Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003

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Onto-Poetic Signatures of Mathematical Analogy in Arts and Literature

By

Milan Jaros

 

 An Overview

    In the pre-modern world the order of things and meaning were to be drawn from codified narratives (e.g. the Bible). The Cosmos of Aristotle was a purposeful unity of gods, things and humans. The Galilean "measure and quantify" weakened the legitimacy of traditional narratives and separated humans and things. The realm of things, nature or reality is a neutral universal referent and the task of modern science as well as arts and literature is to represent its properties.  However, in the course of the 20th century natural sciences brought into existence new technologies that changed the material condition of humans and the way humans experience time. In particular, physical sciences have become inseparable not only from technology but also from the semiotics of audio-visual and literary cultures. Humans have become co-producers of quasi-objects that constitute themselves “as world”. In the absence of legitimating meta-narratives the claim for uniqueness of any particular subject and object (or an image of such an object or event) becomes secondary. One way to render this process visible is to project out of the complex cultural flow the specific instances where mathematical-algorithmic models and relations inscribing material and virtual exchanges today appear (consciously or unconsciously) to be the ultimate source of onto-epistemic dynamics (Jaros, 2002). This agenda is shared across a wide range of disciplines, from research into consciousness and intelligent machines to fine art, theatre and literature. Clearly, Duchamp already noticed it, at least in concept. Every Konvolut of Benjamin's Arcades Project may be read as a quasi-empirical database for researching the origins and advances of this process in the course of the 19th century.  They show that mathematisation of nature has been extended to that of the mind be it in the form of inscriptions in the human unconscious. Yet this domination contains a paradox. The application of analogy e.g. in philosophy or literature does not work the same way as in mathematics. In the latter, when a relation between two points is known it is always possible to assign to a third point its counterpart exactly. In the former, it is only the potentiality of the fourth that analogy can offer. To make analogy "work" a constitutive "onto-poetic" step is needed. Repetitions of such steps detach the "model" or "image" from the original purpose. The model then acquires a new life of its own; it bursts forth in fresh metaphors legitimised by their genealogy as "the real". This detachment of models from representational roles gives rise to openness to re-and-de-composition and to toy-ness that make them traumatic. Models of, for example, atom, rainbow, meteor, automaton, radiation, mirror, symmetry, geometry, entropy, quantum effects, astro-catastrophic singularity, fractals, etc. find many a way into literature and fine arts. The question of interest here is not whether the runaway versions of a model of, say, an atom, collapse of stars, or high altitude bombing are "real" or "true" but what new ways of ordering thought and reality (material exchanges) they impose. In the metaphoric use of models the original meaning or reality of the model and its mathematical rendering is barely noticeable. The model re-emerges - in its new re-coded e.g. "literary" form and territory of application. The result is new divisions of space and time that in turn determine the shape of archetypal icons through which meaning is communicated and actualised. It is argued here that contemporary art and literature offer rich examples of this process that has given rise to new forms of creative expression.

    The purpose of the following section is to establish the role of mathematical analogy in conceptualisations of artistic expression. It begins with a brief account of de Duve's study of Duchamp's writings recast so as to rescue his discovery of the onto-epistemic role of mathematical analogy in fine art from the quarrels of modernist art criticism. It then outlines Daniel Tiffany's notion of the "lyric matter" and the link it establishes between poetry and mathematical-scientific models. Finally, it invokes archaeological-genealogical methodology of Benjamin's Arcade Project. Benjamin makes a pioneering effort in his Konvoluts to capture the process of fragmentation of traditional narratives and concepts under the onslaught of capitalist modes of production. He makes apparent the motion of such fragments with re-assigned meanings across boundaries of domains previously thought to be autonomous (e.g. from science to poetry and art). He shows that the forces propelling such fragments are not the forces of Hegelian history.  Nor can they be linked to any universal (e.g. Jungian) archetypes and icons. The "icons" he himself chooses for the subject of his Konvoluts, the flaneur, Eiffel tower, prostitute, Baudelaire etc. appear temporal, a montage of citations or images open to re-and de-composition. The irreducible kernels of such processes of fragmentation, de-composition and migration of dispossessed fragments of traditional narratives across established boundaries of territory of application and meaning seem best described as invisible inscriptions. They take the form of traces of sequential moves - as if via pseudo-mathematical formulae carved into the unconscious of humans by the ruthless growth of complexity. Since under such circumstances images do not "represent" any-body and any-thing, and since they draw their legitimacy and communicability from the apparent familiarity and "objectivity" of the techno-scientific procedures that must have been used to make them, they can only refer to intensities, velocities, and vectors of (fragmented) motion. They then represent the process of onto-poetic motion itself, not any individual "frames" (products of creative acts) of material reality.   

     The last section is devoted to a brief "case study" of Sebald's Vertigo and Austerlitz. It is argued there that many of the features described above may be recovered from these texts. 

Duchamp's Intervention: the Role of Mathematical Analogy in Artistic Expression

     Already at the beginning of the 20th century Duchamp argued that in the absence of coherent traditional narratives art is merely formal. It only exists "conceptually”.  The essence of the creative act is not the body of the exhibit. Instead, it lies in the fact that every time one set of rules that constitute novelty is broken another one is negotiated. That serves to establish the legitimacy of breaking the first. To bring Duchamp back into the Greenbergian fold De Duve (1996) argued that Duchamp's objective was chiefly to mount challenge to the convention of exhibiting works of art. In doing so he opened a new type of Critique. Yet it is still possible to retain the Kantian vocabulary. The fundamental question of modern aesthetics - what is the work of art ? - is retained be it in a novel shape. Instead of showing dematerialisation of art and its "textuality" Duchamp might be said to have systematically explored the convention of art representation in order to expose it as a convention. Duchamp's "debunking" of such "bourgeois ideological constructs" was carried out by reducing the "artistic debate" to the Kantian distinction between pure and practical judgements. The point is that value remains undecided. It remains a mere convention.

   De Duve's book offers another way of seeing Duchamp's objectives.  Having freed himself from "Art Theory" grounded in the abstract directionality of Universal History, Duchamp wanted to look for a substitute for the lost source of direction and motion in creative act: what it is that "drives" eventness today. Duchamp noticed that the key shift in our experience of time today is linked to a particular form of application of analogy. de Duve quotes (ibid., p.89) from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

 

"In philosophy analogies mean something very different from what they mean in mathematics" where "the equality of two quantitative relations" is "always constitutive"..."In philosophy ...when three terms are given I may learn ....only  the relation to a fourth but not the fourth term itself"

 

Kant tells us that we cannot know that which belongs to the domain of Practical Reason and Judgement. However, since this unknowability is known it can still inform our judgement. In particular, it can lead us to reliable directional insights to which we can assign an a priori concept. This concept remains a mere potentiality and consequently any algorithm attached to it is destined to fail if an attempt is made to implement it (to actualise its law-like content). Duchamp's interest in mathematics went well beyond the curiosity of an artist or chess player. Indeed, in his Warning he invokes the "law-like" content borrowed from the principle of mathematical analogy. de Duve quotes from Warning (ibid., p.95). "…we shall determine the conditions of the allegorical appearance of several collisions seeming strictly to succeed each other according to certain laws, in order to isolate the sign of the accordance between, on the one hand, this allegorical appearance and, on the other, a choice of possibilities legitimated by these laws…". De Duve points out that this "sounds like a mathematical theorem". He recalls a photograph taken in 1917 of the Urinal. It was an "example of the allegorical appearance" of it and also the "proof that the title "Fountain" once had a referent". Hence we are dealing with an organised series of events. It is as if these allegoric appearances succeed each other according to a law. What is this "law"? Of course, for de Duve it is primarily the undetermined nature of Art (as opposed to that of mathematics). This is the "law" that everyone can be an artist. Anything that an art institution shows is Art. Since - thanks to e.g. Greenbergian Critique - Art's meaning is necessarily unstable it always invites a replacement (by "new" Art).  That way it can indeed retain its critical function whatever "it" is.

   The Duchamp formulation contains a cryptic message that is of no use to de Duve. However, its deeper meaning becomes visible when he moves on to consider the practices that were common among the men of influence in the Society of Independent Artists and the Independents show. The Warning is followed by a note entitled "Algebraic Comparison" (ibid., p. 99). Since Pythagoras, aesthetic theories have contained some "mathematical argument". Art objects came into being according to a "formula". It might have been the golden section, symmetry operations or Fibonacci's series. Duchamp sets out to deconstruct this as yet another pillar on which the "representational" theories of art rest. In his rendering the ratios are not ratios of numbers but names (concepts)! The ratios are then manipulated by invoking analogies of such names until it is "demonstrated" that "the locus of dissent and separation" was "the sign of the accordance". (ibid., p. 143) Of course, in the eyes of, say, renaissance artists the legitimacy of the golden section was essentially something given, a divine inspiration or a gift. Duchamp's new turn is that the "formula" approach is legitimated by the legitimacy of "mathematics". His note is therefore first of all the proof that in his view tradition is no longer available as a serious legitimating force. The play with the meaning of words de Duve interprets as Duchamp seeking to unravel the random element, the ambiguity aspect spelled out in the quote about the status of analogy from Kant's Critique. It confuses the remains of Kantian critical force in the artistic act today. But the cryptic phraseology used - surely deliberately - by Duchamp may well point to another more provocative intention. Perhaps, instead of merely trying to play another of his "jokes" or "tests", Duchamp the chess player and amateur trickster-mathematician intended the emphasis to lie on "law".  Perhaps he wanted to invoke the intuitive compulsion and skill we possess in this scientific civilisation of ours that  - in the absence of traditional guiding forces - makes us turn many an encounter into a sequence of approximations by which to measure and quantify whatever is before us. It is as if we had a mathematical formula even if the encounter in question is intuitively and theoretically not calculable! "Duchamp established an aporia of measurement in which organic form is disciplined into a proto geometry…" and in which "identities are defined provisionally through various forms of measurement, inscription, or financial quantification"(Joselit, 1998, 5). More generally, in the absence of any ontological source (e.g. divine will, Kantian metaphysics) an object or event "is" only if "it" is capable of initiating just such a series of steps. Duchamp - consciously or unconsciously - implies that these sequences of approximations as if implementing a mathematical prescription by automatically invoking a series of analogies attached to an impulse are the invisible rails along which contemporary thought travel and collide. They are the ultimate residual source of motion and ontology.

Models for Application of Analogy

   Processes of measurement and experimentation always begin with a model. For example, the study of planetary motion requires a model of the solar system. Such a model must be "invented", usually in the form of a doodle or a playful arrangement of thought or things well before a serious attempt could be conceived of any "theory", not to speak of quantitative evaluation. Indeed, the first models of the solar system, atom, evolution of the species, snowflakes, were conceived years before any analytic mathematical apparatus for implementing them was available. Later the model may lead to an algorithm or mathematical relation (e.g. rotations, elliptic orbits, light reflection patterns). It comes with basic units of assessment or variables that carry the signature of the mathematical method  (e.g. position and momentum coordinates, boundary conditions) and the motion driver (e.g. energy sources and dissipation paths). The choice of these units carve out the boundaries of territories (in space and time) within which the model might be useful. 

    A good example of the way this process has taken place recently is provided by the changing fortunes of geometry. Until about two hundred years ago the only "recognised" system of geometry was that of Euclid. It was no doubt the status of Euclidian geometry as an a priori conceptual foundation for the calculus and for Newton's formulation of laws of mechanics that gave Kant the confidence to declare space and time "forms of perception". However, in the course of the 19th century the work of Gauss, Lobachevsky, and later Riemann, Hilbert, Einstein and others challenged this status quo.  In particular, since the publication of Edmund Husserl's Origins of Geometry in 1917, and increasingly in recent years, there have been a growing number of explicit attempts to articulate the newly discovered degrees of freedom contained in the generalised concept of spatial organisation. These geometrical systems are expressible in terms of well defined parameters and clear  foundational assumptions. Contemporary art, design and architecture seek inspiration in re-assembling such models and the spatial organisations and shapes they generate. They are then re-assigning them to different contexts in an attempt to move beyond  "exhausted" modernist canons of e.g. minimalism, constructivism, and other methods that depend on the so called pure or "ideal forms", i.e. those that are compatible with the Kantian vocabulary. Analogous developments have taken place in connection with models generated by theoretical physics. They invoke, for example, the inflationary model of the universe, ghost particles, fractals, nonlinear response theory, complexity and risk theories. The computer sciences put forward quantum models of computation and consciousness (see e.g. Merrell, 1998, for examples from literary works, and Lynn, 1998 who assembled a collection of such applications in design and architecture).

    Once the model origin of an image becomes apparent its man-made character, its post-Kantian notion of finitude of humans, and therefore a certain degree of openness (to re-designing, for example) emerges as a key quality. More generally, any such "machinic" product or process necessarily appears re and de-composable. Since it is not a product of nature or a copy of something externally given (whose purpose would therefore be constituted externally to man) it is inviting to consider it outside its original context or immediate usefulness. Such a "machinic" product is therefore potentially an instrument of play or simply a "toy". Indeed, in the absence of transcendental necessity and directionality much of what humans do outside satisfying their basic needs may be regarded as "toying".  Unlike "natural" products like apples and bananas a product of the "machinic" age can be "played with". This can be done by re-positioning the original model and associated properties, by modifying design parameters, by re and de-composing, particularly by freeing the model from its original context, i.e. by assigning a new meaning to it!

     In his brilliant study of "toyness" and of he key role of the concept of "play" in forging a link between poetry and mathematical sciences Daniel Tiffany (2000) points out that mechanical dolls as well as meteorological effects have served as models of corporeality even in the history of physics.  He argues that materiality used in literary studies is too narrow to do justice to hypotheses and analogies which are generally regarded as milestones in natural sciences. For example, a (material) body may be "like" a rainbow. It can then be "read" (ontologically grounded) in terms of the mechanism of radiation. He pints out that the question "what is material substance" is not one normally found on the pages of literary studies. Indeed, the post-Galilean culture has been constructed as if there was no room for "obscure" phenomena (unless the reference is to something "unreal" - meaning non-material or as it is now in vogue "virtual"). For the Establishment dominated by the Newtonian notion of nature Phenomena are Kantian phenomena, i.e. testable, measurable and classifiable, out there. Yet it is this imaginary-material domain that is the permanent feature of modern physics and technology. The realism of modern physics often rests on vivid analogies. Models such as that of atom (based on the familiar solar system model) are taken to be "real". Even for most physicists the models of atoms "are" the reality of atom! The question is not so much whether atoms or electrons actually "exist". Rather it is about the ways human discourse (including that of physical and life sciences) might have been conditioned by the apparent "invisibility" or ontological "uncertainty" associated with the microworld or with cosmic dimensions, in the sense of the 19th century rendering of the scientific method and by the regime of analogy that has been associated with it! The decline of positivism has been accompanied by the decline of preoccupation with subject-object divide in favour of concerns with mediation and re-presentation. Tiffany argues that both theoretical physics and poetry share the common objective in that they explore "credible im-possibilities". Tiffany goes on to point out that this might be well captured by Latour's notion of "iconophilic  disposition" of both science and poetry (p.5). Indeed, he reminds us that already Vico argued about correspondence between scientific models of corporeality and poetic images. Physics and poetry share iconography of toy (fetish) models, meteors, natural phenomena like the moon phases, rainbow, lightning, fire (and processes of automation, strength, size, limit, dissipation, excess, repetition, symmetry for which a mathematical description in certain idealised situation is available, e.g. Calabrese, 1992)). No lesser an authority than Samuel Johnson is quoted to have said (p.17) : "metaphysics in poetry becomes a branch of physics". T S Elliot called for "poetry that would incorporate and revise the rationalism of modern physics" (p.12). For Adorno (p.69) "literature itself in the lyric mode is a toy medium". The toy is then " a figure of lyric substance"; and (p.19) we can regard "the lyric automaton in the poem as the image of material soul as well as an emblem of immateriality". "If not left to science the materiality of matter (in Vattimo's phrase) emerges as the 'other' of language… a thing inimical to reflection and representation, which we overlook even when we mean to confront it, or else abandon - with a clear conscience - to trauma, or to some 'lifeless' notion of 'pleasure'…". Play, automatons, "relates aesthetics to mathematics". Walter Benjamin perceives mechanical doll as a "relic of inscrutable loss". He believes that imitation is not a primary motive for child's play with their toys.  "… a single rule and rhythm rules over the world of toys: the law of repetition" which he calls "the soul of toys". Toys are implicated in compulsive and mechanistic framework of inaccessible trauma", irremediable loss.  The toy like the monadic image "contains the indistinct abbreviation of the rest of the world" (p.81). Humans become a "machine" or quasi-automaton not only because of explicit presence of machinic practices of working and thinking (of "pseudo-algorithmic" order of words available to them) but also by "means of body's capacity to incorporate even to the point of self-destruction the image of another creature". Tiffany offers the example of Bellmer's dolls based on the story from Hoffmann's Sandman of Olympia the automaton (the offspring of two men). He invokes the importance of a mathematical formula: "as in a dream the body can change the centre of gravity of its images…for example it can place the leg on top of the arm …in order to make…proofs of analogies, puns, strange anatomical probability calculations" (p.92). This hybridity is legitimised by the notion of body governed and ontologically established via the possibility of a formula, via (the dynamics of) calculation!

 

Fragmentation, Archaeology and Genealogy: from minds and things to lines of force and energy flow

   The man-made needs of Galilean civilisation emerge as products of the separation of man from nature. They carry the signature (inscriptions) of the machinic pseudo-mathematical process that brought them into existence. The inscriptions are the traces in our unconscious of algorithms that control and propel the ("machinic") making of paintings, poems, make ups, election posters, theme parks. It is for literary and philosophical archaeology and genealogy to render them visible, to bring them to the surface and to establish a link between the icons of fragmented and hybrid making and connecting of today and the icons from the age of narratives and ideology. Walter Benjamin (1999) in his Arcades Project made a pioneering attempt to capture the fragmentation of traditional narratives and the birth of new icons with which to communicate and come to terms with the material condition of humanity peculiar to the advanced stage of capitalism. Benjamin chose the 19th century Paris as a place where to study the genesis of such icons, of personalities and artefacts. His "archetypes" are no longer the Jungian icons that were thought to represent the universal substrate of the human unconscious (e.g. the Mother, Trickster, Spirit, Rebirth archetypes). Instead, the Parisian modernity is expressed via flaneurs, prostitutes, workers, writers like Baudelaire, buildings like the Eiffel tower, and of course the arcades. Benjamin's research project was conceived in the 1920s. It was motivated by an unorthodox mixture of redemptive Messianism and dialectic objectivism. By the late 1930s, according to his own programmatic admission, his  "Marxist" dialectics is "brought to a standstill". His focus on "dislodging historical understanding from the entrapment of the reflective subject" (Hanssen, 2000, 48) leads him (Konvolut N of the Arcades Project)  "to pursue the question of whether a link exists between the secularisation of time into space …" which, in his view "…in any case, is hidden in the world view of the natural sciences" !. He wants to understand "secularisation of history in Heidegger", and so on. He becomes an archaeologist who uncovers layer by layer his "buried place". He turned his back on Theory. In the end redemption does not come in the form of some Ur-utopia but as endless strings of citations deposited in his "Konvolutes". They are stitched together along crossing genealogical lines, in a web-like discontinuous pattern. Instead of the evidence of Necessary Progress, amidst the debris of overlapping fragments deposited by the marching victorious Capital in its own path, there lay bare the mechanisms constitutive of passages of thought of late modernity. Yet the choice of the Konvolut "territories" (men, buildings, events) -recognisable as they undoubtedly are - could hardly survive any serious "scientific" methodological challenge (e.g. an objection that the choice of, say, Baudelaire is "subjective"). There may well be many other men, women, buildings, events etc. that would have been just as effective a vehicle for developing the argument in question. But it is no longer any style or ism, any god, any particular male or female personage but the pseudo-algorithmic performances and their "genealogies" that are meant to be rendered visible by the Konvolutes. There they emerge out of a site (place, thing, specific bodily context) of making and connecting. They are the processes of fragmented production peculiar to the "age of mechanical reproduction", of disrupted and re-assigned meanings in communication and service networks, of the rise and decay of local energies propelling human bodily and spiritual creativity.

    What in mathematics of a certain class of problems (e.g. the central field motion) would be described as the geometrical, mechanical, gravitational, entropic, probabilistic, fractal, quantum etc. model is now re-cast in the terms referring to what is "being modelled": repetition, difference, detail, fragment, limit, excess, complexity, distortion, multiplicity, uncertainty. This conceptual and vocabulary shift has now become standard in popular culture (e.g. Calabrese, 1992). It deliberately forgets and disowns the challenge posed by the gap between the original meaning of drivers of mathematical analogy (indeed this appreciation may require non-trivial knowledge of mathematical methods) and the experience (practices of living in a technological society) of "culture" consumed today, in film, poetry, novels, architecture but also in a shop, school or hospital. At the level of concepts like detail and excess the distinct properties of a mathematical model vanish. It is then easier to move across the boundary between the artistic and the scientific, natural and artificial, image and reality, i.e. across the boundaries of the domains that were previously thought autonomous. 

   In the catalogue introducing an exhibition of works of 15 artists called ABRACADABRA (The Tate Gallery, London, Sept. 1999), Nicholas Serota, Catherine Kinsley, Catherine Grenier and others openly declare that for them “art is no longer a place to plant their flag but a territory of exchange”, art that needs to be “animated”. We are used to recognising “things” by their function to dial, to shift, to turn, i.e. as if according to a prescription. How do “scientific” analogies “inscribe” the qualitative analogies that engender “meaning”?  One of the artists explains:  “I have been struck by the omnipresence of analogy in the arts of representation”. By “apparent symmetries” and "equalities" the artist invokes the inscription code that sets in motion a “process of signification”, “evolutionary mutations” and their confrontations with the “problem of absolute symmetry”.

   In her photographs exhibited in Paris and Prague (I.N.R.I., The Rudolphinum Gallery, Prague, Spring 2001) Bettina Rheims assembled images of "gospels in the streets of Paris". These large studio-made photographs picture beautiful young women and men - indeed fashion-model types with high make ups and well trimmed bodies - in postures (pretty as well as sick and tortured) and surroundings resembling the composition of well known paintings of biblical motives such as resurrection, annunciation, etc. Yet the bodies and faces and artefacts are not only unmistakably contemporary. They appear as if printed, made up, and supported by easily recognisable gadgets and laboratory or hospital-like configuration familiar from advertisements. St. Mary is a beautiful young model in a high make up, high heel shoes. She sits in a pastiche-like sub-urban sitting room or garage. It is these faces, postures, dresses, hands and legs, gadgets and proto-laboratory artefacts, as if fresh out of some factory for perfection that are the "archetypes" of today.  Each photo comes with a citation from the Bible to make sure the "correct" anecdote is known since in many cases only a few (old) mandarins might recognise it. Indeed, the driver (the energy that takes one through the picture) does not have to come from the biblical reference. It was the techno-scientific and communicational pseudo-machinic processes that gave shapes and positions to all those figurines and things and made them analysable and re-codable.  The algorithms of making and positioning are betrayed by the machine-shaped make ups, by their chemistry, by the electrical wires and the textures of dresses and walls.  These are the signatures of pseudo-algorithmic inscriptions, the traces that inform a genealogist hoping to recognise them by comparing them with their "predecessors", to e.g. what would have been the image of St. Mary in the nativity scene painted by a renaissance artist. Since Rheims' images do not "represent" any-body and any-thing, and since they draw their legitimacy and communicability from the apparent familiarity and "objectivity" of the techno-scientific procedures that must have been used to make them, they can only refer to intensities, velocities, and vectors of (fragmented) motion. They then represent the process of onto-poetic motion itself, not any individual "frames" (products of creative acts) of material reality.  The result is that such quasi-objects detached as they are from the original model that inspired and launched them do look unreal no matter how many conventional artefacts are used to make them (garage, fashion shoes, make ups).  These images radiate trauma - quite like the trauma radiated by dolls and automatons - not only the biblical trauma of the Cross but mainly of the human thought space cut open to expose the uncertainty that goes with having to draw legitimacy out of one's own humanity. This place is no longer a collection of objects in an abstract space and time masterminded so as to put before the Kantian consciousness an Enhancing Representation of Life. The event is constituted by the gesture of the key figure that breaks any attempt to make Cartesian logical assessment of the scene, the gesture that domesticates all the artefacts. They are fragments in that they belong to different stratas of functionality, society and period, some luxurious and healthy and useful, some cheap and sickly; these hybrid meanings ground the ambiguity of the local order on which the structure and indeed comprehensibility of these photos depend. No attempt is made to "design" the place to reflect a notion of its biblical sacredness, of its "history" or "style", of scientific (Cartesian) healing etc. be it merely in some "post-modern" form - the features so proudly displayed in the city anywhere from the Louvre to La Defence. The humanity of these figurines comes not from the grand narratives forming the background model of the images but from the creativity of the onto-poetic moves of the viewer!

 

Case Study: Sebald's Vertigo and Austerlitz

On the back cover of Vertigo, the publisher tells the reader that this is

 

"Part fiction, part travelogue,…succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself…What would possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake, the Great fire of London, a story by Kafka about doomed huntsman and a closed down pizzeria in Verona? …." 

 

What indeed? Sebald appears to have constructed his text as if out of brief, often only several sentences long blocks, each carefully crafted so as to look almost self-contained. Their solidity is enhanced by the economy and crafty down-to-earthiness with which the sentence is composed. It invariably contains a factual information - such as that 50 000 horses and men were killed at Waterloo - even though the story line does not require any reference to this place or battle. Still less is it necessary to provide details about death toll. He believes that understanding details is a key to grasping the turn of events; "tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything", (p.156). He employs almost scientific precision to embellish the passage or building block of text with concrete names of "archaeological-genealogical" importance. He inserts photos of tickets, buildings, dresses, schematic drawings, with dates, numbers and brand marks clearly visible.  He refers to measurable physical properties such as material (mineral) composition, colour and sound, light (crystalline) reflection, specific acts of performance, e.g. "..she attempted to ease the tension by proposing an excursion to the Villa Simonetta, where a widely famed echo would repeat a pistol shot up to fifty times…" (p.13). Then he moves to another such passage. The move is implemented with great conviction no matter how big the jump (in place, time, theme) it involves. The text is built up as if along a well defined sequence of points (hidden "formula") even though the judgements themselves often openly deny any possibility of uniqueness (indeed reality) of what is being described. By frequent references by name to churches, railway stations, streets, gardens, the reader is led to develop high level of confidence in the objective knowledge of the narrator. This sequence is truncated when it runs out of steam, when further pursuit of analogy that inspired the passage (another texts, physics model of the effect or process of, say, building or seeing) seems no longer effective, only to initiate a new sequence.

    The moves, even pragmatic ones such as changing trains, nevertheless do not contain the level of completeness familiar from traditional novels. Sebald selects only certain details. Even Kafka with whom Sebald obviously wants to be compared settles his characters into their cloths and chairs and makes sure we know they are there. His narrative is simple and depends on common senses recognition of what people do.  There is none of the "abstract" selectivity of Sebald, none of the factual ("scientific") data, names, etc. arranged into sequential moves as if following a logical argument. Thus the solidity of Sebald's textual blocks with all the information about the passage of time and material exchanges and history nevertheless appears as if embedded in a no man's space.

    The work resembles the late medieval miniatures such as the Book of Hours of Limbourg brothers. These miniatures fail to live up to even most rudimentary rules of perspective and observational consistency of shade and colour, relative sizes of objects and humans.  Yet it is generally agreed that they convey a remarkable sense of reality and solidity. This is achieved by careful attention to detail, to suppression of any traces of brushwork that might imply subjectivity. At the same time the detail is carefully selected so that the images are not "overburdened with reality". This selection process leaves a degree of openness, incompleteness. The contrast with the careful rendering of detail gives rise to feeling of a traumatic absence or expectation. Of course, there is a fundamental difference since a Limbourg picture always "illustrates" (intellectually belongs to) a well known anecdote. The picture contains, in addition to the portrait of the anecdote in question, many other signs that re-confirm its belonging to the Cosmos as a unity of God, men and things, e.g. the signs of the Zodiac, a constellation of stars with a chorus of angels, etc. There is no visible Cosmos for Sebald in which to find "place" (Casey, 1998) for his story. Sebald's text then appears as a patchwork cut out of one or many such established yet by now unidentifiable to the reader narrations. The uncertain origin and metric of the space in which Sebald's narrative fragments move, and the position of such building bricks of the text in this space create a sense of vulnerability, of traumatic openness to re-composition, of melancholia and expectation of misadventure or perhaps even catastrophe.

    By choosing to refer to his character as K. Sebald initiates a chain reaction inviting parallels with the misfortunes of famous Kafka's hero. The reader familiar with the Trial (and the Castle?) can now engage in a sophisticated game of parallel "pastiche" readings with Kafka's text(s) as an open space full of virtual admixtures (hints of such admixtures came in the shape of images - e.g. angels - capable of creating numerous variation of meanings). Sebald wants the reader to know that for him "experience" is always already a superposition of events and meanings, invoking a probabilistic rather then deterministic model originating in the quantum mechanical representation theory transplanted into literature (like many others, e.g. Merrill, 1998) and other media via popular science books and now taken for "natural". "…the more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way" (p.212).

    The reader whose education resembled that of Sebald's - that is someone who had been taught about the importance of visiting Italy and seeing its treasures a la Goethe's Italian Journeys and Hegelian Kulturgeschichte will recognise and identify with the otherwise arbitrarily detailed references to places, events and personalities in the description of the trip in All'estero. He will also recognise from his own travels to Italy the hero's desires to see Giardino Giusti soon after arriving at Verona as "his way" of starting a trip to Verona. It might then be a quite another kind of experience  for such a reader to follow from p.69 another twenty pages of "accurate" geographical and art historical tour of Verona, Milan and Venice and again Verona stuffed with intellectual details and to end up with a reminder of Werfel's gift to dying Kafka. Sebald's is probably the last generation in which there still are a nontrivial number of those who can indulge in this way of reading his text. In brief, Sebald's text offers several different levels of reading and each comes with its peculiar class of "in-script-ion" in which the "fragments" and the strings that turn them into a "story" acquire a very different genealogical meaning and invoke a very different "algorithm". However, whatever the level of reading the Sebald text reveals the extent to which the process of fragmentation of experience and dependence on virtual analogy games to legitimate both the meaning and the flow of storytelling have come to dominate the means of literary expression. The detail is animated by genealogical research but the connections are nonlinear even when inscribed by old practices of intellectual kulturgeschichte. It is born in minds that this is what Benjamin, Tiffany and Sebald as well as Rheims and the artists of the ABRACADABRA have in common in spite of their otherwise different backgrounds and means of expression.

    Another key common aspect is the feeling of spectacle, of hyperreality be it of travel, city architecture or human encounters. These are also places in the Arcades Project and Austerlitz where the dependence of the text on techno-scientific mechanisms and models becomes more visible. Take, for example, the process of seeing so fundamental to the mode of expression constantly invoking spectacle, hyperreality and the fleeting and temporal, even the catastrophic. It appears through mirror reflection, phosphorescence, gas and electricity systems of lighting, sparks and rays, "transitional" character of colour and shapes, photography, film and the whole range of time-machines, astro and micro photography, lenses and improved eyes, transparent materials like glass as a new structural medium. Austerlitz the adult specialises in monumental architecture of capitalism. His interest in grand railway stations and fortifications is highly technical as is Benjamin's interest in the Eiffel tower, applications of iron and glass, atriums and street lighting, exhibitions, museums and festivals. Both Benjamin and Sebald dwell at length not only on the description of the material but particularly on the process of using it and the images used to describe such processes in art and elsewhere. They both like to consider the limits of these processes as if they were in a position to know them - as if there were a formula. In Austerlitz there are maps and descriptions exceeding in detail and scope many a tourist or technical guidebook. Even the description of torture in Terezin appears as if factual and following a scientific research. Yet it must be stressed that neither Benjamin nor Sebald can be compared with the authors of literary and other works where an explicit description of a scientific or pseudo-scientific experiment or argument is used to develop a story or simply as an instrument to hold reader's attention or motivation. The mathematical or physical model or effect itself only appears indirectly via its manifestations and in truncated sequences of units of communication. They stand as it were in the background, behind and yet in the text, as inscriptions to be felt in between the lines. They create this atmosphere of possibility of order, of (unfulfilled promise) of organisation far exceeding the visible object and its features before the viewer. For example, "…he was obeying an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to his early fascination with the idea of network such as that of the entire railway system.." and a little later "he…found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations which he said he regarded as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune" (p.45).  This reduction of the concept of system to its local selected manifestations breaks down and decomposes the closure and universality of scientific models and algorithmic arguments generated by mathematisation of nature and scatters the fragments across the boundaries of science and technology and into aesthetic and political domains. The resulting openness is both promising and traumatic. Just as the Arcades is a patchwork of disparate fragments arranged into collector's boxes so it Sebald's novel.

   The similarity of the Sebald project and that of Benjamin's can be carried further, well beyond the comparison of literary and philosophical methodology which is the main purpose of this paper, and into the realm of their personal life. The hatred of bourgeois artefacts, the sailor suits for little boys, the rituals of obedience at home and at school. And the love of the old world of art objects, rituals of opera and theatre going. All that has collapsed in front of their eyes and left them with the alienated fascination with the products of conquering complexity whose language (mathematics) they do not speak. When Benjamin writes about colour he is informed by Goethe, not Maxwell or Einstein. Like Goethe he can only "marvel at the knowledge of colours displayed by scientists" (Goethe, 1980, 8). Sebald's (Austerlitz') interest in artefacts and systems of thought in general also ends at about 1900!

     However, the similarity between Benjamin and Sebald has interesting limits quite telling about the gap separating their respective generations. Unlike Benjamin Sebald does not write about utopia, about ur-history. He does not have an "active worldview" and strong ideas about how to change this world. His Austerlitz lives a life of an abstract intellectual until his "awakening". Then he retires and begins the search for parents but again purely as a personal obsession. He, and it is not just he the orphan but all of the characters of Vertigo, are not seen by the reader to make an effort to be a participating citizen, a whole person with rights and responsibility, in a broader social context. This man, educated and able, now with a personal stake in the tragic turns of recent European history, has no thoughts about what can be done for the future generations, not to speak of justice in general. Things happen and that is that. Even the Kafkaesque is now broken into fragments loosely held along the lines of forces whose direction and energy supply come only virtually, via habitual expectation of "rational manifestations" of order via repetition, dissipation, translation, symmetry, networking, (de)composition and (re)assignment, population growth and decline, singularities (shocks), i.e. not via revolutionary changes informed either by our "will to power" or our understanding of means of production, division of labour, surplus value and digital technologies.

 

References

 

Benjamin, W., 1999, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard U.P.

Calabrese, O., 1992, Neo-baroque: a Sign of the Times. Princeton: Princeton U.P.

Casey, E., 1998, The Fate of Place. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press.

De Duve, T., 1998, Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Goethe, F., 1980, Introduction to the Propylaen", in Goethe on Art, Ed. John Cage. London: Scolar Press.

Hanssen, B., 2000, Walter Benjamin's Other History. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press.

Jaros, M., 2002, “Machinic Inscriptions of Fragment Objectness” in Analecta Husserliana LXXVI, 233-246

Joselit, D., 1998, Infinite Regress. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lynn, G., 1998, Folds, Bodies and Blobs. In "Books-by-Architects",

Eds. M. Lachowsky and J. Benzakin. La Lettre Volee: Depot Legal Bibliotheque Royal de Belgique Bruxelles.

Merrell, F., 1998, Simplicity and Complexity. Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan P.

Tiffany, D., 2000, Toy Medium. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press.