It took fourteen billion years to produce this image, for time to present its insuperably partial self-portrait:
Figure 1: The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF)1
The image raises many questions concerning the character of time, the emergence of order, and the imageability of creation. It presents the early universe approxi-mately one billion years after the big bang, yet was taken in 2004. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is the name of the image, not of what it images. It images time through space because the farther into the universe imaging reaches, the deeper into time it descends. For all the marveling we might do concerning science, or what knowing makes, the image does not, of course, present the inexistence antecedent to the “imaged” infant universe or that inexistence antecedent to the universe’s emer-gence. The first inexistence is merely that of the billion years missing from the image, which is, to that extent, a deep field problem. Yet this is merely a relative inexistence.
The ultra-deep field problem, which the HUDF does not image, involves not only the relative inexistence that fringes the existent image, concept or entity, but the absolute inexistence entailed when the deep field problem is acknowledged. Only this
1 This image “should offer new insights into what types of objects reheated the cold, dark universe about one billion years after the big bang, when stars first started to shine, about thirteen billion years ago.” See www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04086_Hubble_UDF.html.
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warrants the qualification “ultra-deep field,” since it exceeds depth in the direction of the depthless, exceeds any existent in the direction of inexistence.
Historically, then, the HUDF is of something antecedent to its being imaged. In other words, the image of the antecedent is consequent upon not only an image- capable universe (deep field), but also upon the universe (ultra-deep field). As such, the image is additional with respect to the universe: not merely an image of it but an additional ele-ment in it. The HUDF shows that every journey into the past takes place not only in the future of that past, as is entailed by journeying into it; it also shows that, as a result, this past is consequent upon the future in which it is made; and that, as a result, the past for which the infant universe was a future remains a past undisturbed by Hubble’s intrusions.
From this perspective, despite the fact that the universe insuperably antedates its being imaged, it is not inconceivable that creation itself be imaged, though this entails the image of the inexistent universe consequent upon that inexistent universe. But the imaged creation would be the future of the unimaged, its consequent rather than its reproduction, and would amount to the production or emergence, within that universe, of its own inexistence. Accordingly, the irreducible remainder of imaged inexistence will be the existent universe. For the same reason, however, the surd or remainder of a newly existent universe is precisely its inexistence, from which alone, according to the “Earliest System Program of German Idealism,” creation can be understood as “emerge[nt] out of nothingness,”2 that is, historically or temporally. It is this inexistence, the nothingness or not-being of the universe, which, once there is a universe, is paradoxically ineliminable.
To see this, consider what temporality entails. According to F. W. J. Schelling, temporality is what is always in excess of what is, because “what is” cannot be reduced to a thing or an object. He writes: “Everything is temporal, the actuality of which is exceeded by the essence, or the essence of which contains more than it can contain in actuality.”3 Essence consists in more than actuality only if everything actual, every-thing currently active, is emergent. Temporality therefore entails the inactuality from which being operative must itself emerge if it exceeds actuality. Thus understood, temporality is temporality only if creation is involved, and creation entails inactuality, an inexistence consequent upon what is actual that remains irreducible to the inexis-tence antecedent to the emergence of this actuality. Accordingly, creation is consequent upon creation, or if creation is at all, it is creation to the nth power.
The “time before the world,” the antecedent of the image of the infant universe or the HUDF, is therefore both a consequent of the existent universe and irreducible
2 F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich Hölderlin, and G. W. F. Hegel, “The Earliest Program for a System of German Idealism,” in Theory As Practice: a Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 72–73.
3 F. W. J. Schelling, “On the Relation between the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Emergence of the Axioms of Naturephilosophy from the Principles of Gravity and Light” (1806), Schellings Werke II (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61), 364. (Hereafter Schellings Werke is cited as SW plus volume number. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Schelling are my own). For Schelling’s theory of essence (Wesen) or “being operative” (wirksam sein), see his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Objects Connected Therewith (1809), in SW VII, 341–342, 346, 258.
to the antecedence it conceives. In other words, the concept of creation is itself an instance of creation, involving the same irreducibility to the conceived as the universe has to its creation: there is always an irreducible remainder between creation and its concept, image, or additional element because the latter are instances of the former and therefore involve their ineliminable inexistence.
After Immanuel Kant,4 philosophers would object here that any attempt to conceive or to image “nature in its natural state—the time before the world”5 is an attempt to conceive without concepts, to conceive a preconceptual nature behind all concepts. Hence they would conclude that any attempt to conceive of what is without concepts is self-contradictory. The concept of universal inexistence, such philosophers would argue, merely captures a mourning, in the act of con-ceiving, for its inability to conceive its own creation, a melancholic Romanticism bewailing what the concept cannot conceive, or what is “given” in advance of the concept (“nature in its natural state” and so forth). Rather than pursue the self-contradiction, it would be better, it might be argued, to abandon the attempt to conceive of what being is before being conceived. Better not to do ontology at all and to complete the shift that Kant initiated, according to some, from ontology to deontology.6 The “space of reasons” that concept-using creatures by definition occupy, they argue, is insuperable for such creatures which, to that extent, are not saliently biological.7 To acknowledge that conceivers irrevocably occupy such a rational space is thus to accept that it is not things that issue rational demands, but only reason-givings. It is this on which philosophers should concentrate, and thus
“privilege inference over reference,” abstraction over representation, or the norms entailed in making judgments over (hypothetically) nonrational realities.8 This need not deny that there are photons before there are speakers, but only that photons issue
4 That contemporary philosophy is insuperably “downstream from Kant” is asserted, for example, by Robert Brandom in his “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism—and Back,” in Perspectives on Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1: “Developments over the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary
philosophers what the sea was for Algernon Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all.”
5 This is the definition of Romanticism Novalis gives in §31 of his Allgemeine Brouillon, in Gerhard Schulz, ed., Novalis Werke, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1987), 455: “The time of universal anarchy—
lawlessness—freedom—nature in its natural state—the time before the world (the state). Pre-world time provides as it were the dispersed traces of post-world time. […] Chaos is creation fulfilled.
The future world is rational chaos, self-permeating chaos, chaos or .”
6 As the neo-Hegelian philosopher Brandom claims, for instance, in Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 212.
7 Examining “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” Brandom writes that, insofar as they occupy the space of reasons, “merely biological beings […] become spiritual beings, undertakers of commitments” (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 217). He later clarifies this view: “The world consists of things and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief ” (Perspectives on Pragmatism, 123–24).
8 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1. Such “non-rational realities” are merely hypothetical in the sense implied by the famous Hegelian dictum that “what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.” See §6 of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S.
Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 28–30.
SUPREMATIST ONTOLOGY AND THE ULTRA DEEP FIELD PROBLEM
rational demands to which reason-exchanging creatures are practically responsive.9 Such rational demands include well-justified scientific fact.
No one can deny that conceptual work is insuperable in all conceiving. But can it be straightforwardly assumed that the space of reasons is therefore not nature?
Surely to do so relies on an assertion concerning what reason is that, contrary to the hypothesis, privileges reference over inference, if only in this instance—a realism, that is, even if only with regard to the concept. This realism tends, interestingly, to be cashed out in terms of doings, of practices (chiefly the making and justifying of judgments), rather than by considering the concept to be an “object,” a risk philos-ophers share, according to Freud, with schizophrenics.10 Yet since concepts issue only from judgments and do not precede them, the only conceivably real doings are those of judgment makers. Attention is paid neither to the operations of the concepts themselves nor to actors other than those that occupy the space of reasons. Insofar as this position maintains but does not elaborate this restricted realism, it fails to note the deep field problem: as the HUDF shows, no matter how deep the field, it is fringed with the inexistence of that field in which all imaging, conceiving, and constructing are in consequence insuperably partial constituents. A consistent realism con-cerning the concept, the image, or the additional element therefore entails either that “reality,” being itself a concept, is a state that cannot be extended beyond the conceptual or that the concept of reality, if not so restricted, entails conceiving the inexistence of the concept.
Examining the work of Kazimir Malevich, I will contest the claim that the concept—this abstract entity or additional element—is not part of the universe in which conceiving arises. For it is hard to see how a concept, an image, or an abstract element may be added to a world if a world were not some field in which thoughts, images, and abstract elements occur. In consequence, the insuperability of the con-ceptual does not entail the abandonment of nature for norms, nor a naturalization of normativity or, what amounts to the same thing, the normativization of nature.11 And so I deny, secondly, that the insuperability of conceiving licenses the abandonment of ontology: if conceiving arises, it does so (a) in a universe and, (b) consequently upon the inexistence that the concept shares with the universe that arises and in which that concept itself arises. The realism at issue concerns the operations, the distributions of antecedence and consequence, by means of which alone elements may be additional.
9 See Brandom’s discussion of the status of photons before there were vocabulary users in Perspectives on Pragmatism, 125–27.
10 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious” (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 204.
11 This last is John McDowell’s favored response to the problem. See especially his “two sorts of naturalism,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 167–97;
and his responses to Robert Pippin in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas H. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 274–77.
The Flight Paths of Dust
Malevich’s theory of The World as Non-Objectivity, as its title argues, does not claim that because nonobjective art abandons imitation and expression, it therefore aban-dons realism, but rather that the world is nonobjectively.12 Thus the realism Malevich advocates for nonobjectivism, insofar as this consists in a knowing of what is, is for him inseparable from the works of science, as he constantly argues, just as some scientists have argued that the productive element and transformative productions that “knowing makes” turn physics into art.13 It is not by virtue of their various objects (stars, paintings, concepts) that the sciences, arts, and philosophy are “realist” in the sense I wish to spell out, but rather by virtue of the surd-structure, the “irreducible remainder” or the “time before the world” that the concept of creation entails and that is entailed in turn if there are additional elements. The concept of creation, that is, entails that what is created was not. This structure is universal, I will argue, insofar as, if true even in a single instance, it rules out its non-occurrence.
Three theories underpin the philosophy of nonobjectivity, according to Malevich’s unpublished writings of the 1920s. The first concerns the theory of the additional element, the second that of the world as nonobjectivity, and the third, the theory of the copula. Each entails the other two: To the question “To what is an ele-ment additional?” therefore, the answer is—and “of course,” we might say—“the world”; not, however, the world just as we find it, the world of experience and con-crete objects for instance, but the world as it is, as “nonobjectivity.” Just as in any proposition the copula is that element that combines a subject (such as “a square”) with a predicate (such as “white”), so too an additional element augments the non-objective world by means of the copula. What the copula does, therefore, its actions or operations, how an element is added to a nonobjective world, forms the theory of the Suprematist copula. Crucially, how the copula operates and in what environments it operates demonstrate that it is not reducibly a concept or formal device, where
“formal” is understood as not being material. We will address each of the three theories in turn. Malevich begins his account of creation thus:
Not in vain have little airplanes emerged from the bowels of the Earth [1].
They will not be stopped on Earth by the three-dimensional law [2], they will fly to the place whence they have come [3], they are the dust of the Earth
12 Kazimir Malevich, The World as Non-Objectivity. Unpublished Writings 1922–25, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Edmund T. Little (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976).
13 Johann Wilhelm Ritter, “Die Physik als Kunst” [Physics as Art] (1806), in Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse eines jungen Physikers [Fragments from the Literary Remains of a Young Physicist], ed. Birgit and Stefan Dietzsch (Hanau: Müller & Kiepenheuer, 1984), 288–320. His account of what “knowing makes [was das Wissen schafft],” a pun on Wissenschaft, or “science,” occurs at pages 294 and 319.
For a contemporary, albeit more “constructivist” variant, see Isabelle Stengers’s account of science as the experimental embrace of a risky future in Power and Invention, trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 162–66.
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which flies off the Earth’s surface, and by this means pulverize the globe [4]
[…] Everything is striving to leave the globe [5], and to make its way further into space [6], but thanks to the relationship between the elements which have not yet been discovered, it sits like a tick on the Earth [7].14
The seven points I have singled out clarify the sense of the passage, which concerns the character of the world as nonobjectivity or demonstrates the problems to which the category “object” is ontologically prone.
[1] Airplanes do not take off from airports but “emerge” from subterranean worlds. The scope of the flight is larger than its geographically located points of departure; and destinations, or its essential operations, to recall Schelling, exceed the actual flight. The airplane’s natural history thus encompasses the ores from which its metals were smelted, the formation of these ores over geological times-cales and the development of the engine. Accordingly, technology and nature are not different in kind.
Just as the natural history of the airplane exceeds its flight, point [2] argues that the flight exceeds the limitations of terrestrial geometry. Yet it also problema-tizes this: implicit in “geometry” is that it does not measure all dimensions, but only those of ge, of the Earth. It is a local or ontic science, tied to its object. That there are other dimensions—and not reducibly spatial ones, as [1] affirms—again attests to temporality, of what Schelling called the excess of essence over actuality, of the operation over any local “what is” (“What is the Earth?” “What is flight?”).
The core of the problem of the flight path that absorbs the entire passage is addressed in point [3], which offers one solution to it, which I will call Trajectory A.
The passage asks whether the flight, as what Malevich will call an “additional ele-ment” or “culture of action,” is a line or a curve. Here he asserts that airplanes, and by extension natural history, “will fly to the place whence they have come,” that is, that its flight paths are ultimately circular such that origin and end points are identical.
Point [4] thus completes the circuit: flight is from and to dust. From the dust the flight becomes; the earth, its elements exhausted in this effort, turns to dust in turn, raising the crucial question of whether first dust (D1) is equal to second (D2), to which I will return below. Point [5] argues that it is not, and reposes the problem of flight not in terms of orbits but of striving. If essential operations exceed actuality, then this amounts to a realism concerning striving that is, for that reason, not restricted to the airplane or to the Earth. With point [6], therefore, it is not the airplane or the pilot (interestingly unremarked by Malevich) that strives; rather “everything is striving” to abandon earth for space. Point [6] therefore opens Trajectory B—that of the line in the “aerial element.” Striving is a straight line insofar as striving is considered as such and not in regard to the objects within which it is caught or, what amounts to the same thing, to the subject whose striving it might be. Yet no sooner is Trajectory B set against Trajectory A than an animal skepticism rears up
14 Malevich, World as Non-Objectivity, 111–12.
to recapture striving among objects. The airplane does not leave the Earth but “sits like a tick” on the planet, locked into its changeless parasitism.
Finally, then, if [3] appears to be confirmed by tick-talk, that is, that the local holds flight captive, that return is not a habit but a physically insuperable cycle, our attention is returned to the presupposition of the Earth, the history of which gives point [1] its force. If the natural history—mineralogy, metallurgy, manufac-ture, electricity, and combustion—on which the extended flight path is inalienably dependent, what gives the Earth its ultimacy, what licenses the Earth’s exemption from this history? What makes it the ground upon which all else occurs and to which, therefore, the flight paths of dust must invariably return? Malevich’s first indication
Finally, then, if [3] appears to be confirmed by tick-talk, that is, that the local holds flight captive, that return is not a habit but a physically insuperable cycle, our attention is returned to the presupposition of the Earth, the history of which gives point [1] its force. If the natural history—mineralogy, metallurgy, manufac-ture, electricity, and combustion—on which the extended flight path is inalienably dependent, what gives the Earth its ultimacy, what licenses the Earth’s exemption from this history? What makes it the ground upon which all else occurs and to which, therefore, the flight paths of dust must invariably return? Malevich’s first indication