Pitfalls of spacetime cartography

To what extent, or in what sense, are we contemporary with other ages in Earth’s history?¹ So how do we map that? Is chronology necessary?² Are we sitting in little observatories sticking up in an ocean of green looking for signs at the horizon that inspire us to go under and end up somewhere unexpected? Or are there very specific networks and very specific relationships of proximity that are phenomenological and associative rather than spatial or temporal? Are spatiality and temporality as such subject to a passionate geography? What is an accurate map?

Indeed, these are among the most interesting questions, and cannot be definitively answered. I’m immediately heading off on sidetracks: I will pick up three loose ends: a childhood memory, theories of evolution, and the question of writing stories.

When I was a child, my dinosaur books had early on taught me the chronology of the Mesozoic: the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous were as natural a sequence as morning, midday & evening. But I was somewhat less interested in human history and didn’t have the right literature, so for a long time I couldn’t quite get the chronology straight there. I knew the Stone age was very long ago, and I knew the Roman age (as depicted in Astérix) was long ago.

But I couldn’t figure out when the Cowboy age and the Knight age fitted in (those were the two eras where most films and comics played out), they just didn’t seem logically connected to each other. Clearly, the Knight age was more developed, with big castles, elaborate clothes, strange weapons, and rigid social organisation. But then at some point, an adult told me that the Cowboy age actually came after the Knight age, and that indeed the Cowboy age was not so long ago, it was in fact late 19th century. I couldn’t believe it. Late 19th century was recent, it was civilised, it had science, it had urbanism, it had electricity and a lot of technology, it had music, literature and art, which were obviously not around in the world of the wild west. So any linear progression that would pass through the present and lead on to the Science Fiction age, would clearly have to have gone from the Cowboy age to the Knight age and not vice versa. There must be some mistake, the barbarism of the wild west just couldn’t follow upon the brilliant display of medieval court culture.

Those are the kind of stubborn illusions created by the notion of linear progression. And of course, by the universalisation of certain settings that popular culture loves to dwell on, creating the assumption that medieval court culture was a global general situation and not just a European upperclass thing, or that wild west culture was a universal step that civilisation went through and not just a North American frontier thing (both with some historical parallells for sure, but not universal stages).

Ordering issues aside, the conclusion that should have been drawn but wasn’t, was that popular culture tends to actualise all kinds of different historical situations side by side. One could be a celtic pagan in the morning, a dinosaur watcher at midday, and a cowboy villain in the evening. But if all ages are accessible, it is very important that time is still not a flat landscape. Movement still involves wonder and implies meaning. And meaning draws on history. Stratigraphy, or chronology, still makes a lot of sense, since things tend to be understandable only in terms of their origin, of their historical development, and of the contradictions with the specific contemporary uses for particular purposes.

All these things developed. First you see that development, then you find mechanisms that would bring it about. Just as that old romanticist idealist giant Hegel (in the most famous version of the story, which does make a lot of sense) had it all outlined but Marx & Engels found a way that his sense of development could actually work in practice, romantic biologists in dozens, most famously nowadays Lamarck and Goethe but most elaborately and for contemporaries most influentially Lorenz Oken, had a clear view of the history, the transformation, of the organism world being its most crucial aspect, but Darwin and Wallace found a way that this sense of development could actually work in practice.

There is in fact a long tradition of romantics, swedenborgians and occultists in biology who happily embrace evolution, but just can’t accept the purposeless and multidirectional evolution as decribed by Darwin and Wallace, they believe that evolution must have a direction and a purpose, that it must progress according to certain values, and go from simple to complex, from raw to elaborate, on a route towards perfection, illumination and/or dominion.³

Of course the notion of a unidirectional process is not just a cul-de-sac but it’s also methodologically and morally unsound. The elements of undeterminedness and chance, of chaotic overdetermination, of expectancies and the complex connections of desire, of tipping points and emergent effects, are typically the more interesting parts, and the most common patterns are just empirical facts of statistical convergences favouring a simplicity that is in most cases nothing but a special case of the reigning complexity. And this is in itself a case in point, since such reduction and simplicity are very often the outcome of an evolutionary process rather than complexity and any sense of “advancedness” or “superiority” if the terms are taken in any other sense than merely chronological…⁴

Writing moves in all directions too. It is game-like and in a sense metonymical, you could go from anywhere to anywhere. Foreign places are foreign eras, odd moments in time are odd locations, and they can be reached. So where do we go? It’s not inconsequential, it matters. It’s not a Markov chain walk; just because things are accessible they’re not necessarily equally accessible. Even if you can get anywhere in principle, you still have to make a certain effort to go there, and for those movements that are less than overdetermined it might not seem like it’s worth the effort. You will have to offer up your desire and capabilities and work your way there. And something unexpected might turn up on the way. And you might realise that in some sense you’re not the same person once you’re there as you were before, and there is no real turning back. ^{5 6}

Indeed, real fantasies do rarely fit a storyline progressing in a linear manner. Of course, many of the things you imagine are background stories to what you saw before, or series of preambles and postfact commentaries, but that is something they know in classical novels and in Hollywood too. You don’t have to be unidirectional or straight to be linear. But more strikingly, many of the things you imagine are seemingly freefloating, easy or not to interpret as variations and interpretations of what you saw before, just different potentialities getting their chance, or continuations starting anew ignoring wherever you seem to have ended up before. The so-called “true function of thought” reinterprets and revisits and is capable of holding up several versions at once. If storytelling to a certain extent needs a linear structure, it certainly does not have to be a unilinear one. There are always different possibilities. What comes later might draw upon different versions of the past. It might invite different suggestions from the future. The seemingly unrelated events start finding their connections. And big dinosaurs start turning up, or medieval troubadours. And not. Or you find yourself splashing in the famous primordial soup. Which implies that you may not be finding yourself. And things were not what they seemed to be anywhere. And they weren’t what they turned out to be. And yet they were. As this multilinearity is very obviously possible in storytelling ⁷, it can be noted that it is a distinct possibility in everyday life too, though usually discarded by Occam’s razor or “realistically” by pragmatic “farmers’ rationalism” or rigid “common sense” ideology. But if you look at it closely, the “simple version” is something that is expected and therefore imposed on experience, not something that is actually there in the material, so that once you start presupposing less assumptions, there are more options opening as to how to connect the elements and structure experience.

The spontaneous structure of experience is highly approximate, and does not rigidly stick to the almanach. Things may have started somewhere and continue at some very different route. Experience of course has its own selection mechanism, in that stuff which isn’t interesting enough will be left behind rather than built further upon, but at the same time much of the most interesting will be abandoned too for various psychological and practical defense reasons, and will come back to haunt us as symptoms (in this particular context they will become the analog of fossils then). Like evolution, experience has a chaotic sense of direction and does not have an apriori sense of progress. It is a matter of choice whether to impose a strict sense of allegedly realistic chronology to it and struggle to let the past remained buried, or to investigate and restructure ones experience, by means of imagination. An integral part of experience, it is also in many ways an engine of experience, providing many of the opportunities to reinterpret, go back, find that which was overlooked, turn upside down, stay in the eye of the storm, change the outcome of things. Imagination has the particular way of being able to abandon the uninteresting and to go in all directions and to choose between the easy ways and the overly complicated, or painful, or yet undetermined, or heaven-storming. No doubt, following the imagination is the crucial element of structuring experience in a way so as to be an active adventure of investigating possibilities and changing the framework of one’s actions, making other actions possible, and thus potentially changing history. History is there to be changed, not to be passively read.

So: is chronology necessary? Yes, indeed, but it’s not given, it comes as a result of our investigation and interpretation and our continuation of it, we create it, as we weave it together and are being created by it, with voluntary and involuntary contributions.⁸ We don’t write history on a whim, but out of our desire as to what we want to understand, what we long to make out of it. So the history textbook and the novel are both in a sense just attempts to reconstruct chronology, with much more data to corroborate with in the history book than in the novel. And the paleontology textbook is somewhere inbetween the two. I’m not saying paleontology is half-fiction, but then I’m not saying fiction is necessarily fiction either…⁹ It has to go according to its own necessities. You have a certain amount of input that you need to account for or “stay true to”, and you have your method to follow, and you have to make it look a bit like a story. If you want it to remain accessible to others you might keep caring about that effort to make it look a bit like a story. But when it concerns life as such, it will probably benefit the dynamics of living if you loosen that ambition. Stay true to your input, your method, and your efforts to make sense of it afterwards, but don’t make too much of an effort to squeeze it into the story frame, and even more importantly, do not replace the experience with the story about it. Different loci in time will retain their voices and comfort and provoke you.

A story hesitatingly writes us. We keep guessing, so we keep living. Living experience is then a genre of paleontology, a speculative reconstruction with some brilliant tools and particular criteria of truth. While imagination kidnaps us to different places and ages, and different senses of place and age. Thus it’s also true that paleontology is living experience.

Footnotes:

¹ Number one in the Peculiar Mormyrid questionnaire on Deep Time.

² I have had one or two friends who enjoyed quoting Lenin as saying “Is chronology necessary? No!” I’m not sure what the guy means (if the quote is accurate). Maybe just that it’s more important to make history than to write it. But they’re not all that separate, you know.

³ Actually, many accounts of evolutionary theory in popular science, and especially in popular culture, and especially in North America but also in France, are unable to see this difference. They believe they are sticking to the Darwinian version when they are actually teaching the romantic-occult version (there was, for a while, an allegedly non-religious version of this idealist framework called “Orthogenesis” which was particularly popular among American biologists but then abandoned by the scientific community) that evolution always goes from low to high, from simple to complex, from ugly to beautiful, from clumsy to effective, from defenseless to conquering, and thus from passivity to dominion. We’re lucky that the Christians don’t realise that a lot of people already believe in a version of evolution that is congruent with theirs, and that many of the Christian propagandists, again at least in North America, stick to the obviously stupid story of Creationism that will satisfy very few.

⁴ It is extremely common that a population that finds itself in a situation of rapid evolution (small population size, island populations, new niche, host switch, protected environment etc) starts shredding all unnecessary morphological or functional complexity: flightless birds, pale and blind cave organisms, parasites with an ever-decreasing array of bodyparts altogether… On the other hand, there is often an intricate genetic complexity coding for this reduction into morphological or functional simplicity. But another case in point might be salamanders, who tend to have among the largest genomes of all animals, while having retained the generalised morphology and physiology from when they evolved back in the Carboniferous or so, before other tetrapod morphologies familiar today. So they were never reduced but just stayed simple, and still they have these vast amounts of genetic information. Which, according to geneticists, is largely repetitive “junk DNA”, nonsense and redundant extra copies which they seem to have a lack of mechanisms to get rid of. Which may, in turn, create adaptation difficulties and physiological restrictions responsible for the overall critical situation for so many salamander species today. Which one represents advanced simplicity? The hyper-slimmed near-nothingness of parasites en route to embodying the tale of the wizard who conjured away himself, abandoning body for information system like the wet dream of a contemporary virtuality-enthusiast, or the selfdestructive wisdom-like ultrarapid-colossus genetically-obese calmness of the mysterious salamanders?

⁵ If you want to stick to the rules of French classicism you could of course hold on to staying in one place and following a linear 1:1 chronology. But it did always seem strange why anyone would want to do that, when you can explore any place in spacetime and any sequence of events you are curious about, and you can find yourself having ended up there without any conscious effort. Unless you actually want to invoke claustrophobia, which you might have some particular reason for.

⁶ At times, I’ve felt a certain hostility towards metonymic movements in general, just because the emphasis on it in the poststructuralist/postmodernist spectrum tended to highlight this very qualitative nivellation: yes, you could go anywhere from anywhere, and all things were equally unique and equally different so there were no qualitative differences between different loci in practice and there was no such thing as improvement or an ascending movement. Of course, it was a mistake blaming metonymy as such for this, but this was a worthwhile mistake that lead to some quite productive investigation and polemics around the metonymy/metaphor relationship together with Merl Fluin, in her “Laws of Motion” pdf and in the resulting long debate about dialectics on the Robber Bridegroom blog back in 2006.

⁷ Actually, the possibility of a non-unilinear linearity is less obvious in poetry, since poetry tends to be more universally simultaneous, the movements in scale and time are in a sense already there in the sum of associations that form the poetic content.

⁸ One might squeeze in the reminder here that this recalls the argument why “eternal surrealism” in Schuster’s sense is impossible. Sure, we find examples of some sense of objective surrealism everywhere in history, but we can do so only as surrealists, because we embody the surrealist perspective and tradition and take it upon ourselves to reveal this invisible continuity. Without a surrealist activity to recognise this tradition for its own surrealist purposes, such a tradition does not exist in any particularly meaningful sense, and it becomes an inconsequential issue to squabble among academics and critics about criteria for (or not even criteria but merely their unqualified gut feeling).

₉ Well, in this sense, some types of fiction are “mere fiction”, if it is formula-based, audience-adapted, skill-posturing, or novelty-showcasing – but not if its actually imagination-based ( – or purely chance- or game-conjured and imagination-completed), which is a type of truth.