Agency and Chaos

(Source: NASA deep space photo)

Agency demands a problem-space exactly as motion demands regulated (observed) space. Motion is distinguished from space by an observer: space is energy. Thus the discovery that space-time (energy) is at once both a pure sea of light waves folding and crashing in infinite variations as well as a discrete, orderly series of predefined, probabilistic signals, is one of the two great conceptual leaps of this century. The discovery that energy in its very essence is fractured (theoretically, i.e., philosophically) due to this 'fundamental' particle/wave duality is the other, as it accounts for the fact that space (energy) is organized by mutual observation. That is, since time (or energy) is 'broken' (theoretically,) space (practically) has a fractalized topology, and this can be thought of as due to the (unmediated) presence of an observer. The observer converges the subject and the object within a deterministic though dimensionally-problematic space (a 'broken' singularity--no longer merely particles or waves...)

An observer can observe himself. Thus if the nature of the universe depends (in a cosmic sense) on our way of looking at it, then the observer can be expected to introduce not only a sort of polyvocity to objects and a recursive circularity to ideas about reality, but furthermore, the observer can even be expected to produce the universe, by 'breaking' space apart. Thus the observer multiply compounds (through infinite reflections) an inexplicable singularity: he or she produces a meta-mapping of the entire universe into an observed image, and accomplishes the image’s re-projection as the coordinating engine for the entire (real!) universe--all this as though the single observer him or herself contained a bounded though actual infinity. This is how a mirror brings about the fundamental meta-problem of science, that is, the infinite ontological difference between truth and knowledge. The irreducible multiplicity of reflection in observation is a reflection of an irreducible ontological rupture: the habitation of the 'broken space' between image and object, the word and the thing, the map and the territory.

There’s a shift: it is rather as though we had been handed a script not with some fictional scenario traced upon it, but in fact a complete list of all the scenes in which we ourselves as individuals would take part, a final list of all the sentences we would ever utter within those scenes, for the rest of our lives. The fractal twist here would be that some outside observer (in this case me!) is handing you the story: thus in observation we find always a broken co-narrative space, a bi-univocal mutual observation which leads to a curious paradoxical reciprocity: I exist in your 'dream' because you exist (to 'dream me') in mine, and vice versa. Thus we become real only through the reading of each others’ dreams.

But our stories or dreams might still be identical even if identity as such were not cosmically or historically stable, that is, whether we are speaking of the integrity of things, or again, our ideas about things. This is our first evidence that the fundamental unpredictability of the observer’s perspective is an indication of a learning intelligence.

With autopoesis, the scientist must truly turn around to look at himself: moreover, we realize we can only make this turn, as it were, when we have been called. Someone shouts your name: neurons fire, the connection is made, your head turns. The programming in this case is generally so complete we can and often do say we are “turning without thinking.” Yet thinking of a sort is certainly occurring: it is not merely as though we consult a dictionary of syllables to determine if the sound uttered matches our name, but certainly at some level some analogous operation must logically be taking place.

While we would like to say we have free will--and though admittedly this is a biased (but revealing) example-- it is obvious the issue of power and will only apply marginally to this extraordinary 'turning' event. What power indeed do I have (within or against) the encounter with the other; what certainty could falsify the hailing from afar of the same? These sorts of considerations lead us to assert that identity is only brought about through a vigorous process of self-questioning, of a certain uncertainty. Our highly-structured interior 'reality' collapses upon itself in the face of the other, though it remains absolute relative to the encounter. But at some level we know our entire (practico-theoretical) 'house of cards' was constructed in vain the moment he opens his mouth in addressing me--and this only by his or her offering of an alternate reality, through his story, which radically splits my universe in twain, into tiny pieces with crooked and uneven edges. The observer who observers another observer splits a splitted universe: into an image I wish the Other to fall neatly back into, which contrasts with and is unsettled by the jagged, chaotic real space in which nothing sticks and everything flows, regardless of the complexity of the (manual, visual or vocal) dialectics we have constructed to balance all the potential opposing forces.

The Other is the problem par excellence, as well as the enigma in a solution, a riddle whose answer is written upon his or her very face. Our blind spot is always ourselves, but this is the scientists’ positivist abyss: we burn a hole in the universe, and thus of our map of the universe, by our very observation of it--we tear our perceptions apart, into pieces, when we decode them; our affections are untrustworthy, subjective, perilous. But isn’t it here that Nietzsche tells us it is most important to trust our senses, that indeed all the great advances in science have resulted from paying careful attention, to the only thing we can pay attention to--the world around us, as it appears to us, including all the potential distortions and disorganizing chaos?

In fact it is in the chaos of fractal space and the turbulence of flowing photons that we shall seek a more or less final resolution of the central difficulty of computer vision, that is, the reconcilation of the visual and the manual. And even perhaps, after a time, we shall finally be able to learn again that special trust which thousands of years of religion and 'civilization' have all but made extinct... how radical, Nietzsche’s thesis on trusting one’s senses! And how much more troubling, when we realize our senses are always sensed for another, that it is only in mutual observation we observe anything at all!

Levinas

Levinas addresses a question (or criticism) very similar to Badiou’s in his essay God and Philosophy (published in 1975, the ideas put forth were already put forth in different forms in lectures given from 1973-4). In these writings we find Levinas considering the tenability of the inclusion of God within philosophical discourse. It would seem that as soon as we conceptualize God’s existence, we must also situate God amidst existence, somehow mysteriously within being’s movement. But yet, “in the most unlikely way,” God signifies “the beyond being, transcendence.” (G&P 1, all future quotes ibid.)

Thus, Levinas question is whether we can meaningfully express transcendence: can we “thematize” this radical excess of God’s being, or does transcendence delimit sensibility as such? He implies that part of the meaning of the ontological “height” of God’s existence is the exclusion of the possibility of an automatically meaningful self-revelation of being:

“Does not the modality which this adverb [“height”], borrowed from the dimension of the sky over our heads, expresses modify the verbal meaning of the verb ‘to be’ to the point of excluding it from the thinkable as something inapprehendable, excluding it from the esse showing itself, that is, showing itself meaningfully in a theme?” -God and Philosophy

In other words, since the very conception of God is that of the entity par excellence, the manner of God’s being exceeds the thinkable: God is ontologically out of bounds. Levinas' next move here is worth following closely. He recognizes as a “major tradition of philosophical rationalism” the claim that “the God of the Bible does not have meaning, that is, is not properly speaking thinkable.” He cites Mademoiselle Delhomme: ‘The concept of God is not a problematical concept; it is not a concept at all.’ This, of course, is a very Badiouian sentiment, insofar as it radically separates any conception of God from the philosophical discourse, as inherently and unconditionally irrational.

On the contrary, Levinas argues, without the concept of God we would not have thinking, let alone rationality: this radical ontological surplus we find in the transcendence of God is “among the concepts without which there would be no thought.” But the question still remains of the meaning of the word ‘God’ in the debate. After all, the radical belief implied in religious sentiment still seems to place an almost fascist restriction on critical thought. But, according to Levinas, God exceeds infinitely any possible curtailment of meaning. Indeed, meaning originally founds and manifests itself through a transcendent movement which is the very beginning of signification itself.

Thus Levinas’ aims to determine whether the meaning “first broached in presence,” the meaning which is equivalent to the esse of being, is already a restriction of meaning, “already a derivative or a drifting of meaning.” Levinas harbors an intuition that beyond the intelligibility of immanence (the “rationalism of identity, consciousness, the present, and being,”) that the “signifyingness” of transcendence can be and is understood, and (in a sense) is understanding itself. Transcendence is both “rationality” and “rationalism”, for it precedes and structures both. Indeed, this temporal precedence is critical to Levinas’ understanding of transcendence as a meaning which has priority “over and beyond being,” whose translation into ontological language Levinas names as the “antecedent” to being. In other words, we can still meaningfully speak ontologically of a transcendent being, and we are not necessarily lapsing into blind faith or wild opinion the moment we go beyond rational “terms and beings”:

“In fact, in staying or wanting to be outside of reason, faith and opinion speak the language of being. Nothing is less opposed to ontology than opinion and faith. To ask, as we are trying to do here, if God can be expressed in a rational discourse which would be neither ontology nor faith is implicitly to doubt the formal opposition...between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, invoked in faith without philosophy, and the god of the philosophers. It is to doubt that this opposition [between the God of Abraham and the god of philosophy] constitutes an alternative.”

This unnecessary alternative has led to a foundational crisis for modern ontology: what has still “not yet reached the threshold of intelligibility” (transcendence) is identical to what appears in the Bible as that which is above and beyond all possible comprehension. Ontology is not necessarily atheistic; in fact, opinion and faith must belong to ontology, if only because they are things that are. Less tautologically, if faith “speaks the language of being” in wanting to stay outside of reason, it must be because being is manifest in opinion and faith: in authentic belief, being is given a voice, a theme, by that ingenious and overflowing thought (the idea of infinity) which, out of rationality, aims at the outside and limit-point of reason.

Thus the very suggestion can only be justified retroactively through an original archaeo-ontological discovery: we can recover a “meaning equivalent to essence” only through the potential of “going back from this allegedly conditioned meaning to a meaning which could no longer be put in terms of being or in terms of beings.” The meaning which is an equivalent to the essence of being cannot be put in terms of many (beings) or one (being); the truth, as for Plato, is suspended in the void between the universal on the one hand and particulars on the other. Meaning is expressed in the participation between the multiple and the singular, enacted in the relationality of existence and existents.