sought-after closure is never achieved is hidden from the system itself, buried

within its internal logics, creating, in effect, a vacuum which ineluctably convects the system forward.50

Every entity at whatever scale might be said to maintain its corporeal or systemic integrity by wrapping itself around an originary distinction, incorporating within itself a map or sign of that-which-it-is-not as given by the slower-moving segment of the matrix through which it moves. In this sense, the map, sign or low pressure zone might be thought of a variable that reappears in different clothing whenever a system makes a distinction between that which is interior to it and that which is exterior. Flat ontologists such as Manuel Delanda and Niklas Luhmann understand the social group to form such a system, an autonomous entity which differentiates between itself and that which is foreign to it – other groups, animals, machines, nature. The latter are some of the variables that help it to make a distinction between inside and outside, forming, at once, both the Other by which it comes to know itself and the low pressure zone at its core, or the differential in speed which convects it forward. But it must also fold a sign of this exclusion into itself, a memory, map, or sign of this exclusion, by which it might orient itself in the future, the equivalent of an inscriptive act of self-reference. “Through self-reference, a system creates its own teleology and, by so doing, reproduces itself indefinitely.”51 For Bruno Latour, this teleology, motored by the vacuum or excluded

Other at its core, takes the form of the mistaken notion, popularized during the modern era, that the human is separate from, rather than a part of, nature. Accepting that the natural and social are thoroughly entwined and even co-constitutive of each other 56

would presumably force humans to recognize and perhaps question the wisdom of their thralldom to a self-perpetuating logic of endless “progress.”

Of course this vacuum or originary distinction manifests, too, at the level of the self-referencing individual (especially in grid-centric, self-reflexive cultures), leading each to seek, through elliptical means, the closure required of it by a cultural fixation on a positivist, instrumentalist rendering of reality. The variable or circulation of low pressure at the core of the individual manifests as the affective register (which we explore in later chapters), and it is this, as cultural theorist Sara Ahmed notes, which irremediably keeps the system open, denying individuals the closure they might seek.52

But mapping the toroidal movement of the smoke ring onto our grid/human dyad reveals that, at least around the horizontal axis, a form of closure is achieved. Where the involutionary (poloidal) spinning around the ring’s core never closes, that which takes place around its perimeter (toroidal) must in order for the ring to have an identity as such.53 This is because where the poloidal movement emphasizes forward progress and the enfolding of inside and outside, the toroidal stabilizes the ring as a torus, providing it a continuity which allows it to move through its environment as a unified entity. As noted, this latter motion works in conjunction with the former to preserve the ring’s shape. Together, they mesh the torus’ elements into a single velocity field such that, as we read in an earlier quote, the movement of one affects that of all.

Mapping this toroidal movement onto our analysis of the grid, we recognize it as the circulation of elements which stabilizes any given instantiation of the latter. In the case of the first textiles, these might range from the components of the earliest threads

– such as milkweed, nettle or flax – and looms – such as weights, battens and shuttles; to the weavers themselves – accomplished, neophyte or indifferent; to the rituals demanding of special raiment – such as puberty, marriage or burial; to the need for markers of status in a given social hierarchy – such as plain-woven, twill and whip- stitched fabrics and garments. We could, of course, drill down even further into the molecular and atomic properties that give the products of the aforementioned plants tensile strength or that allow for wood to be carved into useful shapes or include the skills and desires of the artisans who construct the looms. These and a multitude of other elements, at a myriad of scales, fold together to form and sustain the assemblage of the grid-as-loom, a process repeated for every other manifestation of the grid as well.

Each new instantiation assumes and maintains its orthogonal form as long as the requisite elements are available to circulate through it. And each builds on and amplifies the dimensions of those that came before until, as Kraus might say, those of

“the real” are “crowded out” and replaced by “aesthetic decree.”

This, then, is the effect of the toroidal movement, a stabilization of form in space, even as the poloidal, moving from outside to in, stabilizes it in time, though, in truth, no stabilization is possible without the activity of both.54 Spinning into each other, these movements create a “floating entity” or grid/human vortex ring motored 58

by a “ghost effect,” a circulating vacuum, or originary distinction, which convects the entity forward.55 At the level of the group or individual, the impulse is to deny, ignore, or expel this “uncanny” other and seal off one’s borders, but to do so is to foreclose any further forward progress and thus the dynamic that sustains the whole. This dilemma is poignantly illustrated by Walter Benjamin in the ninth of his Theses on the History of

Philosophy.

"Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.56

Figure 5. Cross-section of a smoke ring. “The structure of a smoke ring is actually a tightly wound toroidal spiral.”57

Storms, such as that blowing in from Benjamin’s Paradise, result from the meeting of faster and slower moving air. They have at their core a low pressure zone such as that which, in miniature, powers the vortex ring. Coiling up around this core is the history of 59

high and low pressure zones, Benjamin’s ever-growing “pile of debris,” or, in our model of the grid, the detritus of instantiations past. And Benjamin’s angel, carried along by that which he is powerless to stop, forced to bear witness to the havoc and destruction it wreaks, stands in for all who find themselves convected by a progress they feel impotent to interrupt, for to impede “progress” is to arrest the vortex ring’s forward motion, or that movement necessary to its survival and, arguably, to that of life itself.

Yet, at the same time, it is precisely this movement which, as Benjamin understood, threatens both. What is to be done?

Benjamin seemed to believe that a richer understanding of the temporal dimension(s) would be necessary to any solution to this conundrum as we shall explore in the fourth chapter. But, clearly, decoupling forward motion from our current understanding of “progress” is a move which he might favor, a possibility which

Duchamp explores in the final chapter.

Abstraction of the Grid: From Gridiron to Cartesian Space

In the last section, three material examples from pre-history revealed how the

“order of pure relationship” known as the grid circulates between the internal, topological and the external, Euclidian environments of the human. We saw how the grid becomes amplified and re-mediated each time it (re)encounters itself through the gaze and haptics of the human (phosphene; net/loom; gridiron) and how the human, in turn, becomes re-mediated in its own right (introspection, individuation,

subjectification) by this (re)encounter. We learned, too, how a dissipative system, or an inside with a co-constitutive, coiled-up outside continuously circulating through it, is necessarily self-convecting and, in combination with its orbital or toroidal movement, self-sustaining. And we learned how the relationship between the grid and the human, too, might be characterized as one of convection as each successively takes its turn as a vortex ring pulling the other forward.

In this section, we will be examining how the grid transitions from the material to the discursive register, or how its unique coordinate system shifts from the foreground in physical systems such as cave paintings, textiles and gridiron to the background in the abstractions of first graticule, then single-point perspective and finally Cartesian space. The dynamic of these transitions remains consistent with that described in the last two sections. Thus the focus here will be less on the mechanics of remediation and more on how both grid and human are mutually affected by its co- constitutive dynamic. For, as we will remember, each serves as medium for the other, with the grid finding in the human its sole means for evolution, and the human discovering in the grid a sort of perpetual motion machine, a mechanism for cleaving the world together and apart in an ever-widening gyre of proliferating differentiation.

Applying Artigiani’s earlier quote to this dynamic, we could then say: “Theirs is a complementary relationship, and neither can be imagined independently of the other.

Nor can one be said to be more fundamental than or to dictate to the other.”

Additionally addressed in this section is the question of why, though some version of the 61

grid is present in almost every culture, it becomes the animating feature of only a select few, at least initially, and then only at certain times in these cultures’ histories.

The Graticule

The first part of our analysis then begins with tracing how the gridiron first becomes decoupled from a specific cultural, geographical context and then deployed as a machine or algorithm for the production of citizen/subjects. This requires an investigation into the origins of citizenship as such and why it was thought that the grid might further its spread.

The Greek philosopher and sage Solon is generally credited with being the first to codify rules of governance, offering the demos some measure of control in their own affairs.58 Internecine squabbling among the oligarchs in Athens in 632 B.C.E. resulted in the former requesting of Solon that he mediate their affairs so as to prevent them from bringing ruin upon themselves. He acceded to this request and arrived at a solution which required the oligarchs share political power with the hoi polloi. The former accepted his ruling because it maintained their exclusive right to govern, and the latter did the same because they were, for the first time, empowered to revoke this right by majority vote. His solution also stipulated that no Athenian could ever own another, thus establishing the concept of a civil right. Thus began a political trend within Greece and its colonies towards the development of a citizen-based form of self-governance, one which some one-hundred and forty years later Hippodamus of Miletus (498 B.C.E.

— 408 B.C.E.) was to articulate in material form through the then new art of urban planning.

While Aristotle credits Hippodamus with having invented this “new art,” it is most likely not, as is traditionally reported, because he believed him to have invented the orthogonal urban plan. Classics scholar Alfred Burns argues persuasively that

Aristotle would have known, for example, that Hippodamus’ plan for the rebuilding of his home city, Miletus (his first project in 473 B.C.E.), merely followed, to a large extent, its original, centuries-old, orthogonal layout.59 He would also have known that a similar plan had been employed in laying out a number of Greek colonies in Sicily, including

Syracuse and Megara Hyblaea, long before Hippodamus’ birth.60 No, Aristotle

(begrudgingly) acknowledged Hippodamus’ talents not because he was the inventor of the gridiron but because he was “an [aspiring] adept in the knowledge of nature… and the first person not a statesman who made inquiries about the best form of government.”61 He was, in other words, what some might consider the first political philosopher and one who understood the need to articulate the necessary relationship between the discursive and the material. Though he did not invent the orthogonal plan, he recognized in its uniform relations of streets; insulae (or rectangular blocks); and lots an opportunity to reinforce and disseminate the egalitarian ethos he championed. This idea is bolstered by the way he reiterated these relations at the macro level, dividing the city into what Aristotle describes as three equal areas:

one of artisans, one of husbandsmen, and a third of armed defenders of the state. He also divided the land into three parts, one sacred, one public, the third private: the first was set apart to maintain the customary worship of the gods, the second was to support the warriors, the third was the property of the husbandsmen. He also divided laws into three classes, and no more, for he maintained that there are three subjects of lawsuits - insult, injury, and homicide. He likewise instituted a single final court of appeal, to which all causes seeming to have been improperly decided might be referred; this court he formed of elders chosen for this purpose....He also enacted that those who discovered anything for the good of the state should be honoured: and he provided that the children of citizens who died in battle should be maintained at the public expense...As to the magistrates, he would have them all elected by the people, that is, by the three classes already mentioned, and those who were elected were to watch over the interests of the public, of strangers, and of orphans.62

In the manner of his contemporary and future patron Pericles, then, Hippodamus made manifest physically the democratic ideals he articulated rhetorically, though his approach, unlike that of the former, was based less on a love of the arts than on the rational logics of number and proportion for which Miletus, his place of birth, was known.

Figure 6. Hippodamian Plan: City of Miletus

For Miletus, a prosperous and powerful cultural center in Asia Minor (then a part of Greece), is considered to be the birthplace of both science and philosophy, home not only to Thales, deemed by Aristotle to be the first philosopher, but also of his fellow pre-

Socratics Anaximenes and Anaximander, the latter being the creator of the first world map. Together, these three founded what came to be called the Milesian School of philosophy, known for its attempt to explain the cosmos in terms of matter and its interactions rather than in those of the mysticism that was popular at the time.

According to Boyer in A History of Mathematics, Thales was “the first man in history to whom specific mathematical discoveries have been attributed.”63 He is also reported to have been the first to have measured the height of the pyramids by using the length of their shadows and the concept of self-similar triangles, an accomplishment which no doubt left an impression on his student, Pythagoras.64

So, the city-state of Miletus is credited with having given birth to a surprising number of (Greek) firsts: urban planner, political philosopher, natural philosopher, mathematician, and to have fostered the career of the first geometer. What was it about this Ionian metropolis of fifty thousand that made it a crucible of modernity, or what cultural theorist Sanford Kwinter describes as “a reverse stream that is present virtually (but relatively rarely actualized) throughout history, emerging here or there as a kind of counterhistory or counterpractice…a transvaluation of all values?”65 Clearly its wealth, cosmopolitanism and location “as a gateway between Aegean and Anatolian

worlds”66 played a role, but there is also its history as a gridded city, the foundations of which, as noted, are believed to have predated Hippodamus’ plan by hundreds of years.

If true, one then could argue that the rectilinear environment itself might have effected such a transvaluation of values among these philosophers, mathematicians and planners, inspiring in them a vision of a type “of Being free of any transcendent unity and without reference to anything outside itself as its cause or ground.”67

This is the logic of the self-referencing, self-generating grid, a timeless algorithm that antecedes that which it produces and whose unvarying rhythm entrains all who enter its coordinate architecture. By lodging itself within the psyches-somas of its inhabitants, it makes cognizable/tangible the concept of an “order of pure relationship,” of a floating variable detached from any particular material substrate, of a citizen- subject, city-state, or cosmos capable of creating its own ground of being. And it is a concept which can be exported, not only in the form of a foundational urban plan enactive of an egalitarian ideal, but also in the guise of a purely rational, practical argument for parsimony and progress.68 Mysticism, monarchs and the gods would each meet their match in this simplest of geometric configurations, though millennia would pass before it gained the absolute advantage.69

In the short term, between 600 – 300 B.C.E., however, it was perhaps Greece’s most important export. Some three hundred colonies based on the Hippodamian model are thought to have been established during this period in the eastern Mediterranean

within modern day Turkey, Italy, Sicily, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya70 (a number the

Romans would more than double during their own pursuit of empire, even as they converted the grid plan for use as a tool of totalitarian control).71 Three of these colonies are of importance to the genealogy of the grid: the Hellenistic city of Cyrene in modern Libya, original home of Eratosthenes (276 – 194 B.C.E), the inventor of a proto- longitude and latitude;72 Ptolemais Hermiou in upper Egypt, founded c. 300 B.C.E., the birthplace of Claudius Ptolemy (90 – 168 AD), the first to make use of a coordinate system of parallels and meridians to construct a world atlas; and Alexandria, established by Alexander the Great as his new Pharaonic capital c. 332 B.C.E., home for both of the aforementioned geographer/mathematicians for most of their adult lives. All three cities operated under a Greek style of government with a constitution and some form of democratic self-rule, each thrived well beyond the Hellenistic period when Greek power was at its zenith and each is believed to have been built on an orthogonal plan.

Figure 7. Eratosthenes’ map of the world, circa 220 B.C. (reconstruction). 67

As with the gridiron and its effects on Milenesians such as Thales and

Hippodamus, it is impossible to attribute Eratosthenes’ invention of the graticule solely to his having spent the bulk of his life in a gridded environment. Growing up in Egypt, the birthplace of surveying,73 for example, might also be expected to have influenced his interest in mathematics and geodesy. And we might expect, too, the pyramids and great temples and his studies in the great library of Alexandria (of which he would later become head) to have piqued his interest in astronomy, providing us with ample explanations for what might have inspired him to conceive not only of a gridded planet, but also of how this idea might be used to draw the first map of the world and to measure the circumference of the earth (which he did to within an amazing two percent accuracy). But, as before, the method here is not to argue for a strict relationship of cause and effect between exposure to and remediation of the grid, but rather to suggest that feedback loops such as those which circulate between body and environment often have the effect of altering both, as in Steigler’s example of the stone ax and hominid brain.

The exterior does not precede the interior, any more than the interior precedes the exterior—at stake is an originary complex through which they compose…"Interiority" sounds like a potentiality of which exteriorisation would be the act (in Aristotelian terms)—the expectation or promise of, the tendency to, exteriorisation. But expectation already means projection and future—anticipation. Thus the problem is that the tool appears to be both the result and the condition of anticipation. The tool is like a mirror, a place of recording and inscription but also a surface of reflection, the reflection that time is, as if the human were reading and linking his future in the technical…And if this technical becoming is not simply directed by the "who," then does the "what" have a return effect on the "who," governing its differentiation? The "who" is differentiated by the non-living, by the "what.”74

Exposure to the grid on the part of humans, in other words, might be considered a necessary but not sufficient explanation for their involvement in its remediation.

Subject to the Graticule

While Eratosthenes’ achievements are remarkable, our interest in them here stems more from what they have to tell us about the subjectification of the human than in how they advanced the cause of natural philosophy. For it is in its instantiation as

(proto-) longitude and latitude, meridians and parallels, that we see the grid take a dramatic leap from the material to the discursive, from that which is tangible, visible to the naked eye (warp and weft, cross streets and avenues) to that which, in this instance, must be inferred from occupying an imaginary spatiotemporal location. To draw or view a plan of a city or region is, of course, already to enjoy an elevated vantage point. To imagine the earth as a partitionable sphere, floating in space, however, is to become virtual, to detach oneself from one’s physical being and to adopt a transcendent perspective. In other words, it is to engage in a form of abstraction more readily accomplished by those who have become habituated to the “endlessly repeatable” virtual coordinate system of the Hippodamian plan, one such as Aristarchus, for example, who studied in Alexandria under the atheist philosopher Strato of Lampsacus and who was the first to propose the concept of a heliocentric cosmos. Having lived its abstractions, he, as well as Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, is then a product of the algorithm of the grid, one primed to reproduce by opening up new areas of investigation, new territories, be they actual or virtual, for colonization. Each of these astronomer/ 69

mathematicians is equally comfortable with representing the actual – tracing the

(apparent) movement of the stars or the grid plan of their home city – as they are with presenting the virtual – the ratios between objects viewable or imaginable only from a transcendent perspective (a spherical earth in relation to sun and moon, regions of the globe in relation to each other).

Figure 8. Aristarchus' 3rd century B.C.E. diagram of the relative sizes of (from left) the Sun, Earth and Moon, from a 10th century AD Greek copy.

Each, in other words, is ready to adopt the disembodied perspective necessary to remediate the grid in the virtual realm opened up by the mathesis of the graticule.

The gridiron, through the medium of Eratosthenes, remediates itself as the graticule, while some four hundred years later the graticule, through the medium of

Ptolemy, re-mediates itself as the world atlas. But, of course, the human, too, is remediated in this cycle of closure and re-entry. In order to comprehend the concept of earth as reticulated globe, the subject must adopt, as mentioned above, a transcendent 70

perspective, one which locates him not only above a given city or region but in the void of outer space. It is a position which can be occupied only virtually, and in this it resembles the position the subject must assume when viewing a perspective painting.

What we are really observing, in this first geological age of perspective, the epoch of the vanishing point, is the transformation of subject into object: like the camera, the painting of perspective clears away the diffuse, non-localised nebula of imaginary definitions and substitutes a definition from the outside. In its final form…the only position for the viewing subject proposed and assumed by the image will be that of the Gaze, a transcendent point of vision that has discarded the body…and exists only as a disembodied punctum.75

By being willing to substitute, however briefly, in place of its lived experience of the local the graticule’s rationalized representation of the global, the individuated human begins a transition from subject to object. The citizen/subject becomes an incorporeal, dimensionless punctum, though one rewarded with a god’s eye view of an earth that is measurable, quantifiable and thus, in some ways, controllable. In helping the graticule to objectify (what now appears as) the planet in this way, the cartographer-colonizers are themselves objectified as it is they who serve as the medium through which the grid remediates itself.

But, as noted, their environment has prepared them for this transition for, by occupying the coordinates of the grid, they have absorbed not only its rational logics but also its perspectival ratios. Casting their gaze down the streets of their home cities of

Cyrene, Ptolemais Hermiou, or Alexandria, they would have encountered the three- dimensional equivalent of the vanishing point first used to organize two-dimensional, pictorial space in Renaissance Italy. Though the vanishing point is always and everywhere present in the viewing plane, a feature, as we shall see in the next chapter, 71

of stereoscopic vision, its effects become exaggerated within the orthogonal framework shared by the gridded city and perspectival painting. This framework is constructed of a system of transversals and rays which, when organized by the vanishing point, reflect back to the viewer a location “infinitely far in the distance,” one “unoccupiable by a person or indeed any physical object.”76 That the viewer occupies the mirror-image of this unoccupiable point and can only exist as a punctum within the logics it establishes would not have been obvious to our cartographer-colonizers and, indeed, would not become apparent until painters such as Velasquez and Vermeer gestured toward this effect of perspective in their self-referential paintings.77 But one might expect the inhabitants of a gridded environment to have internalized its logics, including those of the vanishing point/punctum, and to reflect this in their ability to imagine objects or relationships which lie outside the realm of the phenomenological. Just as occupants of the gridded cities of Babylon and Borsippa, in other words, are believed to have been the first to use algorithms in computation (specifically for the calculation of square roots), so it should not surprise us to learn that it was citizens of the Hippodamian- planned city of Alexandria who were the first to envisage the earth as a measurable, free-floating sphere (and one which, in the case of Aristarchus, circled the sun).78 While it is conceivable that any analytically-minded interlocutor might be able to entertain such a counter-intuitive idea, it would seem that those who have become entrained by the logics of the grid are already primed to adopt the non-occupiable position of the disembodied punctum entertaining such an idea requires.

Despite the great preponderance of Greek and Roman gridded settlements during this period (c. 300 BCE – 200 AD), it would appear that relatively few individuals were able to achieve this unique perspective. Aristarchus’ heliocentric model was largely dismissed by his contemporaries as either impious (Cleanthes, head of the Stoics) or mathematically meaningless (Archimedes). Eratosthenes’ concept of the graticule would fare better, influencing Crates, the creator of the first globe, and, of course,

Ptolemy, but it too, suffered from what might be described as an indifference on the part of other cartographers towards the mathematization of space, such as Posidonius

(whose own world map dispensed with longitude and latitude and underestimated the circumference of the earth by almost thirty percent) and Dionysius Periegetes (a contemporary of Ptolemy whose failure to employ a standard of measure in his mapping practice begins to show the move away from cartography and towards the sort of cosmography which is to dominate the medieval period). It is then left to Strabo, an

Alexandrian scholar and compiler of all pre-Christian geographical knowledge; Marinus of Tyre, geographer/mathematician and proponent of the use of longitude and latitude in map-making; and, especially, Ptolemy some 400 years later, to advance the mathesis of Eratosthenes.

Ptolemy is renowned for, among other things, having produced the first atlas, his Geographia which depicted the known world in a series of 27 maps – 26 regional and one mappamundi. Described as the first scientific geographer, he is credited with having solved the problem of transferring geographical information from a three- 73

dimensional globe onto a two-dimensional plan by inventing the conical and modified spherical projections.

Figure 9. A reconstruction of Ptolemy’s conic projection, suggested for the construction of a map of the habitable world.

We find in his atlas the first example of a true graticule79 in that the ratios described by the parallels and meridians remain uniform throughout, keeping distance and scalar distortions to a minimum. Such accuracy would have been a boon to Rome’s expansionary aspirations. Unfortunately for both the latter and the graticule, within less than a hundred years of the atlas’ introduction, the Empire was to begin to experience a series of shocks (assassination, plague, civil war, invasion) which would lead to its decline and ultimate collapse two centuries later. Much of the knowledge that had been gained during the prior two millennia would be lost in the one to follow, including many of the technologies of the grid discussed here. Not only was there little need for accurate maps in a fragmented world turned insular and xenophobic, but even less for a planned town or settlement which conformed to a grid, allowing it to be navigated 74

easily by invaders. Instead of a focus on expansion – of trade, rational knowledge, hegemony – the emphasis in the West during this era was on fortification, religiosity

(specifically Christianity) and, in the High to Late Middle Ages, scholasticism. The overall dynamic is perhaps best described as involutionary – inward-turning and self-enclosing – as reflected in the morphology of the medieval hill towns which began to populate areas left vulnerable by the receding tide of empire. Only the technology of the loom (and, of course, its distant cousin, writing) would remain to remind the knowledge-seeker of the logic of the grid and the practical value of its mathesis.

Linear Perspective

This would begin to change in the 11th and 12th centuries when the writings of

Aristotle were “recovered” (which is to say translated from the largely dead Greek language into Latin) and introduced into the increasing number of cathedral schools and universities that were being established during this period. His heretical if well- reasoned arguments pertaining to the (non)existence of divine providence and the soul would send shock waves through these centers of learning, sparking philosophical debates among their theologically-minded scholars. The on-going Crusades and dissemination of these and similar antiquarian texts increased interest in the knowledge of the ancients more generally, leading to the translation in Sicily, then a thriving cosmopolitan center, of some the works of Euclid and Ptolemy. It was not until 1400, however, that a copy of the latter’s Geographia found its way to the West via

Constantinople and another ten before it was translated and its maps gradually made 75

available to collectors. Its reintroduction to a Western audience newly interested in other peoples, lands and knowledges would prove momentous in the scope of history in that its gridded logics would soon come to dominate those that had been in place for a millennium. For these would be put to use in a colonizing effort that would come to dwarf any the world had yet known, wresting control both of physical space, as geometrized maps and charts allowed their possessors to move about the planet almost at will, and mental space, as the process of the objectification of the subject, begun in

Hellenistic times (but cut short by the Roman Empire’s disintegration) could begin anew, only this time in the form of a powerful new transformational technology – linear perspective.

By the beginning of the 15th century, then, the grid had been reduced to a shadow of its former self, employed mostly by tapestry makers and local surveyors. But as with vortex rings which release a crown of miniature, self-similar copies upon collision with an opposing force, so too did the grid seed the future with miniatures of itself. One of these, in the form of Ptolemy’s Geographia, found fertile soil in Florence where an elite group of artists and scholars had become newly fascinated by the philosophical and aesthetic systems of classical antiquity. Arguably among these were the architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi and humanist polymath Leon Batista

Alberti, though whether either of these men drew their inspiration for their contributions to linear perspective directly from Ptolemy’s atlas remains a matter of debate. What is almost universally accepted, however, is that Brunelleschi was the first 76

to demonstrate the mechanics of linear perspective (with his now famous experiment at the Florentine Baptistery wherein he showed how the use of the vanishing point enables the artist to transpose accurately the proportions in the visual field) and that, roughly ten years later, Alberti, his friend and fellow Florentine, was the first to mathematize its ratios in his famous treatise De Pictura (On Painting). Also beyond dispute is that the logic of the grid makes a radical resurgence in this same time and place and that this is due in no small measure to the interest these two, among others, took in

(re)introducing to their contemporaries the aesthetic forms and values of classical antiquity.80 While evidence for the Geographia’s direct involvement in the inventions of

Brunelleschi and Alberti might be considered circumstantial by some and compelling to others, the outcome of the debate remains somewhat incidental to the argument being made here.

For what is of importance is that the grid resurfaces after a long hiatus and is almost immediately embraced and remediated by 15th century Florentines who know almost nothing of its logics. Being familiar with the dynamic of the grid, we should not be surprised by this, for we are aware that, though they might know little of the grid, it cannot be said that it is foreign to them. This is because, as we will remember, all systems are convected by the circulation at their core of that from which they distinguish themselves. Every system has folded within itself a sign or map of the originary distinction it made establishing the boundary between what is interior and exterior to it, which, in the case of medieval Europe, would be the digital logics of the 77

grid. Thus it is that the medieval subject would have been familiar with the latter, or at least its ghost, because it is this which would have circulated through the coiled material-discursive armature of the era, animating its persistently analog logics and haunting the medieval subject with its lost promise of progress and a secular paradise on earth. Thus whether the cascade of change which was to originate in 15th century

Florence and sweep through the world in the centuries to follow was triggered by

Alberti’s and Brunelleschi’s familiarity with Ptolemy’s atlas, as the majority of scholars believe, or by other means, such as their interest in astronomy and contact with texts such as Ptolemy’s Almagest (his treatise on the subject) and Euclid’s Optics, as others suggest, is of little concern to us. These two were clearly haunted by the logics of the grid as were fellow 15th century artists Masolino da Panicale, Masaccio, Mantegna, Fra

Angelico and Leonardo, logics which were not to be denied. But at the same time, as art historian Samuel Edgerton points out, it also seems “…clear that there could have been no appreciation or application of linear perspective in pictures and no appreciation or application of Brunelleschi's modular system of architecture without the kind of space structuration Ptolemy's atlas now encouraged in the Renaissance mind.”81

At a minimum, it then would seem, the atlas contributed to the creation of a cultural environment which was favorable to the grid’s (re)emergence and one which would further its eventual dominance of the material-discursive field. But before this could happen, it is almost as if all trace, save for isolated instances, of the grid’s memory

– of the hopes it had raised and the havoc it had wreaked – had to be erased from the 78

mind of the human.82 Only in this way could the second impulse of the modern move frictionlessly into our own era. With the way cleared and the graticule’s resurgence ensuring “progress” in the material domain (improved mapping of geographical areas to be colonized), it was left to linear perspective, the latter’s remediated avatar, to further progress in the discursive. This it accomplished by endowing the artist with the ability to mimic nature exactly, capturing her truth through the use of the vanishing point, as demonstrated by Brunelleschi, and projective geometry as described by Alberti in his De

Pictura. “I use a thin veil, finely woven, dyed whatever colour pleases you and with larger threads [marking out] as many parallels as you prefer. This veil I place between the eye and the thing seen, so the visual pyramid penetrates through the thinness of the veil.”83 The punctum, or disembodied observer, towards which the gridiron had merely gestured subliminally in classical antiquity, is here in the ratios of perspective and the

Figure 10. Artist employing Alberti’s grid method for drawing in perspective.

immobilization of the observer, formulated exactly. In art historian Norman Bryson’s terms, "Alberti's conception of the subject is already Cartesian in its reduction of the 79

space of painting to dimensionless punctuality.”84 The ratios of the grid and the structuration of space they engender, in other words, give rise to a tripartite subject/object/punctum (as we saw earlier) for whom the experience of mind/body contradictions, for better or for worse, might be expected. On the positive side of the ledger, such contradictions might be said to have facilitated the adoption of the disembodied view necessary for discoveries such as Aristarchus theory of the heliocentric universe. On what some might consider the negative side, they can be seen to destabilize confidence in the reality of material existence such that one has only one’s performance of doubt to affirm one’s being.

Cartesian Grid

Such, of course, was the case with René Descartes, but, happily, he then leveraged his anxiety over the distortional effects of corporeal perception, in particular vision,85 to create the foundations of modern Western philosophy.

I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly this "I" - that is, the soul by which I am what I am - is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist.86

Here in his Discourse on the Method, Descartes outlines the radical rupture for which he is justly famous, separating mind from body, inside from outside, immanent from transcendent. Arguably no single philosophical gesture has led to a greater proliferation of material-discursive objects than has this simple attempt to ground thought in itself, 80

with the proliferation continuing apace today.87 Though most scholars agree that he did indeed achieve the “transvaluation of all values” that, according to Kwinter, accompanies thinking “Being…without reference to anything outside itself,”88 there is debate about what role the prior invention of perspective and, by association, the grid played in this transvaluation. In the above quote, Descartes describes what sounds like the experience of the disembodied punctum we associate with the logics of linear perspective. And, indeed, a number of philosophers and art historians have come to assume a causal relationship between the 15th century introduction of perspectival logics and Descartes’ construction, in the cogito, of the objective observer (mind imagining itself capable of thinking without the body).89

But others find evidence for a retrograde origin of Descartes’ rational subject.

Art historian Lyle Massey, for example, suggests that Descartes does not construct the relationship between this subject and the extended world perspectivally, but instead anchors his system in the performative act of doubting/thinking and in the “meta- perspectival” positionality of the rational observer. Drawing on the work of colleague

Karsten Harries, Massey notes that Descartes can ascertain the validity of his point-of- view only by acknowledging that there exist differences between individual viewpoints.

To acknowledge this is already to assume a “meta-view” or the position of what Harries terms the “angelic ‘I’.” Massey then recommends scholars replace the dimensionless punctum, of the subject/object/punctum triumvirate associated with linear perspective, with Harries’ meta-perspectival angelic ‘I.’90 Self-certainty is then only achieved through 81

a process of “disorientation” and the subsequent anchoring of “self-knowledge to an impossibility (irrationality).”91 Massey views this arguably scholastic construction as capturing the essence of Descartes’ rational subject far better than theories which assign to the latter a spatial positionality little indicated in Descartes’ writings. “The spatiality of Descartes' ‘world view’ is similarly ambiguous and in fact closer in spirit to the kind of decentered model presented by Nicolas of Cusa, in which subjectivity becomes a product of a kind of misperception, a dislocation rather than an emplacement.”92

In some ways this discussion belongs more properly in the next chapter, where issues of stereoscopic vision and perspective are more directly addressed, but given the central importance of the cogito to the development and subsequent unfolding of the

Cartesian grid in the modern era, we would be remiss not to examine its origins more closely. And what we find in so doing is that, just as mathematics can never be grounded in its own logics93 but requires of its practitioners something of a “leap of faith,” so too does Descartes’ axiomatic system of rational argument have at its core an element of the irrational. Not only is this true epistemologically, with his ability to

‘think’ being the functional output of a double negative94 (his inability to doubt that he is doubting), but, according to art historians such as Massey and Harries, ontologically as well; only by relinquishing claim to a perspectival positionality and adopting instead that of the angelic ‘I’ (wherein each sees himself diffracted through the perspective of all others) can he gain access to the certainty of his own existence. That this kind of 82

convoluted or topological dynamic should result in something as paradigmatically rational as an abstract coordinate grid on which algebraic equations can be translated into geometric forms, and vice versa, seems counter-intuitive. And yet, looking back, we find each successive closure and re-entry of the grid following a similar pattern, where early would-be adoptees of a new iteration must decouple from an established subject position before transitioning into the one just forming. Some, of course, are unable to bridge the inevitable gap that separates what retrospectively has become the two worldviews, such as Cleanthes and Archimedes in the case of the heliocentric paradigm. And those who are first to initiate such a shift are most at risk of failing to realize fully their goal, as there is as yet no stable formation for them to transition into.

Those who are successful in their attempts, however, are often aided by dreams or visions. Such was the case, as we saw, with the dreamers/painters of Lascaux, but so too was it with Descartes himself. In what he called his Little Journal, now lost but copied in part by his 17th century biographer Andre Baillet, Descartes recorded three dreams “which he imagined could have come only from on high.”95 Occurring in one night in quick succession, the sequence inspired in him first fear as he found himself being buffeted about by a malevolent phantom and then exaltation as the contents of the last dream convinced him that he had discovered the foundations of “a wonderful science.” Numerous scholars, including Sigmund Freud and Descartes himself, have provided interpretations and some valuable insights into the possible meaning of these dreams, but our interest in them here is limited to two fairly simple observations. First, 83

as evidenced by the great many scholars who have tried to diminish or dismiss their importance, it is difficult to reconcile Descartes’ personal investment in these dreams with his otherwise thoroughly rationalist agenda. But for us, having already recognized irrationality to be at the core of this agenda, it is almost to be expected. And second,

Descartes himself must have recognized how his reporting on these dreams’ cathartic nature, not only in the lost notebook but also in the Discourse, would have been interpreted by some as undermining of the “foundation of [his] wonderful discovery.”96

Dreams, after all, as he informs us in the Method, are no more reliable a source for establishing reality than are the senses. And yet, here he announces that one has revealed to him “the wish of the Spirit of Truth that the treasures of all the sciences be unlocked for him.”97

Of all the iterations of the grid, past and future, Cartesian space perhaps best conveys the transformational potential of the grid’s formal properties; where before space was discontinuous and secondary to the Euclidian objects which defined its presence, suddenly, with Descartes, space emerges as “autonomous and preexisiting… independent of solid bodies, preceding them and containing them.”98 Shuffling off need of a material substrate, it reveals the crystalline logic of its coordinate structure and how this puts into relation objects once thought to be purely autonomous. No extended substance can escape the unyielding logics of its orthogonality, and yet these remain obscure to it, the grid having no way to recognize the mechanism that has convected it through these last centuries. It remains blind to the diffractional, meta- 84

perspectival, low-pressure zone at its core because such doesn’t exist for it within its

Umwelt. Descartes had at least an intuition of this irrational convection zone, one which he would appear to have embraced in some ways. And though it is his creations – the cogito, coordinate space and analytical geometry – which are most associated in the minds of some with the so-called “disenchantment of the world,” one can begin to see from the vantage point of the 21st century how the later iterations of these, especially parallel computing, are beginning to make the grid’s recursive dynamic and irrational core legible to itself. Whether this simply signals the initiation of a whole new cycle of the vortex ring-driven, grid/human assemblage, or whether one or both of these elements might be supplanted by others in the current post-human period is as of yet unknown but is a question that will be more fully explored in the final chapter.

And as to the question of whether or not Descartes had any suspicion that there were forces at work which eluded the logic of the grid, or that he might be introducing, buried within the mathesis of his coordinate space, a sort of hybrid rational/irrational technology, we might attempt to arrive at an answer by examining two suggestive images he left behind. The first is from his vortex theory of planetary motion as presented in 1633 in his book The World. It illustrates the swirling vortices of matter that Descartes believed explained the motion of all heavenly bodies, including the circular orbits of planets around the sun.

Figure 11. Descartes’ vortex theory of matter. “A New system of the World (1630-1633).”

And the second is a description of the “terrifying phantom” in the first of the three cathartic dreams that were to set him on his life’s path. As paraphrased by Baillet,

Descartes describes himself as experiencing a “great weakness on his right side,”99 forcing him to lean to the left and drag himself through the streets to escape from the ghost who had frightened him.

Because he was ashamed to walk in this way, he tried to straighten up, but he was buffeted by gusts that carried him off in a sort of whirlwind that spun him around three or four times on his 100 left foot sideways to get to the place he wanted to go.

Such images suggest that, while he may have been fully committed to the rationalist project, some part of his being had an intuition of the immense power of the non-linear, involutionary dynamic that escaped its coordinates.

Endnotes for Chapter Two

1 Michel Foucault. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books Edition. Random House: New York. p. xx. 2 Ibid., p. 74. Foucault gives us the summary formula of the Classical episteme: "…an articulated system of a mathesis, a taxinomia, and a genetic analysis. The sciences always carry within themselves, however remote it may be, an exhaustive ordering of the world; they are always directed too, towards the discovery of simple elements and their progressive combination; and at their center they form a table on which knowledge is displayed in a system contemporary with itself." 3 Rosalind Krauss. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 9. 4 “The marks left on the agencies of observation (the effect) are said to constitute a measurement of specific features of the object (the cause). In a scientific context, this process is known as measurement. (Indeed the notion of measurement is nothing more or less than a causal intra-action.) Whether it is thought of as measurement, or as part of the universe making itself intelligible to another part in its ongoing differentiating intelligibility and materialization, is a matter of preference. Either way, what is important about causal intra-actions is that “marks are left on bodies”: bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world as result of the specific cuts and reconfiguring that are enacted. Cause and effect emerge through intra-actions. Agential intra-actions are causal enactments.” Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 176. 5 Indeed, one might even trace the roots of Boolean logic to its dichotomous, positive/negative structure. 6 This is where the theories of Brian Rotman and Bruno Latour coincide. 7 Richard Lewontin. 1985. “The Organism as the Subject and Object of Evolution.” Scientia vol. 188. pp. 65-82. 8 Of course, this may be an anachronistic “framing” in that one could argue that we only come to model the picture plane as a rectangle after it has been thoroughly worked into our technologies. 9 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. “The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing the image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata — a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.” p. 10. 10 Triangles are inherently more stable than squares because their angles do not change under compression but shift load to the sides. One has to change the length of a side of a triangle in order to alter its shape. (http://www.teachengineering.org/view_activity.php?url=collection/cub_/activities/cub _intro/cub_intro_lesson01_activity1.xml). Accessed 11/5/12. 11 While it is true that the eyes of the long-bodied decapod crustaceans (shrimp, prawns, crayfish, lobsters) are known for their grid-like structure (the inspiration for microwave telescopes), the eyes themselves are spherical such that they exhibit no true 90 degree angle. See Michael F. Land. 2000. “Eyes with mirror optics.” Journal of Optics: A Pure and Applied Optics. Volume 2. Number 6. pp. 44-50. 12 For an informed if contentious debate on this issue see (http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/36437- the-simplest-unit-of-spatial-thought-is-the-right-angle/). Accessed 7/23/11. 13 James M. Adovasio , Bohuslav Klima and Olga Soffer. Sept. 1996. “Upper Paleolithic fibre technology: interlaced woven finds from Pavlo I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 years ago.” Antiquity. 70.269. p. 526.

14 Susan Buck-Morss. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 8. 15 Birds weave nests and build bowers while great apes make quasi-sophisticated sleeping nests in trees requisite of a tacit understanding of physical forces and material tolerances. One can imagine that humans might have recognized efficiencies in making more durable and portable versions of such structures. Evidence of twisted fiber cordage dating back to the Paleolithic (30,000 B.C.E.) suggests its use in construction of nets for hunting small prey and in the weaving of mats and baskets. Interleaving rather than mounding-up found plant materials is likely to have begun even earlier than this and is accomplished more readily with the improved hapticity commensurate with an upright posture. 16 Van J. Wedeen, Douglas L. Rosene, Ruopeng Wang, Guangping Dai, Farzad Mortazavi, Patric Hagmann, Jon H. Kaas, Wen-Yih I. Tseng. 2012. “The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways.” Science. Vol. 335. (6076). pp. 1628-1634. 17 James L. Kent. 2010. Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason. PIT Press: Seattle. Ch 09. 18 J. D. Lewis-Williams, T. A. Dowson, Paul G. Bahn, H.-G. Bandi, Robert G. Bednarik, John Clegg, Mario Consens, Whitney Davis, Brigitte Delluc, Gilles Delluc, Paul Faulstich, JohnHalverson, Robert Layton, Colin Martindale, Vil Mirimanov, Christy G. Turner II, Joan M.Vastokas, Michael Winkelman and Alison Wylie. April 1988. “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art.” Current Anthropology. Vol. 29, No. 2. pp. 201-245. See also: James L. Kent. Ibid. And Surfdaddy Orca. April 13, 2010. “Art, Neurobiology, and Mescaline: The Neuroaesthetics of Semir Zeki.” H+ magazine. Accessed 5/14/12. 19 As I write, new dating techniques have assessed the cave paintings at El Castillo in Spain, including rectilinear imagery, to be far older than those at Lascaux. “The biggest surprise was the age of several large red disks, also made by blowing pigment, at El Castillo: at least 40,800 years ago. Dozens of such disks and 40 hand stencils are in the same panel, along with rectangles and ovals, suggesting that 40,800 is the minimum age of the entire composition.” (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/us-usa- neanderthal-idUSBRE85D1B120120614). Accessed 6/23/12. 20 Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser & Edvard I. Moser. Aug., 2005. “Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex.” Nature. Vol. 436|11. pp. 801-806. 21The quote from Richard Lewontin at the beginning of this section captures my unease with suggesting that a boundary enclosing the human has been successfully established. I don’t want to presume that which we are, in some sense, trying to ascertain. 22 Keith Ansell Pearson.1999. Germinal Life: The difference and repetition of Deleuze. Routledge: London. p. 27. 23 Delanda associates this consistency with the attractors of dynamical systems theory rather than anything as static as the grid, and rightly so. However, examining the dynamic of the grid over millennia we find that it demonstrates a periodic orbit in what is, in effect, a state space, which, in cross-section, very much resembles a Poincaré section (see illustration on p. 14 of “closure and re-entry. The dotted line in this diagram is actually a Poincaré section).” 24 Topologist Louis Kaufman discusses George Spencer Brown’s logical system of distinction and indication. The first entry in Spencer-Brown’s mathematical treatise: We take as given the idea of a distinction and the idea of an indication, and that it is not possible to make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form. Louis H. Kaufman. “Laws of Form - An Exploration in Mathematics and Foundations.” Book draft. (http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Laws.pdf). Accessed 10/14/12. 25 “Closure thus defines a unity that is produced by the contained network of interactions producing themselves ‘as a unity in the space in which the components exist by constituting and specifying the unity’s boundaries as a cleavage from the background.’” André Reichel. 2011.“Snakes all the Way Down: 88

Varela's Calculus for Self-Reference and the Praxis of Paradise Systems.” Research and Behavioral Science, Volume 28, issue 6. pp. 646-662. p. 648. Citing Francisco Varela. 1981. “Autonomy and autopoiesis.” In: Self-Organizing Systems. An Interdisciplinary Approach. Eds. G. Roth and H. Schwegler. Campus Verlag: Frankfurt/ New York. pp. 14–23. p. 15. 26 Olga Soffer, James Adovasio and David Hyland. Aug., 2000. The "Venus" Figurines. Current Anthopology. 41(4). pp. 511-537. See also: Natalie Angier. December 14, 1999. “Furs for Evening, but Cloth Was the Stone Age Standby.” New York Times. 27 Ascher H. Shapiro. “National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films: Film Notes for Vorticity.” MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 8. (http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf/09VOR.pdf). Accessed 6/25/12. 28 It is like a tornado in that it is a spiral with a low pressure, convecting core. It is unlike a tornado in that it does not have the characteristic funnel shape and it is horizontal. In this sense, it is more like a supercell: “Many tornadoes result from the tilting of rotation around a horizontal axis. This horizontal vorticity is due to vertical shear of the wind in the storm's environment. Most supercell storms form in a sheared environment, with poleward winds near the ground and strong westerly winds aloft. The horizontal vortex tubes then are tilted as the air turns to rise in the storm's updraft, creating a component of spin about a vertical axis… The wind shear responsible for the horizontal vorticity may be storm- induced, rather than environmental.” B. Geerts and E. Linacre. June, 1998. “Tornado formation.” (http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap07/tornado_form.html). Accessed 10/22/12. 29 Lord Kelvin noted this when he proposed the vortex ring as the model for the then posited existence of the atom. For more on Kelvin’s vortex theory of the atom see: Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thomson). “On Vortex Atoms.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Vol. VI. 1867. pp. 94-105. Reprinted in Philosophy Magazine. Vol. XXXIV. 1867. pp. 15-24. 30 For a thorough analysis of the various axes of rotation and translation in the vortex ring see: T. Maxworthy. July 1977. “Some experimental studies of vortex rings.” Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Volume 81. Issue 03. pp. 465 – 495. 31 Rodney Cole. 1991. Introduction to Classical Fluids or Divergence, Curl, and Other Things that go Bump in the Night. University of California at Davis. (http://maxwell.ucdavis.edu/~cole/phy9b/notes/fluids_ ch3.pdf) p. 61. Accessed 6/28/12. See also: J. M. V. Rayner. 1980. “Vorticity and Animal Flight.” in Society for Experimental Biology. Seminar Series: Volume 5, Aspects of Animal Movement. H. Y. Elder, E. R. Trueman eds. Cambridge University Press: New York. pp. 177-199. 32 James M. Adovasio . Ibid. 33 There are exceptions of course, such as Stonehenge. 34 Michael E. Smith. Feb., 2007. “Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning.” Journal of Planning History. Vol. 6, No. 1. pp. 3-47. 35 J. H. Bodley. 2003. The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe. 36 James M. Adovasio. Ibid. – See also: Olga Soffer. June 2004. “Recovering Perishable Technologies through Use Wear on Tools: Preliminary Evidence for Upper Paleolithic Weaving and Net Making.” Current Anthropology. Volume 45. Number 3. 37 Lev Manovich. 2001. The Language of New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 6. Here Manovich uses the term “meta-medium” to refer to the digital computer. 38 Brian Rotman. 2008. Bringing Becoming Into Being: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 6. 39 As Kittler notes, “[t]he same cities that translated the anthropological schema of head, hand and torso in to the architectonic schema of palaces, streets and storehouses needed scripts for the processing, transmission and storage of their data. Friedrich Kittler. 1996. “The History of Communication Media.” Eds. Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Special Issues: ga114. Date Published: 7/30/1996. (www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=45). Accessed 10/11/12.

40 The long held notion that Babylon was a gridded city has been contested recently. Heather D Baker. 2007. “Urban form in the first millennium BC.” In The Babylonian World. Ed. G. Leick. Routledge: London. pp. 66-77. 41 Michael E. Smith. Ibid. 42 ”All nature is a continuum. The endless complexity of life is organized into patterns which repeat themselves—theme and variations—at each level of system. These similarities and differences are proper concerns for science. From the ceaseless streaming of protoplasm to the many-vectored activities of supranational systems, there are continuous flows through living systems as they maintain their highly organized steady states.” James Grier Miller. 1978. Living Systems. McGraw Hill: New York. p. 5. 43 Of course, another way to look at these developments is from the perspective of the newly emergent entity itself, that of the agrarian city. Just as the self-conscious, agentive human emerged from the orthogonal layering of white matter cells in the brain, so too, it would appear, does the city begin to emerge as an active participant in its own morphogenesis as the orthogonal grid begins to articulate and coordinate its parts (streets, lots, buildings, boundary) and processes (citizens/subjects). “We…see the idea of the city as an abstract, sometimes sacred, character assuming a personality and role in the administration of power and in the fate of rulers….” Simon Parker. 2008. Cities, Politics, and Power. Taylor and Francis: London. p. 26. 44 Robert Artigiani. 1991. “Model of Societal Self-Organization.”In Time, Rhythms and Chaos in the New Dialogue with Nature. Ed. George P. Scott. The Iowa State University State Press: Ames, IA. p. 114. 45 Brian Rotman. Ibid., pp. 6-7. 46 (http://mpec.sc.mahidol.ac.th/radok/physmath/physics/f3.htm#F3). Accessed 6/2/12. 47 With recent discoveries of their early and sophisticated nature, the importance attributed to woven fabrics in the development of the self-reflexive human has begun to grow. For more information see James M. Adovasio. Ibid. Also: (http://old.postgazette.com/healthscience/19990621vvenus2.asp). Accessed 7/3/12. 48 It is like a magician’s trick, one which riveted the attention of Lord Kelvin causing the one significant error of his otherwise illustrious career, his theory of the vortex atom. 49 Object oriented ontologists such as Graham Harman privilege this operationally closed, toroidal sense of the object or entity. Fractal ontologists, by contrast, recognize that the object/entity is at once closed, in the toroidal plane, yet open in the poloidal, as in a vortex ring. 50 In the terms topologist Louis H. Kauffman articulates: “At least one distinction is involved in the presence of self-reference. The self appears, and an indication of that self that can be seen as separate from the self. Any distinction involves the self-reference of “the one who distinguishes.” Therefore, self- reference and the idea of distinction are inseparable (hence conceptually identical). We explore self- reference by examining what appear to us as distinctions. Through experiencing self-reference, we come to understand the possibility of distinguishing.” L. H. Kaufmann. 1987. “Self-reference and recursive forms.” Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 10(1). pp. 53–72. p. 53. 51 A. Weber and Francisco Varela. 2002. “Life after Kant: natural purposes and autopoietic foundations of biological individuality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 1(2). pp. 97–125. p. 120. 52 Sara Ahmed argues that humans exist not so much as “selves” but as “nodal points” within an “affective economy.” This means that they exhibit a perpetual openness to the outside, one effected by emotions which “stick” to nodes differentially largely as a result of historical precedent: Emotions do not positively reside in the subject – a lack of positive residence which suggests that ‘we don’t always know how we feel.’ This does not mean that emotions do not involve subjects; emotions are felt and lived through the corporeal experiences of being-in-the-world. But the ‘involvement’ of emotions is precisely about how they open subjects to others and worlds, in ways that make any distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ impossible. Sara Ahmed. May – June 2003. “The politics of fear in the making of worlds.” Qualitative Studies in Education. Vol. 16, no. 3. pp. 377–398. p. 386. 90

53 Luhmann cites this as the operational closure of Maturana and Varela: “…closure does not mean empirical isolation. Closure is a highly selective, improbable, artificial achievement – not in the sense of intentional design, but as an outcome of evolution. The emergence of closed systems requires a specific form of relations between systems and environments; it presupposes such forms and is a condition of their possibility as well. The theory of ‘open systems’ describes these forms with the categories of input and output. This model postulates a causal chain in which the system itself serves as the connecting part linking inputs and outputs. The theory of autopoietic systems replaces the input/output mode with the concept of structural coupling. It renounces the idea of an overarching causality (admitting it, of course, as a construct of an observer interested in causal attributions), but retains the idea of highly selective connections between systems and environments.” Niklas Luhmann. 1992.“Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System.” Cardozo Law Review. Vol. 13. pp. 1419 – 1441. pp. 1431– 1432. 54 “If the unmarked state is now inserted, the result is the marked state and so on. For every odd number of crosses or marks, there appears to be some-thing from no-thing (Robertson,1999: 255); in fact, both are identical in the form of re-entry. George Spencer Brown‘s most out-standing contribution (Varela, 1979a: 138) was the realization that this behavior was in fact equivalent to that of imaginary numbers, that is, numbers that have an imaginary part i of the form i squared = -1. Although in normal mathematics, these numbers were interpreted as being ‘orthogonal’ to the real numbers, Spencer Brown interpreted his re-entering expressions as oscillations in time. Whereas the calculus produces space by the injunction to draw a distinction, by re-entering the calculus into itself, it produces time. Although Spencer Brown finished his work there, Varela decided to start his journey right here. (Varela, 1979a: 138) We have to pay attention to the fact that the double nature of self-reference, its blending of operand and operator, cannot be conceived of outside of time as a process in which two states alternate... Both aspects are evident in the idea of autopoiesis: the invariance of a unity and the indeﬁnite recursion underlying the invariance. Therefore we find a peculiar equivalence of self-reference and time, insofar as self-reference cannot be conceived outside time, and time comes in whenever self-reference is allowed. Francisco Varela. 1979. p. 125. This is exactly the conceptual foundation Varela needed for the question posed by Schrödinger. Life itself is autonomous; it arises out of itself and cannot be reduced to anything outside or inside its own creative, repetitive loop, where end products are fed back into the system as new points of departure (Marks- Tarlow et al., 2002).” André Reichel. Ibid. p. 8. 55 Rotman’s quote on writing concludes with: “This floating entity makes ideas of disembodied agency, action at a distance, and thought transference plausible. As a result all communicational media have about them an aura of the uncanny and the supernatural, a ghost effect which clings to them.” Brian Rotman. Ibid. p. 7. 56 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken Books: New York. pp. 257-258. 57 T. T. Lim and T. B. Nickels. Fluid Vortices. 1995. Ed. Sheldon I. Green. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, Netherlands. Chapter IV. p. 96. 58 “No meaningful, consistent concept of Athenian ‘citizenship’ existed before the time of Solon… A general theme in all of Solon's reforms was the creation of boundaries -- spatial, legal and even psychological…Solon established individual rights of property and, in allowing individuals to choose their own heirs, had, so Plutarch tells us raised ‘philia’ over ‘suggeneia’…Solon more sharply distinguished the privileges of the insider and the disabilities of the outsider, thus enhanced the growing ‘Athenian consciousness.’" Philip Brook Manville. 1990. The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. Princeton University Press: Princeton. pp. xiv and 265. 59 Alfred Burns. 1976.“Hippodamus and the Planned City.” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. Bd. 25, H. 4 (4th Qtr.) pp. 414-428. Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart.

60 Matthew Fitzjohn. 2007. “Equality in the colonies: concepts of equality in Sicily during the eighth to six centuries BC.” World Archaeology. Vol. 39.2. pp.215–228. 61 Alfred Burns. Ibid., p. 415. Quoting Aristotle. 1943. Politics. Trans. B. Jowett. Modern Library: New York. 62 Ibid., p. 416. Quoting Aristotle. pp. 1267b22-1268al4. 63 Carl Benjamin Boyer and Uta C. Merz. 1991. A History of Mathematics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: Hoboken. Thales’ five theorems: 1/ A circle is bisected by any diameter. 2/ The base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. 3/ The angles between two intersecting straight lines are equal. 4/ Two triangles are congruent if they have two angles and one side equal. 5/ An angle in a semi-circle is a right angle. 64 John F. Brock. 2004. History of Surveying and Measurement. WSHS2 – History of Surveying and Measurement. “Pyramids to Pythagoras: Surveying from Egypt to Greece – 3000 B.C. to 100 A.D.” FIG Working Week. Athens, Greece. May 22-27. 65 Sanford Kwinter. 2001. Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 35. 66 Alan M. Greaves. 2002. Miletos: A History. Routledge: London. p. 45. 67 Sanford Kwinter. Ibid., p. 35. 68 “Plato and Aristotle who, concerned with civic strife caused by economic, social and political inequalities, suggested that urban planning could provide a correspondence between physical organization and social structure, possibly acting as a mechanism for achieving equality, unity and order.” Matthew Fitzjohn. Ibid. p. 217. 69 This is not to say that the logic of the grid has not also lent itself to the furtherance of totalitarian regimes (see endnote 52) but only that, as with rationality in general, it has the potential to act as a counterweight to transcendence-based regimes of power. 70 Lewis Mumford. 2012 (1922). The Story of Utopias. Kessinger Publishing: Whitefish, MT. p. 26. 71“From the first century BC to the fourth century AD, the Romans built and expanded cities according to a rigid codex. Based on the model of the military camp and reflecting its discipline, the Roman colonial town shows a square or rectangular grid derived from two central axes often orientated to the cardinal directions…Subjugated peoples in the colonies were often moved into the towns, both for control and for assimilation. Walls surrounded the towns where defense was required. While wealth and resources were funneled to Rome and regional capitals, the colonial towns helped to disseminate Roman culture and integrate distant lands into the empire. The grid plan, rigorously executed from Africa to Britain, made the global authority of Rome physically manifest.” Jill Grant. 2001. “The Dark Side of the Grid: Power and Urban Design.” Planning Perspectives. 16. pp. 219–241. p. 231. 72 Based on the map made by Dicæarchus of Messana more than a hundred years earlier, and which included an axis running from east to west through the Straits of Gibraltar, Sicily and the Taurus mountains, and another running from north to south through Rhodes. 73 Brock. Ibid. p. 4. Around 450 B.C. the first historian, Herodotus (c. 484-430/420 B.C.) of Halicarnassus (now Bodram, Turkey) gave us the first memorable record of what the early Greeks had obtained from Egypt: “Sesostris…made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants…If the river carried away any portion of a man’s lot… the King sent persons to examine and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss…From this practice I think geometry first came to be known in Egypt, whence it passed into Greece.” 74 Bernard Stiegler. 1998. Technics and Time,1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press: Stanford. pp. 152 – 154. 75 N. Bryson. 1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. Macmillan: London. p. 107. as quoted in Brian Rotman. 1987. Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. St. Martin’s Press: New York. p. 32. 76 Rotman. Ibid., p. 19. 77 Ibid., pp. 32-46. 78 Anaximander of Miletus was the first to start this tradition proposing a cosmology which had as its center a cylindrical earth supported by nothing other than itself, a model which the Pythagoreans would 92

later adopt (modifying the earth’s form to that of a sphere) and Aristotle would later prove to be accurate. 79 His work in this area was heavily influenced by Marinus of Tyre, by his own admission. 80 Together Alber and Brunelleschi traveled to Rome to tour the old ruins which would serve as inspira on for the la er’s ﬁrst commissioned structure, Ospedale degli Innocen (1419–ca.1445,) and the former’s comprehensive text on the architecture and planning of the ancient Romans, his De re aedificatoria (On the art of building in ten books). 81 Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr. Dec. 1974. “Florentine Interest in Ptolemaic Cartography as Background for Renaissance Painting, Architecture and the Discovery of America.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Vol. 33. No. 4. pp. 275-292. p. 287 82 In this sense the modernist impulse of the grid is laid bare, as described by Ruskin. “Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity…The human figures that epitomize modernity are defined by experiences such as childhood or convalescence, a freshness of perception that results from a slate wiped clear, from the absence of a pst that has not yet had time to tarnish the immediacy of perception (although what is thus freshly discovered prefigures the end of this very freshness).” John Ruskin. 2012 (1904). The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. 15. General Books: Memphis, TN. p. 27. 83 Leon Battista Alberti. 1956. On Painting. Trans. and ed. by John E. Spencer. Yale University Press: New Haven. p. 68. 84 Norman Bryson.1983. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven and London. p. 103. As quoted in Lyle Massey. 2007. Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective. Penn State Press: University Park, PA. pp. 23-24. 85 "…the sense of sight gives no less assurance of the reality of its objects than do the senses of smell and hearing, while neither our imagination nor our senses could ever assure us of anything without the intervention of our intellect." René Descartes. Discourse. 1985. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. and ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Donald Murdoch. 2 vols. Cambridge and New York. "I had many experiences which gradually undermined all the faith I had in the senses. Sometimes towers which had looked round from a distance appeared square from close up; and enormous statues standing on their pediments did not seem large when observed from the ground."(37) Second Meditation. 2:53. 86 Descartes. Ibid., 1985. 1:127. 87 “The modern Constitution allows the expanded proliferation of the hybrids whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies.” Bruno Latour. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 34. 88 Though, of course, in this Decartes was not entirely successful as he was forced to ground his intuition of perfection in a transcendent third substance, God. 89 See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form. Trans. Christopher Wood. New York, 1991 [1927]. See also: Norman Bryson. 1983. Ibid.; and Samuel Y. Edgerton. 1976. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York; and: James Elkins. 1996. The Poetics of Perspective. Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London. 90 He makes this move more intelligible by comparing it with the effect Nicholas of Cusa hoped to achieve with his gift of a painted icon to the brethren of a monastery. The portrait de Cusa gave the monks was of an omnivoyant God painted in such a way that the eyes followed the observer wherever he went. In an accompanying note, de Cusa encouraged the monks to notice how the eyes followed “in like manner with one going in a contrary direction to himself.” Lyle Massey. 1994. “Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry.” Renaissance Quarterly. Vol. 50, No. 4, Winter. pp. 1148-1189. p. 1161.

Owing to the revelation made by the witness (revelatio relatoris), he succeeds in realizing that the face abandons none of the walkers, even when their movements are contrary . . . . If he observes that the gaze leaves none of the persons present, he will see that this gaze is concerned with each one with as much care as if it were the only one to have the experience of being followed, to the extent that the one who is being looked at cannot conceive that another might be the object of the same attention. He will see that this gaze watches with extreme care over the smallest creature (minima) as over the largest (maxima) and over the totality of the universe. [Ibid., p. 28.] Rotman, commenting on this same passage in his book, Signifying Nothing, uses it as an example of the dominant “code of pre-perspectival visual images…whereby like is signified by like [and] where material of an iconic sign, its signifier, is supposed to image or resemble what it signifies….” [Rotman. Ibid., 1987. p. 22.] De Cusa’s attempt to inspire the monks to experience for themselves God’s meta- perspectival, non-spatial locatedness through the use of a ‘natural’ icon (for us a banal painter’s trick), then illustrates for Rotman the “pre-perspectival” semiotic system which will be supplanted during the Renaissance by one dominated by a human-conceived and “imposed system of perspective.” [Ibid.] Michel de Certeau offers yet another view of this passage, however, one more in line with Massey’s which focuses less on situating de Cusa’s icon and advisements within an analysis of the progressive unfolding of an imagistic semiotic than on grasping what significance his concept of a non- spatial, meta-perspectival viewer might have in its own right. For to actually enact what de Cusa exhorts the monks to do, that is, an occupation of the omnivoyant perspective of the icon, is to experience a radical loss of self that can only be reestablished through seeing through the eyes of all others. It requires that one "believe of the multitude what he does not see, in order to get out of his own uncertainty and to comprehend that the coincidence of all and each in 'one' (a gaze or faith) is 'possible'.” [Michel de Certeau. Fall, 1987. "The Gaze of Nicholas of Cuza." Diacritics. 17. pp. 2 – 38. p. 34. As quoted in Lyle Massey. 1994. Ibid. p. 1161. (This is in many ways the same move that Niklas Luhmann makes with respect to the subject who requires the perspective of others in order to ascertain closure). 91 Lyle Massey. Ibid., p. 1162. 92 Ibid. 93 I am referring here to Kurt Gödel’s ‘incompleteness theorems’ which are explained in more depth in the third chapter, ‘Artifacts of Vision.’ 94 The ‘double negative’ is also the source of the ‘irrationality’ that characterizes the Mandelbrot set in that it is the square root of -1 (also known as the imaginary number ‘i’) in its algorithm which prevents the set from achieving closure. 95 Michael Allen Gillespie. 2008. The Theological Origins of Modernity. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. p. 178. Leibniz also copied parts of the Little Notebook but failed to make any mention of Descartes’s dreams as recorded in the section entitled “Olympica” (probably a reference to Olympus and “the Hermetic spirits that point us in the direction of the truth”). 96 Alan Gabbey and Robert E. Hall. 1998. “The Melon and the Dictionary: Reflections on Descartes's Dreams.” Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 59, No. 4. Oct., pp. 651-668. p. 653. 97 Ibid., p. 654. 98 Sanford Kwinter. Ibid., p. 58. 99 John R. Cole. 1992. The Olympian Dreams and Youthful Rebellion of René Descartes. University of Illinois Press: Urbana and Chicago. pp. 32-40. 100 Ibid., p. 35.

Chapter Three: Artifacts of Vision

…technology is an ontologically and epistemologically charged mode of revealing. It discloses and by disclosing brings forth; it is a way of letting appear and thus generating being.1

– Pasi Väliaho

Images mediate humans’ access to the world. By compressing information they make comprehensible its patterns and processes. In this they act as signs substituting for the things they represent, but, in so doing, they also put the human at a remove from reality. What begins as a map-drawing operation, a technology for achieving orientation, quickly turns into a construction of screens. These images-as-screens then obscure the reality they are meant to represent until, in the terms mediologist Vilém

Flusser articulates, “human beings’ lives finally become a function of the images they create.”2 In the discussion that follows, we will examine how one such image, Aristotle’s scala naturae, or what later would come to be known as the “great chain of being,” came to dominate particularly Western epistemological and ontological models, and how this image is being challenged today as a result of the very technologies made possible by its reductive logics. Though other scholars such as Derrida, Baudrillard and

Rotman have similarly explored how signs and the significance ascribed to them result in models determinative of lived reality, it is Flusser’s analysis of the image that engages us

here, as it helps illuminate how vision itself acts as a screen shaping our understanding of such fundamental concepts as space, agency and scale.

In his recently translated 1983 text, Towards a Philosophy of Photography,

Flusser demonstrates how, through a process of forgetting, humans mistakenly come to believe photographic images to be a window onto an unmediated reality rather than the product of a process of semiotic encoding. He presents the invention of photography as having had as profound an impact on the subjectification of the human as did that of writing. Though intended to bring the human closer to an originary reality, photography, rather than reveal the truth of the world, serves only to implicate the human in the system of signs it has helped to establish. In this it can be compared to systems of writing which, as Rotman notes, “work to constitute the very subject engaging with them.”3 And, of course, writing, like photography, was itself invented to overthrow a compromised semiotics, an initial imagistic encoding of the ineffable. The latter, though benign in intent, soon turned into an idolatry of images which came to obscure the originary reality it was meant to reveal. All semiotic systems, it would then appear, eventually succumb to this same fate. Their layers of signs and signs about signs end up only insinuating themselves, according to Flusser, between the human and the reality to which they are supposed to provide access.4

In spite of this, Flusser argues, an increasingly automated photographic regime, one supposedly uncompromised by human subjectivity, has convinced the masses of its

ability to expose things “as they are.” But this new semiotics of the technologically- mediated image puts the human at an even further remove from an originary reality than did its predecessors. It becomes not simply, like writing, another meta-code able to be revealed as such through a process of deciphering, but an insidious product of a black-box apparatus – the camera – which employs an asignifying and unassailable logic antithetical to the needs of humans. Just as ethnology is a necessarily ethnocentric enterprise involving the imposition of seemingly universal but ultimately culture-specific conceptual categories on that which it studies, so the program of the camera, ostensibly under the control of the humans who invented it, imposes largely invisible categorical limitations on the freedoms of the photographer, categories of, for example: photographic time and space (distances to and angles on subject matter); states of things (pursuit of what is positively given and of novelty and hence information); and subject matter (implicit understandings of artistic, technical, or political conventions).

But the vast majority of creators and consumers of photographs remain oblivious to the manner in which their interpretation and/or understanding of reality is channeled by the camera’s logic. They remain ignorant of the way the novel images (a requirement of its logics) that stream from the camera’s inaccessible and increasingly automated interior operate according to their own visual syntax. These images inform the human about its relationship not to the real but only to the program of the camera itself, a program “for which reality is information not the significance of this information.”5

Within its logics:

It is not the world out there that is real, nor is the concept within the camera's program - only the photograph is real. The program of the world and the camera are only preconditions for the image, possibilities to be realized. We are dealing here with a reversal of the vector of significance: It is not the significance that is real but the signifier, the information, the symbol, and this reversal of the vector of significance is characteristic of everything to do with apparatus and characteristic of the post-industrial world in general.6

The camera’s program is designed, in other words, not to put the human in closer touch with the material reality which sustains it but to increase the scope of the universe in which the logic of the camera and its future iterations holds sway.7 The evolution of the camera, along with that of other various black-box technologies, takes priority over that of the human. Collectively, these technologies form a new “super-black-box”8 apparatus, one programmed to pursue its own progress without regard to the intentions of the humans that created it. The “vector of significance” has been reversed in favor of the former, such that humans’ reason to exist is reduced to powering the feedback loops that progressively improve the apparatuses that entrain them. In

Flusser’s estimation, however, a recuperation of some form of human agency is still possible; armed with knowledge derived from decoding the program of such technologies, conscious individuals, such as the experimental photographer, can

“reverse the vector of significance by making chance and necessity [the logic of post- industrial apparatuses] subordinate to human intention. Freedom,” for Flusser, is then

“playing against the camera” by reestablishing the link between significance and information instead of merely “playing with symbols.”9

In his analysis of the unfolding of the discursive structure of the image, of the relationship between signified and signifier, sign and meta-sign, Flusser evinces an 98

arguably romantic vision of the possibility for human transcendence, a nostalgic longing for origin, centeredness and a timeless ontological grounding. His philosophy of the image articulates the first of what Derrida describes as:

… two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, through the history of all of his history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does not seek [the]…"inspiration of a new humanism.10

In our own analysis of the image, we shall be hewing more closely to Nietzsche’s interpretation of the sign (as articulated by Derrida) than to Flusser’s. We will consider the possibility that there is no ultimate ontological ground or originary reality and that the image and writing systems invented by humans constitute but two examples of an indefinite number of sign systems (songs, inscriptions, pheromones, bioluminescence, chemical trails, ionic bonding, geomagnetic reversals, subatomic spin/charm/flavor) by which entities construct their respective Umwelts. We will assume, along with cultural theorist Suhail Malik, “[t]he continuity rather than rupture between anthropotechnical life and life in general…”11 and, going further, the continuity between all entities regardless of how distant from our own their spatiotemporal envelope. Rather than seek to reestablish a unitary, anthropocentric reality, or “new humanism,” we will explore patterns of persistence in a universe perhaps best characterized as a vortical environment of “freeplay” “whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”12

Flusser’s philosophy will still prove useful, however, both in how it reinforces and differs from several themes explored in this chapter and that of the grid. Already it can be seen to resonate, for example, with such themes as: the loss of agency as the human becomes entrained by a technology of its own making; the continuous nature of the unfolding/enfolding dynamic between sign and meta-sign; and the radical transformation of the material-discursive environment as wrought by the externalization of a formerly interior logic (the externalization of the entoptic grid with respect to the human, and of a programmed automaticity which formerly resided solely within the camera). But it differs, too, in that Flusser seems to accept the possibility of an absolute division between inside and outside (humans and images); an establishment of origins (the prehistoric, non-conceptualized image); and theorizing either or both of these without having to engage with the problem of infinite regress (giving an accounting of where the image or its decoding begins and human perception or intention ends).

To his credit, Flusser perceives the latter to pose a potential problem in that, as is true of all symbols (the necessary product of the relationship of signifier to signified), that which emerges from the decoding of an image is “just the tip of an iceberg in the ocean of cultural consensus….”13 In order to avoid an endless chain of decoding, he proposes that the complex composed of the photographer and camera be isolated within its own universe.

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In the case of the photograph, this descent into infinite regression can be avoided, however, since one can be satisfied with recording the encoding intentions at work within the 'photographer/camera' complex. Once one has read off this encoding from the photograph, it can then be considered to have been decoded. Provided, of course, that a distinction is made between the photographer's intention and the camera's program. In actual fact, these two factors are interconnected and cannot be separated; but theoretically, in order to carry out the decoding, they can be considered as separate in every single photograph.14

So, then, in addition to carving out a separate universe for the “photographer/camera complex,” one must assume the possibility of being able to separate human intention from technological program if one is to make any analytical progress at all. Derrida seems to agree with this position in his defense of the use of conceptual tools whose truth-value has been compromised by their self-reflexive origins. “It is a question of putting expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary of that heritage itself.” Analysis and critique then become, in his estimation, not impossible, but “[a] problem of economy and strategy.”15

Cuts must be made, objects of analysis carved out, Flusser and Derrida seem to agree, if one is to have anything to say about anything at all, with the only caveat being that the scalpel be wielded judiciously.

Though we, too, will be examining the nature of the image and the possibility of its decoding in this chapter, we will not be following Flusser in making arguably arbitrary cuts so as to avoid the perceived problem of an infinite regress. We will instead embrace and explore the possibilities opened up by the latter’s coiled logics and recursive patterns. We will, in other words, pursue an analysis of the image through the lens of a truly flat (fractal) ontology, or an ontology that posits the existence of as many

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unique and equally complex Umwelts as there are objects/entities (and their interpenetration). Such an analysis resonates with that pursued by mediologist

Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization.

Citing Deleuze and Foucault, Galloway argues that the modern age has witnessed three types of society: “sovereign,” epitomized by hierarchy; “discipline,” characterized by decentralization and bureaucracy; and finally “control,” distinguished by distributed, peer-to-peer, two-way communications. Though there is still a strong element of top- down control in the latter regime (for example, the hierarchical structure of the Domain

Name System (DNS) on the internet – a protocol which Galloway suggests is “to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies”16), it is unique in affording entities a high degree of autonomy (as epitomized by the anarchic structure of

Transmission Control and Internet Protocols --TCP/IP). Entities, be they object-oriented program elements or users on the web, are capable of both receiving and transmitting information about local conditions and in this sense form worlds unto themselves, thus challenging the hierarchical model of the material-discursive environment that has dominated (especially Western) metaphysics since the introduction of Aristotle’s scala naturae. Contributing to the contestation of the latter model, then, is the proliferation of “bottom-up,” self-organizing, gesture-based technologies (“surfing” the web is more than a metaphor) which convey a sense of infinite depth and complexity. By contrast, the apparent diminishment of complexity of the scala naturae’s elements is related, as

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we will see, to the mechanics of vision itself, mechanics which are being contested, or supplemented, by technologies of the gesturo-haptic.

To be human is to represent space by various means ranging from song, dance, carving and assemblage to scrolls, isometric projection, mappings and linear perspective. To be Western, however, is to have a “point of view.” It is to have been immersed for millennia in the logics of the grid and so the punctuated, perspectival structures that emerge from its mathesis. Contrary to what this mathesis tells us, however, we do not see the world as it is (as if such a thing were possible), but through the medium of these structures and the images to which they give rise. Our reality is encoded by these images, a fact which is becoming increasingly legible now that ocularcentric modes of “re-presenting” the world are being challenged by haptic and proprioceptive technologies that allow us to perceive how we enact a world.

How We See

The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.17

– Marshall McLuhan

Perception might be defined as that activity of collecting and processing sensations, which instills in entities a sense of being bounded or enclosed within a unique spatiotemporal envelope. Touch, especially in the form of pleasure or pain, establishes this boundary concretely, immediately, while sight, at the other extreme,

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does so abstractly, at a remove. Individuals come to comprehend visually the atomized nature of their existence, for example, not primarily by observing their own bodies or reflections but through extrapolating from their observations of others. Though they cannot view themselves in full from the outside and so cannot directly establish the fact of their existence as a three-dimensional, detached entity, they can grasp this concept by observing those around them and then analogically applying these observations to themselves. Unlike with touch, categories must be established and analogies made before visuality and its complement of reflexive modes can warrant the autonomy of the individual. When used to establish such a ground of being, sight then invariably generates signs and meta-signs through an involutionary/evolutionary dynamic not dissimilar to that demonstrated by the grid.

Or such, at least, would appear to be the dynamic in the West, where the early and prolonged exposure to the logics of the grid heightened the sense of the observer as disembodied punctum and so inspired the search for an ontological ground based on something other than unreliable perceptual resources. During the Renaissance, this punctual sense of detachment from matter and the objects of sight became, reflexively, an object of study in its own right, manifesting as linear perspective or the rendering of images as they would appear to an incorporeal observer looking at the world through the apparatus of the body. When the inability of this ideological regime to provide access to reality, to re-present the world “as it is,” was made apparent by, among other things, perspectival manipulations such as anamorphosis, Descartes and other 104

philosophers were forced to attempt to ground being and the search for truth in something other than the senses. This resulted in the further rationalization of knowledge, a process which began early in human history and which has, with the exception of the Middle Ages, guided the development of Western logics ever since.

But what set the stage for this rise of rationality in the West before the development of linear perspective and before even that of the atlas of Ptolemy or the graticule of Eratosthenes was the Greek obsession with the gridiron. For in its ability to acculturate subjects to its logics by commandeering both their proprioceptive and visual capacities, reaching simultaneously into their sub-perceptual and cognitive structures, the gridiron was able to extend for millennia its directorial role in the development of rational discursive strategies, even into the medieval period when its presence in the built environment had been greatly diminished. And perhaps the most successful example of such a discursive strategy is Aristotle’s scala naturae, a concept which may well be attributable to the latter’s direct experience of the grid’s ratios. For though born in the Hellenized town of Stagira in Chalcidice (near modern day Thessaloniki), circumstantial evidence suggests that Aristotle may have been raised in Pella, the then- newly-built capital city of Macedon. As his father Nicomachus was both friend and personal physician to the Macedonian ruler Amyntas III (c.449-369 BC), it has been suggested that the family resided in the capital in close proximity to the King rather than in Stagira some seventy miles away.18 It is also known that Aristotle arrived in Athens at the age of seventeen, which would have coincided with the period just after the murder 105

of Alexander II, Amyntas’ son and heir, when the safety of the former king’s friends would have been in jeopardy. But whether he was raised here or only visited with his father, it is almost certainly in Pella, a city known for its perfected realization of the

Hippodamian plan, that Aristotle first experienced as a youth the rhythms and punctuated perspectives of the gridiron. Later, as tutor to King Philip II’s son Alexander

(the Great), Aristotle would spend additional years here where he no doubt encountered, had he not done so before, the earliest known examples of trompe l’oeil murals. These reportedly decorated the palace walls and crypts and indicate a nascent awareness of the punctual self, or a disembodied subject conscious of sight as a perceptual apparatus from which he is removed. Though Aristotle’s writings make no mention of Pella or his personal experience of the gridiron, he does discuss, within the context of describing his ideal state (Politics, Laws), its merits favorably, except with respect to defense.19

While impossible to prove, it seems not unlikely that Aristotle’s embodied exposure to the ratios of the grid might have exerted an influence on his development of the concept of the scala naturae or “ladder of life.” In principle, the concept is fairly simple: it describes a taxonomy in which those organisms demonstrating the greatest complexity as based on criteria such as “posture; the degree of perfection of the offspring at birth; and the degree of life and motion”20 are placed at the top of a hierarchy of being, while those deemed to be in possession of a lesser perfection and/or

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Figure 12. Aristotle’s scala naturae as interpreted by artist Mark Dion.

capacity for mobility are assigned successively lower rungs. Thus man, being upright, complex and mobile, was placed by Aristotle at the pyramid’s highest level, followed by animals, plants and finally, at the lowest level, minerals and other inanimate matter.

Though it seems an entirely intuitive scheme today, it was, at the time, a thoroughly novel concept, with no other (Western) philosopher (save perhaps Plato in a brief mention in the Timaeus) having thought to order entities hierarchically. In this context, renowned anatomist Richard Owen described Aristotle’s writings on biology as having sprung “like Minerva from the Head of Jove,”21 so fully realized were they in plan and yet so without precedent in the philosophical literature. But rather than assume a parthenogenetic origin for the scala naturae, it would seem more parsimonious to

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account for its singular logic by viewing it as an artifact of that other uniquely Greek phenomenon: the ubiquitous idealized gridiron.

For it would appear that the ideological perspective evoked by Aristotle’s image of a hierarchical ontology resonates quite readily with that which would have been elicited physically by the attenuated street views of Pella’s Hippodamian plan. Looking down any of its avenues, one would have been presented with a foreshortened image of receding entities arranged from the largest and most detailed or complex (nearest) to the smallest and most homogeneous or elementary (furthest). One would have felt, however subliminally, one occupied a privileged, almost omniscient position within this scheme, positioned at the vertex of a cone of rays reflecting in mirror-image the vanishing point at the end of the thoroughfare. One’s existence as a unified, if dimensionless, observer looking onto a hierarchy of entities would have been exaggerated at every turn, in other words, by the optical illusion of the grid’s converging straight lines.22

The subject interpellated by such an environment of forced perspective differs markedly from one called into being by an environment which exhibits few or no scalar clues, such as is experienced traditionally by the Eskimo. As anthropologist and mediologist Edmund Carpenter describes in his 1964 report “Man and Art in the Arctic”:

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The Eskimo view of self isn’t as clearly demarcated as ours, and its precise limits often vary according to circumstances. Eskimo don’t reduce the self to a sharply delimited, consistent, controlling “I.” They postulate no personality “structure,” but accept the clotted nature of experience – the simultaneity of good and evil, joy and despair, multiple models within the one, contraries inextricably commingled. Where literate man regards an “alias” as deceiving, representing something other than the “real” self, every Eskimo has several names, each a different facet of himself, for they assert that man’s ego is not a thing imprisoned in itself, sternly shut up in boundaries of flesh and time. They say that many of the elements which make it up belong to a world before it and outside it, while the notion that each person is himself and can be no other, is to them impossible, for it leaves out of account all the transitions which bind the individual consciousness to the general. The Eskimo conception of individuality belongs in the same category of conception as that of unity and entirety, the whole and the all; and the distinction between spirit in general and individual spirit possesses not nearly so much power over their minds as over ours.23

Carpenter goes on to make the connection between the Eskimo’s perception of the self as unbounded and polyvalent and the non-rectilinearity of his environment, extending this to include the gridded structure of written signs.

Literate notions of enclosed space are alien to the Eskimo. Both snow igloos and sealskin tents lack vertical walls and horizontal ceilings; no planes parallel each other and none intersect at 90°. There are no straight lines, at least none of any length. Rectangles are unknown. Euclidean space is a concept unique to literate man. Eskimo, with a magnificent disregard for environmental determinism, open up rather than enclose space. They must, of course, create sealed-off heat areas, but instead of resorting to boxes, they build complex, many-room igloos which have the dimensions and freedom of a cloud.24

Carpenter’s finding of a strong link between the non-Euclidian geometry of the Eskimo environment and his ontological models lends weight to the argument that we might attribute to the gridded material-discursive environment of ancient Greece and its

Hellenized neighbors, at least in some measure, the rise and reification in the West of the atomized, disembodied subject/observer. It also reinforces cultural theorist

Jonathan Crary’s claim that “[v]ision and its effects are always inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and procedures of subjectification.”25

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While Crary argues convincingly that what we see is not given absolutely by our visual apparatuses, but is necessarily colored by our respective material-discursive environments, it remains less certain that this similarly applies to how we see. There has been for many decades a sometimes contentious debate among scholars and scientists about whether linear perspective is a social construct or an objective rendering of reality, a matter of mere convention or an example of evolution’s having aligned the body’s perceptual capacities to match the pre-given ratios of space. Among those who favor the argument for convention are psychologists J. B. Deregowski and R.

L. Gregory, philosophers Marx Wartofsky and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and art historians

Martin Kemp, Nelson Goodman, W.J.T. Mitchell and, to a lesser extent, Rudolph

Arnheim, while a sampling of those who either equivocate or argue in favor of the objective truth-value of perspective’s ratios include psychologist Michael Kubovy and art historians Ernst Gombrich, Samuel Edgerton and Maurice Pirenne. Both sides support their arguments with an impressive array of empirical evidence ranging from the results of psychological experiments to comparative studies of artistic style and content, but neither can claim to have convinced the other of the superiority of their own position.

This has much to do with the fact that, in rough outline, the debate over linear perspective as convention or objective reality resembles that surrounding the origin of the grid: is the orthogonal (or perspectival) format a naturally occurring phenomenon or is it human-made, the effect of endogenous or exogenous causes? Do humans embrace its logics because they convey inherent truths about the world, or because, once

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deployed, they remake the world in their own image such that not to conform puts individuals, or even entire cultures, at existential risk?

The problem we are confronted with again, then, in the debate about the

“naturalness” or artifactuality of linear perspective, is the nature of the interface between inside and outside. As with the issue of infinite regress, another related facet of the conundrum posed by such dichotomous constructions, the problem seems intractable because it occupies a philosophical space disallowed in Western logics, that indicated by the principle of the “excluded middle.” Formulated first by Aristotle, the principle holds that "there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate.”26 In other words, either a proposition is true or its negation is, but unlike with the quantum states of particle and wave, the two cannot be superposed. Being the third of the “three classic laws of thought,” one would expect that if there were to exist a refutation of this principle it would have originated at some point after this period, but even during Aristotle’s lifetime there were known to be paradoxes of the type “This statement is false,” which called into question the completeness of the principle’s axiomatic logics.

For, clearly, if the above statement is accurate then it is true, which contradicts its statement of fact making it false, which again makes it true… and so on, ad infinitum, suggesting it occupies logically the “excluded middle” between these mutually exclusive alternatives. And while some philosophers might have wished to treat such paradoxes

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as anomalies incidental to the larger philosophical program, mathematician Kurt Gödel would prove them to be a central feature of that most logical of all logical systems, mathematics itself. With his “incompleteness theorems” of 1931, Gödel was able to show that no mathematical system can provide a complete grounding for itself, that is, prove its logical consistency solely by relying on the logic given by its own axioms.

Always it must secure the legitimacy of its statements by embedding the system in the next more encompassing in a series of meta-sets. As with every other semiotic system, it attains consistency only by operating within the constraints of its own formal rules, yet it is forced to find its ontological ground in that which is exterior to it. In this it is like the grid, Mandelbrot set, or linear perspective, a medium superposed between inside and outside, nature and culture, or perhaps more accurately, that very division itself; for it is through an interpellation of its own elements – a “self-calling” or autopoietic emergence – that an interface, image, or screen manifests.27

Where some might like to believe that linear perspective and vision do not reside within the excluded middle but demarcate an absolute boundary between domains, such would appear not to be the case. More than a simple matter of social construction, however, this is due to the fact that no element in the chain of perception could be considered to be a passive receptor of a pre-given reality. The now-classic experiments performed by biologists Maturana and Varela on visual perception in the frog indicate that its visual cortex registers only those features of the environment critical to its survival. Slow-moving objects do not exist in its Umwelt because, being 112

inedible, they do not register in its visual field, while fast-moving insect-like objects trigger a cascade of brain activity. The results of a more recent experiment involving rats’ learned response to a visual stimulus28 builds on these results by indicating that

“selective vision,” or the unconscious filtering of visual phenomena, takes place not solely at the upper levels of the visual cortex hierarchy as previously thought, but also at the level of even the simplest of its elements, the neurons of the primary visual cortex.

The experiment indicates that these neurons alter their response to visual cues in conjunction with the autonomic nervous system’s anticipation of a possible reward.

According to neurophysiologist Susana Martinez-Conde, “Even at the most fundamental level, it seems, our expectations influence how and even what we see.”29 Individual visual neurons once thought capable of conveying only “purely sensory, value-free visual information”30 such as contour and contrast are now understood to be capable of altering their perception of these qualities in anticipation of a promised reward or lack thereof.

We can derive a number of insights from this further elaboration of Maturana and Varela’s experiments on the nature of the perceptual interface between organism and environment. First, as it would appear that no element in the visual system is passive with respect to the apperception of reality, we should then recognize even the most basic visual perceptions to be value-laden. Along with the movement of photons, optics of the eye and decisions of the “higher-level” functions of the visual cortex, we must include the visual neurons’ reaction to an anticipated reward as a co-determiner of 113

an entity’s experience of reality. Contra Flusser’s thesis, it would seem there is no possibility of significance being severed from (visual) information even within the logic of the photograph as the elements of the viewing eye (primed by a nervous system recursively shaped by vision) always impose their own, even if this takes the form of not perceiving certain sensibilia. This would tend to confirm Barad’s contention that every cut is a political act, that is, an acceptance or rejection of conformity to convention in exchange for a proffered reward and thus every moment open to possibility. However, it also highlights the importance of establishing the scale from which one is assessing reality’s contours as the latter can change radically in response to the scale of measure used (individual, group, societal, species), a point to which we shall return. Second, the findings in this case would seem to cast doubt not only on humans’ ability to access reality “as it is,” but that such a thing even exists. Results from such scientific experiments, while predictive, also become, as Latour and other Actor Network

Theorists (ANT) argue, a matter of politics, of aligning the interests and perspectives of a full range of entities (primary visual cortex neurons, various of the visual cortex’s other layers, the nervous system, the organism’s desires, societal goals) constituting and residing among the various (apparent) scalar levels. There is no room for objective truth or absolute reality in this formulation, only for more or fewer, stronger or weaker alliances. And third, it would seem to demonstrate the inappropriateness of the use of simple-to-complex hierarchies to model what increasingly appears to be a radically reflexive, feedback-looped world. With the advent of the computational revolution we

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are now in possession of tools that allow us to begin to model the non-linear dynamics of some of these alliances, suggesting that it is time we shift our focus, as cultural theorist N. Katherine Hayles urges, from “the individual unit to [the] recursive symmetries between scal[ar] levels.”31 While so doing would not gain us the

(impossible) perfect knowledge necessary to predict the behaviors of the tightly- coupled systems which now seem to dominate our temporally-compressed reality, such is not the goal. It is, rather, to foster an awareness of agency as a potentiality distributed equally among entities, a tensional field that suffuses and gives rise to substance.

While it might make sense in the short-term to organize hierarchically space and the entities that define it, problems stemming from exclusive use of this model begin to multiply over time. The rational logics of the grid reinforce a perspectival representation of reality to the exclusion of almost every other. Together these interpellate a unified, atomistic subject whose point-of-view is coterminous with his

(limited perception of his) self-interest and whose ability to entertain the existence of or shift quickly between different perspectives and modes of being (for example, particle/wave) is thereby compromised. Facilitating the ability to make such shifts then requires exposing how logics of the grid and linear perspective constrain alternative

(particularly inter-scalar) conceptions of self. It is not enough to provide analyses of the situation, however, as the grid has learned how to turn these to its advantage, absorbing and using the energy expended to further its own progress. In addition to 115

critique, then, one must also attempt to invent or foreground alternative logics that might permit access to the “freeplay” of an acentered universe.

The Great Chain of Being

…the medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.32

– Marshall McLuhan

As noted earlier, it was Aristotle who first conceived of a hierarchical taxonomy of life. Whether we might attribute the form for this discursive structure to the forced perspectives of his gridded environment is uncertain, but what we know of the recursive dynamic between outside and inside suggests this to be a not unreasonable hypothesis.

What we know with greater certainty, however, is the immense influence this taxonomic scheme has had on especially Western ontological models. Indeed, so thoroughly embedded are we in its logics that it is almost impossible, even for scientists, to conceive of any but a pyramidal organization of matter/entities with the human naturally at the apex. In a recent Nature article, evolutionary biologist Sean Nee despairs of the future of his discipline when colleagues such as Richard Dawkins consistently reify in their work the hierarchical and linear causal structure of the Great

Chain even as they disavow its legitimacy. That they persist in this manner even though

“there is nothing about the world that compels us to think about it in this way” suggests to Nee “that we have some deep psychological need to see ourselves as the culmination of creation.”33 The argument being made here, of course, is that this “psychological need,” one felt especially acutely in the West, is at least in part an artifact of the 116

perspectival ways of seeing that emerge from the logics of the grid. Attempting to think outside of these logics, we face the same difficulties as computer scientists Terry

Winograd and Francesco Flores who, in trying to translate natural language into source code for AI, discovered “there is no neutral viewpoint from which we can see our beliefs as things, since we always operate within the framework they provide.”34

It would seem that in exchange for an incremental and pragmatic progress we have aligned our disparate perspectives along a single ideological axis. Like a movie theater audience, we sit immobile with eyes fixed forward, mesmerized by the verisimilitude of the images (now in 3D!) moving on the screen before us. Flusser would no doubt say that we are little better than the occupants of Plato’s cave, slaves to our screens and the shadows that dance upon them. From the perspective of silent film maker Georges Méliès or his admirer, artist/animator William Kentridge, however, it is precisely illusions such as are created within the cinematographic medium which make possible innovation and novelty. This debate forms an underlying theme of this discussion and is one to which we shall return. But for scholar Tom Conley, “The beauty of the cinematic diagram resides in the way its own causes at once stand coextensive with and even ‘program’ the reality that would be the sum of its effects.”35 Elaborating on this thought, media archaeologist Pasi Valiaho argues that:

Understood as a diagram and a force, the moving image programs not only the reality it shows and exposes directly but also the reality it leaves unseen, that is to say, the reality it implicates in its operations. It does so by creating new perceptions and articulations, new connections of affectivity and modes of thought, and by making others obsolete and disconnected.36

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In this sense, the moving image is a semiotic innovation like many others, its positively- given signs (moving images, theaters, stars, reviews, awards) belying the intensity of the program of subjectification it deploys on a largely affective level. One does not have to come into contact with the cinema for one’s world to be inalterably changed by its emergence. Just as the creation of derivative instruments such as credit default swaps

(CDSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) altered the financial landscape of all entities (Greek pensioners, meth lab operators, municipal bond holders, mosquito populations) and not just the home owners and bankers involved, so the cinema alters, among other things, the circuits of exchange which determine the discursive landscape of an entire culture, or what determines, in the terms Barad articulates, what counts and doesn’t count as communication.

Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to linguistic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity.37

Entities comprising the “field of possibilities” in this instance range from the firing rate of the average moviegoer’s heart to the bank accounts of the movie’s financial backers, with the synchronization of their respective dynamics determining what will rise to the consciousness of the society at large. New entities emerge, others fade away, while still others are precluded from ever existing as determined by the discursive, boundary- drawing operations or internal communications of a given entity, in this case society.

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But this seems to reinforce rather than refute Flusser’s concerns about the increasing dominance of logics foreign to the human. Yes, cinema with its ability to alter affective networks has the potential to reprogram the entirety of reality and not just the domain of the moving image, in the manner of the frog and the shapes it is able to perceive; but in what way can it be said to escape from, rather than merely recapitulate, the program of the camera (or of the more encompassing “super-black-box” apparatus) in which it finds its origins? Does it truly open up new possibilities for the human or does it operate safely within the parameters given by the grid and its perspectival progeny? Galloway has argued in the affirmative; digital technologies are facilitating communication among entities at the local level, contributing to emergent, coordinated events such as, for example, the “Arab spring.” Their ability to make of each actor a self-contained, fully-functioning inertial unit is a development unique to the postmodern, control society. But hierarchical structures still permeate the protocols of these technologies, their hegemony over millennia requiring further investigation.

Perhaps one clue towards an explanation for the staying power of, for example, the scala naturae, is to be found in its transformation in the third-century C.E. into an ontotheology. The move from metaphysics to an ontotheology, while latent in

Aristotle’s taxonomy, began in earnest when Plotinus, in his Enneads,38 grafted onto it

Plato’s concept of a totally transcendent “One.”39 No longer did it rank hierarchically material entities strictly according to their perceived complexity, but with this action by the proximity of their souls to the perfection of an “unmoved mover,” or “according to 119

the degree to which they are infected with potentiality.”40 This then was the “Great

Chain of Being,” a continuous and complete extension of ranked kinds, separated only by infinitesimal degrees of gradation on a static ladder of Perfection.41 It was only left to the Scholastics to articulate these concepts within an ecclesiastical framework, placing God in place of the One, for the contours of the worldview shared by most, if not all, Enlightenment thinkers to come into view. It was a

plan and structure of the world which, through the Middles Ages and down to the late eighteenth century…most educated men, were to accept without question—the conception of the universe as a “Great Chain of Being,” composed of an immense, or…infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents…through “every possible” grade up to the ens perfectissimum.42

Though ripe for revision with the turn toward rationalism in the 17th century, this framework was retained largely intact with only minor adjustments made in nomenclature. Today, for example, we find it is a relatively short jump from an

“unmoved mover” and “initial cause” to the scientific concept of “force” (whatever can cause an object with mass to accelerate).43 We also find physicists contrasting an

“active force” with a “passive matter,” or that substance on which force works through top-down, linear causal chains.44 This view of matter as passive, together with the formal structure of the Great Chain’s static, perfection hierarchy closely mirrors modern science’s tendency to classify entities according to an ill-defined complexity hierarchy.

Where the Great Chain used criteria such as the capacity for self-movement or reflection to rank entities on its scale of being, modern science often uses a similarly less-than-rigorous analysis of an entity’s “complexity” (for example, intellectual,

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computational, morphological, or genomic) to impute varying degrees, or withhold designations of “sentience” or “intelligence.” Thus, the objects of study in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc., increase in complexity and unpredictability as they approach the level of the adult human. In effect, agency—or lack thereof—is still correlated with an entity’s ability to demonstrate consciousness or self-locomotion, with adult humans’ own presumed superior capacities for these phenomena setting the standard against which all others are measured. In essence then, man is still at the center of his universe and at the top of his imagined taxonomic pyramid. Thus the shift from a monotheistic to a scientific version of the Great Chain schema did not so much eradicate its tacit teleological mode of operation as redirect it towards a perfectibility of the species rather than the soul.

So not only do the logics of the grid dominate the physical and mathematical sciences as we saw with the introduction of the Cartesian grid and analytic geometry, but so too with the adoption of the Great Chain hierarchy as its model, the scientific project itself. As noted earlier in the quote by Nee, even evolutionary biologists, those presumably most aware of the fallacy of such a construction, cannot help but reify in their work its teleology, so compelling is the promise of orientation it proffers. For it is difficult to get on without a goal and proper sense of direction, regardless of what

Ingold’s “wayfarer”45 might say. As it happens, other than during the Middle Ages, establishing these are activities at which the West has seemed to excel, amounting, in brief, to wresting nature’s secrets from her and employing them to better the lot of 121

(often a certain segment of) “man.’” Unfortunately, it has become apparent over time that the goal and direction chosen have destabilized the very reality they were meant to reveal. The idealism which might once have characterized the scientific program increasingly seems to have devolved, in line with Flusser’s description of the operational mode of the “super-black-box” apparatus, into mere instrumentalism facilitating a human rapaciousness such as the world has never before witnessed. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of science can effectively undo some of the damage the program has wrought with respect to, in particular, climate change and species depletion, but without an investigation into the teleology that drives the scientific program itself one might expect any success, however minor, to be short-lived.

It should be acknowledged, as the analysis pursued here attempts to do, that the scientific program is not only pulled forward by curiosity, idealism, or even greed, but also convected by the ghost of the disembodied punctum which haunts its core.

Science, too, in other words, makes an originary distinction, orienting itself in the world by differentiating between the subjective and objective, with the latter, of course, being privileged over the former. It is thus heavily invested in maintaining this boundary and is loath to have its logics turned on itself, as anthropologists of science have done. For though the logics of the grid provide access to the magic of digital transmutation, the convertibility of matter into number and thus to many of the wonders of science, they also imply, though do not acknowledge, with their instantiation of a vanishing point, the infinite regress of the observer and of being itself. This lack of ontological grounding has 122

the potential to cause anxiety among those otherwise attracted to the formal beauty and/or predictive powers of the rationalist project. Capitalizing on this anxiety will always be ontotheologists such as Plotinus and Aquinas, who, through their respective faiths, promise respite from the sense of meaninglessness the grid’s lack of grounding might inspire. By associating Aristotle’s taxonomy, a pragmatic graphing of power and morphogenetic relationships, with an Unmoved Mover, they cement the legitimacy of their own ontotheological perspectives while also infecting the rationalist program with a non-obvious, transcendental teleology. Thus in broad scope, one could argue that the scientific and theological projects share an insistence on the boundedness of entities

(save for their potential evolution towards perfection) and on the existence of a single

Truth (even if it is one on which they cannot agree). But the anxiety of the dimensionless, disassociated observer, haunted by the uncanny Other that convects it forward, still floats freely even among modern scientists, sometimes preventing them from questioning the simplistic (if pragmatic in the short-term) hierarchical model bequeathed to them by Neo-Platonists, Scholastics and Enlightenment philosophers.

Yes, empirically the world appears hierarchical – its power relations readily knowable and controllable through the establishment of linear causal chains – when viewed through an instrumentalist lens. But as with linear perspective, this re-presents not the Truth of the world but merely one among a number of possible modes by which the world expresses itself. Just as quanta appear as particles or waves in response to the type of apparatus used in their detection, so the world in general displays a 123

sensitivity to the manner in which it is interpellated. The scientific project’s interpellation of the world enacts the diagram of the Great Chain of Being, a diagram being, in Deleuze’s terms:

…a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is defined by its informal functions and matter and in terms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost 46 blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak.

In this, the scientific project reflects the design of the apparatus that dominated its development up until the 18th century, that of the human eye as entrained by linear perspective and the logics of the grid.

But in the 19th century, the hegemony of this apparatus would be challenged by engineer Augustin Jean Fresnel’s discovery that light moves transversally in waves, not longitudinally in rays or waves as was believed in classical thought.47 This is an indication of the move towards a focus not on the thing itself but on the “conditions which condition its very appearing,”48 which would be fully realized only in the next century. It is a move, in other words, towards understanding the thing to exist not as object but as relation, not as reflection but as diffractional event. Light did not simply move in a straight line from the object to the eye as Alberti (and later, Newton) believed. It instead appeared to interact with itself, giving rise to patterns of interference. As Donna Haraway explains, “Diffraction does not produce ‘the same’ displaced, as reﬂection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reﬂection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where

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differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.”49 Light could no longer be counted on to provide a pure and direct reflection of the real, but had to be understood to be interactive both with itself and the viewer. This precipitated a split between the study of a physical optics (“the study of light and the forms of its propagation”) and that of a physiological optics (“the study of the eye and its sensory capacities”50). What followed was a discovery of, among other things, the eye’s ability to generate its own internal stimuli (entoptic phenomena) and the body’s capacity to register the same electrical impulse as different sensibilia such as sound, touch, or light, depending on where it was applied.

Suddenly, meaning as given by the link between external referent and internal representation was in jeopardy. If one could not determine whether a stimulus was exogenously or endogenously generated, or that it corresponded with a specific sensation, then the entire concept of “reality” was thrown into doubt. At the same time it revealed the malleability of the subject’s experience of reality and the potential for constructing new varieties of both. From this arose an interest in exploring more closely the affective realm of the body through the use of machines capable of recording temporal intervals below the threshold of conscious perception and of developing new means by which the body’s sensory apparatuses, especially sight, might be manipulated through such innovations as the zoetrope and stereoscope. The remainder of this chapter will explore where this research has taken us in the intervening centuries as well as attempt to determine whether there exists, as Flusser hopes, an exterior to the 125

program of the camera (theorized here as another instantiation of the grid within whose logics we always already seem to exist).

Beyond Ocularcentrism

Méliès’s films stimulate continuous transformations and thus portray the automatic character of the new medium that is capable of instigating movements and events without causes or origins and producing action that lacks agency.51 – Pasi Väliaho

Just as the gridiron served as a diagram by which the subject came to apprehend and experience itself as an atomized individual with a point of view (and the Great Chain as diagram for an ontotheological program amplified and elevated this perspective to the social level), so the moving image temporalizes the diagram and maps itself onto the subject’s affective modes, entraining her bodily rhythms such that they synchronize with the image’s own. Passing the eye at 16 frames per second, a series of images can convince the body’s nervous system that it is encountering not a sequence of distinct photographs but a facsimile of the flows of the temporal dimension. The cinematographic manipulation of the viewer’s autonomic nervous functions, such as breathing and heart rate, then becomes a simple matter of composing and editing images such that they trigger (ideally suppressible) urges to, for example, escape or embrace the simulacrum on the screen. But before such manipulations could become the hinge of modern cinema, the body and its affections had to be articulated by physiologists as an “amalgamation of adjacent apparatuses.”52 A whole battery of tests and scientific instruments (automatic inscription machines such as the myo- [muscle], sphygmo-[pulse], and chrono-[reflex] graph) had to be deployed to determine the 126

precise rhythms and intervals – “quantifiable and verifiable ‘units’” – of the subject’s perceptual responses and the manner in which these were generated. For Väliaho then:

The importance of physiology is to show that the subject of knowledge is conditioned by the anatomical and physiological functioning of the body. No longer complying with the timeless order of classical representation, knowledge becomes lodged within the instability and temporality of corporeal existence.53

Väliaho describes the trick films of early cinema, such as those of George Méliès, as featuring “fantastic, magical transformations, unpredictable metamorphoses, multiplications, and dislocations effected by dissolves, multiple exposures, superimpositions [and] stop-motion substitution[s].” A life-sized playing card suddenly becomes human, power lines with suspended human heads transform into a musical staff with singing notes, a leaping man changes into a woman midair. Bodies are everywhere in motion, but the causes and effects of their interactions are reversed, disjoint, or immanent to each other. Space and time become plastic, scale uncertain, orientation impossible. In this they simulate and externalize the intensive topology of the body, mirroring back to the body its own uncertain agency and exposing its sense- of-self to be dependent, not on being embedded in the linear logics of the grid, but on the sensations that come of moving its parts. In effect, the trick film reveals the subject’s lack of ontological ground and makes of this aporia not an occasion for anxiety but a site of freeplay. Where the grid’s continued evolution or “progress” more generally was dependent on this aporia at the subject’s core remaining hidden, even from the subject himself, the early cinema tricksters reveled in exposing and exploring 127

its creative potential. The subject that physiologists had disarticulated into temporal units was theirs to reassemble as they might in ways never before imagined.

Three new phenomena, then, are introduced by the move from a physical to a physiological optics: first, as the body becomes temporalized so too do the objects of knowledge as experiments reveal objects and their perception to be dependent upon the synchronizations or resonances which might be established between the body’s rhythms and those of a referent; second, the body is revealed to be a medium in its own right, and because every medium modulates or transduces what it receives, the body is understood to play a creative role in constructing its reality; and third, the development of temporalized technologies such as the moving image has the potential to make the body more legible to itself, signaling to some such as Kittler that the map and territory have been brought into contact with one another, and signification is at an end. For

Väliaho, “…the moving image amounts to a cartography of thinking, providing a map with which we find our bearings in thought. This is an image that directs our fundamental perception of what the world is made of, that is, our apprehension of the constituents of reality.”54 This suggests that media such as the moving image have rendered it impossible to differentiate between technology and reality, though, as argued here, such a differentiation was only ever a functional possibility.

More recently and in a slightly different register, philosophers and media theorists have been investigating how our understanding of such concepts as affect,

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virtuality, perception and time have been altered by the introduction of new digital media. Mediologist Mark Hansen, for example, in his New Philosophy for New Media, explores what he believes is “the technically catalyzed reconfiguration of human perception,” a process that is proceeding apace as we “shift from a vision-centered to a body-centered model of perception.”55 Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson,

Raymond Ruyer and Gilles Deleuze, Hansen analyzes how contemporary artists’ engagement with the digital is leading to a shift from understanding “…the body as a filter of preexistent images to the body as a ‘proprioceptive interval’ that extracts a lived space from the universal flux of information and in so doing restores the possibility for belief in the world.”56 He documents how the image itself is becoming a process, engaging not a viewer but an “active user” in the exploration of the new medium’s technologically constituted depth; how the body serves to frame this new mediating process, relying on its sensorimotor/proprioceptive capacities rather than on its sense of vision to co-constitutively create “reality” as it moves through the universal flux; how exceedingly fine-grained machinic time is beginning to foreground affect as the site/process of this subperceptual co-constitutivity; and how this technologically- facilitated alteration of the sensing subject has always already been at work on the human, recursively shaping its sense not only of the ”perceptual object-event” but also of the “dynamic temporal flow” in which it appears to be embedded.

Both the trick films of the early cinema and the virtual spaces opened up by digital technologies, then, emphasize the processual nature of reality; the non-linearity 129

of cause and effect and thus of agency; the reformulation of time as at once figure and ground; and the possibility of by-passing or short-circuiting those of our perceptual apparatuses which naturalize hierarchical representations of reality, a proposition which inevitably calls for the reevaluation of the ontological and epistemological models which these inscribe.

What characterizes these early films is a particular kind of indetermination concerning out-of- control bodies that have lost their definition and also a world that has lost its coordinate. . . From this viewpoint, Méliès’s films seem to be specific experiments of the technology’s powers to modulate our perception of movement and sense of self-movement, to blur categorical distinctions between the animate and the inanimate, and to question our very being.57

Finding their origins in the automated inscription machines of 19th century physiology laboratories, these early films in many ways explore the same novel ontological terrain as more recent art forms which “mobilize the digital image in order to catalyze a bodily intuition of space…[and a] breakdown in the visual register itself.”58 We will further explore how the digital image accomplishes this catalysis by following artists’ attempts to understand the body “as felt from within rather than seen from without,”59 an effort that builds on the physiological optics project begun in earnest two centuries ago. We might then see how a physiologically-based optics has helped artists such as choreographer Pina Bausch pursue their explorations of the inner forces that work on bodies: "I'm not interested in how people move; I'm interested in what makes them move." 60

The machinically-derived digital image being now a “process” (rather than a static representation such as a photograph) that engages an “active user” is beginning

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to reveal how consciousness itself has a temporal basis, one generated by the dichotomizing structures of the brain as they segment into discreet temporal events the continuous flow of the matter/energy flux.61 This creates what might be likened to an

“event horizon,” a band within a temporal gradient below which our senses cannot penetrate due to the role they play in co-constitutively creating the “temporal objects” they are attempting to analyze, or those “…object[s] that [are] not simply in time but…constituted through time…Husserl’s favored example is a musical melody.”62 Being themselves enmeshed at a subperceptual level with the temporal dimension, these apparatuses/structures can only reinforce teleological interpretations of the temporal order, imputing a directionality to that which might more properly be understood to cycle continuously. “As a process that is properly subperceptual, the constitution of a temporal object from microphysical fluxes furnishes time-consciousness with a ‘content’ that is not given – and that in principle cannot be given – by an impression.”63 All digital images, being processes, are now “temporal objects” and as such refer not to any pre- existing reality “out there,” but rather to the process of their own becoming in relation to the activity of a “user.”

What is required, then, for an investigation of the new topology such images represent is access to the affective realm, or the subperceptual, pre-temporal flux out of which time-consciousness arises. Digital media’s grounding in intensive, machinic time is beginning to grant access to this realm by making legible the body’s co-constitutive role in the creation of temporal objects. This legibility is being communicated not 131

through a semiotic system of images or language, but rather through the iterative, microphysical adjustments the body makes as it engages with the new temporal reality.

These technologies open up a new interior space, or what Hansen terms an “affective interval,” where the continuity of existence which cannot be accessed through the senses can be “see[n] with the body.”64 According to Hansen, this reflexive turn at the microphysical level is precisely what digital media artists are endeavoring to foreground in their work. By making participant/observers aware of the way their bodies actively

“enframe” digital information, these artists hope to reveal the way in which the body provides access to the virtual realm and the field of potentiality associated with it.

What becomes highlighted in the process of, for example, navigating the topology of virtual space by inclining one’s body in a certain direction, however, is not the ‘object’ or ‘image’ conveyed by the digital data so much as the way technologies work to “alter the very basis of our sensory experience.”65 As Rotman notes:

What is true of the ‘psychophysiology of cinematic experience’ holds for any encounter with a mediating apparatus – cinematic, computational, telephonic, televisual, photographic, audiophonic, telegraphic, or any other: always the user is used, the psyche-body of the one who views, listens, speaks, computes is activated and transformed by an undeclared affect, a force outside the apparatus’s explicit instrumentality.66

The participant/observer, through interaction with virtual objects or environments, becomes self-reflexively aware of this “undeclared affect” by having her attention drawn to the way her senses, especially the haptic and proprioceptive, undergird her cognitive constructions of a perceiving body. Such awareness, coupled with microphysical changes to the participant/observer’s preconscious sensual substrate,

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ultimately enhance the latter’s creative capacity to call forth from the virtual an Umwelt reflective of more than the ratios of her perceptual apparatuses. Rather than effecting a disembodiment of information and a dystopic posthuman future, as Katherine Hayles and others fear, digital technologies, in their ability to foreground the ways in which the body co-constitutively contributes to the creation of its spatiotemporal reality, have the potential to act as positive agents of change. From this perspective, technologies cannot disembody the human because they are always already mediated through the body. New media artists are helping to highlight these co-constitutive aspects of the body by moving away from a predominantly ocularcentric art practice and towards one which foregrounds affective modes of knowing and perceiving. By creating objects and installations that refuse a purely visual resolution but instead engage the body at a subperceptual level, these artists are hoping to help the body discover “in effect itself: its own affectively experienced sensation of coming into contact with the digital.”67

The potential of new media to foster the body’s awareness of itself is perhaps best exemplified by a piece cited by Hansen entitled skulls by artist Robert Lazzarini.

Sometimes described as an installation of anamorphic, three-dimensional objects, skulls provides a window onto a topology heterogeneous to our own, one which usually exists only within the computer. Lazzarini accomplished this modulation between topologies by creating and manipulating in the computer a three-dimensional CAD file of a human skull. He then used this as a model from which to cast, in solid bone, four uniquely- distorted, skull-like objects. The resulting objects are not true anamorphs in that the 133

viewer cannot find a location from which she might achieve their perspectival resolution. Instead, as she moves around the objects (positioned at eye level about a foot off the wall), trying to bring them into focus, she is forced to try first one and then another “paradigm of perceptual abstraction,”68 discarding each in turn as it fails to resolve the image into a form that might be cognitively grasped. What becomes foregrounded for the viewer, as she cycles through these various paradigms without ever completely managing to gain perceptual control over the viewed object, is the process of perceiving, itself, and the way it normally acts to construct the spatiotemporal field through formal abstraction.

[s]kulls situates the viewer in between the machinic space of the image and the normal geometrical space of visual perception: to the extent that our perspectival grasp of the image is short-circuited, we do not experience the image in the space between it and our eye (as in normal geometric perspective); and to the extent that we are thus “placed” into the space of the image (though without being able to enter into it), our visual faculties are rendered useless and we experience a shift to an alternate mode of perception rooted in our bodily faculty of proprioception.69

This rapid shifting from first one unsuccessful perceptual paradigm to another carves out an internal interval, a self-reflexive, affective space within the body which allows the participant/observer only to feel rather than control the irresolvable object before it.

Awareness is pulled below the perceptual threshold, stretched along the temporal axis as the process of perception within the perceiving body itself becomes the subject of the piece and object of the participant/observer’s focus.

Heightening this effect of skulls, of course, is the way it defies the logics of the grid. Not only does it elude any and all attempts at perspectival resolution, confounding

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the best efforts of the punctual observer, but it simultaneously destabilizes the rectilinear surfaces of the gallery, causing the surrounding space “to ripple, to bubble, to infold, as if it were coming unstuck from the fixed coordinates of its three-dimensional extension.”70 The observer experiences a weird and disturbing disorientation when in its presence as well she might, for though skulls engages the observer only at the affective level, prompting her to explore how the sub-perceptual processes of the body construct reality, it also opens a rare window onto the alien logics of the computer, or the “super-black-box” apparatus from which it emerged. That this window would expose a universe of forms and dimensions foreign to the human would not surprise

Flusser for it is precisely this which he fears, that the world is being made over to accommodate such alien logics and that these will supersede any that might properly belong to the human. He is joined in his concern by others such as Paul Virilio, who believes: “These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.”71

But what logics could be said to properly belong to the human? As we have seen, those of the grid are themselves alien in many ways, with its origins uncertain and each of its successive instantiations fundamentally altering how the human conceives of itself.72 Is skulls then indicative of a future in which humans are no more than appendages of an alien technological apparatus as Flusser fears? Or might it represent 135

instead, as Hansen suggests, a move away from ocularcentrism and Barad’s

“geometrical optics of representation” and towards the establishment of a direct interface between body and world? Or might it simply indicate yet another closure and entry of the grid into itself with the human serving yet again as site for its iterative transformation?

Our flat/fractal ontological perspective will help us think through these questions, but rather than attempt to answer them here we will review what can be said about the issues involved. Digital technologies support alternative readings of our spatiotemporal field, opening up for exploration the infinitely nested realms of our affective depths. These appear to defy the sort of closure that is implied by hierarchical structures or linear perspective as diagrammed by Aristotle’s scala naturae, indicating or creating instead a continuous line or conduit that traces the temporally-defined communities of the body down into, and above and beyond, the usual boundaries thought to delimit it. The vanishing point, in effect, is opened up for inspection by digital media,73 its depths, for the first time, made navigable, its implied lack of ontological ground made explicit. Some of the ramifications of this are quite radical:

It may even be necessary to consider the observer as a distribution of events located in many different places. There never was or will be a self-present beholder to whom a world is transparently evident. Instead there are more or less powerful arrangements of forces out of which the capacities of an observer are possible.74

Letting go of the body’s boundaries can be a perilous experience, but, once embraced, potentially liberating. Large and small, inner and outer, past and future, begin to resemble little more than folds in the line, pleats in a new topology whose reticulations 136

can be only affectively registered, not perceptually captured. Virtual objects/ installations such as skulls or fractal zooms into the Mandelbrot set confront the ocularcentric observer with the limitations of his gridded/perspectival logic, pointing to its inability to effectively navigate the newly unfolding topological terrain. Even as the diagram of the grid emerged from within the human to constitute the latter’s external environment, in effect, turning the body inside-out, so another diagram, that of the body’s affective il-logics, is being bodied-forth and instantiated in the material- discursive environment. This would seem to favor those who have learned to feel their way along rather than those who rely solely on reason, a topic we will explore in

Chapter Four.

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Endnotes for Chapter Three

1 Pasi Väliaho. 2010. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam. p. 10. 2 Vilém Flusser. English translation 2000 (1983). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Trans. Nicholas Cahill. Reaktion Books: London. p. 10. 3 Brian Rotman. 2008. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 5. 4 Though, on occasion, these self-referential systems expand too quickly and end up imploding spectacularly, such as in the speculative bubble known as ‘tulipomania” in the Netherlands in 1637. 5 Ibid., p. 39. 6 Ibid., p. 37. 7 In this, it very much resembles the concept of autopoiesis as developed by cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. 8 Vilém Flusser. Ibid., p. 71. 9 Ibid., p. 80. 10 Jacques Derrida. 1967. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Essay in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge. pp 278-294. p. 293. 11 Suhail Malik. 2005. “Information and Knowledge.” In Theory, Culture and Society. Special Issue on: Inventive Life: Approaches to a New Vitalism. 22:1. pp.29-49. p. 46. 12 “The definition of God as 'an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere' has its roots in the Liber XXIV philosophorum, a Latin booklet by an anonymous author, which consists of 24 commented definitions of what God is. It has been ascribed to the fourth-century grammarian and philosopher Marius Victorinus, but the earliest extant manuscript dates back to the beginning of the thirteenth century.” Nicholas of Cusa invoked this formulation in the most famous of his texts, On Learned Ignorance (De docta ignorantia). Commenting on The Book of the 24 Philosophers, author Marc Rihir argues in his own text, And God became Space, that it is “extremely topical […] The modern time till nowadays is not, as we generally say in a superficial way, a period of atheism and abandonment of faith, but a time in which God has become […] a logico-mathematical structure, which is the real symbolic Gestell of our age […] we haven’t yet understood how science is still and unbelievably deeply theological.’ (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/projects/studentperformance /addivinola/). Accessed 9/3/12. 13 Vilém Flusser. Ibid., p. 45. 14 Ibid. 15 Jacques Derrida. Ibid., p. 282. 16 Alexander R. Galloway. 2004. Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 13. 17 Marshall McLuhan. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw Hill: New York. p. 33. 18 Stefan Stenudd. 2011. Cosmos of the Ancients: The Greek Philosophers on Myth and Cosmology. Aribba Publishing: Colchester, Vermont. (http://www.stenudd.com/aristotle/aristotle-life-03-stagira.htm). 19 Nicholas Cahill. 2002. Household and City Organization at Olynthus. Yale University Press: New Haven pp. 13-19. 20 Herbert Granger. 1985. “The Scala Naturae and the Continuity of Kinds.” Phronesis. Vol. 30. No. 2. pp. 181-200. p. 186. 21 James Lennox. “Aristotle's Biology.” First published Feb 15, 2006; substantive revision Jul 27, 2011. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/). Accessed 9/12/12. 22 At least two objections might be raised to this seemingly simplistic origin story. First, as noted in the grid chapter, experiencing such an effect does not require one occupy a gridded environment as perspectivally-derived rays and vanishing points are an artifact of optics, available to experience anywhere. Still, visual cues afforded by gridded spaces (as in perspective painting and optical illusions) 138

are known to reinforce and even exaggerate scalar effects. It seems likely that such cues also prime one, however sub-perceptually, to accept the “naturalness” of pyramidical structures by conflating as they do, “what is seen” with “how we see.” It is difficult to imagine framing reality differently when the perspective afforded by one’s external (gridded) environment echoes that provided by one’s internal perceptual tools (stereoptical vision). And second, our cognitive faculties easily learn to override the illusions presented as fact by the apparatuses of sight. Just as we learn, for example, that parallel railroad tracks do not converge regardless of what our eyes tell us, so we learn that “further away” does not necessarily correlate with “simpler” or “smaller.” While it is certainly true that humans learn to ignore certain visual cues in the environment, it cannot be said that the earlier, more “primitive” resolutions of the visual field do not continue to exert a powerful effect on humans’ psyches-somas, even if only, at times, sub-perceptually. Visual researcher Adelbert Ames Jr.’s trapezoidal room or Escher’s etchings of impossible staircases confirm that certain gestalts continue to appeal to the visual cortex even after they have been overridden by other of the brain’s modules. We might then think of the naïve equating of distance with simplicity as a gestalt which continues to operate behind the more “sophisticated” model afforded by modern perspective, subtly influencing the formal models employed within various discursive fields. 23 Edmund Carpenter. 1964. “Man and Art in the Arctic.” United States Department of the Interior. Bureau of Indian Affairs. Museum of the Plains Indian: Browning, MT. p. 15. 24 Ibid., p. 12. 25 Jonathan Crary. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 5. 26 Aristotle. 2009. The Metaphysics. Trans. William D. Ross. Mobi Classic Series: New York. Book IV. Ch. 7. 27 P. L. Luisi. 2006. The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. “Consider, for example, a political party, or a family, whereby the rules that define a party or a family can be seen as a kind of boundary given by the social structure itself. The whole system enjoys a dynamic equilibrium, as certain members leave the structure, and new people come in, and are transformed into steady members by the binding rules of the party or of the family. There is a regeneration from within, there is the defense of the self-identity; the metaphor of the living cell applies. Also, in all these systems, certain characteristic features of biology can be recognized, such as the notion of emergence—the family being an emergent property arising from the organization of single individuals, etc.” pp. 175-6. 28 Marshall G. Shuler, Mark F. Bear. Mar., 2006. “Reward Timing in the Primary Visual Cortex.” Science. 17. Vol. 311. No. 5767. pp. 1606-1609. 29 Susana Martinez-Conde. April 10, 2007. “Anticipating Reward: More Than Meets the Eye.” Ed. David Dobbs. Selective Vision: The Brain's Spin Machine Starts Early. Scientific American. p. 2. 30 Ibid. 31 N. Katherine Hayles. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Cornell University Press: Ithaca. p. 13. 32 Marshall McLuhan. Ibid., p. 9. 33 Sean Nee. May, 2005. Nature. Vol. 435|26. p. 429. 34 Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. 1988. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison Wesley: New York. p. 32. 35 Tom Conley. 2007. Cartographic Cinema. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 13. 36 Pasi Väliaho. Ibid., p. 11. 37 Karen Barad. Spring, 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs. Vol. 28. No. 3. pp. 801-831. p. 819. 38 Plotinus’ Enneads is a Neoplatonist text aimed at reconciling certain aspects of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophies. See John R. Kroger. 2004. “The Philosophical Foundations of Roman Law: Aristotle, The Stoics, and Roman Theories of Natural Law.” Wisconsin Law Review. pp. 905, 914 n. 39. 139

39 For a discussion on how this misinterprets Plato’s concept of the Same and the Different in the Timaeus see John D. Turner. 2001. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Presses Université Laval: Sainte- Foy, Québec. p. 325; Also see: Plato. 1997. The Complete works. Law X (894A). Eds. John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson. Hackett Publishing Co.: Cambridge, MA. pp. 324-47; Also see: Plotinus: The Enneads. 1991. Ed. John Dillon. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. Abridged Edition. Penguin Classics: London. See: The Fifth Ennead. 40 Arthur O. Lovejoy. 1960 (1936). The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harper Torchbooks: New York. pp. 58-59. 41 Ibid., p. 59. 42 Ibid. 43 This is comparable to the Scholastic understanding of the “‘Will of God’ which everywhere acts directly, without any intermediate intelligent agents.” “Origins of Scientific Materialism.” 1940. Theosophy. pp. 543 – 546. 44 Arthur Lovejoy. Ibid., p. 36, at 282 (discussing the active force inherent in matter). 45 Tim Ingold. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Taylor and Francis, Ltd.: London. pp. 75-6. See next chapter: M- set Interlude. pp. 154-155. 46 Gilles Deleuze. 1988. Foucault. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 34. “…a spatio-temporal multiplicity [which] produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth.” 47 We might compare the importance of this discovery to Kant’s distinction between appearance and apparition. Perception of objects is shown to be related to interference and diffraction, the effects of waves interacting with each other rather than directly representative of the thing itself. “Phenomenology claims to be a rigorous science of the apparition as such, which is to say it asks itself the question: what can we say about the fact of appearing? It’s the opposite of a discipline of appearances. What does an apparition refer to? The appearance is something that refers to essence in a relation of disjunction, in a disjunctive relation, which is to say either it’s appearance or it’s essence. The apparition is very different, it’s something that refers to the conditions of what appears. The conceptual landscape has literally changed completely, the problem is absolutely no longer the same, the problem has become phenomenological. For the disjunctive couple appearance/essence, Kant will substitute the conjunctive couple, what appears/conditions of apparition. Everything is new in this.” “Kant: Synthesis and Time.” 14/03/1978. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Melissa McMahon. p. 5. 48 Ibid., p. 7. 49 Donna Haraway. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cory Nelson, and Paula Treichler. pp. 295–337. Routledge: New York. p. 300. 50 Jonathan Crary. Ibid., p. 88. 51Pasi Väliaho. Ibid., p. 27. 52 Ibid., p. 89. 53 Ibid., p. 34. 54 Ibid., p. 21. 55 Mark Hansen. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 103. 56 Ibid., p. 217. 57 Pasi Väliaho. Ibid., p. 26. 58 Mark Hansen. Ibid., p. 204. 59 Ibid., p. 27. 60 Pina Bausch’s website. (http://pinabausch.blogspot.com/). Accessed 10/24/12. 61 Eva Ruhnau. 1997. “The Deconstruction of Time and the Emergence of Temporality.” In H. Atmanspacher and E. Ruhnau, eds. Time, Temporality, Now: Experiencing Time and Concepts of Time in an Interdisciplinary Perspective. Springer: Berlin; New York. pp. 51-69. “The brain itself creates a dynamic clock. To be more precise, one should probably say that the system “brain” is this clock – this temporal 140

Gestalt. Considered this way, the brain is a measuring rod; measuring itself leads to limits of temporal reducibility. The functioning brain cannot arbitrarily measure itself accurately. To be what it is (at least with respect to certain functional domains), atemporal windows are necessary, i.e., windows where the concept earlier-later is abandoned…Interestingly, there is an increasing accumulation of hints that the concept of Time is no longer adequate with respect to fundamental theoretical problems in physics itself. I dare to predict that even in physics concepts of atemporal zones in the sense of non-observability will turn out to be necessary.” pp. 58-59. 62 Mark Hansen. Ibid., p. 255 63 Ibid., p. 253. 64 Ibid., p. 228. 65 Ibid., p. xx. 66 Brian Rotman. 2008. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 6. 67 Mark Hansen. Ibid., p. 13. 68 Ibid., p. 203. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., pp. 198-199. 71 Paul Virilio. 1997. Open Sky. Verso: New York City/London. p. 43. 72 There is also a link between scalar jumps in human organization and instantiations of the grid suggesting the latter be thought of as logics more properly associated with the community, society, state or supranational system than with the human as individual, group or tribe. 73 Examples of this vanquishing of the vanishing point by digital media include hyperlinks, hypertexts, STM and simulation and fractal imagery. 74 Jonathan Crary. Ibid., p. 6.

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M-set Interlude

As discussed in the introductory chapter, I explore in this dissertation how technology has always played a role in shaping ontological perspectives. While each subsequent chapter traces an historical example of this dynamic, my ultimate focus is on how the computational revolution has made legible the dynamics of the temporal dimension, revealing the ways in which non-linear processes imbricate, carve, accrete and otherwise iterate a world radically different from that described/prescribed by the positivist ontology dominant in the West at least since the Enlightenment. Where the second chapter explores the kinetics of the grid, its origins, movements, evolution and the relationship of these to sight, the third examines how the perspectival framing of the subject and world that emerges from these serves to delimit what counts as a material-discursive object, structure, or event. It also begins to explore how technology’s growing ability to model the “il-logics” of the body might expand possibilities for thinking-feeling the subject and its material-discursive relations. I continue this exploration in the fourth chapter with an analysis of how technology is revealing the self-reflexive nature of time and what the implications of this might be for understandings of agency, scale and orientation. But, by way of introduction to this

‘vortextual’ terrain, I provide here an affective, fractal interlude in hopes that it might

142 help acclimate the reader to the new material-discursive conditions fast approaching and described herein.

The new visualization and haptic technologies that are daily coming online demonstrate how non-linear processes result in a world in which seemingly negligible differences in inputs can disproportionately affect outcomes and in which order and chaos can be seen to be mutually constitutive. But these technologies have revealed a world stranger still, one that runs counter to the reality conjured up by the reductivist logics of the positivist metaphysics. In the ontology associated with the latter, complexity and specificity are understood to inhere in the object according to its position within a scalar hierarchy; there is the possibility of the observer being isolated from that which he observes; and the bounded object forms the primary ontological unit. In the world invoked by the non-linear, flat ontology explored here, however, or what might more accurately be termed a “fractal” ontology, complexity and specificity are deemed to be relational rather than essential qualities of the object and to have no lower (or upper) bound; objects are understood to be at once unities and multiplicities, diffractionally enfolded in one another and thus always linked, however tenuously;1 and objects are at once entities, processes, events, or non-existent relative to the other objects which perturb, constitute, or pass through them, the determination being dependent on the speed/scale at which each operates. Thus an acorn is at once non- existent from the perspective of a fast-moving neutrino, an event for the ant on whose leg it lands, a process for the morphogenetically-linked molecules which participate in

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its unfolding and an object for the squirrel who buries it in anticipation of the coming winter.

Reality as revealed by the digital economy, then, has much in common with the concept of “nature” as defined by philosopher and ecocritic Timothy Morton; it is more than simply one’s “environment,” more than something one can point to “over there.”

Instead, it is that which “…flickers between things – it is both/and or neither/nor…it is both the set and the contents of the set. It is the world and entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series....”2 And, I would add, it is a reality in which parts and wholes can contain each other, where scale-invariance is the norm and where going forward means returning to the spot (or one nearly identical to) where one began.3 It is the world that begins where analytical reason ends or begins to blur into the metaphysical as the digital economy makes legible ever finer-grained details of reality’s constituent parts. What non-linearity and Morton both point us to, then, is what I term a fractal/flat ontology, one derived from combining two seemingly paradoxical stances with respect to the status of objects; a radical perspectivism in which the qualities of an object are as manifold as the objects which make it up and/or prehend it (such that it might be thought of as more pattern than substance); and in

Kwinter’s terms, an “immanent transcendental” such that “‘things,’ phenomena, though sundered from the metaphysical structure that grounds them in ‘meaning,’ now find their principle of being nowhere else but within themselves.”4 The first is evocative of

Leibniz’s Monadology, though without the teleological pull of the “unmoved mover” 144

and attendant perfection hierarchy and with diffracted rather than reflected monads,5 while the second resonates with object-oriented ontologist Graham Harman’s withdrawn object6 – with the exception that the object’s withdrawn interior, like that of the Mandelbrot set (described below), never achieves closure and describes not a true object but at best an invagination or fold in the line that circumscribes its boundary.7

Thus we are presented with an ontology in which objects are both insubstantial quasi- objects, defined not by their contents or essential qualities, but, as with a text, by how other quasi-objects interpret them; yet they are also quasi-closed systems, worlds unto themselves in as much as any object, including the universe, can be said to exist independently of all others.

This makes it an obscure ontology in that, unlike the reigning positivist model, its elements, consisting as they do of the relationships between the real and the virtual, or what can and cannot be quantitatively assessed, largely escape attempts to model or otherwise visualize them. This puts those who would popularize such a fractal/flat ontology at a distinct disadvantage, one only reinforced by the fact that the geometric optics of vision, or that faculty most trusted as an arbiter of truth, tend to reify the ideal, closed forms of Euclidian geometry which ground the positivist ontology. Collectively, vision, ideal geometric forms and the positivist ontology form a closed, self-reinforcing system, one which has, over time, become naturalized within the material-discursive environment. Challenging the positivist, self-reinforcing loop that results from this reification then requires we articulate the ways in which how we see plays a vital, if 145

largely overlooked, role in determining what we see, an articulation scholars such as

Alva Noë and Andy Clark have been pursuing and whose efforts to construct an enactive model of vision and consciousness I attempt to build on here.

But before further elaborating my analysis of the formal elements of sight and how these become reified in the material-discursive landscape, I want to familiarize my readers with the “map” that has guided my thinking on these and related matters. I refer here to the image of the fractal as developed by mathematician Benoit

Mandelbrot and, more specifically, to the infinitely complex set which bears his name.

Fractals, of course, are those detailed patterns which repeat self-similarly at all scales such that they sometimes occupy fractional dimensions.8 While fractal models are capable of capturing the finest, formal details of everything from clouds, mountains, ferns and lightning bolts to the behaviors of heart muscles, neurons, intestinal filtering systems and protein growth,9 I believe it is the Mandelbrot set, the paradigmatic fractal and most complex mathematical object ever discovered, which best serves to communicate the complexities of our otherwise all-but-impossible-to-schematize material-discursive environment.

Many readers are, no doubt, already familiar with the image of the Mandelbrot set (or M-set) – a fuzzy, (typically) black, insect-like shape outlined by brightly-colored, contoured bands. First discovered in 1975 with the aid of computers,10 ever-more detailed and multi-dimensional renderings of the M-set are regularly produced in

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conjunction with improvements in computing technologies.11 The dark interior of the set represents all numbers in the complex plane that remain within a circle of radius 2 and do not grow exponentially when iterated in the function Z= z² + c, while the colorful contours which constitute the set’s exterior indicate the rate at which the output of successive iterations moves towards infinity. The result is a rather peculiar object – a finite area paradoxically enclosed by an infinite perimeter. The ever-receding, filigreed vanishing point familiar to anyone who has experienced a deep zoom into the M-set is then a trip down (or up?) into the infinite boundary separating the set’s interior from its exterior.12 However, because this boundary (being infinite) never attains closure, one can never ascertain that such a division truly exists, all apparent indications to the contrary; that is, unlike with classical geometric forms such as a circle or square, one can never extricate the set from its surrounding topography because the co-constitutive entwinings between inside and outside extend indefinitely into the infinite reaches of the complex plane constituting an unimaginably intricate example of a plane-filling, one- dimensional line (as the line never meets itself). In this sense the boundary of the M-set resembles other ambiguous divisions: “The taut skin of the drum, even of the eardrum, separates inside from outside like a margin, and gives rise to resonant sound when struck...Is this drum, this margin, part of the inside or the outside?”13

It should be clear that the implications for our ontological models would be profound were it to be demonstrated that this condition of non-closure applied not just to the M-set but to objects more generally; that is, that the closure of objects as 147

presented in deterministic models of relations (and to the eye) is partially or wholly illusory – a harmless heuristic, at best, a gross distortion of reality at worst. And, in fact, the computational revolution has repeatedly brought to light evidence demonstrating precisely this, that material reality is permeated by fractal structures and processes such that fractals have been described as “the ‘signature’ of dynamical processes at work,”14 essential to descriptions of everything from the behavior of Brownian motion15 to the structure of interstellar gas.16 This then should give those who employ idealized, atomistic objects in their models and theories reason to doubt the efficacy of the latter, as, indeed, increasingly appears to be the case in disciplines as varied as economics17 and medicine. Health care researchers, for example, have discovered that physiological

“dis-orders” are associated not with a lack of order but rather with too much:

The antithesis of a scale-free (fractal) system (i.e., one with multiple scales) is one that is dominated by a single frequency or scale. A system that has only one dominant scale becomes especially easy to recognize and characterize because such a system is by definition periodic - it repeats its behavior in a highly predictable (regular) pattern. The theory underlying this prediction may account for a clinical paradox: namely, that a wide range of illnesses are associated with markedly periodic (regular) behavior even though the disease states themselves are commonly termed "dis-orders"…Findings from nonlinear dynamics have also challenged conventional mechanisms of physiological control based on classical homeostasis, which presumes that healthy systems seek to attain a constant steady state. In contrast, nonlinear systems with fractal dynamics, such as the neuroautonomic mechanisms regulating heart rate variability, behave as if they were driven far from equilibrium under basal conditions. This kind of complex variability, rather than a regular homeostatic steady state, appears to define the free- running function of many biological systems [italics in original].18

Scholars in the humanities and social sciences who explore issues of recursivity and affect implicitly recognize the limitations of the atomistic model as do scientists who specialize in non-linear dynamical systems and/or quantum mechanics. Cognitive scientist Andy Clark, sociologist Hannah Landecker, cultural theorist Sarah Ahmed,

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theoretical physicist Karen Barad and economist Yanis Varoufakis are just a few of the scholars who are trying to understand and model the interface between inside and outside with the understanding that the two are co-constitutive and thus reflexively linked. This aspect of the M-set reinforces the belief held by many who work in these and related disciplines that an absolute division between observer and observed, subject and object can, at best, be approached only asymptotically rather than established absolutely, a point at variance with the beliefs of positivists and object- oriented philosophers alike (though the latter, at least, have posited the novel concept of an inexhaustibly creative, withdrawn interior). While this is not a new concept, with, among others, Henri Bergson arguing over a century ago for recognition of the porosity of bodies,19 it is one which is only now gaining real traction as a result of the computational revolution. The non-closure aspect of the M-set, as revealed by the new technologies, thus has the potential to help us think, or, rather, feel our way through some of the paradoxes that confront anyone who would try to model either objects or their inter-relations.

But the M-set, in addition to this property of non-closure, has other distinguishing features which help us better understand the peculiarities of the posthuman, material-discursive topology. Though derived from a simple equation requiring nothing more than multiplication and addition, the M-set extends to infinity without ever duplicating any part of itself. As such, it is a graphic example of Deleuze’s “self- differentiating difference” or that which “unfolds itself and thereby creates a 149

universe.”20 Like the whole in which it is contained, each “object” within the set is unique and acts as a potential portal into unexplored realms. At the same time, each is a multitude made up of patterns which repeat at all different scales such that there are patterns, and patterns of patterns, and so on, including periodic repetitions of the insect-like “interior” of the set (though never are these repetitions identical to the original).21 Self-similar at all scales, every part can then be said to contain the whole even as it is contained by a whole which can never be fully encompassed. This quality of the set, then, like that of its non-closure, also has implications for our ontological models, as it allows us to see how it might be possible for parts to contain wholes as readily as wholes contain parts. This is what I refer to as the “diffractional”22 aspect of the M-set, which I liken to Karen Barad’s call for a move away from “common-sense” representationalism and towards performativity.23 We have already seen how the M- set challenges what Barad refers to as “one of representationalism’s fundamental metaphysical assumptions: the view that the world is composed of individual entities with separately determinate properties.”24 It is precisely this “assumption of thingness”25 and its association with the real that must be destabilized if we are to move beyond jejune ontological debates such as those which take place between, for example, scientific realists and social constructivists. Both camps adhere to an ontological model premised on the idea that representations of scientific knowledge

“mediate our access to the material world.”26 However, contrary to what Barad refers to as “Descartes’ asymmetrical belief in word over world,”27 there is no reason to

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assume that we have greater access to our thoughts about things than we have to the things themselves. One does not precede the other but indicates the on-going process of subjectification, a process aptly conveyed by Whitehead in his theory of concrescence, where the “throb of feeling is not perceived by a subject as such but rather constitutes the actual occasion out of which the distinction between subject and object emerges.”28

Another key feature of the M-set and the last I will review here is the insight it provides into the inter-relationships among scale, complexity and locatedness of the viewer. Scale (in the sense of organizational level) and complexity are not absolute but relative distinctions made by an observer located at a certain scalar level. Leibniz was perhaps the first to make this point explicit:

Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond…Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe, no chaos, no confusion save in appearance, somewhat as it might appear to be in a pond at a distance, in which one would see a confused movement and, as it were, a swarming of fish in the pond, without separately distinguishing the fish themselves.29

Ruyer, Simondon,30 Serres and Tarde31 also suggest, to one degree or another, that it is not complexity which diminishes with scale but rather our ability to perceive the inner- workings of entities/events operating at speeds and timeframes radically removed from our own. Biologist Stanley Salthe, arguing along the same lines, constructs a thought experiment:

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…imagine how a human being might appear to a higher-level entity like a city. Since the cogent moment of the higher-level individual is considerably longer than that of the lower-level entity, the latter would be splayed out over a larger level moment so that a human being might appear like an amoeba with its center at, e.g., its bed and with its pseudopods being habitual trajectories.32

Where Salthe likens the relationship existing between the individual and the city to that which exists between the amoeba and the individual, a scale-invariant model such as the M-set (or, to some degree, Leibniz’s Monadology) suggests this relationship be understood to play out ad infinitum. Classical notions of complexity, time/scale and perspective work against this understanding, however, collectively creating the impression of a hierarchically organized natural world in which the small and quick have fewer parts and are thus less complex than the large and slow. But technologies such as those which make possible the experience of virtual reality and the M-set allow us to think, visualize and feel reality as a continuum rather than (or in addition to) a hierarchy, one in which parts and wholes are understood to extend indefinitely without diminishment.33

It is an odd sort of map presented here in that it can help determine neither origin nor direction, neither progress nor goal. It can’t even provide the sense of control typically imparted by maps, as the bird’s-eye view it presents demarcates not a static terrain but an environment that might be said to move through the observer even as she moves through it. It is a map of interpenetrating parts and wholes, making legible in

Bergson’s terms “life’s own domain…reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation.”34 As such, it cannot help her distinguish inside from outside because, as it

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indicates, the patterns of which these domains consist are self-enfolding and self-similar

“all the way down.” It provides her instead with an image of a “topology of multiplicities,” one which marks “the end of dialectics”35 as its symmetry is radial rather than bilateral, always moving out from the center towards the observer as the latter moves towards it. In this respect, it is a deeply disorienting map, and, hence, one I believe perfectly suited to helping us navigate the turbulence of an era defined by the collapse of meta-narratives wedded to static frames of reference.

With the outputs from its algorithm constituting a hybrid of both real and imaginary numbers,36 the M-set is the anti-meta-narrative, incapable of helping viewers/readers determine even the actual from the virtual. Instead, it invites readers/viewers to explore a realm somewhere in-between, a realm in which reductionism and ever-greater powers of magnification lead not to simplification but only to an ever-receding vanishing point of complexity and novelty. The more one chases after this vanishing point the more destabilized one’s own inertial frame becomes. In the terms philosopher Keith Ansell-Pearson articulates, the M-set might be said to enact a map of the “non-chronological time that constitutes our interiority.”37

Viewers of a deep zoom into its boundary can find it difficult to decide at times whether it is they who are moving or the surrounding environment. Exploring the territory described by this map, in other words, is profoundly disorienting, not only because, being self-similar at all scales, it is devoid of absolute reference points, but because one becomes implicated within its infinite folds. To arrive at one’s goal, perhaps one of the 153

“alluring”38 quasi-objects that appear off in the “distance,” is to encounter not one’s telos but only the interplay of a figure and ground traced from a single line, one which includes the viewer as well. This evokes the sense that it is not only the set’s boundary which is infinite but one’s own, a feeling which leads science fiction and science writer

Arthur C. Clarke to speculate that “there is some structure…deep inside the human mind

[and, I would add, body] that resonates to the patterns of the M-set.”39 That neuroscientists, among others, have recently confirmed this to be the case should then come as no surprise to those with personal experience of this “map.”40

So then, one might ask, of what value is this “map”? From the perspective of someone who might be setting out on a journey with all ports-of-call pre-determined, perhaps none at all. Navigating such an itinerary, or one laid out by a traveler more interested in what anthropologist Tim Ingold refers to as “transport” rather than

“wayfaring,”41 requires little more than a point of origin and a small-scale representation of the terrain to be traversed. Always anticipating his next move, the transported traveler is content to skim the spatiotemporal surface, never becoming fully present to the places through which he passes. Transforming space into place would require he allow the spaces through which he moves to move through and transform him, a double movement that might inconveniently challenge the illusion, reinforced by his map, that he is a bounded entity navigating a fixed geometry of absolute time and space. The M-set as map, by contrast, illuminates and even enacts, when set in motion, the geometry of this double movement. It illustrates how one’s entanglements at the 154

macro level are not only mirrored by, but are enfolded within, those at the micro level and vice versa, with only the temporal/scalar dimension intervening to separate and make them legible.

…consequently every body feels the effect of all that takes place in the universe, so that he who sees all might read in each what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or shall happen, observing in the present that which is far off as well in time as in place: sympnoia panta, as Hippocrates said. But a soul can read in itself only that which is there represented distinctly; it cannot all at once unroll everything that is enfolded in it, for its complexity is infinite.42

The M-set, of course, obviates the need for Leibniz’s concept of “he who sees all,” as its infinite recursivity and scale-invariance illuminate how it might be possible for parts and wholes to relate to each other non-hierarchically. The downside, however, is that it has little to say about points of arrival and departure, finding the shortest distance between two points, or judging progress along a pre-planned route, making it comparatively useless to the transported traveler.

On the other hand, it is potentially invaluable to Ingold’s “wayfarer,” as its meanderings help her make sense of her own, the course of her journey and that of the

M-set being similarly determined by (what are perceived to be) “chance” encounters.

The wayfarer recognizes that the serpentine contours of their twinned paths derive from the accretion of unpredictable, iterative outputs from a feedback-looped, eventive

“anarchitecture.”43 What the next stop in the itinerary of either will be can never be known in advance, only discovered by playing out events in real time. Both exhibit in

Barad’s terms a performative aspect akin to Judith Butler’s concept of “gendering… an iterated doing through which subjects come into being.”44 While in the short term the

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incremental movements of both the M-set and the wayfarer seem disconnected and haphazard, they take on meaning over time as patterns linking individual events or iterations begin to coalesce. In this sense, both are reminiscent of the Danish folktale as related by Karen von Blixen (Isak Dinesen) in her memoir Out of Africa: a farmer hears a terrible noise in the night and goes out to investigate. Hearing it come from first one direction and then the other, he roams about his property in the dark, stumbling into ditches and over rocks in the road. Finally, he traces the sound to water rushing through a hole in a dam, and, after repairing this, he returns, exhausted, to his bed. But then, gazing out his bedroom window the next morning, he is amazed to discover that his wanderings of the night before have inscribed in the landscape the large-scale outline of a stork such that even the places where he had fallen form an integral part of the overall image.45 The meanderings of both the wayfarer and the M-set then confirm

Leibniz’s earlier suggestion that determinations of chaos and order (and hence meaning) are not inherent qualities of the object or system but shift in relation to the distance – temporal, spatial and, as this story indicates, scalar – between observer and observed.

The value of the M-set as a map, then, is manifold. While it might not have much to tell us about moving from point A to point B, it graphically illustrates some of the more paradoxical aspects of the fractal/flat ontology that technology is making legible. It allows us to visualize how it is possible for the closure of objects to be not absolute but scale- (and hence speed-) dependent; for a simple formula to generate both an infinity of novel instances and self-similar patterns; for parts to contain wholes 156

as readily as wholes contain parts; and for binaries, such as inside/outside, order/chaos, figure/ground, to indicate not an essential quality of the object or system but rather to be descriptive of the relationship between observer and observed, neither of which can be said to exist independently of the other. As Morton observes, “There is a Buddhist saying that reality is ‘not one and not two.’ Dualistic interpretations are highly dubious.

But so are monist ones. There is no (single, independent, lasting) ‘thing’ underneath the dualist concept.”46 The M-set then, like the technology of the mandala, has the potential to help us explore and even experience, under controlled conditions, the topology of binaries in tension, or the topology of “not one and not two.” More than a visual guide to a stable topography, it might be compared to a flight or surfing simulator in which one learns to synchronize one’s proprioceptive and haptic sensibilities to the surrounding topology. But because the user’s body is already familiar with the topology of the M-set, it being a map of the body’s own, the loop between outside and inside flows in the opposite direction. The M-set, then, encourages the user to actualize

Bergson’s concept of “life” as “endlessly continued creation” by transforming her external environment to align more fluidly with her interior affect. As such, it constitutes a technology for exploring and realizing a fractal/flat ontology as it both lessens the distance between map (representation, Ideal) and territory (object, Real) and reveals the two to constitute not separate domains but a navigable, if performative, diffractional continuum. Clarke is then right to suggest that the implications of the M-

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set for our understanding of reality are profound: “We’ve all read stories of maps that revealed the location of some hidden treasure. In this case the map is the treasure!”47

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Endnotes for M-set Interlude

1 Leibniz anticipated much of what technology is now making legible with respect to a fractal/flat ontology: “And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.” Gottfried F. Leibniz. 1998. “Monadology.” Philosophical Texts. Trans. and ed. by R.S. Woolhouse and R. Francks. New York: Oxford University Press. Paragraph 57. 2 Tim Morton. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 18. 3Philip Pilkington interviews Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on the collapse of neo-classical and neo- liberal economics. “What can be salvaged from the theoretical wreck that is economics? My answer is: The process of discovering the limits of analytical reason. By studying critically all models, we end up none the wiser about quantitative outcomes but much, much smarter about the complexities of really existing capitalism. Our exploration of economics may take us, in the end, right back to the point we started: Not having a clue about when the next crisis will hit, what sectors will dominate, whether the stock exchange will pick up soon or not. But, while we shall not have a determinate model of prices and quantities, we shall be much more appreciative of capitalism’s motivated irrationality, its penchant for surprising even the powers that be, its capacity to create incredible wealth and untold suffering by means of precisely the same process.” (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/the-new-priesthood-an- interview-with-yanis-varoufakis-part-ii.html). Accessesd 4/2/12. 4 Sanford Kwinter. 2002. Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts. p. 40. 5 Gottfried Leibniz. Ibid., Monadology. Paragraphs 82-84. “…rational animals have this peculiarity, that their little spermatic animals, as long as they remain such, have only ordinary or sensuous souls, but those of them which are, so to speak, elected, attain by actual conception to human nature, and their sensuous souls are raised to the rank of reason and to the prerogative of spirit. Among the differences that there are between ordinary souls and spirits, some of which I have already instanced, there is also this, that while souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of created things, spirits are also images of the Deity himself or of the author of nature. They are capable of knowing the system of the universe, and of imitating some features of it by means of artificial models, each spirit being like a small divinity in its own sphere. Therefore, spirits are able to enter into a sort of social relationship with God, and with respect to them he is not only what an inventor is to his machine (as in his relation to the other created things), but he is also what a prince is to his subjects, and even what a father is to his children.” 6 Graham Harman: “The world not only withdraws from human access, but objects withdraw from each other as well. There is no such thing as direct contact between any two entities: causal relations must be indirect, vicarious.” (http://figureground.ca/interviews/graham-harman/). Accessed 10/ 10/12. 7 Much as Niklas Luhmann’s observer is forced to rely on the observations of others to complete him. From Luhmann’s perspective, the self-reflexive system springs from a constitutive paradox in that its ability to maintain its corporeal integrity is dependent on the unity/duality paradox of its origins remaining invisible to the system itself. Rather than this creating a world of closed, solipsistic systems, however, he views this blind spot at the center of every autopoietic system as creating the possibility of sociality, as “only an [other] observer is able to realize what systems themselves are unable to realize” (1990. Essays on Self-reference. Columbia University Press: New York. p.127.) because “reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.” 1990. “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown.” In Wolfgang Krohn, Gunter Kuppers and Helga Nowotny eds. Self- organization: Portrait of a Scientific Revolution. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 76. The significance of this insight for social theory is aptly described by Cary Wolfe: 159

It is only in the mutual observations of different observers that a critical view of any observed system can be formulated. If we are stuck with distinctions that are paradoxical and must live with blind spots at the heart of our observations, Luhmann writes, “Perhaps, then, the problem can be distributed among a plurality of interlocked observers” who are of necessity joined to the world and to each other by their constitutive but different blind spots. The work of social theory would then consist in developing “thoughtful procedures for observing observation, with a special emphasis on that which, for the other, is a paradox and, therefore, cannot be observed by him.” William Rasch, Cary Wolfe. Eds. 2000. Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pp. 260-261. 8 The self-similar folds in a crumpled sheet of paper, for example, typically give such an object a dimension of 2.5 because its dimensionality lies midway between a plane (a flat sheet) and a volume (a compressed ball). 9 (http://katachriston.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/fibonacci-fractals-and-inorganic-teleology/). Accessed 4/6/12. 10 Except for Udo of Aachen a 16th century German monk who drew the first Mandelbrot set from tens of thousands of calculations made over a number of years. (http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/Mandelset/ MandelMonk/MandelMonk.html). Accessed 3/4/12. 11 4D rendering of the Mandelbrot set. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ej3dj4x64k). Accessed 9/3/12. 12 Deep zoom into the Mandelbrot set. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs). Accessed 9/3/12. 13 Morton is here referring to Derrida’s discussion of the ambiguity of “margins”: “Derrida has shown how this suggestive term evokes the difficulty of distinguishing between inside and outside.” Tim Morton. Ibid., p. 40 14 S. N. K. Watt. 1993. “Fractal behaviour analysis.” In Prospects for Artificial Intelligence. Eds. A. Sloman, D. Hogg, G. Humphreys, A. Ramsay, & D. Partridge. IOS Press: Amsterdam. p. 112. 15 (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_95/journal/vol4/ykl/report.html). Accessed 5/6/12. 16 (http://iopscience.iop.org/0067-0049/178/1/1/pdf/74198.web.pdf). Accessed 5/6/12. 17 Author and financial analyst Yves Smith (of “Naked Capitalism” blog) discusses how most economists fail to effectively model the economic landscape because of their aversion to non-linear/fractal models: “And this problem is made worse by the fact that economists have long been allergic to the sort of mathematics and modeling approaches best suited to this type of analysis, namely systems dynamics and chaos theory. I discussed both these aesthetic biases at length in ECONNED, but the very short version is that following Paul Samuelson, economists have wanted to put the discipline on a “scientific” footing, and that meant embracing the “ergodic” axiom. Warning: a lot of natural systems aren’t ergodic. The ergodic assumption means no path dependence and no tendencies to instability. If you get a good enough sample of past behavior, you can predict future behavior. If you think these are good foundation for modeling financial markets, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.” (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com /2012/03/gillian-tett-exhibits-undue-faith-in-data-and-models.html). Accessed 3/9/12. 18 Ary L. Goldberger. 1999. “Nonlinear dynamics, fractals, and chaos theory: implications for neuroautonomic heart rate control in health and disease.” Eds. C. L. Bolis, J. Licinio. The Autonomic Nervous System. World Health Organization: Geneva. pp. 135 –152. 19 Keith Ansell-Pearson. 1999. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. Routledge: London. p. 25. “Throughout his work Bergson performs an important critique of natural perception, which is a model of perception that reduces the activity and becoming of life (movement) to a centred subject of perception. Hence he writes: ‘to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in this summing up a very long history, to perceive means to immobilize’ (233; 208). Not only is the border between an organism and its environment never clear-cut, being always porous and sympathetic, but so are the boundaries which 160

separate and divide bodies: ‘the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them’ (209). ‘True evolutionism’, therefore, must assume the form of a study of ‘becoming’ (Bergson 1962:369; 1983:370). But this requires that we do not follow the path of perception which would reduce an ‘infinite multiplicity of becomings’ to the single representation of a ‘becoming in general’.” (pp. 303-4). 20 Ronald Bogue. 2003. Deleuze on Literature. Routledge: New York. p. 4. 21 To give some idea of the frequency with which this occurs, one can imagine that while the image of the original set takes up six inches on a computer screen, magnifying this so as to arrive at the fourth generation of the insect-like core (which is similar to the original but slightly different) creates an image half a mile wide. 22 Whitehead’s “extensive continuum,” as interpreted by Steve Goodman, presents another sort of ‘diffractional’ reading of reality such that: “… there is a resonance of actual occasions, which are able to enter into one another by selecting potentials or eternal objects. It is in such a potential coalescence of one region with another that an affective encounter between distinct actual entities occurs. The vibratory resonance between actual occasions in their own regions of space-time occurs through the rhythmic potential of eternal objects, which enables the participation of one entity in another.” Steve Goodman. 2009. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 23Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press: Durham. pp.48-9. 24 Ibid., p. 55. 25 Ibid., p. 56. 26 Ibid., p. 48. 27 Ibid. 28 Steve Goodman. Ibid., p. 97. 29 Gottfried F. Leibniz. Ibid., “Monadology.” Paragraphs 67 and 69. 30 Gilbert Simondon . 2009. The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis. Trans. by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia. Number 7. pp. 4–16. “In this way, it becomes possible to think of the relation that is interior and exterior to the individual as participation, without referring to new substances. The psychic and the collective are constituted by individuations that occur after the vital individuation. The psychic is the continuation of the vital individuation in a being that, in order to resolve its own problematic, must itself intervene as an element of the problem by its action, as a subject. The subject can be conceived of as the unity of being as an individuated living being, and as a being that represents its actions through the world to itself as an element and as a dimension of the world. The vital problems are not closed upon themselves; their open axiomatic can only be saturated by an undefined series of successive individuations that engage ever more of the preindividual reality and that incorporate it into the relation to the environment.” p. 14. 31 Gabriel Tarde. 2012 (1893). Monadology and Sociology. Trans. Theo Lorenc. Re.press: Melbourne. “In truth, one might justifiably wonder…whether it is really certain that our own intelligence and will, those great egos disposing of the vast resources of a gigantic cerebral state, are superior to those of the tiny egos confined in the miniscule city of animal or even plant cell. Surely, if we were not blinded by the prejudice of always considering ourselves superior to everything, such comparisons would not be to our advantage. At root, it is this prejudice which prevents us from believing in monads.” p. 22 32 Stanley Salthe. 1985. Evolving Hierarchical Systems. Columbia University Press: New York. p. 284. Salthe defines the cogent moment as “the duration of the smallest natural time unit for some system. Systems of different scale will have cogent moments of relatively different durations.” 33 This, of course, runs counter to the Standard Model of Physics which states that nothing can exist below the Planck Length though, as Arthur C. Clarke points out, “no one know s for sure.” Meanwhile, theories speculating on the possibility that we live not in a universe but a “multiverse” are proliferating as they 161

seem to offer the best solution to the problem of accounting for the recent discovery that seventy percent of our universe’s mass consists of dark energy. These concepts are not necessarily related other than that they both point to the fact that some of our most basic understandings of matter and cosmology are still and will probably always remain open to debate. 34 Keith Ansell-Pearson. Ibid., p. 24. “The ‘ethical’ character of this method of philosophy resides, therefore, in the cultivation of a ‘sympathetic communication’ that it seeks to establish between the human and the rest of living matter (Merleau-Ponty is one of the few commentators to note that an ‘ethics’ informs the entirety of Bergson’s thinking, 1988:31-2)…By expanding consciousness ‘it introduces us into life’s own domain, which is reciprocal interpenetration, endlessly continued creation’(Bergson 1962:179; 1983:178). 35 Ibid.,p. 103. Citing (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:603-6; 1988:483-5). 36 Leibniz described the imaginary numbers as being “a wonderful flight of God's spirit… [because] they are almost an amphibian between being and not being.” 37 Keith Ansell-Pearson. Ibid. Ansell-Pearson characterizes Bergson’s concept of duration as understood by Deleuze: “Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.” (Deleuze 1985:110-11; 1989:82-3): the separation between things, objects, and environments is neither absolute nor clear-cut, for ‘the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material universe, the perpetuality of their reciprocal actions and reactions, is sufficient to prove that they have not the precise limits which we attribute to them’ (235; 209). p. 24. 38 This is Graham Harman’s term for the special quality of an object that draws others to it: “Allure is a special and intermittent experience in which the intimate bond between a thing’s unity and its plurality of notes somehow partially disintegrates.” 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court: Chicago. p. 43. 39 Arthur C. Clarke. “The Colors of Infinity.” Video. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ embedded &v=qB8m85p7GsU). Accessed 3/26/12. 40 Steven B. Lowe, Larry S. Liebovitch, John A. White. May 1999. “Fractal ion-channel behavior generates fractal ﬁring patterns in neuronal models.” article in Physical Review. Vol. 59. No. 5. (http://www.ccs.fau. edu/~liebovitch/pre59b.pdf). Accessed 3/8/12. 41 Tim Ingold. Lines: A Brief History. Taylor and Francis, Ltd.: London pp. 75-6. 42 Leibniz. Ibid., “Monadology.” Paragraph 61. 43 Based in New York in the 1970s, Anarchitecture was an artists' group whose members included artists Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry and Richard Nonas, as well as the architecturally trained artist Gordon Matta Clark (1943- 1978). The group’s name, a mixture of 'anarchy' and 'architecture', was conceived in informal conversation, one of the main ways through which the group collaborated. In 1974, they produced an exhibition of the same name, which encapsulated their critique of the modernist impulses of contemporary culture within which architecture was conceived as a symbol for that culture's worst excesses and drawbacks. Anarchitecture was very critical of the stasis in cultural attitudes and what Richard Nonas called the 'hard shell', or resistance to change, that architecture epitomized. All contributions to the show were anonymous and followed an agreed format to emphasize their collective approach. The central role accorded to architecture was perhaps a reaction to Matta Clark's own experience of architectural education at Cornell University, from where he graduated in 1968. The group as a whole tackled architecture's complicity in capitalist modes of production, using wordplay and found photographs to explore issues related to cities, ways of inhabiting buildings and the role of property. (http://www.spatialagency.net/database/the.anarchitecture.group). Accessed 3/19/12. 44 Karen Barad. Ibid., p. 57. 45 Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)“The Roads of Life.” (http://www.whiterabbit.net/@port03/Dinesen/ Stork/roads _of_life.htm). Accessed 2/12/12. 46 Tim Morton. Ibid., p. 48. 162

47 Arthur C. Clarke. Ibid.

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Chapter Four: A Topological Dialectic

The old Paris bewails the monotony of the new streets whereupon the new Paris responds:

Why all these reproaches? . . . Thanks to the straight line, the ease of travel it affords, One avoids the shock of many a vehicle, And, if one’s eyes are good, one likewise avoids The fools, the borrowers, the bailiffs, the bores: Last but not least, down the whole length of the avenue, Each passerby now avoids the others, or nods from afar.1

– Walter Benjamin quoting M. Barthelemy, Le Vieux Paris et Le Nouveau.

The regime of representationalist optics that is being critiqued in this dissertation is stabilized in the cultural imaginary by three intertwined images/diagrams: the grid, the hierarchy and the circle of time.2 The grid, as we have seen, is a compelling representation of extended space, one which serves as, among other things, an algorithm for generating the ratiocinated subject and as a screen for the projection of possible futures or wish images. The hierarchy, as discussed in the third chapter, is an artifact of mediation; it is the form in(form)ation takes as it is emitted to or collected from the spatial domain by (especially stereoscopic and thus triangulating visual) perceptual apparatuses and one whose effects become amplified in cultures which subscribe to a logics of the grid. The circle, as we discuss in this chapter, is a diagram of time, or what Deleuze describes as the affection of self by self,3 the looping of self back on itself reflexively so as to carve out, eddy-like, a bounded intensity stabilized within

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the turbulence of the flux. It historically has been associated with perfection, completion, stasis, unity. This changed, however, as technologies capable of tracking time’s seeming passage began to be introduced, and temporality very slowly began to be modeled as linear extension. Linear time would eventually become synonymous with the progress of the modern era, and as the latter begins to come to a close it is the new, non-linear analyses made possible by linear logics which can be seen to be both cause and effect of its demise. This is an insight derived from a reflexive analysis, and it is reflexivity itself which has become foregrounded as a main driver of material and discursive processes. The modeling of the latter through the use of feedback loops and iterated algorithms then becomes the preoccupation of the new post-human era.

We begin to discover, as a result, that life, vision and language each begin with an enfolding, a reflexive looping, an involution. Be it the morphological reorganization of the blastula during embryogenesis, the evolutionary development of the lens of the eye and the latter’s concave container, or the semiotic shift from a gesturo-haptic to a speaking subject, the topological move is the same. In each case, a generative void is created through invagination, or that process by which part of the outside folds in on itself to form a new space of possibility. It is in this space, for example, that a ball of embryonic cells, in the case of life, begins to differentiate into a multi-layered organism.

Or in the case of the eye, it is the concavity formed by the infolding of the lens placode and optic stalk and the subsequent development of the curved lens and optic cup which affords the organism its first intuition of a geometrized world of lines and angles. 165

Figure13. Transverse section of an incubating chicken’s skull showing morphology of eye cup.

Figure 14. A time-lapse series of images showing the multiple implications of the lens placode and lens.

And in a more obviously discursive register, it is here that a reflexive recognition of self in an other, a development deemed essential to the creation of spoken language, begins to split the gesturo-haptic entity into the embodied, materially present “I” and the disembodied, spoken, virtual “I” as the former folds back into itself to create a space of possibility for the latter. Rotman has documented the dynamic of this latter process and convincingly demonstrated how such a virtual self is periodically reborn through

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subsequent and similarly momentous (re)mediations such as writing and parallel processing.

In this dissertation I am similarly concerned with tracing the reflexive dynamic that opens up such spaces of possibility, but I wish to show that its ability to effect/affect material-discursive relations extends to all levels of organization and not solely those involving human affairs. In particular, I wish to explore how expanding the definition of technology to include such structures as the eye allows us to understand the human to be part of a vast material-discursive continuum rather than its telos or limit. Similarly, I wish to demonstrate through an analysis of the mechanics of sight how the material and the discursive are inextricably linked, folded into one another, implicated throughout. Morphological patterns repeat regardless of scale or material substrate connecting our endogenous and exogenous realities. Thus we find that the dynamic of both the human and the grid might best be modeled not by invoking abstractions given by Euclidian or vision-centered geometric systems (circle, triangle, quadrangle), but by exploring the morphologies of vector fields such as vortex rings.

Where the latter might close along one axis of rotation they remain open, like a spiral, along another, thus making it possible for the system to convect itself forward.

The morphology of the human and the eye then share a degree of non-closure both materially, with both forming as the result of an invagination or infolding, and discursively as their interfaces demonstrate a constitutive “blind spot.” The “self-

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affecting self,” as we learn from Luhmann, fails to attain full autopoietic closure just as the eye centrally features a discontinuity, a blind spot which, by definition, it cannot see.

We might then say that time, as traced through processes of closure, has, at its core, a rupture, making the circle a less than optimal choice for its representation.

Though the discovery of this rupture in terms of the formation of the blind spot of the eye was made in the mid 17th century, it seems unlikely that it played a role in the shift towards the adoption of a linear model of time. We might even say that this shift began as early as 3500 B.C.E. with the invention of time-keeping devices (obelisks, sun dials), with the linear model finally superseding the circular as a cultural norm in the

West only in the mid-18th century. Among the more significant reasons for this shift is the introduction of new physical theories of gravity, motion and work and technological innovations associated with the Industrial Age (steam engine, cotton gin, marine chronometer), but also, and perhaps more importantly, the revelation by Scottish geologist James Hutton of “deep time,” or the sequentiality of rock layers leading to an estimate of the earth’s age as numbering in the billions rather than thousands of years.

Collectively, such innovations had and continue to have the effect of compressing the individual’s experience of the cogent moment even as such moments become increasingly discretized into commodifiable units. Ultimately, this has lead to the point where, in the terms social geographer Nigel Thrift articulates, “…the leading edge of capitalism is involved in a process of engineering worlds such that every

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moment becomes an opportunity to both make a sale and explore the subsequent moment: capitalism wants to run at the rate of life itself.”4 In order to accomplish this, capitalism must build what Thrift describes as an “infrastructure of intimacy”5 where the freeplay of affect and imagination can be traced and fed back in real time into the processes which shape the marketplace and, thus, in part, the space of agency.

Clearly, linear temporal models provide little insight into the interactions which take place within and define such an affective infrastructure. We have entered, in the

21st century, a socio-economic domain whose contours are continuously and recognizably being reconfigured even at the micro-physical level by feedback- (and feed- forward-) looped events and whose seemingly progress-oriented dynamic is thus best understood in terms of spirals and cascades. The first of these, of course, is the temporal diagram preferred by dialecticians such as Hegel, Marx and Engels and, later, members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor

Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Stated simply, dialectical theory assumes that everything is composed of opposing forces with one dominating the other until, through a process of iterative change, an inflexion point is reached and the formerly weaker force begins to dominate. Eventually this newly dominant force, which had negated the power of its opposed term, is itself negated, a dynamic described as a negative dialectic. In critical analyses of socio-politico-economic systems, dialectics is considered to be the “thought- form” characteristic of capitalism, or the iterative, self-reflexive dynamic by which capital transforms contradictions into opportunities for its “progressive” advancement. 169

As employed by Frankfurt School theorists, dialectics becomes an organ for historical awakening, a powerful tool for analyzing consumer and media culture, revealing, in particular, how the latter has become so dominant as to make it impossible for the subject to determine reality from illusion. “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry,” according to Adorno and Horkheimer, such that “Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies.”6 The end result is “the stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity”7 and the ever- increasing power of those who control the images and symbols to which the culture is exposed.

By contrast, Walter Benjamin, while equally concerned that the creative freedoms of the individual should be preserved and even maximized, recognized the potentially liberating qualities of modern media such as film. Yes, the latter gave the appearance of doing little more than pacifying the disenfranchised, distracting them from focusing on ending their oppression, but, as Freud recognized in the

Psychopathology of Everyday Life, “memory fragments are ‘often most powerful and most enduring when the incident which left them behind was one that never entered consciousness.’”8 While consciousness is otherwise absorbed, for example, in parsing the meaning of the images moving across the screen, the affective modes of the body are open to impressions from those elements of the images which escape semiotic encoding. This led Benjamin to observe that:

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Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasingly noticeable in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.9

Benjamin recognized that technology had already disarticulated movements, shortened attention spans, increased multi-tasking capabilities and in general exposed the multipartite nature of the (non-unified) modern subject. Art, by adopting the temporal modes of the new technologies and inserting itself into their programs, had the potential, when deployed strategically, to turn the new technologized media towards the goal of awakening the masses from their phantasmagoric, consumerist slumber. “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus…the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”10 By revealing, through the manipulation of time and the camera’s gaze, the vast, unexplored temporal territories immanent to mundane existence, film, in particular, has the potential to counter the myth of progress that its arrival seems to confirm. For to recognize the specificity of an object, including potentially one’s own, in all its depth, as these manipulations made newly possible, is to recognize that “Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences,”11 which is to say, in its discontinuities. Time for

Benjamin is then neither a circle nor a straight line but demonstrates a nested architecture, a spiral composed of discrete units or monads of coiled potentiality. But though Benjamin recognized in the newly temporalized media the means by which this

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potential might be actualized, he also understood that it was not inevitable that it would do so. He thus took it upon himself, in the manner of Proust,12 to construct his own apparatus for bringing to light the specificity of the object/event and the alternative temporal universe to which knowledge of its depths pointed.

The Arcades Project

How this work was written: rung by rung, according as chance would offer a narrow foothold, and always like someone who scales dangerous heights and never allows himself a moment to look around, for fear of becoming dizzy (but also because he would save for the end the full force of the panorama opening out to him).13 - Walter Benjamin on The Arcades Project

On the surface, Benjamin’s posthumously published text The Arcades Project, is a study of 19th century Paris as viewed through the organizing metaphor of its then new architectural structures, the arcades. These were a distinctly Parisian phenomenon: cast iron-supported, glass-roofed passages couverts built over existing streets by the nascent leisure industry to cater to the needs of the burgeoning middle class. Lighted naturally by day and by gas at night, the enclosed, marble-clad, proto-shopping mall setting of the arcade allowed the newly-minted consumer to meander through its lavish labyrinth of luxury shops without concern for the hour, vehicular traffic, or weather. Loitering within its warren of boutiques, cafes, restaurants, dance halls, “panoramas” and baths was encouraged such that, over time, they became “the public version of the aristocratic salon where people came to see and be seen.”14 As a slow-paced refuge from the busy boulevards which they connected, they also created the perfect environment for prostitution, legislation against which contributed significantly to their

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decline in the latter half of the century. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin demonstrates how the history of these liminal, outside-turned-in, phantasmagorical spaces form a microcosm of the age in which they arose, one whose utopian dreams and conflicting desires have much to tell us about our own. But more than this, as we shall see, he attempts to create nothing less than a machine for altering our understanding of time altogether.

Most scholars regard Benjamin’s posthumously published text as an unfinished work. Though he had hoped that his thirteen-year effort might result in a magnum opus, the crowning achievement of a modestly productive and sometimes fraught writing career, commentators tend to describe it instead as a notebook or compilation of largely undigested and loosely organized research material, a “massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture…,”15 or “fragments…[which] can be compared to the materials used in the building of a house, the outline of which has just been marked on the ground….”16 The raw materials for this “house,” then, consist of some thirty-six sheaves (or what Theodor Adorno termed “convolutes”) with subject headings such as “Idleness” or “Photography,” each containing a varied number of folios or compilations of material associated by topic. Within these are pages of passages consisting mainly of quotations from 19th century authors as well as Benjamin’s own commentary interspersed with a few dozen images iconic of the age.17 Some researchers do not agree with the assessment that these fragments were to be organized into a more recognizable literary structure, however. The Project’s English 173

language translators Eiland and McLaughlin, for example, based on such evidence as

Benjamin’s transference of edited notes and rewritten drafts to the body of the text, suggest it is complete in form if not substance. In disagreement, then, with Rolf

Tiedemann, editor of the German, and original version of The Arcades Project, they feel it does not require the addition of “the mortar [of] Benjamin’s own thoughts…to hold the building together.”18

While Benjamin himself considered the Project to be incomplete, there is much to suggest, in addition to Eiland’s and McLaughlin’s observations, that its aporias and linkages, its discontinuities and resonances enact its author’s intended finished product.

In Benjamin’s own words: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”19 Benjamin doesn’t feel the need to insert commentary to guide his readers through the maze of passages he has constructed, for his “method,” as he states elsewhere, is, quite simply, “detour;”20 that his readers might lose themselves within its labyrinthine structure, as well as any thought of the goal which might have initiated their engagement with the work, is precisely his intention. His method is not then one of analysis but of revelation,21 an attempt to induce physically, through such discursive tropes as juxtaposition and distraction, the unmediated experience of an historical materialism which “blast[s]

[objects] out of the continuum of history.”22 And while such an approach seems almost 174

naïve in its embrace of non-mediation and rejection of critical analysis, it is one which has a long tradition in theological studies, one which insists that truth can be arrived at only obliquely, by focusing one’s attention on minutia such as individual passages from holy texts. Though infrequently employed in secular scholarship, it is not a method which can be dismissed lightly, as the enduring interest in Benjamin’s work will attest.

Instead, we should recognize in The Project’s attention to the smallest details of material existence and in its non-linear, networked architecture a finely honed strategy for circumventing the rectilinear logics that have dominated literary and socio-political discourse since at least the Enlightenment.23 How effective this strategy was or is is open to debate, but it is clear that Benjamin was early to recognize how the products of such logics, in the form of traditional histories and even of analytical critique, are readily appropriated by capitalist and fascist programs of control. He was also aware that if he were to circumvent such programs and challenge the culture of somnambulism they engendered, he would need to incorporate into the The Arcade Project’s structure a

“criticism of the concept of progress itself.”24 Only in this way might he help awaken society from its consumerist/totalitarian dreams and introduce it to the profundities of

“now-time,” or a conception of the moment as residing outside of time or the flow or history.

To be clear, it is not that Benjamin was opposed to progress as such, for clearly his work was intended to foster improvement in the human condition; but he was opposed to socio-economic programs in which progress becomes “the objective of 175

mankind and not mankind the objective of progress.”25 The so-called “progress” of modern consumerist cultures was little more than the hell of repetition, the endless cycling of the “always-again-the-same”26 from which, he believed, the authentically

“new” must be “heroically wrested.”27 In order to challenge the existing order which recognized “only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of society,”28 he understood that another approach was required, “For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.”29 Rather than employ rational logic and linear narratives, he would devise a literary “structure of awakening,”30 one that might, through a strategy of distraction and detour, induce in his readers a physiological

“shock,” for “It is a shock that brings someone engrossed in reverie up from the depths.”31 He would engage his readers at a performative, embodied level and in this way attempt to combat those forces which drew their strength from controlling the dreams and symbols of the age, an especially pressing concern during the pre-WWII period in which he worked on The Arcades Project.

What follows, then, is an analysis of Benjamin’s design for this “structure of awakening,” how it anticipated that of a similar structure which would be built only half a century later and then only with the aid of digital technologies, and how both structures indicate the need for, even as they effect, a radical revision in the (Western) human’s understanding of its space-time milieu. What we will be investigating, in other 176

words, is how The Arcades Project, in the form intended by Benjamin, actualizes a

(slightly modified) Leibnizian, metaphysical space of interlinked, diffractional monads even as it enacts a Spinozan concept of time as eternity manifesting for the observer as contrasts in motion and rest. We will also be exploring how the internet (a considerably expanded and animated if commercialized version of The Arcades Project) and digital media more generally are opening up for exploration this monadic (nomadic)32 space, revealing in ever greater detail its looped, eventive, scale-free architecture and the temporal dimension this describes.33

A theme central to this chapter, then, is that mediation, as indicated and effected by the time compression associated with technological innovation, is moving from a visual/representational mode to one of gesture and “enactivity.”34 Increasingly the codes deployed by technologized media are designed to engage directly with the body’s own as signal rather than symbol.35 As a result, boundaries between the body and other material/discursive object/entities such as animated avatars, surgical or diagnostic equipment, aerial drones, or the marketplace itself begin to blur. The human is learning to model and mimic the rhythms and oscillations of the body, the organ, the cell, the molecule and is transformed in the process. The body is no longer encapsulated but distributed, modeled as, at once, a set of nested interfaces each a transducer of signals between an ostensible outside and inside,36 and a fractal network of nodes, each a potential trigger of a cascade event. Writing becomes merely one form of signal in such a model, and one not particularly well suited to a time-sensitive 177

environment. By way of analogy, we can compare the on-going shift from language- encoded to haptic/proprioceptive media with the move from an alphabetic discourse which requires decoding to one of intellectual montage or what Sergei Eisenstein called

“visual metaphor,” “the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.”37 The immediacy of montage and gestural media, resulting in part from their ability to bypass various cognitive filtering systems, give them an advantage over the more traditional, orthographic-type, such that we might expect the influence of the latter to wane.

Benjamin, anticipating this shift, attempted to create with The Arcades Project an extra-literary (non-)medium, one which through the technique of montage would bring together form and content, subject and object in what he termed the “dialectical image” or “monad.” For Benjamin:

The idea is a monad – the pre-stabilized representation of phenomena resides within it, as in their objective interpretation. The higher the order of the ideas, the more perfect the representation contained within them. And so the real world could well constitute a task, in the sense that it would be a question of penetrating so deeply into everything real as to reveal thereby an objective interpretation of the world. In light of such a task of penetration it is not surprising that the philosopher of the” Monadology” was also the founder of infinitesimal calculus. The idea is a monad – that means briefly: every idea contains the image of the world. The purpose of the representation of the idea is nothing less than an abbreviated outline of this image of the world.38

It seems clear that he hoped to create, by compiling and interlinking these images or monads, an unmediated, performative milieu, one which enacted its contents through the exploratory activity, the meanderings and detours, of the reader/participant. It was his hope that in engaging with the resonant, monadic constellations of which The

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Arcade Project is composed, readers/participants might experience the “lightning flash” of non-historical “now time” and thereby awaken to the fact of their own existence as monads (nomads): “[w]here thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives the configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.”39 It was a machine, in other words, for conveying the experience of “dialectics at a standstill,” for revealing the ghost that convects forward the dream of progress, for breaking, finally, the spell of the logics of the grid. And it was designed to be purely experiential, relational in hopes that its performativity might make it immune to appropriation by these same logics.

The Passages

It is a regrettable characteristic of the Western mind to relate expressions and actions to exterior or transcendent ends, instead of evaluating them on a plane of consistency on the basis of their intrinsic value. For example, a book composed of chapters has culmination and termination points. What takes place in a book composed instead of plateaus that communicate with one another across microfissures, as in a brain?40 – Deleuze & Guattari

To better understand how Benjamin intended The Arcades Project to operate as an apparatus revelatory of now-time, it is helpful to know in which way the English version was altered from the original.41 Two such alterations are key for the discussion here, one being the title of the text itself and the other being the omission of a notation system Benjamin had devised to link one citation, image or commentary with another.

Each of the translations into various languages has been given a different title reflective of its editor’s interpretation of the project. Tiedemann, for example, chose to title the

German translation Das Passagen-Werk because in adding the polysemous term Werk

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to the concept of the iron and glass arcade structures that are the text’s central metaphor, he was able to transmit his understanding of the Project as at once a “five or six story house” or factory, a magnum opus and as something which was in the process of being realized. In the English language edition, choosing the term “arcades” allowed translators Eiland and McLaughlin similarly to emphasize the Project’s strong structural component, though with a term associated almost solely with architecture. An Italian translation entitled simply “The ‘Passages’ of Paris” (with the French spelling of

Passages retained) perhaps comes closest to Benjamin’s own working title of Das

Passagenarbeit or simply Das Passagen in that it opens up a slightly larger range of possible meanings: different eras of the city as it moves through time, people moving through the narrower of Paris’ streets, the arcades themselves and literary passages descriptive of Paris. But Benjamin’s own title “The Passages”(as translated into English) works on more semantic levels than all others combined, conjuring up imagery associated with, among others: “the French passages, rites of passage, texts that comprise quotation, thresholds, extracts from books, lapses in time, journeys, mountain paths, labyrinths, astrological transits, Passover, and of course the notions of transience and aimless wandering.”42 It seems logical to suggest that the multifarious meanings of this simple title more accurately convey the many levels within which Benjamin understood his text to operate than do interpretations of the text’s title by its editors and/or translators.

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Even a cursory overview of what I will hereafter refer to as The Passages should convince the reader of Benjamin’s sensitivity to and strategic planning of his project’s multifacetedness. It is a structure composed of worlds within worlds in which separate passages in different folios in seemingly only tangentially related convolutes not only stand alone as pure distillations of the tensional forces of “not one and not two,” but resonate with and point to each other in subterranean fashion. Reading through the text at random, one might find in one convolute a commentary on the reverie of the flâneur and in another a description of protests by the cultural elite against the construction of the Eiffel Tower. Between them they establish a resonance with a third fragment, such as the razing of the arcades by Haussmann, and initiate the formation of a constellation, one captured uncannily by an image of a ruin in yet another convolute.

Benjamin designed The Passages to facilitate such a reading experience, one similar to the sort many, no doubt, have had while idly surfing or pursuing research on the web.

But the quality of the internet experience is often improved by following the trail of searches or hyperlinks left by those who have gone before. Benjamin anticipated the benefits of this feature and tried to build it into the text by including alongside “many of the citations and reflections in the manuscript…[notations from] a system of thirty-two associated symbols (squares, triangles, circles, vertical and horizontal crosses — in various inks and colors).”43 According to Eiland and McLaughlin, it was Benjamin’s intention that through the use of this system of symbols, or what he called “blinks,”

“Citation and commentary might…be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different

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angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect ‘the cracking open of natural teleology.’”44

Unfortunately, this notation system has not been reproduced in the English language edition, making it difficult to assess how it might affect the experience of reading the text; how it might, for example, point to intersecting layers of dialectical images. But for the purposes of the argument being made here, the success of

Benjamin’s system of “[b]links” is less important than that he attempted to connect them at all. For in so doing, he demonstrated not only the means by which texts might attest to and perform the non-linearity of history, how it is shot-through with wormholes connecting widely distant eras with each other, but also his belief in the productivity of putting into dialogue ostensibly divergent or opposed terms. Stasis and movement, object and relation, form and content, part and whole: rather than being mutually exclusive binaries as rational logics would have, reveal themselves within the scale-free labyrinth of The Passages to be two different states of a single monad, oscillations of an individual crystal, the lone face of an intricately and indefinitely twisted Möbius strip. “Benjamin tries to think of an identity of extremes that is produced not in mediation but in a paradoxical inversion and transformation of the one into the other.”45 We should understand his system of blinks, then, as an attempt to provide the short cuts and intersections by which such inversions and oscillations might be actualized. By introducing the former, he increases the dimensionality of the overall constellation of fragments. The whole begins to assume the quality of a multi- 182

dimensional, topological manifold where the “intervals of reflection” which give rise to and separate individual monads are maintained even as, within its hidden interior, they are connected with opposed and/or resonant images. The Passages itself then becomes an image of “dialectics at a standstill,” constantly turning its inside out, even as it maintains its static position in the stream of linear history, defying the latter’s claim to universality. As Adorno notes: “In Benjamin's micrological method [...] the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in the image. One understands Benjamin correctly if one senses behind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself.”46

47 “The Ghosts of Material Things”

The country no longer had a future. And so…the time that was yet to come was, as it were, all rolled up into the past, like a scroll, and became a sort of underworld of the future, one haunted by only the oldest of things.48 – Walter Benjamin

The hidden dynamic that exists between antinomies such as the “one” and the

“many” fascinated Benjamin throughout his life. As an adult, one of his favorite possessions was a “trick Jesus head” which “presents at the same time, depending on one’s perspective, three different representations of saints.”49 The idea that an object contains multiplicities which might be accessed by engaging with it from different angles is a common theme in his work. But there is another image, one from his childhood, which captures an idea even more central to his philosophy. As recounted in his book,

Berlin Childhood around 1900, Benjamin’s favorite cabinet, and the first he learned to open, contained, in addition to his underclothes, his rolled up stockings. These were 183

coiled in the “traditional manner” such that the top part was folded inside out, forming a pocket which contained the rest of the stocking rolled from the toe up. The involuted and tripartite nature of this object never ceased to fascinate the young Benjamin:

I drew it [the interior woolen mass, toe or “present”] ever nearer to me until something rather disconcerting was accomplished: the 'present' was wholly wrested from its pocket, but the latter itself was no longer around. I could not put this enigmatic truth to the test often enough: the truth, namely, that form and content, veil and what is veiled, 'the present' and the pocket, were one. They were one – and, to be sure, a third thing too: the sock into which they had both been transformed.50

This image effects for us what the “trick Jesus head” did for Benjamin, that is, a multipartite perspective of, in this case, the formal structure of Benjamin’s philosophy.

Two of the more obvious insights to be drawn from this remembrance, of course, are those he cites himself: the dialectical relationship between container and contained, outside and inside; and the recognition that behind such binaries there exists what we might think of as a Deleuzean “plane of consistency” or Spinozan monist ground. As represented by the sock in the story, this “ground” does not contain either the

“present” or the pocket, but is another facet of the topologically-determined entity that is at once all three.

Benjamin delights, as a child, in discovering this univocity in multiplicity, a fascination reflected in his attempts to capture, as an adult and writer, the magic entity/image/concept that will unite seemingly opposed terms. This is evident in his efforts to reconcile theology and politics, a theme which undergirds much of his work and which takes on a temporal dimension in The Passages. For in the dialectical image of the infolded stocking, we see that Benjamin is also able to convey his understanding 184

of the relationship between historical (or political) time and “now-time” (a Kabbalisitic term). It demonstrates that it is only from within a culture of progress that time appears to move linearly, its coiling around the low pressure zone at its core remaining invisible to those who, fixated on trying to wrest the “present” from its “pocket,” fail to notice the scenery repeat, animated cartoon-style, as it passes by. For those not so focused, it is the stretched out stocking which offers the potential for progress, for it provides an image in which time discloses itself not as a continuous, Hegelian unfurling of antimonies and syntheses, but as a series of singularities, its dynamic having “an upward movement at each individual point of its course forward.”51 As such, it is demonstrative of a Messianic dimension where “in order for a piece of the past to be touched by present actuality, there must be no connection between them.”52

The image of the infolded stocking, however, conveys another link between the theological and political registers, one similarly hinted at in a story from his childhood in which he describes secretly acquiring and devouring E.F.A. Haufman’s Ghosts, a book that had been forbidden him. For we can see, in the sock’s inside-out, self-enclosing involutions, similarities with the vortex ring that drives the logics of the grid. As we read in the second chapter, Benjamin seems to have intuited that “progress” or the “storm blowing from Paradise” is convected by the low pressure zone at its core. It is this uncanny, ghostly presence that he feels needs to be revealed if society is to awaken from its dream-state and avoid the looming catastrophe that is piling up at its feet. Yet, like filmmakers Méliès and Kentridge, he also recognizes that ghosts and other 185

phantasmagorical creatures have the power to induce shock and evoke a suspension of disbelief in the magic that is the world. They therefore have the potential to open up discontinuities in the flow of linear, historical time, the very thing he feels is necessary if the public is to grasp that "The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression."53

For Benjamin, then, the goal is to show that “The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.”54

Drawing inspiration from, among other sources, his friend Bertolt Brecht’s “epic theater,” he recognizes that he will need to fight ghosts with ghosts if he is to convey

“the art of experiencing the present as waking world.”55

Ghosts exorcise ghosts, phantoms expel phantoms, intoxication prepares the ground for sobriety. The role of the ghost’s apparition for Brecht is a radical critique of the seeming evidence of reality which itself is phantom and phantasmagoria, produced by the world of commodities. Through the apparition of the ghost “naked reality” is supposed to appear, for it is the ghost that points out what the appearance of reality is: namely mere appearance. The ghost plays the role of the caesura that, according to Holderlin, interrupts the precipitous sequence of representations and shows them as representation.56

In order to bring the vortex of progress associated with the logics of the grid to a standstill, Benjamin understands that he will need to expose the ghost that convects it forward. But as only ghosts can reveal ghosts, and as it is vortices, such as the “storm of progress,” which produce them, he will need to generate a vortex of his own.57 This is how we might then think of The Passages – as a countervailing (cultural) weather pattern, one which might, in spinning in a direction opposite to that of the grid vortex, drain the storm of progress of its energy. By conjuring the ghost of the 19th century, in other words, Benjamin hopes to put an end to the hauntology that has become the

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modern era. We might imagine him leading his readers/participants through his system of secret passageways as though through a spook house with wish images leading to ruins, fetishes to fossils, the paths of these intersecting such that they all spiral back to the utopian dreams from which they originate. It is a system of tunnels populated by specters – gamblers, prostitutes, collectors and flâneurs – each embodying the ambiguities of the phantasmagoria that is consumer culture.

The flâneur is like a ghost who is physically manifest in the material world, but not opaquely. His translucent personality, like a phantom, haunts his own narrative, leaving a tinge of himself, of his latent, repressed personality, on every detail of his interior-exterior universe, as though he were leaping into and out of his surroundings.58

As these ghosts with their impulsive, obsessive behaviors interrupt the otherwise laminar flow of historicism, they reveal the spectral catastrophe that is the “status quo.”

The character of the flâneur, in particular, is a favorite of Benjamin’s in as much as it captures the essential tensions of Paris in the 19th century. This was an era when the monetary and material rewards of unfettered capitalism first sparked the growth of the bourgeoisie, giving rise to both capitalist excess and those with the luxury of time to reflect on this new state of affairs. Typically, the flâneur is a well-dressed man of leisure who wanders the arcades immersing himself in the sensuous chaos they engender.

Benjamin associated him with the poet and dandy Baudelaire (in his book of the same name), an empathic meanderer of the Parisian streets who could always find there within the discarded rubbish of a profligate age, the inspiration he sought. "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flâneur abandons himself in the crowd.

He…enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. 187

Like a roving soul in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes."59

Part stroller, part investigator, the flâneur was a man always half-way in a dream, though still, or as a result, alive to the world around him in all its specificity. He was an idler who made of the arcades his home away from home: of its formerly paved, now marble-tiled streets his private drawing room; of its parade of characters and stock piles of luxury goods a running, interior monologue; of its maze of shops and cafes, dance halls and play houses, a tour of his own mind.

The Fractal Arcade

Comparison of other people's attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic North Pole. Discover this North Pole. What for others are deviations are, for me, the data which determine my course. – On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of the inquiry), I base my reckoning.60

– Walter Benjamin

Indeed, in that the arcades appear to inhabit the flâneur as much as he does them, with each moving through and transforming the other,61 we might compare his character to that of Ingold’s wayfarer. Carrying the metaphor further, we might then recognize in the maze of the arcades a resemblance to that which constitutes the

Mandelbrot set, or the topological/metaphysical space through which the wayfarer roams. Of course, the manifold structures to which fractal geometry gives rise were not visible in Benjamin’s day, or, at least, not as computer-generated formations. But they permeate the natural environment (including our cognitive structures and functions) and have inspired countless cultural productions of everything from the cathedral at

Chartres and United Nations building62 to the rhythms of classical symphonies and

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ragtime pieces.63 But the case being made here is not that Benjamin structured The

Passages to conform to a set ratio of parts to wholes or that the form it eventually took was planned in any way other than that which was given by the method he chose to follow, that of montage. It is rather to show that the latter method shares with the algorithm of the M-set this seemingly haphazard approach, one which, as we saw in the

Interlude, gives rise to patterns that cannot be predicted beforehand and thus might be said to “run at the speed of life”64 itself. It is also the same approach taken by physical and biological processes at every scalar level, such that isomorphisms or patterns can be seen to repeat at and unite apparently differentiated levels of organization.

Thus, for Benjamin, the method and goal of the project was “…to assemble large- scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.

And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such.”65 The Passages would show how the small can contain the large, how a single algorithm – the juxtaposition of elements in montage – can generate an infinity of unique constellations or monads at all scales, and how the future is not given in the past, as each monad represents dialectics at a standstill or each moment as a potentially new leaping off point, an “origin stand[ing] in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool.”66

The organizational structure of The Passages is thus one of nested realms each recapitulating the other at its own scale of organization providing no center and no narrative features that might guide the reader along a goal-driven path. At the same 189

time, however, it is also a continuous whole, knitted together by a rhizomatic network of tunnels, one reminiscent of a Menger sponge whose ruptures and discontinuities are as important as its “passages,” or the fragments that connect to give it a material presence as extension. The Passages, then, might be thought of as a fractal structure in which the smallest fragment

Figure 15. A Menger sponge

contains as much information as the largest and which, when juxtaposed with other fragments, forms constellations, themselves monads when viewed from a distance.

Theoretically, there would be no limit to the number of levels at which this same process might take place, with groups of constellations forming meta-constellations and so on. The sheer volume of material Benjamin collected suggests that he was, in a sense, constructing a sort of shadow universe, one that could be superimposed over our own to show where the singularities, or ruptures in the temporal fabric, might be found.

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It was his “pedagogical” mission, after all, “to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally, stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade.”67 According to Susan Buck-Morss, each passage or fragment of The Passages was to form one half of this historical, stereoptical image (it being the outcome of two images aligned side by side) with the other supplied by Benjmain’s readers as they juxtaposed the former with their own present historical condition.68 The images he evoked would then have to be familiar, the degree of differentiation not so great as to disrupt the embodying effects of visual triangulation. Only in this way might his readers be made to recognize that for all the technological progress that had taken place, only superficial change had been achieved.

Employing the nested, outside-in architecture of the arcades as an organizing trope allowed him to correlate the two centuries. It encapsulated, as he noted, the whole “world in miniature”69 in the same way as did each of the individual objects found within.

Benjamin had a passion for small, even minute things;…For him the size of the object was in an inverse ratio to its significance. And this passion, far from being a whim, derived directly from…Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which “significance”…and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide. The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else…70

This passion is graphically illustrated by Benjamin’s contention that “The eternal, in any case, is far more the ruffle on a dress than some idea.”71 In the simple algorithm of the

Mandelbrot set, which unfurls to reveal the most complex mathematical object ever

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discovered, we find a similarly “concentrated form” of the “eternal.” It is one which points to an infinite regress of self-similar objects differentiated in space by a temporal displacement.72 It is a scale-free design which one can see most clearly iterated in such physical systems as the fern, the coastline, or the heartbeat, but one which Benjamin also recognized to be at work in the architecture of the arcades, in the nested relationships between the largest of its structural elements – the passageways themselves – down through the shops and boutiques with their cloistered interiors to the heavy glass display cases with their array of luxury goods and finally to the smallest of consumable items the arcades had to offer: the walking stick, the café au lait, the kiss, the conversation.

He recognized it, too, in the way memory works: "remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier."73 And it is this self-similar design which would serve to guide his construction of both the actual and virtual registers of

The Passages, with its implicate structure of actual (waiting to be virtualized) elements:

Convolutes, Folios and Fragments separated by Intervals (or blank spaces on the page) and their virtual (waiting to be actualized) counterparts -- Constellations, Resonances and Monads, linked to each other by Blinks or Passageways. Though nested and so forming a seemingly linear series, any element can encounter any other through these blinks and possibly trigger, thereby, the cascade of “shock” incipient in the Project’s synapses. For in as much as Benjamin, as “a historical materialist, cannot do without the 192

notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop,”74 he must attempt to actualize such a present by employing even, or especially, shock. Only in this way might he achieve the standstill that promises “to blast open the continuum of history.”75 But such a standstill, as Deleuze is well aware, is not one of complete stasis but of the type found in a vortex: “Dividing endlessly, the parts of matter form little vortices in a maelstrom, and in these are found even more vortices, even smaller, and even more are spinning in the concave intervals of the whirls that touch one another.”76 Benjamin understood every object/entity/event to take the form of this maelstrom and to be, as such, itself an origin, the null point of a coordinate structure from which novelty arises even as it contains within itself a multitude of such points. He designed The Passages to communicate this insight, with each fragment having the potential to (re)constitute a unique image of the whole, and it should then, along with the Mandelbrot set, be regarded as a diagram of Deleuze’s maelstrom. And in that The Passages enacts rather than simply represents its meaning, it, too, should be understood to constitute, like the Mandelbrot set, not just a map or medium that might lead us to the golden treasure, but the treasure itself – the actualization of the moment.

It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.77

Closure

…the time is past in which time did not matter.78

– Walter Benjamin

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In its emphasis on non-mediated, performative modes of communication, on those which ‘do’ rather than ‘say,’ or ‘actualize’ rather than ‘analyze,’ we might compare

The Passages to digitally-derived artworks such as skulls. As discussed in the third chapter, the ability of skulls to refuse decoding by the body’s cognitive, “function- meaning interloops”79 forces the viewer to engage with it at an affective level. The focus of the piece then becomes the viewer’s encounter with the normally invisible, subperceptual routines of proprioception or tactility which orient her within the spatiotemporal coordinates connecting body and world.80 These ‘organs’ of interoceptive perception are then revealed to be working continually behind the scenes to help exteroceptive senses such as sight make sense of the world. “To see…a surface as flat is precisely to perceive it as impeding or shaping one’s possibilities of movement…when we perceive, we perceive in an idiom of possibilities for movement.”81 Thus, to perceive an object is not just to take it in with one’s eyes and visual cortex, but to engage with it at the level of the muscles and joints, nerves and synapses distributed throughout the body. What causes the viewer to panic and disengage from contemplating skulls is then related to her experiencing an overwhelming feeling of an incipient, infinite regress. Her body is confronted, that is, with an object entirely foreign to it, one derived from a dimension which exists only within the logics of the computer. As such, it cannot be “grasped” cognitively or corporeally by the viewer. But her body does not yet know this, and as it attempts, at an ever finer-grained level, to make sense of the alien object before it, it discovers, with

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a shock, that it ‘cannot see that it cannot see;’ that is, it bumps up against the metaphorical blind spot at its core or that which protects it from experiencing its openness to the virtual. And the reason it needs this protection is that to experience the virtual is to recognize the illusory nature of the body’s sense of closure, that is, to experience an existential crisis. To experience the virtual would require the viewer detach herself from the movement of the vortex at her core and recognize that its ground is to be found only in the paradox that is the virtual, “where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt;…[and] where “futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness….”82 It would require, in other words, that she superpose herself and, like a diffraction pattern, maintain being while simultaneously experiencing the stream of becoming, that is, as

83 Brian Rotman might say, “be beside herself.”

skulls, then, like The Passages, plays the role of the “ghost that exorcises ghosts,” the “intoxication [that] prepares the ground for sobriety” in that it reveals just how deeply embedded atomistic subjectivities are in the spatiotemporal coordinates associated with Euclidian geometries and vision. It demonstrates how the distorting or disabling of these coordinates effects the destabilization of the atomized self. The

Passages similarly exposes the relationship between the bounded subject and rectilinear logics by denying its readers the linear framework by which they unconsciously orient themselves. There is no seriality, no terminuses, no center, no scale, only oscillations, elisions, resonances and transitions. The text funnels the 195

individual reader’s attention down to the level of the “monad,” the “crystal,” or the

“nucleus,” making ever tighter revolutions until, finally, distracted and disoriented, she finds herself – with a shock – at a standstill, occupying, like origin, the center of a

“whirlpool,” around which swirl “earlier and later events – the prehistory and post history of an event, or, better, of a status….”84 This is the experience of now-time or of a singularity on “the plane of consistency” which The Passages tries to evoke and one which Benjamin hoped might forever alter his readers’ perspective, one after which, in

Guattari’s terms, “everything will become illuminated differently: causalities will no longer function in one direction, and it will no longer be permitted for us to affirm that

‘all is played out in advance’.”85

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Endnotes for Chapter Four

1 Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 146. [E12a, 1]. 2 As a diagram, each acts then, according to Deleuze, “as a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place ‘not above’ but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce.” Gilles Deleuze. Foucault. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 32 3 “As he [Kant] has just defined space as the form of exteriority, it must be the case that time is the form of interiority. It's the form under which we affect ourselves, it's the form of auto-affection. Time is the affection of self by self.” Gilles Deleuze. 14/03/1978. “Kant: Synthesis and Time.” Les cours de Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Melissa McMahon. p. 17. 4 Nigel Thrift. Feb., 2012. “The insubstantial pageant: producing an untoward land.” Cultural Geographies. Vol. 19. (2) pp. 141–168. p. 144. 5 Ibid. 6 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. 2000 (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Continuum: New York. p. 126. 7 Ibid. 8 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.: New York. p. 160. 9 Ibid., pp. 240-241. 10 Ibid., pp. 236-237. 11 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 474. [N9a,7]. 12 “Proust has brought off the tremendous feat of letting the whole world age by a lifetime in an instant. But this very concentration in which things that normally just fade and slumber consume themselves in a flash is called rejuvenation. À la Recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost awareness. Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection.” Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 211. 13 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 460. 14 Andrew Ayers. 2004. The Architecture of Paris: An Architectural Guide. Edition Axel Menges. p. 384. 15 Susan Buck-Morss. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. viii. 16 Walter Benjamin. Ibid., p. 931. Essay by editor Rolf Tiedemann. 17 Benjamin had apparently collected hundreds of such images but the vast majority of these were lost while The Project was stored at the French National Library. Only sixteen of the original images survive which the editor, Tiedemann supplemented with others he chose. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 460. [N1a,8]. 20 Walter Benjamin. 1972-89. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser with the assistance of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. 7 volumes. Frankfurt a.m. VoI. I, p. 209 21 “In Benjamin’s profane illumination, things are not symbols for something, they are revelations in that literal and radical sense that sacred texts are revelations in religious traditions. It is here where Benjamin’s historical materialism intersects with and takes its ultimate leave from theology…“things” – everyday things – as unmediated, explosive revelations.” Rainer Nägele. 2004.“Body Politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism Between Brecht and the Frankfurt School.” The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. p. 170. 22 Water Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 263.

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23 The work of other authors such as William Blake, James Joyce, T. S. Elliot, and Ezra Pound similarly explored methods by which form and content might be combined such that the text enacted its meaning through interaction with the reader. 24 Ibid. p. 257. Thesis XII. 25 Alfredo Lucero-Montaño. “On Walter Benjamin’s Historical Materialism.” (http://aluceromontano. tripod. com/id47.html). Accessed 10/2/12. 26 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 337. [J60,7]. 27 Ibid. 28 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 259. Thesis XI. 29 Ibid., p. 240. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 30 Walter Benjamin. 1999. p. 389. [K1,3]. 31 Ibid., p. 325. [J53a,4]. 32 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. “…a nomadic absolute [is] a local integration moving from part to part in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process.” p. 494. 33 “To virtual time Deleuze gives the name Aion, borrowed, like Chronos, from Stoicism. Rather than being composed of more or less extended presents, which draw into them pasts and futures, Aion is an instantaneous form of temporality without presence, in which change has always already happened and is about to happen. For example, a singular point which marks a phase transition, such as that between ice melting and water freezing does not occupy a moment within a living present and therefore mark a definite state, but rather marks the indeterminacy between actual states, embodying whatever divergent directions of becoming can be taken by the actual system at the same time (Gilles Deleuze. 1990. The Logic of Sense. Athlone Press: London., p. 80).” As found in the essay: Christopher Groves. 2006.“The Futures of Causality: Hans Jonas and Gilles Deleuze.” Cardiff University. Sponsored by 'In Pursuit of the Future' (http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/futures/). Accessed 10/5/12. 34 “The central claim of what I call the enactive approach is that our ability to perceive not only depends on, but is constituted by, our possession…of sensorimotor knowledge.” Alva Noë. 2004. Action in Perception. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 2. 35 “The system becomes continuous and continuously inventive. Everything is consumed for production and everything is produced for consumption. The outside edge is folded into the centre through multiple ‘environmentations’.“ The maximization of production through these networks of circulation includes ultimately the production of not only replaceable objects but objects that are already en route to replacement. To exist within these networks is to be diffused along their paths, to be everywhere at once and nowhere wholly. What is present here is likewise present in a storeroom awaiting the call for delivery, already on its way to delivery, surging along the circuitry.” Nigel Thrift. Ibid., p. 150. 36 This blurring of boundaries is not limited to technologized sites of exchange, however. In a remarkable essay, “Food Is Licking is Plastic,” sociologist Hannah Landecker traces how epigenetics, as a result of the discovery of the temporal dimension of gene regulation, has become a particularly “intense site” for the re-theorization of boundaries: “Interchangeability begins to set in as substances previously understood as quite distinct from one another both practically and epistemologically begin to occupy the same category of significant signal. The ontology of the things in the environment shifts, but so does the understanding of what inside and outside have to do with one another. The boundary of the organism becomes more important as a transducer of signals than as a partition that keeps environment and body distinct: “the relevant environmental event may be internal or external to the organism; e.g., a change in the availability of glucose, an electrical impulse, or a social interaction (Meaney 2010, 50.)”

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It would appear from the results of this research that the changes to our ontological models are being driven not by digital media alone but by our growing ability to incorporate into them the temporal dimension. 37 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 14. “Introduction” by Hannah Arendt. 38 Walter Benjamin. 1998 (1928). Origin of German Tragic Drama. Verso: London. pp. 47-48. 39 Walter Benjamin., 1968. Ibid., pp. 262-263. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” 40 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guarttari. 1987. Ibid., p. 22. 41 Heather Marcelle Crickenberger. 2007."The Structure of Awakening”: Walter Benjamin and Progressive Scholarship in New Media. As part of her dissertation project, Crickenberger designed an interactive website demonstrating how The Arcades Project anticipated the architecture of hyperlinks and web pages that digital computing has made possible. It is an invaluable resource for Benjamin scholars and one from which I drew inspiration for some of the thoughts recorded here. (http://www.thelemming.com/lemming /dissertation-web/home/arcades.html). Accessed 9/22/12. 42 Heather Marcelle Crickenberger. 2007. "The Structure of Awakening”: Walter Benjamin and Progressive Scholarship in New Media. Proquest: Ann Arbor, MI. p. 22 43 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 958. 44 Walter Benjamin. Ibid. From translator’s foreword by Eiland McLaughlin. p. xi. 45 Rainer Nägele. Ibid,. p. 156. 46 Theodor Adorno. 1992. Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Columbia University Press: New York. p. 228. 47 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. xii. 48 Walter Benjamin. 2005. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. 1931-1934 Vol. 2. Michael William Jennings, Marcus Paul Bullock. Eds. Michael William Jennings, Marcus Paul Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. p. 429. 49 Rainer Nägele. Ibid., p. 157. 50 Walter Benjamin and Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. 2003. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 3: 1935 – 1938. Eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Trans. Howard Eiland. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 401. 51 Walter Benjamin.1999. Ibid., p. 479. [N13a,2]. 52 Ibid.,p. 470. [N7,7]. This resonates with the seemingly random distribution of points which combine to form the patterns of the Mandelbrot set. 53 Adorno Horkheimer. Ibid., p. 36. 54 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 473. 55 Ibid., p. 389. [K1,3]). 56 Rainer Nägele. Ibid., p. 169. 57 Of Hofmannsthal Benjamin wrote: "The country no longer had a future. And so…the time that was yet to come was, as it were, all rolled up into the past, like a scroll, and became a sort of underworld of the future, one haunted by only the oldest of things." Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2: 1931- 1934. Ibid., p. 429. 58 Heather Marcelle Crickenberger. (http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dissertation- web/home/flaneur.html). Accessed 9/23/12. 59 Walter Benjamin and Michael William Jennings. 2003. Walter Benjamin Selected Writings. Volume 4: 1938-1940. Eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Trans. Howard Eiland. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 32. 60 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 456. [Nl,2]. 61 Besides flâneurs such as Baudelaire, the term is used to describe the literary trope of an omniscient narrator often in an historical setting. In this way both actual and fictional flâneurs can transform the concept if not the physical structure of the arcades. 62 The golden mean like the Fibonacci series is a fractal ratio used regularly as an architectural standard. 199

63( http://phys.org/news/2012-02-classical-musical-compositions-adhere-power.html). Accessed 10/12/12. 64 From Thrift (see endnote #4). This, of course, implies a one-to-one correspondence between territory and map, an ability to simulate a system and all its degrees of freedom exactly. In order for the map or simulation to faithfully capture the system, it would have to include a likeness of itself which opens onto the problem of infinite regress. 65 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 461. [N2,6]. 66 Susan Buck-Morss. Ibid., p. 8. 67 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 458. [N 1,8]. Rudolf Borchardt’s Epilegomena zu Dante, v. 1. [Berlin 1923] pp. 56-57. 68 Susan Buck-Morss. Ibid., p. 292. 69 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 31. [A1,1]. 70 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., pp. 11-12. 71 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 463. [N3,2]. 72 “But how does this explain the spiral patterns, golden angle, and Fibonacci numbers? Two physicists, Stéphane Douady and Yves Couder from the Laboratory for Statistical Physics in Paris, performed a compelling experiment in 1992 that tied these ideas together. They dropped magnetized drops of ferrofluid into a dish that was magnetized at its edge and filled with silicone oil. The droplets were simultaneously attracted to the edge of the dish and repelled from one another. When the team dropped the oil in slowly, the droplets moved directly away from each other. But when they increased the speed, two older droplets would repel the new droplet simultaneously. So instead of simply marching to one side or the other, the droplet would move in a third direction—at the golden angle from the line connecting the drop's landing point with the previous droplet. The resulting pattern formed spirals.” (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/8479/title/The_ Mathematical _Lives_of_Plants). Accessed 10/30/12. 73 Walter Benjamin. 2005. Ibid., p. 597. 74 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 262. 75 Ibid. 76 Gilles Deleuze. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Athlone Press: London. p. 5. 77 Walter Benjamin. 1999. Ibid., p. 460. [N2, 1]. 78 Walter Benjamin. 1968. Ibid., p. 93. 79 Brian Massumi. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham. p. 25. 80 This concept of the body experienced as movement is well captured by James Merrill in his 1982 article “Acoustical Chambers”: Trying for a blank mind, I catch myself instead revisiting a childhood bedroom on Long Island. Recently, on giving up the house in Greece where I’d lived for much of the previous fifteen years, it wasn’t so much the fine view it commanded or the human comedies it had witnessed that I felt deprived of; rather, I missed the hairpin turn of the staircase underfoot, the height of our kitchen ceiling, the low door ducked through in order to enter a rooftop laundry room that had become my study. James Merrill. 2004. James Merrill Collected Prose. Eds. J.D. McClatchy, Stephen Yenser. Knopf: New York. p. 3. 81 Alva Noë. Ibid., p. 105. 82 Brian Massumi. Ibid., p. 30. 83 Rotman’s most recent book, Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed Human Being, describes in detail how this process unfolds in the remediated subject. 84Walter Benjamin. 2005. Ibid., pp. 502-503. 85 Felix Guattari. 1979. L’Inconscient machinique. Recherche: Paris. p. 9. Trans. by Taylor Adkins and published on Wednesday, July 25, 2012. (http://fractalontology.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/speculative- materialisms-thinking-the-absolute-with-meillassoux-and-guattari-2/). Accessed 8/23/12.

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Chapter Five: Strategies of Persistence

In the past what we thought outstripped what we were; now what we are outstrips what we can think.1

– Steven Connor

The preceding chapters have given us some sense of how the mediators of vision

– rectangle, triangle, circle – have informed the human’s discursive diagrams of grid, hierarchy and atomized individual, even as they have obscured the ontogenesis of the latter. As simple, intuitive forms seemingly always already present in the environment, they encourage the naturalization of their cultural counterparts. We have also seen how these ostensibly ideal forms given by vision are not monolithic but rather emerge from or are elicited by the intra-actions of virtual forces – vector fields, interference patterns and monads into which “all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale.”2 Rather than Platonic templates for producing the Good or the True, technology is beginning to reveal these static, Euclidian forms and their seemingly atemporal discursive avatars to be but artifacts of an age in which it was possible to model the flow of time as linear and uniform, as the ubiquitous and therefore unnoticed time signature which marked off the intervals of the human.

But time, through advances made in simulation technology, increasingly reveals itself to consist of dilations, intensities and recursivities, not only as subjective

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experience3 but as morphogenetic principle.4 Entities such as social movements, knots of traffic, slime molds, polyps, might all be shown to cohere through the interactions of their elements, the latter establishing what we might consider to be the entity’s metabolism, the molar instantiation of molecular activity. Time is then neither a continuous flow carrying entities along nor the means by which their movements through the container of space might be measured. It constitutes and is constituted in turn by relationships of interiority and exteriority, intensive qualities and extensive quantities.

Extension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts. Such a connection of whole-parts forms an infinite series that contains neither a final term nor a limit (the limits of our senses being excepted). The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration. For space and time are not limits but abstract coordinates of all series, that are themselves in extension: the minute, the second, the tenth of a second…5

The grid is representative of time as extension in that it describes and creates the spatial field into which thought (the dynamic form taken by time manifesting as bounded movement) imagines itself expanding. Grid/thought, being invisible to itself, regards its dichotomizing activities as discoveries, its (re)ordering of already organized territories as liberations and its abstract ideas or diagrams as antecedent and superior to the mere matter that actualizes them. It perennially attempts to think itself apart from matter and enlists the latter in efforts to create the conditions of its transcendence that would thus break forever the bond between them. It operates in the extensive visual field, where it complexifies in an effort to evade its own probing. But because it is

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incapable of recognizing the dichotomizing effects of its own mediations, mistaking these for evidence of a pre-existing ‘real,’ the grid, in the form of ordered thought, is blind to the strategies it has developed to evade its own investigations.

Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn't know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn't want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking.6

The dichotomizing effects of the grid as diagram of thought remain invisible to it in part because these are mediated through the human. The grid and the human have formed a symbiotic relationship where each advances by using the other as a means of its own remediation, pointing to the other as the pre-given ground on which it builds its models, and thus making undiscoverable, in the manner of Latour’s “nature versus society,”7 or

Luhmann’s “psychic versus social,” their shared origin.

They are inextricably joined in their inability to proceed without constantly disarticulating one from another, self- from hetero-reference. Their essential unity lies in their paradoxical operational commitment to "closure." Because "identity" is a problem for them, because they cannot achieve identity otherwise than differentially, theirs is a symbiotic antagonism; each functions as the operation for the other's observation, the alibi of an environment for the other's system.8

But as we know, the vortex/smoke ring is a vector field with each element affecting the movement of the whole. And the ring is not so much pulled forward by mediating technologies as it is convected by the low pressure system trapped at its core, a system which can be found to be operating at the core of any thought-directed entity9 (which

Guattari tells us is a very broad category indeed).10

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Traveling as an element of the ring/vector field is to experience a culturally- reinforced forward, if locally looped, trajectory. It is to experience the linear unfolding of time or the evolutionary progress recorded by historicists. Benjamin’s objection to the latter’s hegemonic framing of temporal discourse marks the occasion of his introduction of the concept of “now-time” into his own cultural productions. This is the view of reality from inside the vortex ring’s core which rotates toroidally, or orthogonally, to historicity’s progressive trajectory. To experience now-time is to “stand outside” of progress while being conscious of being constituted by its involutionary movement. It is the experience of “movement moving,”11 a “double insight” which immediately follows the “shock”/caesura that marks the change of direction of rotation effected upon arrival at the ring’s core. It is the exorcism of the ghost of progress through an acknowledgment of one’s superposed identity with it as unmediated circulation of outside and inside, the ring’s undisclosed origin.

The Moderns’ Time

As presented here, the human’s new-found ability to speed up and slow down time’s flow has revealed morphogenetic consistencies across scalar levels. The most immediate impact of this, however, has been an increased focus on time’s composite, multivalent nature, an understanding of time at odds with the view of the moderns. The computational revolution has undermined attempts to cling to a “past in which time did not matter.”12 Indeed, if such a time ever existed, it did so only within the parameters created by the meta-narrative of the modern era in which existence was organized 204

according to the coordinates of a single spatiotemporal continuum, one in which the multiplicity of time was never a consideration. The laminar flow that this era required and enforced for its coherence13 has become in the post-anthropocentric age turbulent in the manner of Deleuze’s maelstrom. Once described by the physicist Richard

Feynman as “the most important unsolved problem of classical physics,”14 the continuing intractability of turbulence marks the limit of rational knowledge and the end of linear time’s hegemony. The new age, better able to model the time signatures peculiar to variously-scaled entities, is beginning to recognize how the latter result from the amplification and dampening of oscillations and vibrations at various scalar levels which extend potentially indefinitely.15 Turbulence, growing globally in response to the breakdown in tightly coupled systems at all scales, disarticulates these entities into their constituent tempos and rhythms corresponding to smaller-scaled entities such that the posthuman era is likely to witness the unleashing of pent-up heterogeneous temporal flows.16

What we call inert things, the sea, the earth and the universe, the sky, landscapes, time, living beings, we and our history, cultures and knowledges, abstraction and experience, you, me, and our soul, all of them move turbulently between these two conditions’… [the] ‘universal’, the centripetal convergence of systems that tend towards unity, and the centrifugal dissipation of systems that move away from integration.17

According to Bruno Latour, the conception of time as universal and irreversible is central to what he terms the “modern constitution.” There are not times but, rather,

Time, and it flows (in the modern era) always in the direction of progress (or from the perspective of anti-moderns, decadence). Under its rubric, the pre-moderns are

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understood to have lacked a conception of this temporalizing order and as such were

(and are) unable to synchronize the objects of their world into a unified whole, leading them to suffer from category confusion when dealing with notions of past, present and future. Moderns, by contrast, having achieved such a synchronization through the logics of the grid, are certain of their categories – ontological, temporal, or otherwise – and can confidently speak of epochs and inanimate matter, species and styles. Thus, where the past represents for the moderns a time of “confusion of men and things; the future is what will no longer confuse them.”18

This dream of a more ordered future where everything has been gridded and all contingencies mapped has always exerted a teleological pull on the moderns.19 It is one which recognizes as its apotheosis the decoupling of mind and matter and the final realization of pure thought coming to know itself as circulating bits in the binary computer that is the cosmos; pure spirit finally transcendent over corruptible matter.

According to Latour, however, the days of this successful organizing trope may be numbered.

…the moderns’ time has finally been suspended, but time has nothing to do with it. The connections among beings alone make time. It was the systematic connection of entities in a coherent whole that constituted the flow of modern time. Now that the laminary flow has become turbulent, we can give up analyses of the empty framework of temporality and return to passing time – that is, to beings and their relationships, to the networks that construct irreversibility and reversibility.20

The momentum of the modern movement is slowing, its energies dissipating as it encounters the turbulence left by its own wake. What had seemed to the moderns to be a straight trajectory of progress, a tangent to the pre-modern world of ritual and

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dogma, now appears, from the post-humanist perspective, to have been the arc of a circuit, a curved path leading ineluctably back to the starting point. But the world is not as the moderns had left it. The circuit is actually a coiled spiral and has returned them not to the point of origin, but to one just above, or, more accurately, alongside it

(referring to our smoke ring analogy, we could say they never reached the ring’s core).

Though hundreds of years away, this new point is so close to the original that, turning to investigate, the moderns are able to discern a ray of points coming into alignment on the seemingly graduated windings of the spiral, each dimly projecting as it recedes into the distance, an image of the moderns’ own reflection. Their own point seems suddenly crowded with this multiplicity of images, specters from a past left behind long ago. But these are not images from the past because there is no Time, as such, there are, rather, only times. And these images are not reflections per se, but, rather, the vast numbers of hybrids and quasi-objects that have come to populate the world during the modern interval. They are constitutive of the pile of debris coiling up at the feet of Benjamin’s angel, and they refuse to be ignored. By-products of the moderns’ imagined progressive movement through Time, they are the source of the turbulence the moderns are now encountering as the chains of unsteady vortices at all scales that had peeled off of its

“moving hull” now siphon off its energies and splinter its singular drive. From the perspective of French novelist Louis Aragon, one of Benjamin’s favorite authors, it becomes clear that “There is a modern form of tragedy: It is a kind of great steering mechanism that turns, but no hand is at the wheel.”21

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What the moderns have never been able to comprehend is that there are as many times as there are entities, and that, even as their investigative methods have generated more unique object/events, proliferations emanating from the nature/culture divide, in the last fifty years than in the last fifteen hundred, they have only seen fit to slot them into their “empty” spatiotemporal framework. They have been promoting, in other words, a meta-narrative which, as philosopher Isabelle

Stengers observes, “reduces the diverse and the changing to the identical and the permanent, [which] as a result eliminates time.”22 Time, being universal (from the moderns’ perspective), can be ignored. While this seems counterintuitive in that Time appears to figure very prominently in the modern psyche (as evidenced, for example, by the formulation “time equals money”), it is, simultaneously, understood by them to constitute part of a pre-given, coordinate structure that allows for extension and action, part of the ground against which the figure of materiality, or that which is of main concern to the moderns, is made manifest. They have had little concern, historically, for intensive time or those internal operations which give rise to the experience of time at the subperceptual level. They have had no time, that is, for processes of becoming and the lived specificities to which these give rise.

Posthuman Temporalities

Where the “empty framework” of the modern’s Time might be ignored, it being a basically static, passive structure, the unfolding of intensive time(s) is insistent. They have a distributive, diffractional quality, being deeply imbricated within the networks 208

that constitute and connect entities at every organizational scale. As Stengers notes,

“Every complex being is composed of a plurality of times,”23 and it is precisely the multi- temporal specificity of an entity that identifies it as unique and gives it its ability to constitute itself as such in the face of countervailing pressures and perturbations from the environment. This multi-temporal specificity is itself constituted by the coming into contact of a given being’s differentially moving sub-entities, nested processes of acceleration and deceleration, which telescope down along an indefinite continuum like an endlessly receding vortex street. Experience of these internal phenomena, of couplings, oscillations and ongoing changes in rates of speed, is generally not directly accessible to the “higher-order” system in which it is taking place. What is provided the entity, however, is a feeling of itself from the inside, a sense of being in the world through the affective, intensive register’s access to this virtual realm of incipiencies. It is through this register that the virtual becomes actualized, the virtual and the actual being inextricably linked as between two sides of a coin. This relationship creates the lived paradox of coexisting opposites in Hansen’s “affective interval.” It is the realm in which “outsides are infolded, and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life).”24 While this describes an infolding of times at the level of the human, it could apply equally well to entities, individuals, systems, or networks, that is, any entity along the scalar continuum.

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A machinic assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, ontological and phylogenetic thresholds, creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoiesis. The notion of scale needs to be expanded to consider fractal symmetries in ontological terms. What fractal machines traverse are substantial scales. They traverse them in engendering them. But, and this should be noted, the existential ordinates that they "invent" were always already there. How can this paradox be sustained? It's because everything becomes possible (including the recessive smoothing of time, evoked by René Thom) the moment one allows the assemblage to escape from energetico- spatio-temporal coordinates. And, here again, we need to rediscover a manner of being of Being - before, after, here and everywhere else - without being, however, identical to itself; a processual, polyphonic Being singularisable by infinitely complexifiable textures, according to the infinite speeds which animate its virtual compositions.25

These ideas begin to help us imagine how differences in speed or rates of change between coupled entities can create an emergent affective or proprioceptive sense of corporeal continuity. For example, even as my comparatively rapid movements – buying a cup of coffee, walking to the subway – divide the cogent moment of the city into intervals imperceptible to it, so they resonate with and amplify the rhythms of others – pedestrians, stop lights, delivery trucks – until these coalesce into the city’s own rhythms with which it begins to identify and others begin to associate with it.

These same rhythms, resonances and rates of change play a role in determining the morphology of structures at every scalar level,26 determinative as they are of what counts as a border or margin. Storm cells and ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream are terms we use to describe the mass migration of differential, intensive qualities such as temperature, density and pressure. They are best described in terms of vector fields where the movement of each individual element affects the movement of the whole,

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making of it a single entity. Where the movement of such an intensive field brushes up against the slower moving milieu through which it passes, a train of vortices is established, otherwise known as a boundary. This sort of boundary formation is more obvious in fluid dynamics, where moving matter itself “sheaths” the entity, but one can extrapolate from this to see that the entwining of slownesses and fastnesses, insides and outsides, is what separates one entity from another, the interval between them more realistically modeled as a fractally-structured, interstitial zone of turbulence rather than as two Euclidian planes gliding smoothly past each other. This describes both the internal and external topology of the body as well, its fractal rhythms and architecture, the sedimented outcome of millions of years27 of such speed differentials.28 It is also important to note that differences in intensive qualities such as temperature and pressure do not “cause” the movement of vector fields such as storm cells, but rather are identical with it. Movement is what difference does. Cause and effect become conflated in this understanding of the entity collapsing its experience of the temporal dimension – its sense of seriality – into the feeling of being as becoming, a vector force.

In this sense no interval is privileged over any other, and one enacts the moment as a surfer does a wave.

This is the intuition of spacetime imparted by Benjamin’s Aleph-like29 The

Passages and Lazzarini’s alien object, skulls. It is the intuition of movement unmediated, or the apperception of self superposed with moving movement. It is also, then, stasis, as movement without a datum is non-indexical and cannot know itself. This 211

is the shock which both works impart, an illumination of identity between self and world, object, event and the simultaneous experience of the caesura that this evokes and requires for its apperception. It is the oscillations between 1 and 0 brought to a standstill in the superposition of the quantum bit;30 the labyrinth and the subduing of the chimera at its center; the convolutions of the body’s affective register and their derailment of thought’s perceived forward progress; and the potential for a new beginning without origin, or one which like an “eddy in the stream of becoming…swallows the material involved in the process of genesis.”31 The human actualized by Benjamin’s “now-time,” in other words, is a tripartite topological manifold like his infolded stocking: at once movement moving; the stasis which provides movement an intuition of itself; and the paradox that the juxtaposition of these implies, otherwise known as origin.

Topology is a model for a new form of thought that thinks, or thinks about its thought (and it cannot help but do so, since topological thinking is always thinking about its own thought, and thinking about its own thought is the form its thinking must take), not as a transpiercing, or unveiling or penetration or an attempt to get to the bottom of things, but as a spreading out or unfolding extrapolation. It extrapolates the thinking of things into new forms, and thus makes possible new forms, new topologies of thought.32

This topological structure is one I wish to explore further, as I believe that “true forward progress” finds its origin in paradoxes of self-referentiality. Thus developing strategies that might allow paradox to ramify through the body and culture should advance efforts to discover what this concept of “true forward progress” might mean.

In the context of cultural theory, it means moving beyond “positioning” or “coding” subjects on a grid, a system of cultural emplacements originally adopted as a means of

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circumventing the ideologically motivated universalization of subjects. But this has had the unintended consequence of locking subjects into their gridded identities, preventing them performing any but prescripted moves. Progress then becomes a question of how a system which has pinned subjects in place according to their superficial characteristics might be expected to undergo change. In other words “How can the grid itself change?”33

This is the question to which this dissertation has attempted to respond, though in an ontological context rather than one specifically related to cultural theory or even the human. Of course, since Bergson revealed position to be derivative of duration, that change was the ground of being, the question has been reversed, not “how is change possible,” but “how is stasis possible within movement.” These questions share the same root, and I have taken a formal approach towards responding to them, examining how certain discursive diagrams, reinforced by the optics of vision, have obscured rather than elucidated the paradox they present. Increasingly, technologies of the virtual such as simulation and mathematical modeling are enabling us to visualize and experience the paradox of stasis in movement that undergirds all of existence. Lazzarini’s skulls is but one example of how the digital is turning the body inside out, bringing to our attention the ghost that is the body’s ground in the virtual and making it available for contemplation. Preceding it by seventy years, Benjamin’s The Passages similarly effects an inversion of his reader’s frame of reference, leading her by way of its labyrinthine

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passages to her own inner core, which, with a shock, reveals itself to be outside of time, a singularity opening onto a new beginning.

But Benjamin drew inspiration for his investigations into the topological manifold that is The Passages not just from Goethe, Marx, Brecht, or his study of the Kabala, but also from the Surrealists. Harnessing unreason as a strategy for revealing the “madness that was reason,” artists associated with this group attempted nothing less than an inversion of the spatiotemporal field. By inhabiting and acting out the dreamlife of the

19th century, what we might think of as its Id rather than its Ego, they were able to reveal its phantasmagorical character and “the liberal, moralistic–humanistic sclerotic ideal of freedom”34 that it represented. Benjamin admired their willingness to embody their subversive strategy: “This loosening up of the I through intoxication is at the same time the fruitful, living experience that made these people step out of the magical circle of intoxication,”35 an ideal of the non-mediated, performative tactic he would later incorporate into The Passages. But one artist in particular excelled at the sort of field inversion that Benjamin attempted in his own work – Marcel Duchamp – with whom he once met in a café in Paris, though there is no extant record of the encounter.

Duchamp, operating at the beginning of what would come to be called the postmodern era and being a student of mathematics, saw, perhaps more clearly than any of his compatriots, how best to leverage the new spatiotemporal models of his day to invert the cultural field. He recognized in the paradoxes they presented a method for

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how one might “deframe and reframe the frame,”36 one which he was to put into effect in artworks such as his “ready-mades.” I conclude this dissertation by examining one example of Duchamp’s use of paradox to destabilize the “sclerotic” formalisms of the time, as I believe it may have implications for how we might address those stunting our own current cultural milieu. As I hope I have made clear in the arguments presented here, I believe the latter to consist of those formalisms which allow a crypto- anthropocentric model of time to color perceptions about the nature of reality and the structure of the cosmos we inhabit. Duchamp helps us to recognize that self- reflexivities of both first and second order37 characterize all systems and are not unique to those pscyhco-social organizational levels which are held by some, such as Luhmann and Harman, to be more, or “hyper”-complex. His work, in other words, by puncturing the smallest of holes in what appears to be a seamless cultural fabric, foregrounds the normally invisible topological movement which keeps the vortex ring spinning along its three axes and forces us to recognize ourselves in it.

Elegant Simplicity

One of the sources for Duchamp’s success was his adoption of nature’s parsimonious ways. Nature, as one may attest from a quick survey of her products, has determined that she need use only a few related forms in her development of an indefinite range of unique phenomena. Examining her methods, we find that she has narrowed the basic plans for her productions to a small clutch of patterns, such as spirals, meanders, branchings and explosions, which “bring certain benefits and 215

efficiencies, irrespective of the size of the system, the forces, or the particular materials used.”38 It is only scale, for example, which differentiates whirlpools in the sink from spiral galaxies in the heavens, or distinguishes the ratio of small to large branches in our bronchia from those found in trees, lightning and stream hierarchies. These patterns persist because, rather than resist the forces which act on them, they inhabit or enact the tensions that exist between these forces, balancing and distributing them as efficiently as possible.

Of course, to some degree, all entities, as evidenced by their existence, adopt this strategy; everything from atoms, organs, individuals and species can be understood to be the enactment of tensions or interference patterns that develop at the point of confluence between forces or relationships, constituting what we might call diffractionary events. Some entities/enactments, however, demonstrate a particularly elegant, streamlined method of persevering in their forms. In Latour’s terms, these represent those political assemblages which have developed a decidedly robust strategy for distributing stresses evenly throughout their networked forms. Two of the more successful of such assemblages which we will examine here are the water snake and

Marcel Duchamp.

But first it might benefit us to know why we should be interested in merely persisting when it seems like we should be focused instead on improving, evolving and/or progressing. Anthropologist and fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin is instructive on

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this point. In her view, humanity is much like the sorcerer’s apprentice; having unleashed a powerful and sometimes-destructive force that has moved beyond its control, humanity is now forced to spend much of its time and energy trying to ameliorate the problems wrought by its own interventions. Technoscience, in the name of progress, in other words, seems to have created as many if not more problems than it was designed to solve, making it increasingly difficult to imagine an inhabitable future.

We’ve been so busy chasing after, or simply trying to keep up with, progress’ ever- deferred promise of a utopian paradise, it would seem, that we’ve never really had much of a chance to invest in creating a habitable present. In spite (or because?) of our technological capabilities, Le Guin notes, “we have very little sense of where we live, where we are right now,” the proof of this being that “if we did, we wouldn’t muck it up the way we do.”39 But what if we were to get off the progress treadmill; what if we were to recognize, as Le Guin urges, “the concept of progress as a wrong direction, and to accept persevering in one’s existence as a completely worthy social goal?”40 While hardly a novel concept, being the modus operandi of, for example, Native American tribes; the Amish (to a more limited degree); and certain counter-cultural groups, it is an idea that is in many ways perhaps more viable now than ever. It may be no coincidence that we find it resurfacing as a point of discussion just as the age of expansion and linear progress is coming to a close and our computing technologies are beginning to allow us to explore the non-linear, recursive processes that describe the vast majority of the universe’s intra-actions. Though both the snake and Duchamp precede the

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computational revolution which is making newly legible these “processes of becoming,” their strategies of perseverance have elevated this endeavor to an art form and might serve as a model for our own.

Examining the movements of a snake in water, we find, according to aeronautical engineer Heinrich Hertel,41 that they differ subtly and surprisingly from those of fish. The latter are known to create a double row of alternately spiraling vortices around which they wrap their bodies, the better to harness the propulsive force these vortices generate. The snake apparently does much the same, though its movement creates only a single line of vortices. Cutting through the middle of these rather than wrapping its body around, it is able to eliminate the wake normally left by a body moving through water. This lack of wake testifies to the snake’s greater economy of movement, an efficiency which is also reflected in the fact that the vortices that it bisects do not travel downstream with the current but remain in place, fed by the flow of the stream as though it had encountered a fixed object. Enumerating the tactical elements of the snake’s strategy, then, we find that it:

. adopts the dynamic of its environment (rendering its movements less visible to both predators and prey); . expends an absolute minimum of energy (contributing to its ability to persist unchanged in its chosen environment, at least since the late Jurassic period); . uses the resistance of the medium in which it operates to further its own perseverance; . leaves behind persistent traces of its passage, maintained by the energy of the medium through which it moves (testament to its efficiency of its locomotive apparatus).

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Comparing the snake’s strategy with that of artist, trickster and agent provocateur

Duchamp, we find the latter to be as equally persistent as the former in his chosen milieu, largely as a result of employing the same elegantly simple techniques.

Duchamp’s economical strategy is most clearly revealed in the much discussed case of his anonymous submission of an artwork entitled Fountain to the Society of

Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917. The artwork, itself, consisted of little more than a recumbent, factory-made urinal which had been inscribed on one side with the signature “R. Mutt.” Even though the show’s Board of Selectors, of whom

Duchamp was one, had “daringly” declared it would accept all submissions, members were willing neither to include this particular piece in their exhibit nor to acknowledge their refusal to do so. Given the final outcome of these events, they might be considered prescient in their refusal to acknowledge their role in the affair, for had they condemned Duchamp they might well have ended up playing the role of the Catholic

Church to his Galileo in a change of paradigm that has been likened by some to the

Copernican revolution.42 Indeed, for the five hundred British art world professionals who recently voted Fountain to be “the single most influential artwork of the 20th century,”43 Duchamp might as well be Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler rolled into one, so revolutionary did they judge the impact of this piece.

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The Topological Moment

So, how was it possible for a simple urinal, the most prosaic of objects, to have driven the Board of Selectors to distraction and scandalized the art world of the time?

And perhaps more importantly, why are the reverberations from its non-showing still being felt today? Many scholars have attempted to answer these questions, but certainly one of the major, and yet often overlooked, factors was Duchamp’s love of mathematics and, in particular, of the then-new higher-dimensional geometries: non-

Euclidian, n-dimensional and topology. Prior to the development of these alternative geometries, mathematics was thought to be bringing humanity ever-closer to a true picture of Reality. But once it became apparent that Euclidian geometry was but one among a number of logically consistent relational systems, that there existed equally viable geometries in which it was possible, for example, for parallel lines to meet, mathematicians could no longer argue that they were merely discovering the laws of nature. They had to admit that convention played a role even in mathematics, the purest of the sciences. This thrilled the young Duchamp as it revealed how conventional thinking might dominate even his own chosen field of art even as it pointed to the ways in which these conventions might be overcome. Thus inspired, Duchamp immersed himself in the writings of mathematicians such as Henri Poincaré, whose invention of modern topology Duchamp was to mine for ideas on how to subvert what he saw as the oppressive conventions of the art world of his day.44

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Topology was particularly well-suited to Duchamp’s needs because it deals with qualitative descriptions of connections and boundaries (such as are used to describe wormholes in space or the looped space of a Klein bottle) as opposed to the more familiar Euclidean or Riemannian quantitative analyses of shape and size. It makes it possible to explore how apparent insides become outsides; how objects can stretch, twist and bend and yet remain qualitatively the same; and how scale, as with any frame of reference, describes only a relative, rather than an absolute, relationship. Its development thus proved critical to the generation of Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905 (a theory which, among other things, famously postulated that there were no privileged inertial frames of reference) and would later play a crucial role in the development of chaos and complexity theory in the 1970s, equated in importance by some with the development of quantum and relativity theories.

In truth, it is tracing this on-going shift, begun in Duchamp’s day, from a

Euclidian to a topological understanding of our world and selves, that is, a shift from thinking of entities as existing in time to thinking of them as existing of time, which is of relevance in the current discussion. Time, from a topological perspective, as we learned earlier, might be understood to be that which moves through or comprises entities rather than that by which their progress might be measured within a three-dimensional,

Cartesian framework.45 The topological model’s introduction of the concept of a spacetime manifold not only contested the Newtonian idea of space as container and time as exterior parameter, but reopened debates about cause and effect, 221

subject/object relations and autonomous agency that had been settled since the ascendency of the modern worldview. Duchamp’s almost unique position of being both artist and amateur mathematician allowed him to put the new spacetime manifold to work, destabilizing these key elements of the still-dominant Enlightenment paradigm.

Duchamp was adamantly opposed to the metaphysics of individualism, expressed disbelief in the possibility of separating knower and known and invented the field of conceptual art to escape from the oppressive regime of representationalism that still reigned at the time. No doubt recognizing the concept of an anthropocentric agency to be implicit in each of these, he must have realized he could launch an efficient attack on all three by erasing evidence of his own participation in the artwork, Fountain, and by having the piece itself initiate or enact, rather than merely represent, the cultural upheaval he perceived the topological model to herald. The Enlightenment concepts which he believed this model threatened are, of course, still very much with us, built as they are into the fabric of our material-discursive environment – into the plans of the cities we inhabit, the financial transactions we make, the laws we follow. But the degree to which Fountain disrupted and continues to disrupt the anthropocentric worldview suggests that he correctly identified the central and charged role that agency plays in our Enlightenment-inflected philosophies. We could say, in this regard, that he anticipated the current move towards a flat ontology by almost a hundred years and indeed contributed to the conditions which made possible its conception.

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We might confidently speculate that Duchamp understood his submission of

Fountain to the show in 1917 to be his opening move in a larger project to destabilize and “democratize” (in the strongest sense) the art world. That this could have been a strategic gambit on Duchamp’s part is evidenced by his love of strategy in general, a fact which he readily acknowledged and which accounts for his decision six years later to devote himself solely to playing and writing about chess at the expense of his thriving art career.46 Having “come to the conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists,”47 it seems it was clear to him he would have to invest his efforts in mastering the more inclusive and, thus, strategic of the two activities. And that Duchamp was interested in democratizing the art world is borne out by his claim that “everybody is making, not only artists” and his stated hope that “maybe in the coming centuries there will be a making without the noticing.”48 It has been suggested that it was the rejection of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 from a show at the Salon des Independents early in his career which sparked his impatience with the conventions of the hermetic art world of his day, but such impatience can also be linked to his vision of the existence of alternative processes for creating art, and life more generally, inspired by his study of topology and non-Euclidian geometry. Recognizing that even mathematics could not establish the existence of an absolute Truth, Duchamp was determined to demonstrate that conceptual and processual approaches to art/world-making were at least as valid as the more traditional “retinal” variety. After all, as he had no doubt learned from reading Poincaré, it was not "the things themselves

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[that science] can reach, as the naïve dogmatists think, but only the relations between things. Outside of these relations there is no knowable reality.”49

Applying this to his own field, he apparently recognized that the art world had become too focused on “things themselves,” that is, the artist and art object, and was ignoring what mattered – exploring the relations between things. In order to de- fetishize the art object and “de-deify”50 the artist, as he claimed he wanted to do, he would need to disrupt not just implicit assumptions about what art was or what the role of the artist might be, but the entire Enlightenment-era episteme out of which these categories had precipitated. Much as had Copernicus, he would need to find a way to induce in his audience members a gestalt shift, one which would allow them to recalibrate their perception of the center of gravity and displace it from the object or person (that which “occupied” space and time) onto that of the inter and/or intra- relationships of which objects and they themselves were composed, that is, onto their own dynamic topology, or that which “enacts” spacetime. Ultimately, he realized, such a shift would require his audience/participants relinquish the notion of a center altogether along with the related concept that agency was the sole prerogative of the human.

Endgame

Duchamp was able to foster this inversion of figure and ground by evacuating any evidence of his own agency from the art object (Fountain) and locating the source of

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the piece’s agency, instead, in the relationships which circulated through it, bringing the plumbing fixture cum artwork to life; that is, the piece was not the urinal but rather the- urinal-in-relationship-with-the-audience.51 By secretly orchestrating the rejection of

Fountain from the Independents exhibit (as some have speculated),52 he was able to spark the intended controversy that was to set this relationship in motion. It was a relationship based on mutual category disruption, with the urinal oscillating between industrial artifact and art object in conjunction with the audience’s oscillations between passive consumer and active participant. He had, in effect, narrowed down to one the possible actions of his viewer. In the terms Alain Badiou articulates: “The ready-made is the envelope of the point where thought is reduced to a choice where we must find nothing, except choosing itself.”53

Duchamp’s strategy, then, was to ensure that there was no neutral ground for the audience members – there was no “outside the frame;” were they to accept the urinal as art, they would have to accept that anything and everything was art, and the audience’s agentic role as critic was negated; if they contested it as art, they would play a role in furthering its dissemination as such and thus be enlisted into the art-making process against their will. It was, in a sense, the ultimate chess move, one that would allow the game (the activities of the cultural milieu) to continue but which would ineluctably fold its attention back on itself in the manner of an endless regress belying its pretension to progress. The grid of the board, the rules of the game would be forever altered by this warping of the spatiotemporal order, and to further guarantee 225

this outcome, Duchamp designed Fountain to entangle the audience in similar conundrums at multiple levels. His use of a factory-made object altered almost not-at- all by the artist confounded critics used to judging a piece by evidence of the artist’s agency. Here, Duchamp had reduced proof of the difference between passive matter and active agent to a single signature which he had applied to the urinal but which was itself the name of a non-existent person (the “R,” he claimed, was for “Richard,” French slang for “moneybags,” and the “Mutt” inspired by the greedy, dimwitted character in the then-popular comic strip “Mutt and Jeff”).54 And then, of course, there was the question of the content of the piece, or just what it was that Duchamp intended to represent (an identifying feature of art at the time). But Duchamp claimed that

Fountain represented nothing other than itself. It didn’t “re-present” – it acted, or better, it enacted, in the manner of Nietzsche’s freeplay, the world in collaboration with other actors, some of whom were distinctly non-human. And it is precisely this which makes this piece so disturbing to so many, then as now, because, according to

Enlightenment philosophy, the human capacity for agency is what distinguishes the human from the rest of “Nature.” Without exclusive claim to the rationality and free will it signifies, how is the human to orient itself in the universe?

The modern era, broadly understood as the birth and unfolding of a humanist philosophy, might be said to have begun with the Copernican revolution and to have ended with the inventions of relativity and quantum theories (though its legacy will no doubt live on for the foreseeable future). The unfolding of its logics tells the tale of the 226

decentering of the human – spatially, by the heliocentric worldview which displaced humans from the center of the physical universe; temporally, by Darwin’s theory of evolution and James Hutton’s “deep-time” conception of geology, both of which posited the earth to have existed for eons prior to the arrival of the human; psychically, by

Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which challenged the concept of the unitary, rational agent; and, finally, physically, as technoscience begins to make tangible the effects of

Einstein’s equating of matter and energy and Bohr’s revelation of the inseparability of knower and known. Duchamp’s work should be viewed in this context and understood as contributing to this general thrust, albeit in another register. From an object that was never exhibited; that bore the signature of a non-existent person; that showed no evidence of the artist’s hand; that represented nothing (literally and figuratively); and for which no trace of the original has ever been found, he created a cultural icon which marks the inflection point of a new spatiotemporal order. In short, by evacuating agency from Fountain – thereby creating a “negative” space, an invagination, a fold –

Duchamp successfully foregrounded the usually invisible field of relations out of which this phenomenon arises, casting into doubt any claim humans might have to its sole possession.

Fountain, in other words, can be thought of as the smoke in a smoke ring which calls attention to the normally invisible forces which distinguish inside from outside, figure from ground and, in this case, art from non-art. But it is more besides, because it not only indicates the tensions between these invisible, evolutionary/involutionary 227

forces (the intra-actions between investments in aesthetics, art careers, art market futures, etc.), but also siphons off some of these energies to form and feed its own self- similar dynamic, that of a recursive, circulating vortex ring which progresses and perseveres by continually oscillating between outside and inside, a human-scaled quantum bit. Just as surely as the snake’s creation and use of vortices ensures its persistence, so Duchamp, as evidenced in his creation of Fountain and in his art world strategies more generally, similarly makes use of this most elegant of nature’s efficient patterns.

Returning to our original investigation of these patterns, then, we find that both the snake and Duchamp incorporate them into their strategies of persistence, which has the effect of making their strategies appear similar, if not identical. Where the snake disguises its movements from predators and prey by adopting the sinuous motion of the current, effectively enacting the dynamic forces at play in the stream, Duchamp plays the part of the ambitious artist, submitting his works for acceptance at shows, sitting on curatorial committees and otherwise moving in the circles that define the conventional art world of his day, knowing that it is only by being accepted into this world that he can undermine its conventions and set about harnessing its energies to feed his vision of an alternative, “non-retinal,” processual art. Where the snake has been able to secure its survival over the ages by strategically minimizing its expenditure of energy, Duchamp

(consistently ranked as one of the top five artists of the 20th century despite his minimal artistic output) created works which in each instance reflect an attempt to disrupt as 228

thoroughly as possible conventional modes of thinking while employing the most economical means through the use of, for example: found objects, puns, abbreviations, aural cues, shadows, performance and strategies of self-reference. Where the snake recursively relies on the generation of friction between its head and the water to create the vortices that facilitate its progress, Duchamp similarly relied on the outrage his pieces generated in his audience to complete and further their progress, their notoriety being an essential driver of the recursive dynamic that was the central focus of his work.

And finally, we find that the vortices created by the snake’s progress, which spiral in place in the stream, resistant to its flow, or rather, which harness its energies to further their own existence, are indistinguishable in their dynamic from many of Duchamp’s works, Fountain being paradigmatic among these; for Fountain remains embedded in the modern psyche to a degree matched by few other works, a fact which can only be explained by its ability to tap into and feed off of an anxiety that is as palpable in his audience today as it was nearly a century ago when topology and other alternative geometries were first beginning to expose the limits of Truth and an atemporal universe. By subverting the art world’s frames of reference, Fountain foregrounds the conventionality of all such frames, even as it strips its audience of its (sole claim to) agency, for who can judge good or bad, right or wrong in a world devoid of a datum, dominated by mere convention?

Which is precisely why we might want to adopt the snake’s/Duchamp’s strategies of persistence and adapt them to suit our needs in our own social contexts 229

rather than invest further in chasing after a rationalist utopia; for “progress,” too, reveals itself to be not some absolute good but rather a matter of convention.55 We cannot determine whether it is moving us “forward,” for, as Duchamp reminds us, we lack any stable reference by which to gauge its directionality or “progress.” Instead, we should recognize, as both the snake and Duchamp demonstrate, that the most effective way to persist in a maelstrom, which in many ways the posthuman era resembles, is not to resist its force by clinging to one’s own sense of agency, but rather to figure out ways in which one might inhabit its dynamic field and begin to siphon its energies into projects whose recursive flow runs counter to its own. One has to learn to think and operate inside the vortex, in other words, in order to move beyond a concept of progress which offers “no habitable present and speaks only in the future tense.”56 The prescription then might be to attempt to get comfortable with occupying one’s own non-mediated, self-differentiating, oscillating core, an effort we find, paradoxically, being facilitated by technologies of the grid as they make available for contemplation articulations of the temporal.57

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Endnotes for Chapter Five

1 Steven Connor. 2008. “Wherever: The Ecstasies of Michel Serres.” A lecture given at Digital Art and Culture in the Age of Pervasive Computing, Copenhagen, Nov., 14. p. 13. 2 Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 475. [N10,3]. 3 For more information on the subjective experience of time and its importance to successful negotiation of the environment see: Susie Vrobel . 2011. “Fractal time: Why a Watched Kettle Never Boils.“ Studies of Nonlinear Phenomena In Life Science. Volume 14. Institute for Fractal Research, Germany. 4 For an interesting discussion of how epigenetics has altered perceptions of the temporal dimension within the life sciences see: Hannah Landecker. 2007. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. 5 Gilles Deleuze. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The Athalone Press: London. p. 77. 6 David Bohm. 1994. Thought as a System. Routledge: London. p. 11. 7 “Inert and mechanical matter is as essential to civil peace as a purely symbolic interpretation of the Bible.” Bruno Latour. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Harvard Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 19. 8 Jonathan Elmer. Spring, 1995. “Blinded Me With Science: Motifs of Observation and Temporality in Lacan and Luhmann.” Cultural Critique. No. 30. The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part I. pp. 101- 136. p. 132. 9 This has much in common with such diverse concepts as Lacan’s “symbolic,” Timothy Morton’s “strange stranger,” Luhmann’s “unmarked state,” and Deleuze’s “fold.” Lacan: “The wager lies at the heart of any radical question bearing on symbolic thought. Everything comes back to to be or not to be, to the choice between what will or won't come out, to the primordial couple of plus or minus. But presence as absence connotes possible absence or presence. As soon as the subject comes himself to be, he owes it to a certain non-being on which he raises his being. And if he isn't, if he isn't something, he obviously bears witness to some kind of absence, but he will always remain purveyor of this absence. I mean that he will bear the burden of its proof for lack of being capable of proving the presence.” Jacques Lacan. 1988. The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 1954-55: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. Norton: New York. p. 192. Commenting on this quote Elmer suggests: “This symbolic realm of communication is the home of negation and radical finitude, in which man attains a paradoxical freedom and identity in knowing himself to be, like Odysseus, "No Man." Ibid. p. 119. Morton: “[t]he strange stranger [...] is something or someone whose existence we cannot anticipate. Even when strange strangers showed up, even if they lived with us for a thousand years, we might never know them fully—and we would never know whether we had exhausted our getting-to-know process.” Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. 2010. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 42. Levi Bryant comments on this quote: “The concept of the strange stranger, however, is a concept without a binary. Rather the multiple-composition of being consists of strange strangers all the way down. And in this regard, we ourselves are strange strangers not only to other entities, but above all to ourselves insofar as withdrawal is not merely a relation of one entity to another, but also a relation of entities to themselves.” Levi R. Bryant. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Series: New Metaphysics. Open Humanities Press. An imprint of MPublishing, University of Michigan: Ann Arbor. Library. 6.1. Luhmann: “The operation of observing…includes the exclusion of the unobservable, including, moreover, the unobservable par excellence, observation itself, the observer-in-operation. The place of the observers is the unmarked state out of which it crosses a boundary to draw a distinction and in which it finds itself indistinguishable from anything else.” Niklas Luhmann. Autumn, 1995. “The Paradoxy of Observing Systems.” Cultural Critique. No. 31. The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II. pp. 37-55. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 44. 231

10 “Imagine an autopoietic entity whose particles are constructed from galaxies. Or conversely, a cognitivity constituted on the scale of quarks....another ontological consistency…. If there's choice and freedom at certain "superior" anthropological stages, it's because we will also find them at the most elementary strata of machinic concatenations.” Felix Guattari. 1995. Chaosmos: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 52. 11 In author Erin Manning’s construction “movement moving” is synonymous with Bergson’s concept of duration or the primacy of passage over position. Erin Manning. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 12 Walter Benjamin. See Chapter 4. Endnote 78. 13 For an authoritative discussion on how time became unified in the modern era see : Peter Gallison. 2004. Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time. W. W. Norton & Company: New York. 14 Parviz Moin and John Kim. Jan., 1997. "Tackling Turbulence with Supercomputers." Scientific American. Vol. 276. No. n1. pp. 62-68. 15 The rolled up ten-dimensional topology of string theory give us some idea of how this works. This TED talk by physicist Brian Greene explains the basics of this relatively new cosmological model. (www.ted.com/.../brian_greene_on_string_theory.htm). Accessed 10/15/12. 16 We might expect the end of the hegemony of linear time to manifest in various ways including the breakdown of “globalization,” a catch-all phrase used to describe the entrainment of the rhythms of human and non-human activities by a single capitalist pacemaker. As examples of the lessening influence of globalization in the human register we have the Arab “spring” and the call for an independent Catalonian state in the face of austerity measures being imposed by Spain, not to mention the potential breakdown of the entire European Union. Of greater concern, however, are the signs of stress being shown by such natural systems as the oceans whose temporal webs are being thinned by the depletion and outright destruction of species. Those which remain do so in an environment stripped of the boundary interfaces which act as the wellsprings of regeneration and morphogenetic novelty. 17 Michel Serres. 2003. L’Incandescent. Le Pommier: Paris. p. 308. 18 Bruno Latour. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 71. 19 For an example of what the unraveling of this dream means for financial markets see: (http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/10/09/1200681/welcome-to-the-desert-of-the-real-a-postmodern- economy/). Accessed 10/10/12. 20 Ibid., p. 77. 21 Susan Buck-Morss. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 260. 22 Isabelle Stengers. 1997. Power and Invention: Situating Science. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 40. 23 Ibid., p. 41. 24 Brian Massumi. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. p. 30. 25 Felix Guattari. Ibid. pp. 51-52. 26 Hannah Landecker. 2010. “Food is Licking is Plastic.” Unpublished ms. 27 From the perspective of the earth, of course, the development of the human might appear as a passing, if annoying rash. 28 “…fractal structures in the human body arise from the slow dynamics of embryonic development and evolution and…this evolutionary advantage accounts for their ubiquitous presence in biomedical phenomena. Fractal branches or folds greatly amplify the surface area available for absorption (as in the small intestine), distribution or collection (by blood vessels, bile ducts and bronchial tubes) and information processing (by the nerves). Fractal structures, partly by virtue of their redundancy and irregularity, are robust and resistant to injury. The heart, for example, may continue to pump with little 232

mechanical dysfunction despite extensive damage to the His-Purkinje system, which conducts cardiac electrical impulses.” Gary Bass. 1997.“Nonlinear Man: Chaos, Fractal & Homeostatic Interplay in Human Physiology.” (http://www.tonleenders.nl/Pdf/chaos_and_man.PDF). Accessed 10/22/10. 29 “The Aleph” is a short story by Jorge Louis Borges which features an object in space that contains all other objects. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion. 30 R. Vijay, C. Macklin, D. H. Slichter, S. J. Weber, K. W. Murch, R. Naik, A. N. Korotkov & I. Siddiqi. Oct., 4, 2012. “Stabilizing Rabi oscillations in a superconducting qubit using quantum feedback.” Nature. 490. pp. 77–80. “Superposition could, in theory, let quantum computers run calculations in parallel by holding information in quantum bits. Unlike ordinary bits, these qubits don't take a value of 1 or 0, but instead exist as a mixture of the two, only settling on a definite value of 1 or 0 when measured.” p. 78. 31 Walter Benjamin. 1998. Origin of German Tragic Drama. Verso: London. p. 45 32 Steven Connor. Mar., 2001. “Flat Life.” A paper first given at the University of Glasgow. 33 Brian Massumi. Ibid. p. 3. 34 Walter Benjamin. 2005. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2: 1931 – 1934. Michael William Jennings, Marcus Paul Bullock. Eds. Michael William Jennings, Marcus Paul Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. p. 215. 35 Ibid. p. 208. 36 “But why do we communicate paradoxes in the first place if we are not supposed to take them seriously? The conventional answer seems to be-exercise of wit. This may be good advertisement for selling books, but it is not the whole truth. When we go back to the traditional definition of paradoxes as going beyond the limits of common sense, the immediate intention seems to be to deframe and reframe the frame of normal thinking, the frame of common sense. The communication of paradoxes fixes attention on the frames of common sense, frames that normally go unattended. If this is the function, then it will not surprise us that deframing again needs its own frames.” Niklas Luhmann. Ibid., p. 39. 37 “If "modernity" relies on its future for its deparadoxification, it is, and will always remain, an "incomplete project" (Habermas). The future never becomes present; it never begins but always moves away when we seem to approach it. But how long are we supposed to live with or wait for this future if we run into troubles with our present society? The more pressing need might well be to describe the present condition, but then we might have to acknowledge that there are many possible descriptions, so that we will have to move from first-order to second-order descriptions.” Niklas Luhmann. Ibid., p. 52. 38 Peter S. Stevens. 1974. Patterns in Nature. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co. p. 42. 39 Ursula K. Le Guin. 1989. “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World. Gollancz: London. p. 85. 40 Ibid. p. 94. 41 Heinrich Hertel. 1966. Structure, Form and Movement. Reinhold: New York. 42 Jerry Saltz. 2006, February 21. “Idol Thoughts.” In The Village Voice. (http://www.villagevoice. com /2006-02-21/art/idol-thoughts/). Accessed 8/10/11. 43 Dec., 1, 2004. “Duchamp’s urinal tops art survey.” In BBC News. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ entertainment/4059997.stm). Accessed 8/10/11. 44 Craig Adcock. Fall 1984. “Conventionalism in Henri Poincaré and Marcel Duchamp.” Art Journal. Vol. 44. pp. 249-258. 45 For an interesting analysis of how this concept forms the basis of object-oriented programming see: Casey Alt. Fall 2002. “The Materialities of Maya: Making Sense of Object-Orientation.” Configurations. Vol. 10. Number 3. pp. 387-422. 46 Of course, this is what he wanted everyone to think, but, ever the trickster, he spent 20 of his last years secretly working on his last major piece, Étant donnés, which was put on permanent exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art only after his death, as per his request. 233

47Bradley Bailey and Francis Naumann. 2009. Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Chess. Readymade Press: New York. 48 Francis Roberts. Dec., 1968. "I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics Just a Little." Interview with Duchamp. In Art News. 67. No. 8: 46. p. 33. 49 Henri Poincaré. 1913. Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis. Science Press: New South Wales. p. 28. 50 “…the idea of the artist as a sort of superman is comparatively recent. This I was going against. In fact, since I’ve stopped my artistic activity, I feel that I am against this attitude of reverence the world has.” Dalia Judovitz. Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. p. 131. 51 Duchamp gave a controversial talk in April 1957 entitled “The Creative Act” in which he questioned assumptions about the agency of the artist in relation to that of the audience. Both contributed equally to the piece, in his opinion and thus agency could not to be said to reside solely in either one. There are “two poles of creation in art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.” He then went on to compare the work of the artist to that of a “medium,” a statement to which a fellow panelist objected. Duchamp then followed up: “I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this mediumistic role and insist on their awareness of the creative act – yet, art history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations completely divorced of the rationalized explanations of the artist.” Marcel Duchamp. 1989. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson. Da Capo Press: Cambridge, MA. pp. 138-139. 52 Michael Betancourt. 2003. “The Richard Mutt Case: Looking for Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.” (http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org/articles/betacourt.htm). Accessed 8/12/11. 53 Alain Badiou. 1997. “Some Remarks Concerning Marcel Duchamp.” Symptom: Online Journal for Lacan. (http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou29.html). Accessed 10/13/12. 54 Jerry Saltz. Ibid. 55 Or as art historian T. J. Clarke recently asked in an article in “New Left Review. 74. March-April 2012:” “What would it be like for left politics not to look forward—to be truly present-centred, non-prophetic, disenchanted, continually ‘mocking its own presage’? Leaving behind, that is, in the whole grain and frame of its self-conception, the last afterthoughts and images of the avant-garde.” Or again Nietzsche: ”Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede but actually love a fair amount of contingency and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak themselves on that account . . . human beings who are sure of their power and who represent, with conscious pride, the strength that humanity has [actually] achieved.” Friedrich Nietzsche. 1967 (1901). The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage: New York. Section 55, pp. 38–9. 56 Ursula K. Le Guin. Ibid., p. 88. 57 Ibid., T. J. Clark poignantly captures the paradox that the current temporal milieu poses for those who believe in a political solution to social problems: “There will be no future, I am saying finally, without war, poverty, Malthusian panic, tyranny, cruelty, classes, dead time, and all the ills the flesh is heir to, because there will be no future; only a present in which the left (always embattled and marginalized, always— proudly—a thing of the past) struggles to assemble the ‘material for a society’ Nietzsche thought had vanished from the earth. And this is a recipe for politics, not quietism—a left that can look the world in the face.” (http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future#_ednref18). Accessed 10/23/12.

234

Figures

Figure 1. p. 42. Phosephene groups. (http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/04/13/art- neurobiology-and-mescaline-neuroaesthetics-semir-zeki/).

Figure 2. p. 46. Diagram of closure and reentry by Jill Reynolds.

Figure 3. p. 47. a.Experimental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Department of Mechanical Engineering. Southern Methodist University (http://lyle.smu.edu/ ~pkrueger/ vrentrainment.htm). b. (http://vortexdynamics.blogspot.com/). c. Cut-away of vortex ring showing two axes of rotation and one of translation by Jill Reynolds.

Figure 4. p. 53. Time lapse images of interacting smoke rings by Jill Reynolds, based on image from: Van Dyke, Milton. 2011 (13th ed.). Album of Fluid Motion. Parabolic Press: Stanford, CA.

Figure 5. p. 59. Cross-section of smoke rings: Lim, T. T. & Nickels, T.B. 1995. Vortex Rings. In Fluid Vortices. Editor: Sheldon I. Green, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Fluid Mechanics Group. Singapore University. (http://serve.me.nus.edu.sg/limtt/).

Figure 6. p. 64. Georgia Institute of Technology/Architecture Department. (http://www.studyblue.com/notes/note/n/prehistoric-architecture/deck/38188).

Figure 7. p. 67. Eratosthenes’ map of the world. (http://cartographic-images.net/ Cartographic_Images/112_Eratosthenes.html).

Figure 8. p. 70. 10th century C.E. Greek copy of Aristarchus’ 2nd century B.C.E. calculations of the relative sizes of the Sun, Moon and the Earth. Original source: Library of Congress Vatican Exhibit. Online source Pearson Prentice Hall Companion Website for Astronomy Today.

Figure 9. p. 74. Ptolemy’s conic projection. (http://regardingmeasurement. wordpress. com/2010/10/31/considering-maps-ii-virtual-lines/).

Figure 10. p. 79. Artist demonstrating Alberti’s grid method for perspective drawing. Albrecht Dürer. 1527. Woodcut from Unterweysung der Messung, (Treatise on Perspective).

235

Figure 11. p. 86. Descartes’ vortex theory of matter. Image from his text Le Monde (The World) 1660 – 1663. (http://scrye.com/~station/hist190/descartes.html).

Figure 12. p. 107. Aristotle’s scala naturae as interpreted by artist Mark Dion. 1993, photostat, 33×24 x ½.” (http://bombsite.com/issues/85/articles/2586).

Figure 13. p. 166. Transverse section of eyecup morphology. 1918. Gray’s Anatomy.

Figure 14. p. 166. Embryonic induction of lens: image by Jill Reynolds based on article by Lena Gunhaga. April 27, 2011. “The lens: a classical model of embryonic induction providing new insights into cell determination in early development.” Philosophical Transactions from the Royal Society. Vol. 366. no. 1568 pp. 1193-1203.

Figure 15. p. 190. Menger sponge. Ankur Pawar website (https://sites.google.com/site /workofap/).

236

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