What in the hell …

I wrote about this a bit to some UK pals not long ago. This weekend it came up again. I thought I’d cull from what I wrote before, to put it back on my mind. I quite like this as a metaphor for relationships between past and present - the sense I can make of what Benjamin calls the ‘dialectical image,’ or the type of writing on/with history Ranciere does once in a while. Reid talks about this in his intro to Nights of Labor, Ranciere was part of a history collective called Revoltes Logiques, who ‘wanted to know something else’ in their work on/with history, rather than confirming what they already knew.

I wrote about this before, quoting the Revoltes Logiques collective:

“An episode from the past interests us only inasmuch as it becomes an episode of the present wherein our thoughts, actions, and strategies are decided.”
(Page xxi in Kristin Ross’s introduction to Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster)

Anyway, tesseract: the word comes from a book I read as a kid. A Wrinkle In Time. (Everything until the end of this post is taken from a prior post here.) In the book they use a form of space and time travel called a “tesseract”, the verb form is “to tesser”.

I found a brief explanation of the idea here, which summarizes a conversation in the book:

“Imagine holding up a string with two hands, stretching that string so it is a straight line.

A hypothetical ant on your left hand (point A) could reach your right hand (point B) by walking on that straight-line string.

But is there a quicker route? Yes there is. Bring your two hands together so that the string’s tips touch each other, and there you have the shortest route from point A to point B… and it isn’t a straight line.

It’s a wrinkle.

That is a tesseract.

The theory is that one may tesser through the fabric of time-space in order to get to places quicker. ”

Some googling turned up a bunch of science stuff related to this that is way beyond me… Among that was this from some blog which compared the tesseract to time travel stuff involving worm holes (burrows dug by moles/tribes of moles?) and black holes -
like I said the science is all beyond me, but I found it a nice piece of resonance that, from what I remember from science back when I used to know a bit about it, black holes are also called singularities, and they have a part called an event horizon. Nifty.

Anyway, I think the tesseract is a nice metaphor for the type of relationship between past and present, history and politics that I’m keen to see more of and to try and develop both as an idea and practice… instead of just slagging off stuff that doesn’t do this, like the periodizing impulse in Negri and others. It’s like, you know, instead of complaining about what’s on the radio you can just go start a punk band instead, to compose rather than just oppose.

Lastly, I found a long quote from the book here, which if my memory serves follows directly after the conversation quoted above:

“Oh, dear, ” Meg sighed. “I guess I am a moron. I just don’t get it.”

“That is because you think of space only in three dimensions,” Mrs. Whatsit told her. “We travel in the fifth dimension. This is something you can understand, Meg. Don’t be afraid to try. Was your mother able to explain a tesseract to you?”

“Well, she never did,” Meg said. “She got so upset about it. Why, Mrs. Whatsit? She said it had something to do with her and Father.”

“It was a concept they were playing with” Mrs. Whatsit said, “going beyond the fourth dimension to the fifth. Did your mother explain it to you, Charles?”

“Well, yes.” Charles looked a little embarrassed. “Please don’t be hurt, Meg. I just kept at her while you were at school til I got it out of her.”

Meg sighed. “Just explain it to me.”

“Okay,” Charles said. “What is the first dimension?”

“Well—a line:—— ”

“Okay. And the second dimension?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, you’d square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat anymore. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the square. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time.”

“That’s right,” Charles said. “Good girl. Okay, then, for the fifth dimension you’d square the fourth, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

For a brief, illuminating second Meg’s face had the listening, probing expression that was so often seen on Charles’s. “I see!” she cried. “I got it! For just a moment I got it! I can’t possibly explain it now, but there for a second I saw it!” “