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| The letter Aleph, of the Hebrew alphabet. It is not pronounced as part of words. |
Take ants, who exhibit intelligence in a very different way. In 2009, the BBC reported that Argentinian ants had formed a ‘mega colony’ that stretches across much of the world. When ants from quite dissimilar locales come in to contact they recognise their shared ancestry and behave in a familiar manner. This behaviour is facilitated by scientists that bring the disparate ants together for observation. The ants may belong to a mega colony, but it does not exist. They just act as if it does.
It strikes me that the mega colony ants might ‘believe,’ for lack of a better term, that they belong to a giant ant hill in the æther. This leads me to a key contention: perhaps one of today’s challenges is recognising that we are never as plugged in as we feel in the happy moments. We have access to tonnes of information, but the quickening feeling can easily turn out to be false. Worse it can hide important truths close to home, like the illusion suffered by the ants that falsely recognise each other—they do not realise their environment has been artificially tampered with.
Maybe there is a mega colony in the sky.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is perhaps the closest analogue for Borges’ Aleph, though their state of progressive collapse is of course markedly less advanced. Electronic financial markets have to be a close runner-up. Both are no-place/ every-places and both allow the interface of tickers, dashboards, leader boards, Bloomberg terminals and operations rooms. The devices are both metaphoric and literal. These are cybernetic-panoptic devices which hold out the possibility that one might be looking at the most cardinal, salient thing and that the insight gained might, just might, be the key to understanding the workings of the world, for an instant.
Borges’ Aleph figures strongly in the formulation of William Gibson’s cyberspace in his Sprawl Trilogy: Bobby Newmark, often known by his hacker name “Count Zero,” finds his own high tech Aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive.
In Gibson’s Zero History, Hubertus Bigend gains a key to the future. While the financial markets are a notional collapse of the space between various traders’ terminals, it takes an Aleph like construct to collapse things further to a single point for a single observer. Prices are single points, but which one is cardinal? With a hack that gives him insight into the ‘order flow,’ Bigend manages to see the world’s financial transactions. Presumably, this is made practical through computers aggregating these actions into more intellectually manageable trends—a state of collapse in the vein of the pinprick zero space within which the Aleph holds everything. Bigend enriches himself through betting on these trends, of course.
A related fictional occurrence is found in the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, 2nd Gig. The antagonist, Kuze, contrives to carry out a phenomenal heist. Rather than tunnelling into a bank vaulthe uses voluminous fraud on a miniscule scale to pilfer fractional sums (a tenth of a cent maybe) of money from millions or billions of bank accounts. The end result is prodigious funding for his violent cause, all liberated from the no-place/ every-place of the world financial system. He seemingly makes everything out of nothing.
It strikes me that the mega colony ants might ‘believe,’ for lack of a better term, that they belong to a giant ant hill in the æther. This leads me to a key contention: perhaps one of today’s challenges is recognising that we are never as plugged in as we feel in the happy moments. We have access to tonnes of information, but the quickening feeling can easily turn out to be false. Worse it can hide important truths close to home, like the illusion suffered by the ants that falsely recognise each other—they do not realise their environment has been artificially tampered with.
Maybe there is a mega colony in the sky.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is perhaps the closest analogue for Borges’ Aleph, though their state of progressive collapse is of course markedly less advanced. Electronic financial markets have to be a close runner-up. Both are no-place/ every-places and both allow the interface of tickers, dashboards, leader boards, Bloomberg terminals and operations rooms. The devices are both metaphoric and literal. These are cybernetic-panoptic devices which hold out the possibility that one might be looking at the most cardinal, salient thing and that the insight gained might, just might, be the key to understanding the workings of the world, for an instant.
Borges’ Aleph figures strongly in the formulation of William Gibson’s cyberspace in his Sprawl Trilogy: Bobby Newmark, often known by his hacker name “Count Zero,” finds his own high tech Aleph in Mona Lisa Overdrive.
In Gibson’s Zero History, Hubertus Bigend gains a key to the future. While the financial markets are a notional collapse of the space between various traders’ terminals, it takes an Aleph like construct to collapse things further to a single point for a single observer. Prices are single points, but which one is cardinal? With a hack that gives him insight into the ‘order flow,’ Bigend manages to see the world’s financial transactions. Presumably, this is made practical through computers aggregating these actions into more intellectually manageable trends—a state of collapse in the vein of the pinprick zero space within which the Aleph holds everything. Bigend enriches himself through betting on these trends, of course.
A related fictional occurrence is found in the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, 2nd Gig. The antagonist, Kuze, contrives to carry out a phenomenal heist. Rather than tunnelling into a bank vaulthe uses voluminous fraud on a miniscule scale to pilfer fractional sums (a tenth of a cent maybe) of money from millions or billions of bank accounts. The end result is prodigious funding for his violent cause, all liberated from the no-place/ every-place of the world financial system. He seemingly makes everything out of nothing.
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| Kuze, vagabond and charismatic revolutionary |
To return to Borges’ story, I really like the explication and analysis in this blog: United Infinity. What I want to point out is the strange logic that is on display in the story. After he has experienced the Aleph, Borges concludes that it must be false.
Borges discounts the veracity of the Aleph he has experienced, instead favouring Burton’s admonishment that ‘The faithful who come to the Amr mosque in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies in one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard…’ Why privilege the insights of an obscure Burton manuscript of dubious provenance over your own observations?
This situation is also indicative of the generic character of the fantastic. Option b) is an attempt at allowing what conventional wisdom says reality is to reassert itself. That is, the reality that Borges the author assumes the reader experiences (I have never seem all points in the universe at once, have you?) The actions of Borges the narrator seem to be an outward reference by the text to the same real that is subverted within the text by the fantastic Aleph.
Borges discounts the veracity of the Aleph he has experienced, instead favouring Burton’s admonishment that ‘The faithful who come to the Amr mosque in Cairo, know very well that the universe lies in one of the stone columns that surround the central courtyard…’ Why privilege the insights of an obscure Burton manuscript of dubious provenance over your own observations?
This situation is also indicative of the generic character of the fantastic. Option b) is an attempt at allowing what conventional wisdom says reality is to reassert itself. That is, the reality that Borges the author assumes the reader experiences (I have never seem all points in the universe at once, have you?) The actions of Borges the narrator seem to be an outward reference by the text to the same real that is subverted within the text by the fantastic Aleph.
Desire
There is an additional challenge in addition to our limited ability to regulate the bulk input of information (we must accept finitude) and our need to interrogate our own feelings while pursuing knowledge. You may have heard of the filter bubble, but it feels a little harsh to single out certain service providers like Google. The fundamental enclosing filter bubble when it comes to ideas is desire. Some truths are simply too much for us; others’ verities can be too unpalatable to become our truths. Desire leads Borges’ narrator to dismiss the Aleph and in doing so he ironically restates the reality that exists outside of the text. Perhaps this means that the Aleph can only ‘exist’ in Borges’ text if we accept as a corollary that the text highlights its own virtual character.Distraction and desire are both, in this context, markers of human imperfection. They shape how we perceive. Perhaps a real Aleph would be made false by its human observer and their own inability to hold it all within themselves, thus maintaining the line drawn by Borges between fiction and reality.
Another way of expressing this problem of perception is through allusions to the mirror in psychoanalytical terms. Charlie Brooker understands this well. In his television series Black Mirror we see the problems of perception encapsulated in the contemporary proximity of “real life” and fonts of information like the mass media and the World Wide Web. While I have my doubts about the execution, it is clear that in the title and the kinds of topics broached by the show that the tools we use to perceive the world are held to have a distorting effect on us. The implicit argument is that our windows onto the world like the Web function as mirrors, reflecting the dark elements of our characters. There are two critical assumptions at work in this conceit: first, that our reflected darkness colours our response to the events we perceive before we can isolate it for the purposes of perceiving ourselves, and second: that our experience of life or sensorium is sufficiently contingent upon these forms of media.
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| Black Mirror. Episode 1: 'The National Anthem.' |
The real danger though, is that as we attempt to bring information to the an Aleph-like state of infinite collapse we may find the result increasingly distorted by our desire. It’s a situation comparable to black holes: we cannot know what is beyond the event horizon. It brings to mind Nietzsche’s warning that ‘if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’
To return to the theme of the Tree of Knowledge, it is interesting that Black Mirror has a strong vein of Judaeo-Christian morality to it. This is most notable in ‘The National Anthem.’ When the Prime Minister has sex with a pig it brings to mind the story of the Prodigal Son—the sinner forced to live amongst the pigs he feeds. That and the broadcast journalist that gets shot by the SAS—her comeuppance for send photos of her vagina to a civil servant on her mobile in an attempt to get a scoop. These are perhaps portents of the judgment awaiting the sinner for their partaking of the fruit of knowledge; sexual promiscuity and financial incontinence can be referred to as prodigality.
Magic and mysticism, ants, TV shows, the internet, abstract thought—there are a fair few strands here. Maybe it’s appropriate, Alephs encompass a lot. Borges wrote:
To return to the theme of the Tree of Knowledge, it is interesting that Black Mirror has a strong vein of Judaeo-Christian morality to it. This is most notable in ‘The National Anthem.’ When the Prime Minister has sex with a pig it brings to mind the story of the Prodigal Son—the sinner forced to live amongst the pigs he feeds. That and the broadcast journalist that gets shot by the SAS—her comeuppance for send photos of her vagina to a civil servant on her mobile in an attempt to get a scoop. These are perhaps portents of the judgment awaiting the sinner for their partaking of the fruit of knowledge; sexual promiscuity and financial incontinence can be referred to as prodigality.
Magic and mysticism, ants, TV shows, the internet, abstract thought—there are a fair few strands here. Maybe it’s appropriate, Alephs encompass a lot. Borges wrote:
I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer’s hopelessness begins. Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors. How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?In the context of the internet, it is interesting that the initial discoverer of the Aleph, Carlos Argentino makes reference to ‘the modern man’ and his analogue internet of information systems and means of collapsing space, he is ‘in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins …’ credit to Zachary McCune for pointing this one out. This goes to my central point that in Borges’ story we can find a meditation on the human desire for ultimate microcosm—maybe it goes back to Eve and the fruit of knowledge.
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