mind, matter, difference and the city

That mind was an alien element in the material cosmos has long been intuitively recognized, but scientists only toward the end of the last millennium [the 20th-century] formulated its primal place among the forces of creation. The particles smaller than a quark, it was reluctantly proclaimed, are purely mathematical, that is to say, mental. 1
John Updike

It remains imperative that the alien characters of the material and the mental be figured into a unity. There is connection, it is certain that there must be translation . . . a point or a form through which they become one and the same character while retaining their different groundings. It is also inherent in the oneness of everything that the material and the immaterial are essential and necessary to each other. This relationship includes their existential requirements as well as their peculiarities.

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“And so?” Montale says, “Still, it’s a fact/that something happened, maybe a nothing/which is everything [italics mine].” 2

The omnipolis, 3 coming into being, relying not on geographic unity (connection) so much as communicative instantaneity, the developing home of us all, is not governed by a single polarity. The radical pessimism of Paul Virilio is supported by only half of the picture. The omnipolis is not simply reducing all real cities to suburbs. The forces which push all to the periphery are also redefining the position of the edge. The bipolar of traditional urbanity is being closed while, inside out, it is being pushed to its limit. Virilio under-presents the internal completeness of this process. When he thinks the new virtual city is merely “. . . a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere, he misses the the implication of the reverse. The sense of the original statement (the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere) already includes Virilio’s opposite version. 4 Either characterization holds at the logical endpoints of ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere.’ The new omnipolis grafts on to our geographical organization a structure which equally places everyone (tied in) at the edge and centre at the same time. The dream of the internet is that all terminals sit at the very side of all others, without hierachy, without distance. The centre is everywhere and nowhere, the periphery likewise. The distinction held forth by these terms collapses within the realm of instantaneous telepresence. The meaning they structure is maintained only because that telepresence is a kind of alternative life which confuses the polarity of the ever existing (?) geography of physical presence.

1 John Updike,Toward the End of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997): 151.
2 Euginio Montale, “Xenia II,” in Satura {Poems}, trans. W. Arrowsmith (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998): 31.
3 A term coined by Marco Bertozzi.
4 The original derives from the Corpus Hermeticum (3rd Century).