RELATED TERMS: Complementarity
General and restricted economies
Plotnitsky (1994: 2): “General economy denotes a mode of theory that relates the configurations it considers to the loss of meaning – a loss it regards as ineluctable within any given system. The concept of general economy was introduced by Bataille and deployed by Derrida, although Nietzsche may be seen as the first practitioner of general economy and Bohr as the second. According to Bataille, “the general economy . . . makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, which, by definition, cannot be utilized. The excessive energy can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning.” The general economy is juxtaposed by Bataille to classical theories or restricted economies – such as, in particular, Hegel’s philosophy or Marx’s political economy. Restricted economy, however, defines classical theories across a broad spectrum of Western intellectual history: in philosophy, the social and human sciences, history, and other fields. Mathematics and the natural and exact sciences, too, can be seen as restricted economies, when their practice is governed by metaphysical epistemologico-ontological agendas, as they have often been even in the works of many revolutionary scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, and beyond.”
Design practice as restricted and general economy
Arkady Plotnitsky (1994: 2) states that, “Restricted economies consider their objects and the relationships between those objects as always meaningful and claim that the systems they deal with can avoid the unproductive expenditure of energy and control multiplicity and indeterminacy within themselves. General economy exposes such claims as untenable.”
The argument being developed in Incomplete … is that design has been conceived primarily as a restricted economy, one that promotes a conception of ‘total design’ in which there is no unproductive excess which escapes its meaning production and which is able to control multiplicity and indeterminacy. Design practice in the form of a restricted economy of total design takes as its model the onto-theology of divine creation, creatio ex nihilo, creation by divine fiat. Total design, as Wigley (1998) points out, will always be frustrated because it is untenable when understood in the context of a general economy. As Incomplete … argues, design must open up to that which exceeds it, to multiplicity and to indeterminacy.
The conception of design at which Incomplete … is aiming is one where it is understood in the context of a general economy. There are aspects of any design practice that generate an excess that escapes the frame of its meaning production, which open up unanticipated multiplicity and which give rise to outcomes which are not determined by the design. Not all of the world, as actantial entanglement, is, or can be, captured within the (restricted, restrictive) meaningfulness of design. The world does not conform to one, singular ‘total design’. The entangled actantiality of the world, as a general economy, will always exceed the actantiality of design intention (as a restricted economy).
The view that Incomplete … seeks to articulate is that a different approach to design is possible whereby designs open up to and acknowledge the general economy of the world, with its excess, multiplicity and indeterminacy, without seeking to encapsulate it within a restricted economy that designs, as future-oriented intentionality, must nevertheless articulate. A complementary approach to design, following Bohr’s insights, acknowledges both the conventional teleological character of design, as aiming toward a specific goal within a restricted economy, and the falling apart of design as end or closure within a general economy, as it admits its own excess, multiplicity and indeterminacy.
Design practice and processes are suspended (are in suspension) between general and restricted economies. Design as enacting a restricted economy and design as enacting a general economy are complementary: they are mutually exclusive but equally necessary for a comprehensive, complete description and analysis of design design actantiality (what design does). [“Complementarity, thus, connotes both mutual exclusivity and completeness of description” Plotnitsky, 1994: 5)]
Through this suspension, “the possibility of representation without loss” , in other words, design without loss, has to be acknowledged. Could we say, analogously to quantum mechanical configurations, that all design configurations (as re-entanglements of existing entanglements) are simultaneously both irreducibly incomplete and irreducibly rich.
Design as a general economy: “All general economies deal with arrangements (between and within the configurations they consider) that are complementary in the broad sense of being heterogeneous but interactive – heterogeneously interactive and interactively heterogeneous.” (Plotnitsky, 1994: 10-11) …”while they multiply interact, the elements or fields engaged in such relationships never allow for a complete synthesis, Hegelian or other.” (Plotnitsky, 1994: 11) forming a “general economy of asynthesis” (Plotnitsky, 1994: 11) [Arrangements – Entanglements]
The dislocation created by a general economy of design is never a simple or uncritical dismissal of conventional theories of design. Rather, it is their rigorous suspension, implying an analytical exposure of their limitations and a refiguring of the conventional concepts through a general economy.
An absolute abandonment of conventional design theories does not amount to a sufficiently radical transformation of the field; and transformation is not radical at all.
Radical suspensions imply the introduction of complementary modes of description and analysis.
Bohr and complementarity
(Plotnitsky, 1994: 5) “To offer a preliminary outline, complementarity as developed by Bohr enables one to describe comprehensively and employ productively the conflictual aspects of quantum phenomena that cannot be accommodated by classical theories. In Bohr’s interpretation such aspects become their complementary features – the features that are mutually exclusive but equally necessary for a comprehensive, complete, description and analysis of all quantum processes. Bohr speaks of “a new mode of description designated as complementary in the sense that any given application of classical concepts precludes the simultaneous use of other classical concepts which in a different connection are equally necessary for the elucidation of the phenomena.” Due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations, quantum mechanics introduces a certain irreducible-general economic loss in representation and thus irreducible incompleteness of knowledge as classically understood. Quantum mechanics, however, and specifically complementarity form, as Bohr argues, a complete theory of its data-as complete as a theory can be under these conditions of irreducible incompleteness. Complementarity, thus, connotes both mutual exclusivity and completeness of description, as the word complementarity, which carries both these meanings, would suggest.
“Two forms of complementarity are of particular significance in Bohr’s framework …
The first is the wave-particle complementarity, reflecting the duality of the behavior of quantum objects and relating the continuous and discontinuous representations of quantum processes. These two types of representation have always been unequivocally dissociated in classical physics. … Bohr’s complementarity equally deconstructs both the classical, unequivocal unifications and classical, unequivocal dissociations of features through which physics constructs, describes, and interprets its objects.
The second complementarity is the complementarity of coordination, defining a position or a configuration of positions of a quantum object or system, and causality, classically determining the behavior of such an object or system.
Coordination and causality are always united in classical theories, and these theories are in fact defined by this unity. In quantum mechanics, however, in Bohr’s defining formulation: “The very nature of the quantum theory … forces us to regard the space-time co-ordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and definition respectively.” Bohr’s word “idealization” is extremely important here. Both coordination and causality must be seen as idealizations, symbols, metaphors. This understanding is crucial in defining complementarity as a theoretical matrix and specifically in making it a general economy.
In contrast to the classical theories, then, we cannot ultimately establish or calculate, or postulate, the causal dynamics – or, one might say, the history of a system – given the positions of its elements at a given point.
This disjunction between the classically united observation of position and definition of causality leads to what may be seen as the anticausality or indeterminacy postulate of quantum theory.
A decisive feature of the quantum postulate, however, is that it also implies the acausal character of the quantum behavior of light, as against the causal character of the wave or continuous theory of light. Thus the quantum postulate leads to the anticausality and indeterminacy of quantum theory.
The complementarity of coordination and causality is directly connected to the complementarity of position and momentum, or the kinematic-dynamic complementarity as it is sometimes called, which precludes one from measuring or even meaningfully defining both variables – position and momentum-simultaneously at any given point. By virtue of this connection, the mathematical counterpart of the complementarity of coordination and causality becomes Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations.
It can be said that uncertainty relations connote a radical, irreducible loss in representation affecting – in advance, always already – any quantum system and ultimately making all such representations idealizations.
Bohr directly invokes the inevitable loss of knowledge on several occasions. In terms of the present study, this loss defines Bohr’s complementarity as a general economy. This “loss” is so radical that, strictly speaking, it prohibits one from assuming that there is somewhere a complete or unified system, existing in itself or by itself, concerning which system some information is lost in the processes of observation, measurement, and interpretation.
As Bohr stressed throughout his writing, the statistical character of quantum mechanics is radical – irreducible – insofar as, contrary to Einstein’s hope, it does not imply some “hidden” large complete, unified, and causal system about which quantum mechanics provides partial, statistical information.
Quantum statistics appears to result from a radical – irreducible – multiplicity, which becomes particularly pronounced in modern quantum electrodynamics and field theory.
But such a multiplicity cannot be conceived in classical terms, and it could be contrasted to classical multiplicities, including those of classical statistical physics. Whether in physics or meta-physics, or philosophy, an assumption of a complete large system would restore the classical, metaphysical appurtenance to the interpretive and theoretical framework based on it.
One needs instead a very different and more complex economy of difference, exteriority, alterity – general economy. By the same token, the irreducible loss at issue leads to the irreducible fragmentation, the fracturing in advance of any quantum system. One thus is also prohibited from speaking of complete quantum systems, although within its limits quantum mechanics must, as I said, be seen as a complete theory as complete as a theory can be under these conditions of irreducible incompleteness. (Plotnitsky, 1994: 8)
Quantum electrodynamics (QED) suggests that if “the very nature of quantum theory forces us” to renounce the claims of causality and the possibility of representation without loss, it also forces us to regard all quantum systems as fields defined by an irreducible, infinite multiplicity and incessant, unending transformations of their constitutive elements. This multiplicity equally redefines one-particle systems, or rather the systems classically defined as one particle systems – one photon, one electron, and so forth – which are all transformed into irreducibly multiple fields. All quantum mechanical configurations are, thus, simultaneously both irreducibly incomplete and irreducibly rich.
The features just described allowed Bohr to develop complementarity into a comprehensive framework that encompasses both quantum physics and quantum meta-physics – the ontological-epistemological and, as it turned out, the anti-ontological and anti-epistemological dimensions of quantum theory.
In this sense, Bohr’s meta-physics is anti-metaphysics, as metaphysics has been developed from (or before) Plato and Aristotle, in their physics and metaphysics alike, to Heidegger, via Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and most other major figures in the history of philosophy or intellectual history in general. Aristotle’s works after his Physics – ta meta ta physika – the phrase apparently introduced by commentators on Aristotle to refer collectively to these works, were seen as dealing with things beyond nature or physis. These works, however, continued and reinforced the grounding structures defining philosophical discourse as developed before Aristotle, particularly in Parmenides and Plato.
[In this sense, metaphysics = metaphysics of presence, ontotheology or restricted economy. On the other hand,] Bohr’s meta-physics implies and in fact practices an anti-epistemological general economy of physics, rather than any form of metaphysics developed in the history of philosophy.
As such, Bohr’s meta-physics can be used to dislocate all classical or, in terms of the present study, restricted economic metaphysics, the metaphysics of presence-all its ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, ontotheology, and so forth-and the philosophy of physics that such metaphysics has produced. This dislocation implies that one can neither fully separate physics and meta-physics nor fully unite them, for example, by encompassing physics within philosophy, as Hegel wanted to do. These relationships may instead be defined as complementary, even variably complementary, with shifting border lines between physics and meta-physics.
The anti-epistemology of my title refers, broadly, to the general possibility of a dislocation, or as we say now, deconstruction of classical or metaphysical theories-epistemologies, ontologies, phenomenologies, or, to return to Derrida’s more encompassing terms, forms of ontotheology, logocentrism, and the metaphysics of presence. The theoretical base of this dislocation in Bohr’s work is the general economic character of complementarity as a theoretical matrix. This character is, once again, codetermined by the irreducible loss – and thus indeterminacy – in the process of representation and by the equally irreducible heterogeneous multiplicity of all representations that such a matrix generates and employs.
All general economies deal with arrangements (between and within the configurations they consider) that are complementary in the broad sense of being heterogeneous but interactive – heterogeneously interactive and interactively heterogeneous.
… the general economy of asynthesis is a fundamental aspect of Bohr’s complementarity, which makes it a profoundly anti-Hegelian, or a-Hegelian, theory. In both Bataille and Derrida, general economy is explicitly defined in relation to Hegel and Hegelianism. Derrida, in fact, uses the name “Hegel” to connote the culmination of the history of the philosophical understanding of interpretive, theoretical, historical, and political processes, the history defining what he calls the closure of the episteme – the closure of the metaphysics of presence – on which we might still depend even in our anti-epistemological projects and practices. The pervasiveness and power of this closure is one of the main reasons why one is compelled to see general economy as “anti-epistemology.”
The dislocation created by a general economy is never a simple or uncritical dismissal of classical theories, but is instead their rigorous suspension – an analytical exposure of their limitations and a refiguring of classical concepts through a general economy.
an absolute abandonment of classical theories – or, for that matter, anything absolute – never amounts to a sufficiently radical transformation of the field, and in a great many cases such a transformation is not radical at all. Radical anti epistemology and anti-Hegelianism may be defined by their anti-absolutism; whether a positive or a negative absolute is at issue. Radical suspensions of epistemology are possible, however.
Radical suspensions do appear to imply the introduction of complementary modes of description and analysis.
References
Plotnitsky, A. (1994) Complementarity: Anti-epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Incomplete ... 