A Return to the Eleventh Dimension

            To evoke string theory as an integral whole obscures its bewildering heterogeneity.  We might speak of a plurality of string theories, save for the fact that certain more recent versions no longer even posit the string as their fundamental object.  When cataloguing string theory we are obliged to include M-theories, F-theories, brane theories, and Landscape theories. among others.  As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously writes of pornography, in lieu of a precise definition: ‘I know it when I see it.’[69]  It would be equally arduous to speak of a unitary string theory imaginary, but rather a multitude of imaginaries that proliferate within specific discourses, as well as across disciplinary boundaries into others.  One would be hard pressed to amass an exhaustive taxonomy of all the imaginaries that constitute a string theory intertext.

            To conclude this essay, I want to return to the disquisition offered up by Scott Mehring of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.  His narrative invokes the following images in succession: the Big Bang, elements, atoms, neutrons, protons, stuff, spontaneous generation, a theory, meat, the ground, maggots, physics, the eleventh dimension, infinite universes, death, the earth, the Bible, everlasting life, an intelligent designer, complication, one dude, the very top, everything, Gods, goose bumps, an endless loop, computer programming, and lastly, insanity.  Of these, the core images would seem to be: time, elements, life, death, God, infinity and eternity, and the eleventh dimension.  As I said earlier, the eleventh dimension is an image adapted from string theory.  Its inclusion, along with the scientific ideas of atoms, neutrons, protons, the ‘dead theory’ of spontaneous generation, and the Big Bang mark the imaginary as scientific.  Yet the imaginary also seems to recognise that science progresses through history and that older theories are invalidated and replaced by newer ones.

            The human agents who operate within the imaginary are ‘you’, ‘me’, and ‘they’.  They act with the imaginary through the following verbs: going back, thinking, saying, believing, getting, hopping, going insane.  Both the images and the actions upon them exhibit a wide range of qualities—some are highly abstract, some concrete, others hybrids of the two.

            If one visualizes the cosmos that Mehring has articulated here, it would seem to consist of several layers, where (an ostensibly disembodied or ethereal) thinking you and me surround and penetrate in towards an interior.  This is followed by several creating and anthropomorphic (‘one dude’) Gods, the eleventh dimension, elements that generate and then constitute an infinitude of universes, various times corresponding to those universes that all begin with their own Big Bangs, this earth with a ground where maggots and human bodies are borne and die, while human souls, upon the death of the body, hop from universe to universe within the eleventh dimension.  Mehring conflates the elements he evokes—the neutron, the proton neutron, stuff—with God, that is, a creator or intelligent designer.  This cosmos furthermore has an overarching structure of a endless loop—implying presumably, that the infinities stretch out to such an extent that they eventually return back to their origins.  And by contemplating excessively this vast spectacle, the thinking you and me, both as disembodied souls within the narrative, and as persons outside it looking in, risk insanity.  By insanity, Mehring presumably means a kind of paralysis whereby ‘you’ become incapable of either thinking or acting in any meaningful way.  There is a schematic tension here between mobility—both in mind and body—and immobility.

            It is tempting to dismiss this imaginary as hopelessly muddled, but even this initial analysis reveals a certain noteworthy complexity and intricacy to it, a rich space of meaning.  The principle agents within the imaginary—the ‘you’ and ‘me’—face a universal quandary, namely, the problem of death.  We are, in turn, offered an eschatology, a meditation on a possible escape from death, in the form of a transmigration.  On the one hand, we are able to escape the bondage of decay and death (alluded to by the proximity in the narrative of meat on the ground, of maggots that consider that meat food).  On the other hand, contemplation of the infinite regression of universes and creators inherent, according to Mehring, to this ‘new theory, the eleventh dimension’ jeopardizes the contemplator’s mental health.  In this, Mehring would seem to recognize that to embrace theoretical physics requires belief, that there is no pre-ordained correlation between theory and truth.  In Mehring’s imaginary, the eleventh dimension is a container: it contains an infinite number of universes.[73]  He also posits a dual nature of the ‘we’—a Cartesian (or Christian, for that matter) res cogitans and res extensa, a soul that inhabits the body like a homunculus, but upon death escapes.  I say homunculus because this me-soul or you-soul continues to exhibit embodied characteristics, namely, it sports idealized legs: in the imaginary, it can ‘hop from universe to universe to universe’.  Interestingly, the schema that accompanies this image—of a soul-in-the-form-of-a-body—brings about a radical transformation in the scale of these universes.  What one would normally consider unimaginably vast becomes condensed to the scale of a rock lodged in a stream, where, in the analogy, the soul-body is able to hop—generally imagined as a rather small jump—from one rock-universe to another.  Perhaps Mehring imagines hopping to be more virtual, more in keeping with a Star Trek-style teleportation where the body disappears from one universe and magically reappears in another.  But he does not make this explicit.[74]  Later, one is confronted with yet another radical transformation of scale: this whole imaginative structure gets compacted into a ‘loop’.  Mehring goes on to connect this ‘new theory’ with Biblical eschatology—with the Christian promise of an ‘everlasting life’.  In a leap of logic, he then problematizes the presumably other salient assertion of the Bible, that one God creates the universe.

            Mehring’s imaginary is essentially inclusive: through it he tries to synthesize various seemingly disparate knowledges: string theory, Big Bang theory, Biblical theology—into a coherent whole.  Obviously, one could debate the seriousness or success of the effort.  But it is undeniable that the imaginary has a fairly intricate structure—drawing on a wealth of images that bear with them various schema, some readily compatible, others not—and that the synthesis of these images demand a certain balance between mobility and stability.  The imaginary suggests both freedoms and constraints, possibilities and limitations.  But what is most interesting about Mehring’s imaginary—as a metaphysics—is, to return to Durkheim, how its cosmology couples with or reflects Mehring’s own presumed social identity.  The cosmology represents, in a certain sense, either a prescription on how to live one’s life (casually before)—or a justification (casually after).  In psychoanalysing his imaginary, one discerns in it the following preoccupations: a fear of death and longing for escape from it, from the fate of the decaying meat on the ground, food for maggots; a desire for absolute freedom of movement, for the abolition of all restraints on a liberty to gratify one’s impulses; a close association between mental activity and visceral bodily responses, between contemplation and goose bumps; and a fear of loss of control, implicit in the final caveat concerning insanity.

            As I stressed earlier, Mehring’s disquisition arrives pre-framed by a judgment implicit in the details Chapman chooses to disclose to the reader.  These details, in a sense, classify Mehring as a socially positioned agent and tacitly grant the reader permission to assume a critical, if not ironic, distance from the imaginary he presents to us in his speech.  This framing contributes to the impression that Mehring’s imaginary is hopelessly incoherent, logically suspect, frivolous, and utterly pseudoscientific.  In addition to the merit of a scientific imaginary’s content—which readers must necessarily have some degree of familiarity to assess, our predisposition to judge it meaningful is predicated on our submission to the authority of that imaginary’s communicator.  Imaginaries are framed and supported by institutions of belief, and as such, are inherently ideological.  That ideology functions on two dimensions: on the one hand, it works, from the outside, to authorize the value of the imaginary to be consumed; and on the other hand, it arrives embedded within the imaginary in the tight coupling of social practice with a metaphysics.  This coupling constitutes a double-bind: social institutions outside the imaginary sustain it, while the imaginary, remote from daily social experience, delivers within its own structure prompts for social practice consistent with the institutions that reinforce it.  Decoding the culture implicit in Mehring’s metaphysics, one finds, then, a soul, disembodied yet possessing bodily features, isolated from its brethren, ‘hopping’ somewhat indiscriminately from one gratification to the next, without much sense of telos or even social obligation.  A culture of individualism provides inspiration for Mehring’s imaginary, while the imagination, in turn, justifies that solipsism.[75]

[69] From Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).  This ‘I know it when I see it’ argument also speaks to the notion that, echoing Feyerabend, science is simply what a culture collectively recognizes as science.

[74] A more appropriate verb to describe this might be ‘to pop’ from one universe to the next.

[75] In her encyclopaedic work The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, Linda Dalrymple Henderson writes that ‘the fourth dimension’ as a literary image, emerged ‘in an era of dissatisfaction with materialism and positivism’ and that it ‘gave rise to entire idealist and even mystical philosophical systems’.  She goes on to say that ‘[n]ot only was it a popular fascination, but the idea of the fourth dimension as a place or as a temporal means of reaching another era provided a position from which to comment on contemporary society’.  Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1983), pp. ixx, 33.

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