{"id":29838,"date":"2015-04-03T13:29:41","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T12:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/monasandnomos.org\/?p=2023"},"modified":"2015-04-03T13:29:41","modified_gmt":"2015-04-03T12:29:41","slug":"ichnography-the-nude-and-its-model-the-alphabetic-absolute-and-storytelling-in-the-grammatical-case-of-the-cryptographic-locative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meta.copyriot.com\/2015\/04\/ichnography-the-nude-and-its-model-the-alphabetic-absolute-and-storytelling-in-the-grammatical-case-of-the-cryptographic-locative\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIchnography\u201d\u2014The Nude and Its Model | The Alphabetic Absolute and Storytelling in the Grammatical Case of the Cryptographic Locative"},"content":{"rendered":"

abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n

This article discusses different modes of how the ominous \u2018all\u2019 can be plotted as \u2018comprehension\u2019 via narrative, calculation, and measurement. The main interest thereby regards how the apparent \u2018Real Time\u2019 induced by the logistical infrastructures established by communicational media becomes articulable once we regard \u2018Light Speed\u2019 as the tense-ness proper to spectral modes of depicting the real in its material instantaneity. The \u2018real\u2019 in such depiction features as essentially arcane, and its articulation as cryptographical. The articulation of the real thereby takes the form of contracts. We suggest to take cryptography at face value, i.e. as a \u2018graphism\u2019 and \u2018script,\u2019 whose (cipher) texts we can imagine to be signed according to a logics of public key signatures: while the alphabets that constitute such a script are strictly public, a ciphertext\u2019s \u2018graphism\u2019 cannot be read (deciphered and discerned) without \u2018signing\u2019 it in the terms of a private key. This perspective opposes the common view that we are living in \u2018post-alphabetical\u2019 times, and instead considers the idea of an alphabetic absolute. This bears the possibility for a novel humanism, based not on the \u2018book\u2019 (Scriptures) but on the laws of things themselves. The article traces and puts into profile classical positions e.g. by Descartes, Leibniz, Dedekind, Cantor, Noether, Mach on the role of \u2018script\u2019 in mathematics, the possibility of a general and\/or universal mathesis, the role of measurement in relation to conceptions of \u2018nature\u2019.<\/p>\n

This is the manuscript version of a forthcoming text in: Vera B\u00fchlmann, Ludger Hovestadt, Vahid Moosavi (eds.), Metalithikum IV, Coding as Literacy (Birhk\u00e4user: Vienna, 2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

CONTENTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

THEME one, PLOT one | HUMANISM
\n<\/strong>Blessed Curiosity
\nThe Comic
\nThe Alphabetic Absolute
\nMediacy and Real Time
\nHow to Address the Tense-ness of Radioactive Matter in a Universe\u2019s Instantaneity?
\nThe Unknown Masterpiece: The Depiction of Nothing-at-All
\nThe Signature of the Unknown Masterpiece<\/p>\n

THEME one, PLOT two | THE SUMMATION OF INFINITE TERMS IN SERIES
\n<\/strong>Science, Liberalization, and the Absolute
\nTwo Kinds of Mathesis: General and Universal
\nCartesian Limits
\nAlgebra in the Service of Parabolic Invention<\/p>\n

THEME one, PLOT three | NAMING THAT OF WHICH WE KNOW NOTHING
\n<\/strong>We Are Leibniz\u2019s Contemporaries
\nAlgebra\u2019s Scope of Infinitary Discretion
\n\u201cNature Is There Only Once\u201d\u2014The Promise of a General Metrics
\nSymbolisms and Modes of Determination
\nPsycho-political Struggle around the Cardinality and Ordinality of Sums (Totals)
\nThe Presumptuousness of Universal Measure
\nDiscrete Intellection of Invariances vs Measuring the Continuity Owed to Constant Values<\/p>\n

\n

THEME one, PLOT one | HUMANISM<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Anita Kechickian<\/em><\/strong>: <\/strong>In 1958 you wrote about alienation produced by non-knowledge of the technical object. Do you always have this in mind as you continue your research?<\/p>\n

Gilbert Simondon<\/em><\/strong>: Yes, but I amplify it by saying that the technical object must be saved. It must be rescued from its current status, which is miserable and unjust. This status of alienation lies, in part, with notable authors such as Ducrocq, who speaks of \u201ctechnical slaves\u201d. It is necessary to change the conditions in which it is located, in which it is produced and where it is used primarily because it is used in a degrading manner. [\u2026] It\u2019s a question of saving the technical object, just as it is the question of human salvation in the Scriptures.[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Blessed Curiosity<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Michel Serres was invited to give a talk in celebration of the 150th anniversary of his own college, the Lyc\u00e9e Saint-Caprais in Agen, France, he used the occasion to share what he calls \u201ca confession.\u201d It is a short and humorous text, full of tender memories about all sorts of more or less innocent mischief, but it also places a ruse that both supports as well as upsets the honorary frame of generational sequentiality in which he had been invited to speak. \u201cGod has given us the endless freedom to disobey him, and this is how we can recognize him as our Father,\u201d Serres sets out, and continues: \u201cScarcely installed in the terrestrial Paradise, Adam and Eve quickly eat the apple and pips, immediately leaving that place of delights and fleeing towards hazy horizons. Only a few months old, the infant tries to say no; those among you who raise children will learn this and know it in overabundance.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The presumptuous ruse Serres has placed in this \u201cboring preamble of mixed theology and natural history,\u201d as he calls the story of expulsion, the ruse from which he wittily distracts also by the grandness of the opening address in the first sentence, is a small change in the setup of the Great Story:[3]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> when Adam and Eve give in to their human and purportedly corruptive and nonnatural inclinations for curiosities, they already have a child, in Serres\u2019s account. Thereby Serres purports nothing less than a naturalization of sexuality within God\u2019s own likeness\u2014Adam and Eve have a baby that must have been conceived and born before<\/em> the disrespectful act had been committed! This mischief introduces into the narrative of the Tree of Life nothing less than an abundance of directions in which it might descend and branch off. What presumptuousness, indeed! One that dares to set out, high-spirited, light-humored, and quick, for nothing less than the Total, the Ultimate Sum, by unsettling the earthly grounds in which the Tree of Life roots.<\/p>\n

But how could such ground possibly be unsettled? Serres assumes that the Nature of the Human must, as everything else as well, be thought to factor in a Universal Nature\u2014a nature of the universe\u2014whose path of descendance is divine (omnipotent) and decided (lawful) as being undecided<\/em>: it is a nature capable of developing in an uncountable abundance of directions, progressive ones as well as regressive ones. Such nature then must count as essentially arcane, a secret that can be preserved only in a \u201ccrypt,\u201d as Serres refers to it elsewhere.[4]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Of course we know the term crypt from the architecture of churches, but it once meant more generally a \u201cvault, cavern,\u201d being derived from the Greek verb kryptein<\/em>, \u201cto hide, to conceal,\u201d by nominalizing the adjective that was built from this verb.[5]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> For Serres, there is a path for knowledge to access universal nature, but never a plain, pure, and immediate one. All knowledge is a reduced model of universal nature, a model that does not seek to represent that nature, but rather a model that seeks to keep alive as best as it can that nature\u2019s character: to be secretive. The entire raison d\u2019\u00eatre of such Knowledge is to serve and obey\u2014unconditionally, absolutely\u2014nature\u2019s secretive character. Such obedience can only be performed through disobedience, through mischief, through the comic. It can be performed by inventing a reduced model of the Secret, and this without the assurance of being initiated to it. Universal Nature\u2019s secretive character can count neither as private nor public, neither as esoteric nor established insight; rather, we can refer to it as constitutive for both in a manner of which Serres maintains that only Law can be.[6]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Knowledge then embodies Law in the building of a Crypt, a vault, one that is growing deeper and vaster, more intertwined and winding, from the act of being frivolously explored, challenged, tested, strained in the very solidity in which it is built. To keep the Secret that is Universal Nature demands Absolute Obedience without tolerating submission: its secret indeed has one vulnerability, namely that obeying it can be confused with doing so in a servile manner. Serres calls the Evangelist\u2014the messenger that claims to bring the Good News with no mediation necessary for receiving it\u2014\u201cSatan the Master of the world.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Other than she who strives to master the universe\u2019s secret by keeping it encrypted, and who spends her time in that very vault that doesn\u2019t cease to challenge and take issue with the earthly grounds where the iconic Tree of Life is rooted, she who strives to master the world \u201cleads you to a very high mountain, shows you all the kingdoms in all their glory and promises to give them to you on condition that you grovel before him.\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> If knowledge of the Universe\u2019s Nature is a Crypt, knowledge of the world is the crypt\u2019s Flat Projection in terms that claim the authority to represent the crypt\u2019s arcane. Such flat projection alone can claim to produce \u201cpositive\u201d or \u201cnegative\u201d knowledge; the crypt on the other hand embodies knowledge that is always already articulated, knowledge that presents insight only by leaving absent what it has intuited. Serres\u2019s seeker of articulate knowledge, whom he addresses as the Researcher, serves the Law, she is an \u201cofficial\u201d whose duty it is to explore and challenge all the regularities that have been stated as lawful\u2014without ever claiming to represent those regularities with official authority. \u201cWe always save ourselves by the law. Freedom comes from laws,\u201d Serres tells his audience.[9]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Law binds and contracts the ambient terror of the jungle, in a manner that allows \u201ca balance between hunting and being hunted, between eating and being eaten.\u201d[10]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Law contracts violence. If those contracts are sound, whoever is subject to it can afford to live and care for all that is vulnerable as the source of all that is improbable and precious. With these elaborations, we can perhaps better appreciate the radicality of Serres\u2019s confession: \u201cI continue to make mischief in order to bear witness in the face of the world that we are not beasts, that therefore we have left or begin to leave the hell of violence, because we are men.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Serres\u2019s humorous Confession Story, giving in to the human inclination to be seduced by curiosity ceases to be a tragic act. Rather,\u00a0it is the Researcher\u2019s Official Duty to enjoy masquerade, to be transgressive by engaging in the challenges that motivate desire and seduction, pleasure and satisfaction, pain and relief. This is comic, and yet it is serious: a researcher \u201ccannot cheat.\u201d[12]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> For \u201cto obey, here, consists in submitting oneself to the laws of things as such and to thereby acquire freedom, whereas cheating consists in submitting oneself to the conventional laws of men.\u201d[13]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> In Serres\u2019s inversive account where the universe has an active nature, rather than being imagined as either static or dynamic, cheating becomes equivalent to being obedient (to the laws of man), and disobedience comes to count as blessed rather than cursed: \u201cThings contain their own rules. Less conventional than the rules of men, but as necessary as the body that falls and the stars that revolve; even more, difficult to discover. We can do nothing and should do nothing without absolute obedience to these things, loyal and hard. No expertise happens without this, no invention, no authentic mastering. Our power comes from this obedience, from this human and noble weakness; all the rest falls in corruption towards the rules.\u201d[14]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

For the researcher and the comedian, disobedience, as it characterizes the tragic manner of acting, is not thought to be nourished by delusions, to produce regret, anguish, and guilt that can be relieved only by comfort derived from acknowledging the principle impotence to which such \u201cacting\u201d is always already sentenced. Quite inversely, the very possibility for disobedience comes to feature in Serres\u2019s account as that which is capable of preserving the possibility of salvation. Acts of comic disobedience replace the Scriptures as that which preserves and circulates that possibility. What in the Scriptures unfolds between the Two Covers of a Book (or the top and the bottom of an inscription plane, be it stone, clay, papyrus, or parchment) is thereby attributed a different status by Serres: the mediacy of what unfolds between the covers\u2014on the limited inscription plane or the numerous sheets contained in a book\u2014is attributed to be capable of capturing, conserving, and expressing a sense whose extension as meaning is in principle<\/em> of vaster magnitude than that which the two covers (or the limiting ends of a plane) are Officially Entitled to contain.<\/p>\n

In Serres\u2019s narrative, Adam and Eve have a child before they taste the pleasures of transgression and disobedience. With this, sexuality is decoupled and set free from being ascribed the prime motive animating the play of sinful seductions. And suddenly there is the possibility of a distance, a Genuine Mediacy capable of discerning a human world as a Locus In Quo<\/em> that spans between the traditionally purported Covers of the Scriptures, the \u201coriginal\u201d act of Divine Judgment<\/em> that is said to have predicated the nature of all that is, and the act that is consequential to Eve and Adam\u2019s frivolity of tasting from the forbidden fruit, namely the Divine Sentence<\/em> with which the ancestors of humankind are sent into expulsion, the act that leaves the Disobedient Ones alone with the representatives of Official Generality as the sole placeholders for a source of comfort. If, on the other hand, the divine entitlement of the covers is to preserve the possibility for disobedience, then the titles with which they express what they capture and conserve must pass on the virtually abundant activity of possible disobedience<\/em> they are to guard in the service of duty they are to represent. Just like the plane of inscription they limit, or the sheets they bind, the covers too need to be capable of capturing, conserving, and expressing a sense whose extension as meaning is in principle<\/em> of vaster magnitude than that which the two covers are officially<\/em> entitled to contain.<\/p>\n

In other words\u2014and this, again, is Serres\u2019s adorable humor\u2014if you hold respect and esteem for official representations, then never trust official representations, especially while paying service to the law they represent! In an admittedly twisted but not really complicated way, as I have tried to depict, it is their entitlement as official representations to take care of their capability to compromise themselves. \u201cTo compromise\u201d here is an important albeit dangerous term that I am using to translate the German word Blo\u00dfstellung<\/em>, which means something like embarrassing exposure, a kind of personal vulnerability that comes from \u201clowering one\u2019s guard\u201d (sich Bl\u00f6\u00dfe geben<\/em>). The guards of an official representation would of course be the official order, and what Serres then tells us is that the official representation must in turn have \u201ccapabilities of mediacy,\u201d namely the capability to transmit and pass on the virtually abundant activity of possible disobedience<\/em>\u2014which it is entitled to delimit and protect\u2014to the official order that is predicated to guard and protect, in its turn, the official representations.<\/p>\n

Like Eve and Adam\u2019s child in Serres\u2019s narrative, and like the unfolding mediacy between two entitled limits, the entitled limits as well must be respected in their divine nature, and this divine nature consists in being endowed with the possibility for disobedience. This very possibility is being guarded in Serres\u2019s narrative, and it is what renders it capable of still preserving the plot of a story of salvation, despite the frivolous masquerade of that plot\u2019s prime characters in which Serres engages as the narrator of that story\u2019s novel articulation: \u201cContrary to what is sometimes said, this blessed disobedience solves many problems. In accumulating black follies and an experience which helps nobody, each generation blocks history so that we no longer see, in a moment, how to leave it; only children sometimes unblock the situation by seeing things in another way. Animals rarely disobey; genetic automates, some follow an instinct programmed since the origin of their species: that is why they have no history. We change, progress and regress, we invent the future because, deprogrammed, we disobey.\u201d[15]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

If Eve and Adam were with a child naturally<\/em>, before their frivolous act, then all those humanisms would be mistaken that purport that humankind has been left alone in the world, with the sole and tragic spirituality of a Regulative Machinery (instead of an arcane architectonic body of laws) that operates obediently and reliably in official generality, and that it is the tragedy of humankind that the very possibility for comfort is a finite good that this machinery must administrate to as best as it can. Because if Eve and Adam were with a child naturally, the Tree of Life follows a sequential order too, which descends, branches off, but doing so in many directions and in no preset manner\u2014history does not distance mankind from its lost original nature that had, purportedly, been corrupted when history begins. The sequential order now includes the possibility for Regression just as much as that for Progression. Human nature now is not good<\/em> nature\u2014the spheres of \u201cnature\u201d and \u201cvalue\u201d are kept distinct now, they are kept apart by the Encryptions and Decipherments depicting the secret that is the universe\u2019s nature, those Symbolical Building Blocks of the crypt that embodies the law obeyed by the kind of universal human nature of which Serres speaks. But if it is Codes that manifest those \u201cbuilding blocks\u201d of the Crypt, the Great Story that knows the Age of the Tree of Life, what then are those \u201ccodes\u201d made of?<\/p>\n

The Alphabetic Absolute<\/strong><\/p>\n

I would like to suggest that we can think of this \u201cmateriality\u201d as the Alphabetic Absolute. And I do not mean by this, of course, a particular linguistic alphabet to be now declared foundational and unconditional; I don\u2019t even mean an alphabet of language, in any restrictive sense. Rather, I mean alphabets in a generalized sense, as applied in coding\u2014numerical ones, linguistic ones, probabilistic ones, any<\/em> ones. So what then counts as an alphabet? It is important to distinguish what can be called an alphabet from an inventory of signs, for example. An alphabet does not ever relate to things themselves, but to how one \u201cspeaks\u201d when articulating something at stake. I put speak in quotation marks, because with such a generalized notion of the alphabet as I am suggesting, we can say \u201carticulate\u201d instead of \u201cspeak,\u201d and thus all kinds of practices that articulate something\u2014by composing elements, caring for junctions, for flexibility and conjugation (interlinking), practices that nest different hierarchies\u2014can all be included in the kind of \u201cspeech\u201d measured by an alphabet. This indeed may sound stranger than it is; it is well known for example that the letters of writing words and those with which we count and calculate share the same genealogy: both depend on an abstract place-value system within which they can operate. Numbers are depicted as numbers in the terms of a particular numerical value taken as the base of that system\u2014sixty in the hexadecimal number system, ten in the decimal one, and so on. The letters of a script, on the other hand, are depicted within a finite set of characters that are arranged in linear sequentiality\u2014the very name \u201calphabet\u201d means exactly this: alpha and beta were the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Thus, when suggesting of speaking of an alphabetic absolute, what I mean is to think of whatever it may be to which one feels inclined to ascribe a status of being impartial and unconditioned (absolute), as being an articulated crypt. The codes that can articulate such an absolute as a crypt need alphabets to build it from\u2014rather than, for example, \u201cnotational systems,\u201d because a notional system would already be too specific, for it would imply a set of rules according to how the letters that operate within a place-value system can be combined. It is the power of an alphabet that many such syntaxes\u2014more inclusively, such grammars\u2014may be applied to it (there are very different languages coexisting, all using the Roman alphabet, for example). It seems to me that only an alphabetic absolute can integrate the kind of unconditional obedience Serres talks about, requiring as it does that one behaves wittily and mischievously. An alphabet does not yet distinguish false from correct usage, as a notational system would. We know the word Literacy in relation to the alphabet for precisely this reason: to be literate is pre-specific (undecided) with regard to whether one speaks\/writes poetry, lies, wants to convince with arguments, or persuade with plausibility and opinion. And still, literacy can be measured\u2014in terms of power of expression, imagination, distinction, elegance, being informed, and so on. But there are varieties of different metrics. In this, the Masterful Literate is someone who is literate more or less masterfully, as we are used to call a musician masterful, or an architect, or a doctor or she who cares for and masters whatever practice. That is why the kind of unconditional obedience Serres talks about ought to be granted to an absolute that is alphabetic, a total of any alphabet conceivable, including all possible \u201ccouplings\u201d and \u201cmultiplications\u201d that constitute the ciphers articulated in codes. What I have called Serres\u2019 \u201cOfficer\u201d is a literate person in just this sense: she is the architect of articulated crypts that hollow existing standards.<\/p>\n

There is another reason why the Alphabetic seems to deserve a central role here. In all his writings, Serres hails a novel humanism where history is not the consequence of a terrifying act of punishment and expatriation.[16]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Literally: \u201cGod has given us the endless freedom to disobey him, and this is how we can recognize him as our Father,\u201d he maintains.[17]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Hence, a stance is needed that allows for coexistence of what is disparate.[18]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> If the Tree of Life descends without linearly and progressively distancing us \u201ccontemporaries\u201d from our origin, then originality is always \u201cthere,\u201d and the Universe\u2019s natural kinds, we have said, are many. This peculiar \u201cthere-ness,\u201d Serres suggests to call \u201cnoise\u201d: \u201cWe must keep the word noise, the only positive word that we have to describe a state that we always describe negatively, with terms like disorder.\u201d[19]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> For Serres, seduction, desire and pleasure, and the existence of sound and fury are natural forces that forever disturb pureness and harmony. They are the very conditions for the possibility of disobedience, and hence, also for the possibility of a kind of beauty that is beautiful because it can be compromised, embarrassed, exposed, and vulnerable\u2014in short, \u201cnaked.\u201d In an article to which I will turn shortly, Serres calls this beauty, which is pure because it can be embarrassed, \u201cla belle noiseuse,\u201d the beautiful querulent.[20]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n

The Comic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let us first come back to this aspect of the coexistence of the Disparate. The possibility of salvation, in the terms of \u201cnatural morals,\u201d as Serres suggests, depends on the inversion of the idea of illusion and its opposite, truth. Disguise, masquerade, fashioning, and dressing up do not pose a threat to truth; rather, they are the conditions for it to be self-engendering, alive, sexual. A lot depends on recognizing reality as mediacy, and immediacy as illusion, Serres seems to tell us. Curiosity now appears as a stance that is neither sinful nor just, but then what? Curiosity diverts the attention that can be granted. It animates a play of amusement; it is quick and can never be at rest with what attracts it; it is a form of appreciation that depends on no intermediate didactic, appreciation that is possible in an unexpected encounter. All of this binds curiosity to the Comic. Early forms of comedy are said to originate in pagan manners of emancipating from traditional cults of worship; in their rituals of thanksgiving, for example, where particular Gods were celebrated, they began to frivolously dramatize the characters of these gods in masquerade. They would still perform the rituals, but now in a challenging rather than entirely serious manner. Comedy is older than tragedy, and it is purported as a manner of dealing with magnitudes one encounters as evidently \u201cthere\u201d but disparate, non-fitting, without knowing how, why, or what else. The very possibility of a thinking of repetition as something that does not reproduce the same depends on the comic; for example, in Serres\u2019s manner of thinking of the sequentiality of time in his tree of life.[21]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Comedy shares its origin with the carnivalesque, and in many ways it can be said to mark the early stages of coming of age\u2014the youth going through comic situations when challenging the customs, expectations, and orders of their parents.<\/p>\n

Serres\u2019s assumption of considering a nature and a sexuality of the universe itself has an important and difficult implication: it involves the assumption of different kinds of natures, and hence morals of nature, that are all to be considered \u201cuniversal.\u201d This has consequences for science that considers a particular system of concepts universal (metaphysics), as well as one that considers physical nature as universal (\u201cmodern\u201d science). In either one, the paradigm of a plurality of natural kinds translates into the assumption of categorically different and incompatible magnitudes\u2014magnitudes that are, because they are categorically different, strictly not <\/em>to be experimented with. Indeed, all attempts, however experimental, to disobey the rule of traditional hierarchies of subordination among the different magnitudes are then perceived outright as evil: we can easily remember the trials of Galileo or Kepler for assuming, in the case of the latter, an elliptic instead of perfectly round path of the planets (heavenly bodies), and hence addressing the course of the stars in the category of an imperfect circle. That was sheer frivolity and disrespectful in the eyes of the clerics at the time: the orders of the heavens, locus of the divine, could not possibly correspond to a measure that captures imperfect movement, because it would imply that what is moving, in the starry heavens, are magnitudes whose purity is corrupt and imperfect. It would imply that the most perfect and pure order, that of the heavens, would be the order of imperfect magnitudes. When Galileo and Kepler might stand for an endpoint of the reign of a particular dogmatism, we can see perhaps in Dante Alighieri\u2019s Divina commedia <\/em>an early announcement of what was to come. If today media apologetics are concerned with the Post-human, and a purported End of History, we can easily see a certain symmetry to the situation for which the names of Galileo and Kepler stand; and again, we have a much earlier literary work that seems to indicate such a development to come, namely Balzac\u2019s monumental Com\u00e9die humaine<\/em>, whose idea, he tells us in the preface, \u201coriginated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality.\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Because \u201cit is a mistake,\u201d Balzac maintained, \u201cto suppose that the great dispute which has lately made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, arose from a scientific innovation.\u201d At stake is the idea of a Unity of Plan<\/em>, the idea that \u201cthe Creator works on a single model for every organized being.\u201d This issue does not arise from scientific innovations, he insisted, rather \u201cunity of structure, under other names, had occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries.\u201d[23]<\/a> He goes on to name references and their core concepts in addressing the issue at stake:<\/p>\n

\n

As we read the extraordinary writings of the mystics who studied the sciences in their relation to infinity, such as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, and others, and the works of the greatest authors on Natural History\u2014Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the monads<\/em> of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules<\/em> of Buffon, in the vegetative force<\/em> of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of Charles Bonnet\u2014who in 1760 was so bold as to write, \u201cAnimals vegetate as plants do\u201d\u2014we detect, I say, the rudiments of the great law of Self for Self, which lies at the root of Unity of Plan. There is but one Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being. \u201cThe Animal\u201d is elementary, and takes its external form, or, to be accurate, the differences in its form, from the environment in which it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of these differences. The announcement and defence of this system, which is indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of Divine Power, will be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier\u2019s victorious opponent on this point of higher science, whose triumph was hailed by Goethe in the last article he wrote.[24]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As Balzac announces, he himself had been convinced of such a scheme of nature (a unity of plan) long before his contemporaries raised its issue in terms of scientific innovations, and hence in a manner supposedly set apart from the spiritualism entailed by the authors on natural history\u2014as if now it wouldn\u2019t imply unanswerable questions anymore. So Balzac doesn\u2019t refer to this scheme as a frame of reference for explaining particular postulates of scientific accounts. Rather he takes it as an inspiration for a kind of investigative story telling: \u201cDoes not society modify Man, according to the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the species in Zoology?\u201d[25]<\/a> And further on: \u201cIf Buffon could produce a magnificent work by attempting to represent in a book the whole realm of zoology, was there not room for a work of the same kind on society?\u201d[26]<\/a> Somewhat surprising perhaps, his Com\u00e9die<\/em> is all set up as a great project of taxonomy and categorization: \u201cThe differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc.\u201d[27]<\/a> But \u201cthe limits set by nature to the variations of animals have no existence in society. [\u2026] The social state has freaks which Nature does not allow herself; it is nature plus society. The description of social species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in view of the two sexes.\u201d[28]<\/a> Furthermore, \u201canimals have little property, and neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his life in everything he appropriates to his use. [\u2026] The dress, the manners, the speech, the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of civilization.\u201d[29]<\/a> In consequence, Balzac decides: \u201cHence the work to be written needed a threefold form\u2014men, women, and things; that is to say, persons and the material expression of their minds; man, in short, and life.\u201d[30]<\/a><\/p>\n

But still, if this introduction is to set up Balzac\u2019s project in clear demarcation to a scientific account, how should it be possible to embark upon such an immense project of taxonomy and categorization in the manner of storytelling<\/em>? For Balzac the realist writer, such storytelling could only take the form of a natural history\u2014yet a natural history of manners. Manners, if studied in a historical manner that works empirically, pose entirely new problems for a writer because they must be considered as what we would call today perhaps \u201ca population effect\u201d or \u201cproperty of a collective.\u201d But how to address abstract ideas such as a collective and its properties with enough intuitable distinction and common sense to work as a story? Balzac indeed asks himself: \u201cBut how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time, please the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I saw no way of writing it.\u201d[31]<\/a><\/p>\n

The way of writing that he eventually found was one of categorizing typicalities of entire scenes: \u201cNot man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes by types. There are situations which occur in every life, typical phases, and this is one of the details I most sought after.\u201d[32]<\/a> And furthermore, he specifies, the possibility of his writing depended upon setting up a gallery: \u201cIt was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period; for this is, in fact, the number presented to us by each generation, and which the Human Comedy will require. This crowd of actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a setting\u2014if I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery.\u201d[33]<\/a><\/p>\n

Balzac, the great realist author of the nineteenth century, pursued capturing the richness of reality by embracing typification, masquerade, and modeling as means to work out\u2014against our established and well-tested intuition!\u2014the truly fine distinctions that make reality \u201creal.\u201d Such storytelling ceases to lend its services to a representational paradigm; instead, it informs a new paradigm of writing and storytelling that doesn\u2019t fit well with the modern categories of either<\/em> fiction or<\/em> documentary, either history or<\/em> story. Balzac was clearly fascinated by the novel methods of population thinking, statistics, and the analytical capacity of these methods to at once resort to gross generalizations, as well as to reveal infinitesimally fine distinctions. Furthermore, he was well aware that the invention of electricity would profoundly unsettle the order of societies: \u201cIn certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted relations of the worlds to God? In what way can they shake the Catholic dogma?\u201d[34]<\/a> It was clear to him that there is something \u201cheretic\u201d about these interests in the kind of abstract possibility that is owed to technology and scientific innovation. This is why I have suggested seeing in this work an early premonition of the themes that preoccupy intellectuals today\u2014themes like an end to history, or post-humanism\u2014that are rather straightforwardly tied up with a certain apocalypticism.<\/p>\n

Mediacy and Real Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gilbert Simondon, whom I cited at the beginning of this text, follows the same idea when he claims that the grand theme of alienation that haunts modernity, and the so-called industrialization of societies, depends upon finding ways to save the technical object:<\/p>\n

\n

I believe there are humans in the technical objects, and that the alienated human can be saved on the condition that man is caring for them [the technical objects]. It must in particular never condemn them. In the Old Testament, there is a sort of jealousy of Yahweh toward the creature. And we say that transgresses the creature. But is not all creation a transgression? I think transgression, whose origin is the serpent, is the creation of a person. If Adam and Eve never left the Garden of Eden they would have not become human beings or inventors. Their one son was a shepherd, the other a farmer. Techniques were born there. Finally, technics and transgression seem to be the same. Blacksmiths were once considered as cursed.[35]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Simondon argues that what is called \u201chuman alienation\u201d cannot be separated from our custom to degrade the technical object to a passive and servile status. The theme of alienation demands for the grand theme of salvation to be articulated on new grounds, he maintains. If, classically, the possibility for salvation is remembered, preserved, and articulated in the Scriptures\u2014their theological as well as hermeneutic readings\u2014we must make and reserve room now for an essentially arcane and enigmatic kind of possibility in new media. Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, and many other new media apologetics have suggested that with electronic media, we are living in \u201cpost-alphabetic\u201d times; this entails that it is not the Scriptures that preserve and communicate the possibility of salvation anymore. Without elevating the technical object (its unconcealed and naked \u201cnaturalness\u201d alias \u201cpure functionality\u201d) from its servile and passive status, we are living in a terrifyingly inhospitable and infinitely open universe, thus Simondon. Kittler, for example, but many others as well, see in this perceived inhospitality the pain of a narcissistic wound, which however turns into a new promise of salvation (although he would probably never say that) if only we lose our arrogant narcissism. Then this inhospitality can be perceived as the true recognition of the human, existential predicament, and the tortures of history would \u201cend\u201d: the post-alphabetic age that characterizes the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy is then conceived as the end of history\u2014an end that is at the same time its completion, its infinitesimal self-reference, a dynamics that completes itself by being infinitary. This is a logic we can find developed with subtle care also in Giorgio Agamben\u2019s writing. It is not that within history\u2019s infinitary completion through self-reference there would be no salvation possible\u2014rather, the promise of salvation is now tied up in the burden of bearing an irresolvable paradox, namely that the object of salvation must be unsavable. Salvation does not concern the active recovery of what was lost and the remembering of what was forgotten. In Agamben\u2019s argument, \u201cthe lost and the forgotten do not demand to be found or remembered, but to remain such as they are, in their being-thus.\u201d[36]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

McLuhan takes a different path. For him, the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy doesn\u2019t mean the End of History according to the above logic. Where the latter can be characterized as raising an anthropological stance to an absolute status, by addressing history as a political subject, McLuhan remains more committed to physics and science. For him, the post-alphabetic means the implosion of the experimental stage for objective representation in models of a universal \u201cAll\u201d that is to be both origin and destiny of any scientific symbolization. In a quantum-magnetic, electronic universe, every medium adds something to reality, McLuhan insists. Along with the new scale, it introduces units, meters, and measures that permit mediating magnitudes with magnitudes, open-ended and infinitarily so: \u201cit is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.\u201d[37]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> With this view, McLuhan spiritualizes communicative activity such that communication takes on quasi-cosmic dimensions. It is not magnitudes anymore that are universal and therefore allow for reliable measurement; rather, in the mediacy that renders the real as real, measurement constitutes magnitudes, not the other way around: \u201cBefore the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that the medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the \u2018content,\u2019 as people used to ask what a painting was about<\/em>.\u201d[38]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> So on the one hand McLuhan spiritualizes communication in relation to the human scope of action and, hence, in relation to existence, if not to Being itself. But on the other hand he discredits, on objective grounds (by referring to the quantum kind of physics that made possible electromagnetic communication technology that in principle, if not in fact, operates at the speed of light), the very possibility of a prophetic word that supposedly reaches one via artifacts from a categorical beyond of this world; rather, the message (prophetic or not) that can<\/em> be received, he maintains, is virtually any<\/em> message: \u201cThe electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.\u201d[39]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> If virtually any message is no message<\/em> than any actual message is a particular modulation of the generic actuality\u2014movement in infinitive form\u2014that McLuhan finds represented in the electromagnetic physicality of whatever it may be that moves at light speed. His dictum that the message needs to be looked for as immanent to the medium can be seen as answering to exactly this complex issue: in a quantum-magnetic, electronic universe, he tells us, every medium adds something to reality. This has hitherto been associated with the (potential) tremendousness of a cosmic order, but certainly not with a (potential) prudence of an anthropological one: \u201cThis is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium\u2014that is, any extension of ourselves\u2014results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.\u201d[40]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

All technology counts, for McLuhan, as extensions of \u201cman\u201d\u2014this cannot only be understood in terms of an augmentation of corporeal strength and the perceptive faculties, but also intellectually: technology incorporates mathematical principles invented or at least intuited by \u201cthe intellect.\u201d With the herewith implied emphasis on the mathematical symbolisms that unlock novel scales of action, once they are externalized and embodied in technical \u201ccases\u201d and then reappropriated by our bodies in learning how to use them, McLuhan also insists that mathematics is an articulation of human intellect\u2014however \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201cdivine\u201d one might specify the possibility of such \u201cintellection.\u201d[41]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> In this, Kittler parts ways with McLuhan. For him, mathematics is the immediate<\/em> expression of \u201cthe real,\u201d directly, in terms of physics. He sees no symbolism at work in it: \u201cWhat distinguishes the post-Gutenberg methods of data processing from the old alphabetic storage and transmission monopoly is the fact that they no longer rely on symbolic mediation but instead record, in the shape of light and sound waves, visual and acoustic effects of the real.\u201d[42]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> With this assumption, he can mock Balzac\u2019s project:<\/p>\n

\n

Photo albums establish a realm of the dead infinitely more precise than Balzac\u2019s competing literary enterprise, the Com\u00e9die humaine<\/em>, could ever hope to create. In contrast to the arts, media do not have to make do with the grid of the symbolic. That is to say, they reconstruct bodies not only in a system of words or colors or sound intervals. Media and media only fulfill the \u201chigh standards\u201d that [\u2026] we expect from \u201creproductions\u201d since the invention of photography: \u201cThey are not only supposed to resemble the object, but rather guarantee this resemblance by being, as it were, a product of the object in question, that is, by being mechanically produced by it\u2014just as the illuminated objects of reality imprint their image on the photographic layer,\u201d or the frequency curves of noises inscribe their wavelike shapes onto the phonographic plate.[43]<\/a><\/sup><\/sup><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For him is clear: finally, \u201cof the real nothing more can be brought to light than [\u2026] nothing.\u201d[44]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> With the nineteenth-century concept of frequency, \u201cthe real takes the place of the symbolic,\u201d[45]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> and \u201cliterature defects from erotics to stochastics, from red lips to white noise. Marinetti\u2019s molecular swarms and whirling electrons are merely instances of the Brownian motion that human eyes can only perceive in the shape of dancing sun particles but that in the real are the noise on all channels.\u201d[46]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The end of the Gutenberg Era marks for Kittler the end of storytelling, because, as he puts it, once the real takes the place of the symbolic within the physics of electromagnetic spectrums, frequencies, and stochastic noise, time turns into \u201can independent variable\u201d\u2014a \u201cphysical time removed from the meters and rhythms\u201d that could make harmony and music. Rather, such physical time \u201cquantifies movements that are too fast for the human eye, ranging from 20 to 16,000 vibrations per second.\u201d[47]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

For both McLuhan as well as Kittler, media come to stand in for the Kantian forms of intuition, those \u201cconditionings\u201d supposedly innate to the human mind that, according to Kant\u2019s transcendentalism, were the guarantors that everyone can intuit space and time uniformly, if only they have already learned to discipline their faculties of understanding and reason.[48]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Kant molded his forms of intuition according to notions of space and time informed from physics, not mathematics. Against the rationalism of Leibniz, for example, which cannot do without an idea of beauty that is harmonious and theological, mathematics had to be decoupled from theology for Kant: it should only be legitimate if its postulates can be made the object of physical experimentation. With this, Kant aligns closely with empiricist traditions. But against Newton, whose systematization of methods in physics, The<\/em> \u201cPrincipia\u201d: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy<\/em>, anchors his Axioms, the Laws of Motion, in a notion of absolute space that he attributed to the cosmos itself, Kant\u2019s transcendentalism introduced a level of mediacy between thought and the real. This \u201cmediacy,\u201d however, is entirely distinct from the \u201cmediacy\u201d thematized with reference to \u201cnew media.\u201d While the former notion of mediacy was uniform and objective because Kant simply attributed Newton\u2019s prime cosmological assumptions (linear and reversible time, and Euclidean, three-dimensional [plane] geometry) to the human mind instead of the cosmos (as the Forms of Intuition). Mediacy in relation to new media, on the other hand, is new because it makes so-called nonclassical quantum physics its point of departure. With the crucial consequence that the notion of an objective and uniform process of mediation\u2014arguably the key element in Kantian transcendental philosophy, as well as for every epistemology that commits itself to the critical tradition\u2014has lost its very base. When everything happens \u201cinstantaneously,\u201d and at \u201clight speed,\u201d how to maintain a critical distance to events then? How to \u201cbase\u201d a notion of mediation that is manifold, variate, and unfolds in multiple linear sequences that all link up in a not entirely predictable manner, within the probability space of one linearity, rather than one that is schematic, uniform, and goes along a mechanical causal line? How indeed to do so once \u201cmediality\u201d forms into different strata because what constitutes it (be it the Kantian forms of intuition, the letters in language, the numbers in arithmetics, the forms in geometry) loses its neutral and transparent character\u2014that character captured in the saying \u201cNever trust the messenger if it is not a mechanism.\u201d Contemplating a notion of the real vis-\u00e0-vis such mediacy, McLuhan dares to consider a nonapocalyptic reversal in the direction of progress that inheres the paradigm of modern experimental science, whereas Kittler (as well as Agamben, Baudrillard, and many others) considers a self-referential implosion of the real, and anticipates a novel kind of immediacy arising from a totalized notion of mediacy.<\/p>\n

How to Address the Tense-ness of Radioactive Matter in the Universe\u2019s Instantaneity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

So what about Serres\u2019s la belle noiseuse<\/em>? What about his idea of a kind of beauty that is not harmonious, not perfectly adequate or equal, but clamorous and querulous noise, a beauty that is universal, omnipotent, and yet \u201csexed\u201d in the sense that it is \u201cwhole\u201d only because it \u201cdesires\u201d itself in all that it can be? A truth, a nakedness, whose beauty is pure only because it is vulnerable and can be embarrassed? Why hold on to the idea that truth must be beautiful, desirable, and natural? Serres too engages in making sense of a reality that is counted as universal, in a manner that whatever happens happens at light speed and its understanding depends upon mediation by spectra. For him, spectra render the real, so to speak. But rather than imagining the universe as a Grand Vacuum, a container of a natural balance (Newton) or a Grand Harmony, the substance of God (Leibniz), or the locus where History can complete itself by referring, dynamically, to nothing but itself (Kittler), Serres inverses the perspective. The universe is ill thought of as a container because it is expanding; thus a key passage in a recent lecture by him entitled \u201cFrom Rotating Revolutions to an Expanding Universe.\u201d[49]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Different from Kittler, he shares with McLuhan the view that mathematics works symbolically, not \u201cimmediately.\u201d But if media are extensions of man for McLuhan, then this same relation is incomplete if we think of one as a function of the other. Rather, this relation must count as mutually implicative and reciprocal for Serres: one may regard media as extensions of man, but man, equally so, extends media. The real is real because it is mediate, for Serres, in the precise sense that if we want to consider a universe that is not only dynamic but also expanding, all relations must be thought of as mutually implicative and reciprocal. In all consequence then, Serres maintains that physics itself is \u201ccommunicational.\u201d For him, \u201cinformation circulates universally within and between the totality of all existing things.\u201d He elaborates:<\/p>\n

\n

Bacteria, fungus, whale, sequoia, we do not know any life of which we cannot say that it emits information, receives it, stores it and processes it. Four universal rules, so unanimous that, by them, we are tempted to define life but are unable to do so, because of the following counterexamples. Crystal, indeed, rock, sea, planet, star, galaxy: we know no inert thing of which we cannot say that it emits, receives, stores and processes information. Four universal rules, so uniform that we are tempted to define anything in the world by them, but are unable to do so because of the following counterexamples. Individuals, but also families, farms, villages, cities, nations, we do not know any human, alone or in groups, of which we cannot say that it emits, receives, stores and processes information.[50]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The real then must count as a noisy totality of communicative circulation among all existing things. It is to this that the witty ruse he placed in the Great Story\u2019s beginning responds\u2014the ruse that universal nature itself is sexed and that the first act of transgression and pleasure (the disobedience to the father by eating from the forbidden tree) is natural and blessed; the ruse that keeps the beginning of the great story open in its development, indeterminate and yet natural, and contemporaneous to every generation anew. Isn\u2019t this the essence of modernity?<\/p>\n

There is one key moment that Serres\u2019s inversion depends on: light speed may well be \u201creal time,\u201d but it is not \u201cinstantaneity\u201d or \u201cimmediacy\u201d\u2014rather, we must assume a universal \u201ctense-ness\u201d (Zeitlichkeit<\/em>) proper to the totality of quantum-physical matter. Light speed then must be understood in relation to this tense-ness: it manifests the tense-ness proper to the totality of quantum-physics matter in its proper activity. The physical nature of the universe is neither static, mechanical, nor dynamic, it is radiating and active, which today\u2019s science refers to with the term \u201cradioactivity.\u201d Galaxies are born from, and bearers of, radiation emitted from the activity of nucleosynthesis. From a quantum-physics point of view, this radiation is what we call \u201clight.\u201d In each of the myriad galaxies, light matter is emitted from a sun. And it is this radiation of light that contemporary physics depicts in the technical image of a spectrum. In the totality that is depicted as a (whole) spectrum, light is called white\u2014the sum of all the colors it distinguishes according to variable frequencies of white light.[51]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Now, if real time refers to the tense-ness of light speed proper to the universe that is not only dynamic but also expanding, Serres insists that there must be a kind of storytelling that corresponds to such universality. There must be a kind of storytelling that \u201clocates\u201d itself in the peculiar tense-ness of this fourfold universal activity. For Serres, thinking itself is this storytelling: \u201cWhat is thinking, in fact, if not at least carrying out these four operations: receiving, emitting, storing, processing information?\u201d[52]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Thinking is all of the attributes philosophy has endowed it with in the past: judging, reasoning, understanding, conceiving, imagining, remembering, discerning, delineating, measuring, expressing, articulating, et cetera, but it never strives to master an object (or a subject matter, a theme) by revealing its bare identity. Thinking is storytelling for Serres because its dignity (power) consists in preserving and transmitting truth, not in possessing or subjecting it. She who is a masterful thinker, then, is she who knows how to masterfully not know what she preserves, transmits, and keeps in circulation.<\/p>\n

I will try to show that such storytelling, for Serres, is intimately tied up with painting: a spectrum is the totality of all colors\u2014the Eigenvector, the generic characteristics of all colors. Thus the question becomes how to \u201cpaint articulately\u201d the noisiness that is matter-in-terms-of-a-spectrum. If there can be a kind of storytelling here, it is because, unlike for Kittler, a spectrum counts for Serres as the \u201celementariness\u201d of geometry, as constituted by symbolism and not immediate physical expression. Its form is, ultimately, mathematical. The spectrum is a topological homology in time<\/em>, an apparatus, while a technical image that depicts a spectrum is a snapshot of this apparatus\u2019s dynamics at a certain point of time<\/em>. Images of spectra do not, properly speaking, represent<\/em> anything specific, instead they facilitate the transmission and exchange of something arcane that is being conserved and invariant in circulation; they facilitate a \u201ctechnical fiction\u201d that conserves and transmits a \u201cphysical plot.\u201d This is not merely a metaphorical manner of speaking, for light in today\u2019s astrophysics indeed facilitates the exchange and circulation of energy quanta (light in quantum physics has particle-like properties because the \u201cpackages\u201d [photons] in which light is discerned, measured, and depicted in spectral analysis are distinguished according to varying frequency rates that depend upon the \u201cenergy load\u201d they \u201ccarry\u201d). And energy is defined ultimately in no qualitative way at all, but solely as a quantitative invariant whose assumption allows for qualifying matter in its specific forms (\u201cmatter\u201d as the Other of \u201clight\u201d).[53]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> All one assumes to know about energy is that the total amount in the Universe is invariant\u2014energy cannot be created nor can it decay.[54]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The storytelling Serres envisages, hence, must be considered as symbolic or mathematical storytelling, as storytelling that works according to what the information-technological paradigm of communication suggests, to which Serres reverts. But how can it be tied up with painting? Serres wrote an article entitled \u201cNoise\u201d on Balzac\u2019s 1845 short story \u201cLe chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre inconnu,\u201d translated as \u201cThe Unknown Masterpiece.\u201d[55]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> I will try to elaborate on this relation between Serres\u2019s kind of storytelling and painting by discussing the plot of this story. This discussion itself will be \u201ccommunicational\u201d and \u201cnarrative\u201d in the sense that it seeks to \u201cactively\u201d preserve the issue at stake in the plot \u201cdepicted.\u201d \u201cActively\u201d means that I will add something to how both of them retold that story; this is what each of them did as well. Balzac tells the story of two historical figures, painters, that both tried to tackle the same problem: if perfect beauty can or cannot be discerned from the relation between nakedness and the model in nude drawing or painting. But in his story of these two historical characters, Balzac \u201cdoped\u201d the historical \u201cdata\u201d to be documented by adding a fictional character, a third painter whom he calls Frenhofer, as a symbolical operator that acts upon and complicates the documented \u201cplot\u201d (of a real event) and that allows Balzac to dramatize that plot fictionally. With this \u201ctactical move,\u201d Balzac\u2019s realist account turns into storytelling (rather than being documentary-like), and it raises a novel aspect from the historical \u201cplot\u201d; namely, the issue of a categorical difference between drawing\/sketching (working with lines) and painting (striving to work with color alone).<\/p>\n

Serres, in turn, retells that plot, and how Balzac communicates it, by applying a tactical move once more: he in turn \u201cdopes\u201d the plot by endowing it with an aspect that neither Balzac nor the two historical painters raised. He introduces the element of a theoretical term from architecture\u2014\u201cichnography.\u201d Within the categorical term of ichnography, the depiction of that same plot (how beauty can be discerned from the relation between nudity and the model) comes to \u201cconserve\u201d and \u201ctransmit\u201d again all that has been told, and then some more. Balzac\u2019s interest was in how this can be enriched in distinctiveness by extracting a notion of drawing from painting (rather than interpolating a notion of painting from drawing). For this, he goes from Balzac\u2019s planarity to voluminosity (he introduces the architectural terms for planning that keep the three dimensions distinct from one another by introducing the infinitesimal into each one separately\u2014namely, ichnography, orthography, and scenography).[56]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> In Serres\u2019s account the notion of ichnography is capable of establishing a contractual kind of writing, as we will see. Painting affords a kind of writing that cannot be reduced to any other form of writing, because its encryption constitutes a graphism that is not \u201cwhole\u201d\u2014it needs to be doubly articulated to be a graphism. It needs to be articulated in terms of form to correspond to the substance\u2019s expression of what the form contains, and it needs to be articulated in terms of content to correspond to what the articulation of the form expresses.[57]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> It is a kind of writing that literally inscribes \u201cnothing,\u201d by placing a signature whose subject does not, properly speaking, exist. This is why in Serres\u2019s account the unknown masterwork is indeed a masterwork\u2014because it is both at once \u201cunknown\u201d and \u201csigned.\u201d It \u201chas\u201d a master, but no master can \u201cown\u201d it: by leaving the trace of something unknown that is absent, the signature marks a void that is universal not in the sense of a Great Vacuum, but in the sense of a vault or Crypt. It is a writing capable of remembering what has not yet happened, and even what might not ever happen. It is a kind of writing that transmits between generations without needing the assumption of a linear order of descendance and sequentiality.<\/p>\n

With giving us this notion of ichnography Serres must not, as McLuhan does, spiritualize communication and announce a novel age of speech based on post-alphabetic presentism (the global village). And neither must he, as Kittler or Agamben do, totalize History and submit to it as the subject of an entirely generic kind of humanism. I will try to show in my retelling of the plot (if beauty can be depicted from the relation between nudeness and its model) that, with Serres, we can expect the dawn of an alphabetic absolute from exactly those developments that lead the former two to announce a post-alphabetical era. The storytelling Serres envisages, we said, must be considered as symbolic, or mathematical storytelling, as storytelling that works according to what the information-technology paradigm of communication suggests, to which Serres reverts. This mathematicness, this symbolism, Serres links to painting via this notion of ichnography. My point is that ichnography introduces a categorical aspect into how we can \u201cpaint,\u201d how we can depict something entirely in terms of \u201ccolor,\u201d which links the canvas of a painting to the spectrality of light as color in its purity prior to the painting that takes a snapshot (a technical image) of this spectrality. Via the categorical aspect that ichnography introduces, both spectrum as well as painting are regarded as forms of writing in Serres\u2019s peculiar \u201cgraphism\u201d that is not \u201cwhole\u201d without being \u201cread\u201d; a graphism that needs to be doubly articulated by both the writer and the reader; a graphism, hence, that is essentially contractual. Like a contract that expresses a mutually agreed assurance of what is not going to happen. In order to assure what is not going to happen, a contract tries to articulate all possible aspects of something the parties agree (by signing it) is not going to take place. All the while, and this distinguishes a contract from an order, the parties of a contract are not<\/em> subjects to an external authority that is to be held responsible for guaranteeing that this \u201csomething\u201d (which is not supposed to happen) be \u201crepresented\u201d in adequate manner. A contract is signed if both parties withdraw from the stance that could claim legitimate authority over the other. In this sense, Serres\u2019s theory of the \u201clight speed\u201d of \u201creal time\u201d that media reality is approximating with its electronic communication-technology infrastructures can be said to agree to what McLuhan and Kittler (and others) mean by characterizing our time as a post-alphabetic age. But we have to look carefully.<\/p>\n

In the paradigm referred to as the Gutenberg Galaxy, writing was meant to have an authoritative status firmly tied up with, and legitimated, via the role of an author in relation to her statements, counting on her authenticity and sincerity with regard to knowing how to render the representation of an object (of discourse) plainly<\/em>, in uncorrupted, a-subjective manner. In science and philosophy, this author-driven legitimation framework manifests in argumentative discourse and in the technical precision of experimental practice. But in art, it manifests\u2014more straightforwardly perhaps than in the latter two\u2014in the attempted act of capturing in painting, drawing, or sculpture a model\u2019s \u201cneutral nakedness\u201d\u2014the very plot depicted and doped by Balzac and Serres in different manners. Instead of truth, it is nakedness that here ought to be called \u201cneutral.\u201d Just like an experimental scientist strives to capture truth in its nonbiased, uncorrupted quality, any artist is striving\u2014against all odds\u2014to encounter, to glance at, to capture and preserve, by drawing, painting, or sculpture, a model of purity in a manner that strips the pure off the model\u2019s live and finite body. Such a successful act of capture would preserve beauty in its pureness. Isn\u2019t that why we call nude paintings\/drawings\/sculptures, at least in German, by the term Akt<\/em>? Nudity cannot be worn; nudity cannot be represented\u2014just like \u201cactuality\u201d in the Greek sense of infinitive activity, energeia<\/em>, that can never be referred to without imposing form upon it (de-fine it), and hence corrupt its infinitive-ness by putting it into proportion, by applying regularity and measure. New media theory (as opposed of the theory of mediation that forms the backbone of transcendental idealism) readily declares the very possibility of such an act of capture impossible. All acts of capture are mediated, either by aesthetic categories, history, or a cruelty of the real itself, alias History. Hence it is this very notion of a legitimate authority that is tied to an alphabetic order that Serres also wants to dispose of. But what characterizes Serres\u2019s stance as unique is that he suggests replacing the concept of authority with a concept of mastership whose subject, however, is indefinite because it is never wholly present nor wholly absent.[58]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> It is the subject of his novel humanism\u2014a humanism whose dignity (power, nature) consists in how different generations succeed or fail in preserving their mark of distinction: the possibility for mischief, the possibility for blessed disobedience. If generations indeed build together on a pyramid of shared knowledge, as popular way of thinking about science suggests, then the \u201cmastership\u201d that organizes the subject of this humanism consists in masterfully not knowing <\/em>what is being kept safe by this structure of collective architecture whose beginning\u2014arch\u00e9<\/em>\u2014never ceases to happen in real time<\/em> as long as this knowledge is considered to be universal knowledge in the sense discussed above\u2014demanding obedience without submission, and embarrassed, humiliated, and exposed if being \u201cserved\u201d in the submissive manner of false modesty that claims to merely represent it without contributing, by occluding its clarity or adding to it. For Serres, the pyramid of knowledge does not store a resource; rather, it is a crypt that keeps originality itself as the secretive well of a power of invention that can be sourced continuously, without ever growing distant in time.<\/p>\n

Thus, in my own retelling of the plot of the story, I will furthermore \u201cdope\u201d the way this plot can be told. I will attempt to endow Serres\u2019s notion of ichnography with a grammatical case that is capable of addressing the locus in quo of the pyramid, the crypt, that is being built on the distributed and discrete base of ichnographical\u2014architectonic\u2014writing. I will call this grammatical case, \u201cthe case of the cryptographic locative.\u201d Of this locative I want to postulate that it is capable of addressing, and hence articulating, the locus in quo<\/em> where the plots of Serres\u2019s Great Story are being preserved\u2014that is, the locus in quo of knowledge. Grammatical cases can be seen as categories that organize the instantaneity of a \u201creal time\u201d that pertains to an alphabet\u2014they articulate all possible relations that can be expressed in an alphabet based language (the possessive, the dative, the nominative, the accusative, or whatever cases a language may distinguish).[59]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Cryptography now can be seen as articulating the space \u201cin between\u201d different \u201calphabets\u201d in a \u201ccomical\u201d way, not unlike light and colors articulate the space in between different things. Hence, we can imagine the totality of the cases that can be expressed by the grammatical categories as building a spectrum, just like we think about the totality of all colors as building a spectrum. The cryptographic locative then articulates this spectral mediacy of the totality of grammatical cases. It articulates this mediacy (the \u201cnakedness\u201d of pure grammatical relations) by (1) depicting the sum total of the possible cases (the topological homological invariances) they specify in \u201canalogue\u201d manner\u2014i.e., in the technical image that depicts a spectrum where frequency amplitudes are the sole criteria of distinction; and (2) by establishing \u201cdigital\u201d communication channels on the spectrum basis of this totality of all cases. Like this, the cryptographic locative attributes a locus to what is real without ever having actually happened and taken place. In other words, it demarcates traces of an encounter between the real and the symbolic, and it is capable of preserving a kind of possibility that can never be fully known or exhausted. I would like to think of this grammatical case of the cryptographic locative as indexing what happens in the peculiar tense-ness proper to the radiating, emitting, and absorbing communicational activity of \u201creal time\u201d\u2014the universal activity that leaves on our planet traces of some of all<\/em> that happens \u201cat the speed of light\u201d in the galaxy that the earth belongs to.<\/p>\n

The Unknown Masterpiece: The Depiction of Nothing-at-All<\/strong><\/p>\n

Serres introduces his article \u201cNoise\u201d with the words: \u201cThe story I am going to tell happened in the beginning of the seventeenth century, a time of noisy quarrels whence came the body of reason, beauty, genius that we admire today.\u201d[60]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> But at the same time, Serres\u2019s storytelling has nothing to do with keeping records of events: \u201cThe story I am going to tell and that Balzac tells could not have happened, never happened.\u201d[61]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> I would like to consider taking this setup for how Serres\u2019s story is to be encountered literally; that is, under the assumption of an alphabetic absolute. With such consideration, I want to ponder the possibility of addressing the fictional in a particular manner that neither opposes it to the real, nor subsumes either to the terms of the other and hence effectively does not subject one to the regime of the other. My interest is moved by Serres\u2019s statement that in this story, we can witness a meeting between the real and the symbolic. He challenges our imagination: \u201cWho has ever seen a meeting between the real and the symbolic in the story?\u201d Balzac did witness such a meeting, Serres claims in the continuation of his text; he can know this, he says, because of the manner in which Balzac signed his text.<\/p>\n

Let us first recall in broad strokes the plot of Balzac\u2019s story. There are three painters: young Nicolas Poussin, the middle-aged court painter Franz Pourbus (whom Balzac calls Porbus)\u2014both of whom were real seventeenth-century French painters\u2014and Balzac\u2019s invented older artist, Ma\u00eetre Frenhofer. Frenhofer visits Porbus at his lodgings, where he meets young Poussin as they are both arriving. Porbus lets both of them in, assuming on no particular grounds that Poussin was with Frenhofer. Frenhofer and Porbus realize only later that neither one of them actually knows Poussin. The conversation begins to ensue about Porbus\u2019s latest work, a painting of the Virgin Mary, during which Frenhofer criticizes the painting for lacking life. When Poussin objects, the older artists grow aware of his anonymity and challenge him to prove his right to be in the studio with them by producing a sketch. This Poussin does in a manner that sustains their interest in him, and he is officially welcomed into the context. To illustrate his own emphasis on life and movement, Frenhofer then applies his own artistic touch of color to Porbus\u2019s Virgin Mary, making the figure appear live as he had insisted he could. Later on, they discuss a painting by Frenhofer\u2019s own master, whose name is Mabuse, and who is absent from their meeting. It is a painting of Adam. Frenhofer makes the same critique of his master\u2019s painting as well, that it is lacking liveliness. Then he begins to talk about a painting by himself that he had been working for ten years, and that no one had so far seen. Like Porbus\u2019s own painting, it is an attempt at capturing perfect beauty in paint\u2014beauty that is engendered without ever having been received in an act of conception: a Mary that will have been without ever actually being \u201chere\u201d or \u201canywhere\u201d\u2014i.e., beauty as pure nakedness, beauty in the temporal form of a future past that could only be real if it were capable of bracketing out the presence in a manner capable of preserving its actuality indefinitely, toward both past and future\u2014in other words, a present tense that never actually happens. Pure nakedness, the painters well know, cannot possibly be embodied by a model that poses for a painting.<\/p>\n

Serres now stresses the generational setup of Balzac\u2019s story, while \u201canchoring\u201d all protagonists in one shared spatiotemporal \u201cclimate\u201d: \u201cBalzac depicts three painters, contemporaries and successors. It took place in bad times when stubborn men without any hope were keepers of the sacred flame, men who were certain that they had to keep it alive,\u201d Serres tells us.[62]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Hence the continuity between the generations is established by \u201ca secret flame\u201d\u2014all the protagonists knew that \u201cthey had to keep it alive.\u201d[63]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Poussin is the young one, Porbus the adult one, Frenhofer the old one, and Mabuse, the Frenhofer\u2019s master, is absent. All of them are aspiring to achieve one and the same goal in their work, namely \u201cto keep the sacred flame\u201d without knowing how.[64]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> All of them find inspiration in their models, who are also their partners in life. Poussin lives with Gillette, \u201ca perfect beauty. Go to Greece or Turkey, go anywhere, you wont find her match.\u201d[65]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Porbus, the adult, lives with Marie, \u201can image that is alive in spots and not in others. A mixed set.\u201d[66]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Frenhofer, the old one, lives with Catherine Lescault, \u201ca courtesan, that beautiful noiseuse who does not exist.\u201d[67]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> All strive to keep the flame in taking their loved ones as a model for their painting. But: \u201cThe tree\u2019s direction is one way for men, as the brush loses power as time goes by. For women, it is the other way as beauty wins its calm presence as time goes by. Time goes one way for the maker [facteur], the other way for the model. Nicolas, while drawing, lives next to being itself, the old man, the creater, has lost it. Porbus is in the middle, uneasy, undecided, floating around. His picture fluctuates and doubts, it passes the river of time.\u201d[68]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> After this depiction, Serres stops and begins anew. \u201cLet us try to forget the simplistic cascade in which what he makes visible in turn makes visible a picture that in turn makes visible what . . .\u201d Serres invites his readers.[69]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> What cascade?<\/p>\n

\n

The three men follow each other, according to the order of Mabuse, just as priests are consecrated time after time, according to the order of Melchizedek. The three painters follow each other, according to the order of representation, the proper name of the dead man cannot fool us. All three have turned around to see their own pictures while, naked and forgotten, beauty cries behind them. As for the three women, they follow each other according to the order of being. Not according to the order of appearance but according to the scale of being.[70]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

So how to begin anew? How to mobilize one\u2019s doubt, strength to live up to one\u2019s commitment that one needs to achieve (keep the sacred flame) without knowing how? \u201cThe tree of life comes out of the picture, just as the tree of representations, obviously, goes into it. Why these two times, these two directions, these two ladders, these two trees, do they form a cross? Is this a very old, very absurd way of thinking?\u201d[71]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The story that Serres sets out to tell, and that he claims has happened in the seventeenth century, in the noisy quarrels of that time\u2014while at the same time being a story that did not happen, and even more that could never have happened\u2014introduces a manner of narration, of storytelling, that can do without these two times. It is a story of time in generational terms that does not mold the tree of life, iconically, into the form of a cross. In the picture, according to Serres, the tree of life and the tree of representations leave traces of an encounter. Traces in which, literally, nothing<\/em> can be seen, because nothing<\/em> is being depicted\u2014\u201cBut sooner or later he\u2019ll notice that there\u2019s nothing on his canvas!\u201d Poussin will comment when glancing at Frenhofer\u2019s completed masterpiece in the end of Balzac\u2019s story.[72]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> And Frenhofer himself will despair: \u201cI\u2019m an imbecile then, a madman with neither talent nor ability. [\u2026] I\u2019ve created nothing!\u201d[73]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Nothingness cannot possibly be mastered according to Balzac\u2019s story, hence Frenhofer cannot possibly identify with his masterpiece by seeing in it the completion he has achieved. Instead, he views it as a failure, destroys it together with his entire oeuvre, and dies that same night.<\/p>\n

By suggesting to take this \u201cnothing-at-all\u201d in a literal manner, do I not, in my reading of Serres, positivize what needs to be negated, for the sake of any ethics\u2014if I may say so, a practice of keeping the sacred flame\u2014that might once have been? The ethics we are looking for would have to be formulated in a strange tense that conjugates a kind of mightiness that will once have been<\/em> without ever actually having been, as I specified earlier on. That is, an ethics, a form of life, or rather: the temporal mode of a form of life that cannot possibly be inferred from something that actually did happen. Are we not asking, thereby, for a practice that is, oddly, disembodied? In this peculiar story Serres narrates, which centers around a painting he claims capable of somehow capturing \u201ca meeting between the real and the symbolic\u201d[74]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>\u2014and this without being capable of actually depicting it\u2014does Serres not lead us astray, leaving us behind somewhat lost, trying to grasp an empty center, dangerous and unsettling like the inner eye of a tornado, an empty center that swallows up and noisily distributes what appears to have been relatively peacefully at rest? Is it not a particularly violent destruction that I am trying to contemplate here? Thinking along these lines, we would be forgetting that this painting at stake, just as its painter\u2014le chef-d\u2019\u0153uvre inconnu<\/em>, the unknown masterpiece, and its fictional master (Frenhofer is the only character in the story that is entirely invented by Balzac)\u2014exists only as a formulation that is fictional. Is fiction then that strange locus in quo that is capable of hosting as its \u201ccases\u201d formulations in that strange tense that conjugates a kind of mightiness that will once have been<\/em> without ever actually having been<\/em>? In other words, what would it mean to say that the character of fiction does not apply to mightiness itself\u2014thereby distinguishing fictional mightiness as false pretense, as fake at best and a crime at worst, because of its impotence due to its character as invention, against a kind of nonsymbolic mightiness that must count as \u201creal\u201d and therefore \u201ctrue\u201d and powerful\u2014but to the temporal tense of a symbolic mightiness in which the fake actually exerts real power?<\/p>\n

One cannot deny a sequential order of time, Serres seems to be saying, by foregrounding the generational setup of Balzac\u2019s story. But its sequentiality does not follow directions: \u201cThe tree of life comes out of the picture just as the tree of representation goes into it.\u201d[75]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Serres seems to maintain that we would be capable of rethinking time in neither a continuous nor fragmented, nor linearly progressing manner if only we begin to value (discern, estimate, rate), in our stories (narrations), a life of the fictional\u2014of that which is invented or imagined in the mind, just as we value the liveliness of all things real. Balzac witnessed a meeting between the real and the symbolic, and he did so in the story<\/em>. If we read this \u201cin the story\u201d as a fictional locative<\/em>, then it will be a locative that is not empty of meaning but rather one that can sustain any<\/em> meaning. It would be a cryptographic locative<\/em>, that is, because it is symbolic\u2014empty neither in the sense of demarcating, nihilistically, the reality of a non-place, nor in the sense of a determinate and defined positively locatable location, a place of the negative. Such \u201cemptiness,\u201d I want to suggest, is the emptiness of a cryptological code that is pure capacity\u2014relative strictly to the meaningfulness with which one is capable of endowing the symbolic any-structure of the meaning transmitted. A phonetic alphabet, like the Roman one, for example, can be viewed as such a code: it comprehends a finite stock of elements that are ordered in a particular sequentiality, the characters expressed by letters, and in terms of these letters all words that can in principle<\/em> be uttered\u2014meaningful once, now, in the future, or even never\u2014can be expressed. There is a certain materiality to the utterances of articulated speech, and a distinction between literal and figurative speech, truth and fiction, argument and rhetoric, can be applied to them only retrospectively. In that sense, the formal character of the alphabet is that of a code system, just as the diverse and so-called probabilistic alphabets with which engineers are computing today, or the many phonetic alphabets that preceded the Greek one (which is usually referred to as \u201cthe first\u201d phonetic alphabet in history).[76]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> My claim then is that the cryptographic locative can express \u201cnothingness\u201d in \u201cliteral\u201d manner, because the letters of the alphabets it uses are the atoms of a materiality of articulated speech\u2014a materiality that presents itself in no form, a materiality that is furious, unorganized, yet not inarticulate, a materiality that Serres calls \u201cnoise.\u201d[77]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> A cryptographic locative cannot possibly be working within a scheme of representation because it calls for an infinite<\/em> base, which, following Serres, we can learn to call \u201cichnography.\u201d He seems to be telling us that it is the infinite base of an ichnography that is being narrated in fiction, and that constitutes fiction as a locus in quo where the real and the symbolic can meet. Let us now pursue this line with greater care.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cfiction\u201d comes from the Latin fictionem<\/em>, \u201ca fashioning or feigning.\u201d It is a noun of action from the past participle stem of fingere<\/em>, \u201cto shape, form, devise, feign,\u201d originally \u201cto knead, form out of clay,\u201d from PIE *dheigh<\/em>-, \u201cto build, form, knead,\u201d and also from the Old English source in dag<\/em>, \u201cdough.\u201d[78]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Since the late sixteenth century, fiction also demarcates \u201cprose works of the imagination\u201d in distinction to dramatic works of the imagination. From that same time onward, there is also a legal sense of the word, according to which law was characterized as \u201cfiction.\u201d[79]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Related words include the latin fictilis<\/em>, \u201cmade of clay, earthen,\u201d as well as fictor<\/em>, \u201cmolder, sculptor\u201d as well as (ascribed to Ulysses) \u201cmaster of deceit,\u201d drawn from fictum<\/em>, \u201ca deception, falsehood, fiction.\u201d What strikingly distinguishes the notion of \u201cfiction\u201d from that of \u201cillusion\u201d is, as we can see in this genealogy of the term, that it was used in a sense that could perhaps be characterized as \u201cuncritical\u201d: different from a fiction, an illusion makes plain that it operates within the realm of the apparent, and hence presumes, for its very identity, a certain distance and mediacy related to the faculty of understanding, and this faculty\u2019s capacity for judgment. Such mediacy is inherently problematic in relation to fiction, because fiction does not operate within a representational framework. This is exactly the point Serres makes so strongly in his narrative mode of \u201cstorytelling.\u201d Let us carefully and slowly try to understand how this might work.<\/p>\n

The masterpiece painting around which the plot in our story unfolds is Fernhofer\u2019s painting of his imaginary mistress, Catherine Lescault, also called \u201cthe beautiful noiseuse.\u201d This painting \u201cis not a picture,\u201d Serres tells us, \u201cit is the noise of beauty, the nude multiple, the abundant sea, from which is born, or isn\u2019t born, it all depends, the beautiful Aphrodite.\u201d[80]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Beauty, in its pure nakedness, is neither to be seen in a woman, a female God, nor in a feminized reification of nature that would characterize physics in its objectivity. Such beauty can only be imagined in status nascendi<\/em>, born from the foam of a noisy sea, as the fictional impersonation of the anadyomene: \u201cWe always see Venus without the sea or the sea without Venus, we never see physics arising, anadyomene, from metaphysics.\u201d[81]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The schema of associating an active principle, form, or intellect that imposes itself upon receptive and nurturing nature, is thwarted in Serres\u2019s account. Considering the fictional as distinct from the illusionary, he must not see in form a schema or outline of the true that needs to be substantiated\u2014filled with materiality\u2014in order to constitute knowledge. Rather, form itself is a figuration of the unknown rising as the anadyomene: form is \u201cinformation that is phenomenal,\u201d[82]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> and it \u201carises from chaos-white noise.\u201d[83]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> He continues: \u201cWhat is knowable and what is known are born of that unknown.\u201d[84]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Serres refers to \u201cthat unknown,\u201d the anadyomene, also as \u201cchaos-white noise\u201d\u2014 with that, he separates that unknown from an unknown that would merely host the impossible as the negative of the possible, or the improbable as the negative of the probable. In the unknown, Serres considers that \u201cthere is nothing to know.\u201d[85]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

I want to suggest that (1) if we consider Serres\u2019s understanding of a story as the locus where the real and the symbolic can meet, then (2) we can reason and make sense of this \u201cnothing\u201d as something neither positive nor negative, but (3) as the any-capacity proper to an alphabet that constitutes a cipher. What I would like to read into and extract from Serres\u2019s text is that the question of \u201cmediacy\u201d can be approached in a different manner once we can develop a less counterintuitive and less disturbing idea of (1) such \u201cnothingness\u201d that is, essentially \u201canythingness\u201d; (2) its communicability into \u201csomethingness\u201d through encryption; and (3) the \u201coriginality\u201d of the \u201csecret somethings\u201d that are being sourced from such a symbolic nature as \u201cnothingness\/anythingness.\u201d We can develop such an idea from looking at how mathematics deals with the zero. My assumption thereby is that the zero in mathematics entails all the problems we have encountered with regard to the nothingness that Fernhofer has painted in Balzac\u2019s story, that nothingness of which Serres, in his reading of Balzac\u2019s story, insists (against Balzac) marks the completion of the unknown masterwork, not its failure.<\/p>\n

So what is a mathematical \u201ccipher\u201d? The notion designates, on the one hand, the zero in mathematics, and, on the other, it is a generic name for numerical figures (as Ziffer<\/em> is in German).<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with how we refer to the zero. Of course we have an encoding for it with our symbolic notions of numbers. This may sound rather unspectacular, but we need to consider more precisely what it entails. We have in mathematics, or more precisely in algebra alone, an intermediate level of notational code and ciphering between \u201cnotational signs\u201d and what they \u201cindicate.\u201d This intermediate level is introduced because algebra operates in abstract symmetries (equations): algebra is the art of rendering what terms a formula (an equation with unknowns) is being expressed in into the mappings of possible solutions for the unknowns. From a mathematical point of view, the mappings rendered by the articulation of a formula (an equation) are varying expressions of one and the same thing\u2014while that \u201cone and the same thing\u201d itself remains \u201cabsent.\u201d Neither of the articulable expressions of the terms (articulated in how the terms of the equation are factorized, partitioned) is ever capable of expressing explicitly and exhaustively all at once whatever it may be that is being articulated in a formula (the \u201cidentity\u201d expressed in an equation). There is a constitutive level of mediateness involved, which never lets the mathematician forget that what one seeks to express by stating its identity in terms of a formula must be considered as being of a vaster extension than any one discretion of its symbolic expressions can ever be. In other words: a function is always derived from an equation that has been rendered solvable. We can conceive of this \u201crendering solvable\u201d as \u201cmediation\u201d that is peculiar to the relation of algebraic \u201cidempotency\u201d and its capacity to express \u201cidentity\u201d inversely<\/em>. And we can conceive of any version of algebraically articulated \u201cidentity\u201d as the symbolic establishment of a tautological relation in a manner that is not \u201cabsurd\u201d\u2014precisely because of this tautological character that expresses one and the same thing differently. Like the allegorical elephant in the room full of blind people eagerly describing to each other what they perceive to be \u201cpresent,\u201d the algebraically articulated \u201cidentity\u201d becomes more and more distinguished and rich in qualities as the quarrel of \u201cgetting it right\u201d goes on. Every claim, if it is to persuade, has to establish a code that can be shared.<\/p>\n

Now in what sense can we say that every code is constituted by a \u201ccipher\u201d? The establishment of a code requires a projection space in which a structure is doubled up and mirrored around a neutral point, such that a fixed order of reference can be assigned between the doubled-up structures. Cipher is another word for this neutral point, which we commonly call the zero. A code is always participating in the game of encryption. An easy example to illustrate the cryptographic or cryptological relation between a code and a cipher are codes for encrypting texts.[86]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> One takes a set of finite and ordered elements, in this case the alphabet, duplicates it, and mixes up the order of the elements in the duplicate version. Perhaps one uses another notation system like numbers or figures, or perhaps one may also decide to introduce further elements to the duplicate version that are not contained in the duplicated one in order to raise the difficulty of \u201cbreaking the code\u201d\u2014that is, in figuring out the structure of the transformations applied between the two. The establishment of a code depends upon a place-value grid or frame within which it is possible to locate and correlate the positions occupied by values. This allows for remaining undecided with regard to the substance of the value, or algebraically, the one partition scheme that determines judgments (prime parts, Ur-teile<\/em>). Thus considered, \u201cvalues\u201d have an essentially cryptic character\u2014one that can only be clarified by giving \u201cfigure\u201d and associating a \u201cface\u201d to their cryptic character as we learn to \u201cenfamiliarize\u201d and \u201cdecipher\u201d it. I put decipher in quotation marks to highlight that here (as in the allegorical space with the elephant and the blind people), we are speaking about a mode of deciphering that has to invent the code that makes that very decipherment possible\u2014a kind of deciphering that does not hack or intrude into a \u201csecret,\u201d but one that renders communicable what we might perhaps best call \u201can arcane regularity\u201d\u2014 a regularity that remains arcane, even while being rendered communicable, sharable, public.[87]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

As one comes to \u201cmaster\u201d such regularity, one literally \u201cmasters nothing,\u201d in a manner in which \u201cnothingness\u201d must not be addressed in either positive or negative terms. We have to understand the secret at stake in a sense that is chemico-physical, as a secretion, from the Latin secretionem<\/em>, \u201ca dividing, separation, a setting apart.\u201d[88]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> In other words, the secret is not something initially clear, pure, or plain, whose possibility of discretion has been rendered occult, difficult, exclusive. What Serres suggests in his reading of \u201cThe Unknown Masterpiece\u201d as the beautiful querulent is that such assumed purity, clarity, or plainness is, in fact, initially noisy\u2014a mixture of heterogeneous factors, factoring in something that can never be known exhaustively and as whole. A secret in that sense turns into a well or source that is, essentially, public: no one can control all the articulations of how the secret circulates that can be \u201csourced,\u201d set apart and rendered communicable, by learning to master its well\u2014which, for Serres, is nothingness as primary noisiness.[89]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

With this, we come close to the second genealogical lineage of the notion of the cipher, one which departs from and builds upon the first one (cipher as zero): in number theory, the cipher not only stands for the zero, but also for the numerical figures as they are expressed in the terms of a common base like the hexadecimal number system, or today the decimal number system. Such positional systems are organized in what is today called logarithmic tables\u2014a term introduced by John Napier in the seventeenth century, expressing what he called \u201cratio-numbers,\u201d or numbers put in proportionate notation, from logos<\/em>, proportion, and arithmos<\/em>, number. The decision with regard to which base the proportionality is set up characterizes the notion of numbers as a particular code. It is within algebraic number theory that the positional logic of such notational systems itself is being thematized, in a manner that in the nineteenth century usually took the form of placing numbers on one infinite line\u2014the so-called number continuum. Richard Dedekind and Giuseppe Peano have introduced a general procedure of how to identify numerical domains as number classes embedded and nested both within each other as well as within that continuum (the rationals, reals, integers, etc). The application of this procedure (called the Dedekind Cut) requires further and further levels of relative<\/em> abstraction attributed to the algebraic symbols in whose bonds or relations numbers are now being expressed\u2014numerical values are here subjected to symbols used as jokers, as placeholders with a \u201cnaked\u201d or \u201cpure\u201d capacity to render countable an any-meaning that might not even yet be articulated. Algebraic symbols are at work in identifying the positional logics of these purely symbolic domains, up to the situation we have today where number theory is understood by many as the very object of cryptology\/cryptography\/cryptoanalysis rather than as part of natural philosophy, as Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Husserl, and others have regarded the advent of Universal Algebra.[90]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Today, on an ordinary basis (in all electronic things and infrastructures) there are entirely abstract numerical bodies at work that are called \u201cfields\u201d in English,[91]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> as well as a great diversity of abstract constructs that build upon them\u2014with beautiful names such as \u201crings,\u201d \u201clattices,\u201d \u201csheafs,\u201d and so on. In the perspective outlined here, these \u201cnames\u201d of \u201calgebraic things\u201d (symbolic \u201cthings\u201d) name secretions of nothingness\u2014secrets rendered communicable because they are extracted from the inverse <\/em>of what Western philosophy has been centering around for more than two millennia, namely the fantastic inception of the idea of universal, eternal, enduring, and persisting essentiality<\/em>\u2014that is, the notion of universal<\/em> substance<\/em>.[92]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

If number theory could give us an inverse of universal substance instead of its axiomatic elements, as Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Husserl, and others were trying to establish[93]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>\u2014would that not help in coming to terms with those developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science that so trouble modernity\u2019s grand idea of a Natural Philosophy? I am referring of course to all the issues already discussed in relation to the notion of \u201cmediacy\u201d and \u201cmedia\u201d: (1) to the centrality of \u201cradioactivity\u201d in physics, and its counterintuitive understanding of a quasi-materiality of invisible light, or more precisely, the interactivity among particles in their emission and exchange of light that contains energy; (2) the therewith associated \u201cbirth and death\u201d of countless galaxies in an expanding Universe in astrophysics; (3) the depiction and technical control of such radiating activity via technical images called \u201cspectra\u201d; and (4) the spectrum-based, quantum-physic \u201csubstrate\u201d of our contemporary form of technics in communication and computation.[94]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Let us return to the plot of the story. We have already seen that Frenhofer\u2019s masterpiece is characterized as depicting nothing-at-all. More concretely now, what does it in fact depict? \u201c\u2018The old fraud\u2019s pulling our leg,\u2019 Poussin murmured, returning to face the so-called painting. \u2018All I see are colors daubed one on top of the other and contained by a mass of strange lines forming a wall of paint.\u2019 \u2018We must be missing something,\u2019 Porbus insisted.\u201d[95]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The \u201csecret\u201d is not something initially clear, pure, or plain, whose possibility of discretion has been rendered occult, difficult, and exclusive, as Porbus and Poussin consider (\u201c\u2018There\u2019s a woman under there,\u2019 Porbus cried\u201d).[96]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> What Serres suggests in his reading of \u201cThe Unknown Masterpiece\u201d is that such assumed purity, clarity, or plainness is, in fact, initially \u201cnoisy\u201d\u2014 a mixture of heterogeneous factors, factoring in something that can never be known as whole. But what, then, did Frenhofer depict? How could he possibly paint noise as noise? By producing a \u201cfake\u201d painting, a painting that lacks an original. \u201cThe Unknown Masterwork is a fake. It happens in a placeless space, is signed by a nameless author, is told in a timeless time. No, there is nothing beneath, not even a woman.\u201d[97]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> And Serres continues to spell out how he thinks of the unknown that he understands Frenhofer to have painted: \u201cIf the masterwork is improbable or impossible it is not unknown and there is nothing to know.\u201d[98]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

But if Serres\u2019s reading maintains that this very masterpiece is indeed a masterpiece, because it depicts beauty stripped from any model that could \u201cwear\u201d it, instantiate or represent it, beauty in pure nakedness, beauty as unknown beauty, then these characterizations counter his argument, or don\u2019t they? If the masterpiece is declared impossible or improbable, then it would not be unknown\u2014because the impossible is merely the negation of the possible, and the improbable is the negation of the probable. Both are statements uttered from the stance of the always already initiated, for whom there can be no genuine secret in the chemico-physical sense introduced above in which there can be nothing to know. For according to this sense of the unknown as a genuine secret(ion), there must always and still be something new to know, as Serres adds to his critique on impossibility and improbability as frames in which to refer to the unknown that Frenhofer has painted. \u201cOr else: is there still something new to know now?\u201d he asks.[99]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> But if neither a model, nor a frame in whose terms we might refer to the kind of Unknown Serres seems to be talking about, then what? Are we not at a hopeless loss with such purport?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe picture that is discovered at the end of the story is the ichnography,\u201d we are told by Serres\u2014the ichnography<\/em>, with a determinate article. But how can Serres\u2019s proposed resolution, that of ichnography, mean something different from a frame of reference? Let us attend to the full passage that Serres continues with: \u201cThe picture that is discovered at the end of the story is the ichnography. The beautiful noiseuse is not a picture, is not a representation, is not a work, it is the fount, the well, the black box, that includes, implies, surrounds, that is to say buries, all profiles, all appearances, all representations, the work itself.\u201d[100]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The term \u201cichnography\u201d is usually rendered into English as \u201cgroundwork,\u201d or \u201cground plan,\u201d and into German as Grundriss<\/em>. It is a term that plays a crucial role in architectural theory ever since the first theoretical treatises on architecture (that we know of) had been composed by Vitruvius in the first century BC. It never comes alone, but always in association with two complementing terms: those of orthography<\/em> and scenography. <\/em>All three are terms that refer to particular kinds of draftings that help the architect to learn, develop, and refine building as a practice (or even as an art). In technical terms, the orthography means plans that elevate the schemata of the ground plan into upright position (depicting the voluminosity of the building in profile), and scenography means plans of the multiple views on a building in profile. The German terms are respectively Grundriss<\/em>, Aufriss<\/em>, and Seitenriss. <\/em>I mention this because the German terms, unlike the English ones, hold on to a distinction that keeps the practice of the draftsman, and hence the timelessness of geometry, separate from the dynamics that unfold in time as is inherent to the notion of the \u201cplan.\u201d This is an important distinction, because it helps to understand that there has been a dramatic element in architecture ever since it has been theorized: scenography introduces storytelling and a quasi-rhetorical aspect of expression to building as a practice. There is a tension at work within architecture that is not unlike the one in philosophy between rhetoric and argumentation, whose vectors rotate around that big idea called Truth. Is there in architecture then also a kind of \u201ctruth\u201d at stake? It surely couldn\u2019t be the same as in philosophy, it seems. But then, on the other hand, from the first treatises on architecture, it was all about a building\u2019s \u201cadequateness\u201d or \u201cproportionality\u201d\u2014 a temple\u2019s adequateness to the gods that are being worshiped; a villa\u2019s adequateness to the social and political power of the master whose oikos<\/em> (property) it is to accommodate; an aqueduct\u2019s adequateness to its purpose (transporting water); and perhaps the most immense \u201ctask\u201d to be fulfilled by architecture, namely to match a city\u2019s adequateness in con-forming to \u201cthe\u201d order of \u201cthe\u201d cosmos. The three different kinds of drafting, serving the architect to refine her able-ness as an architect, also introduce thereby a contractual<\/em> dimension into the power relations that organized the practice of \u201cbuilding in adequate and proportionate\u201d manner. They each come with different kinds of categories that all allow to differentiate, discrete, compare, and argue about the \u201cworth\u201d of particular buildings via recourse to the work of the architect as draftsman. Thus, without necessarily being very familiar with the corpus of architectural theory, we can easily imagine the disputes about what exactly was meant by ichnography<\/em>, orthography<\/em>, and scenography <\/em>(as well as the relations between them that could be derived from these attributed meanings together with the network of consecutiveness that results from those relations). It doesn\u2019t seem to be overstressing the point to say that these three terms capture the invariant \u201ctopic\u201d of architectural theory. Architectural theory encrypts and encodes its own \u201cidentity\u201d in the terms of these \u201ccategories\u201d\u2014 not at all unlike metaphysics, which has been doing the same with the philosophical categories.[101]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

In Serres\u2019s account, the Unknown Masterpiece is \u201cnot a picture, is not a representation, is not a work, it is the fount, the well, the black box, that includes, implies, surrounds, that is to say buries, all profiles, all appearances, all representations, the work itself\u201d\u2014 it is \u201cthe ichnography,\u201d the crypt of the arcane source of all secrets that can be articulated. This is what Poussin and Porbus don\u2019t expect to see in the painting. They \u201crun toward the canvas, move away, bend over, right and left, up and down, they look for the habitual story-line, the usual scenography. And they stand so as to see an oblique profile. As if by chance, they shall have a spot where a straightform will appear. Scenography, orthography. And they look, as is their wont, for a space where there is a phenomenon, a space and an incarnation, a cell and knowledge. A representation. And thus, they do not see the ichnography.\u201d[102]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Because there is no habitual storyline depicted they too look for something that lies buried\u2014\u201c\u2018There\u2019s a woman under there,\u2019 Porbus cried\u201d[103]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>\u2014 but they look for it as if there would have to be \u201ca space where there is a phenomenon, a space and an incarnation, a cell and knowledge.\u201d[104]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> But Frenhofer\u2019s painting \u201cis not a picture, is not a representation, is not a work,\u201d Serres tells us, \u201cit is the fount, the well, the black box, that includes, implies, surrounds, that is to say buries, all profiles, all appearances, all representations, the work itself.\u201d The ichnography is the crypt of the arcane source of all that can \u201csecrete\u201d only insofar as it must be deciphered<\/em> from all profiles and perspectives\u2014there is no continuous mapping from orthography and scenography to ichnography. \u201cOnce again, what is this ichnography? It is the set of possible profiles, the totality of all the horizons. Ichnography is what is possible, or knowable or producible, it is the fount of phenomena. It is the complete chain of the metamorphoses of the marine god Proteus, it is Proteus himself.\u201d[105]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

With his insistence that \u201cthe ichnography\u201d be \u201cthe totality of all the horizons,\u201d where no continuous mapping from the phenomena (profile and perspective, orthography and scenography) to the ground (foundation or reason, ichnography) is possible, Serres relates Balzac to Leibniz. \u201cBalzac saw the ichnography. I think he figured out that he had seen it. Since he signed his name to it.\u201d[106]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> I will come back to this role of the signature in a moment. In contrast to Balzac, Serres continues, \u201cLeibniz never saw the ichnography. He undoubtedly demonstrated that it was invisible. He was aware of it, he demonstrated that it is unknowable.\u201d[107]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> And furthermore: \u201cLeibniz drowns everything in the differential and under the innumerable thicknesses of successive integrations. The mechanism is admirable. No one ever went as far in rational mastery, even into the smallest nooks and crannies. The straight direction of reason that must turn away from this chaos is the ascent of these scalar orders. The path is ahead, it is infinite, the perfect geometrizing remains inaccessible. It is divine, it is invisible.\u201d[108]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Porbus and Poussin followed the path that Leibniz had thought infinite, Serres maintains. \u201cHaving broken in, they contemplate the divine work of geometry without understanding.\u201d Why? \u201cBecause they expected another picture, one that would have been like an extrapolation, part of the chain of forms. The last, the first representation, why couldn\u2019t it be a representation too?\u201d[109]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> But \u201cichnography is not harmony, it is noise itself.\u201c[110]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Leibniz\u2019s system turns around \u201clike an iceberg\u201d in Serres\u2019s purport of an unknown that is \u201cthe beautiful noiseuse [\u2026] beauty denuded of her appearances, of the dress of representation.\u201d[111]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Like Leibniz, Serres too is after an infinite base. Yet it \u201ccannot be structured by rigorous and lucid reason. It is immersed in white noise, in the mottled clamor of the confused.\u201d[112]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The totality of the rational is not itself rational, Serres maintains.[113]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> And further, the culminating phrase: \u201cBalzac paints the vision that is the opposite of divine architecture.\u201d[114]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Signature of the Unknown Masterpiece<\/strong><\/p>\n

But once again, how shall such painting be possible? How can Serres claim that \u201cBalzac saw it, knew it\u201d?[115]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Indeed, how can he? \u201cI can show that he saw it. I can really show that he figured out that he had known it: since he signed it.\u201d[116]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> We have to come back now to this crucial notion of \u201csignature,\u201d and the role it plays in relation to the architectonic dimension of a \u201ccontract\u201d the architect enters as the \u201cdraftsman.\u201d For it is this very dimension, the contract the architect enters, that secularizes the role of the architect in the precise sense of this word: the secular means \u201cliving in the temporality of the world, not belonging to a religious order.\u201d[117]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The unknown as the fount of the possible that Serres purports allows the architect, as well as the geometer, to preserve, within the contract that is the contract of the draftsman, the possibility for disobedience. For Serres, the spectrum\u2014the totality of all colors, the canvas of the successful completion of a masterpiece (in Serres\u2019s understanding of mastership whose master is the subject of his novel humanism), is the element of geometry\u2014it is metaphysics, and not physics. It is the crypt of physics, physics as encrypted reality of all that is \u201cmediate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Geometrizing was the inaccessible object of metaphysics and still is. White noise is geometrizing. A field of inquiry thought closed is open. The noisy, anarchic, clamoring, mottled, striped, streaked, variegated, mixed, crossed, piebald multiplicity is possibility itself. It is a set of possible things, it can be the set of possible things. It is not strength, it is the very opposite of power, but it is capacity. This noise is the opening. The Ancients were right to think chaos a gaping abyss. The multiple is open and from it is born nature always being born. We cannot foresee what will be born of it. We cannot know what is in it, here or there. No one knows, no one has ever known, no one will ever know how possibilities co-exist and how they co-exist with a possible relation. The set is criss-crossed with possible relations.[118]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Physics as encrypted reality of all that is \u201cmediate\u201d is physics as that which is computable. It is important to see that computable solutions\u2014encrypted algebraic \u201cidentities\u201d\u2014 do not stand for<\/em> something, they are no representation<\/em>. The articulation of a formula resolves the involved terms (their factorization) into mappings (functions) that can stand in<\/em> for<\/em> rather than stand for. <\/em>It is true, they demarcate a case, because they are inferred from a generalization, but they do not demarcate a case by representing it; rather, they demarcate a case categorically, by depicting the syntax of a function according to whose rules we articulate the terms of an equation. My point is that we can think of their categorial demarcation of a case according to the grammatical case of the locative. They demarcate a case whose place is \u201cnowhere\u201d\u2014 but this \u201cnowhere,\u201d being a function to \u201csomewhere,\u201d is locative rather than representative. They stand in for the unknown parts and aspects of that which has been articulated in a formula<\/em>\u2014not unlike in language, where words stand in for whatever absent thing they may present to our minds when we depict the sense of words. These mappings can stand in for their own \u201coriginal,\u201d so to speak\u2014that is, they can articulate \u201cthe original\u201d as an unknown, as something not mastered, because they articulate \u201cthe original\u201d in a tautological manner (in the form of an equation). This does not need to be seen as an absurdity. The mappings rendered by the articulation of a formula (an equation) are varying expressions of one and the same thing\u2014while that \u201cone and the same thing\u201d remains absent. Neither one of the articulable expressions of the terms (articulated in how the terms of the equation are factorized, partitioned) is ever capable of expressing explicitly all that is to it at once. In other words: that which is being expressed is of a vaster extension than any one discretion of its possible symbolical expressions can ever be.<\/p>\n

\n

I shall explain what I mean. What is ichnography? What is this masterwork where the term \u201cmaster\u201d [chef] means less a unique and rare success than it does capital, stock, fount, I mean ichnography? Well, the Greek term ichnos<\/em> means footprint. Moving toward the canvas, they saw, in a corner of the canvas, a bit of a naked foot that arose from the chaos of colors, tones, and vague shadings, a kind of form-less fog; it was a delicious, living foot! They stood there in complete admiration in front of this fragment that had escaped from the unbelievable yet slow and progressive destruction. The foot appeared there like the torso of some Venus sculpted in marble from Paros, a Venus arising from out of the rubble of a city in flames. Here then is the signature with the very name of ichnography. The beautiful noiseuse is the flat projection.[119]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We can see from this how encrypted expressions always have a \u201ctranscendent\u201d referent. Their power consists in \u201cpresenting\u201d this transcendent referent symbolically while leaving it absent, just like words are capable of evoking something absent into presence. We can regard a cipher (an alphabet) as a symbolic body of a self-referential relation whose identity is being articulated, not represented\u2014yet articulated in a split, linked, double, and parabolic manner, or more precisely, in a symbolic<\/em> manner:[120]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> neither form nor content, neither substance nor expression can be considered without reference to each other. They stabilize each other rather like planets in the galaxy of a solar system than by occupying schematic positions that would be thought of as existing prior to the birth of a particular solar system. The way that they refer to each other constitutes natures <\/em>(in the plural) of the universe<\/em>\u2014the universe being, according to contemporary astrophysics, galaxies that differ in \u201ckind\u201d but not in \u201cnature.\u201d The astrochemical elements are considered by today\u2019s science as the products of nucleosynthesis (the sun), and they are the main \u201creferent\u201d of whatever is organized in the technical \u201cformat\u201d of a spectrum: what is being measured in an spectrum is the frequency rates of different types of light emitted by the sun (solar radiation).[121]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> All, in such a manner of thinking about the universe, is universal in character. And as such, Serres maintains, it is essentially noisy<\/em>, or in status nascendi<\/em>, anadyomene, as he says, physics born from metaphysics.[122]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> Serres chose a mythical manner of formulating here, but there is a sense to what he is saying that is empirically supported, and we can decipher it from his insistence that geometry depicts white light. If as nonexperts we turn to a thesaurus of modern science, we can read that the white spectrum depicts all that moves at light speed; all that moves at light speed is of universal nature, in the sense that it is matter in its sub-particle \u201cstate.\u201d Isn\u2019t this what Serres calls \u201cmetaphysics\u201d\u2014that which \u201csecretes\u201d all that is sound and solid, as if out of the foam that is left behind by the furious clamor of incandescent and radiating matter (a sun)?<\/p>\n

Let us recapitulate. The nature of the universe for Serres is secretive communication. Knowledge of the universe\u2019s nature consists in knowing how to keep its secretions secret, by building reduced models, crypts, that strive to duplicate it such that there can be communication\u2014literally, \u201ca sharing with, a making common\u201d[123]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a>\u2014of the bare beauty of universal nature through its models, the crypts. While modeling, building the crypt, is a kind of contractual architecture (a contract whose basis is the work of draftsmen) that proceeds in terms of symmetry (the object agreed upon in the terms of a contract is articulated algebraically, tautologically, and what is agreed upon is the inverse of the thus articulated object\u2014as far as the parties can imagine it). The communication of such bare beauty that can only be modeled, on the other hand, must proceed in terms that are asymmetrical. This is why I have suggested that the practice of modeling is an act of comic dramatization (it has to deal with incommensurate magnitudes). The asymmetrical communication that models afford in turn affords the nature of the universe to be universal; that is, capable of descending and branching off in all sorts of directions. Such asymmetrical communication affords a universe that is expanding, but in no preset manner. It is important that keeping the secret in a crypt requires asymmetrical<\/em> communication\u2014or else there would have to be a Master Code(x), and those who serve its law would have to keep the channels of communication \u201csafe\u201d such that the Master Key could be shared solely among those initiated to that master code, while excluding whoever is not. Those who keep the secret then would not articulate Universal Nature, rather they would act as Universal Nature\u2019s representatives. Within Serres\u2019s narrative, instead of a Master Code(x), we have Code in whose terms the totality of all colors (a white spectrum) has been depicted. And this \u201ccode\u201d is not a \u201ccodex.\u201d Rather than referring to the universal nature as (immediate) law, by duplicating the authority of universal nature in order to claim to be acting as its representative, the code at stake refers to universal nature only mediately, in the terms discernible from a spectrum. A code that has thus been depicted (as a spectrum, a painting of the ichnography) carries the signature of someone who serves that law by obeying it without submitting to it. Because the subject of such a signature has to be authenticated as one who obeys the (unknown) rules of things themselves. Someone like that acts disobediently, comically, toward all official representations.<\/p>\n

But could there possibly exist such a signature, for its subject could not possibly be \u201cone\u201d or \u201cwhole,\u201d or could it? Wouldn\u2019t such asymmetrical communication require of the subject of such a signature to be of a split personality? A symbolic persona? An animal whose sex is to be universal?<\/p>\n

If Serres dopes Balzac\u2019s story by introducing into it the notion of \u201cichnography,\u201d I want to dope Serres\u2019s story by introducing into it the notion of \u201ca public key signature.\u201d The subject of such a signature indeed is a \u201csplit\u201d subject, a \u201csexed\u201d subject that desires and is never fully \u201cwhole\u201d; it is, on the one hand, \u201canyone,\u201d and on the other hand it is \u201cme.\u201d Let us see the principle behind it:<\/p>\n

\n

Public-key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, is a class of cryptographic algorithms which requires two separate keys, one of which is secret<\/em> (or private<\/em>) and one of which is public<\/em>. Although different, the two parts of this key pair are mathematically linked. The public key is used to encrypt plaintext or to verify a digital signature; whereas the private key is used to decrypt ciphertext or to create a digital signature. The term \u201casymmetric\u201d stems from the use of different keys to perform these opposite functions, each the inverse of the other \u2013 as contrasted with conventional (\u201csymmetric\u201d) cryptography which relies on the same key to perform both.[124]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With this, we could inverse our usual perspective, and consider that all \u201ctext\u201d be, naturally so, ciphertext; encryption then doesn\u2019t obscure \u201cplain text,\u201d rather plain text is what \u201csecretes\u201d from ciphertext.<\/p>\n

Whatever message any private key can unlock from a message transmitted in ciphertext that is being transmitted distributively, and signed by a public key signature, would be strictly private. Such decipherments, then, appear to be plaintext\u2014but the plainness of such a decipherment is but that of a model. The apparent plaintext that is contained in a ciphertext can only be articulated \u201cauthentically\u201d by placing it in the locus where that peculiar mightiness of a possible future past (will have been) can be conjugated. We can refer to this locus by ascribing the practice of cryptography its own grammatical case, the case of a locative. The locus of a cryptographic locative is fictional, but that doesn\u2019t mean that it is an illusion. Quite differently, the locus addressable by the grammatical case of a cryptographic locative is the territoriality of the subject of Serres\u2019s novel humanism. Fictitiously, it builds a reduced model of universal knowledge, a model that is official not because it represents a lawful regularity (with lesser or greater authority) but rather because it serves the law by helping to keep the secret that is the essence of universal knowledge. If the subject of a public-key signature is humanity at large, which guards its own nature and origin in the care with which it articulates the reduced models\u2014the plaintexts, the private because deciphered \u201cmessage\u201d\u2014 of the ciphertext (universal nature as it manifests in all things existent and\/or object to thought), then this subject never ceased to become what it already is.<\/p>\n

****<\/p>\n

Let us recapitulate: what an alphabetic absolute and its ichnographic bases\u2014the Crypts\u2014would oblige a researcher to is modeling. But the relation models maintain to ideas is not one that would \u201crealize\u201d them. The authenticity of models does not depend on their capacity to represent. Rather, it depends on their obedience to the laws of things themselves, laws that can be deciphered only after they have been encrypted, laws whose statements are ultimately arcane. The obedience that makes a model authentic is an obedience that doesn\u2019t develop strength and concentrate power; but it still produces capacity. It develops the capacity to source phenomena<\/em>: \u201cichnography is what is possible, producible, knowable.\u201d[125]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> This capacity is the very opposite of power and strength,[126]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> for it is capacity in dealing with sums and products of infinite terms.<\/p>\n

Every model generalizes. But if the Genus is a spectrum rather than a common denominator, then the discretion of \u201cdata\u201d points must be rationalized and proportionalized discretely and fictitiously, and data \u201cpoints\u201d must be treated as many-valued indexes into numerous possible encryptions of the ichnography: the set of all possible profiles, the totality of all horizons. Every model informs a genus and is informed by a genus. How so? Because the genus is a sum of infinitely many terms (the genus as a spectrum) only because the model is universal in kind. With regard to the universality of its kinds, the genus can be considered real without ever being born or existent. A model\u2019s kind is universal, self-sufficient, and hence also circular, but actively so: it strives to complete itself in comprehending all that it encompasses. Hence the model is not only kindred but also sexual (the symbolic \u201cmarkedness\u201d that endows the model with \u201cinclinations\u201d [desire and potency]). But it is the nature of this sexuality to be modal. <\/em>The contingencies and necessities that determine a model can do so in n<\/em> amount of manners\u2014constrained only be the ichnography. In other words, as a model is conceived, the sex of its universal kind is omnipotent and undecided. It is an \u201corgan\u201d of the universal kind. The genus is what specifies models\u2014what limits their strength in developing a capacity that is the very opposite of power. Every model generalizes. But if the researchers that raise them are committed to the alphabetic absolute, the models continue to maintain an intimate relation with the singularity of ideas regarding the great secret that is the universe\u2019s omnipotent nature. These ideas are singular in how they demand to be encountered intimately, with pride and grace, in a play of seduction and conquer that never strives to possess the secretive sense\u2014precisely because as a secret sense it is \u201cprivate.\u201d An encounter between the real and the symbolic, between the generic and the singular, is possible if the plots of stories are told in the cryptographic locative where no one can find their ways by being shown \u201cthe right path.\u201d Our researcher committed to the alphabetic absolute learns to masterfully not know<\/em> the meaning of this sense. This obliges her to assume:<\/p>\n