Cultural and Epistemological Consequences of Modern Physics

Theron Schmidt
Senior Culminating Essay
Departments of Physics and English Literature
Swarthmore College



Around the turn of this century, the discipline of physics found itself in a precarious position. It seemed to be very near the completion of its project of cataloguing and explaining the physical phenomena of the universe in a way that rendered them predictable; only a few anomalous mysteries remained to be explained. This was not only a time of triumph, however, but also a time of great anxiety; the story is often told of the physics professor who told his students not to pursue graduate studies in physics since there would soon be no more "work" to be done in the field. Fortunately for those who pursued their studies anyway, these few remaining problems proved to be significant enough to require a fundamental recasting of the basic epistemological assumptions of physics. This recasting resulted in ideas of irresolvable indeterminacy and paradox, globality in locality, and the dissolution of the distinction between observer and observed, all of which are fundamental principles of the theories referred to by the shorthand terms "theory of relativity" and "theory of quantum mechanics" and hereafter referred to as simply "modern physics." This paper will consider the impact on the rest of the century of these principles; the consideration will be divided into three sections, which address respectively the cultural implications, the theoretical implications, and the cultural implications of the theoretical implications.

I. Physics as Cultural Practice

The Consequences of Modernity (1990), a transcript of lectures given by Cambridge sociologist Anthony Giddens, succinctly outlines Giddens's understanding of the conditions of existence referred to by the term "modernity." In addition to this outline, Giddens makes two arguments. The first is against the idea that we are living in a time of post-modernity: "Rather than entering a period of post-modernity, we are moving into one in which the consequences of modernity are becoming more radicalised and universalised than before" (3). The second is a reaction to and a reversal of the privileging of natural science over social science: "Modernity is itself deeply and intrinsically sociological" (43). The first point will not be contested here; the second, however, is flawed not in its positive assertion of the reflexive relation between modern sociology and modernity, but in its negation of the existence of similar relations involving modern physics. This section will begin by rereading Giddens's outline of modernity with an emphasis on the indebtedness of some of his concepts to modern physics, and then will extend his reflexive relation of modernity to the natural sciences by way of other theorists of modernity. In this way I will argue that modern science is both typical and foundational in the development of the conditions and assumptions of "modernity."
Temporally and geographically, Giddens situates modernity as "modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence" (1). Narratively, he locates it by "deconstructing social evolutionism" (5) in favor of a discontinuist story line. Structurally, he describes modernity as "multidimensional on the level of institutions" (12). All three acts of location suggest the influence of modern science, developed in Europe, radically discontinuist from classical (Newtonian) physics, and originary of terms like "multidimensional." As I will show, this influence is explicitly manifested in the key processes of modernity as Giddens sees them: those of time-space distanciation and of disembedding.
These two characteristic processes are related in their connecting of presence and absence. Giddens writes, "The problem of order [created by social systems] is here seen as one of time-space distanciation - the conditions under which time and space are organised so as to connect presence and absence" (14). The result of this distanciation, Giddens writes, is that "in conditions of modernity, place becomes increasingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them" (19). This linking of presence and absence, in which what is present is determined by what is absent and as a consequence is locally indeterminable (and so in practice undetermined), directly parallels one aspect of the idea of "globality in locality" found in quantum mechanics, in which local conditions are determined by global wave functions. The other aspect of this idea, in which an infinite (though not equally probable) range of possibilities turns each locality into a globality of potentiality, is partially paralleled in Giddens's disembedding: "by disembedding I mean the 'lifting out' of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space" (21). One example of a disembedded system is that of modern money economies, in which "money does not relate to time (or, more accurately, time-space) as a flow, but precisely as a means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity and deferral, presence and absence" (25). These two related processes describe the collapse of the categories of presence and absence as a characteristic condition of modernity, but (as will become more clear in the second section) this collapse is a fundamental premise of modern physics.
Nevertheless, carried to excess in his desire to legitimate the social sciences, Giddens describes sociology as having a uniquely complicated relation to modernity. This complexity arises from a reflexive relation between the study and the subject of study that Giddens describes as a double hermeneutic (15). He writes, "Sociological knowledge spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe as an integral part of that process" (15-16), and "sociological concepts and findings are constitutively involved in what modernity is" (16). Provocatively, Giddens writes that this reflexive relation (which he sees only sociology as possessing) is itself a characteristic of modernity: "In the social sciences, to the unsettled character of all empirically based knowledge we have to add the 'subversion' which comes from the reentry of social scientific discourse into the contexts it analyses. The reflection of which the social sciences are the formalised version ... is quite fundamental to the reflexivity of modernity as a whole" (40).
Playing on the meanings of reflection, Giddens notes that this characteristic results in an instability of knowledge: "Modernity is constituted in and through reflexively applied knowledge, but the equation of knowledge with certitude has turned out to be misconceived. We are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time we can never be sure that any given element of that knowledge will not be revised" as a result of further reflection (39). Even though this fundamental uncertainty is characteristic of modern science (as will be seen later), Giddens sees this as an opposition to modern science, writing that "in the heart of the world of hard science, modernity floats free" (39). In this way, Giddens writes, "the social sciences are actually more deeply implicated in modernity than is natural science, since the chronic revision of social practices in the light of knowledge about those practices is part of the very tissue of modern institutions" (40). This occurs because of a lack of "insulation" between information available to the student and to the subject of study (41), yet this lack is not exclusive to the conclusions of sociological studies.
In Giddens, there are statements that exactly parallel the principles of modern physics, such as the following: "the development of 'empty space' is linked above all to two sets of factors: those allowing for the representation of space without reference to a privileged locale which forms a distinct vantage- point; and those making possible the substitutability of different spatial units" (19). Taken out of context, this could easily be a passage from a text on the theory of relativity. Elsewhere, he paraphrases a principle of the theory of quantum mechanics: "Knowledge claimed by expert observers (in some part, and in many varying ways) rejoins its subject matter, thus (in principle, but also normally in practice) altering it" (45). In quantum mechanics, making a measurement of the state of a system will affect the results of future measurements, as if the system knows that it has been observed and knows the results of its observation.1 However, in the sentence immediately following, Giddens stubbornly insists that "there is no parallel to this process in the natural sciences; it is not at all the same as where, in the field of microphysics, the intervention of an observer changes what is being studied."
I propose to maintain Giddens's analysis of the reflexivity of modernity but to abandon his restriction to sociology. Thus, in the statement cited above, it is not only sociological knowledge but all formulated knowledge that "spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe as an integral part of that process" (15-16). Following the work of N. Katherine Hayles in The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (1984), this circulatory model can be extended to modern physics. Hayles and others demonstrate some of the ways in which modern physics spirals out of the universe of social life of the nineteenth century as part of the transition from Enlightenment machine-models of existence to Romantic organism-models. In rereading Giddens, I have already demonstrated some of the ways in which modern physics has spiralled back into social life by participating in the construction of the conditions of modernity; Hayles demonstrates how modern physics also influences the development of modernism, which can roughly be characterized as the literary response to modernity.
In her book, Hayles pursues the implications and influences of the field model developed first in the context of quantum mechanics and relativity, but part of a "revolution in world view" (15). This model implies "a reality that has no detachable parts, indeed no enduring, unchanging parts at all. Composed not of particles but of 'events,' it is in constant motion, rendered dynamic by interactions that are simultaneously affecting each other.... Its distinguishing characteristics, then, are its fluid, dynamic nature, the inclusion of the observer, the absence of detachable parts, and the mutuality of component interactions" (15). Hayles writes that in contrast to a mechanical, Newtonian model of particles, physicists "have suggested that it is more economical to think of the essential entity not as the particle, but as the underlying quantized field. In this view 'particles' are expressions of the field's conformation at a given instant, appearing as the field becomes concentrated at one point and disappearing as it thins out at another. Particles are not to be regarded as discrete entities, then, but rather (in Hermann Weyl's phrase) as 'energy knots'" (16).
P. M. Harman traces this transition from particle to field models in physics in the nineteenth century; it was by no means an immediate transition, for the mechanical view of the universe persisted in early field models. In "Speculation touching electric conduction and the nature of matter" (1844), Faraday presented a model in which "matter will be continuous throughout, and in considering a mass of it we have not to suppose a distinction between its atoms and any intervening space"; Harman writes that in this model, "interactions between 'particles' of matter were envisaged as interactions between 'centres of force' or arrangements of powers diffused through space" (77). However, Faraday maintained a distinction between matter, composed of these lines of force, and space, which was like an ether (78).
In "On physical lines of force" (1861-2), Maxwell presented a mechanical interpretation of these lines of force. Harman writes, "In this paper he advanced from a discussion of the physical geometry of lines of force to a treatment of the electromagnetic field 'from a mechanical point of view'" (89). Maxwell used geometrical interpretations to model the field as a mechanical apparatus; Harman writes, "He supposed that the magnetic field could be represented as a fluid filled with rotating vortex tubes, their geometrical arrangement corresponding to the lines of force, and the angular velocities of the vortices corresponding to the intensity of the field. He suggested a mechanical analogy to explain the rotation of vortices about parallel axes in the same direction: that of a machine in which an 'idle wheel' was placed between two wheels..." (89). Maxwell's paper even includes a schematic illustration of a honeycomb-like structure of these "idle wheels." Like Faraday, Maxwell distinguished between these field-structures and the structure of the universe: "Maxwell was committed to the concept of absolute space and regarded the field as being in space, rather than conceiving the curvature of the lines of force as defining the geometric structure of space" (97).
Boltzmann, too, was greatly attached to a mechanical model. Harman writes that in 1861, "Boltzmann sought to describe a working mechanical model, explaining its structure and motion in great detail. He argued that mechanical analogies possessed great heuristic value in clarifying the meaning of Maxwell's theory of electricity" (151). Boltzmann advocated a mechanical model not only in electrodynamics, but also in statistical physics. Harman writes that he "maintained his resolute defense of the intelligibility of the mechanical view of nature ... By establishing the concepts of entropy and irreversibility by a statistical theory of mechanical motions [the H-theorem], he tried to interpret the second law of thermodynamics within the ontology of the mechanical view of nature" (152).
At first, statistical physics seemed to be less determinate than allowed for by a mechanical theory. In "Molecules" (1873), Maxwell "distinguished the theory of gases, which was based on the 'statistical' method of explanation, from a theory based on the 'dynamical' method, concerned with the motion of individual particles of matter. He argued that the theory of gases could not be subjected to the dynamical or 'historical' method .... Maxwell maintained that in the theory of gases the probability, or moral certainty, of the regularity of averages replaced the 'absolute' certainty of the strict dynamical method" (Harman, 131). However, in Elementary principles in statistical mechanics (1902), Gibbs argued against this departure from the mechanical model by bringing statistical methods under mechanical domain. Harman writes, "The elaboration of a 'statistical mechanics' of molecular motions brought thermodynamics within the conceptual framework of the mechanical view of nature, by providing molecular analogues for thermodynamic concepts. Remarking the gap between the laws of thermodynamics and their molecular analogues, Gibbs nevertheless affirmed that thermodynamics could be interpreted within the ontology of the mechanical view of nature" (148).
From this evidence, it is clear that the tenacity of the mechanical view of the universe in physics should not be underestimated. In the epilogue to his book, titled "The Decline of the Mechanical World View," Harman writes that it was not until quantum mechanics and relativity that this view was totally abandoned: "The quantum theory detached speculation about atomic structure from the constraints imposed by the kinetic theory of gases; and the theory of 'relativity' ... dismissed the need for an ether as superfluous. These developments were shaped by the controversies of the 1890s about the programme of mechanical explanation" (153). Even then, the transition was not a radically discontinuity; Harman writes that Einstein saw himself as unifying field and particle theory rather than advocating one over the other (153).
This move in physics away from mechanical world views, however difficult it may have been, was concomitant with similar movements in other aspects of nineteenth century life. In "The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism" (1982), Hans Eichner identifies this movement as the characteristic force of Romanticism. He writes that the "more than six hundred books and articles" trying to define Romanticism result in the identification of "the most significant features of the Romantic period as the emphasis on symbol and myth in literature and the replacement of the 'mechanical philosophy' by an organic view of the cosmos" (8). He describes this as "a desperate rearguard action against the spirit and the implications of modern science2" (8). His article traces the Romantics' resistance to the mechanical, particulized view and the development of a living, organic, interconnected view.
Sociology, too, saw a movement from metaphors of machines to those of organisms. In The Division of Labor in Society (1893), Durkheim outlined a movement from what he termed mechanical solidarity of society to an organic solidarity. Mechanical solidarity was based on the internalization of collective motives such that, if they were called upon, all members of a society would follow the same internal principles (61). Durkheim emphasizes the dependence on law and repression of this solidarity (perhaps as classical particles are constrained internally by the laws of nature); there exist "common states of consciousness" because they have been imprinted by law (64). Durkheim writes, "We only use this term for it by analogy with the cohesion that links together the elements of raw materials, in contrast to that which encompasses the unity of living organisms" (84). In the latter form, organic solidarity, "the collective consciousness leaves uncovered [undetermined] a part of the individual consciousness, so that there may be established in it those special functions that it cannot regulate" (85). Because of the division of labor in modern society, each member of society is rendered "an incomplete being" (334), dependent for meaning and existence on the rest of society. Again, this metaphor recalls the idea of globality in locality of modern physics, or that of absence in presence of Giddens's analysis (and of post-structuralism).
Hayles identifies this common movement from mechanical to organismic metaphors in the nineteenth century (16-17).3 She writes, "If we were to try to graph the relationship between these eras it would not be ... a straight line from eighteenth-century rationalism to twentieth-century positivism with Romanticism as a deviant point, but a curve that, by including Romanticism, thereby proceeds in a radically altered direction" (18-19). This statement manifests the idea recast from Giddens of knowledge cycling in and out of social existence; the field theory of modern physics emerges along with similar movements in literary and sociological environments, and it rejoins these environments in the movements of modernity and modernism. One might read Hayles's analyses of literary texts as charts of an idea of knowledge and meaning that moves from Romanticism to modernism by way of quantum mechanics. Just as Giddens privileged a reflexive model of society in order to privilege sociological reflexivity, so Hayles privileges a field model of society in order to privilege modern field theory. Thus the interaction between disciplines described above can be explained by "a field notion of culture, a societal matrix" in which it is a general "climate [of opinion], rather than direct borrowing or transmission, that is the underlying force guiding intellectual inquiry" (22). The field model allows for a nonlinear, nondeterministic influence of ideas; the metaphor explains its own proliferation.
Hayles notes an important distinction between the modern field model and the Romantic organism model, for "whereas the Romantics identified this dynamism [of the universe-organism as a whole] with a specifically living force, the modern period links it with a breakdown of universal objectivity" (17-18). This model produces two problems in attempts to narrate through language: the breakdown of cause and effect (19), for "every cause is simultaneously an effect, and every effect is also a cause" (20); and the lack of exterior objectivity, for "what we see depends on where we stand" in the network, and we will never see "the spot we are standing on" (20). Hayles's study examines this and other problems in Pirsig, Lawrence, Nabakov, Borges, and Pynchon, and synopses of her analyses is given on pages 25-28.


II. Physics as Supplementation

The first chapter of Hayles's book, "Representative Field Theories and Their Implications," further pursues the problems that this field model of understanding presents for attempts to mean through language. To the ideas of indeterminacy and lack of objectivity, Hayles adds Gödel's theorem from "Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems" (1931), which proved that "for any axiomatized theory with axioms strong enough so that arithmetic can be done in terms of them, the theory either will be inconsistent or will contain propositions whose truth cannot be demonstrated" (Hayles, 33). Hayles cites Douglas Hofstadter, who in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid writes that the proof is made possible by "the insight that a statement of number theory could be about a statement of number theory" (Hayles, 34). That is to say, the proof is based on the inseparability of theory from the language it theorizes. If one adopts a field rather than atomistic perspective of language, Hayles writes, one will find that the language that makes sense of particles (of subject and object) by mediating between them will be "contaminated" because "it participates in the interconnection at the same time that it purports to describe it" (41).
Furthermore, we are always in the middle of this contamination; relativity implies that "there is no such thing as observing this interactive whole from a frame of reference removed from it" (49). The Heisenberg Uncertainty Relations have a similar implication, for "no matter which viewpoint is chosen, there will always be aspects of reality that can only be understood from another, mutually exclusive viewpoint.... The classical concept cannot simply be abandoned, because any concept whatever - that is, any definition of reality that is external to us - will have the same built-in limitations of viewpoint" (53). The Uncertainty Relation is often referred to as the price physicists must pay for using a classical vocabulary to describe non-classical systems. Similarly, Hayles writes that "Bohr's point - that to speak requires a subject-object dichotomy - is true not only in the general sense that to speak is to assume a separation between the speaker and the object of speech, but also in the more specific linguistic sense that to speak is to use a linguistic structure built on such distinctions" (54). The problems of meaning and knowledge presented by modern physics have their origin in our conception of what it is to mean or to know; there is no exteriority or alternative.
In Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (1994), Arkady Plotnitsky writes about similar concerns with the implications of modern physics for theories of meaning. Whereas Hayles considers the implications for literature, Plotnitsky addresses those for philosophy and deconstruction, specifically Bataille's general economy and Derrida's deconstruction. As his title suggests, Plotnitsky follows the trope of complementarity, which for Bohr has two manifestations: "the wave-particle complementarity, reflecting the duality of the behavior of quantum objects and relating the continuous and discontinuous representations of quantum processes," and "the complementarity of coordination, defining a position or configuration of positions of a quantum object or system, and causality, classically determining the behavior of such an object or system" (6; an example of the second kind is position-momentum duality; both cannot be known with certainty about a quantum mechanical object or system). Like Hayles, he is concerned with showing "the impact of modern scientific ideas and the metaphorical models which they generate in the humanities and social sciences" (5). However, Plotnitsky advocates a privileging of temporal priority and feels that he gains a particular advantage by using complementarity to reflect on later developments: "Bohr's matrix and his practice suggest [...] a theoretical model or paradigm - complementarity - which is not strictly (Derrida's) deconstruction and which enables a critique of certain, possibly residually metaphysical, aspects of deconstruction" (5). While this is certainly valid, it seems that Plotnitsky becomes overly ambitious in this desire; because he feels Bohr's complementarity is "dislocated" from metaphysical traditions (10), he feels that it can offer an "impartial," or at least exterior, perspective on metaphysics. He begins with Bohr's complementarity and reduces everything else to it, not just philosophical tropes that are not identical like general economy or Derrida's supplementarity, but also scientific ones. I will follow his reading of Bohr, Bataille, and Derrida, but rather than wholly encompassing his reduction to complementarity, I will suggest a more nuanced reading enabled by the very dislocated post- structuralist ideas he wants to ground, most notably that of Derridean supplementarity.
In "... That Dangerous Supplement ..." (in Of Grammatology), as part of a discussion of Rousseau's evaluation of speech and language, Derrida describes the supplement as "the addition of a technique, a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent. It is a violence done to the natural destiny of the language." It "make[s] itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements" (144). Derrida notes the two meanings of supplement: "The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence.... But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the- place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.... its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness" (144-145). As the translator of "Structure, Sign, and Play" notes, supplement means both "'to supply a deficiency,' on the one hand, and 'to supply something additional,' on the other" (260).
In "Structure, Sign, and Play," a discussion of the implications of Lévi-Strauss's ideas on signification, Derrida refers further to the conditions under which supplementation is necessary. Derrida writes that Lévi-Strauss's guiding thread has been "the opposition between nature and culture" (252). However, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss "encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition" (253). The centering of Lévi-Strauss's discourse that had been maintained by this opposition is obliterated by scandal, which clearly has the same form as Bohr's complementarity; it is "decentered," it is "nonsense," it fails to mean. The binary totalizes understanding by bringing everything under one or the other of its terms; that which comes under both terms at the same time - that is, that which displays complementarity - scandalizes this meaning and makes totalization impossible. This creates a field of "freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrest and founds the freeplay of substitutions. One could say ... that this movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity" (260).
In this way, complementarity exists as a finitude, a completion, but one that is infinitely insufficient in its meaning. The possibility (or even necessity) for infinite movements is an important characteristic of supplementation. In "... That Dangerous Supplement ...", Derrida writes, "Through this sequence of supplements a necessity is announced: that of an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing they defer: the mirage of the thing itself, of immediate presence, of originary perception" (157). Elsewhere in Of Grammatology he writes that "supplementarity is a necessarily indefinite process" (281). In the final section of this paper, I will return to the idea of infinite supplementation.
In Plotnitsky's analysis, complementarity is equated with both supplementarity and différance: "this economy [of différance] is reminiscent of Bohr's complementarity" (40); "Complementarity is concerned with a supplementary efficacity, rather than a causal efficacy. It is supplementary" (51). As I have shown, supplementarity is not identical with complementarity; they are related, true enough, in that complementarity (or indeterminacy, or decenteredness) allows for and necessitates supplementation, but they are not the same thing. Complementarity is a finite completeness with infinite lack of (or indeterminate) meaning, as Plotnitsky himself writes: "complementary features [are] feature that are mutually exclusive but equally necessary for a comprehensive, complete, description and analysis of quantum processes.... Complementarity, thus, connotes both mutual exclusivity and completeness of description, as the world complementarity, which carries both these meanings, would suggest" (5, his emphasis); complementarity provides a completeness of description but an irreducible "loss in representation and thus irreducible incompleteness of knowledge" (5). The loss is what is manifested in complementarity, and supplementation represents attempts to cover the loss, to signify the incomprehensible signified; this latter process is not subsumed under the concept of complementarity. His statement that "all quantum mechanical configurations are, thus, simultaneously both irreducibly incomplete and irreducibly rich" (9) perfectly parallels Derrida's description of the supplement that is referenced above. As for différance, Derrida writes in "The Supplement of Origin" (in Speech and Phenomena) that "what is supplementary is in reality différance, the operation of differing which at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence.... The supplementary difference vicariously stands in for presence due to its primordial self-deficiency" (88). At one point, Plotnitsky acknowledges this distinction: "différance ... renders the efficacity of these complementary effects as supplementary in Derrida's sense" (46); this I agree with, but the effects are no longer complementary!
Keeping this distinction between complementarity and supplementarity in mind, I turn to Plotnitsky's analysis of Bataille's general economy. Not surprisingly, Plotnitsky equates the general economy with complementarity: "Both historically and theoretically, then, one can ascertain not only the general economic character of quantum mechanics, particularly Bohr's complementarity, but also a kind of 'quantum mechanical' and complementary character of general economy" (18). This mutually constitutive phrasing becomes a refrain as the book repeatedly refers to "the general economic character of Bohr's complementarity and, conversely, the complementary character of general economy" (19, for example). As I will show, however, the idea of general economy embodies both complementarity and supplementarity in distinguishable forms; since Plotnitsky subsumes the latter within the former, he does not make this distinction.
Plotnitsky describes the general economy as "a 'science' - a theoretical framework and a textual practice - by means of which one can relate to the production, material or intellectual, of excesses which cannot be utilized" (19). However, the production of excess is one of Lévi-Strauss's characteristics of supplementation cited by Derrida in "Structure, Sign, and Play": "In his endeavor to understand the world, man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus of signification ... [which is a] distribution of a supplementary allowance ..." (261, from "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss"). Derrida concludes that "the superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented" (262, his emphasis). Plotnitsky writes that "loss and indeterminacy - and the multiplicity that results from them - would characterize any general economy" (20); in this sentence, the distinction between the effects of complementarity - loss and indeterminacy, and those of supplementarity - the resulting multiplicity, is clearly manifested.
Relations of excess are thus relations of supplementarity, not complementarity. Plotnitsky summarizes the functions of excess: "That which is left in the margins and claimed to be reducible or treated as contamination by classical theories - the unconscious, the meaningless, the improper, the distasteful, the impure, the wasteful, the perverse - is not only incapable of being marginalized or reduced, but is in fact constitutive of that which is unequivocally opposed to these contaminating forces and is supposed to be purified of them - the conscious, the meaningful, the proper, the tasteful, the pure, the normal" (28). This relation is not one of complementarity; the model of particle-wave complementarity, for example, cannot be made to fit with this description. Particles are not constitutive of waves, nor vice versa; one of the principles of complementarity is that the complements are wholly exclusive of each other. Instead, it is the complementary pair that should occupy the marginal position: the expression of complementarity is the non-sense of physics, for the statement "both a particle and a wave" is seemingly garbage, unproductive, useless, paradox. Yet it is exactly this relation that constitutes, that allows for and necessitates, the supplementation of "normal" physics. Complementarity signifies unknowledge, which can never be described by supplementation: "It does not describe unknowledge, for this is impossible, but only the effects of unknowledge" (23, quoting Derrida).
Plotnitsky also describes the idea of "globality in locality" as an effect of general economy: 
In any given field, beginning with physics, we constantly encounter very large    
statistical, or otherwise unencompassable, configurations.  We can only    
approach them partially, statistically, by way of approximations.  But such    
classical economies operate only under certain conditions, locally, within the    
limits where one can and must operate classically; and in a general economy    
global situations are always local.  General economy, thus, makes locality and    
globality enter into a continuous interplay, a kind of complementarity.... we    
have an irreducible - indeed infinite - degree of multiplicity even locally, at    
each point.  For, in contrast to classical theories, quantum mechanics gives an    
infinite degree of freedom to a single particle at each point.      (31)

This is an effect of general economy, but the relation between globality and locality is not a complementary relation; rather, it is what is enabled by complementarity. The relation only goes in one direction; because of complementarity, infinite multiplicity is possible at each point, or a globality exists at each locality. Because of this, and not complementary to this, expressing a "true" (unlimited) globality is impossible.
These are not the only misapplications of the ideas of complementarity and general economy. While it is true that the uncertainty relations represent a loss of information that always-already exists, but it is not in practice irrecoverable. The uncertainty relation between energy and time, for example, DEDt � h/2p, is typically assumed to be an equality rather than an inequality: DEDt = h/2p. In this way, lifetimes of particles can be determined from measurements of their mass (equivalent to energy). A particle physics experiment typically results in a bell-shaped graph of number of particles detected as a function of energy; the width of this curve is an uncertainty in energy, and from the uncertainty equality (now a relation of certainty), the lifetime can be determined (Griffiths, 73). Of course, this is always done with a fair amount of skepticism; Griffiths writes, "In general, when you hear a physicist invoke the uncertainty principle, keep a hand on your wallet" (52). Nevertheless, it is a standard procedure, and it represents the treatment of a general economy as a restricted (unexcessive) economy.
The relations of quantum mechanics to classical physics are not so disparate as Plotnitsky portrays them to be. He writes that "Bohr's complementarity equally deconstructs both the classical, unequivocal unifications and classical, unequivocal dissociations of features" (6); this again reflects a conflation of supplementation with complementation. Complementarity scandalizes classical physics, but the existence of scandal does not represent the enactment of a deconstruction. It is true that quantum mechanics is a "rigorous suspension" of the classical (11), but it must also be said that the classical is rigorously reclaimed and rigorously approximated. Finally, Plotnitsky writes that "Quantum mechanical nature is a kind of criminality that always escapes from the laws of physics" (58). This is not strictly true; a more accurate statement would be that it uses the laws of physics in a different way. Energy relations, for example, are still the same, for the classical energy is the basis of the quantum mechanical energy operator (the Hamiltonian). The same laws are obeyed, but by a radically different subject; this does not make it a criminal any more (or less) than all human subjects of modernity are criminals.




III. Supplementation as Cultural Practice

Having demonstrated the effects of supplementation within the theory of modern physics, I now turn to the implications that this has for modern physics as cultural practice. Characterizing scientific activity as "supplementation" is a far cry from the teleological quest for knowledge of the nineteenth century; how does this difference manifest itself culturally in terms like progress and legitimation?
First, some of the texts discussed earlier expressed images of supplementarity. Giddens writes that the question posed by the conditions of modernity is "How can we justify a commitment to reason in the name of reason?" (49); justification is an exemplary form of supplementation, for that which seems to need justification lacks the self-evidence by which a thing could be truly justified. Giddens adds, "Modernity turns out to be enigmatic at its core, and there seems to be no way in which this enigma can be 'overcome.' We are left with questions where once there appeared to be answers, and I shall argue subsequently that it is not only philosophers who realise this. A general awareness of the phenomenon filters into anxieties which press in on everyone" (49). The image of an insurmountable enigma parallels the fundamental indeterminacy of the condition of complementarity; anxiety supplements this indeterminacy.
In a footnote in Hayles, she describes the work of Gerard t'Hooft toward a unified theory of the four fundamental forces. Hayles notes that it depends on canceling of positive and negative infinities, and on "ghost particles" that do not exist but make the calculations come out right (58-59). These are images of excess. The calculations with infinity and infinite calculations recalls the freeplay of supplementation described by Derrida. In "Différance," he writes "The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end" (7). The image of infinite calculations can also be found in the computational work of quantum physics, known as perturbation theory. Hayles alludes to this in describing the possibility Bohr sees for progress in knowledge "by systematically examining and exploiting" the limitations of viewpoints (55). In A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics, John Townsend describes the necessity for perturbation theory: "Obtaining quantitative agreement between theory and experiment in the real world has its ups and downs. The bad news is that there aren't any interacting systems that have Hamiltonians for which we can determine the energy eigenvalues and eigenstates exactly. The good news is that because a number of extremely important physics systems are sufficiently close to ones that we can solve... we can treat the differences as perturbations and deal with them in a systematic way" (306). In this procedure, increasingly difficult calculations come decreasingly closer to the "real" answer; the sheer magnitude (excess) of the calculations serves to elide the unknowable that necessitates them. The calculation is a quest not for understanding, but for a number.
Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions depicts a narrative of scientific knowledge-seeking that, like supplementation, is anti-teleological. Progress in science, he argues, is carried out not by a single linear narrative, but by radical paradigm shifts. Scientific revolutions, then are "the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science" (6). He writes, "the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science" (12).4 According to Kuhn, "normal" scientific activity is markedly unexciting: "Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science" (24); "Perhaps the most striking feature of the normal research problems [...] is how little they aim to produce major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal. Sometimes, as in a wave-length measurement, everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance ..." (35). This image of "mopping-up" bears considerable similarity to the activity of supplementation, especially as it is bound up in the activity of textualization. In Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, a sociological study of laboratory activity, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar write that "Our initial visit to the laboratory established the central importance of literary inscription for laboratory activity: the work of the laboratory can be understood in terms of the continual generation of a variety of documents, which are used to effect the transformation of statement types and so enhance or detract from their fact-like status" (151). Compare this with Derrida's description of production in "... That Dangerous Supplement ...": "The concept of the supplement is a sort of blind spot in Rousseau's text, the not-seen that opens and limits visibility. But the production, if it attempts to make the not- seen accessible to sight, does not leave the text.... what we call production is necessarily a text, the system of writing and of a reading which we know is ordered around its own blind spot. We know this a priori, but only now and with a knowledge that is not a knowledge at all" (163-164).
In supplementation through textualization, the production of textbooks is an important activity. Kuhn writes, "Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field./ Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and then proceed to supply a substitute [supplement] for what they have eliminated" (137). This recalls the reflexivity of Giddens's sociological activity: "authors who regard sociology as the study of 'societies' have in mind the societies associated with modernity" (Giddens, 13). Kuhn describes the institutionalization of this activity in the formation of future scientists: "Until the very last stages in the education of a scientist, textbooks are systematically substituted for the creative scientific literature that made them possible" (165). This training is a conditioning to accept the unknowability of the "real," for "the route from stimulus to sensation is in part conditioned by education" (193), and "we have no direct access to what it is we know, no rules or generalizations with which to express this knowledge. Rules which could supply that access would refer to stimulus not sensations, and stimuli we can know only through elaborate theory" (196). Only by training do we mistake representation for presence, do we forget the fundamental absence that necessitates endless re-presentation. "There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like 'really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its 'real' counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle" (206).
This process of narrativization recalls Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)5, in which these tactics of supplementation and legitimation take on a political significance. Lyotard writes, "the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government" (9). For Lyotard, "lamenting the 'loss of meaning' in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative" (26). As in Kuhn, an linear evolutionary narrative must be abandoned, for "postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, 'fracta,' catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place .... And it suggests a model of legitimacy that has nothing to do with maximized performance ..." (60).
Lyotard writes that the supplementation of unknowability has taken on a legitimating character: "Today the problem of legitimation is no longer considered a failing of the language game of science. It would be more accurate to say that it has itself been legitimated as a problem, that is, as a heuristic driving force" (27). Legitimacy becomes associated with generating a need for further supplementation: "Science is a model of an 'open system,' in which a statement becomes relevant if it 'generates ideas,' that is, if it generates other statements and other game rules" (64); "The only legitimation that can make this kind of request [for further research, institution-building, etc.] admissible is that it will generate ideas, in other words, new statements" (65). Echoing the Derridean supplement in the next to last sentence of his book, Lyotard writes that this political activity cannot exhaust its stakes, "for the stakes would be knowledge (or information, if you will), and the reserve of knowledge - language's reserve of possible utterances - is inexhaustible" (67). Despite this inaccessibility of the universe to science, we are coerced by these forms of legitimation and supplementation to accept Freud's statement at the end of The Future of an Illusion (1927) that "our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere" (71).


Sources

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­­­­­­ Of Grammatology (1967), tr. Gayatri Spivak. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1976.

­­­­­­ "Différance" in Margins of Philosophy (1972), tr. Alan Bass. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1982.

­­­­­­ "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in The Structuralist Controversy (originally in Writing and Difference, University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1978). The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1982.

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Plotnitsky, Arkady. Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Duke University Press, Durham: 1994.

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