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August 31 - September 7, 2020
the positivist program failed when it was recognized that language creates a field that encompasses the observer as well as the observation.
N. R. Hanson, for example, argued that what we see depends upon our cultural, scientific, and linguistic contexts.
Hanson pointed out that what the Received View had called “observational terms” were in fact not sensory data per se, but sensory data as interpreted, at the very least, through an experimental apparatus that already had certain assumptions built into it, as well as through the unconscious perceptual sets of the observer.
They believe that what appear to be the “objective” facts of science are inextricably linked with important intuitive elements that are not susceptible to formal analysis or articulation.
In this view, it is not possible to separate the observation from the scientist who observes. That the scientist’s cultural and linguistic set helps determine what he or she sees implies that there is no way to create a language of observation that will not contain subjective elements.
The question of how language is used, or, more accurately, how its use is perceived, is crucial because language mediates across the subject-object dichotomy. When this dichotomy is redefined in a the field concept, the perception of how language functions also changes.
In the atomistic view, the gap between subject and object is not “contaminated” by the circular paradoxes of self-referentiality because it is assumed that reality can be divided into separate, discrete components. Consequently, it is assumed that language can be used to define the relation between subject and object in a formally exact way.
But the field concept assumes that these components are interconnected by means of a mediating field. When language is part of the mediating field (i.e., the means by which the relation between subject and object is described), it participates in the interconnection at the same time that it purports to describe it. To admit the field concept thus entails admitting that the self-referentiality of language is not accidental, but an essential consequence of speaking from within the field.
The modern novel emerged from exploring the Cartesian dichotomy in literary terms; or, to put the proposition in its more usual form, from exploring the relation between the teller and the tale.
As self-referentiality of language is virtually the defining characteristic of post-modern criticism and texts,
“an intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists”; this vast intellect could then “embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.”
“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”
“Space is different for different observers. Time is different for different observers. Spacetime is the same for everyone.”
Einstein suggested that we should think of spacetime as being curved around large masses, and that it is this curvature which accounts for gravitational phenomena. Spacetime, in this view, is not an empty container for mass. Rather it exists, and is given its characteristic structure, because of the distribution of mass.
Relativity, then, contains two fundamental and related implications that were to be absorbed into the field concept: first, that the world is an interconnected whole, so that the dichotomies of space and time, matter and energy, gravity and inertia, become nothing more than different aspects of the same phenomena; and second, that there is no such thing as observing this interactive whole from a frame of reference removed from it. Relativity implies that we cannot observe the universe from an Olympian perspective.
there is no way to measure a system without interacting with it, and no way to interact with it without disturbing it.
“what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
“we are suspended in language.”
It is here that Bohr’s idea of being suspended in language enters. The classical concepts, Bohr felt, evolved as a consequence of our experience in the world; they reflect the essential distinction between subject and object that is the absolute prerequisite for the process of observation to begin. From the division into subject and object, Bohr writes, “follows… the meaning of every concept, or rather every word, the meaning depending upon our arbitrary choice of viewpoint.”
The very act of speaking, Bohr felt, evolved from the distinction between the subject and object. To speak is to speak from a position that is defined as separate and distinct from that which is spoken about. Language thus implies a viewpoint, a specific place at which the subject-object split is made. But because of the Uncertainty Relation, this viewpoint will always result in an incomplete and partial description. To complete the description, another viewpoint is necessary which makes the subject-object split in a different place. But these viewpoints will be mutually exclusive, because the
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One is the extraordinary vision of unity inherent in the field concept of reality; the second is the extreme difficulty of translating this intuitive vision into an articulated model.
the indivisible quantum links of everything with everything imply that nothing can be separated.”
“each part… contains the whole in some sense. The whole is folded into each part.”
Because the task of articulation requires that a vision of a dynamic, mutually interacting field be represented through a medium that is inherently linear, fragmented, and unidirectional, the novelist’s concern with language will have much in common with these scientific concerns.
Any human observer is necessarily in space and time, and so always in fact occupies a point within the diagram. Similarly, the timeless nature of the Minkowski diagrams (timeless in the sense that time is encompassed in the spacetime matrix) should not lead us to think that this reality already preexists. Relativity theory, insofar as it says anything about the future, is fully consonant with seeing it as a Becoming rather than a Being.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tract at us
More than any other writer in this study, Pynchon grasps the full implications of the field concept, including both its promise of a reality that is a harmonious, dynamic whole and the problem it poses of how to represent that reality in the fragmented medium of language.
contemporary philosophers of science and linguists have suggested that the act of cognition is not merely a passive observation of a world “out there,” but the active creation of a world that is then perceived as separate from the cognitive faculties that brought it into being.
What the text exhibits may more properly be described as a deliberate obliteration of pattern.
