Quantum Art and Uncertainty by Paul Thomas (review)

For this reviewer art has, among others, three important functions, two desirable, one not. As distraction, spectacle or even solace, it acts in a reformist way at best, certainly not revolutionary. We turn in circles: everything’s awful, but look, this cheers us up. But it’s all terrible. But here’s some beauty or humor or something; but we’re all going to die; but see the life-light in this painting, the awe in the interaction with this screen . . . Spectacles, however uplifting we pretend they are, are always, in the end, inadequate; ones involving VR headsets especially: often not only inadequate but authoritarian, too.

The two desirable functions are performative, in the sense that the words “abracadabra” or “I love you” are performative. Art can make us want to do things, and it can make us think. In other words, it can be political with a small p, and it can be a representation of, or stimulus toward, philosophy. And just as a lot of philosophy today is almost a branch of physics, and certainly vice versa, art can be considered as part of philosophy and physics. This may be too bold or bald a statement for some, but please bear with me.

This stimulating book, whose powerful three-page introduction by Timothy Morton is itself almost a reason to buy it, deals with the power of fragile uncertainty, the in-betweenness of things, as exemplified in various artworks and in the speculative thought and art of Paul Thomas.

Spectacle comes from spectate, to view, watch or behold. It’s passive. While etymologically close, speculation is more active, to do with contemplation and of course thinking about what you’re observing. But what we are observing is not clear. We shiver between two horrible poles: absolute nothingness/nonexistence and mechanical, cold, perpetual motion, that is not alive in any useful sense, like a pointless pendulum about which we know Foucault. The attraction toward either of these poles, really, is a death-drive. Art, and here quantum art especially, quivers in the middle and postpones or suspends this momentum. The life that flickers twixt nonexistence and pointless agitation, and Thomas’s art that mirrors or embodies this flickering, is not definite life as opposed to death, but “uncanny,” uncertain, hard to discern. While the manic pursuit of certainty is destructive, of life and everything, the powerful fragility of the flickering, asserts Morton, challenges the “rigid, binary ways of thinking and acting.” Uncertainty is power. The horrible poles are in fact impossible; the in-betweenness is all there is.

Thomas’s book is an insight into art as reflection of, and stimulus to think about, our flickering lives in a flickering universe, via art. Immateriality precludes neither performativeness nor political action. If that’s hard to accept, given the urgent materiality of threats we face today, think about the opposite, the death-wish binaries of the Cold War era, revisited and repeated now as both farce and tragedy. This malign Zeitgeist would collapse all waveforms, reducing all uncertainty to a tweeted obscenity. We need the flickering. One way to confound the enemies of humanity, truth and oneness is to throw glitter into their eyes, to rattle them by being gloriously off their bases, swerving, scintillating, made of different stuff, shimmering life to their hard death, multidimensional to their one-dimensionality, infinite to their zero.

These don’t make very good slogans or plans of action, of course. We can, and do, drift off into clouds of semiprofessional unknowing, making, you know, art about that stuff, just one more useless pole, virtual now. We can get lost and self-destruct in a frenetic forest of norms and tangents to the death-death line yet make a good career out of that along the way, if you get the self-destruction just right. But art can anchor us, not trapped but located, at least for a bit.

Each large chapter of Quantum Art and Uncertainty deals with one...