Representations of uniformity or the illusion of total agreement must have their own ends, yet the illusion of infinitude where there is only the finite presents a far-reaching representational problem.

In a journal article, “Measuring the Shape of the Universe,” Neil Cornish and Jeffrey Weeks described this problem and the difficulty in finding a solution:

In a finite universe we may be seeing the same set of galaxies repeated over and over again. Like a hall of mirrors, a finite universe gives the illusion of being infinite. The illusion would be shattered if we could identify repeated images of some easily recognizable object. The difficulty is finding objects that can be recognized at different times and at different orientations. (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, December 1998)

The authors point to the implausibility of “a perfectly homogenous and isotropic universe” that expands only to repeat itself, implausible since “our very existence rules out this scenario” and “there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets, and no cosmologists” (p. 1466).

One question that arises from this reasoning is whether it’s possible for the implausible, here defined as that which rules out our very existence, to exist nonetheless, at least in theory. In that sense, to desire perfection in universal homogeneity is to desire transformation into that which already obtains.

A more plausible scenario is presented, drawing on observations of photons with slightly different energies or inhomogeneities, “small perturbations” in the early universe that grow via gravitational collapse “to produce the structures we see today.” The authors describe these photons as having come from denser regions, having “climbed out of deeper potential wells” and suffering energy loss in the process.

One outcome of being able to differentiate among energy distributions in this way is that it allows for their more accurate determination. In another sense it would complicate the waking dream narrative of infinitude placed in the service of invalid inferences that rely on illusions of symmetry, e.g. where it’s held that the map is the territory or that what’s above is below. In any case, it’s not a metaphysical question to want to determine the finite parts of a universe conceived as infinite. Rather it speaks to the desire to escape metaphysics. Yet if proof of finitude as a way to overcome the illusion of infinitude has to do as well with complicating metaphysical certainty, it speaks to the conviction this is not something haphazardly undertaken.

What’s notable in the cosmology article is that the authors don’t seem to cast the loss of energy some photons undergo as pointing to a deficit threatening to void out all life but rather seek to demonstrate scenarios whose very uniformity speaks to error. Energy differentials are regarded as productive of structure rather than seen as posing negative constraints.

The more well-known example of the ‘symmetry shattering’ this article reminds me of is with Adorno’s work on the Culture Industry that theorized how mass media representations re-deploy emptied or else undifferentiated spaces to their own ends. (That’s assuming the illusion of uniformity indicates empty space as much as it seeks to empty space.) But with Adorno I wouldn’t say an original point and purpose of his was to deceive and even less so to “warn away” those who would take the facades erected in those spaces for inviolable, eternal truth or attestations of some revealed reality. He was too cynical for that is my understanding. From another perspective that no doubt will be dismissed as too naïve, Wallace Stevens argued the display of uniforms associated with authority but absent the use of real force would be just as effective in maintaining order where recourse to a strengthened poetic imagination is permitted.

The notion of inhomogeneities and energy differentials as giving rise to positive structures also reminds me of the work of Michel Foucault, who seems to have thrown himself into a ‘deep potential well’ of his own as a solution to a problem noted separately (and diagnosed differently) in C. Macann (1991).

Macann combined parts of Heidegger and Husserl in his own argument that distinguished between thinking that takes itself to be objectively true and that which belongs to another, “originary plane” of thought. To unravel the “self-sustaining, self-upholding” character of objective consciousness has become a “monumental” task because the “ontic thinking” characteristic of the objective plane apparently keeps forgetting its “non-original character” by invoking, in a ‘display of inherent tendency’ “more fundamental modes of thought which, as such, are more adequately grounded” (134).

To lose sight of the difference between ‘objective’ and ‘originary’ is, in the case of the philosophical critique Macann engages, what results in an overly secure, “self-ascribed sovereignty” (135).

Not anything like Macann, but also complicating the notion of a sovereign consciousness, Foucault sought to void the subject altogether (The Archeology of Knowledge, 1972, 2010). Within the anti-humanist framework of Foucault’s methodology in which “humanity” is treated as a construct, questions of how the humanities as a set of disciplines is practiced and what the status of the subject is in them permits of discontinuities whose basis for emergence is historical. Yet, if we accept any of this, “by what right” does Foucault’s anti-humanist discourse speak?

In the part of his book treating Archeology, Hayden White described as “curiously weak” Foucault’s answer to this question posed to himself. White’s description seems apt and brings clarity to Foucault’s project as one that looked to unsettle the notion of a sovereign subject for author as much as reader. To me, this unsettling seems to oppose that kind of ‘cybernetic’ or homeostatic feedback intended to confirm, correct and, in short, help facilitate ‘adjustment’ for the subject in the sense Nabokov used in his critique of philistinism among the bourgeoisie.

White quotes from Foucault’s concluding remarks in Archeology:

…my discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is avoiding the ground on which it could find support…it is trying to operate a decentring that leaves no privilege to any centre…it does not set out to be a recollection of the original or a memory of the truth. On the contrary, its task is to make differences…it is continually making differentiations, it is a diagnosis. (205-6)

The quoted material is among the more coherent of Foucault’s writing, but even incoherence is allowed insofar as he allows it, since lacking in clarity to the point of risking incommunicability at least doesn’t gain its force of expression at the expense of nuanced, diverse, and even contradictory speech.

Denying any safe haven even to himself, Foucault’s locus of speech doesn’t use ground conditions as supports, whether those supports entail overidentification with privilege or its lack. He looks not to make parallels but perturbations out of which discursive structures may form.

And, rather than his speaking serving to ‘reveal’ him or deliver him over to psychoanalysis, Foucault’s discourse is intended to diagnose the historical conditions governing what may be said and thought or, as White wrote, these “’diagnoses’ intended to reveal the ‘pathology’ of a mechanism of control that governs discursive and non-discursive activity alike” (The Content of the Form, 1987, 112).

What I like about the set of discursive strategies Foucault laid out is how they would seem to render inoperative a ‘smoking gun’ tendency among even the most empathic anthropologists in their discovery of Spanish-speaking mountain gods in Latin America, for instance.

That is, with Foucualt no longer is the task to identify who the ‘real’ speaker is ‘behind’ what is said. (He wasn’t the first or the only one to say that). Rather the distinction between the type of all-enveloping, interconnected discourses that today might be termed “systemic” and that which limits them on the level of an ‘authorial’ subject would change key criteria with which one learns to acquire knowledge of a distant colonial past or administer any measurement of progress since then.

As Foucault identified in The Discourse on Language, “The essential task was to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendence,” specified there as a 19^th century problem of origin and subjectivity that asks its adherents to function in darkness, to move blindly and naively toward their historical destination.

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