Slavoj Žižek: The Ontology of Quantum Physics(part 7)

part6
Notes
 
1 It is true that, if we accept the hypothesis of the Big Bang, we can nonetheless formulate an immanent measure or limit of grandeur to the universe, namely that there is, in this case, a zero-point of measurement (the singularity of the beginning) as well as the All (of the finite universe), so that the imagined observer cannot jump along an infinite scale of grandeur. However, what about many Big Bangs following each other?
2 Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings, Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1990.
3 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham: Duke University Press 2007, p. 35.
4 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, New York: Bantam 2010, p. 5.
5 Ibid., p. 7.
6 Furthermore, one cannot help noticing that, as to the positive content of Hawking’s Theory of Everything, it bears an unmistakable resemblance to dialectical materialism, or is at least fully compatible with a reasonable version of dialectical materialism.
7 See Nicholas Fearn, Philosophy: The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions, London: Atlantic Books 2005.
8 Ibid., p. 37.
9 Ibid., p. 36.
10 No wonder the greatest poet of the material inertia in cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, is simultaneously one of the great cinematic “spiritualists.” More broadly, do not the three aspects of the Lacanian Real fit the three aspects of materialism? First, the “imaginary” Real: the proverbial grain of dust, the material “indivisible remainder” which cannot be sublated in the symbolic process. Then, the “symbolic” Real: scientific letters and formulae which render the structure of material reality. Finally, the “real” Real: the cut of pure difference, of the inconsistency of structure.
11 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International 1989, p. 249.
12 Ibid., p. 269.
13 Along these lines, we can perhaps conceive the wave function in quantum physics as the teleiosis of an object deprived of the object’s actuality, as the direction of a point without its reality.
14 Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, London: Vintage Books 2004, p. 782.
15 Quoted from Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 287.
16 Quoted from ibid.
17 Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, London: Gerald Duckworth 2007, p. 66.
18 As summarized in ibid., pp. 108–9.
19 Ibid., p. 164.
20 Quoted in ibid., p. 165.
21 Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, New York: W. W. Norton & Company 1999, pp. 116–19.
22 I rely here on the third chapter (“Quantum Physics with Lacan”) of my Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso Books 1996.
23 To cite Borges, with the emergence of Kafka, Poe and Dostoyevsky are no longer what they were, for, from the standpoint of Kafka, we can see in them dimensions which were not previously there.
24 See F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters,” trans. Priscilla Hayden-Roy, in Ernst Behler, ed., Philosophy of German Idealism, London: Continuum 1987.
25 Rosenblum and Kuttner, Quantum Enigma, p. 171.
26 Ibid., p. 170.
27 Nick Bostrom, “Playthings of a Higher Mind,” Times Higher Education Supplement, May 16, 2003. Also known as “The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High.”
28 Recall how Kant thought that our ignorance of noumenal reality is a condition for our being able to act ethically: if we were to know Things in themselves, we would act like automata.
29 Although a mystery remains here, the proverbial mystery of the additional grain of sand which makes out of individual grains a heap proper (functioning like a wave).
30 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 113.
31 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Vol. 1, trans. J. B. Baillie, New York: MacMillan 1910, pp. 73–5.
32 Barad rejects the notion of reflexivity as a tool for conceiving the inclusion of the observer in the observed content, with the argument that “reflexivity is founded on representationalism”: “Reflexivity takes for granted the idea that representations reflect (social or natural) reality. That is, reflexivity is based on the belief that practices of representing have no effect on the objects of investigation and that we have a kind of access to representations that we don’t have to the objects themselves. Reflexivity, like reflection, still holds the world at a distance” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 87). But this notion simply misses the core of Hegelian reflexivity, which is the inclusion of the act of reflection in the object itself: for Hegel, the distance between the object and its reflection is not external (i.e., the object is in itself, the reflection is how it appears to the observing subject), but is inscribed into the object itself as its innermost constituent―the object becomes what it is through its reflection. The exteriority implied by the notion of reflexivity is precisely what Barad calls an “exteriority within.”
33 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 90.
34 Ibid., p. 128.
35 And the spiritualist misreading of quantum physics (“the observer creates reality”) merely opposes to this vulgar abstract materialism a no less vulgar idealism: here, it is not the object but the subject which is exempted from the concrete reality of a phenomenon and presupposed as the abstract source of reality.
36 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 115.
37 Ibid., p. 114.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., p. 347.
40 Ibid., pp. 350–1.
41 Another inscription of the opposition between idealism and materialism in cosmology occurs in the ongoing debate about the Big Bang: no wonder the Catholic Church has for decades now supported Big Bang theory, reading it as the moment of God’s direct intervention, the singular point at which universal laws of nature are suspended. The materialist answer to Big Bang theory is the cyclical theory of the universe, which reads the Big Bang not as the zero-point of the inexplicable absolute beginning, but as the moment of passage from one universe to another, a passage which can also be accounted for by the laws of nature. The idea (relying on string theory―and the problems with string theory signal the potential weakness of this approach) is that there are more than the usual four dimensions in the universe (three spatial dimensions plus time): there is (at least) another spatial dimension which maintains an infinitesimal but still operational distance between our world (a “brane”: a multi-dimensional membrane) and its double; at the end of a cosmic cycle, the two branes collapse into each other, the distance separating them is canceled, and this collapse engenders the explosion of a new world. See Rosenblum and Kuttner,Quantum Enigma.
42 This is homologous to the question of hierarchy: why can the higher order retain its priority only if it appears within the lower order as subordinated to it?
43 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 149.
44 Ibid., p. 152.
45 Ibid., p. 335.
46 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: Continuum 2001, p. 119.
47 Ibid., pp. 119–20.
48 Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Durham: Duke University Press 2000, p. 5.
49 George Greenstein and Arthur G. Zajonc, The Quantum Challenge: Modern Research on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett 1997, p. 187; as quoted in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 285 (emphases added).
50 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp. 305–6.
51 Ibid., pp. 311–12.
52 Ibid., p. 315.
53 Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, pp. 179–80.
54 All theosophical speculations focus on this point: at the very beginning (or, more precisely, before the beginning), there is nothing, the void of pure potentiality, the will which wants nothing, the divine abyss prior to God, and this void is then inexplicably disturbed or lost.
55 Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, London: Phoenix 2008, p. 82.
56 Ibid., p. 92.
57 Within the domain of the drive, the same gap appears in the guise of the difference between the drive’sgoal and aim, as elaborated by Lacan: the drive’s goal―to reach its object―is “false,” it masks its “true” aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by way of repeatedly missing its object. If the fantasized unity with the object brought the full/impossible incestuous jouissance, the drive’s repeated missing of its object does not simply compel us to be satisfied with a lesser enjoyment, but generates a surplus-enjoyment of its own, the plus-de-jouir. The paradox of the death drive is thus strictly homologous to that of the Higgs field: from the standpoint of the libidinal economy, it is “cheaper” for the system to repeatedly traverse the circle of the drive than to stay at absolute rest.
58 See Tim Hartford, The Undercover Economist, London: Abacus 2007, p. 77–8.
59 See Stephen Jay Gould, “Phyletic Size Decrease in Hershey Bars,” in Hen’s Teeth and Horses’ Toes, New York: W. W. Norton & Company 1994. This is the profit: the price of nothing we pay when we buy something from a capitalist. The capitalist economy counts with the price of nothing, it involves the reference to a virtual Zero which has a precise price.
60 In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the opposition between Napoleon and Kutuzov is one between active passivity and passive activity: Napoleon is frantically active, moving and attacking all the time, but this very activity is fundamentally passive―he passively follows his fate which pushes him into activity, a victim of historical forces he does not understand. Marshall Kutuzov, his Russian military counterpart, is passive in his acts―withdrawing, just persisting―yet his passivity is sustained by an active will to endure and win.
61 There is a personality type which exemplifies the catastrophic consequences of “doing nothing”: the subject who just stands still, doing and noticing nothing wrong, while causing catastrophes all around him. According to Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell was such a type, sitting still at the center of his family network and enjoying life, while suicides multiplied around him. Here we can invoke a common experience: when one is over-excited, attempting to calm oneself down by ceasing all activity usually fails since it is counter-productive―it demands a lot of effort to abstain from activity in such a state. It is much more effective to pursue some minimal meaningless activity, like rhythmically pulling or squeezing one’s fingers―such automatic activity brings much more calm than does complete inactivity.
62 We should make the same move apropos the opposition of performative and constative: for decades, we have heard how language is an activity, not a medium of representation which denotes an independent state of things but a life-practice which “does things,” which constitutes new relations in the world―has the time not come to ask the obverse question? How can a practice which is fully embedded in a life world start to function in a representative way, subtracting itself from its life-world entanglement, adopting a distanced position of observation and denotation? Hegel praised this “miracle” as the infinite power of Understanding, which can separate―or, at least, treat as separated―what in real life belongs together.
63 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 74.
64 Perhaps Derrida was aiming at something similar with his notion of différance.
65 See Robert Pfaller, Die Illusionen der anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2002.
66 One commonplace about philosophers today is that their very analysis of the hypocrisy of the dominant system betrays their naïveté: why are they still shocked to see people inconsistently violate their professed values when it suits their interests? Do they really expect people to be consistent and principled? He we should defend authentic philosophers: what surprises them is the exact opposite feature―not that people do not “really believe” and act upon their professed principles, but that people who profess their cynicism and radical pragmatic opportunism secretly believe much more than they are ready to admit, even if they transpose these beliefs onto (non-existent) “others.”
67 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2007, p. 223.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 239.
70 Ibid., p. 40.
71 François Laurelle, Introduction au non-marxisme, Paris: PUF, p. 48; as quoted in Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 138.
72 The terminological reference to Marx is not as arbitrary as it may appear: in Marxist terms, the relationship between determination in the last instance and overdetermination is that between the economy and politics: the economy determines in the last instance, while politics (political class struggle) overdetermines the entire process. One cannot reduce overdetermination to determination in the last instance―this would be the same as reducing political class struggle to a secondary effect of economic processes. Again, the duality between determination in the last instance and overdetermination should be conceived as that of a parallax split.
73 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, p. 139.
74 Ibid., p. 140.
75 Ibid., p. 137.
76 Note how “the One is not” brings us back to the hypotheses of Plato’s Parmenides.
77 Alenka Zupančič, “Sexual Difference and Ontology” (unpublished manuscript).
78 It is in this sense that we should read those theologians who claim that Adam and Eve did copulate while in the Garden of Eden, but did so as a simple instrumental activity, like sowing seeds in a field, without any underlying sexual tension.
79 Zupančič, “Sexual Difference and Ontology.”
80 Ibid.