Owl of Minerva: What Is The Next Frontier?

28 November 2010

What is the next frontier? In technology, the next frontier is smart matter. As Neri Oxman said, materials are the new software. That sounds metaphysical to me. That sounds like Leibniz. There we go: the new frontier is the nano world, the thinking of tiny structures on which everything depends. The new frontier is the search for fractal comprehension, seeing and understanding those identical processes that link together disparate scales. The new frontier is the vertical integration of reality. There can be no movement forward until we abandon, or at least backburner, our insistence on ontological certainty. Any scientist will tell you that scientists make models. They gather data and then formulate models that map onto the data as accurately as possible. To any scientist who is not disingenuous, the notion of “truth” should be meaningless and irrelevant. There is always an epistemological rift, a lacuna of essential heterogeneity, lying between the model and the phenomenon. A good scientist never confuses models of reality with reality itself. But the rest of us tend to make precisely that mistake, and we ought to stop immediately. We need to stop mistaking ways of thinking about reality for reality itself, and then turn our efforts to the question of what is the best way to think about the world. Or, rather, what is a different way to think about the world. We know from Hume and Kant that causality, the principle of interaction whereby the world becomes intelligible, is supplied by the mind itself. So why not try on a different pair of glasses?

And here is what I’m getting at: the world is due for a revival of the analogical paradigm. I no longer think it should supersede science, but it should certainly rap on the window of science’s corner office. The analogical paradigm is the way of thinking about the world such that analogical correspondence, not causality, is the principle of interaction. Mimesis—the unforced force of elective affinity. It yields a logic of inevitability. When something happens, its question is not “What caused this to happen?” but “Why did it have to be this way?” It moves like a strange oozing worm that merges end-to-end and then splits at the middle. Every moment contains the latent image, the master-key, of the next—by the force of affinity it draws toward and into itself what it needs. It completes itself, but by completing itself it also ends itself. The word “complete” means “whole,” but people forget that it can also mean “finished.” Aufhebung: the moment yearns to complete itself, but by completing itself it finishes itself off and becomes a new moment with a new blemish, a new Messiah waiting in the wings, a new lock waiting for the right key.