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MLN 118.3 (2003) 688-703



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Chaos by Design: 1
The Light-Sound Constellation

Anselm Haverkamp


Er war ein Wissenschaftler
Ich möchte wissen, wie er es geschafft hat. . .

(Otto)

He was a scientist;
I would like to know how he did it. . .

The disorder in the designations 2 of the sciences (Wissenschaften) may not be surpassed by that disorder supposed to have existed as chaos before the creation. With the support of astrophysics—in a strange but highly suggestive re-literalization of the Einsteinian conception of space—the newest metaphysics of light would have us believe that it is able to place an event prior to the first hundredth of a second of the legendary first three minutes—an event which, in its incessant [End Page 688] repercussions, has brought (like no other since) the facticity of all knowledge-creation (Wissen-Schaffen) to a new and mythical concept, a mythical analogon in nuce. 3 What is, however, less than self-evident here is that the concept of myth itself (rather than that of space) has now entered into a new dimension; this conclusion remains hidden for as long as we are under the spell of the knowledge-creating event. The reverberations of the bullet-photograph experiment of Ernst Mach and Peter Salcher also acoustically second the same metaphysics of light, bringing the circumstance (precisely as a stance of matter and matters) into an unsurpassed emblematic constellation. 4 The moment of ordering, of design and designation, is prior to order itself and is of limited epistemic duration—limited to the already stated seconds and minutes. In this time, an unsensed disorder balls itself up into a moment—the only one which deserves the name—and discharges itself as an excess momentum into a mythic constellation of light and sound.

Such a scenario, offering instantaneous illumination to the picture of book-like designs of Mach and Salcher, contains at least three interesting elements. How does it even come to ordering in the first place (since it actually possesses none beforehand)? What is the subsequent further development of such an ordering (its epistemic duration)? What finally limits and defines it (its validity)? I will limit myself here to the second of these aspects with the expectation that [End Page 689] the a priori of designation (the a priori per se) and the a postiori of validity (the a postiori above all) will also be defined and co-produced by the specification of what connects them and serves as their episteme, as typical or ideal conditions of beginning and end. This makes the beginning of the new sciences 'sublime' like Genesis itself; 5 but nowhere else so extremely and paradigmatically as in science does praxis determine what theory will have going for it in terms of its reach and power—its own reach as well as that of its presuppositions. (This is precisely what makes up science's empirical proof.) In the present instance of experimental design, this would mean that the experimental design of Mach and Salcher's light and sound constellation would be a new re-formatting of the mythical dimension, displacing it to a lower level; this almost cinematic dissolution would mean the loss of focus at one level in favor of a new resolution at a different level.

The period of ordering, for as long as it lasts—after having once been summoned to life without ever having been uttered as a fiat—and before it is over (or is counted as over) leads a disorderly existence without much calculability. (Even if from the perspective of the research-authorities it lies under the aegis of the most extreme retrospective calculability.) The requirement alone, according to which reasons and justifications must be provided (a completely hermeneutic category), as well as the necessary belatedness of this demand, produce something that can be called—though only in a secondary and derivative sense—"rhetoric of research." The primary sense pertains to the disorder itself, which by showing the ordering within itself shows its rhetorical nature. This means that the disorder produces a grammar...

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