Quanta and Dialetheia

Here is a somewhat loose reply to Ajay Kurian, who asked this interesting question:

Since you have now proposed this as the truth of objects, thus making their destruction or death a part of their being, I was wondering how this jived with your previous writing on the re-mark in Ecology Without Nature.  If sound and noise, place and space, marks and drawings all exist in a quantum state, and if the re-mark suggests that there is only one state in which they can be, then how does this jive with the dialetheia of objects?

(The re-mark is a concept I like to use, taken from Derrida's Dissemination and The Truth in Painting. For every system of marks, there has to be a mark that designates that system as a system. My trivial example would be the speech bubble around Woodstock's speech. His words are just little scratches and they could look like random noise, but the speech bubble turns them into words—we just don't know what they mean. Derrida came up with the re-mark in the same year that Spencer Brown came up with the Mark.)

I responded:

Well quantum coherence is dialetheic by definition. A particle both is and is not at a certain position, and so on. In fact that very point is in the book. Now when you look in the box you collapse the wave function (or however it works, depending on which interpretation you're using). Derrida's re-mark precisely is a weird boundary marker that also isn't one. In this sense it's unlike Spencer Brown's Mark, which really does something. In other words, you can never be sure what is a mark and what isn't. I'm not completely sure how this doesn't work with the argument in Ecology without Nature. I'd need to know a bit more about what you're thinking.

What I'm attacking in that book is the very idea of a unified, unambiguous reality underneath things. I'm not proposing anything, which may itself be a fault, in that book. So I'm not sure what I'm saying that you're having trouble with. I think the passage you're referring to is where I say that there is a "one shot deal" in effect with perception (this is towards the end of chapter 1). In other words you can't ever "see" coherence. Of course this was before the clever guys at UCSB designed an experiment where you could indeed see it! But I think it's compatible with OOO to say that you always "reduce" (in the quantum theory language) something inherently ambiguous to a superficial parody of itself, present-at-hand, when you measure it.

That's a pretty quantum level OOO there, which has worked its way into a couple of essays I've been writing (and btw into Realist Magic). In other words, quanta are perfect examples of withdrawn objects. Nothing can know them in themselves, since to measure is to hit with another quantum. But I think the argument in that part of EwN was simply to undermine a reified idea of Nature, which, I was arguing, seems to depend upon layers of aesthetic effects that at bottom (the re-mark level) are highly shifty and ambiguous.

—Of course the less convoluted answer is that I may have been wrong when I wrote Ecology without Nature!  Or that I have definitely undergone a change of mind, about many things.