No Object #6: The Quantum Mechanics of Protest

Apparently, the protest simply does not possess both a position and a momentum simultaneously.

It follows that there is an intrinsic fuzziness in the microworld that is manifested whenever we attempt to measure two incompatible observable qualities, such as position and momentum. Among other things, this fuzziness demolishes the intuitive idea of a protest moving along a distinct path or trajectory in space. A quantum projectile cannot have both at once.

In daily life, we take it for GRANTed that strict laws of cause and effect direct the bullet to its target along a precisely defined geometrical path in space. We would not doubt that when the bullet arrives at its target its point of arrival represents the end-point of a continuous curve which started at the barrel of the gun. No so for protests.

It is sometimes convenient to think of each protest as somehow possessing an infinity of different paths, each of which contributes to its behavior. This is how the protest can keep track of what is happening throughout an extended region of space. The fuzziness in its activity enables it to "feel out" many different routes.

(Thanks to The Ghost in the Atom)

No Object #5

It is the urge to read the picture showing up with the words as "illustration" that makes possible the slight delay entered when there's some doubt about that. When it is not so obvious that the picture shows what the words are saying, what becomes obvious is the delay itself. As Zizek wrote in For they know not what they do (Verso, 1991, rev. 2002): "This dialogical economy therefore implies a purely logical temporality: a temporal scansion between the moment of expectation and the moment of its disappointment, a minimal delay of the second part of the tautology. Without this minimal temporality, the proposition A = A remains a simple affirmation of identity and cannot produce the effect of pure contradiction." He is talking about Hegel's commentary on "God is ... God," but the dissolution works likewise, as it can do in words alone when reference is delayed; however, there people turn away or merely back to some quality in the words themselves.