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Notes
1 Patti Smith, ‘Birdland’, from the album Horses, lyrics by Patti Smith; music by Patti Smith, Richard Sohl, Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral (Linda Music Corporation: 1975). < http://www.songmeans.net/songs/view/3530822107858521110/#HAUx8hQ3TBOKB2bF.99>[12/12/12].
2 According to the Vulgate translation of John 19:5, Pontius Pilate is said to have used the Latin Ecce Homo, subsequently translated in the King James version as ‘Behold the Man’. However, the original Greek Ἰδoὺ ὁ ἄνθρωπoς (Idou ho Anthrōpos) renders a slightly different timbre to the well-known phrase. Ecce Homo translated closer to: This [is]/[would be] Man – the conditional pluperfect of the ‘to be-future’ rendered – indeed, constitutively derived/expressed – here, now. I will return to this point momentarily, but for the Vulgate translation see: < http://www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/the-king-james-bible/john/19>[11/12/12].
3 For a taste of the differing interpretations in part brought about via different translations of the same text, see for example Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is [1979], trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1991); as distinct from the translation by W. Kaufman, On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, where this subtitle is tucked in the Note on Publication. Quoting from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, section 209, Kaufman writes: ‘Perhaps one or another reader of the book will react in a manner similar to Napoleon's surprise when he came to see Goethe: it shows what people had associated with the “German spirit” for centuries. “Voilà un homme!”’ (p.214). In the former, we have a more poetic take whereby ‘how one becomes what one is’ foregrounds the constitutive moment, a stylistics of existence (as Foucault might say); in the latter we have a description of the ‘this’ and the ‘here-now’ as such simultaneously foregrounding and marking this always confounding disappointment: that one's hero turns out to be but a ‘common man’.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p.4.
5 ‘People say’, says Wittgenstein, ‘if negation means one thing, then double negation equal affirmation; but if it means another thing, double negation equals negation. But I want to say its use is its meaning’. [my emphasis] (Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture XIX’, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics-Cambridge 1939, ed. Cora Diamond (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975/76), p.184. We will return to this point in Diffractions 4 and 5, but see also ‘Lectures IV, XII, XVIII–XXI, XXIV–XXVI, XXIX’, pp.39–48, 111–122, 171–201, 231–255, 282–287 respectively.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), Section 4, p.218 and Section 8, p.223 [my emphasis].
7 Of specific interest in a bid to reject both analytic and continental traditions, but seemingly managing to re-state slices of each: object oriented philosophy and the extremely potent work by Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court Press, 2005).
8 See Graham Harman's web-blog, Object-Oriented Philosophy < http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/about/>[24/01/2014].
9 Ray Brassier, ‘Speculative Realism with Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux’, in Collapse III: Unknown Deleuze [+ Speculative Realism], ed. Robin Mackay and Dustin McWherter (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), pp.320–321.
10 Vintage Žižek on the impossibility of heterosexuality nicely addresses this point. See his ‘Cogito and the Sexual Difference’ and ‘Part III: Sum: The Loop of Enjoyment, 5. The Wound Is… and 6. Healed only by the Spear that Smote You’ in his Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology [1993] (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp.45–82 and 165–200. For his attempts at negotiating subjectivity with transsexual/ism, see his more recent The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005).
11 Niccolò Machiavelli, ‘The Prince’, The Discourses (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970), especially pp.34–37.
12 This view of the world remains prevalent in game theory and economic theory alike, taking on the wider mathematical – and political – implication that the gains and losses are thus calculated within a tightly spun arena or sociality, one where if A pushes forward, B will fall back; if B pushes forward, A will retreat, and in neither case can A or B jump over the said perimeter. Also known as the binaric divide, the classical explanation is best worked out in the well-known work of John von Neumann, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour [1944] with O. Morgenstern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Of course, in guerilla warfare, this zero-sum rule is the first rule to be broken, leading one to remember that zero-sum does not clearly represent, and never did represent, the whole picture.
13 George Sand, ‘Introduction’, in Jean Ziska, Épisode de la guerre des hussites, as quoted by Marx's ‘The Metaphysics of Political Economy’, in The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the ‘Philosophy of Poverty’ by M. Proudhon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), p.161n.53.
14 Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: Continuum Press, 2004), vol.1, p.xv.
15 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill), For Andrew Crooke, at the green Dragon in St Paul's Church-yard, 1651, Prepared for the McMaster University Archive of the History of Economic Thought by Rod Hay (Quebec: McMaster; site copyright, 1996–2007). See especially ‘The First Part of Man: II. Imagination and V. Of Science Reason and Science’, in < http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/Leviathan.pdf> pp.10–15, pp.26–31.
16 Giambattista Vico, New Science (The 1744 Third Edition), trans. D. Marsh (Middlesex: Penguin, 1999). See also S. Golding, ‘Gramsci's Epistemological Eclecticism: What he borrows from Vico and Croce, and why’, Gramsci's Democratic Theory: Contributions to a Post-liberal Democracy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp.19–24.
17 For the mathematical/dynamical division, see in particular Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), especially pp.43–65. For Hegel's repositioning of the infinite as linked with ratio, measurement, quantum and finite being, see his Science of Logic, trans. George di Diovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially Vol. One: Objective Logic, Book One: The Doctrine of Being: Section One: Determinateness (quality) Chapters 1 (Being) and 2 (Existence); Section Two: Chapter 2: Quantum; and Chapter 3: Ratio or the quantitative relation, pp.46–82, 83–125, 168–270, 271–281 respectively.
18 This list of names is of course but an all too brief nod in the direction of analytic, feminist, phenomenological and continental scholarship and the (often uncomfortable) partnership with ‘the sciences’. But see, for example, the well-known and deeply criticized (by Gödel and Wittgenstein to name but two) Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903) and Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Second edition, 1925 (vol. 1), 1927 (vols 2, 3)). See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics and his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, with G.E.M. Anscombe, Rush Rhees and G.H. Von Wright (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1981); Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, in Jacques Derrida, Introduction to ‘The Origin of Geometry’ [1979], trans. John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp.155–180; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and Julian Pefanis (Syndey: The Power Institute, 2012); Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2007); Jean-François Lyotard, Miscellaneous Texts in Aesthetics and the Theory of Art, vol 4.I and 4.II, ed. and trans. P. Herman (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012); Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. M. Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
19 Playing with the term ‘queer’ as in strange, possibly fishy, but certainly not uninteresting, and perhaps even compelling, the term is used throughout Wittgenstein's work. See in particular ‘Lectures IV and XII’ in Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, pp.45–47 and 114–122. See also the compelling and playful ‘wild and creative’ adventures of Whitehead as noted in Stengers’ Thinking with Whitehead and Shaviro's additional explorations in his Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
20 Jacques Derrida, Introduction to ‘The Origin of Geometry’, p.107.
21 A point to which I will return momentarily, but see for example this, somewhat disappointing, turn in Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester with C. Stivale, ed. C.V. Boundas (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), Series 27–31, pp.186–223. Suffice it to be said at this stage that the quiet (or otherwise) reliance on platforms that cannot address the slipperiness of multi-dimensionality or spacetime or unconventional forms of matter or speed (or all four) will always prompt a privileging of Euclidean or Newtonian geometry. For a longer explanation of this remark, see Roger Penrose's masterpiece A Complete Guide to the Physical Universe (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), especially, pp.357–470.
22 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
23 The whole of the Arcades speaks to this point, but see in particular ‘J. [Baudelaire]’, ‘L. [Dream House, Museum, Spa]’, ‘V. [Conspiracies, Compagnonnage]’, ‘Y. [Photography]’, and ‘a. [Social Movement]’, pp.228–387; 405–415; 603–619; 671–692; 698–739. But see also the set of remarks by Benjamin where he starts to outline the impact of the sexual with the erotic on imagination and therewith possibility: ‘One must turn from the [Flowers of Evil] to Goethe's Selige Sehnsucht to see, by comparison, what powers are conferred on the imagination when the sexual is joined with the erotic’. (p.357)
24 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), especially Chapter 1: ‘The Great Ephemeral Skin’, pp.1–43.
25 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (‘K. [Dream city and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung]’), pp.389 and 474.
26 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (‘N. [On the Theory of Knowledge; Theory of Progress]’), p.476.
27 The importance of emphasizing Benjamin's use of ‘application’ as linked to ‘doing’ history underlies our return to the question of science (and more precisely that of mathematics and physics) in relation to philosophy. CF Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, where he convincingly establishes that application can and must form the basis of logic (and not the other way around) – with profound consequences for those who currently prefer to champion mathematics over physics (‘Lecture XVIII’, p.172ff).
28 On this point, see also ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (second version)’, in Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. M. Jennings, B. Doherty and T. Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), pp.19–55.
29 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project (Materials for the Exposé of 1935), p.908 [my emphasis].
30 Inspired by Mandelbrot's ‘theory of roughness’ as developed in his fractal geometry, see J. Golding, ‘Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast (Visual Arts in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction)’, in The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-First Century, ed. P. Baler (Lanham, MD and London: The Farleigh Dickinson University Press/Rowman & Littlefied, 2013), pp.105–120.
31 For an initial discussion of the uncertainty relation, see Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), elaborated by G.J. Chaitin's path-breaking ‘Information Theoretic Incompleteness’, in Applied Mathematics and Computation (New York: Elsevier Science Publishing, 1992), pp.83–101. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, esp. ‘Quantum Entanglements’ (pp.293–304) and ‘Appendix C. Controversy concerning the Relationship between Bohr's Principle of Complementarity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle’ (pp.402–404); and Roger Penrose, Complete Guide to the Physical Universe, pp.502, 523–24, 538.
32 Kurt Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions in ‘Principia Mathematica’ and Related Systems [1931] (New York: Dover, 1992), pp.37–38. See also C.S. Calude and M.A. Stay, ‘From Heisenberg to Gödel via Chaitin’ Research Report Series no. 235 (Auckland, NZ: Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Sciences, Feb 2004/Revised May 2004).
33 For Turing's initial thoughts on computing (1936), particularly as linked with undecidability, see his ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2 (1937) 42, pp. 230–265, updated and corrected by Turing in 1937 in his revised ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem: A correction’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. 2 (1937) 43/6, pp.544–546.
34 See Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Hugh Whitemore's celebrated play Breaking the Code: A play (New York: Samuel French, 2010).
35 ‘I should like to show that one tends to have an altogether wrong idea of logic and the role it plays; and a wrong idea of the truth of logic. If I can show this, it will be easier to understand why logic doesn't give mathematics any particular firmness’. (‘Lecture XVIII’ in his Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p.181)
36 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture XXIX’, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p.276–77. But in the same lecture he also writes: ‘What does it mean to say it gives no information? We should have to describe all sorts of situations in which one gives or gets information. We should have to describe the language-game: what we do with such a proposition. ‘If there are fifteen chairs, there are fifteen chairs’. In the game in which we ask how many chairs, no behaviour is provided for in answer to this sentence. […] (But) To say that mathematical propositions impart mathematical information is (also) misleading. For the information they impart is different from what is suggested by their structure as sentences’. (pp.280–281)
37 See quote note 5.
38 For ‘undecidability’ as a troubled dichotomy (neither here nor there; whilst being here and there), see Derrida's development of pharmakon, hymen, spectral, tympanic etc. in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. P. Kamuf, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). As to the early development of a ‘quasi-transcendentalism/messianism’, see Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); also Josha Kates, ‘Ch. 1: The Success of Deconstruction: Derrida, Rorty, Gasché, Bennington, and the Quasi-Transcendental’, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction, (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2005), pp.3–31.
39 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lecture XXV’, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, p.240.
40 Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lectures XXV and XXVI’, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, pp.240 and 253.
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Johnny Golding
Johnny Golding is a philosopher and artist. Her research covers the curious intersections of fine art, digital, media and electronic arts as thought through (i) ana-materialism and the new materialisms of space/speed/curved-time and dimensionality, (ii) dirty theory and the erotic logics of sense, (iii) the ‘Enlightenment’ filtered thorough feminism, queer studies and the wild sciences. She is the Director of CFAR and holds the Chair as Research Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the School of Art-BIAD (Margaret St). Her recent publications include: The 9th Technology of Otherness: A Certain kind of Debt; Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye; Fractal Philosophy and The Small Matter of Learning how to Listen (Attunement as the Task of Art); Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report on Art; The University Must be Defended; and Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics). Executive Editor of zētēsis: a peer-reviewed journal for contemporary art, philosophy & the wild sciences (ARTicle Press), it foregrounds research driven by curiosity, experiment, and risk. Email: [email protected]