The dynamo and the spime
Henry Adams writes about his life in the third person. Annoying as this is, a limited omniscience does fit his subject matter: himself, a nineteenth-century, Harvard-educated East Coast aristocrat who sees enough during his travels to decide that people like himself have been applying some outdated metaphors to encompass with language all that they did not understand (pretty much anything to do with science, art, and the creation of the universe). Affecting a distance to write about a younger Henry, Adams might as well be the narrated subject fifty or so years in the future. The device is useful, a sort of deus ex machina that spans time.
One of Henry's loves is a machine. He meets it at the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. (See "The Dynamo and the Virgin," bookmarked in the sidebar, for Adams' account.) The dynamo had been around for about 70 years, but people like Henry, who knew scientists but wasn't one, were separated by nearly a generation from a device as intellectual know-how and the device as useable object. Henry does not know where to look to see what "the development or economy of forces" (what true science achieves, according to Francis Bacon according to Adams) has been silently generating until a scientist friend leads Henry through the exhibition--past all the latest, de rigueur paintings that fail to show Henry signs of the time--to where the dynamo is silently (a baby sleeping beside it wouldn't wake, Adams writes) generating electricity.
The dynamo
Henry decides that the "occult mechanism" of the dynamo is to the modern sensibility what the occult mechanism of religious iconography (the cross and images of the virgin and Venus) and art had been to (Western, Christian) man until the break with the past the dynamo and its implications affected. The occult mechanism is the mysterious force that turns cause into effect: whatever happens to turn the dynamo's spinning--mechanical energy (a measurable quantity)--into electricity (less obviously, and to Henry impossibly, quantifiable).
The Virgin:
she wants you to think sex is mysterious
Henry doesn't understand how the dynamo could be just a channel for forces already, mysteriously latent in the device itself. The dynamo creates a current--a potential--but does not create electricity. This break between cause and effect leaves Henry a little muddled, so he tries out a metaphor to reconnect the two. What Henry concludes is, the dynamo mysteriously exercises the same force on the mind that other "symbols of infinity" have exercised in the past--the cross could get people to believe in an occult force (g-o-d), and images of the Virgin and Venus could get people to believe in sex as an occult force, something more than just a cause that leads to an effect (babies). In his muddle, Henry anthropomorphizes: he decides that the dynamo now exercises the power once exercised by the artist, "the creator," over the imagination.
The Birth of Venus
Henry also does a little reverse-anthropomorphizing. He compares the human trying to understand the dynamo to a Branly coherer. To indulge in the metaphor Adams sets up: the human is a signal decoder, a device made of material that, when exposed to the right kind of input (in the case of a coherer, a high enough voltage), changes its composition accordingly. Henry, trying to figure out how this machine works, is a component in an analog circuit, analog being an analogy between cause and effect, on and off. (And hey, look at analog.)
In this circuit, there is no omniscience; or rather, the omniscience comes of the process begun by the desire to understand and involves both the subject (human) and object (machine). It's a process that involves human understanding as a component, or channel. (And to be a word drudge one more time, and possibly to point to the obvious, the root of "omniscience" comes from the same Latin word from which our word "science" comes. It means "to know.") By Adams' metaphor, the attempt to understand the unknown is a process much like the one by which the dynamo uses mechanical energy to produce electricity. Latent potential realized through a channel of intentionality.
All of this from the omniscient Adams, removed from himself by his own devise.
Next: What all of this has to do with Bruce Sterling, spimes, and pet rocks.
One of Henry's loves is a machine. He meets it at the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. (See "The Dynamo and the Virgin," bookmarked in the sidebar, for Adams' account.) The dynamo had been around for about 70 years, but people like Henry, who knew scientists but wasn't one, were separated by nearly a generation from a device as intellectual know-how and the device as useable object. Henry does not know where to look to see what "the development or economy of forces" (what true science achieves, according to Francis Bacon according to Adams) has been silently generating until a scientist friend leads Henry through the exhibition--past all the latest, de rigueur paintings that fail to show Henry signs of the time--to where the dynamo is silently (a baby sleeping beside it wouldn't wake, Adams writes) generating electricity.
The dynamo
Henry decides that the "occult mechanism" of the dynamo is to the modern sensibility what the occult mechanism of religious iconography (the cross and images of the virgin and Venus) and art had been to (Western, Christian) man until the break with the past the dynamo and its implications affected. The occult mechanism is the mysterious force that turns cause into effect: whatever happens to turn the dynamo's spinning--mechanical energy (a measurable quantity)--into electricity (less obviously, and to Henry impossibly, quantifiable).
The Virgin:
she wants you to think sex is mysterious
Henry doesn't understand how the dynamo could be just a channel for forces already, mysteriously latent in the device itself. The dynamo creates a current--a potential--but does not create electricity. This break between cause and effect leaves Henry a little muddled, so he tries out a metaphor to reconnect the two. What Henry concludes is, the dynamo mysteriously exercises the same force on the mind that other "symbols of infinity" have exercised in the past--the cross could get people to believe in an occult force (g-o-d), and images of the Virgin and Venus could get people to believe in sex as an occult force, something more than just a cause that leads to an effect (babies). In his muddle, Henry anthropomorphizes: he decides that the dynamo now exercises the power once exercised by the artist, "the creator," over the imagination.
The Birth of Venus
Henry also does a little reverse-anthropomorphizing. He compares the human trying to understand the dynamo to a Branly coherer. To indulge in the metaphor Adams sets up: the human is a signal decoder, a device made of material that, when exposed to the right kind of input (in the case of a coherer, a high enough voltage), changes its composition accordingly. Henry, trying to figure out how this machine works, is a component in an analog circuit, analog being an analogy between cause and effect, on and off. (And hey, look at analog.)
In this circuit, there is no omniscience; or rather, the omniscience comes of the process begun by the desire to understand and involves both the subject (human) and object (machine). It's a process that involves human understanding as a component, or channel. (And to be a word drudge one more time, and possibly to point to the obvious, the root of "omniscience" comes from the same Latin word from which our word "science" comes. It means "to know.") By Adams' metaphor, the attempt to understand the unknown is a process much like the one by which the dynamo uses mechanical energy to produce electricity. Latent potential realized through a channel of intentionality.
All of this from the omniscient Adams, removed from himself by his own devise.
posted by evelyn at 12:54 PM
1 Comments:
*This ought to be pretty good.
(((pulls up chair)))
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