Monster, 2021

 

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Lugano, Switzerland

In the spring of 1995 when I was fifteen years old my parents had the school extend the spring breaks of my sister and I and the whole family went off on a long and highly stimulating road trip through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, plus one night in Strasbourg and a quick leisurely pass through Liechtenstein. It is easy to remember that this was the spring of 1995 because when we got back to the hotel in Frankfurt where we'd started, right at the end of our trip, all the newspapers were screaming in self-explanatory German about the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. Every couple years I have a situating historical landmark like that. On one long day of driving I managed to read the entirely of The Catcher in the Rye and then the first third-or-so of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The most captivating and magnetic place I visited that trip was Lugano, Switzerland—see one of the photos I took immediately below—which feels an awful lot like somebody transplanted a piece of the French Riviera into the Swiss mountains employing little else save brute strength and counterintuitive logic. I felt that place like warm light in my bones and circulating in my blood.

Lugano played an important role in the personal and intellectual development of Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved the Swiss mountain-and-lake regions very much. Lugano is where Nietzsche's complicated romantic pursuit of author, psychoanalyst, and boy-crazy globetrotter Lou Salomé came to a head and dropped him in his own tracks. 1882, Salomé, along with Nietzsche and writer Paul Rée, visited the area surrounding Lake Lugano. While staying there, Nietzsche and Salomé went on long mountain hikes and kept close quarters. According to historical accounts from those who knew both it was during these mountain excursions that Nietzsche's obsession with Salomé deepened and he is generally believed to have made a failed marriage proposal, a major turning point in his turbulent life and definitely not a good one. Even if you try to be optimistic and generous, all of the turning points in Nietzsche's life look pretty dismal.

Lou Salomé (with whip), Paul Rée, Friedrich Nietzsche

German-born Nobel Prize winner and grand literary mystic Hermann Hesse lived in Montagnola, on the hills above Lugano, for over forty years. Steppenwolf and Siddhartha were written there. You'd think the unshaven and the unkept would be heading there in pilgrimages like Chaucer's. Point-to-point communication, mountain-to-mountain. You shan't get a new diskette if you cannot practice your etiquette. Argentinean grand literary mystic Jorge Luis Borges ended up with his family in Lugano happenstantially, immediately subsequent to the First World War, when he was still only eighteen. After the death of Borges’s maternal grandmother in 1919, the family left Geneva and chose to settle in Lugano because it was beautiful, relatively inexpensive, peaceful (off the beaten track), and it wasn't going through the protracted sanitation and public health nightmare all the major European cities seemed to be sharing in immediately after the war and its disposable human millions. For reasons not at all different from Hesse and the Borges clan, Mikhail Bakunin, bold Russian revolutionary and godfather of anarchism, retired to Lugano...for about a year...and then died the year after that. He went for the peace and the beauty. He'd more or less just turned sixty. When you get to be about sixty the expectation is that you start conducting your revolutions with pen rather than with brick. Don't stress. I find one quickly gets the knack.  

Lake Lugano, 1945/46, Christoph Traugott

Jason Philip Wierzba Photo Gazette [Bildungsroman]

 Elementary School

High School

 

Ottawa, the Legendary January '98 Ice Storm

Min Bul, "Champagne of Course"

A Very Short Bit [Vision Board Month]

The Globe and Mail: Mr. Wierzba, your debut novel The Victimage Cycle, though lost in the barrens—ahem, ahem—for an extended period of terrestrial gestation, would ultimately find a loud and enthusiastic audience wherever the finer points of literary prose and poison pen animus are concerned, though there were many who called the work unpleasant, belligerent, and alienating. Some of them may be pleased to hear that your surprisingly-rapidly-dispatched follow-up is cute in conceit and almost never bitter...more glum...in the sense we'd expect a man your age to be glum. I shan't elaborate. But it's basically a sweet detective story about a funny and wordy fuddy-dud guy who would lose his head were it not fastened to him by nature herself. The novel is episodic and there's even little sprees of abject glee. Is the change in direction here a conscious concession to readers and to book sales?  

Jason Philip Wierzba: Did you just hear something?!

Ten Exemplary Music Videos Party [in Chronological Order]

 

Meat Puppets, "New Gods" [1984]

RUN DMC, "King of Rock" [1985]

Public Enemy and Anthrax, "Bring the Noise" [1991]

Cat Power, "Cross Bones Style" [1998]

Sonic Youth, "Sunday" [1998]

Guitar Wolf, "Jet Generation"

The No-Neck Blues Band, "The Black Pope" [2005]

Hot Chip, "I Feel Better" [2010]

Yo La Tengo, "Friday I'm in Love" [2015]

Santigold, "Chasing Shadows" [2016]

Metaphysical Experiments

 

17th Century Woodcut by Carlo Antonio Manzini

The James Webb Space Telescope 
(It's Currently About 1.5 Million Kilometers from Earth) 

In “Probability and Proliferation,” the third of the four principal chapters of which his 2019 critical study Metaphysical Experiments: Physics and the Invention of the Universe is comprised, Bjørn Ekeberg makes the speculative claim—not the sort of claim of which he is most fond!—that the great pantheistic-materialist philosopher and lens-crafter Spinoza would likely argue that the universe of modern science and cosmology is not a real being but a metaphysical one, a being of reason, though this is not to say that it is thus as a whole without legitimacy. Ekeberg does not know that contemporary cosmologists have provided us with a false cosmic world-picture because our neurology limits what we can know about the visible and invisible worlds around us. What he argues, in an extremely convincing manner, is that this cosmic world-picture is fundamentally dubious and assuredly an invention or a construction, though hardly one cobbled together out of nothing. The basic problem may appear to be one of epistemology. For Spinoza, “The price to pay for reason is constitutive uncertainty.” Both Spinoza, who operated in the context of 17th century Scholasticism, and Henri Bergson, a key French philosopher of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a popular lecturer and public figure who taught none other than ‘Pataphysics innovator Alfred Jarry, are, as Ekeberg emphasizes, thinkers who would tend to pursue “a perspective on the modern sciences in terms of their action in the world rather than their knowledge claims about it." Ekeberg has, near the beginning of the book, already assured us that Heidegger discerned in physics, in its move from Newton to the atomic age, a fundamental loss of its basis in empiricism and phenomenology, having come to suppose a suprasensory order, or rather physics and physicists have been compelled to insist that their toil and inquiry be conducted under the sun of a universe knowable in its “object-ness” and by virtue of “enframing” intervention. Mankind as the dispassionate and strategically displaced measure of all things…at an ungodly angle and in terrible light. Metaphysical Experiments is a book that addresses cosmology and disparate disciplines within physics in an academic social sciences/humanities mode. While the history of physics from Galileo to the James Webb Space Telescope is analyzed with rigour and in depth, the history of philosophy is equally pertinent here, and it is Ekeberg’s repeated contention that when philosophy and physics approach their limit situations in any number of ways, this is the point at which questions of metaphysics and constructivist intervention routinely assert themselves, whether we would prefer to acknowledge them or not. Always it is a matter of metaphysics for Ekeberg, seldom if ever ontology. 

The Introduction begins with an epigraph from Émile Meyerson: “Metaphysics penetrates all science, for the very simple reason that it is contained in its point of departure.” Metaphysics makes especial sense in a context which builds to a critical assessment of contemporary cosmology and the groundlessness of its projections. “The question of the nature of the universe is metaphysical in the sense that it lies at the very limit of scientific inquiry, where what we really know is not so easily distinguished from what we think we know, believe we know, and would like to believe.” Metaphysical Experiments begins considering the aforementioned James Webb Space Telescope, a massively over-budget telescope which is not in any traditional sense an actual telescope. “What understanding of the universe determines [the telescope’s] design, its questions, its parameters?” The James Webb Space Telescope is more than a little like the famous Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in the sense that both work by translating data into “computerized renderings” on large digital monitors. What a particle accelerator tells you in data, the events it prioritizes, is based on the vast majority of information being filtered out because that’s what the tech has been told to do. This is experimentation as largely predetermined fishing expedition. “Here, as in all scientific ventures, theory and experiment mutually determine each another,” meaning that even if all the complicated tech performs satisfactorily there is still “the risk of paradigm failure,” although it must be said that it isn’t altogether likely such a thing would happen, the expensive tech not having been built and sent out to accomplish a crisis or chronoclasm in the field of study that generated it and which hopes to receive ongoing funding based upon experimental successes. The experimental scientist cannot outrun their own “tacit assumptions, unquestioned principles, hidden implications, overreaching simplifications, and other forms of delimitations.” Because physics has increasingly dealt with principles not available to direct empirical scrutiny or laboratory exploration, it has become “the only science in which theoretical laws are treated as more fundamental than phenomenological ones.”

A Standard Model or Grand Unified Theory of Physics (or GUT) is gonna need to get real fancy if it doesn’t want to topple fast like a straw man. The emergence of these kinds of problems are what ruined Albert Einstein’s peace of mind in later years. Indeed, “the quest is on, and has been going on for decades, engaging thousands of physicists in work on theories that can unite the Standard Model with gravity and merge the quantum physics of atomic structures with the order of stars and galaxies.” Although mostly what the distinct fields of physics find are discontinuities and irregularities, the forking disciplines themselves are still operating under the presumption that there is something like a road to total cosmological unification, a Theory of Everything itself analogous to René Descartes’s dream of a mathesis universalis. We have something like a stark formulation of opposing models: Galileo, kinematics, identity, autology of excluded middle vs. Descartes, dynamics, principle of reason (force), and autology of included middle. Descartes’ metaphysics requires God for instrumental (autological) purposes in a way that Galileo and Newton, beginning with the supposition of an abstract void, do not. From the Galilean-Newtonian void we see the development of future physicists, like Joseph-Louis Lagrange and his various descendants, “not only theoretical physicists but economists and other modelers,” pursuing “a deceptive definition of mechanics as a thoroughly independent and neutral model, useful for generalization across problems and disciplines.” When you keep fudging the numbers eventually you can no longer make them out. Here much begins to accelerate, perhaps especially tensions and/or exclusions between the aleatory/stochastic element of statistical probability and the more purely epistemological domain, generally a matter of coherent, determinable causal delineation, and always reminding yourself that you know impossibly little. Aleatory probability subtracts the autological, the principle of reason, and mobilized generative forces, fielding a kind of randomness of situated identities and making calculations about them for shits and giggles. It happens in multiple domains and persists to this day. Think of currency and commodities speculation, social media and algorithms. In the 19th century, the fundamental substance of atmospheric ether was invented in order to perform a binding autological function for people, map, and territory, making mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics actually work and bringing Descartes's God in through the back door without so much as a how-dee-doo. 

Increasingly what the benevolent systems administrator in the sky sees when he looks down upon us from his puffy aquamarine cloud are networks, webs, and what Ekeberg calls “hypologic,” whereby the intercession of a governing axiomatic introduces a new arbitrary regulatory authority, not unlike how the month of January begins our year because a powerful Roman enamoured of Janus once insisted this be the case. Who’d have called the longevity on that baby?! The hypological posits “something as under itself, in the manner of a framework, established through the retroactive unfolding of a transformation that makes its terms self-evident.” The hypological framing begins to truly operate when the governing axiomatic is repressed or naturalized/neutralized such that we participate in an unconscious framework which we never for a moment imagine to be an invented metaphysical conditionality and specialized relativity in its own right. For our metaphysical world-picture to survive—and to continue to win funding!—we have had to approach total ignorance of the nature of our own work. Einstein’s insistence that the speed of light is constant is not empirically verifiable, but rather hypologically axiomatic. And then a new hypological intercessor comes upon the scene, the singularity and black holes which swallow whole the unreconciled mathematical flotsam, though actual black holes cannot be empirically verified in any way we know. 

If Spinoza and Bergson would place scientists within the world rather than outside of it where they can preside juridicially over truth claims with gavel and gown, this already suggests politics. But it goes further than that. The rise of a new cosmology in the 20th century is concurrent with a physics that has been appropriated by the war industry and which has essentially abandoned any explicit connection to metaphysical considerations, seeking instead to negate evidence of the conditional nature of the epistemic world frame. [Academia is like the Central Intelligence Agency.] It’s a context in which Hannah Arendt is presented by Ekeberg as figuring centrally. How does the whole banal evildoer picture show play? The big bang as theory follows quickly on the heels of the atomic bomb, a boon to burgeoning nuclear science sector. Let us just look at Albert Einstein making claims about the universe: “from the standpoint of the theory of relativity…,” or “it is more satisfying to…,” or “possible only if….” This looks an awful lot like a mind formidable in its reasoning capabilities chomping at the bit of constitutive uncertainty! You can call it the scientific method or ontology instead of metaphysics, but you are nevertheless merely playing a game you made up and that you keep making up as you go.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubric, 1968)

Je vous salue, Marie (Jean-Luc Godard, 1985)

My Father in the 1990s and the Time I Went to Murder Camp [Photographs]