*full text available here
The Afri-descendent and Indigenous character navigating environments of dominant histories - working both with and at odds with the spacetimes they exist in - has a growing representation in media cultures. A recent example is a character called The Protagonist in Christopher Nolan’s TENET. I have been thinking about temporal corollaries between The Protagonist and Client Zero from my video work, Simunye Systems Orientation Video, the season two story arc surrounding Commander Michael Burnham and Dr Gabriel Burnham in STAR TREK: Discovery and Sergeant Roberta Draper’s story arc in season 2 of The Expanse and the book, Caliban’s War.
To stay with the spaciotemporal tensions facing racialised characters I want to touch on Michelle M. Wright’s notion of “epiphenomenal time” in her critique of dominant linear progress narratives. In Physics of Blackness: Beyond The Middle Passage Epistemology, Wright challenges what she describes as dominating schools of thinking centering the Black Atlantic experience, and contrasts this observation by offering definitions of Blackness that highlight the multidimensionality of Black selfhood, are contoured by historical processes, and acknowledge multiple poles of ongoing trans-geographic connectivity. Wright exercises her positions through an analysis of the experiences of characters drawn from diasporic Black speculative fiction.
A most enduring theme in science fiction (SF), involves time-travel technologies that disrupt the dominant temporalities in the worlds of such characters. This trope offers SF practitioners a kind of toolkit for a reinventing of histories and collective identities. In a community dominated still by a Eurocentric imagination, I want to offer some initial thoughts on Black and Indigenous characters in recent science fiction.
The kind of thinking through spacetime temporalities by Science Fiction practitioners that are of interest for now, directly and indirectly, complicate what Michelle Wright calls a Newtonian “linear progress narrative”.
Wright points out that linear progress narratives are regularly instrumentalised by both diasporic and non-diasporic civilization projects. Tracking these projects across space and time feels important but for now, the Western cultural project of Enlightenment is a useful example of a civilization project that self-mythicises grand narratives. Foundational to such narratives, is a belief in the naturally occurring progression of history. Myths of progress are often recounted as idealised, forward marches towards some irradiated, ascension machine, coming out from a darker, wilder and lesser evolved past.
For Wright, this tendency is representative of a hegemonic, uncritical reliance on the picture of reality offered by classical mechanics. Wright argues that there is a lasting, seductive power in the ubiquitous logic provided by classical mechanics in daily macro life. We experience many aspects of life in linear ways. Newton’s mathematics are fundamental to understanding the way tangible bodies move through atmosphere-rich environments, for example, calculations for the motions of planetary bodies that are necessary for space navigation.
Epiphenomenal time is a concept Wright offers to describe and promote a nonlinear, perhaps relativistic positioning in spacetime. It is an outlook or condition that de-centers any singular account or perspective of an event as primary, or ‘native’. Instead, epiphenomenal time favors the primacy of a presence in spacetime involving all activities that from a Newtonian perspective, exist in the ‘past’ or the ‘future’.
Wright expands on this position by qualifying some entropic qualities of epiphenomenal time; noting that our experience of time is not consecutive but rather accumulative, that the events of the past do not have a causal connection to the present. The form of connection that past and future events have to the present is produced and managed by the present. Maybe another way to put it is that at any given point, what exists in recorded historical events, are produced in each individual present moment when participants are motivated to historicize or remember a past event.
Epiphenomenal time reminds me of ideas that impact modern formulations about temporality; from endogenous Bantu metaphysics to climatic determinist critiques in the environmental humanities. A recent correlate I have come across is Walter Benjamin’s meditations through a historical materialist approach to history. In the essay On the Concept of History, Benjamin calls for a psycho-spiritually immersive engagement with events in the past by removing a sense of everything that happens after; to summon or imagine a historical context or memory as if it were taking place in your sense of the present moment.
Curiously, Benjamin invokes the shock of trauma that comes from such a psychic displacement, as a catalyst for this kind of recollection (perhaps making it possible?). I might want to think about a function of this sort of traumatic break as a protocol for reversing or reconstructing internal systems of entropy.
Time Crystals and Latent Physics (of Blackness)
The Protagonist in the film TENET finds himself undergoing a psychological and material unorganising of selfhood. With the help of the Mumbai-based arms dealer, Priya, and the agent Neil, the Protagonist uncovers an epiphenomenal experience of time first experienced as a reversed missed bullet shot in the opening scene. The bi-directional flow of trains that frame the closing scene of this sequence emphasises this introduction to a nonlinear regime. In a larger sense, the material calibrations I'm referring to are the geopolitical entanglings of emergent temporal warfare technologies and the unfolding nature of The Protagonist’s intelligence operation.
Priya informs the Protagonist that in the future, a scientist develops an algorithm with the ability to ‘inverse’ the entropy of any object (and apparently, the object that is spacetime). Fearing the technological potential for mutually assured destruction scenarios between past and future generations of humans, the scientist resorts to “...splitting the algorithm into nine sections” and dispersing each section into their ‘past’. In the audience's timeline, a “cat and mouse jaunt” ensues between the Protagonist and his distastefully brute, Eastern European billionaire antagonist.
Psychically, the Protagonist’s experience of legal death in the opening scene of the film is itself an inversion. A resetting of the biological clock whose passing is more ambiguous. The protagonist is forced to embrace the logics available to him.
In Neil’s final scene he shares with The Protagonist that He had “... a future in the past, years ago for me ... years from now for you” and it is revealed that Neil, Priya, and all the collaborators working with The Protagonist were under the employment of a future-originating Protagonist operating a ‘temporal pincer movement”. This is described as a warfare tactic where an actor or team “...moves forward through an event”, observes the outcomes of the engagement, and then “attacks backwards” having hindsight of how events unfold. A pattern of motion not dissimilar to the electrons or photons, cited by Wright, in John Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment, that appear to be able to perceive and adjust for ‘future’ changes made to their paths.
The audience shares in both these internal and external recoveries, disclosures of memory. Critiques of this popular interpretation of results of experiments based on Wheeler’s delayed choice thought experiments remind us that particles exhibit a dual nature, simultaneously existing as particle-like and wave-like “entities”. I think Wright leaves us plenty of room to play with her metaphysical engagement with John Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiments. In 1978 esteemed physicist and philosopher of science John Wheeler shared a proposal for an experiment that investigates the wave-particle dual nature that quanta somehow embody.
Wheeler’s experiments are based on the double-slit experiment devised almost 200 years prior by the polymath, Thomas Young. Building on 17th and 18th century science describing the wave theory of light, in 1801, Young sought out to disprove the Newtonian assertion that light acts like a particle. Young demonstrated the wave-like nature of light by imagining an experiment where a light source is beamed at a series of cardboard barriers. The first barrier has one slit, both letting the light through and focusing it as it passes through a second barrier with two slits. The slits each measured under a millimeter thick, and, after the light passes through the second screen, it impacts onto a third screen as an interference pattern.
By the mid-20th century, it was thought that a single unit of quantum matter shot at a double-slit screen would pass through one slit or the other. The discrete nature of particle matter gives us this intuition, however, even the use of heavier particles of matter demonstrates the same interference effect. Significant for several reasons, Young’s experiment establishes in the Western sciences the basic idea that particles have both wave-like and particle-like qualities.
Wheeler’s “delayed-choice” version of the double-slit experiment considers the problem of observation or more specifically, detection. Wheeler wondered about the Earth-bound path of light from a distant quasar, Wheeler explains that a photon from this quasar would have to choose which paths through space to take, navigating the gravitational pull of some galaxy cluster or black hole; traveling, on either side as a particle or in both directions as a wave. either observations are possible to detect, depending on the chosen astronomical tools. Inferometers do not detect the exact positions of individual photons, instead they aggregate the cumulative passage of photons as light waves. Wheeler tried to understand how the choice of observational tools, made from an Earthly perspective millions of years after the photon left its origin, creates the very observation of wave-like or particle-like behavior.
This question encouraged efforts in modern experiements to add detectors with a “delayed choice” element to a double-slit type environment. The ‘choice’ is the decision of whether or not to measure the path of the particle, this decision is ‘delayed’ until after the particle has entered the slit or splitter. Famously, however, when detectors are added to the setup, measurements are always consistent with when the path of the particle was measured or not. Producing particle-like patterns when it’s path is measured retroactively and interference patterns when the particles path isn’t measured.
In 1999, Yoon-Ho Kim, R. Yu, S. P. Kulik, Y. H. Shih, and Marlan O. Scully published findings from an experiment that sent a pair of entangled photons through an environment of instruments combining what are known as delayed choice quantum eraser experiments. Variations of the delayed choice and quantum eraser environments are organised as a complex set of paths, beam splitters, and mirrors to both record and erase information about the paths of a beam and its entangled twin. The Quantum eraser adds another step to the delayed choice experiment. In a setup where a particle travels along a path that is being measured [occuring after the other ½ of the entangled particle has been detected at the end of its path], the which path information of particle being measured is erased.
Yoon-Ho Kim and colleagues found that their results were still consistent with previous experiments; the appearance of an interference pattern by what is usually referred to as the ‘signal’ photon was consistent with whether the longer path of its entangled twin, the ‘idler’ photon was known, even when the measurement was erased after the ‘signal’ photon was detected.
It is tempting to think about retrocausality when thinking about this quantum effect, however what’s more interesting for a latent field about the nature of wave-particle duality as demonstrated by a delayed choice environment is less about a perceived ability to predict the future and more about the role that probability plays to an observer experiencing the unfolding of spacetime. When we look at particles we make them visible to our 4 dimensional material and temporal reality. When we are not focused on a particle, it is distributed across a specific range of possible positions. In a state of superposition that probably only feels counterintuitive from a spacetime awareness that sees changelings as firmly bound and distinct.
The payoff at the end of TENET is the revelation of The Protagonist’s larger temporal pincer movement. The Protagonist’s character development in adapting to the shifting temporal environments he faces is ultimately bound by the plans set in motion, or detected (in keeping with the analogy with Wheeler’s delayed choice thought experiment) by the future Protagonist.
...
Comments