Lucretian Geometry (a speculation)

Is an hoop just a dot by other means?

A dot and an enclosed circle are certainly more dissimilar than a dot and a connected line in space (i.e. a hoop). A circle is an outline, a trace, history’s most pragmatic abstraction, whereas hoops, loops, Möbius strips – these more closely resemble the paradox of the dot.

If you think about it, dots are simply impossible: they’re either tiny (thick) lines or filled-in circles (i.e.:“a hair or a hairball”). Dots are uncanny.

Dots are not the same as points.

In Euclidean geometry, points are the beginning realities (so called one-dimensional space), but in fact they are complex abstractions of the imagination. If you think about how lines are defined as the shortest distance between two points, this is phenomenologically incorrect since in fact the lines include – or subsume – the points themselves. In this formulation, “point” – or dot – means “end,” an intangible concept denoting the place where a thing ceases to be a thing and instead becomes a not-thing, separated, void. Following Lucretius, who posits that the world is made up only of “bodies” and “void” (and no “third things”), an end is not an abstraction but the observation of void. Consecutively, points (vis-à-vis Euclid) are ill-defined abstractions that seek to make sense of impossible dots, and in turn, impossible realities.

In three-dimensional space, ends become edges, giving further shape to the Lucretian geometry of void and furthering the groundlessness of points.

But knives do cut, you may say.

Importantly knifes do not cut on their own, independently; they cut into other things. We say a knife cuts because we see an apple or a cheese wedge bisection at the point of contact with the knife’s edge. [Furthermore, there is no knife that is not a tool (or a consumer product), hence a further abstraction.] A cut is equal parts cutting-thing and cuttable-thing.

Though it possesses more verisimilitude, the Euclidean third-dimension is in a way the most problematic because it gives body to shapes but leaves out the energy, the vitality, the presence of thing-ness. Disappointingly, three-dimensional space is less-than inert. If you think about a stationary wheel (the one on your bike in the shed), it is not a circle in the third dimension (albeit with the accidental imperfections necessarily added to bring abstract shapes into actuality, through welded metal and molded rubber, etc.). What do wheels do but spin? Balls but roll? Blocks but impede? Pyramids but erode? Three-dimensional space is still abstracted “space” and does not represent “live” space. Motion – kinematics, not time – is the fourth dimension because movement necessarily resembles living bodies – living bodies in active relationships with other living bodies. [It is Lucretius not Augustine who first insists that time is insubstantial: “Time also exists not of itself, but from things themselves is derived the sense of what has been done in the past, then what thing is present with us, further what is to follow after. Nor may we admit that anyone has a sense of time by itself separated from the movement of things and their quiet calm” (On the Nature of Things, 1. 459-463, Rouse & Smith).] The Euclidean spectrum of x, y, z, t is both abstract (as opposed to descriptive) and ideological (as opposed to universal) as it attempts to present the sense of things as a heap of sensible things extra-dependent of nothing, where in fact objects are extra dependent of precisely nothing, of void, that allow for the presence and interactivity of other objects.

A hoop then has two conceptions, one in the third-dimension and the other in the fourth-dimension. A hoop, like a circle, has no beginning or end, except when we remember that a circle does indeed have a beginning (the abstract x center) and an end (the circumference dictated by d distance from x in all directions). Hoops in the third dimension have this same finite quality to them, only with added complexities of gauge and further demarcations shaped by their bloated edgings with void.

In the fourth dimension of kinematic geometry, however, hoops begin to assemble their symbolic association with infinity and no longer resemble the Gordian knot whose complexity is merely a complicit illusion. This is because a moving hoop, a loop looping, a shaping of objects into a material blur of non-beginning and non-ending, mirrors the velocity of experience. [A model Mobius strip then is really just a three-dimensional representation of the fourth-dimensional hoop.]

When a bus darts past your field of vision, it moves away in a linear vector defined in essence by the surface of the earth’s crust. If you are on a bus darting past Overland Avenue, the earth is transformed into blurring lines of light and matter. The bus stops and the experiential hooping of earth-things comes to an end. Just as waking and sleeping are not fixed points of experience but only definite matters in the abstract (a fact also mirrored in our entire existence of being here and then eventually not), these liminal continuums mirror the experience of being hooped.

Returning to the failures of three-dimensional geometry versus actual “live” geometries, all three-dimensional objects imply a spectral dissection dictated by their coming into contact with experience (i.e. with sense and reflection) and perhaps none so illustratively as a hoop. The are two ways a subject can be presented to a hoop: as a thing-that-hoops and as a hooping-thing. As a thing-that-hoops, it is a child’s hula-hoop or a metal bracelets – but a hooping thing can be any encapsulating space of varying thickness: a belt, a car, a department store floor, the woods, etc. Life cocoons experience, but observers – others – are finite, specifically our widths, even just the space of a brain synapse, or an atom. A loop is a tube in the moment. A moment in a tube is a container. In life, the wild is counterintuitively a confined space. Our conceptions are always-already limited, yet simultaneously more complex than their abstraction attempts to conceal.

Back to the original question: Is a hoop just a dot by other means?

If you go fast enough, all shapes turn to lines, and if you are constantly moving then what’s the difference between the continual line connected in space (a hoop) and a dot? At top speeds, dots become indistinguishable from hoops, not to mention other dots. Dots – not points – are live space when they are blots, spots, smudges, spills, drops – all synonyms of human accident. The information age devalues uncanny dots and their vicissitudes because they avert the binary codes of mobility.

Quote #18: Viktor Shklovsky (1981)

—words don’t just stand on their own, they exist within the context of a phrase; a word juxtaposed to another word isn’t an arbitrary word, it shifts the meaning into another dimension. It’s a labyrinth of linkages that that has a purpose.

Humboldt contra Saussure

On the advice of Andrea Wulf, whose The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World makes for stellar reading, I’ve been pouring over the German polymath’s seminal texts, namely Cosmos, Views of Nature, and Essay on the Geography of Plants. Wulf wonderfully weaves not just a kind of “Greatest Hits” of the once-infamous, since-obscured writer/thinker but delves deeply into his dense works (it helps that they are evocative and poetic to begin with) – including mentioning his theories on language. Besides Simon Winchester, who turned the history of the OED first into a British caper film a la The League of Gentlemen or X-men and then a Gothic murder mystery, I don’t know other bestsellers who openly discuss semiotics for pages and pages. More to the point: I’ve read a great many of those 20^th century theories of language in vogue after the second World War, and I can’t recall a single mention of von Humboldt (even from the French, who happily hosted him even while Bonaparte was lobbing cannons at his Austro-Hungarian Empire!).

Something Wulf fails to mention explicitly (though perhaps it is the reason why she couldn’t just fail to drop the subject altogether) is that von Humboldt’s theories of language appear throughout his works; they are sporadic, but consistently sporadic.

Here are some of the heaviest sections from the introduction of Volume II of Cosmos (representing his later work from 1844, but which I randomly read first; cool fact from Wulf: he debated naming the book Gaia, especially ironic considering Wulf and other Humboldt scholars have indicated that the “pre-Darwinian Darwinist” suggested the Gaia theory of a living Earth a full +125 years before it caused a rage amongst environmentalists in the 1970s, where it is still customary to direct attribution):

Exploded errors may survive partially among the uneducated, aided in some instances by an obscure and mystic phraseology: they have also left behind them many expressions by which our nomenclature is more or less disfigured; while a few of happier, though figurative origin, have gradually received more accurate definition, and have been found worthy of preservation in our scientific language.

In a far more interesting way that I am accustomed to reading – and, importantly I think, without using the terms – he is talking about dialects, regionalisms, and slang. He continues:

That which sense grasps but imperfectly offers a free field to creative fancy; the outward impressions change with the changing phases of the mind; and this without destroying the illusion, by which we imagine ourselves to receive from external nature? that with which we have ourselves unconsciously invested her.

This is, to my recollection, a much more dynamic dialectical observation than Ferdinand de Saussure. The Swiss structuralist simply argued (and much later) that there’s no internal logic to a word referring to a thing; signifiers are relational to other signifiers in a linguistic system and not to the external world of contingencies (remember: from de Saussure we get the surrealistic, anarchical interplay of signifier and signifier à la Duchamp). Humboldt, too, is no essentialist, however he sees language not akin to a priori reason or something mechanical that ultimately has no meaningful interplay with the natural world (after all, he writes further on in the introduction, “[t]he impression produced by the grandest scenes of nature does not depend exclusively on height;” here, like Saussure he severs the external world from its cultural overdeterminacy). Rather, the functionality of language ignores (or has amnesia about) just how intimately connected it is to the signified (but not in positivist or predetermined ways). What he is articulating is very delicate and even circuitous and sounds kind of mystical (he even uses the term), but I think he’s trying to say, building on Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason, that human language has a role in natural world: this is a radical idea even today, let alone in 1844.

His clearest articulation of his “organic structure” of language is the conclusion to the introduction:

Words, therefore, are more than signs and forms; and their mysterious and beneficent influence is there most powerfully manifested, where the language has sprung spontaneously from the minds of the people, and on its own native soil.