(*With apologies to Willie Nelson)
Early in my Psychoanalytic training, I came to a conclusion that I have valued ever since.
I had long known that I have a decent facility with the English language and a good ability to grasp difficult concepts. The Psychoanalytic literature, like the literature in any technical field, has a small amount of wheat among a great deal of chaff. Within the literature there are the occasional gems, articles that become part of the necessary body of literature that every Psychoanalyst should know and appreciate, many more articles that contain small bits of useful wisdom within larger bodies of more pedestrian work, and an even larger number of articles written primarily to fill the pages of our journals with verbiage more valued by the writer than the reader.
During my time reading one particular, densely packed article, filled with language that seemed to exist near the borderline between jargon and gibberish, I realized that the time and effort I was investing into decoding the author's arguments were not being rewarded by any particular "gems" worth knowing or remembering. At that point I decided that if an author failed to clearly state a worthwhile objective in the first few paragraphs, then my investment in the piece of work would be inversely proportional to the effort required to understand what they were talking about.
Yesterday, I came upon a wonderfully titled article, which apparently has been published as the core of a book of the same name, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory. (HT: Luboš Motl)
I have a longstanding interest in Cosmology (my derivative of Freud's first question, "where do I come from?") and related areas of physics, like Quantum mechanics, although my level of knowledge extends no further than a Scientific American grasp of the subject. I was curious to see how Feminism and Mnemotechnics could be quantized. Further, I was interested in what the author might have to say about the limits of memory. The author's opening paragraphs did not inspire confidence:
New technologies--whether used for artistic or scientific ends--require new shapes to speak their attributes. Feminist writers too have long sought a narrative shape that can exist both inside and outside of patriarchal systems. Where like-minded theorists have tried to define a gender-specific dimension for art, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics demonstrates that feminist artists have already built and are happily inhabiting this new technological room of their own. This dissertation is an exploration of the architectural shapes of mnemonic systems in women's narratives in the new media (focusing on Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, M.D. Coverley's Califia, and Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and The Maze Game. Memory is key here, for, what gets stored or remembered has always been the domain of official histories, of the conqueror speaking his dominant cultural paradigm and body. The shapes these stories take are explored in three spatial architectures of the new media: the matrix, the unfold and the knot.
Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time--no longer an arrow--are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix. This is the real time realm of cyberspace where the multiple trajectories of the virtual engender a new kind of looking: disorientation as an alternative to linear perspective. Where women have usually been objects to be looked at, hypermedia systems replace the gaze with the empowered look of the embodied browser in motion in archival space. Always in flux, the shape of time's transformation is a Möbius strip unfolding time into the dynamic space of the postmodern text, into the 'unfold.' As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval. In this in-between space, the transformance of the nomadic browser takes place; she performs the embodied knowledge acquired in her navigation of the world of the text. Quantum space in hypertexts is shaped as an irreducible knot, an entangled equation both in and out of space-time, spanning all dimensions as a node in a mnemonic system. Wanderlust is the engine driving the browser on her quest through the intricately knotted interplay of time and space in these electronic ecosystems. What the browser finds there is rapture--an emergent state of embodied transformation in the experiential realm. What she acquires is not mastery, but agency, and an aesthetic interval of her own.
I emphasized the line above because this appears to represent a novel understanding of Quantum mechanics, which I always thought had to do with subatomic particles and now find is the science of the body in motion (formerly known as classical mechanics). Could it be that Newton and Einstein have been reversed? After all, mnemonic time is "no longer an arrow"?
Needless to say, this introduction did not allay my concerns that my investment of time and energy were going to be rewarded. I found the level of opacity of the writing impressive yet I persevered, so that my readers would not have to! Unfortunately, despite a careful reading of the above, I could not figure out exactly what point the author was making. Apparently, when we follow hyperlinks we are no longer looking linearly but are disoriented; I didn't know that, I thought I was following my curiosity, but I am not an academic so I might be wrong about that. I do agree that women are often objects to be looked at, but that seems to include traditional media in the real world; the idea of a browser having an empowered look confused me, but again, maybe I am missing something important. I sallied on but was soon stumped. I ask for assistance; what doses this mean:
As quantum interference, the unfold is a gesture that is a sensory interval.
And then the author really gets going:
Quantum space in hypertexts is shaped as an irreducible knot, an entangled equation both in and out of space-time, spanning all dimensions as a node in a mnemonic system.
At that point I gave up on trying to understand the article. My best guess is that the author believes that cyberspace makes our already untrustworthy memories even more subject to the vagaries of the powerful. Those who control the internet control the past. There is something to be said for such an idea and the fact that so many despotic governments around the world are trying to control and filter he internet suggests they find unconstrained information a danger to their power. Yet, the author might notice, form such events as Rathergate, or Pallywood, that the internet also has the potential to empower individuals to strike back against the hegemons, including the hegemons of the MSM and totalitarian governments around the world. Of course, those who have attacked the entrenched elites are male and female, so it is not strictly speaking a feminist enterprise, but I would not quibble with such a well intentioned article (though I do wonder how anyone can tell what the author's intention is?)
Once I determined my search for meaning was going to end in failure, I decided to give it one more try. I decided to read her conclusion:
The whole concept of reaching a conclusion or drawing conclusions is, of course, antithetical to the nature of this kind of literature as much as to my aims in this work as a whole. However, it is perhaps appropriate to tuck in some of the loose threads and tie together all of this as some kind of a patchworked piece.
This is ultimately a study of irreducible forms. The multi-dimensional matrix, the unfolding fold, the spinning Möbius strip, the intricate knot. I have explored matrices, folds, knots, all of them, perhaps only adding to their complexity rather than managing to unravel them. The only way to truly unsnarl irreconcilables of course is to twing, as Óh-T'bee demonstrates. I have twinged? Twung? Twisted? Danced as hard as I could through raising arguments, shapes and states--probes, McLuhan would have called them--that cut across and through these constructions in space and time: the quantum, browsing, becoming, agency, noise, flow, différance , interface, objects, events, duration, intervallic space, topology, complexity, ecstasy, incorporation, inscription, translation, heterotopic space, hierophanies, hysteria, hybridity, chora, translation, transformance, interference, entanglement, chaos, Hilbert space, speed, resonance, rupture, rapture, wanderlust, subjectivities, all kinds of systems, including the circulatory one of the body itself. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Suddenly, I understood! This was a piece of classical post-modern ephemera, sound and fury signifying nothing! If there are no conclusions, why would anyone read this work? And color me skeptical that our author, a "Senior McLuhan Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto", actually understands such concepts as "the quantum", topology, complexity, entanglement, and Hilbert space in any technical sense. As with so many academics, they consider understanding the vernacular use of a term like quantum as the equivalent of actually understanding the meaning of the concept. I have quoted the quintessential Post-modern exchange before. This comes from a book steeped in quantum mechanics, awash in entanglements and twinged by the Mobius strip of time, and as a bonus, a wonderful read :
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
ATTRIBUTION: Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898), British logician, author, humorist.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 6 (1865).
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