Negative twenty
questions modernism
There’s a party game called twenty questions.
One person goes out of the room, and the people in the room then discuss among
themselves and choose an object in the room. Then the person is recalled, and
he asks the people in the room up to twenty questions – classically, of the
kind : is it bigger than a breadbox – in order to guess the object. John
Wheeler, the physicist, spun off another game that he claimed was closer to the
quantum world, or what at least it meant to investigate the quantum world. The
structure of sending a person outside of the room remains constant. What this
person doesn’t know, however, is that in this version of the game, all the
people in the room pick their objects and don’t speak to each other. When the
questioner is called in and asks the questions – for instance, is it bigger
than a breadbox – the person who answers changes the object, in as much as his
reply makes the other people in the room silently repick their object. So say x
has chosen a matchbox and y has chosen a sofa, if the questioner asks x if it
is bigger than a breadbox (to which x says no), then y has to quickly chose
some other object (which may be the matchbox or may be a match, etc) in order
to remain consistent with the line of questioning.
There is something rather eerie about Wheeler’s
game of negative twenty questions. It produces a community that is founded not
on addresses and maps, but on being lost – on a continual re-matching of
addresses and maps, a battlefield in which inconsistency is the rule and
consistency is continually catching up. The game brings into focus a certain modernist
other – a modernist fantastic, stretching from Balzac’s Le peau de chagrin to Freud’s
Der Unheimlich. This is the modernism in which the rules of reason overcome and
mug reason, which becomes, simply, a way of having rules. And that way of
having rules obeys a rule that makes the outcome of rule following radically
uncertain. None of the players can predict it.
Freud, eventually, found his way out of the
red light district in Rome he kept compulsively finding himself in. In Balzac’s
tale, a curse and power is written on an onyx’s skin. The Wild Ass’s Tale, written when Balzac was
coming out of his apprenticeship in pulp novels, is considered the first novel
in the vast Human Comedy universe. Here is the premise of the book, unrolled at
the very beginning, when we follow Raphaël de Valentin, a poor student, as he
walks about in a fever, waiting for night to come so he can throw himself off a
bridge. In the course of his wandering, he comes upon a shop full of odds and
ends, and in it he finds a mysterious talisman made of onyx hide. The talisman
is inscribed with a phrase in Arabic. Balzac, that master of cod learning,
reproduces it and allows Raphael the knowledge to read the “Sanskrit”, as the
owner of the odd shop calls it. promises to make the wishes of the person who
uses it come true. “If you possess me, you will possess all. But your life
belongs to me. God wills it. Desire, and your desires will be realized. But
regulate your wishes according to your life. It is there. For every wish, I
will shrink, like your days. Do you want me? Take me. God grants it to you. So
be it!” And so the desire for fortune, the want realized, is paid for in kind –
by a counter-gift of the days of one’s life. The talisman is the very image of
one way of looking at the almost magical supply of goods and services that
already, in 1830, could be felt on the horizons. The culture of growth never
shakes off Nemesis, who balances and casts an evil eye on the “too much”. The
balance between desire and lifespan, here, is encoded in an object whose
material existence is the very correspondent of the material existence of its
user. This isn’t exactly addiction. It is more like the guessing in Wheeler’s
game, where the object keeps changing as the guesses multiply. In Raphaël’s
case, of course, there’s a romance – a mystery beauty named Foedora, whose
allure is heightened, in that Balzacian way, by her wealth, which is exactly
measured – somehow, everybody knows she her networth is 80,000 francs.
Foedora - what a name! A perfect name for a
silent movie star. One imagines her slinking expressionistically into some
crooked room in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Wheeler’s game was supposed to get to some
scientific truth about quantum theory – a way of making us understand the role
of measurement. The hole in the game is, of course, that it is unclear what it
would mean to win it, and how winning could be agreed upon by a community that
is so radically atomized that its objects are private.
An image for political philosophers, surely
- but one only a novelist could love.
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