asemic horizon

(To some extent, this is a part of the Ezra, Huaso and St. Dennis series (I and II, Huaso unchained, Margot Robbie’s legs, Julian.)

I.

The curious task of economics is to trace out modes of circulation and render them as media. For as much flak as it gets for some presumed “physics envy”, econ hardly partakes in the scramble for differential equations that, otherwise, inevitably characterizes mathematicizing efforts in the social sciences. The sticking point here is, of course, that “economic time” is not the homogeneous time of physics — that universal flow we like to write as dt. Thereafter even simple linear production models like Leontief’s input-output matrices, which at a surface level are stated as dynamical disequilibrium equations, are instead solved — and in this one instance for something that’s not quite an equilibrium assumption either.

This is ultimately, of course, downstream from a wider-reaching malaise about time and movement. Early industrialists were quick to realize that movement (along a production line) was unmanageable and proceeded to create a scientific praxis entirely out of subordinating movement to time. dx/dt, movement over time has in turn by now been reframed as a productivity, a moral category. (Differential equations do show up in economic theory to formalize this moral frame.) But civilization-defining episodes like longitude invert this frame altogether: only in the divergence of measurable timelines (the succession of noontimes versus the beating of the mechanical clock) we’re able to draw a spaceline (a second one, after latitude, both jointly giving locations in our home 2-manifold). Thereafter jet lag and datelines: time, human-defined time changes with movement again.

We have to stop playing precious games with physics notation after a while. The Cinema books tell us that movement (or action, or something) is in a sequent exactly as follows: perception + affect ⊢ dx. Longitude is such a sequent: global evident time + local measured time ⊢motion along evident space. Alike is the whole drama of capitalism: by simple arbitrage all risk-normalized interest rates equalize, but a blank stands between that and the material work of capital (rate of return + ____ ⊢ production). This blank is filled by basic human need in times of poverty, but growing abundance gates production differently. This is why, for example, we need the spectacle of capitalist leaders of mythical wealth burying themselves in overwork.

II.

Ezra Pound’s charge against Capital (“…made to sell and sell quickly”) is one of m/d/misalignment with humane time. Well, duh. asemic horizon used to make much out of how the “time value of money” (under the conditions of sequential coherence that mandate the exponential function) was a manifestation of a mathematical-metaphysical principle (the Laplace transform, which exchanges timelines for rates of frequency and return) which replaces dt altogether for something slightly mysterious usually written ds. The beating heart of the (small-c) capitalist economy is then, well, a beating heart, something that makes more sense in ds-domain than in dt-domain. But ds is also the site of arbitrage, and therefore of the universal, acid-like dissolving power of capitalism. Everything that seems “out of joint” about time in the current regime is fine there.

Of course, everything out of the financial news cycle says otherwise: spreadsheet monkeys may think in ds-lang, but the true (small-m) masters of the universe think and speak in the language of hype. What of this is spectacle, and what is genuine contingency and opportuneness? Whatever that is, it properly gates the temporalization of production: ds + ____ ⊢dt. Here, Alone the Pirate Doctor used to say: “this is why the system is the system and you’re not”. Yet the “system” can feel rudderless from the straight, glistening dt line. Time laughs in the face of movement; longitude is undefeated; the “system” depends on governing abstractions lack the proper tactile affordances. Even capitalism has to plant itself in the uneven breakbeat time of human affairs which asemic horizon used to call tempo.

III.

Lifters everywhere know that a heavy barbell always tells the truth. Yet moving from a soft booty-gym to a grainy powerlifting one will change your perception of just how jacked you thought you were. This was the point of Dunning-Kruger: not that you might be unwittingly using fake rubber plates, but that your hard-won two-plate deads is actually pussy weights, dude.

Dunning-Kruger-awareness is therefore rationally moot. Whereas something like an awareness of something like the germ theory of disease has effects in the social medium but not through social mechanisms, Dunning-Kruger is purely social. It’s true that being around hardcore guys might eventually lead me to bigger, more impressive lifts; this implies there’s more to lifting than my relationship to the barbell. But then: this is the precise opposite of what the epistemic hygienist (see also: biases, fallacies, blind spots) wants to find in social psychology. (It also says precisely zero about my actual lifts.)

IV.

We should be especially cynical of anything or anyone that holds the Bayes formula (“Bayes’ theorem”) as especially significant. The “theorem” appears magical, but follows from the definition of conditional probability P(X|Y) very directly

P(X|Y) = P(X and Y)/P(Y) = P(Y and X)/P(Y) = P(Y|X) P(X)/P(Y)

which of course means any of the cute puzzles used to illustrate the Bayes “theorem” can usually be given a simpler direct analysis with conditional probabilities. (Ite domus, rationalist, and sin no more.)

Now, serious contemplation of the formula as “belief-updating” method should be anxiety-inducing. Given new evidence, are we.. producing new evidence about the joint (X,Y) probability, thereby making it about a new probability measure Q(X|Y) — or are we just retroactively overwriting our previous knowledge as if it hadn’t been there? And what does Y|X mean again? Whence the formula that gives that a probability? How would you marginalize Q? What if P(Y)=0?

That said: naive adoration of little equations like the Bayes rule speaks of a wild, wide Emersonian freedom. It’s definitely good that mathematics can be safely misused like this, even if mostly for religious inspiration (like in the Slate Star Codex). It’s in this spirit of freedom that I begin this essay by mixing-and-matching Leibniz derivatives, notation from the Gentzen calculus and film theory. But taking something like the Bayes formula seriously (at least in the absence of a deep, zuhanden experience in so-called “Bayesian” statistics) runs you a sharp risk of getting stuck in a higher-order version of the Dunning-Kruger’s: not that the barbell lies or that your intuitions are per se “wrong”, but that you misunderstand what kind of lift you lift and what kind of abstraction your thinking spans. And yes, the “p(doom)” types are pretty much self-mocking — but I’ve seen the best minds of my generation produce ad hoc ontologies, searching for their keys under lampposts, stark, raving mad.

V.

Here’s a pure act of theory: we’ve been stating, staking out formulas, patterned after the Gentzen sequent calculus and the Cinema books

perception, affect ⊢ dx (movement)
dt, dt’ ⊢ dx (longitude)
ds, ____ ⊢dx (production)
ds, ____ ⊢dt (timeline)

Logical traditions prior to Gentzen used to understand the turnstile ⊢ as something to be leaped over — as the site of a (stated, staked out) judgement; its most basic form being a pure succedent or consequent

⊢something known

and its extension to the left (with antecedents) something like

natural contours, feminine face, ___ ⊢this is a woman

In the modern approach (there’s violence to a subtle field here in the casting of Frege as ‘old’ and proof theory as ‘new’), the turnstile is realized as something more productive: I can obtain a woman (out of some nondescript human biomass) from this combination of objective and ineffable antecedents; I can derive and construct longitude from divergent timelines. But the accretion of consequents restores indeterminacy to this picture: “something known” is unspecifiedly unspecific:

⊢life, death

which is how, of course, we’re able to say dt, dt’ ⊢ dx with a straight face — movement, yes, but in which direction does colonization ensue? The motto of modern intellectualism is that “ideas matter”, but how exactly? Where to place the turnstile, that pure container and harbinger of indeterminacy?