2
The double topology of the PT and the MTT is determining of thought, which is differentiated as intelligence, i.e. as matter. Such thought incorporates all intellectual and affective processes. These are necessarily oriented around meanings, whether clear or obscure (rational or irrational). It is situated in an axiomatic space [Spielraum] of ideas and matter, which can be topologically described as the idea-matter-matrix (I-M-M). For every body, appearance and material entity, there is a corresponding idea. For every idea and general concept, there are corresponding appearances, bodies and material entities.1
The relation between the idea and matter is not stable and uniform; it is subject to continual reinterpretation. The opposition between idealism and materialism does not consist in the denial of each position by the other, but in the assertion of the priority of the idea over matter on the one hand and of matter over the idea on the other. In the context of the double topology, however, it is a matter of indifference which position is adopted. Either way, the result remains a certain order of bodies that becomes thinkable through a certain order of concepts.
The order of these orders forms a universal genetic structure. The path from the idea to matter and back again is production. To think something – to operate via the movement of the double topology – is to produce. To contemplate the idea is implicitly to regard the model on the basis of which a given entity is to be produced or is to produce itself (for the philosophers of the Middle Ages there was therefore no obstacle to reconciling Plato’s theory of Ideas with the notion of a creator God).2 Within the space-time of the I-M-M, thinking grasps the world as a construction of a demiurgically instantiated idea. Alternatively, the idea can also be regarded as a product of matter. The given world would then be the precondition of thinking (as materialism affirms). The movement of thought between the idea and matter is inescapably productive.
In the I-M-M, things only emerge in accordance with the supertemporality of the idea and the temporality of materialization. This results in a more or less well-ordered chronographic continuity. What can be invented and developed within the MTT is not contingent. Through the conjunction of the information available at a given time and the supertemporal conditions of emergence, temporal points come to be formed at which what is invented is what can be invented. And since these temporal points form a determinate order, what can be invented is only what has to be invented.
The course of technological development brings to light a progression which presents the unfolding of the I-M-M in time. Progress is therefore the primary category of historical development. It may well be inseparable from chronography as such. This is why it is always unconvincing when the concept of progress is rejected. Because the MTT realizes itself in the I-M-M, progress necessarily occurs.
The course of history is more or less determined. ‘More or less’ here refers merely to the probability of an invention occurring at a given time. Yet since chronometry is in any case artificially superimposed on the extension of space-time, the notion of probability is itself problematic here. It is an effect of finite thinking. What happens and will happen in history is already determined. As an integral of the TCM universal, the human being can only do what is absolutely possible, i.e. necessary.
This is because the temporal unfolding of the I-M-M can only bring to light what is contained in the I-M-M. At issue here is the economy of possibility: it is never the case that everything is possible; in truth, there are only ever very few possibilities, and perhaps only one. This is also indicated by the necessary course of the internal friction and inversion of the double topology (from myth to argument).
Everything that can be invented has been invented. This claim may seem hubristic, but in the context of the MTT in the I-M-M it is not nonsensical. Every technological discovery recombines and recomposes what has already been discovered. It must then be possible to reconstruct an unbroken path from the invention of the first telephone to the development of the smartphone, or even from the invention of the wheel to today’s most advanced electric cars.
The PT too can only function as a source of meaning within the space of the I-M-M. Poetry, however, is a different kind of production. It does not move from the general to the particular, from the model to the copy. It affirms the singular, the unique event. In order to do so, it has to modify the meanings contained in the I-M-M. Unlike technological modification, this modification is unmethodical. While Arnold Schoenberg had to discover the opening motif of his String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp minor, Op. 10, he did so in a different manner to that in which Edison discovered the electric chair. Schoenberg speaks of ‘musical ideas’3 in order to indicate the proximity and distance between such thinking and ordinary thinking in the I-M-M.
The consequence of the relation between the PT and the MTT in the I-M-M is that three universal entities produce the universal topography, the world-form: technology, capital and the medium. Their sense is a direct result of this determined and determinate relationship. The meaning of technology, capital and the medium within the world-form is clear and distinct and, since determined, without alternative. The original relation between the PT and the MTT already implies its later inversion. In this respect, history is not only determined but also predetermined. It could not have been otherwise.
The double topology is thought, but it is not only that. It was before thought and will continue to be after thought. Yet thought, consciousness – intelligence – is one of its integrals. Just as there was a time in which intelligence did not yet manifest itself in thought, there will be a time in which intelligence no longer manifests itself in thought.
Notes
1 Cf. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in Spinoza: The Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), Part II, Proposition 7: ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.’ And the proof: ‘for the idea of what is caused depends on the knowledge of the cause of which it is the effect.’ What Spinoza has in mind here is clearly less the Platonic Idea than the thought of what is caused. On the connection between Platonism and quantum theory cf. Gregor Schiemann, Werner Heisenberg (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008), 78ff.
2 At least from Augustine onward. Cf. Richard Heinzmann, Philosophie des Mittelalters (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1992), 80ff.
3 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 399. ‘The language in which musical ideas are expressed in tones parallels the language which expresses feelings or thoughts in words, in that its vocabulary must be proportionate to the intellect which it addresses.’ The ‘musical idea’ thus resembles language insofar as it ‘expresses’ something. Yet what it ‘expresses’ is not as clear and distinct as a purely linguistic statement. This negative dimension of the musical idea nonetheless becomes something positive when it comes to the affectivity of expression: the pain in Mahler’s adagios is more painful than the word ‘pain’.