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 is 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]

 

Denemen Keese

 

Denemen Keese, a man of mixed race and no small amount of gumption, served nearly two tours of duty in Vietnam before the Tet Offensive pulled the ground out from under the war, early 1968, and then the whole world warped far and wide, much funhouse mirror confusion ensuing. It looked like the global cabal was about to maybe topple and the youth and factory workers were gonna, I don’t know, join arms and return us to planetary degree zero. Yeah, right. With their seventeen different kinds of Maoists who all hate each other? Denemen took note of the fact that the Japanese students made the French students look like pussies. I mean, you just never know who’s gonna suddenly disembowel themselves in a traffic roundabout, am I right? Denemen once wrote me when he was over there and asked me to tell Jane Fonda that he wasn’t a baby killer because if he’d killed any babies he hadn’t visually clocked them first and therefore hadn’t even known he’d done it. He would sometimes joke like that. It played better with some folks than with others. Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke, like they say over in Austin. How did he feel about the war and his experiences in Southeast Asia? In plain fact, he liked combat and he especially liked it on hash and heroin. The jungle just basically agreed with him and armed combat at close range thrilled him in a way that he hadn’t expected. He glorified in killing and confessed that sometimes it nauseated him to recall the blood frenzy, though his mentality as a whole could never have become so crude and inhuman were he not constantly high and facing stresses and pressures of an intensity he could never have imagined. Showing camaraderie and solidarity with your combat brothers meant despoiling the remains of the enemy; they’ve been doing it since way back. The night he heard that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, Denemen was planning on killing his commanding officer with a fragmentation grenade, a growing trend in 1968 that was actually a wide orchestrated plot involving a system of couriers and underground G.I. newspapers that funded and organized personnel for the execution/murder of officers, non-commissioned or otherwise, all this intersecting and intertwining with the trade in contraband and sex. He never would get to kill the officer he’d targeted, largely because before he could he got high on a whole sheet of acid one night and the extremely obscene scene he made, which evidently involved copious gunfire inside the base, got him punted hard and fast, drop it like it’s hot. He loved to brag that he was the first soldier they ever sent back to the U.S. to rest. Through connections in the counterculture and the drug culture, Denemen ended up befriending and then going into a long and fruitful professional partnership with former Yippie! organizer Jerry Rubin who in later years became a bit of a libertarian and a kook, like a hippie Howard Hughes or William Randolph Hearst. Denemen worked for Mr. Rubin almost twenty years until the latter passed on and Denemen served as pallbearer at his funeral. He was astonished and then giddy to recognize Jane Fonda in attendance at the funeral…as though they’d gone and grabbed Discreet Anonymous Celebrity from central casting, but Denemen Keese weren’t never nobody’s fool; he’d seen her sure as shootin’. I once asked him about Jerry Rubin and the kind of man he was. Denemen’s casual response: he died doing what he loved…jaywalking. After working for nearly two decades selling real estate and assorted chemicals in Austin, Texas, where cowpoke locals affectionately called him ‘Diphthong,’ Denemen spent his remaining years pursuing his true love—painting—in the hills just north of Taos, New Mexico.  

MC5, "Ramblin' Rose"

Phonograph Ducky Loves Old Book [Sunday Fun Day]

The four-year reign of Heliogabalus, who was slaughtered by his own guards at the age of eighteen, was characterized by performances of incest, sodomy, butchery, debauchery, and an anarchic ridicule for all forms of government. Of the many responses to the Roman Emperors, it is Antonin Artaud's extraordinary account of the life and work of Heliogabalus which most exactly aligns with those forces of uncontrollable uproar with the seisms that now seize and impel contemporary voided empires, corporealities, audiences and art.

- Stephen Barber in his introduction to Antonin Artaud's Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist (first published in 1934)

What stink of artifice.

- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

La chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931)

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

La poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951)

Albert Ayler Quintet Live in Berlin, 1966

Erlton, Magic Hour

 

Mary Halvorson's Code Girl, Artlessly Falling [Full Album]

Dates in August and September

Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, 1976)

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Lizzie overdosed on a toxic cocktail of street drugs again and I had to go pick her up at the decrepit bar near the hospital. When I came in she waved me off as though that were some kind of greeting. Lizz, I said, what the hell, girl? are you trying to land yourself dead and gone? She was drinking a water glass full of straight scotch. That’s about the size of it, shorty, she agreed. She complained that she’d been seeing visions of the serpentine underbelly of the Mother of Worms, a slithering organism beyond any scale of mass we currently comprehend. I was dismayed that Lizzie intends to go on with her tour of the northeast in August and September when all the young ones who adore her so are back at school and getting wasted like soccer hooligans and bridesmaids. I asked her why she’s so gaga over this frankly-reckless tour and she casually explained that there is a guy in Halifax selling a seaworthy vessel for personal use. 

My money guy sent me a little slip that says I don’t have any more of the do-re-mi and I believe I am supposed to take it to H&R Block and file it with those folks. They will not pity me because they will correctly assume that I am a hobo. Is a hobo a hoe-boy? Usually. On the farm you’ll find the hoe and many other toys but the more they make you play the more you’ll want to bust out of there quick quick like a bunny. Already dangerous people came out to settle these western lands after the schizzy catastrophe of Columbus and no matter how bad a motherfucker you were when you set out, by the time you got to Calgary, where the Bow and Elbow rivers charmingly conjoin and the buffalo look at you like a trespasser, a whole heap of new trauma had been added to your bundle and you couldn’t really be expected to have much regulatory control with respect to the nastier and/or thornier emotions. There is a scene right at the end of Werner Herzog’s wonderful 1976 narrative film Heart of Glass where a group of well-appointed men from late-antiquity stand on a rocky shoreline whilst sending off a small skiff full of their intrepid peers who head in the direction of the horizon just to see what is going to happen. This sort of shit-or-get-off-the-pot foolhardiness is perhaps the thing I find most endearing in people. True love means I’ll be your crash test dummy. Of course, there is also that sublime opening epilogue to Andre Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and its Icarus in shorn armour, Yefim, the peasant and artisan who builds his unwieldy flying machine and is thereafter taken for one hell of a bumpy ride.

Lizzie said I’m too thin and that I need to put on ten pounds or will no longer be given contracts to work. I asked Lizzie what she thinks of the possibility that we’ll all be immortal someday just like those Church of Perpetual Life nuts would have it. She said the most fascinating thing ever: if we gain immortality we give up fertility because mathematically you can’t have both. You see? That’s why this little bitch is so famous, dawg!

When I was a grad student in philosophy at Western University in London, Ontario back when things were a whole lot sketchier and more sub rosa, I sold weed and coke out of a small nondescript house within walking distance of campus. One day a student I vaguely recognized came in, pulled a gun, collected all my drugs, money, and jewelry, then gingerly stepped out the way he’d come. Neither of us stopped being students at Western University. I saw him around campus semi-regularly. I was upset and dismayed, to be sure, I had never really encountered gumption of this kind previously and there wasn’t any clear road to the attainment of satisfaction from my end of the deal. Well, that is until I told my friend Jay, former high school football star and ex con and during the period we’re addressing a dope fiend and passable lady’s man with some kind of government income that never got brought up. He was also scary and unpredictable. The son of a small town Ontario sheriff, Jay had adopted the attitude that he could talk however he wanted to law enforcement and this really scared the shit out of me. Normally I did not like being in a car with him. However, many months after the initial incident with the armed-robbery-in-private-residence, I happened to tell Jay and Jay predictably lit-up with mirth, zeal, and mayhem. I had a pretty good sense that we were about to break the law a little more than I had ever wanted or intended to break it. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out like that awful Irréversible, the nasty Gaspar Noé movie that was still pretty new! In all honesty? It did actually get pretty close to that bad, though the hard part for me was not knowing how bad it was going to get or how soon it would be over. We found the guy and Jay gave him a good going over, warm up—and I saw for sure that he lost some teeth—before throwing him in the back of the Dodge and driving him to the outskirts of town where he was dumped in a ditch with a gun pointed at him and ordered to take his pants off. Once the guy had managed to get his pants all the way down, Jay signalled me with a nod and we jumped quick quick back in the truck and sped out of there with a screech.     

Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984)

This That Is and Isn't

Erlton Represent

This is me. This is me in a Tiffany display window working a run in my garter in the red light district of the mad and infamous. This is I, the slut with the sappy sermonizing. This is I spy with my little eye-in-the-sky (something that is pumpernickel). What kind of a drunk am I? Is it that specific bright-eyed and bushy-tailed guy in the A.A. meeting who says his drug of choice is “more” and has stories about snorting crystal with seven luchadors and a blind Uruguayan pimp and things of that nature? No. I am a drunk of dark impossibly depthless depths and cruel tongue like Patty Highsmith. This is me, a low bottom drunk even though there is only one bottom and that bottom is death, the crack of your neck hitting pay dirt, a real Dustbusting bonanza. In active alcoholism I had my kidneys fail a number of times and received a blood transfusion. The first kidney shutdown experience was so fucking nightmarish—certainly the worst thing I had ever endured up until then—that it would not be likely to enter the mind of a normal person (i.e. a normie) that I would in contravention of all sense proceed to go and do it to myself a couple more times. This is why the old-school recovery crusaders describe the disease of addition as “cunning, baffling, and powerful.” One final reminder: physical craving and mental obsession are the two principal symptoms of addiction. But surely you already know all this. Do I belong to any organization whose foremost principle is that of anonymity? I’m afraid that I don’t really know how to answer that question.

This is me. I am Mimi. I am lionine and on the decline, pleased as a peck of pickled peppers. I have had a grisly fucking run of it so far this decade and because I don’t care when—not if, naturally—I die...well...nobody knows how far I’ll go. Not far, champ, I assure ye. I get dizzy getting out of bed. I am good at eliciting disgust and contempt. I am very often sad. I often wish folks were better able to apprehend that I have a mood disorder, not a cognitive one. What are you gonna do, that’s people and places and things outside your micromanaging-inclined control again, isn’t it? I remember that when I was hospitalized at Rockyview following the psychosis, public nudity, and frostbite incident, I begged the doctors to send me to Switzerland to be euthanized, still pretty loopy, and I can state without doubt that I had Jean-Luc Godard at least part in mind because of how deeply I had been touched upon discovering that Godard’s longterm common-law partner and creative collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville, who he had been with since the late-70s though the two were amicably separated and no longer residing together, had walked arm and arm with the great Swiss filmmaker to his final appointment [see photo directly above]. Clock that one as a plenty dignified exit!

Marianne Faithfull, "As Tears Go By"