On this quiet gray Saturday afternoon, in the last days before an election that seems to come at us like a road approaching a chasm without a bridge, I read two interesting articles in short order. The first by Stephanie Burt writing in The New Yorker (“The Never-Ending Story”) is about the prevalence of the many iterations of the theme of multiple simultaneous worlds. The article tracks this theme from science into science fiction to Marvel comics and their cinematic offshoots and finally beyond the market-driven entertainment industry into more serious recent literature and poetry. The article quotes the hypothesis that the idea of the multiverse appeals to us because our sense of singularity as individuals has been fragmented by the dissociated existences we experience in shifting from one online mode to another. It would seem that, as in medieval thinking, the human microcosm parallels and mirrors the natural macrocosm: so the multiverse is our multitrack existence writ large. Another article, a New York Times opinion piece by the ever-astute Zeynep Tufekci, offers a complementary perspective that invests the alarming phenomenon of digital fragmentation with a sense of political foreboding. She argues that the take-over of Twitter by Elon Musk is of little importance compared to our systemic manipulation by algorithms aimed at maximizing the user base for advertising. She points out, no doubt rightly, that the assumption that such services are in any sense “free” means its opposite. Even the advertising fees are passed on to the consumer. But worse: the algorithms that maximize the user base do so by fomenting enmity and conflict. What we see as our “opponent” is a simulacrum, behind which the real opponent acts upon us with more ethereal and effective tools. In this regard, the multiverse is entirely actual. The rage and enmity we feel only tighten their grip on us. This is probably why we are attracted to the narrative structure—The Man in the High Castle is a classic case in point—in which, behind the scenes, another world interacts with this one. All that is missing is a plot resolution revealing that, behind all those behind-the-scenes worlds in which there operates a mysterious character: that character is none other than the self whom the Delphic oracle enjoined the seeker of wisdom to know. It was Franz Kafka who brought off this paradoxical turn of plot in The Castle, in the remarkable nocturnal episode with Secretary Bürgel (about which, see pages 32-43 of my essay on “Kafka’s Castle: The Bureaucratic Everyman and the Enigma of Modernity”).
Know thyself!
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 