¹ I shall, by and large, bypass here the literature of Blake and science, or indeed scholarly literature on Blake in general. This literature is immense, and I am indebted to a great many works on Blake and Romanticism (the list would be too long to cite here). On the other hand, the present approach appear to me rather different from the treatments I have encountered, even though a number of works deal with quantum theory, and specifically complementarity, and chaos theory. In my view, while it would by now require substantial updating, Donald Ault’s earlier Visionary Physics: Blake against Newton (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1974) remains the best full-length study of the subject. Ault’s more recent work on the relationships between Blake’s work and mathematics and science has been presented at several conferences, but remains unpublished. I am also indebted to R. Paul Yoder for helpful discussion. His article, "Unlocking Language: Self-Similarity in Blake’s Jerusalem," on the present issue is among the more balanced and fair-minded treatments of fractal-like aspects of Blake’s work. I have considered the quantum-mechanical epistemology in a number of previous works, and the present essay is a continuation of this, by now long, project, to which and to the literature cited there I permit myself to refer the reader for further details of the present argument. These works include Complementarity: Anti-epistemology After Bohr and Derrida (Durham, NC.: Duke UP, 1994), "Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality," Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, ed. Barbara H. Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (Durham, NC.: Duke UP, 1997), and "Techno-Atoms: The Ultimate Constituents of Matter and the Technological Constitution of Phenomena in Quantum Physics," Tekhnema: Journal of Philosophy and Technology 5 (1999): 36-95, and, in the context of Romanticism, "All Shapes of Light: The Quantum Mechanical Shelley," in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World, eds. Stuart Curran and Betty Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995); "A Dancing Arch: Formalism and Singularity in Kleist, Shelley, and de Man," International Romantic Review (Winter 1998), and "Algebra and Allegory: Nonclassical Epistemology, Quantum Theory, and the Work of Paul de Man" in Material Events, ed. Thomas Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, Minn.: U of Minnesota P, 2000).close window

² The point was well realized by Schrödinger in his famous "cat paradox" paper, "The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics," in Quantum Theory and Measurement (hereafter QTM), eds. John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983). In particular, he observes "If a classical state does not exist at any moment, it can hardly change causally" (154). Discussions of the cat-paradox are found in many accounts of quantum physics. I have considered it in Complementarity (284-85, Note 20).close window

³ The situation is more complex in classical statistical physics as well. The classical view even of classical statistical physics (i.e. physics disregarding quantum effects) has been challenged more recently, in particular in the wake of quantum mechanics. In general, it is no longer altogether clear how classical physics is or can be. close window

⁴ Actual systems are often chaotic. The point of chaos theory is that deterministic predictions are not possible even in idealized situations. close window

5 I shall be able here to give it only a restricted attention, concentrating, in accordance with my main subject, on the key concepts involved. The subject of artists’ books is by now a filed of its own. For comprehensive thematic and historical introductions to it, see, for example, Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Source Book, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester, NY.: Visual Studies Workshop P, 1985), Joanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1995), and for a more general context of the question of the book, Roger Chartier, The Order of the Book, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994). close window

⁶ The subject has been approached from the perspective of the connections to both mathematics of complex variables (originating in Bernhard Riemann’s work) and chaos theory in recent investigations (yet unpublished) by Donald Ault and coworkers. close window

⁷ This topos has been a subject of well known investigations from Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton 1967), 319-326, to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 6-26, and beyond, although surprisingly not in the scholarship on the artists’ books. close window

⁸ The latter would be much closer to "writing" in Derrida’s sense than to the classical conception of the book. Accordingly, the beginning of Blake’s book may also be seen as the beginning of writing. close window

⁹ All the reference to Blake are (by plate numbers) to The CompletePoetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1982). close window

¹⁰ Derrida’s well-known investigation of the subject in his earlier works remain an unavoidable reference here. close window

¹¹ See especially Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins UP, 1975), 6-26. close window

¹² The latter may in turn be shown as conceived by Leibniz in terms of the superimposition of the body, the book, and the (Baroque) city or, at least, architecture. On these questions see, Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). close window

¹³ The topology and epistemology of Leibniz’s monads has been a major subject of recent investigations, relevant here, by both Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze, most especially in Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. close window

¹⁴ "Letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802" (The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 693). close window

¹⁵ Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis, Minn.: U of Minnesota P, 1996). This statement cannot be seen as strictly defining allegory, which, as de Man says on the same occasion, is difficult to do (Aesthetic Ideology, 51). If, however, there could be one (or any) such definition, the formulation just cited appears to come as close to it as possible. The feature itself indeed appears to characterize the practice of allegory, at least from Dante on. Galileo’s project of the mathematical sciences of nature can be seen from this allegorical viewpoint, and connected to Dante, along these lines. I permit myself to refer to a forthcoming article by David Reed and the present author, "Discourse, Mathematics, Demonstration and Science in Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences." close window

¹⁶ Conceptual parallels with other ideas from twentieth-century mathematics may be invoked as well. close window

¹⁷ The epistemology becomes classical once such exclusion takes place. This point is crucial to Derrida's reading of Kant in "Economimesis" (Diacritics 11, no. 3 [1981]:3-25). close window

¹⁸ This is a consequence of the so-called Bell’s theorem, at least insofar as one maintains Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. See David Mermin’s essays on the subject of quantum mechanics in Boojums All the Way Through (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990). close window

¹⁹ The differences between Newton’s and Leibniz’s conceptions of differential calculus are of some interest here. close window

²⁰ In actuality the key feature that mathematically defines fractals qua fractals (and gives them their name) and that is often ignored by the humanists addressing the subject, is their fractional, rather than whole, dimensionality, most often, a fractional number between 1 and 2. It is also worth noting that not all (mathematically) chaotic systems are fractal. close window

²¹ I here refer to the difference between symbol and allegory, as considered by de Man, in particular as concerns any possibility of deriving representations from an original or primordial unity, which define "symbol" and is prohibited by "allegory," or "irony." See, especially, his "Rhetoric of Temporality," Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis, Minn.: U of Minnesota P, 1981). close window

²² At the level of practice, materiality remains crucial in Blake, whether one speaks of the materiality of the book, the materiality of the signifier, or the materiality of engraving, or, to return to Plato’s allegory, the materiality of carpentry or of painting. One can also give the concept of materiality has a complex architecture, in part defined, and reciprocally defining, a concept of concept itself, which I shall consider below; and I can only briefly indicate a few key aspects of this architecture. According to this concept materiality and materialism are not seen as something only associated with matter, but refers to a certain field of concepts, theoretical and political strategies and interventions, events, and so forth. These may not in turn be subsumed by any single concept, strategy, event and rubric, or even by a single configuration of concepts, strategies, events, or rubrics. A much greater degree and a more radical form of heterogeneity are here at work. The rubric of materiality itself becomes ultimately provisional. In particular an analysis of "materiality" of this radical type entails a deployment of an equally radical form(s) of ideality, conceptuality, and phenomenality. (Still other rubrics and conceptualizations become necessary as well.) This radical critique redefines both concepts materiality and ideality, or phenomenality. Indeed it redefines all concepts that it considers and engages in this irreducibly multiple and multiply interactive field. However, the "elements" (which, it follows, cannot be seen as strictly or "absolutely" elementary either) that constitute this field work so as undermine all idealist ideologies, including those of metaphysical materialism philosophical, aesthetic, political or other and, to return to Althusser’s phrase, ideological state apparatuses. The case in point is aesthetic ideology, according to de Man’s analysis. In this sense, Blake’s conceptuality is materiality, and his conceptual art a form of materialism as such, rather than only by virtue of its irreducible association with matter. From this perspective, Blake’s suspicion concerning, and his ultimate suspension of, nature or matter, in particular if conceived according to a Newtonian view, is, contrary to appearances, ultimately a "materialist" strategy. close window

²³ The latter concept is often compared to Bohr’s complementarity, but rarely, if ever, with due caution as concerns the specificity of both concept in Blake or, especially, Bohr. At the very least, the differences (specifically epistemological ones) are just as significance as similarities. close window

²⁴ See, however, Note 22 above. close window

²⁵ On these issues see, again, Deleuze’s analysis of monads throughout The Fold. close window