File Note 110: Paul Johnson

What’s underneath the stuff that we see in the stuff we inhabit all the time? I mean, when you take a box apart, what do you get? There’s nothing there, right? When you erase a list you wrote in pencil, is there anything left? What about the pencil marks that tell you how tall your kids are, on that part of the doorframe in the doorway to the kitchen? Come to think of it, what about that part of the doorframe in the doorway to the kitchen? 

According to default scientistic atomism, eventually you reach absolutely nothing at all. According to our habitual patterns, you reach nothing at all quite quickly. There’s nothing left after you erase the list. There’s nothing left after you take the box apart. 

Default scientistic atomism is quite different from actual science. Actual science says that there’s always going to be a little bit of something left when you take stuff apart. You can test this by isolating stuff. When you put stuff in a vacuum very close to absolute zero, you observe it shimmering, vibrating without mechanical input. There’s a little bit of energy there, a little bit of fluctuation, even when all the chances of being pushed have been reduced to zero. There is not a void. Even the vacuum of space is fluctuating like that. I read somewhere that you can find all kinds of amino acids and stuff there, let alone in comets – I mean, in actual space. Matter-energy comes in all kinds of colours – there are no flavourless particles. There are oceans of indigo, saffron, lime green down there. 

Stare at a light bulb for a moment then close your eyes. 

If you remove most of the rhetorical varnish and put the sentences a bit too close to the fire so they get slightly burned and cinders start to fly about, and then you crumple what’s left into a short essay on the brilliant Paul Johnson, what happens? I mean, if you stir stuff at the bottom of the bucket of significance around, what do you see? 

So I claim, with the uncool kids, that there’s something left when you take stuff apart. Something else. This something may have a strange form. It may make you think it has no form at all, because it doesn’t have a recognisable one. I’m very sorry to have to break it to Rosalind Krauss and Mr. Spock, but really, there’s no such thing as ‘pure matter devoid of form’ (as the latter was quite fond of saying on Star Trek). ‘Formless’ is just a very sloppy, grey goo way of saying I, a human being, can’t cope with the infinite fractal dimensionality of things, a deep aspect of how they are, of their ontology. 

You can’t cope, so you just look, fascinated. Consider Johnson’s grey clay translation of a fizzy drink can, bursting out of its can-ness to reveal the friable subtlety of the clay. The can translation has burst into still flames of grey. We live in a world bursting with friendly strangeness. 

Formlessness is just how something departs from my expectations about what form is. It’s the departure that’s interesting. When you break a glass, you don’t have nothing – you suddenly have all these fascinating bits of broken glass. That’s the phenomenology of how stuff happens – new stuff. Novelty happens in the universe as a deformation or distortion or anamorphosis. Suddenly there’s a shatter pattern of irregular crystalline chunks in your kitchen. The destroyed glass is nowhere to be seen. Or maybe there’s a recognisable part of that glass still left, say the stem and some of the container part, along with some shattered bits. What’s that called? What’s that called especially if you can take a drink out of it, quite carefully? 

You didn’t destroy the glass. You allowed the glass to tell a joke about what it’s like to be a glass. You watch its laughter, those little crystalline bits. 

Aristotle thought it was the shape of a thing, not what it’s made of, that determines what it is. But if you think about it, this shape business is a bit circular. It’s like the myth of Adamic language. Adam called the tiger tiger because it looked like a tiger. Quite soon you find yourself stabilising the idea that the essence of a thing is its form, with the idea of teleology, otherwise known as what it’s for. But then you have another problem. Ducks are for swimming, Greeks are for enslaving barbarians… You can justify Alexander the Great’s imperial mission if you keep going like that, and ducks aren’t for swimming according to Darwin. Evolution has no telos at all, at any level. It’s all rather retroactive. You look at the duck’s webbed feet and you go: wow, how perfectly designed for swimming. Then you remember coots. They don’t have webbed feet. They swim. Evolution doesn’t give a monkey’s about the purpose of webbed feet.