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From ENGROSEN@ACS.EKU.EDUFri Nov 10 21:57:39 1995
Date: Fri, 10 Nov 1995 17:28:02 -0500 (EST)
From: ENGROSEN@ACS.EKU.EDU
To: jpb8@acpub.duke.edu
Subject: Portals ReduxReduxduxdux
Martin E. Rosenberg
engrosen@acs.eku.edu
Department of English
Eastern Kentucky University
Richmond, KY 40475-3133.
PORTALS IN DUCHAMP AND IN PYNCHON: A DELEUZIAN READING1
Paris: November 6, 1995 (AP) --Prominent French philosopher, writer and
university professor Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by leaping from the
window ("s'est defenestre") of his Paris apartment, his family said Sunday.
Introduction
In an earlier essay, I explore traces of the works and writings of
Marcel Duchamp in Thomas Pynchon's fictions, particularly highlighting
chess allusions as they might inform the relationship between geometry and
hegemony, as well as the question of complicity, in avant-garde discourses
generally speaking.2 Duchamp and Halberstadt's treatise on the
endgame, Opposition et les cases conjug'ees sont r'econcili'ees (1932),
addresses the complicitous arrangement of the two players at endgame as
they conspire to delay the end of the endgame as long as possible. The
players agree to superimpose mirror symmetry onto the 64 squares of the
chessboard so to recalculate the precise ÒoppositionÓ or "equilibrium"
between the Kings after each and every move. They do so in order to avoid
a "breach of opposition" which brings on the catastrophic end. This act
of geometric superimposition involves mapping the chessboard into Zones
controlled by each King, and then requires each player to fold and invert
the geometry of that chessboard so that the Kings seem to be emerging out
of the same square. This fold in the chessboard is called a "hinge," and
each player must relocate the hinge on the chessboard after each move in
order to control for the perpetually shifting geometry of opposition.
(GRAPHIC # 1)
Each player then plots the move of the King in such a way that the
opposition, also called "equilibrium," remains intact. By following the
rules of this treatise, one cannot win; one may only avoid defeat. For
every move, each king is reversible with respect to its "other," and
whether the movements seem random or obsessively repetitive, the condition
of "draw" remains. If both players employ the tactic, "breach of
opposition" occurs only when the irreversible nature of contingency in the
form of a mistake creeps into this otherwise overdetermined ritual, which
precipitates the end of the endgame. In the chess treatise, these
inversions are represented graphically on transparencies, so that the
position of each King is marked on the diagrams situated in inverted form,
on opposite sides of the transparency. In effect, these transparencies
parody the form of Duchamp's numerous glass assemblanges, such as To be
looked at, with one eye, close to, for over an hour (1918-19).
(GRAPHIC #2)
In this assemblage, we have figured, in the form of lead and
silver edges in the surface of the glass, a pyramid in N dimensions, as
well as a crystal structure undergirded by radiating lines anticipating a
part of Large Glass, and peaked by concentric circles, while balancing
unevenly (reminiscent of the scales of justice) two other circles in
distorted perspective. In the central circle above the crystal, viewers
see themselves in mirror inversion--upside down. These images are
disrupted by random and contingent lines which were caused by accidental
breakage. The pyramid, of course, encodes the division- classification
system of a library, the organizational structure of a totalitarian state,
corporation, the military, a university. The crystal encodes a perfect
symmetrical order resistant to entropic threat, while the accidental
breakage encodes the contingency of duration as a necessary condition for
entropic processes in science and society, whether described by Clerk
Maxwell or Henry Adams, Ludwig Boltzmann or Oswald Spengler.
Duchamp's concept of mirror symmetry and inversion extends to
other realms as well, including and especially his play with gender
identity, exemplified by the Man Ray photograph of Rrose SŽlavy, Duchamp's
alter ego, in drag. According to the logic of the chess treatise, Rrose
SŽlavy is encoded as Duchamp's complicitously inverted Other at war.
In Pynchon's Vineland, Zoyd Wheeler lives in a time-warp, a shadow
of his past revolutionary self, a subject position defined in terms of
nostalgia for the hope of cultural transformation represented by the
counterculture of the 1960's. In order to collect government disability
checks, Zoyd must make himself visible once a year to certify his
disability through an act of transgression. Reduced to media eccentric,
Zoyd dons a woman's dress and jumps through the geometry of a plate glass
window in the Cucumber Lounge for the benefit of the local TV stations.
An inversion of Slothrop crossing the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole
as the last act before disappearing from the novel's convoluted plottings
("only to emerge multiple"), the actions of Zoyd Wheeler allude to John
Archibald Wheeler's extensions of Albert Einstein's general relativity
theory in "Geometrodynamics," an unsuccessful attempt to explain not only
the logics of black holes, worm holes and white holes, but of the
ÒessentiallyÓ geoemtrical nature of matter itself. Zoyd "defenestrates"
himself, then disappears to watch TV and eat Froot Loops for another year.
In Vineland and in Gravity's Rainbow, portals, in the form of
plate-glass windows, dark pier glass mirrors or french doors, sometimes
open onto verdant scenes such as the redwood forest outside of the
Cucumber Lounge, the lovely landscape outside of Slothrop and Geli's
boudoir after their tryst, or Pirate PrenticeÕs secret roof-top banana
tree garden. These verdant scenes exemplify the time-irreversible
perspective of non- equilibrium thermodynamics, premised as it is on
contingency, aggregation, gestation, evolution and other processes
incapable of being reduced to trajectories mapped onto time- space
geometries of the time-reversible perspective exemplified by Albert
Einstein's or John Wheeler's relativistic physics. Yet these scenes are
only observed, or visited, as with the portal-as-chink in the boards of a
medieval wooden door located in an obscure, darkened hallway off the
Duchamp Room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, revealing the scene of
Duchamp's posthumous work 'Etant Donn'ees: 1. La chute D'eau 2. Le Gaz
D'ƒclairage... (1968):
(GRAPHIC #3)
In this work, the naked, partially dismembered female form displays the
entrance to the womb, while it is surrounded by other icons depicting the
irreversible flow of contingent duration, as represented by the entropic
processes of the gas lamp, the irreversible flow of the fountain and the
vagina as portal to the site of gestation, where local organs develop
autonomously and yet coordinate spontaneously into a global "body"-- all
arranged on a chessboard field.
(GRAPHICS #4, #5)
For Duchamp and Pynchon, portals mark the boundary between
contingent processes of becoming and geometric superimpositions and these
portals invite transport between two different styles of cognitive
functioning within the mind, as well as between two epistemological
stances toward nature and other human beings as external others.3 Outward
structures of hegemony may be inverted parodies of mirror interiorities:
particular epistemological assumptions and disciplinary practices in
physics and social philosophy may be linked to particular cognitive
processes, and these processes seem to bear ideological weight, with
aesthetic and political consequences. I would like to pay particular
attention to how Marcel Duchamp and Thomas Pynchon seem to focus on the
relentlessly geometric nature of dominant cognitive processes, with
respect to subject positions (for Pynchon) and subject formations (for
Duchamp).4 I would like to use this juxtaposition of geometry, portals,
cross-dressing and mirror symmetry in their works, in order to make
visible the virtual interiority as well as the actual extensions of what
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the Body Without Organs,
independent of the processes of ÒBecomingÓ that traverse its smooth, and
remain invisible to its striated spaces. In doing so, I wish to use the
occasion of Pynchon's and Duchamp's artistic constructions to explore an
ethics of cognition.
Portals in Pynchon
Let us begin with the geometry of subject positions in Gravity's
Rainbow. Pirate Prentice's surrogate dream landscape spells thermodynamic
doom: Gritty as well as grotesque, with both visual clarity and sensual
distortion, this passage presents the opening gambit between geometry and
complex systems by juxaposing an allusion to Henry Adam's Crystal Palace
with Oswald Spengler's worst nightmare, the last gasp of the civilization
phase without the promise of a pawn or piece of tropical refuse emerging
into a Queen or prime symbol. Here, masses of people are seen spiraling
slowly downward in underground passageways toward some dark hole from
which their can be no hope for escape.
Pirate Prentice wakes from this nineteenth-century nightmare of a
nineteenth- century man in end-of-the-war London. When we read Pirate's
mind and not his surrogate, we find him living in a house with a roof
covered in soil once devoted to cultivating plants producing the alkaloid
crystals of drugs, but now both the garden and Pirate are devoted to other
possibilities. We have here a "progressive knotting into" involving not
an obsessive circling downward but the dissolving of boundaries between
various sources of humble scum, presenting immediate possibilities for
order, for the spontaneously hot ferment of compost. Pirate is growing
bananas, and these horticultual shenanigans in response to a wartime
shortage stands in stark contrast with impending endgame of equilibrium
thermodynamics implied by his surrogate nightmare. The condition of the
earth in the enclosed glass hothouse, and the fruits of his labors in that
earth, suggests not a spiraling or crashing down of a crystal palace but
of beginnings, not the final seizing hush but the music of mitochondria.
The references to the politics of bacteria, the spirals of DNA strands,
the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of culture: Pirate Prentice may
remember the horrors of entropy in his surrogate dream, but lives
embracing its potential. The distinction between attitudes toward entropy
as threat or promise hints at the epistemological crisis underlying the
ideological struggle: the fear of an endgame and the obsession over
control, or the intuitive understanding of contingency as an initial
condition for self-organizing systems requiring the reliquishment of that
very control.
As Ilya Prigogine writes, irreversible, entropy-producing
processes: "play a fundamental constructive role in the physical world;
they are at the bases of important coherent processes that appear with
particular clarity at the biological level" (BB xiii). I have argued
elsewhere that Ilya Prigogine's distinction between the time-reversible
perspective (premised on geometry) and the time-irreversible perspective
(premised on contingency and statistical formulas) serves as a powerful
heuristic for analyzing Pynchon's cultural poetics (see note 1), but I
would like to take one more progressive knot inward by examining the
portals that seem to foreground the epistemological tensions created by
intercourse between the two perspectives.
Pirate wakes and begins his morning rituals:
Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing without a thought in his head. Then
he threads himself into a wool robe he wears inside out so as to keep his
cigarette pocket hidden, not that this works too well, and circling the
warm bodies of friends makes his way to French windows, slides
outside into the cold, groans as it hits the fillings of his teeth, climbs a
spiral ladder ringing to the roof garden and stands for a bit, watching the
river. (my emphasis)
Across the nightmare metropolis and into the banana trees: Prentice's
progress completes what the faceless invisible masses scarcely dare hope
for. The reference to French windows, which is capitalized in the text,
reminds us of Duchamp's notorious Fresh Widow assemblage in the MOMA, a
French window painted an opaque black so that, as a dead end and as a
portal, it signifies the yes/no blankness of DADA, as well as the horizon
of observation, the gaze beyond which requiring the motive of the voyeur.
(GRAPHIC #6)
Passing through the portal and up the spiral staircase like the double
helix of DNA as an inscribed steady state far-from-equilibrium waiting for
coupling and self-replication, Pirate Prentice stands amoong his banana
trees, witnessing the remnant monoliths of the Age of Iron, just before he
gets a glimpse of the V2 contrail on the horizon while inhaling the
anticipatory smells of a banana breakfast that is the direct result of
those self-organizing processes.
In a passage that balances this one very nicely indeed, Slothrop
the Zonal nomad runs into Geli Tripping, who mistakes him at first for her
lover Tchitcherine. They become lovers in a bombed (or rather
reconfigured) town, their open boudoir reflecting the manifestations of a
new, spontaneous ordering:
Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet, is as porperly constituted a
state as any other in the Zone these days. Not paranoia. Just how it is.
Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He and Geli reach their arrangement
hidden from the occupied streets by remnants of walls, in an old
four-poster bed facing a dark pier glass. Out the roof that isn't there
he can see a long tree-covered mountain ascending. Wine on her breath,
nests of down in the hollows of her arms, thighs with the spring of
saplings in the wind. (291; my emphasis)
While Slothrop becomes irritated when Geli reaches orgasm with
Tchitcherine's name on her lips (an experience described as an ecstatic
moment culminating in Slothrop's entire body ejaculating out from the apex
of a totalizing pyramid), the reference to the Duchampian opaque portal
pivots the open system of their love-nest in which the green life
spiraling up the mountain, the spring-energy of Geli's thighs like
saplings, all suggesting a dissolved boundary between inside and outside.
This passage ties to the Pirate Prentice passage on through their mutual
emphasis on organic dissipative structures in contrast with the
dissipative wastefulness of machines. Even though Geli tells Slothrop
"Its an arrangement...Its so unorganized out here. There have to be
arrangements," these temporary alliances, exemplifying the behavior of
irreversible systems far-from equilibrium, become local processes
generating order out of the chaos/refuse of the war- machine. That
Slothrop seems convinced by these alternative orderings gives us pause as
we examine a more overt link between geometry, portals, and the liberatory
claims for self- organizing cultural processes that we associate with
Slothop's traversing the schwartzchild radius of a black hole, and with
the suspicions of Baudrillardian complicity that we associate with Zoyd
Wheeler's jump through the plate glass window of the Cucumber Lounge, in
drag.
Slothrop's Black Hole and Zoyd Wheeler in Drag
One crucial issue raised by critics of Gravity's Rainbow lies with
the status of Slothrop's subject position when he disappears three-fourths
of the way through the novel. Throughout the novel, Slothrop's behavior
becomes described variously in terms of sub- atomic and molecular
phenomena, but when he disappears, it is represented as if passing the
threshold of an anomaly in Einstein and Minkowski's space-time geometry:
the schwartzchild radius of a black hole. A black hole is a node where
curved space-time may be said to spiral down into a point of density of
such density that its gravitational field will not even allow light to
escape. A black hole can therefore be thought of as a singularity, and
this is how N. Katherine Hayles represents Slothrop's disappearance.
(GRAPHIC #7)
Yet, a black hole may also indicate a portal: what enters the black hole
becomes absorbed by a posited substantial field on the other side of the
space-time continuum.
(GRAPHIC #8)
Some of Pynchon's references to Slothrop's scattering and absorption by
the Zone itself matches this explanation, which of course echoes the
metaphysics of the ether, creating an opposition between geometry and
essence, the critique of which we should defer for now.
Another possibility is that a black hole may actually be a
worm-hole, allowing the possibility for jumps from one place to another,
or from one time to another, in hyperspace. And, like Der Springer,
Slothrop does leap about the Zone, disappearing and reappearing. More
interesting, a black hole may be reversed so that mathematical
representations of "white holes" have been developed to describe how
matter might emerge from out of a node in space-time geometry: a black
hole might function as a white hole in a parallel universe.
(GRAPHICS #9, #10)
These speculations have their mathematical basis in an extension of
General Relativity, called geometrodynamics, pioneered by Richard
Feynman's teacher at Princeton, John Wheeler, whose last name should ring
bells for fans of _Vineland_.
Mathematical studies of gravity and electromagnetism in the 1940's
and 1950's demonstrated that the "footprints" left by gravitational and
electromagnetic fields are so precisely represented geometrically that
Wheeler and others came to believe that these footprints could themselves
be considered the full manifestation of the gravitational and
electronmagnetic fields: in other words, one can talk about fields
entirely in terms of geometry. Wheeler's speculations led him to conceive
of not just fields but matter itself as geometry. Geometrodynamics
attempts to fashion matter out of curved empty space, with the democritean
unit being the Geon. Theoretically, it can trap radiation in a
gravitational field, in effect establishing a holding pattern, like a
standing wave, that resists "leakage" for a measurably significant length
of time. Although existing independent of any "real" mass. Wheeler
writes: The geon moves through space as a unit. It responds to the
gravitational fields of other masses. It also exerts forces on them. It
provides a completely geometrical model for mass. (Wheeler xii) (GRAPHIC
#11) Geometrodynamics represents all forces and processes in terms of an
invariant, ontologically stable frame that dissolves the distinction
between form and essence. At its moment in the history of field theories
(mid 1950's-1960) this theory was thought to be the ultimate hegemony, the
beginnings of Einstein's dream: a grand unified field theory of
everything. It has had, however, no experimental validation.
In fact, geons are fictions; they bear no resemblance to any
observable phenomena. Historically, the symmetries of Wheeler's geometry
represent a dead end in theoretical physics. But we should not let the
fact that geometrodynamics has become theoretically quaint to stop our
observation of a possible correspondence between matter and geometry on
the one hand, and hegemony and the status of the subject in Pynchon's
fictional universe. In fact, John Wheeler's relentless attempts reduce
everything to a geometrical frame helps to situate the problem of control
and complexity in terms of cognitive acts, and we will attempt to
formalize this problem by drawing on the philosophical writings of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the distinction between emergent
properties and computational models of cognition in cognitive science
formalized by Francisco Varela and others.
In _Gravity's Rainbow_, space-time geometry corresponds with the
discursive and repressive formations of the state at war in the most
general sense. Slothrop's subject position in the Zone remains free and
contingent precisely because of the disintegration of those formations at
the end of World War II. It is only when the flows or moires of the Zone
begin to close up into the geometrical chessboard of a new game between
the United States and the Soviet Union, that the character Slothrop
disappears across that schwarzschild radius. InVineland, the protagonist
Zoyd Wheeler must alter his subject position by making himself visible
once a year to certify his disability. This former revolutionary has been
reduced to media eccentric, a buffoon who dresses in women's dresses and
jumps through the plate-glass window of the Cucumber Lounge for the
benefit of local TV cameramen. If we reflect on how panes of a
plate-glass window may represent the geometry of space-time, perhaps
Zoyd's leap is a busting-through from the void, from the invisible
marginality of his slothful, counter-cultural time-warp back into time and
visibility, aided of course by the tactical use of fake glass designed for
stuntmen recently employed by Steven Spielberg for the shooting of Return
of the Jedi..
What disturbs us about this yearly ritual lies with Zoyd Wheeler's
motive, a tacit commitment to live parasitically off the system he has
devoted his life to resisting. His resistance seems merely an act of
transgression-for-hire--just a way to pay the bills. So, while Slothrop
disappears through a black hole as if to liberate himself from the Soviet
and American matrices closing off the contingencies of the post-war
European Zone, Zoyd Wheeler emerges from a white hole (or perhaps a
worm-hole) to verify his abject dependence upon those matrices (it will be
useful to remember that matrix is defined in the OED as a reductive,
two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional event). Unlike the
hope implied by the disappearance of Slothrop and the emergence of a
Counterforce in GR, however, there is no escape from geometry, no hidden,
privileged relm in John Wheeler's (and Zoyd Wheeler's) universe:
(GRAPHIC #12)
We begin to suspect that there is no metaphysical "other side"
where we might find Slothrop's traces because, perhaps, everything really
does exist in two dimensions. While Slothrop's disappearance might imply
his impotence in resisting the emerging matrices which threaten humanity
with the endgame of Mutually Assured Destruction, it also marks the traces
of hope, exemplified by his absorption in the Zone and his figuring of the
potential of the Counter-Force itself. Zoyd Wheeler's commitment to a
bankrupt lifestyle bankrolled through yearly ritual debasement of his
ethical currency marks a cynical complicity, a seduction by the forces
that he resists. In the final analysis, it seems that, though he does
leap through the fake plate glass: there is no over there, there.
We can reinforce this link between geometry and complicity if we
recall that, as Ronald W. Clark writes in his biography of Albert
Einstein, I.G. Farben funded an Einstein Institute for physics research in
Crakow during the 1920's and 1930's. This fact seems to undercut the
vitural yet moral presence that Einstein exerts on the landscape of GR,
given his often reworked remark that the atomic bomb he helped to create
initiated an epoch marked by the birth of a new technology without the
wisdom requisit to manage that technology. Einstein's financial
arrangement with the corporation that went on to produce the gas used in
the death camps as well as the plastic that Jampf supposedly activates in
the infant Slothrop's penis, helps to underscore the relationship between
geometry and complicity. But we need to take this one step further, by
noting that Albert Einstein's physics is as dependent upon the geometrical
frame as the physics of John Wheeler.
Einstein often invoked the name of Spinoza when discussing the
vision of an eternal, unchanging Being underlying all the multiple
complexities of phenomena, a Being Given, to literalize Duchamp's title
('Etant Donn'ees ), that makes geometry possible. Interestingly, it is
Spinoza's _Ethics_ that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari point to as
exemplary of philosophical thought produced by the Body Without Organs.
Marcel Duchamp's 'Etant Donn'ees (Being Given: 1 The Waterfall; 2 The
Illuminating Gas ) captures perfectly a clash of worldviews represented by
Pirate's surrogate dream on the one hand, and the banana tree garden on
the other; by the baudrillardian nightmare represented by Zoyd's
simulacrum of Jim Morrison and the Door's "Break on Through to the Other
Side" while dressed like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention from the
album cover "We're Only In It For the Money." By now, however, we can see
that Jim Morrison and Frank Zappa are not the only inspirations here;
Einstein and Wheeler, and Marcel Duchamp, particularly in drag as his
alter ego Rrose S'elavy, deserve equal billing.
(GRAPHICS #13, #14)
Here we move from the issue of subject positions to that of
subject-formation, from geometric representations of hegemonic dominance
and the possibly inescapable condition of complicity, to the mirror
interiority of internal schematizing at the level of cogntive processes,
as infomed by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the cognitive
science of Varela, Thompson and Rosch.
Duchamp's Chess Treatise, the Green Box Notes to Large Glass, and Rrose
S'elavy
For Duchamp and for Pynchon, art is simultaneously an act of
creation and an act of destruction. Duchamp states that "the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and
interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to
the creative act" (Salt Seller, 140). Duchamp joins the artist, the work
of art and the spectator onto a common field where the event as an
interference pattern of creation and interpretation resembles the
seemingly symmetrical vectors created through time upon the sixty-four
squares of a chessboard ("eros' matrix," Salt Seller 51). For Duchamp,
and as I will argue, for Pynchon as well, the mappable relativity of
subject positions merely externalizes the mirror interiority of the
subject formations within the artist and within the observer. Paralleling
the insights of Henri PoincarŽ and Henri Bergson concerning the social
origins of geometry as a symptom of control as symptomized by the physics
of John Wheeler, Duchamp and Pynchon insist that the mind tends inevitably
toward the condition of geometry. It is the infinite regression of the
mind's will to geometry that constitutes its pathology.
This diagnosis, as well as the hope for the mind's liberation from
relentless geometricality, becomes the focus for all of Duchamp's work
from his Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). We have mentioned briefly
how Opposition et les cases conjug'ees sont r'econcili'ees delineates the
rules governing the avoidance patterns of the two Kings seeking
"opposition," so that what goes on in the minds of the players is more
important than what is actually on the board. "Breach of opposition"
refers to a disruption of that regal equilibrium, a moment of positional
disadvantage due to a miscalculation that precipitates the end of the
endgame, a moment that both Kings avoid at all costs. Duchamp's chess
treatise can also be read as a rhetoric of the aporeia, so that "breach of
opposition" corresponds to the charged moment that Duchamp calls in the
Green Box Notes to Large Glass, "exposure."
The aporeia serves as a portal which triggers mirror interiority
within the mind of the observer. It pivots the destabilized planes of
verbal and visual structures, a chaotic vortex triggered by the
avant-garde event. Uncovering Duchamp's laws governing the rebus as a
sign for disturbance as well as an aporeia of the sign, Carol P. James
states:
This chiasmus, a mirrored angle or "double invagination" not only
disturbs the linearity of reading with a "trajectoire des surveillances du
coin de l'oeil" but also inscribes reading as a figure, a letter
("Reading Art," l08).
James's emphasis on Derrida's sly double entendre
for the space opened up by the chiasmic rebus in the systems of verbal and
visual signs and their significances, confronts the unstable nature of
aesthetic cognition by a mind capable of generating an infinite regression
of spatial frames in order to account for those multiple and indeterminate
significances. While referring specifically to Duchamp's readymades, we
can see that this double entendre becomes appropriate for the subject
position of the observer as voyeur peeking through the the chink in the
door of 'Etant Donn'ees.
(GRAPHIC # 15)
Duchamp coined the term "metairony" to indicate how the
affirmation and denial of meaning can be generated by this chiasmic
invagination, and he calls the metaironical device a "hinge" or "hook."
He defines both in the Green Box Notes, and we have seen how crucial the
concept of the hinge is to his chess treatise. This is a fundamental
concept for understanding Duchamp further:
"perhaps make a hinge picture. (folding yardstick, book. . . .) develop
the principle of the hinge in the displacements 1st in the plane 2nd in
space. Find an automatic description of the hinge. Perhaps introduce it
in the Pendu femelle" (SS 27).
Duchamp carefully distinguishes between two kinds of hinges here
(remembering that the "hinge" is the term for the crease used to create
the mirror inversion of the Kings' positions on the chessboard): one "in
the plane" of the formal artifact (or chessboard); the other "in space"
which could refer to the mind of the spectator(s) (or chessplayers).
Duchamp then links the concept of the hinge to the "Pendu femelle," so
that the ambiguity of that term, in turn, refers to his preoccupation with
the archetypal presence or absence of woman as Other, as neoplatonic
Bride, or perhaps as a senile or at least mechanical (drag-or-"delay")
Queen. Duchamp's female alter-ego Rrose Selavy (artist as "pendu
femelle," as work of art) captured in Man Ray's photograph (1921),
generates any number of responses to her name: "erre ose," "arroser la
vie," "eros c'est la vie," capital R "Est-il R(Art)?," or even the English
tautology "a rose is a rose is a rose."5 Rrose Selavy becomes an inversion
of the artist Marcel Duchamp: together they form a portal, a mirrored
invagination of the artist into warring kings on the public
chessboard-field of art itself within the mind of each spectator.
Duchamp therefore seeks to conceptualize and visualize how the
aporeia initiates a confrontation between artist and observer which then
must be sustained within the cognitive processes of that observer. The
portal of the aporeia disrupts the force-field upon which the complicitous
relations between artist and observer exist, a field defined as the
tension between "the unexpressed but intended" by the artist, and the
"unintentionally expressed" (or the various cognitive and hermeneutical
activities brought to the object of art). This force-field, which Duchamp
calls "Delay," and which he judges to be both intoxicating and
habit-forming, resembles the vectors created through time upon the sixty-
four squares of a chessboard ("eros' matrix," SS 51) during a match, "a
game between artist and onlooker, or a drug as I said before" (quoted in
Thomkins, Bride 18). Duchamp describes the laws governing this field of
force with pseudo-mathematical precision, and they help to conceptualize
the charged moment of "Exposure" which ends the endgame of art in the
avant-garde event. Occuring as an infinite regression of mirror
interiority, this event short-circuits the force-field formed by the
complicity between artist and observer.
A more refined sense of Duchamp's concept of "delay" comes from
his "Preface" to the Green Box Notes, in which he juxtaposes "delay" with
the concept of "exposure":
Given 1st the waterfall
2nd the illuminating gas,
we shall determine the conditions for the instantaneous state of Rest(or
allegorical appearance) of a succession [of a group] of various facts seeming
to necessitate each other under certain laws, in order to isolate the sign of
the accordance between, this state of Rest (capable of all the innumerable
eccentricities) and, on the other, a choice of Possibilities authorized by these
laws and also determining them.(SS 27-8; Duchamp's emphases).
Prefaced by what would become the title of 'Etant Donn'ees, this passage
dissolves one opposition, that of art and interpretation, and creates
another. On the one hand, we have "the instantaneous State of Rest (or
allegorical appearance)," which is "capable of all the innumerable
eccentricities," indicating a liberating moment of undetermined cognitive
flows experienced as pure contingency. On the other hand, we have the
terms "succession," "various facts," "a choice of possibilities" which
collectively indicate the superimposition spatial and temporal difference
upon cognitive processes responding to the world habitually, by
experiencing the flow of duration as a series of still frames,
mathematically through calculus, conceptually through schematic forms,
musically through staves,bars and time signatures, or artistically through
a single-lense reflex or motion picture camera. These two categories, in
turn, bracket an in-between category: the activity of "we" who must
"determine" this opposition, "in order to isolate the sign of the
accordance between" first "the state of Rest" and then the "choices"
which simultaneously are "authorized by these laws" and which determine
those very same laws. The distinction between succession and rest itself
serves to delay "Rest," which we should recognize as synonymous with
"exposure":
For the instantaneous state of rest=bring in the term extra rapid We shall
determine the conditions of [the]best expos'e of the extra rapid state of
Rest[of the extra rapid exposure (==allegorical appearance) of a
group......etc.
nothing perhaps.
The pun on exposure and expos'e signifies a momentary and surreptitious
flash and a scandalous revealing in the journalistic sense. It thus
provides within itself the difference between the moment of "exposure" to
the pure apprehension of duration stripped of schematized formations, and
the conceptualizing of that moment (which also serves to defer the
moment), while titilating our interest (as voyeurs) in it as well. The
glimpse of the cross-dressed "other" becomes the site for the scandal of
subjectivity, and its reverberations.
Furthermore, this passage addresses, equivocally, what may be the
essence or function of the "accordance between," of "exposure" itself as
an potentially infinite mirror interiority. Is it an allegorical
appearance?: "The Bride basically is a motor. But before being a motor
which transmits her timid- power.-she is this very timid-power" (SS 42;
my emphasis). In other words, is exposure made possible by double
invagination itself simply a hieroglyph that can be called a
transcendental signifier, a "sign of the accordance between"? Or is it
"nothing perhaps"? After all, a literal English translation of 'Etant
Donn'ees is not Given but Being Given, an offering of "nothing perhaps," or
a reminder of Being's fiction by demonstrating it's crystaline
impossibility in the contingent world of irreversible duration. Or,
perhaps it represents the end of the tyranny of Being, as the necesssary
premise for all geometrical constructs, in the pure contingency of
Becoming, liberated by the disruption of the mechanisms of signification,
a distruption which constitutes the terror of the avant-garde event.6
All this toying with oppositions suggests an infinite regression,
a mirror interiority exemplified by the capacity of calculus to divide
time into an infinite number of points on a trajectory, or by the capacity
of n-dimensional geometry to generate an infinite regression of interior
spatiality in much the same way:
The Pendu femelle is the form in ordinary perspective of a Pendu Femelle
for which one could perhaps try to discover the true form. This comes from
the fact that any form is the perspective of another form according to a
certain vanishing point and a certain distance. (SS 45)
Steve Weisenburger's demonstration of the intelligibility of narrative
embeddedness to the fifth degree in Pynchon's fictions, thus has a
cognitive correlate in the way Duchamp represents the mind constructing
thinking spaces as a series of telescoping frames (potentially) in
infinite regression in order to stave off the doom of the subject's
dismantling, in order to "delay" "exposure."7 This suggests a fundamental
opposition between the irreversible processes of exposure as threat in the
form of "indecisive reunion," and the dynamics of delay as calculus and
geometry extended to the Nth degree as symptoms of the striations of
control.8 Following this line of reasoning, that many have noticed the
hypertextual nature of Pynchon's fictions, and that one can visualize
Weisenburger's insights only by recourse to hypertext, makes us suspicious
that hypertext as striated cyberspace itself simply externalizes PoincarŽ
and Bergson's diagnosis of the mind's tendency toward relentless
geometricality, as I have argued elsewhere.9 Despite the liberatory claims
of its practitioners and theorists, hypertext symptomizes this pathology.
In a permutation on the "Given" passage that immediately follows,
Duchamp adds: "If Given [in the dark]," repeating "in the dark" close to
a reference for the "illuminating gas" or clouds of signification
surrounding the art-i-fact at the moment of "exposure." Here, he seems to
insist on the interior and contingent nature of the condition of exposure
in its relationship to the "succession," or the cognitive tactics of
delay: it must take place within the individual mind in solitude. While
the concept "we" in effect has no being except as an arbitrary
sub-category within delay itself, yet, paradoxically, the "we" can only
manifest itself in terms of individual consciousness: the dispersed
plenitude of the I between art and fact reverberates in a sophisticated
way with recent accounts of complex systems, and their implications for
physics, philosophy and cognitive science, implications which were
anticipated by Poincar'e and Bergson. "Nothing, perhaps" underscores the
play on the presence/absence telos of any infinite progress or regress of
opposing categories, of which the blankness of DADA is the manifesto.
Finally, it is in the blankness of DADA, signified by sheer, opaque or
mirroring glass assemblages, and, by implication, by the indeterminate
nature of black holes as singularities or as worm or white holes, that we
may make visible the relationship between the various forms of "becoming"
and the Body Without Organs in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari.
Geometry, Cognitive Science, and Deleuze and Guattari's Body Without
Organs
In The Embodied Mind, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor
Rosch represent the mind as having two competing cognitive processes
occurring simultaneously. Cognitive processes at the local level, from
the senses, the organs of the body, and the operations of memory,
self-organize or "emerge" into a global state. That global state may be
considered fictional, since it has no being, but it does really and truly
function, however, to constrain those lower order processes in order to
act in the world as if it were unified and autonomous. These antithetical
cognitive processes may serve to help inform Deleuze and Guattari's
distinction between various processes of "becoming" associated with the
senses, circulatory and nervous systems (including the operations of
memory) as well as the bodily organs, and their crucial concept "the Body
Without Organs," the operations of which are usually described in terms of
geometrical constructs, such as "plane of consistency" and "strata," and
in terms of the"waves" or "intensities" that flow through these surfaces
and depths. For Varela, and for Deleuze and Guattari, the condition of
contingency, which characterizes processes of self-organization, is
always-already becoming in a non-dialectical relationship with those
superimpositions. The striations of the Body Without Organs, in turn,
bear resemblance to the ways in which the unified, autonomous global
construct constrains contingent cognitive processes. This tension between
bottom-up contingent emergent and top-down deterministic processes has
epistemological as well as ideological weight within the field of
cognitive science, in the distinction between the computational and
emergent properties perspectives.
The shift from the computational model to an emergent model of
cognition resulted from the discovery of two fundamental limitations in
the computational model. Otherwise known as the ÒVon Neumann Bottleneck,Ó
the first limitation results from the Òsequential rulesÓ (Varela 86) that
constrains the processing of symbolic information; that is, only one rule
may be applied at a time. The second limitation is indicated by the fact
that if any loss or malfunction of even a small number of symbols or rules
occurs, the system often suffers catastrophic failure.
Varela, Thompson and Rosch argue that it was Prigogine and others'
work in non- equilibrium thermodynamics that alerted cognitive scientists
and computer scientists to possible rules governing the behavior of
complex systems, and while they note that there is Òno unified formal
theory of emergent properties,Ó symptoms of such systems have been
identified across disciplinary boundaries: Òin each case a network gives
rise to new properties,Ó and the ability to formalize and replicate
artificially those properties, observed in a large variety of physical and
cognitive phenomena, represents a fundamental shift in the understanding
of the functioning of systems generally speaking.
But what makes this shift from the computational model to the
emergent properties model interesting is its ideological as well as
epistemological significance. Let us borrow from Varela, Thompson and
Rosch once again as they explain simply, in terms of three questions, the
distinction between these two paradigms.
The Computational Paradigm:
Question 1: What is cognition?
Answer: Information processing as symbolic computation--rule based
manipulation of symbols.
Question 2: How does it work?
Answer: Through any device that can support and manipulate discrete
functional elements--the symbols. The system interacts only with the form
of the symbols (their physical attributes), not their meaning.
Question 3: How do I know when a cognitive system is functioning adequately?
Answer: when the symbols appropriately represent some aspect of the real world, and the information
processing leads to a successful solution of the problem given to the system. (42)
The Emergent Properties Paradigm:
Question 1: What is Cognition?
Answer: The emergence of global states in a network of simple components.
Question 2: How does it work?
Answer: Through local rules for individual operation and rules for changes
in the connectivity among the elements.
Question 3: How do I know when a cognitive system is functioning adequately?
Answer: When the emergent porperties (and resulting structure) can be seen
to correspond to a specific cognitive capacity--a successful solution to a
required task. (99)
This distinction becomes interesting from the perspective of
ideology in the following way: for the first, the emphasis is placed on
the total control of the trajectories of symbolic manipulation; any loss
of control brings down the computational house. The primary structure for
such control is the upside-down arboreal (root) configuration of
genus-species, whose geometrical correlate is the pyramid or perhaps the
crystal. For the second, the emphasis is placed on the connections among
elements of systems, the deliberate relinquishing of control of those
elements, and the observing of contingently emergent forms of order among
the connected elements that might not necessarily be predicted. The
primary structures which illustrate the stability of such contingent
processes are dissipative or aggregating systems, such as a non-linear
catalysis, the homeostasis of a single cell, or a colony of single
organisms, such as a rhizome.
The top-down exertion of control, and the contingencies of
bottom-up emergence symptomize as well epistemological and ideological
stances toward the world, and in the study of human cognition, both
processes go on simultaneously, and perhaps even at cross purposes. I
would like to argue that, of all social philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and
F'elix Guattari have played out the ideological and political implications
of these two styles of cognitive functioning, as these styles are encoded
in the socius.
Deleuze and Guattari's ÒrhizomeÓ exemplifies the emergent state,
and in fact precisely refers to a functioning aggregation. Its principles
include: 1) connectivity, which describes the capacity to aggregate; 2)
heterogeneity, as in the coordination of unlike elements; 3) multiplicity
with respect to the connections,the variability of which is at a maximum;
4) asignifying rupture (which allows the system to function despite local
breakdowns); 5) cartography as an inadequate representational form (Òa
rhizome cannot be reduced to a structural or generative modelÓ); 6)
decalcomania, or the condition of infinite flexibility, adaptability and
resistance to rigidity--all refer to aspects of the functioning of
self-organizing systems in some way or another. Specifically associated
with Òall manner of becomings,Ó (TP 8-21), the rhizome exemplifies one
style of cognitive and social functioning that resists domination and
determination, exemplified by the radicle-system, or fascicular root (5)
Òto which our modernity pays willing allegiance,Ó represented by Òbinary
logic and biunivocal relationshipsÓ that dominate ideologically
linguistics, structuralism, and until recently, Òinformation science.Ó But
these two cannot engage in a Hegelian struggle to the death:
ÒYou may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger
that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations
that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject--
anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions. Groups
and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystalize.Ó
For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer to domination by rigid
calcification and binary determinism in the trajectories of symbols as
well as in the behavior of human beings, lies in the in-difference of
emergent aggregative forms as they interpenetrate yet remain beyond the
grasp of those crystaline structures (or fascicular root) within and
without the single cognizing subject. These laws exist simultaneously and
interpenetrate extensively. It becomes a question of a subject or
collectivityÕs style of functioning whether it leans more heavily toward
one set of laws or the other. The laws governing the in-different
emergence of aggregating processes and forms are called collectively
ÒBecomingÓ (Becoming-Intense, Becoming Animal, Becoming Imperceptible
etc.) and they become complicated in terms of the stages by which
aggregating forms (woman-child-animal- molecule) may begin to localize as
a site of aggregation, to evolve under the stress of external conditions,
and then learn to function under the condition of in-difference.
The psycho-social site in which the radicle-system dominates and
seeks to control the various becomings is called The Body Without Organs
(BWO), and it refers to what might be called a preexisting condition of
wholeness: in other words, the BWO is the Global State itself, a Òfield of
immanenceÓ from which emanate top-down contraints (154), the reductio ad
absurdum of which is schizophrenic dream of the the rubber body suit
without any holes to breathe, eat, defecate. Consistently described in
terms of the spherical wholeness of the egg prior to the complete
formation of the embryo, in terms of hierarchical strata and of planes of
consistency through which rhizomes must propagate but only by avoiding
detection, the BWO constitutes the regime through which the exertion of
contraints on various becomings may occur. Philosophically represented by
SpinozaÕs ethics, psychoanalytically by the analystÕs intrusion in the
imaginary and symbolic formations of the patient, representated by the
betrayal of desire in the form of the hypochondriac body, the schizo body,
the drugged body, the masochist body, the BWO can be understood simply as
the superimposition of constraints on the lower order cognitive processes
emanating from the organs of the body, from the nervous, autonomic,
circulatory and immune systems.
Just as the rhizome and its laws of becoming exemplify the
conditions of emergence present in the smooth space of the BWO, the
striated space of the BWO exemplifies the strict rigidity of the
computational model of cognitive functioning, of schematic modelings,
structural representations, geometrical constructions of time, the
formalist obsessions of art and music. While the BWO provides the spatial
extensivity for various "becomings" to emerge, there remains the question
of how the smooth "enabling" space turns into the "constricting" striated
space of cognitive schema symptomatic of subject formation, and of
physical geometries symptomatic of processes for determining subject
postitions in science and in society. If we turn to the various passages
on capture, for example, Deleuze and Guattari couch these processses
largely in overtly political terms. But the question of causation remains
mute, however. Yet, there remains one important hint. That hint lies
with Deleuze and Guattari's reference to the figure of the one-eyed King
(424-7), a king therefore crippled by a lack of depth perception,
condemned perpetually to reduce the four dimensions of life to a two
dimensional plane. There are two ways of reading Deleuze and Guattari's
allusion to the King's crippled condition: as a diagnosis of a congenital
condition; or as the consequence of the will to schema or geometry for the
purposes of operational control, which is the occupational disease of
those who wish to rule--from within as well as from without. The King of
Diamonds stares, like the intended audience for Duchamp's notorious glass
assemblage depicting a pyramid in n-dimensions and a crystal (To Stare at,
from the other side, with one eye closed for over an hour), because of a
pathological condition. Henri Poincar'e and Henri Bergson first diagnosed
this pathology competently. These two great thinkers also offered the
grounds for the science of complexity in both physics and cognitive
science, and it was to Bergson that Deleuze turned in his search for a
critique of the cognition of duration as a spatial category and its
aesthetic and political implications. Yet it isn't just the philosophers
who follow the insights of science. Duchamp and Pynchon's portals provide
sites for reviewing the diagnosis, and for pursuing its cure.
1. Parts of this essay were read at the Warwick Conference on Thomas
Pynchon, November, 1994, and at the International Association of
Philosophy and Literature, Philadelphia, May, 1995. I'd like to thank
Eugene Holland, Nick Land, Paul Harris, Ronald Bogue and Eric Cassidy for
their helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank John Krafft, Eric
Cassidy and Dan O'Hara for their permission to allow electronic
publication of this text.
2. Martin E. Rosenberg, "Invisbility, The War Machine and Prigogine:
Physics, Philosophy and the Threshold of Historical Consciousness in
Pynchon's Zone," 91-138, especially 104-109.
3. Here I am not assuming the facile dichotomy between cognitive and social
domains. Instead I am locating processes (bottom-up emergences; top-down
superimpositions) which are common to both realms. See, for example, the
similarities in approach of Edwin Hutchins, _Cognition in the Wild_; and
Varela, Thompson and Rosch, _The Embodied Mind_.
4. Here my distinction is quite arbitrary: I could have reversed focus, or
addressed the representation of both subject positions and subject
formations in terms of physics and cognitive science within the works of
both figures. This arrangement is simply an attempt to economize. One
purpose for this arbitrariness is to challenge the stability of the
concept "post-modern," as I argue in my book length manuscript, Fables of
Self- Organization: The Cultural Work of Complexity in the Avant-Garde.
The tendency to use physics tropes from reversible and irreversible
systems pervades the avant-garde strain of high modernism and postmodern
artists and theorists. One wonders if it might have been possible for
Jean-Francois Lyotard to write his Postmodern Condition before he wrote
Duchamp's Transformers. I doubt it. When I asked him about this at the
IGHLS Conference at Texas A&M, May 1994, he was graciously but decisively
evasive.
5. See Carol P. James' derridean account of the implications of these puns
in the two articles listed in the bibliography.
6. Here I am drawing not only on "being" and "becoming" as ontological
categories in mainstream philosophy, but in terms of Ilya Prigogine's
distinction between the geometrical perspective of reversible systems, and
the contingent perspective of irreversible perspectives, respectively.
See From Being To Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Natural Sciences,
and, with Isabelle Stengers, _Order Out of Chaos_.
7. See his "'A progessive knotting into': Hyper-Embedded Narration in
Gravity's Rainbow," in this collection of essays.
8. On the role of geometry in the art of Marcel Duchamp and his
contemporaries, see Craig Adcock, Marcel Duchamp's Notes from the "Large
Glass": An N-Dimensional Analysis; "Duchamp's Eroticism: a Mathematical
Analysis," in Rudolf Kuenzli, ed. _Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century_.
See also Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean
Geometry in Modern Art.
9. Martin E. Rosenberg, "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in
Art and Pedagogy," in _Hyper/Text/Theory_, 268-298. For a pointed response
to this challenge to the liberatory rhetoric of hypertext theorists, see
Stuart Moulthrop's essay in the same collection, "Rhizome and Resistance,"
299-322. See also Stuart Moulthrop and John McDaid, "Not Yet Blindingly
One": Gravity's Rainbow and the Hypertextualists," _Pynchon Notes_ 32-33,
forthcoming.
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