I have wandered far away from serial writing. This was an error that I will henceforth try to mend. Let me resume my serial writing-slash-wandering with the etymology of the word ‘error’. It comes from the Latin root ‘errare’, originally meaning: ‘to wander’. And, I wonder, where did wandering become associated with being dead wrong? Not that this specific wonder of mine is very original. No, Foucault so wondered long ago and his wonder was just him wandering from Canguilhem’s basic idea that the errors in DNA are what makes life, well, living. The fact that we’re obsessed with correcting errors is, of course, directly related to the desire of keeping everybody straight, which Foucault decidedly was not. His counter-obsession to this, our, modern obsession was to err - therefore to make errors. I sympathize, but I simultaneously need to be honest: I decidedly am straight. So I wonder (and this wonder is, perhaps, original) how being straight and erring can become friends again. In a world where foes abound this may, I hope, mean something to someone even if it requires that someone - you, that is - to join me in erring through a winter wonder land of quantum physics and entropy. You might find there is only one necessity to being alive: not being alone so you can stand (being) corrected.
My story starts with the small. Remember the days when you were first allowed to run an errand for your parents. How fun it was to be out in the open. Yes, with a goal; but, free to roam. Free to walk on the other sidewalk - and to pick a pattern in the tiles that you absolutely needed to follow. If you can remember this then you remember how to play (and if you cannot, try again, as remembering such things is absolutely crucial for your mental health which is nothing else but playfulness). Play is the thing happening between getting somewhere and the how you get there. Play is also sometimes getting somewhere else and figuring out how the hell you got there. And when you remember all this then you remember wondering whether this tiny piece of ashes was alive when it seemed to move playfully up up up in the air. As the tiny piece of ashes moves up up up your mind wanders here and there and you find yourself thinking about this or that to suddenly stop at an insight. That insight may well be that you left the kettle on, and you need to hurry from keeping it to boil over. Or it may be that you owe somebody an apology because, in wanting to keep them straight, you interrupted their play. You did not let them be, as you just let yourself be, watching this tiny piece of ashes going up up up jumping left or right intermittently dropping in mid air to resume its up up up.
Or the insight may be that chance has something to do with play, and that it is what is common to the child running its errand, a tiny piece of ashes going up up up, and you-the-adult-reader watching the ashes (or reading this post, which, I hope, feels, by now, more or less the same as watching the tiny piece of ashes going up up up). The chance of being pushed this way or pulled that way by things even tinier it meets on its errant way. Its goal being up in being propelled by the fire underneath but its Brownian path being indetermined in meeting all kinds of invisible but undeniable resistances which move in myriad ways. Entropy is to energy as spices are to bland food. The entropy of mini-molecules in a cell is what makes macro-molecules form that can harness energy making the cell, well: a cell. And up up up the structure goes when cells coagulate and form a body that flourishes and dies and returns to ashes that, when heated, create the conditions for ever more complex bodies to evolve. Just as the goal of running errands is to get something somebody else wanted, the goal of evolution is ever more complex structures. Just as the fun in running errands is to err whilst running them, the fun in evolution is this haphazard diversity of structures visited whilst evolving toward more and more complexity (biodiversity being the pinnacle of evolutionary complexity).
In short: the goal is necessary to, but does not determine the fun. But also: without the fun nothing really happens. Our tiny piece of ashes just shoots up in the air in a direct line as if it were an ideally free - an absolutely unbound - electron. There is nothing to wonder over. Worse: there is nobody to wonder as for somebody - some cellular body - to evolve would have required entropy, the push and pull implied in encountering, and therefore becoming bound to, something else (which, in my case, for instance happens to be Els, whom I love). The physics of ideal trajectories, trajectories without frictions, is a physics that is simply dead wrong. It’s a physics where everything goes straight to its goal without erring because it doesn’t really meet anything else. At most it bounces off something, fracturing its straight line without retaining any memories whatever of what it met. Following this physics of idealization we meet the error of determination: the. power of quantification ends at the quantum where chance re-asserts itself again. The infinitesimally small behaves much like we behave as small children: outwardly it looks like a random walk jumping haphazardly from one tile to the other as if without purpose or goal. It errs but still achieves to run the errand as if it is both goal-governed and driven by pure chance, the universe at rock bottom being their interplay.
The pitfall of this complex superstructure that is a human being - being caught up in a more complex superstructure of culture still - is to think that it is the goal of evolution and that what happens to be its culture should reign supreme. It is a pitfall specifically realized in modern times where everything needs to be reduced to straight lines (if not already in an ideal society then to plot the straight line towards such an ideal, without any margin for error). So we try to go unerringly from an ideal of unbound electrons to that of unbound individuals, forgetting what straightness has wrought in the past. For sure, there is a goal but it is a goal in the background, a direction of allowing diversity, of allowing better room for error. Surely also, diversity can only be expressed as erring from what are perceived as straight lines in complex structures. Straight and queer are like yin and yang: they are not mystical forces but names for naming the fact that what is real is never unbound or self-sufficient. What is real is always bound up - entangled - with what it has met, with its history of non-ideal encounters creating heat allowing evolution to go up up up. Not at all to a final destination but further and further away from this relatively monolithic monotony of the periodic table by which we straighten out the underlying mess of chance encounters of the quantum kind.
It is, then, impossible to err alone. Or to err in a universe which is perfectly in balance being as crystalline as no crystal ever could be. No, to be is to be caught up, meshed or threaded, with others in a structure that both defines what is straight and allows error to generate new structures. Every error can be the start of a new pattern of weaving, to avoid error always means to start dying. It means this because the structure becomes a monolith collapsing under its own weight. To control everything - to eliminate chance - is to set oneself apart and to see the world as threatening, instead of as inviting play. Shit becomes heavy as hell and before you know it you have lost all of your playfulness and have gained a world of foes. This was a wandering plea for keeping an open mind, open to encountering insights that contradict strongly held convictions not to fall into new dogma but to remember that the random walk on which the universe is based is a random walk that also - and still - goes on in our head. Every experience is a new knot in our brain and as long as we are child-like enough to learn new structures we remain alive to new experiences. In the end, we are such a tiny piece of ashes. We can imagine ourselves being watched so let us not disappoint and try to go up up up inspiring what may be the crucial insight of needing to apologize for wanting everything so straight.
(This post is inspired by a variety of thinkers. Not only Foucault and Canguilhem but, I name them and you can ask me in comments for details, - Kauffman, Bohr, Jefferies, Rovelli, Boltzmann, Prigogine and Van de Cruys.)
(The image of this post is reused from this blog post by Robin)