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BARBARA KOHLER: I wish to dedicate this talk to my friends Georgina Paul in Oxford, England, and [INAUDIBLE] in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, and all our long phone calls bridging long distances, this full with misunderstandings and clearings and everything.
So some possibilities for sailing in a friendship [SPEAKING GERMAN] No, it is no error, no mistake, no failure, [GERMAN]. You needn't fall at all for alliteration. There's no failing in that friendship or failing is not the subject. The subject is sailing with an S, [SPEAKING GERMAN]
But nine can be nine, can be [NON-ENGLISH], can be [NON-ENGLISH], can be [NON-ENGLISH] or [NON-ENGLISH]. This is nine, but [GERMAN] is no. Just one letter is changing places and there is no nine. There are not nine there, just two, two false friends, nine and [GERMAN]. [SPEAKING GERMAN] [NON-ENGLISH] so-called in many languages. But why should the first friends one find in learning a foreign language always be false?
And what would be the right way of falsification for friends that one cannot count on them or that one doesn't want to be counted on your Facebook account? And on the other hand, are digits, numbers, numerals and countable things the only true friends one could find? And would you define a relation in which one part is supposed to stay always the same and never change it its meaning and/or his or her mind. Would you define this as a friendship? Is it just word play, plain pun and fun. To board a ship and a relation in a language where ship is a common suffix and countless vessels of that kind could be launched.
What is shipped by it? What could be the cargo? A content, a message, two friends, or nine? Is this transportable, translatable at all? Or should it at last be just poetry, what gets lost in translation, like Robert Frost said.
What could be the worse, the value of things one can neither translate nor count. Or shouldn't shipping be another way of translating movement on moving ground? Or do you think broad roads are the only ways to go abroad?
If not, welcome aboard. Welcome on sea, on water, on the big betweens within land and land, betwixt and between, switching language and [SPEAKING GERMAN] where you can already see the other shore. [SPEAKING GERMAN] sea upon the lake, [SPEAKING GERMAN] small change, one single letter to [GERMAN] overseas tongues, or in Portuguese, [PORTUGUESE]. The language or [SPEAKING GERMAN] the German [GERMAN], and caution notorious false fronts, in that case, see and sea. The German pronounced [GERMAN] can be either singular feminine, she, or plural can be they.
But you could be [GERMAN] in German, too, all of you, in a formal, polite form of address. And you could also be [GERMAN] or in the singular [GERMAN]. But [GERMAN] in that case would be an informal, familiar plural form and no possessive of her.
Language is an item being one can communicate with, one can interact with. So let's speak with language. [SPEAKING GERMAN] the languages, or [GERMAN] those who spoke. Is disambiguation needed?
And all natural languages, one could say, keep the presence of those who spoke [INAUDIBLE] flavors, light change and stress, slight imprints, which intensify or weaken the particular use of a word show it in another light, change the direction in which it points, the possibilities of linking between words, phrases, and sentences, the chemistry of grammar.
So-called natural languages, can also be seen as living, moving beings, at least I prefer to do so. I tend to see them as a sort of ecosystem by their own rights that we can observe and describe. We can try to find out rules that we do use and could manipulate them, but we shouldn't forget that we are living on their terms.
We are thinking in and think with them are parts of a system in which every action is interaction, [GERMAN] in German and physics, and not just in one directional way a line of cause and effect, a system which is self-organizing, nonlinear, complex, highly self-referential, and redundant. In other words, languages are not just that objects. Words aren't mere things, man-made tools to form other things with, as sometimes imagined by the ideologies of the bygone, heroic, industrial age.
The only really man-made languages are formal ones, such as programming languages. Formal languages are built to explore, to understand, recreate, construct, and manipulate structures. They try to reduce complexity and avoid the ambiguity that characterizes natural languages. The idea is they ought to be universally understandable and fully translatable. The idea is [GERMAN]. I'm sorry.
You cannot imagine how much I like this word. it's so funnily German and gives wonderful examples of how and what can be found in translation. In its core, it bears the root [GERMAN], which leads directly to the language, Deutsch, German. The supposed Indo-European root [NON-ENGLISH] refers to people, land so that [NON-ENGLISH] could mean and was used as explain, declare something to the people. And in that way it includes all the idea of translation clearly shown by translations like to construe or to interpret.
On the other hand, it shows a bodily gesture, to point at something, to move the index finger, the pointer to indicate something, a gesture, pointing out one single point, a gesture that creates [GERMAN], significance, meaning sans importance. And by the way, another possible translation for [NON-ENGLISH], to portend. In English, that could point at what is important is what comes from outside, what is imported, whereas German gives importance rather to the person who is pointing, the one who is [GERMAN].
Someone who gives significance must own some, the one. In English, you have at least the possibility to think of that as neutral. But the [GERMAN] and [GERMAN] seems to be quite neutral, too, just one, not jot or not one jot. [SPEAKING GERMAN] small change on both sides of a border as small as the dot on the eye of [GERMAN], one single point to point at.
But a big change will happen if you try to translate the whole word. Some dictionaries suggest clarity, which would be an equivalent rather to [GERMAN]. Uniqueness is more [GERMAN] and refers to another concept of a single, incomparable specimen. [GERMAN] means that one element of a set matches or is equivalent to would be exactly the same as one element of another set. This comes close to the concept of identity.
Two languages, two words, one meaning, thus simple to translate, numbers or [GERMAN] as seen above, in the example of nine. Numbers that we usually call real, which can be called irrational and transcendental like pi, but can be indefinitely-- infinitely, sorry, infinitely precisely defined up to billions and trillions of digits.
But the most frequently used translation for [GERMAN] is the strangest word to me, unambiguity. Seen in relationship to [GERMAN], it looks a bit paradoxical, like a counterpart, an affirmation by denial of the contrary. What could it mean?
An interpretation may be that in English the concept of ambiguity as thought of as normal and [GERMAN] as an exception of rather low probability, while in German things are thought of as being or at least wish to be [GERMAN], unambiguous, and ambiguity is seen more as a threat cause of disorder, insecurity, instability, uncertainty, and other such negative things backed by prefixation.
German is or can be an extremely precise language. Nevertheless, precision is also not the right word for [GERMAN]. One can be very precise in ambiguity. German is famously used by philosophers like Kant and Hegel, and in the first part of the 20th century, it served as a lingua franca of science generally.
Great discoveries were made and described in those days by Austrians, Germans, and in Switzerland. Just think of [? Hilbert's ?] program. Think of Schrodinger, Einstein, or Gödel, discoveries connected with relativity, incompleteness, complementarity. And it was even a German, Heisenberg, who found the uncertainty principle for quantum physics. And actually, one could say German might have been the language in which the possibilities of [GERMAN] were thought and brought to their limits, their borders.
In classical logic and mathematics and all formal language that are based on them, the basic difference is between 1 and 0, both so-called neutral or identity elements which leave other elements unchanged when combined with them, 0 for addition, 1 for the multiplication of real numbers, 1 and 0, something or nothing, true or false, or at least more or less true or false. On a line, a scale between 0 and 1, less or more, bigger or smaller, the basic figure is the line.
A one-dimensional object on which one can place and sort items like numbers in a relation, with no ship at all in that case, and every kind of comparison of competition of ranking, plus or minus, better or worse. The basic number, the divine number of truth, of identity is 1, and 0 means nothing or false. Everybody can count with one, one and one and one and one, and so on and on and on and on, on the line up to infinity.
It's so easy, so [GERMAN], so simple, quite simple as it is natural. [SPEAKING GERMAN] the unit and [SPEAKING GERMAN] the one, the only one. In German, every one is gendered. Must be either male or female or neutral [SPEAKING GERMAN] and which is also the case in English and most of the other languages, every first person is a third one or a third one. Every me becomes seen from outside a she or a he. But in Hungarian, for instance, there's just one third person, no difference marked, just [NON-ENGLISH]. And every we is for others a they, others or other ones, right?
One means, same as me, right? I am one. Am I? You are one, Two are two. Three are three.
But am I the right-- oops-- but am I the right one or the left? Just left of the right one or left by the right one? Am I alone? On the one hand or on the other hand, [SPEAKING GERMAN].
Who or what could I be? One moment. Who or what could I be when me is not a he, I is another, [NON-ENGLISH] [SPEAKING GERMAN] is significant [GERMAN]. Maybe there is just a little doubt about how to write significant with a small or capital S, as an adjective or a noun.
Is disambiguation needed? [SPEAKING GERMAN] you or they, she, and me. [SPEAKING GERMAN] difference. There's her, your, their difference, or even the difference between her and him too. [GERMAN] difference is [GERMAN] His is another one, an other one. Is he the one that counts or the one who counts?
Is disambiguation needed? Is it possible? And should she as [GERMAN] be the one that doesn't count even if she is one who counts? [INAUDIBLE] number of historical examples for that could be enumerated spontaneously.
But my question would be, what is [GERMAN] in the relationship in relation to 1? Is [GERMAN] 0 or no one? Nothing, of course, she is no thing, no body or something or somebody else [GERMAN] somebody sounds good. And Elsa in German is a female first name and a male one.
But someone seems to me even more precise. Someone isn't there [SPEAKING GERMAN] Here we have the figure of the so-called generic masculine that generalizes the male as prototype of humankind in German grammar. As another case, one could also translate it into [GERMAN] means some, but [GERMAN] also means to be agreed or united. [GERMAN], some who are united. They are one, some one, more than just one one, and without excluding that one.
But could one explain that in mathematics when she finds herself not able to translate it into German? Well, maybe exactly that would be helpful. But for that, we'll have to do something impossible, to extract a root from a negative number or search for a solution of the equation x squared plus 1 equals 0, which seems hopeless on the infinite line of real numbers. There's no answer. Maybe elsewhere.
Could there be an elsewhere beyond the so-called real, beyond the infinity of the line? The idea of another sort of numbers arose in the 16th century and was developed in the 18th and early 19th by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and the German Carl Friedrich Gauss. Euler introduced the imaginary unit, the imaginary unit, i, a little i, not a big one, as the number that when squared yields minus 1, the other one.
He also found a formula for minus 1 that became famous as the most beautiful theorem in mathematics called Euler's identity. e raised to the power of i by pi plus 1 equals o. e is the base of the natural logarithm. Pi you know from geometry. Both are important mathematical constants on so-called transcendental numbers.
This little i, furthermore, is ambiguous. Like every normal square root of a positive number, it too has two solutions, two figures, a positive and a negative 1. Like 1 for the real numbers, perhaps it could count as a multiplicative identity of the imaginary numbers. But that I don't know. It could give a strange kind of double identity.
I think there's not so much known in general about imaginary numbers. They are still suspected of being purely fictitious figures, just invented as a sort of expedient to deal more comfortably with real and complex numbers, useful but meaningless. Named as a contrary to the real, they enable the erection of a second line, rectangular, the real, creating thus a two-dimensional coordinate system, the complex plane, an area [GERMAN] where complex numbers composed as pairs with an imaginary part and a real one are coordinates placed on that plane.
Seen this way, the so-called real numbers are complex numbers with the imaginary part 0, one dimension less. An exclusion of the imaginary makes it possible to sort things like numbers in less or more, bigger or smaller, and to see difference just as the result of a subtraction, in one simple, single dimension on line. Shouldn't we actually consider once again what we are used to calling real and reality?
[SPEAKING GERMAN] farther or further or more forward or wider or just on? On a line, on a surface, or into space, [NON-ENGLISH] a real on an aerial. [NON-ENGLISH] Spanish queens and kings, or black or white kings and queens as figures on a chessboard. And positions and positions figured as a combination of letters and figures, d2 to d3.
But in what kind of relation to the players and what numbers sort of dimension? In German, this could even depend from the verb [SPEAKING GERMAN]. On what line, what surface on, or rather in what sort of plane or place or space. Which space and which language?
On, said Beckett. Say on, at the beginning of Worstward Ho, one of his last books, written in 1983, 30 years ago, Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.
Worstward Ho is a text that explores strictly a counter direction to the west and [INAUDIBLE], the way of competition, infinite progress, improvement, plus, and surplus. It moves resolutely and bravely into the inverse, the minus.
Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least.
A place. Where none. For the body. And so on. On and on. [GERMAN].
And one direction, two or three, many, one direction could be the way, the direction of a first person singular or the me. Could everybody identify with it or just every one? Could there be a difference? And what could be the difference between everybody and everyone?
Manifold starts with three or two with a pair and [GERMAN], and [GERMAN] could mean some, too. It depends how [GERMAN] is written with small or capital P, or how "two" is written, with W or double O. Can you hear the difference, the difference between ein pair and ein [GERMAN], between indeterminately many, or few and two? Could you?
The Beckett text starts with one and goes on to one which is none, just a one in a voided space and avoids any circumstances. No words for him whose words. Him? One.
No words for one whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words.
It turns out to be a skull. The hardware of the hat we are thought to think was without any properties, for instance, sex, or gender. No hands, no face. Skull and stare alone. Scene and seer of all.
By emptying, by avoiding, it becomes space, the space of a language and in a language and open space by excluding everything that would exclude something else. That's Beckett's one, the minus one. None but the one where none.
No other than no other one but others. It goes on with the twain. One old man and child. It could be two. That could be two, but it could be one, too.
They could be one and could be two, a man in different ages or a childish old man. He could be two, could be one. And child could be a girl or boy.
Can you see the ship in this relation? It's moving just like [INAUDIBLE], but in another way, in another language. Beckett's twain is in a movement, too, backs turned, [INAUDIBLE] bowed, joined by health, holding hands, plod on as one, one shade, another shade.
[SPEAKING GERMAN]
Just one and only else.
[SPEAKING GERMAN] mere minimum.
[SPEAKING GERMAN] relationship.
The uncertainty principle of quantum physics states that certain pairs of physical properties of a particle cannot simultaneously be measured precisely. The more exactly the one, for instance, the position is determined, the less the author, the momentum in that case, can be known and vice versa. Maybe there is a possibility for both, a degree of uncertainty. Both can be observed, but not measured. Couldn't this be that minimum? At most mere minimum. Meremost minimum.
[GERMAN] does not ascertain or rule or determine [SPEAKING GERMAN] simultaneously contemporary, a pair joined by held holding hands. Two together in the-- or rather, a same space, same time, same tense, but maybe a different sense. Some one.
During the last third of Beckett's texts there emerges a third, shade 3 from now. An old woman's. [GERMAN] the third that [INAUDIBLE] is excluded by the law of the excluded middle and person a shade. Nothing and yet a woman. Old and yet old.
[SPEAKING GERMAN] who is, who are, who could be. Could be she. Could be you. Could be they. Remember, nothing and yet a woman.
A word. One word together with others could have different eigenstates. And that's also a word I'm extremely fond of. Usually and commonly called meanings, since in that case would make sense just in the singular.
Eigenstate is a cute German-English bastard conceived under the circumstances of quantum physics becoming somewhat popular by a thought experiment from 1935 called Schrödinger's Cat. Quantum theory stated that quantum systems would exist in a superposition of different eigenstates in a simultaneity of states which all are possible for the system but normally, meaning measured, exist just discretely and would exclude each other. The decision, which state becomes real, is produced first by the act of observation of measurement.
This is directly connected to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Erwin Schrödinger undertook to translate that into what we used to call reality, thinking of a cat in a box, where the life or death of the cat depends on a random event, the state of a subatomic particle. As long as the box is not opened, that cat would be by the terms of quantum physics dead and alive, both at once, in a superposition. And everybody knows cats are either/or.
But back to the eigenstates of words. In English, the word "eigen" could be either own or strange or separate or proper or peculiar or distinct, or, as a French pupil translated, a law unto itself. And "state" could be translated into German as [SPEAKING GERMAN] and a long list of verbs where my favorites would be [GERMAN] and [GERMAN]. The latter clearly comes close to the semantic field [INAUDIBLE]. Eigenstate as a word, both German and English and with obviously different possible eigenstates, a pure bred Schrödinger cat.
What is light? And should something that is heavy also be dark? It could, but it needn't be, just one possibility. Light is the element of possibilities, of probabilities and [INAUDIBLE].
It is not so easy to understand [GERMAN] but as light. [SPEAKING GERMAN] adjective or noun. It leads us, lights us to the basics of quantum physics. But that's the moment when I first have to say I really admire these possibilities of plurality in the English language that's speaking, as a matter of course, of basic physics, mathematics, aesthetics, arts and so on in a plural form, and not like German insisting on the singular. Sometimes I feel tempted to suspect that large parts of German philosophy and science are driven just by an excessive use of the singular and a definite article on top.
I was scared stiff when I heard that I'd have to do this lecture [SPEAKING GERMAN] aesthetic. Only one, only the right one, and no light one left over, just [INAUDIBLE]. I felt awfully relieved by translating the subject into its local circumstances as contemporary aesthetics. Both singulars vanished without any trace.
Not only the possibility of more than one idea of aesthetics arose as absolutely normal. The idea of [GERMAN] of present or of presence became wider, whiter, more spatial, not just linear or plain. An idea became a concept, something that can be called together, to summon, [GERMAN]. "Contemporary" could be translated into German also as [GERMAN] or [GERMAN]. The latter sets a focus on site, that time, according to which one ought to be, one ought to behave, act, or be up to date and online, on the timeline.
[GERMAN] refers rather to a plural form, [GERMAN], contemporaries, people or things, or ideas or whatever, all with lots of possibilities to be different, sharing the same space of time, existing in existence together in relationships. This difference may also be a question of perception of [GERMAN] aesthetics, right or left.
But back to light. I shouldn't-- we have left it at all. Light that leads us, as I said, to the basics of quantum physics. And the third of his famous lectures on physics, Richard P. Feynman spoke of a phenomenon which is impossible to explain in any classical way and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics, the double slit experiment.
It was first performed in 1802 by Thomas Young, who showed with it the wave character of light versus the Newtonian corpuscular theory accepted in those days. There's light from a single source passing through a plate pierced by two parallel slits and observed on a screen behind. Without any disturbance, you would see on the screen an interference pattern, a rhythm of shadows and light that's typical for superimposing waves.
But in case you'd suppose that light consists of particles or the source is emitting particles, electrons or molecules, and you wish to find out, to detect through which of the slits or one particle is passing, to decide between left or right, to make sure, to measure, to objectify, to produce [GERMAN], in that case, this interference pattern will collapse and it will vanish. Following the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics that shows that light can be seen both with particle or wave properties, but not simultaneously, this holds for particles too.
This interpretation was also, you see, a sort of translation, mathematical equations and the principles and the words like complementarity, uncertainty, probability, correspondence, or entanglement, all referring to relationships, relativity, plurality. And thus the act of observation and the state of the observer became the problem, the topic, the subject, the point of view.
Is this an abstract point with dimensions 0 or one point on a line or a place on a plane or a being in space, the point of a second person of you or a point of view or just one point of view? How to consider, imagine difference? How to say?
This is a question of language too, and of different languages of the difference of languages, the one we have internalized and which we name our mother tongue. Most of you have other ones than I have. The one we think is natural, the one we are speaking and thinking and dreaming, and all the others we can learn. And that could teach us what makes our way of speaking, thinking, and dreaming, eigen makes it different.
Different, actually, could be a very good translation for eigen, meaning other than others. Even what Feynman called the only mystery of quantum physics could be named as just difference and how we look at it and how we speak about it or on or in it from an inside conscious that we are inside or parts of that difference, as if science would be possible as common science, conscience and awareness of being together and different of gigawatt contemporaneity. One and together with others, singular and plural, movement on moving ground, possibly sailing a friendship.
By contrast, the classical place of the observer I would describe as chess player state, the position of God, the scientist or the author. In another dimension somewhere outside, above the board, where down below the wars were fought, the battles. Speaking about the things above, not reachable from below in a space of absence somewhere in general, moving the figures as a general, as an observer or manipulator, creator of minor creatures of objects and objectivity. A one, our single point that allows no difference except the other, an enemy to be defeated, the black or the white one, the left or the right or the right.
To checkmate means to reduce the possibilities of movement of the other to zero. A pretty German word for this would be [GERMAN], which one could also translate as to detect, to fix, to declare, to ascertain, to determine. But chessboards are like maps or pictures, two-dimensional and solid, stable ground, not moving. And figures are just figured.
Computers, Turing machines were invented constructed by considering chess problems. At least pioneers like Alan Turing or Konrad Zuse did so. And since Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in 1997, they are definitely the better players. In relation to them, in the logic of computability, failing is the only thing human beings can still do. Nice example for failing, see also Kramnik versus Deep Fritz in 2006 or blunder of the century.
An example for encouragement, see Beckett. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
To translate a bit of the untranslatable, [SPEAKING GERMAN] And this text is indeed untranslatable. It moves inside the English language and in a difference to others, which Beckett also spoke like French or German. Beckett's very own, his [INAUDIBLE] writing started when he started to write in French in 1945. And an important part of this writing was first to translate his own texts in a very eigen way.
In the late 1950s, he began to write texts in English again, translating them later into French. But Worstward Ho is, besides the media scripts like [NON-ENGLISH] two longer French texts and some tiny poems called [NON-ENGLISH], but Worstward Ho is the only text he did not translate himself. And in trying to translate it, one can actually do nothing but fail.
Beginning with the first word "on," a proposition that can be translated into German in more than seven ways, and each one would show another position in relation to a supposed object. [SPEAKING GERMAN] remember, in how many dimensions. A one-syllable, two-letter word, a meremost minimum that is furthermore a palindrome, literally connected counterpart of no, a negative of denial and so on.
I started this lecture with no, so I'll end with on. And in the end, the subject that, as it turns out, is failing. It becomes a different failing one, by failing, won, failing to win. And couldn't do anything but fail, maybe furthermore sail beyond the line and a wider sense and difference and a friendship?
I've hopefully too failed or have missed the point to tell you something about some commonly so-called contemporary aesthetics like fashionable subjects, books of the season and up to date authors one has to know. But eventually, you've observed or just felt some strange sort of movement that might be or might show the wave nature or light nature of language, possibly as poetry, something that has the power to move us, moving ground.
[SPEAKING GERMAN] pulsing pattern of shadows and light. Something you cannot cross but see, but sense, but you cannot count it. Something that is perhaps not computable.
A text, whether it's 30 years old or 3,000, can be contemporary to us. It can speak to us. It's possibly able to touch and to move us. And that also means that does all this in a language with which is not just spoken in past tense and passive voice, but is speaking in a kind of continuous present, a gift. It's ours to imagine. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Barbara Kohler, artist-in-residence with Cornell's Institute for German Cultural Studies, presents the IGCS Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics April 16, 2013 from her inspired creative perspective on poetic language, quantum physics and imaginary numbers. The performance pivots on what this prize-winning author cultivates poetically as "precision in ambiguity."
Born
in the former East Germany in 1959, Kohler has emerged as one of the most creatively significant and formally exacting German poets of our time with prize-winning
publications such as Deutsches Roulette (1991), Blue Box (1995), Wittgensteins Nichte (1999), Niemands Frau (2007), and literary translations of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, in addition to acclaimed multi-media installations and performances concerning the evolving nature of poetic language and textual arts.
