In a graph, when you touch or cross the x-axis, you can call that point “a zero.”  If whatever you’re drawing crosses the x-axis at “3,” then “3 is a 0.”  And “multiplicity” determines the shape of the thing you’re drawing at that point on the graph: the even numbers are parabolas, odds are dog-legs, and a “one” is a plain old line. “Multiplicity 2” means that at the point your thingy touches the x-axis, it does so in the shape of a parabola.  And although my class hasn’t gotten to this yet, I also know that it’s possible to have imaginary zeros.  I don’t know what you do with imaginary zeros.

Multiplicity has been a favorite word of mine since I was introduced to Bergson and Deleuze.  But I usually use the word in a sloppy way, as in: “we should have a multiplicity of voices represented in the literary canon.”  That’s a terrible thesis.  Bergson (who was a math whiz before he became a philosopher) wrote about both quantitative and qualitative multiplicities in much more precise, interesting ways.

Qualitative multiplicity is found in a singular experience that can’t be juxtaposed against another one.  One of Bergson’s examples is to imagine the stretch and elasticity of an elastic band. “Bergson tells us first to contract the band to a mathematical point, which represents ‘the now’ of our experience. Then, draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. He warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which traces it”(from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).  The duration of the stretch, the inherent tension, the smooth transition from point to line, the experience of it all: these elements contribute to the qualitative value of the multiplicity more than a static image (such as a graph of a trajectory like the one above) can preserve.

So there’s math + philosophy. And also + art: in Findings on Elasticity, editors Hester Aardse and Astrid Alben write, “Elasticity has no inhibitions.  Science has no inhibitions…As science continues to shamelessly stretch knowledge as far as it will go, unburdened by inhibitions, so art, in its limitless ways of expressing human experience, often confronts our inhibitions and suggests where we should put them.”  It’s a wonderful book full of experiments and installations and inventions exploring (it seems to me) the question: How do we authentically record, document, preserve, share, communicate our experience of the qualitative multiplicity of elasticity?

These notions of multiplicity-via-elasticity (math, philosophy, art) relate to the nomadic paths of protest librarians and the (often surprisingly divergent) paths of the libraries’ physical collections of books.  The question is, how do these trajectories represent both quantitative and qualitative multiplicities, and how can they be recorded in a meaningful way.  This is a project to root around in over the summer.

PS: This article about an exhibit called “Design and the Elastic Mind” randomly passed through my Facebook feed just as I posted this entry: Curator Forced to Kill Out-of-Control Bio-Art Exhibit