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2. The Quantum Flux as/in Fiction
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
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The Quantum Flux as/in Fiction In the past several years no one has written about the relationship between quantum theory and literary deconstruction as perceptively and as rigorously as Arkady Plotnitsky, whose essay “Thinking Singularity with Immanuel Kant and Paul de Man: Aesthetics, Epistemology, History, and Politics” I discovered in Marc Redfield’s Legacies of Paul de Man (2007). He has also written The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures” (2002) and Reading Bohr: Physics and Philosophy (2006). I would like to try and summarize his descriptions and definitions of quantum theories in relation to deconstruction before looking at how both have been used in a popular mystery, Martha Grimes’s The Old Wine Shades (2006), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), and Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985). Grimes’s mystery reveals how quantum theory has been absorbed into popular formulaic fiction. Pynchon’s reveals his subversion of that formula, as does Auster’s, and in doing so inaugurates an entirely new genre of quantum-inspired fiction. Beyond Pynchon’s subversion, the chapter will show how Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods transforms the mystery genre entirely, as do DeLillo ’s Libra, Auster’s Moon Palace, and Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy. It will also broaden the quantum vision from “mere” subversion of particular narrative structures to include such issues and techniques as language and structure in terms of fragmentation and entanglement as well as the uncertainrelationshipbetweendetailsanddesign,connectionsandconspiracy, as we move toward the apotheosis of this “quantized” analysis in chapter 5. Plotnitsky sees Niels Bohr’s view of quantum theory as creating a radical 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 48 : quir ks of the qua ntum epistemology for the way quantum physics is understood. This he describes as “nonclassical” thought, as opposed to classical. For Plotnitsky classical or “commonsensical” thought is best represented by Einstein’s work in that, as a theory of realism, it upholds the vision of a physically visible world, independent of human observation, and reveals laws of causality and often of determinism—we can unearth the laws and, thereby, predict the future— clearly identifying objects as recognizably separate entities in the world at large. Although Einstein also discovered relativity and linked it with position and momentum, he believed that the world obeyed certain physical laws that do not change, despite the relative positions of human observers. For Plotnitsky, Bohr’s idea of complementarity changed all that. His idea, at first based on the two-slit experiment, in which particles or waves (as viewed as traces of collisions on a photographic screen) are determined by the measuring instruments in place at the particular moment of observation, revealed a world of total randomness, chance, and accident. We can observe measured trajectories of electrons and see the dots that they leave on photographic plates, but we cannot see the electrons themselves. We have no idea why quantum things happen the way they do, where they happen, how they happen, or when they happen. Each experiment remains unique, individual, irreducible, and indivisible. Thus, a new radical epistemology was born without any possible visible models or signs. As Bohr suggested, “We are not dealing with an arbitrary renunciation of a more detailed analysis of atomic phenomena but with a recognition that such an analysis is in principle excluded” (qtd. in Plotnitsky, RB 46). For Bohr and Plotnitsky the quantum realm remains inaccessible, an ongoing flux or fluid subatomic milieu that is not only beyond our abilities to see and fathom but also beyond our abilities to conceptualize. Because of its inaccessibility , the quantum realm must remain (at least at the present time), as all quantum experiments must remain, essentially ambiguous, invisible, irreducible , discontinuous, and thoroughly random, leading to the necessary “radical suspension of realism at the ultimate level of description” (RB 112). Classical thought and concepts will no longer help define or describe the world of the quantum, or to speak more accurately, they can be used only to describe the effects that measuring devices measure, thereby encompassing a world of effects that may have no relation whatsoever to the world of nature. Chance becomes [3.239.214.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:44 GMT) The Quantum Flux as/in Fiction : 49 not our misreading or lack of knowledge about certain laws but is embedded totally in the quantum realm as part of its very existence. Bohr...