Meridian Proprioception and the Common in the Outwith of "World" – A Canonical Question for Quantum Literacy

Abstract

How to speak of the common? I will attend to this question as a philological question whereby the object of the quest does and does not coincide with the subject of the endeavour. Speaking of the common cannot do with attending to particular voices, utterances, formalisms to be classified and sorted out, it needs to actively invent an Outwith to such orders, a categorical and cornucopian kind of exteriority. This paper will raise the question of the common through the optics proposed by Michel Serres’ quest for a General Treatise on Sculpture (Statues, Second Book of Foundations, 1987) – because the gesture of “a general treatise” (not "theory") captures this paradoxical con-founding of abstraction with graspability very well. The case I wish to raise and stake (rather than state) is this: If a philologist asks a question, she needs to ask it as a plastic artist with a meridian kind of common proprioception that senses out (erspüren, ausloten) an abstract yet elementary (in that sense: axiomatic) locus in quo for such thought. How to speak of the common will be framed thus as a vernacular sort of silent talk that speaks from an Outwith of World and that manifests itself as world "in the inclination angle of creaturely existence" (Paul Celan). My main theoretical sources to draw from will be the following: Werner Hamacher’s attention to "data" through a quantum optics where words are actively “given” in the silent speech of articulate formulation uttered by no one in particular; Paul Celan’s Meridian poetics with its cosmic architectonics, as well Peter Handke’s conception of how ideate Capital by literary means in Bildverlust (2003), and both Celan’s and Handke’s intricate vocabularies (e.g. Gegenwort, Zeitgehöft, Sprachgitter, das Gehege der grösseren Zeit, Bildmeteoren etc); as well as Michel Serres’ late work on how to re-conceive thought in respect to light as “incandescence” (the white light of photons) through a physics of communication, and his related notion of a “global intuition”. The proposal thereby is to view the question of how to speak of the common as a canonical question for exercising oneself in quantum literacy, and in new materialist methods of "study". There is inevitably a situational involvement with such quest/ioning (hence a kind of activism); but the often evoked looking glass of “states of entanglement” overemphasises one of two ratios confounded in the physicalist’s proportioning of light today. Constitutive for quantum physics (and hence electricity that brings us globality, its logistics and forms of capitalism) is a double character of (1) light as mass, and (2) light as photon. This double character of light is evoked on the one hand in the terms of the wave analogy for mass (often evoked as “states” of entanglement), while on the other hand, photons are called “particles” – despite their being defined as that which has not mass (often evoked as a kind of activity that is “intricate”). The quantum optics of such philological quests treats of this double character of light as mass, and light as photon without hierarchy between one or the other. I will argue that in quantum physics, photons "provide" the "activity" (intricacy) before which “states” (of entanglement) show up at all, like we can say from such a philological point of view that words are what they articulate (entanglement) in being given by an impersonal activity (intricacy). Speaking of the common needs to come to terms not only with "entanglements" and their "extrication", but also with “intricacies”, with a kind of interiority, an inwardness or inside "proper" to such new materialist speech – could this “interiority” not be that of a cosmic self as a self that can never properly say “I”?