A World Suited to be Measured, Some Final Thoughts

To prove that, in some very profound way, I remain myself haunted by the thoughts I engaged here earlier -- on mystery, monsters, and ghosts -- I thought it prudent (somehow) to offer an epilogue. This comes in the form of two novels I have recently read: Measuring the World, by Daniel Kehlmann and Spook Country, by William Gibson.

I was made aware of Measuring the World by Ben, one of the curators of this here menagerie. It looks back at the differing efforts of explorer Alexander von Humboldt and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to understand their respective worlds.

I'm presuming that Ben himself will offer some sort of post on this book, which is definitely worth a read. One thing that struck me, however, was the following account of Humboldt's efforts of surveying, following in the footsteps of his progenitors:

Things weren't yet used to being measured. Three stones and three leaves were not yet the same number, fifteen grams of peas and fifteen grams of earth not yet the same weight. ...La Condamine held out the longest. Eight years in the forest, protected by a mere handful of fever ridden soldiers. He had cut trails which grew back again as soon as he turned his back, felled tress which resprouted the next night, and yet, little by little, with stiff-necked determination, he had forcibly imposed a web of numbers over reluctant nature.

I thought the idea of things not being used to being measured, but gradually becoming so, resonated well with some of my previous posts. It is interesting to reflect on the process of measurement, and how it has to become accepted not just by humans, but by those things (in becoming "things") that are quantified and deemed equivalent to comparable numbers. And that such a process has a relatively recent history.

Shortly after that novel, I picked up William Gibson's newest, Spook Country.

Neither a fan of the term genre fiction, nor, alas, of those works frequently categorized as such, I usually have to be coerced into reading such efforts. But, as any intrepid researcher of the internet and its effects must, I worked my way through Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, if for no other reason to be yet another person to cite Gibson as the originator of the word "cyberspace." Those books, like his most recent effort, should not be read for the credibility and depth of the characters that populate the worlds he creates, but rather for those worlds themselves. Real enough to be credible, and insightful enough to cause all manner of anxiety, Gibson's fictional universe takes on possible futures and stretches them, fills them out, to see where the edges might fray.

I don't want to summarize or review this book, but point to one of the innovations he tracks in this work. A few of the characters in the novel participate in what is called "locative art," which, apparently, is a real thing . Locative art relies on spatial coordinates overlaid by GPS technologies to configure and reconfigure spaces, giving them virtual layers of meaning accessible to those plugged in. The artist character described in the passage that follows has used the technique to create her own hyper-annotated space:

"...This is an annotated apartment, do you know it?"
"Annotated how?"
"Each object is hyperspatially tagged with Beth Barker's description, with Beth Barker's narrative of this object. One simple glass of water has twenty tags."

Gibson has gone from a more abstract virtual space found in Neuromancer to a more ghostly virtual reality, creating images and texts the more explicitly haunt the everyday world. One artist/character in the book actually recreates famous celebrity deaths (River Phoenix, Sharon Tate) that can be seen virtually in the real spaces in which they occurred - the purported ideal, here, is to layer channels of virtual experience over geographic space.

The characters in Spook Country see such efforts as enhancements to lived experience, and they surely would be - but fundamentally for a world suited to be measured, a world understood as a particular thing that then can be modified. A world haunted not just by spectral images generated by virtual positioning, but by the likes of Humboldt.

*WG's bio can be found at the end of his first guest post here.