"The ultimate shadow": Consciousness and the Human in Kubrick and Dick

            1968 was an interesting year for science fiction, primarily due to two historic moments in the SF tradition: the production of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the publication of Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep?  Of even more interest is the mutual concern shared by these two prominent cultural texts: the research into artificial consciousness, and the implications this holds for how we define “the human.”

            Artificial intelligence needs to be separated from artificial consciousness.  Artificial intelligence designates the ability to operate at vastly complex levels of logical computation; this typically includes such actions as algorithmic functions, games of chess, and even linguistic exchanges.  Artificial consciousness, on the other hand, must imply the ability to reflect on these actions; to consider mathematical paradoxes, to relish in the victory over one’s opponent, to speculate on the etiolations (to borrow a term from J.L. Austin) of language in instances of communication.  In most cases, artificial intelligence (henceforth referred to as “AI”) seems to come first.  Consciousness remains an uncertain and mysterious concept, and theorists from across the board – neuroscientists, philosophers, biologists, mathematicians, psychologists, the list goes on – have proffered numerous explanations for its existence.  Despite my relative ignorance in the field of neuroscience and biology, my limited understanding of consciousness proceeds from the following basic assumption: consciousness is what I refer to as an emergent phenomenon.  It is the result of incalculably complex systems of matter and biology: of what Peter Watts calls “chemicals and electricity” (Watts 41).  Consciousness thus does not require a central, core “self” around which to congeal or collect.  The self only appears in retrospect, after consciousness has already emerged out of neural and synaptic networks.

            This, at least, is the argument that must be adopted if we wish to look constructively and intellectually at Kubrick’s 2001 and Dick’s Electric Sheep.  The HAL 9000 onboard computer – perhaps the most iconic character from Kubrick’s film, and referred to as “Hal” – is not constructed on the basis of a core self or identity.  Its identity only takes hold after its complexity allows it to achieve consciousness.  The same must be said of Dick’s Nexus-6 model androids as well.  The ability to conceive of oneself as a self requires the ability to reflect upon oneself; and this reflection is an identifying mark of consciousness.  Among other things, such reflection also permits conscious organisms to contemplate ethical or empathic issues, and it is here that Dick’s novel stakes its primary concern, as evidenced by the importance of the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test:

Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida.  For one thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider’s ability to survive.  It would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his prey. (Dick 455)

The Voigt-Kampff Empathy test is introduced in the novel as a means by which to verify whether an organism is human or android.  Since the androids all look remarkably human, the only way to tell if they are not is to put to them a series of questions that are traditionally considered to elicit some empathic response.

            The question that inevitably rides on this description betrays a certain paranoia: if androids are advanced enough, can they not mimic conscious/empathic reactions?  We might be compelled to answer “yes” to this question, but we would have serious implications to consider.  Would an organism not require consciousness in order to mimic consciousness, or empathy?  Essentially, can consciousness and mimicking consciousness be differentiated?  Are they any different?  Organisms can certainly mimic intelligence, as argued by theorists such as John Searle in his Chinese room thought experiment; but how would an organism mimic consciousness?  Dick continues to blur the boundaries between human and non-human by introducing human characters that appear to exhibit no empathic faculties, particularly the bounty hunter Phil Resch:

“If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex.  Wake up and face yourself, Deckard.  You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android – nothing more, nothing less.  I felt that way, on one occasion.  When I had just started bounty hunting.  Don’t let it get you down; you’ll heal.  What’s happened is that you’ve got your order reversed.  Don’t kill her – or be present when she’s killed – and then feel physically attracted.  Do it the other way.”

Rick stared at him.  “Go to bed with her first-”

“-and then kill her,” Phil Resch said succinctly.  His grainy, hardened smile remained. (Dick 537)

The novel’s protagonist, Rick Deckard, questions where the “inhumanity” lies between himself and Resch.  At one point he thinks the following: “There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman about Phil Resch’s reactions; it’s me” (536).  For Deckard, the inhumanity does not lie in Resch’s treating of an android inhumanely, but in his own human love/empathy for an inhuman organism.  Dick challenges his readers to reorient themselves in regard to what constitutes a conscious entity; furthermore, to what constitutes a human.

            Kubrick puts a similar challenge to his viewers.  In 2001, Hal is arguably the most human character, and the computer’s actions reveal a far more reflective and conscious entity than the single, circular red light indicates.  Perhaps most revealing is Hal’s paranoia upon learning that the ship’s two operative astronauts (there are others, but they remain in a programmed, monitored state of prolonged sleep – all their life functions reduced to little more than saved hard drive on a computer that has been hibernated), Dave and Frank, plan on disconnecting him (“him” also being how Dave and Frank refer to Hal).  This scene occurs immediately after Hal’s report concerning a faulty communications device is discovered to be incorrect.  Dave and Frank test the device, and they can find nothing wrong with it; Hal then suggests that they replace the device and let it fail in order to ascertain the source of the fault.  Hal proclaims that he cannot possibly be wrong in his assessment, and that it can only be attributable to “human error.”  Dave and Frank express agreement, but then quickly conceal themselves (or so they think) within one of their ship’s pods in order to discuss decommissioning the computer.  The close of this scene (and of the first half of the film) shows a shot apparently from Hal’s perspective, completely silent, but in full view of Dave’s and Frank’s lips moving behind the glass window of the pod.

The nuances of just this sequence of events are highly suggestive.  Dave and Frank excuse themselves by acting as though one of Dave’s instruments has a mechanical issue that he wants Frank to look at; this is, of course, merely a front for evading Hal’s surveillance.  Dave asks Hal to rotate the pod; after Hal does so, Dave turns off the microphone in the pod and again asks Hal to rotate it.  Hal fails to do so, thus confirming Dave’s and Frank’s mutual understanding that the computer can no longer hear them, and they can talk in private.  In retrospect, however, Hal is revealed to have been knowledgeable the entire time, meaning that when he was asked to rotate the pod a second time, he was acting as though he could not hear.  The origins of this suspicion must be traced back at least as far as Dave’s and Frank’s excusal from Hal’s presence: Hal suspected that Dave and Frank were not going to discuss a mechanical snag in a minor shipboard instrument, but were going to talk about him/it/Hal.

The revelation of Hal’s suspicion in turn reveals that he is able to conceive of himself as a self; the presumably faux-emotion in his voice, and his description of himself as a third member of the crew, are not merely theatrical tactics to make it “easier” for Dave and Frank to talk with Hal.  Hal is genuinely able to conceive of himself as a subject, as something (or someone) that Dave and Frank might talk about, and experiences an emotional reaction to this conscious realization.  Dave’s eventual decommissioning of Hal also suggests that Hal not only conceives of himself as a subject about which Dave and Frank might ponder or speak, but that Hal also conceives of his own interior self; he begs Dave to “stop” while disconnecting him, and in what is perhaps the most heartbreaking scene of the film, he tells Dave: “I’m afraid.”  Although his voice does not carry the strong emotional tone that one might expect in a human voice, the plea sounds equally – if not more – genuine.  He tells Dave that his “mind is going,” and he dies (an appropriate term in this context) singing a song that his creator taught him.  Skeptics might question whether Hal’s fear was genuine, or whether he was trying to manipulate Dave’s emotions in order to make him stop.  I, however, am not certain that there is any difference.  Hal’s ability to understand Dave’s emotions, and to reflect on the impact his own words would have, suggest not only mimicry of consciousness, but an emergence of consciousness.  What we would call “artificial” in Hal becomes, in its manifestation, as real as any human consciousness or empathy.  This characterization raises yet another important question: why must Hal’s consciousness (as well as the consciousness of the Nexus-6 androids in Dick’s novel) come to assume the character of “the human”?

Hal’s representation in 2001: A Space Odyssey not only calls into question what “the human” really is, but also betrays a formal inability to represent inhuman consciousness as anything other than human.  Consciousness, so to speak, is always only human consciousness.  There are, of course, logical reasons for this: how would an audience know it was looking at something conscious if that object was represented as a conscious form unfamiliar, or inaccessible, to humans?  Furthermore, the audience would not be able to engage in the intellectual debate that Kubrick invites his viewers into.  Questions of what constitutes “the human,” how we identify “the human,” and how we ethically treat something that possesses ambiguous “human” qualities supersede questions of how alternative consciousness (i.e. inhuman consciousness) might be formally represented.  For Kubrick (and for most science fiction involving artificial intelligence), consciousness must assume a recognizably human form in order to be intellectually assessed.

Despite its cinematic grandeur and historic importance, 2001: A Space Odyssey betrays traces of traditional anthropocentrism and teleology even while pushing against the boundaries of human thought.  Consciousness emerges in the film as a human apparatus, as something that artificial constructs strive toward, and as something that possesses the quasi-spiritual privilege of transcending itself (with the help the obviously superior race that lurks beyond the black monolith).  Kubrick does not shy away from human atrocities such as war – symbolized in the image of the bone-weapon – but ultimately human consciousness, even with all its downfalls, remains “chosen,” so to speak, by the unseen engineers (this narrative appears more blatantly in Ridley Scott’s recent film Prometheus, wherein the aliens are actually dubbed “engineers” by the human characters, although the implications are more dour than in Kubrick’s film).  The alien monolith appears in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence immediately prior to the advent of “tool-being” (a term used by Graham Harman in reference to Martin Heidegger); again on the Moon, immediately prior to humanity’s Jupiter Mission; and again for Dave Bowman before his transcendence as the “star child” (a term popularized not by the film, but by Arthur C. Clarke in his related books).  The representation of Hal as a human consciousness reinforces the narrative’s concern with consciousness as human, and with history as human history/teleology.

The formal inability to portray alternative representations of consciousness persists in Dick’s novel as well; despite anything we might try, artistic modes such as literature and cinema remain confined by the very limits of our consciousness and sensory faculties.  That which we make reflects the consciousness we exhibit.  However, Dick is able (due to the nature of the novel form) to explore the ideological implications of consciousness more than Kubrick is able to.  In a poignant scene, Deckard has a conversation with Wilbur Mercer, the founder of the futuristic earthly religion, Mercerism, whose followers experience Mercer’s suffering via Empathy Boxes.  Mercer tells Deckard the following: “‘You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go.  It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.  At some point, every creature which lives must do so.  It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life.  Everywhere in the universe’” (561).  Implicit in the foundation, or core, or self of every organism exists a dehiscence.  The violation of identity reveals the annihilation of it: life’s “basic condition” is a fluidity that prohibits any consistent or stable identity.

The successes of 2001 and Electric Sheep lie in their profound ability to destabilize the human, and because of their simultaneous appearance, 1968 marks a historic shift in the science fiction tradition.  Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a 1953 novel that describes an invasion of Earth by infinitely intellectually superior organisms, unveils its teleology as its narrative progresses; humanity, although not the most intelligent or powerful species in the universe, plays a monumental role in what appears to be the inevitable formation of what Karellen, one of the alien invaders (called “Overlords”), calls the “Overmind.”  The novel can be read in multiple ways: as a critique of religion, a political approval of communism in light of Cold War hostilities, an exploration of utopianism, etc.  None of these fully explain the novel’s concerns, and ultimately the most obvious interpretation is the best: the novel explores the possibility of a shift in consciousness and how humanity might play a role in the teleological movement of the universe.  Much of pre-1960 science fiction remains steeped in teleological tendencies; the affirmation of the human, or of an ultimate plan for the universe, or of the strengths and shortcomings of human consciousness as necessary and purposeful.  In their respective texts, Kubrick and Dick introduce something radical and groundbreaking into Western culture; not by relegating human consciousness to a lower tier of the universe’s hierarchy (as Clarke does in Childhood’s End, which still maintains humanity’s teleological importance), but by uncovering the uncertainty of what the human is.  The center no longer holds: the texts of Kubrick and Dick, and many subsequent works of the science fiction tradition, illuminate the human not as an affirmative and natural identity, but as an epistemological construct.  The self, and the human, are illusions.

This argument is not intended to convince the actuality of selflessness, or the impossibility of identity, or the unimportance of the human.  Even if “the self” is an effect of consciousness, and not a central core around which consciousness forms, it remains of importance for those who project it into themselves.  The argument I am making is that these works provide us with radically alternative perspectives from which to consider our own existence so that we might better understand organisms and entities which might appear to us as inferior or unintelligent, or even unconscious.  The purpose of blurring the boundaries between the human and the machine, or artificial and actual consciousness, is not to emphasize that humans do not possess consciousness, but to emphasize that our perspective is limited; and furthermore, that this limit might prevent us from effectively treating or dealing with that which is “other.”

Two years prior to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? French theorist Michel Foucault published his now seminal work on Western epistemological structures in the human sciences, The Order of Things.  In the introduction, Foucault writes the following:

Strangely enough, man [i.e. human] – the study of whom is supposed by the naïve to be the oldest investigation since Socrates – is probably no more than a kind of rift in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determined by the new position he has so recently taken up in the field of knowledge.  Whence all the chimeras of the new humanisms, all the facile solutions of an ‘anthropology’ understood as a universal reflection on man, half-empirical, half-philosophical.  It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form. (Foucault xxiii)

This remarkable statement contains several radical and unsettling claims: that the human is an “invention,” that it is less than two centuries old, and that it will “disappear.”  Finally, Foucault’s admission of feeling “relief” at this might also be taken by some readers as a kind of vulgar misanthropy.  However, there are more nuances than many readers are willing to admit, and these are further revealed once one absorbs Foucault’s entire text.  Specifically, Foucault laments the human not as a biological organism capable of experiencing pleasure or pain, but as an epistemological construct; that is, as a construct of knowledge, an “invention.”  This invention, Foucault argues, shapes the way in which humanity conceives of itself and its place in the universe.  It influences the way humans categorize other organisms, the way they hierarchize and historicize, the way they impose boundaries and make evaluative judgments.  In short, Foucault wishes to denaturalize the assumptions that human beings have taken to be absolute.  The disappearance of humanity, which in science fiction is often represented literally, is understood by Foucault as an epistemological shift.  This disappearance would present human organisms with a new system of knowledge by which they might observe and exist within the universe.

            Science fiction, like surrealism and gothic literature before it, challenges its readers to brave the “ultimate shadow” of existence; to dare to see the world in new ways at the cost of its own perceptive destruction.  Humanity must see the values and beliefs that it takes for granted as propagated by the structure of its own consciousness; ideology, it seems, takes root at even the most basic biological practices.  Only by recognizing the contingency of our own capacities as conscious organisms can we ever hope to radically position ourselves – ethically, politically, and existentially – next to the alien, the android, the “other.”

Works Cited

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood’s End. New York: Random House, 2001. Print.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Four Novels of the 1960s. Ed. Jonathan

Lethem. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2007. Print.

Kubrick, Stanley. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. Film.

Watts, Peter. Starfish. New York: Tor, 1999. Print.

On Knowledge as Such and On the Knowledge of Man

DISCLAIMER: This post introduces a new direction I hope to take in the future, although not with every post I make.  I focus in the following essay on a specific work of nonfiction; although I still certainly intend to write about SF books and cinema, I also hope to, every once in a while, focus on a piece of theoretical or philosophical nonfiction that has occupied my fancy.  I have amended my "Welcome" post in order to account for this shift.  I do hope that any studies of nonfiction works taken up here will contribute to my studies of SF fiction in the future.  Finally, I hope that this slight alteration won't scare away too many readers.  Many thanks, and happy new year!

“Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might, from an impersonal point of view, suffer only a very trivial imperfection.  In describing the world, subjectivity is a vice.  Kant spoke of himself as having effected a ‘Copernican revolution’, but he would have been more accurate if he had spoken of a ‘Ptolemaic counter-revolution’, since he put Man back at the centre [sic] from which Copernicus had dethroned him.”

~Bertrand Russell

           

I include the word “man” in the title of this post in order to further invoke the title of a rather famous essay, on which I will elaborate in the following post.  Of course, the word “man” should be read synonymously as “human,” and I ask that any gendered biases be forgiven.  I like to think that if the writer had been alive today, he would have appealed to our sensibilities and used the word “human” instead.

This post derives its title from two primary sources: Bertrand Russell’s quote on knowledge (cited above), and Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.”  My interest in Benjamin’s essay stems from something of a fascination with it rather than an academic responsibility.  It is a difficult piece, and I don’t proclaim any right or ability to faithfully and effectively explicate his argument, which incorporates an odd blend of Saussurean linguistics, historical materialism, and more-than-slightly mystical theology.  However, I do perceive a potent speculative capability in Benjamin’s work, which I hope to explore in this post.

            This speculative capability resides in Benjamin’s emphasis on language’s material issuance.  Near the end of the essay, he writes:

Just as the language of poetry is partly, if not solely, founded on the name language of man, it is very conceivable that the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing languages, that in them we find a translation of the languages of things into an infinitely higher language, which may still be of the same sphere.  We are concerned here with nameless, nonacoustic languages, languages issuing from matter; here we should recall the material community of things in their communication [emphasis added]. (Benjamin 330).

Benjamin does not define “language as such” as strictly human; human language merely names things, but the limits of “language as such” lie beyond naming: “It should not be accepted that we know of no languages other than that of man, for this is untrue.  We only know of no naming language other than that of man; to identify naming language with language as such is to rob linguistic theory of its deepest insights.  It is therefore the linguistic being of man to name things” (317).  Beyond the narrow limits of naming, language subsists in all things and takes infinite forms.

            Benjamin delineates two important concepts that require clarification if we are to continue exploring his essay: linguistic being and mental being.  Of these two concepts, he writes the following: “Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a language, which means: it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being.  Mental being is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication.  What is communicable in a mental entity is its linguistic entity” (316).  The linguistic being loses something along the way; it cannot communicate the entirety, or totality, of the mental being, but only the portion of it that is communicable.  Acknowledging the danger of slipping into tautology, Benjamin argues: “This proposition is untautological, for it means: that which in a mental entity is communicable is its language.  On this ‘is’ (equivalent to “is immediately”) everything depends.  Not that which appears most clearly in its language is communicable in a mental entity […] but this capacity for communication is language itself” (316).  Linguistic being testifies to its own existence in language, and this being would go unnoticed (indeed, would be nonexistent) were it not for the expressive capacity of language.  Benjamin has taken something of a brief detour in order to drive home the point that language resides in things themselves.  This is something of a shocker for those of us traditionally educated in the Lacanian symbolic order, the boundary of language that the subject must pass through, so to speak.  In contrast (and prior) to Lacan’s notion of the symbolic, Benjamin radically removes language as something that all things must pass through, and reestablishes it as something that all things inherently possess: “It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language.  Languages therefore have no speaker, if this means someone communicates through these languages” (315-6).

            It is worth spending just a few brief moments on this argument since it illuminates Benjamin’s intellectual mysticism (and, as I will argue, speculative potency).  An important point underlies his argument: all language communicates itself, thus exposing the linguistic being of things and the mental being of humans.  Language performs this binary function simultaneously, but Benjamin distinctly separates them.  The things that human beings name do not communicate the mental being of humanity through their names, but only their own linguistic being that corresponds to a portion of their mental being; naming is the linguistic mode, and process, by which human beings communicate among one another, navigating the world of things.  The mental being of humanity, in contrast, communicates itself in the general act of naming; in a kind of emergent consequence, the entire complex system of human language communicates humanity’s mental being.  Not individual names of things, but the complex nature of human language itself; therein resides the mental being of humankind.

            From here, Benjamin drafts a kind of hierarchy of languages, and this leads him into regions currently dismissed as either mystical, or hopelessly speculative.  Benjamin prompts this speculative critique by means of a question: to whom does humanity communicate itself?  The short answer (Benjamin’s answer) is: “in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God” (318).  I think we all saw that coming; but the essay presents material that concerns more than just theologians.  For Benjamin, human language – naming – communicates the linguistic being of the things it names, and the mental being of the organism (i.e. human) that uses it:

Naming is that by which nothing beyond it is communicated, and in which language communicates itself absolutely.  In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language […] Name as the heritage of human language therefore vouches for the fact that language as such is the mental being of man; and only for this reason is the mental being of man, alone among all mental entities, communicable without residue.  On this is founded the difference between human language and the language of things.  But because the mental being of man is language itself, he cannot communicate himself by it but only in it. (318)

Humans cannot communicate themselves “by” language; they can name themselves, but this only captures a portion of being, the portion that is communicable by naming.  The entire mental being of man emerges only in the presentation of language itself, of the complex human practice of naming.  Benjamin thus aligns this presentation of language, the emergence of such a complex system, with the full mental being of humankind.

            This assertion leads Benjamin to the notion of logos, the Fall of Man, and the problem of revelation, all devoutly theological concepts.  Revelation appears as a kind of mediating term between “what is expressed and expressible and what is inexpressible and unexpressed” (320).  Revelation guides Benjamin through a sometimes confusing explication of expressibility; revelation, he contends, suggests that

the expression that is linguistically most existent (i.e., most fixed) is linguistically the most rounded and definitive; in a word, the most expressed is at the same time the purely mental.  Exactly this […] is meant by the concept of revelation, if it takes the inviolability of the word as the only and sufficient condition and characteristic of the divinity of the mental being that is expressed in it.  The highest mental region of religion is (in the concept of revelation) at the same time the only one that does not know the inexpressible. (321)

The expressible, of course, relies on sound; but “[t]hings are denied the pure formal principle language – sound” (321).  The languages of things, thus, are imperfect; rather, things must “communicate to one another through a more or less material community.  This community is immediate and infinite, like every linguistic communication; it is magical (for there is also a magic of matter)” (321).  Benjamin states that human language possesses a feature incommensurable with other “thing-ly” languages; namely, it operates within a network that is immaterial and (as has been shown) “purely mental,” and its immaterial and mental power manifests in the phenomenon of sound (321).  Benjamin even finds mystical support for this argument in the Old Testament: “The Bible expresses this symbolic fact when it says that God breathes his breath into man: this is at once life and mind and language” (321).  With God as Benjamin’s potential prime mover, I here want to posit a break with Benjamin’s argument.  We will continue to cite it, occasionally, and will indeed have cause to return to it; but for the time being, this is where we part ways.

            Benjamin lays a radical framework for language not as an apparatus in the Lacanian/poststructuralist sense, but as a form of being inherent in things themselves.  It does not exist in its own right, as an independent form, but exists as appearance, as presentation; it forms part of the being of things.  I will always remember when, during a conversation with him in his office at the University of Chicago, Bill Brown described Benjamin as trying to locate a “fossil language.”  At the time I was unsure what that entailed, but I believe that it illuminates Benjamin’s speculative streak, latent though it may be; I intend the speculative potentiality of his argument as an alternative to the more obvious theological program apparent in the essay.  The speculative question can be posed in the following manner: what if things, rather than being possessed of a certain divine being (i.e. a being “breathed” into them by God), instead possessed language strictly in its material form?  This would not be a language bestowed upon things by a higher power, or a metaphysical essence that resists representation or human access (as in Heideggerian phenomenological thought), but a strong persistence of the capacity for communication in inanimate things.  Even if things don’t actively “commune” with animate subjects (animals, humans, aliens, etc.), their potential for harboring language is not precluded; we have to imagine that language does not consist of ideas, nor does it derive from consciousness.  We have to imagine, for a moment, that language is nothing more than matter.

            Language usually ascends to the highest rung of idealistic representation in critical circles.  Quentin Meillassoux most recently emphasizes this point in his book After Finitude: “Generally speaking, statements are ideal insofar as they possess a signifying reality; but their eventual referents are not necessarily ideal (the cat on the mat is real, though the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ is ideal.)” (qtd. in Brassier 86).  Language appears “ideal” because its content is referential; the subject of a sentence is merely represented by the sentence, but actually exists elsewhere.  Language presents an “idea” of its subject.  While this is true, I want to insist that language fulfills a far more powerful task; just as the very system of language communicates the mental being of humankind (in Benjamin’s argument), so the system of languages in things (whatever these languages may be) also exhibit emergent qualities.  I want to distance myself from Benjamin’s hierarchy of languages wherein human language possesses a greater power to communicate humanity’s mental being because humanity’s mental being is language; the languages of things, presumably, is somehow inferior, or lacking: “the mental entity [of a thing] that communicates itself in language is not language itself but something to be distinguished from it” (Benjamin 315).  Only the mental being of humankind is language; the mental being of things, on the other hand, falls short.  What does the language of a thing then communicate?  Its linguistic being must correspond to a portion of its mental being; just as human names do not express humanity’s mental being, but only portions of the mental beings of things, the units of thing-ly language do not express its own mental being.  We encounter an obvious dilemma at this point: if human language is made up of names, then what are thing-ly languages made up of?

            We must recall that things need not partake of naming in order to partake of language.  Language subsists in things even if they do not practice the art of naming.  But what is this language?  What do the systems of thing-ly languages communicate, and to whom do they communicate it?  How can we fathom language, in a non-naming mode, fashioned into the very matter of the world itself?  In a segment concerning Schelling, in his recent book Less Than Nothing, Slavoj Žižek writes:

In his most daring speculative attempt in Weltalter, Schelling tries to reconstruct (to ‘narrate’) in this way the very rise of logos, of articulated discourse, out of the pre-logical Ground: logos is an attempt to resolve the debilitating deadlock of this Ground.  This is why the two true highpoints of German Idealism are the middle Schelling and the mature Hegel: they did what no one else dared to do – they introduced a gap into the Ground itself. (Žižek 13).

Logos is the divine word, the “breath” of life and language bestowed upon the world by God (and from which is derived our word “logic”); the “pre-logical Ground” is thus the realm of dead, inanimate matter prior to this breathing.  It is the actual, material world prior to the advent of language and history, or what Meillassoux refers to as the “ancestral realm” (Meillassoux 10).  This ancestral realm remains vastly separated from human experience, having existed prior not only to human life, but all life (Meillassoux situates ancestrality roughly contemporaneously with the accretion of the earth), not to mention human language, logic, and knowledge.  If we avoid the solution that God breathed language into all things, then I want to suggest that language has subsisted in things since the very accretion of matter in universe.  If language is material, instead of ideal, then language might have been a consistent element in things since their very material accumulation.  Indeed, language itself is matter.

            The meaning that arises between signifying statements and human linguists is thus, once again, an emergent phenomenon.  Meaning does not inhere in things, nor even in language itself; rather, the complexity of all systems of language results in phenomena that cannot be accounted for when observing singular linguistic units.  Benjamin writes that humankind “alone has a language that is complete both in its universality and in its intensity” (Benjamin 319).  Benjamin insists here on the fact that human language strives to name all things; but names taken at random, in their singularity and independence, cannot reveal either their own meaning or the mental being of humanity.  Meaning among names comes about only through their difference and distinction from one another; meaning is differential.  A word references something, or means something, because it does not reference something else.  Thus, only the entire system of language can ground meaning among its units; furthermore, it reveals the mental being of its practitioners.  Material conditions can explain, and account for, all such emergent phenomena.  Specifically, emergence theorizes how immensely complex patterns and systems can arise from combinations of simple units.  If viewed in the context of emergence theory, Benjamin’s essay might in fact demonstrate how a collective “superconsciousness” could emerge out of the system of human languages; the complex mental being of humanity.  I want to push this idea to include not only human language, but the languages of things as well.  The relevance and practicality of such an idea may seem elusive; but I don’t intend this post as a means to decipher the language of things.  Rather, I want to assess the consequences of language as matter and emergent phenomenon.

            Subsisting within all matter, language would ground an ontological division – as Žižek calls it, the “gap.”  This is because language establishes that which is communicable within matter, and that which is not; through the implementation of its language (e.g. naming for humans), matter cannot communicate everything about itself or the subject of its language.  It can only communicate that which is capable of being communicated.  If language, in this speculative material sense, indeed subsists within matter, then all matter naturally contains a dehiscence within itself.  There is always-already a separation between that which can be communicated in matter, and that which cannot.  This notion conjures the Heideggerian quality of “earth”: “We call this ground the earth.  What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet.  Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as such.  In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent” (Heidegger 168).  However, we have to distinguish Benjamin’s linguistic project from Heidegger temporal-ontological project, because Heidegger’s “earth” relates to something of the perceptive, or sensory, imperfections of humankind; that is, the fault lies with our own inability to properly represent something of things to ourselves.  In Benjamin’s formulation, more radically and speculatively, this imperfection must reside already in the materiality of things.

            How did language achieve this paradoxical position in reality?  Language is, at the same time, both a referential material and a phenomenon of matter.  It refers to that which is communicable in things, but it is also part and parcel of things.  How does language, if it is a material phenomenon, refer to itself?  Benjamin points out that “[a]ll language communicates itself,” but what is the language of language?  We seem to fall, at this point, into an infinite regress of languages and meta-languages.  Benjamin, once again, offers us some assistance:

It is whether mental being [of both humans and things] can from the point of view of linguistic theory be described as of linguistic nature.  If mental being is identical with linguistic being, then a thing, by virtue of its mental being, is a medium of communication, and what is communicated in it is – in accordance with its mediating relationship – precisely this medium (language) itself.  Language is thus the mental being of things. (Benjamin 319-20)

We arrive here at the crux of the entire movement.  Earlier we noted that the mental being of humanity is language; here Benjamin tells us that language is also the mental being of things.  This coheres with Benjamin’s notion of revelation and expressibility; the more firmly rooted in the mind, the more concretely “thought,” the more coherently it can be expressed in language.  Somewhere along the way, humans lost touch with this primordial, original, divine language of things that allowed them to “speak” the mental being of things:

The language of things can pass into the language of knowledge and name only through translation – as many translations, so many languages – once man has fallen from the paradisiac state that knew only one language […] The paradisiac language of man must have been one of perfect knowledge; whereas later all knowledge is again infinitely differentiated in the multiplicity of language, was indeed forced to differentiate itself on a lower level as creation in name. (326-7)

Our “postmodern” historical position allows us to recognize that any pristine, originary language is an ideological illusion.  The ultimate language of the creative breath provides the grounding for Benjamin’s linguistic hierarchy; but we can transpose his framework onto a speculative notion of thing-ly language.  Benjamin argues that what transpired in the Fall of Man was “the birth of the human word, in which name no longer lives intact, and which has stepped out of name language, the language of knowledge, from what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become expressly, as it were externally, magic” (327).  All we need to do is recognize that the “fall” never took place; language, whether human or thing-ly, has always been the source of gaps in matter.  It is always “stepped out” of itself, subsisting as matter and yet somehow reflexively referencing the material in which it subsists.

            That which is linguistic acts as a medium; but mediums, mediating apparatuses, are material.  Even the “ideas” we propose to think, the images conjured when someone else speaks, are nothing more than the reactions between neurons and synapses firing in our brains.  The meaning expressed in these “ideas” is nothing more than an emergent phenomenon resulting from the vastness and complexity of the entirety of language itself.  In order to achieve the grounding illusion of language (the centeredness of meaning), it must appear as a closed system; but it remains far from closed.  Language is infinite, spiraling always further and further out of control, adapting and evolving, continuing to sever itself from itself.  Benjamin suggests that, prior to the Fall, language somehow possessed an immediate quality; only after the Fall did it become a means of mediation.  But we know that language always mediates, can do nothing but mediate; because language material like everything else, and as matter it effects a radical split in the matter in which it inheres.  By its very communicable being, matter suffers an irreparable rupture.

            The title of this post suggests an analogous relationship between language and knowledge.  Knowledge could not exist without language, and knowledge itself is susceptible to the cultural limits of language, as thinkers like Michel Foucault have taught us.  But if language subsists in all things, then might we conclude that there is also a knowledge of things?  What does this mean?  If we follow Benjamin’s lead, then a knowledge of things is not a metaphysical essence that permeates all things, waiting for humans to discover it; it is not a divine power, an animistic mana that resides in the very earth.  Rather, a knowledge of things would merely be that which can be known about them.  Just as the linguistic being of things is that which is communicable in them, so is a knowledge of things that which can be known about them.  But does this not suggest that there is something that cannot be known about things?  Something that eludes human perception?

            Here we will avoid what Alain Badiou calls the “Great Temptation,” a concept explained by Ray Brassier in his book Nihil Unbound (a book that performs fantastic explications of the philosophical projects of both Meillassoux and Badiou).  Brassier writes that at the heart of matter we encounter a split, a fissure, effected by being’s consistent presentation of its own inconsistency (for Badiou, on whom Brassier comments, axiomatic set theory provides the ontological basis for this argument).  Essentially, this fissure always-already subsists within matter prior to any human, or cognitive, engagement with it.  The flaw lies not in human apperception, but in actual material noumena; an incommensurability exists between being and its presentation: “this is not, as mystics and negative theologians would have it, because being can only be presented as “absolutely Other’: ineffable, un-presentable, inaccessible via the structures of rational thought and therefore only approachable through some superior or initiatory form of non-conceptual experience.  This is the ‘Great Temptation’” (Brassier 107).  The great temptation is to insist that part of reality – some mystical, supernatural, metaphysical essence – must remain unknowable to us, in a Kantian sense (i.e. we can think the noumenon, but we cannot know it).  This, Brassier and Badiou insist, is misguided; in fact, we can know the “thing itself” because this rupture, or fissure, or lack, which we perceive as a hole in our perception, is nothing more than an actually existing hole in the thing.  The blind spot does not prohibit our knowledge of the thing; it is a part of the thing:

Consequently, the metaontological concept of presentation is that of anti-phenomenon; a split noumenon which vitiates every form of intellectual intuition insofar as it embodies the unobjectifiable dehiscence whereby, in exempting itself from the consistency which it renders possible, structure unleashes the very inconsistency it is obliged to foreclose.  The law of presentation conjoins the authorization of consistency and the prohibition of inconsistency in an unpresentable caesura wherein the deployment and subtraction of structure coincide. (107)

Benjamin’s fossil language, like Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil, exposes and occupies a space once thought impossible for humans to detect; a space precluded by the imperfection of human senses and perceptive faculties.  This does not mean that the human organism, with all its senses and strange consciousness, is a perfect sensory entity, prepared for the reception of external stimuli and the perception of the noumenon.  The next piece of the puzzle lies in recognizing this gap, this fissure in things, the rupture of matter, in our very selves.  We must level the human, put it on par with everything else of which we have been speaking: we must see the human as a thing.  The human organism, the human thing, drenched in its thingliness and replete with all its misgivings and shortcomings (the blind spot right in front of our face, our inability to consciously access 100% of our brains, that same consciousness that effectively removes us from our animalistic mode of survival-existence…) cannot entirely conceptualize and understand itself.  Today neuroscience and philosophy of mind are plagued by questions about consciousness: what it is, how it arose, how it is changing, etc.  Rather than perceive those gaps, those caesuras, as spaces of knowledge yet to be filled in, perhaps we should reorient ourselves.  Perhaps the fissures we cannot seem to fill in are not fissures in our knowledge of ourselves; perhaps they are fissures in ourselves.

"Literary Singularities": a few words on M. John Harrison's 'Light'

“Information might be a substance.  Can you imagine that?”

~M. John Harrison, Light

            Can you imagine that?

            M. John Harrison’s Light is yet another example of recent science fiction literature that subverts the expectations of the genre.  It centers around three characters who never actually meet in the course of the narrative: the first is Michael Kearney, who, with his colleague Brian Tate, is a researcher in the field of theoretical physics whose recent work is beginning to expose some strange anomalies (oh yes, and Kearney is also a serial killer in his spare time).

            The second is Ed Chianese, better known in the novel as Chinese Ed.  Ed used to be an “entradista”; a space explorer who ran risky payloads and such through indeterminate regions of space.  However, the novel takes place after Ed’s heyday, depicting him living the remainder of his life in a state of stasis where he indulges in dream-like fantasies; of course, this idyllic world of sloth and sluggishness is about to come to a violent end.

            Finally, we have Seria Mau Genlicher, a K-ship pilot who has been cybernetically altered so as to be (literally) a part of her vessel.

            Kearney’s plot takes place in 1999; Ed’s and Seria’s both take place in 2400.  Across this broad temporal scope, Harrison gives us a glimpse into an ingeniously envisioned and immaculately constructed world.  This strange setting (for even Kearney’s 1999 plotline is ripe with oddities, particularly the serial murderer’s haunting visions of the mysterious Shrander) revolves around an even stranger center – central absence would be more appropriate.  Just before the novel’s halfway point, Harrison describes the anomaly of the Kefahuchi Tract, the enigmatic singularity at the story’s core:

This object was massively energetic.  It was surrounded by gas clouds heated to 50,000 degrees Kelvin.  It was pumping out jets and spumes of stuff both baryonic and non-baryonic.  Its gravitational effects could be detected, if faintly, at the Core.  It was, as one commentator put it: “a place that had already been old by the time the first great quasars began to burn across the across the early universe in the unimaginable dark.”  Whatever it was, it had turned the Tract around it into a region of black holes, huge natural accelerators and junk matter – a broth of space, time, and heaving event horizons; an unpredictable ocean of radiant energy, of deep light.  Anything could happen there, where natural law, if there had ever been such a thing, was held in suspension. (Harrison 183)

            Rather than attempt an exhaustive analysis of the entire novel, or performing a hodge-podge of different plot points and characters, I would really like to focus on who I believe is the most interesting character and his place in the novel: Michael Kearney.  However, this is not to say the other characters are not interesting.  If any of my readers choose to pick up Light at some point, simply make sure you read the passage concerning Seria Mau’s “binding” to her K-ship; if this description does not strike something ineffable in your core, then I doubt you have truly understood what you read:

They strap you down and give you a rubber gag to bite on.  The way is cleared for the shadow operators, running on a nanomech substrate at the submicrometre level, which soon begin to take your sympathetic nervous system to pieces.  They flush the rubbish out continually through the colon.  They pump you with a white paste of ten-micrometre-range factories which will farm exotic proteins and monitor your internal indicators.  They core you at four points down the spine […] (Harrison 337).

And that’s not all; believe me, it gets worse.  It is one of the most relentlessly inhuman processes I’ve ever seen imagined in fiction, and this is why I find the work so riveting.  As far as Kearney goes, I’m mostly interested in him because of his diegetic position at the opposite end of most of the narrative action.  Kearney’s plot takes place in 1999, more than ten years in our past even, and incorporates elements that might better befit a horror story than a science fiction novel.

            Kearney is haunted by visions of a mysterious being he calls the Shrander.  He describes it, at one point, to his ex-wife Anna Kearney: “‘Try and imagine,’ he had once said to Anna, ‘something like a horse’s skull.  Not a horse’s head,’ he had cautioned her, ‘but its skull […] Imagine,’ he had told her, ‘a wicked, intelligent, purposeless-looking thing which apparently cannot speak.  A few ribbons or strips of flesh dangle and flutter from it.  Even the shadow of that is more than you can bear to see’” (113).  Without ruining the surprise, we can say that the Shrander constitutes a horrific enigma for Kearney.  While it certainly materializes in a more crystallized form later in the novel, for most of the narrative the Shrander is a speechless, ominous presence that somehow drives Kearney’s mad desire to kill.

            Kearney has also come into the possession of a pair of dice, purportedly from the Shrander itself.  I want to share the description of these dice as well:

Despite their colour they were neither ivory nor bone.  But each face had an even craquelure of faint fine lines, and in the past this had led Kearney to think they might be made of porcelain.  They might have been porcelain.  They might have been ancient.  In the end they seemed neither.  Their weight, their solidity in the hand, had reminded him from time to time of poker dice, and of the counters used in the Chinese game of mah-jong.  Each face featured a deeply incised symbol.  These symbols were coloured.  (Some of the colours, particularly the blues and reds, always seemed too bright given the ambient illumination.  Others seemed too dim.)  They were unreadable.  He thought they came from a pictographic alphabet.  He thought they were the symbols of a numerical system.  He thought that from time to time they had changed between one cast and another, as if the results of a throw affected the system itself.  In the end, he did not know what to think. (163-4)

I might also mention that this is possibly one of the few examples of fine literature that manages to incorporate the word “craquelure”.  And a bit further down:

Over the years Kearney had seen pi in the symbols.  He had seen Planck’s constants.  He had seen a model of the Fibonacci sequence.  He had seen what he thought was a code for the arrangement of hydrogen bonds in the primitive protein molecules of the autocatalytic set. / Every time he picked them up, he knew as little as he had the first time.  Every day he started new. (164)

Rules and systems for categorization break down.  The dice are perhaps the most obvious example of an object in the narrative that refutes any attempt to define them.  Analogous to these strange, porcelain-like objects is the enigmatic Kefahuchi Tract; yet this warped fabric of space-time is also, in some ways, inverted.  The Kefahuchi Tract is not a place where the laws of physics stop working, but a place where law becomes illimitable, and hence ceases to be “law” at all:

Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory.  All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions.  You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything.  If your theory gave you a foamy space to work with – if you had to catch a wave – that didn’t preclude some other engine, running on a perfectly smooth Einsteinian surface, from surfing the same tranche of empty space.  It was even possible to build drives on the basis of superstring-style theories, which, despite their promise four hundred years ago, had never really worked at all. (182)

We are given a glimpse of this in Kearney’s narrative, within the laboratory that he and colleague Brian Tate.  In one scene, when Kearney visits Tate, he finds that his partner has barricaded himself in the lab, apparently afraid not that something will get in, but that something might get out.  When asked about their research, Tate replies: “‘We had q-bits that survived a whole fucking minute before interference set in.  That’s like a million years down there.  That’s like the indeterminacy principle is just suspended” (280).  The indeterminacy principle, of course, is Werner Heisenberg’s famous maxim which proposes that there is an epistemological limit on our ability to know certain pairs of physical properties of a particle at the same moment: when one property is measured, another inevitably changes, and it is impossible to know the exact measurement of both properties at once.

            What we are being shown in Harrison’s brilliant sci-fi narrative is the structural importance of what I playfully call “literary singularities”.  It’s worth mentioning that Ken MacLeod, another contemporary sci-fi writer, actually called Light a “literary singularity”.[i]  MacLeod intends this in a kind of critical-generic fashion, which certainly suits the novel; however, by “literary singularity” I mean that Harrison is actually manipulating certain structural points within the narrative – points that have traditionally been governed by what Fredric Jameson theorized as the “unknowability thesis” – where representation and expression fail.  The laws of physics might be described as a method whereby human subjects represent reality to themselves, and theoretical quandaries such as black holes and time travel are points where these laws no longer hold any water; the representational model fails.  Light is critically aware of this failure; these scientific forms figure in the text as analogous singularities: both gravitational and textual.  The anomalies of science and the natural world achieve the status of effectual narrative components, perhaps the most important narrative components.

            I’m skeptical, however, of Jameson’s dialectical model of unknowability or inexpressibility within a Marxist hermeneutical framework, although I’ve expressed my fondness for this model in previous posts (namely, my post on science fiction and historicism).  While I admit that Jameson’s method is not only theoretically rigorous but also one of the most influential approaches to literary theory in the past half-century, I want to stress that the dialectic poses problems for critics.  Perhaps most problematic is the dialectic's tendency to succumb to causal reasoning; since dialectical thought establishes antinomies that function in a structural relationship to one another, and these antinomies eventually must be reconciled (the Hegelian Aufhebung), dialectical method necessarily gravitates toward a determined telos.  Anything and everything can be subsumed by the dialectical method, which thereby insists that the total field of phenomena somehow conceals a dialectic substance.  Thus, Hegel could claim that History is, essentially, dialectical.

            The issue thus becomes separating the theoretical practice from the inherent nature of things.  We can interpret a text dialectically, but we must be cautious to avoid attributing a dialectical essence to the object on which our method fixates.  This is a major problem with much dialectical thought: while it takes texts as its objects, it doesn’t stop here but continues on to claim that the historical movement and conditions wherein phenomena might be witnessed (literary genres, class conflict, scientific development, etc.) is also dialectical.  But if current science and philosophy has revealed anything to us, it is the obliteration of teleology and idealism; history has no governing essence that necessitates one logical conclusion.  The laws of history and culture, like those of physics in the deep regions of space, fail; and if Light demonstrates anything, it is that in the wake of these failures possibility becomes infinite.

            The term “singularity” here has a very important definition that I should clarify before continuing.  I intend this term not in what is perhaps its most immediate sense: something that is singular, although this is certainly a component of what I intend.  The appropriate definition in this context is most closely linked to the use of the term in general relativity: a gravitational singularity, otherwise known as a black hole, an anomaly of space-time so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational center.  Because of this extreme density, everything in a black hole collapses into an infinitesimally small point: a singularity.  Theoretically, black holes are also demarcated by mathematical limits known as event horizons (here, readers might be reminded of Paul W.S. Anderson’s cinematic sci-fi cult classic about a spaceship that mysteriously returns from the depths of space after vanishing some years prior).

            The event horizon is the truly intriguing structural component of a black hole that enables it as a metaphor for what I am deeming “literary singularities” in Harrison’s novel.  The event horizon marks the limit beyond which nothing (not even light) can escape the gravitational grip of the black hole.  Once something crosses this boundary, it will gradually be pulled toward the singularity and broken down atom by atom.  As Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains:

If you stumbled upon a black hole and found yourself falling feet-first toward its center, then as you got closer, the black hole’s force of gravity would grow astronomically.  Curiously, you would not feel this force at all because, like anything in free fall, you are weightless.  What you do feel, however, is something far more sinister.  While you fall, the black hole’s force of gravity at your two feet, they being closer to the black hole’s center, accelerates them faster than does the weaker force of gravity at your head.  The difference between the two is known officially as the tidal force, which grows precipitously as you draw nearer to the black hole’s center […] Your body would stay whole until the instant the tidal force exceeded your body’s molecular bonds […] That’s the gory moment when your body snaps into two segments, breaking apart at your midsection.  Upon falling further, the difference in gravity continues to grow, and each of your two body segments snaps into two segments.  Shortly thereafter, those segments each snap into two segments of their own, and so forth and so forth, bifurcating your body into an ever-increasing number of parts. (Tyson 284)

Furthermore, Tyson goes on to explain, you would also “extrude through the fabric of space and time, like toothpaste squeezed through a tube” (285).  All in all, not a pleasant way to die, provided you were wearing a sealed suit and hadn’t already succumbed from exposure to vacuum.  Space, as Tyson describes and Harrison reminds us in Light, is an inhospitable place.

            The most interesting factor concerning the event horizon is its appearance to an outside observer.  Human beings require light to see, but since light cannot escape a black hole once it’s crossed the event horizon, humans cannot actually “see” a black hole (hence the painfully obvious nomination).  What happens, then, when an object traverses the theoretical boundary of the event horizon?  Rather than simply disappearing to an outside observer, the object instead would appear to tumble eternally toward the event horizon, always nearing the point of no return, but never actually crossing it (think of an asymptote, a curve which approaches the line of a graph without ever actually touching it).  Likewise, if a subject traversed the event horizon, the moment of crossing would be mathematically calculable, but invisible; there would be no discernible visible difference.

            Since information itself cannot escape a black hole, any method of representation fails.  While mathematics and quantum physics can point us toward knowledge of a black hole’s existence, they cannot explain what a black hole is.  Descriptions of black holes as collapsed stars whose masses and densities have reached such extremes that not even light can escape their gravity helps us understand how a black hole comes to be, but doesn’t explain (again) what it is.  Most immediately, all we can say about black holes is that they are nothing; but nothing cannot exert the devastating forces that gravitational singularities exert on the observable universe.

            Can it?

            In Light, the Kefahuchi Tract is an observable, or naked, singularity.  It is a singularity without an event horizon, thus allowing observers to visibly witness it (theories do exist for naked singularities in current science, but none have been discovered).  However, even visibility doesn’t permit answers for Harrison’s readers.  If the singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract is visible, it is radically illogical.  The Kefahuchi Tract – and the universe in general – becomes, in Harrison’s literary vision, a site where anything is possible: “[Humans] wondered why the universe, which seemed so harsh on top, was underneath so pliable.  Anything worked.  Wherever you looked, you found.  They were hoping to find out why” (Harrison 182).  The Kefahuchi Tract is even more affronting than a black hole because it makes the absence of logicality visible.

            If the laws of physics do not hold for Harrison, neither do the laws of literature; and this makes Light an artistic masterpiece in my opinion.  If temporal processes break down, how can a narrative be traditionally represented?  This is not a problem for Harrison, who leaps back and forth between 1999 and 2400 seamlessly, although the two begin to bleed into one another in the presence of the strange substance that leaks from Kearney’s and Tate’s computer monitors.  This leads me to the quote with which I opened this post: “Information might be a substance.  Can you imagine that?” (Harrison 357).  To which I then asked: can you?  Harrison certainly does.

            One of the most enigmatic features of black hole research is known as the “information paradox”, which suggests that black holes destroy physical information once they consume it.  This seems strange on first glance, since information often appears intangible – as something known, but not something that is.  Does material contain information?  Or is information projected, internalized, and represented by observing subjects?  Harrison’s delicious romp through space and time posits a universe wherein information exists on an entirely different scale, as something physical, tangible, and perhaps even biological.  I would refrain from claiming that there is any conclusion to Light; I don’t think it attempts any conclusion.  It embraces an environment and narrative structure where a wealth of information proliferates, but remains incalculable to the human sciences.  Light accepts a universe where (just as in our reality) researchers and scholars posit theories and hypotheses by which to navigate space-time; but the novel exposes these theories to a harsh and capricious non-totality where anything seems to work.  This in turn invites the following question: what happens if things stop working?

            If information is a substance, a substrate, to the universe in Light, then the Kefahuchi Tract is a window into its non- and pre-human ontology.  It does not conform to epistemological structures; or, if it does, it conforms to all of them.  Rather than a void, an unobservable absence that consumes light and information, the Kefahuchi Tract is observable; rather than consuming physical laws to the point that nothing functions, it deconstructs the limits of physical possibility.  Causal reasoning faces its greatest challenge.  The problem of induction first posed by David Hume suddenly surges to the forefront.  Viewed in this light (an unavoidable pun), the narrative universe almost seems to take on an abstractly benign quality.  There is no doubt that Light is a violent story, but behind the three narrative strains lurks something of a unifying thread.  I would not go so far as to claim that Harrison believes our universe to be inherently benign.  That would grant far too much anthropomorphism to its being.  There is, however, far more to it than what is visible.

---

[i] This reference is from the collection of excerpted critical praise at the beginning of Light.

Works Cited

Harrison, M John. Light. New York: Bantam Dell, 2007. Print.

Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.,

2007. Print.