The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  At the end of term, Tori invited us to Greenwich. Her parents were attending a medical conference in Switzerland, and the empty house, a semi-detached neo-Georgian within walking distance of the Royal Observatory, was to serve as our base for a weekend in London.

  On the train we discussed our plans. Tori was going to show us where she’d grown up and introduce us to her childhood friends. Claire was keen on visiting charity shops in Shoreditch. I hoped to catch a set at one of the clubs in Camden Town. That suited Zach just fine, he said, because Camden was where the party to which he’d been invited—and which we were going to crash—was to be thrown.

  Despite the setback he’d experienced earlier at the Philosophy and Theology Faculty, Zach was undeterred in his quest to track down a copy of The Zero and the One. His next move was to contact Dr. Sybille Levine, the author of the article through which he’d come to learn of Abendroth in the first place. Uncharacteristically, he wrote her an email: states of emergency, he explained, require emergency measures. Dr. Levine, a professor of Psychoanalysis at Paris 8, replied warmly, thanking him for his interest in her work. Unfortunately, she wrote, she couldn’t be of much use to him. She had only read Abendroth in the original—the translation of the aphorism in her article had been her own. What’s more, her copy of Null und Eins had been a casualty of the harrowing bedbug infestation of the flat she had sublet with her partner in Chicago last year. “When I’m feeling superstitious,” she wrote, “I’m certain the book is cursed.” Since he was not far from London anyway, she recommended he attend the launch party for the new issue of Theory and speak with Niall Graves, the journal’s editor, who might be able to help him. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you,” her email concluded facetiously.

  The four of us arrived a few minutes before midnight at the address Dr. Levine had provided. We found the place more by sound than by sight. That evening, the streets were choked with fog, visibility was low, so we headed in the direction of the discordant rumble of electronic music, which grew louder as we approached the crossroads. The offices of England’s most unorthodox philosophy journal turned out to be located in the most quotidian of places, a dilapidated brown brick terrace adjacent to a veterinary college. But the aspiring vets would doubtless have been horrified to learn what went on next door after they had lain down their syringes and scalpels and gone home for the evening.

  “Which button should I press?” asked Claire when we were all standing in front of the forest-green door at No. 8 Royal College Street.

  “The one labeled T.A.Z.? Dunno. Just a guess,” Zach said with anticipatory satisfaction as she extended her finger to the circle someone had blacked out with a marker pen. We waited a moment, but heard nothing. We looked at each other and then up at the windows, which flashed with light. Zach pressed the button a second time. “They must not be able to hear the doorbell over the music.” Rather than yelling up at the window to get someone’s attention, as I was on the verge of doing, he asked Tori for one of her bobby pins.

  “You’re taking the piss,” she said, handing him the pin, brushing back the wave of hair that fell over her eye.

  “Sorry dear, you’re not going to get this back.” He flexed the ends until it broke in two. We stared at him mutely. “What?” He shrugged. “I forgot my keys at home a lot growing up.”

  I took my mobile from my pocket and held it above the lock, using the orange screen as a torch. We crowded round to watch. He bent the tips of each half of the pin until they looked like miniature jemmies. Then, making an L with his left hand, he cupped the lock, holding the part of the pin he’d inserted in the top of the keyhole in place with his thumb. With his right hand, he introduced the other half into the bottom and finessed the lock. When he heard it click, he swung his thumb anticlockwise, using the pin as a lever. We were all a bit spooked when the door seemed to recede of its own free will. All but Zach, of course, who gave a low bow and, with a flourish of his wrist, invited us up the dark staircase. “That was ace,” I said. “You’ll have to show me how to do that one day.”

  The spacious reception room, if you could call it that, looked more like the set of a science fiction film than the offices of a proper academic journal. Illuminated by multicoloured LED tendrils that dripped from the ceiling, the walls were papered with complex diagrams, mysterious hieroglyphs, technical blueprints, and anatomical drawings, which suggested some intersection between cybernetics and the occult. The floor was a snake pit of black cables slithering off in every direction, round the legs of the eclectic furniture, plugged into the mainframes of a dozen computers, whose screens glowed and flickered with charts and graphs, pornographic images, scrolling lines of binary code. A cabinet of speakers was stationed in the far corner of the room, but where one would have expected a band or a DJ, there was instead a man in a black tunic wearing two prosthetic gauntlets, somehow conducting, through the wires that were attached to them, a raving symphony of sampled beats. The dancers threaded slowly round the room, out of time with the music, carefully overstepping the intertwined limbs of the people who, sprawled on the floor, were looking at the computer screens or up at the ceiling, wiping sweat from their foreheads as they drank bottled water. Each danced alone, lost in rapt contemplation of the movement of his or her own hands, hands that traced lines through the sweet-smelling clouds of exhaled smoke, patterns invisible to us, but which no doubt appeared to them as melodious waves of laser light.

  Tori looked at Zach. “So you’ve brought us to the spring bop at Bedlam.” Zach, who was still taking in the scene, his mouth slightly open, conceded the point with a silent nod. “Let’s find the warden, then, shall we?” she suggested. “He’ll know where the drinks are. Looks as though we all have a bit of catching up to do.”

  The warden, Niall Graves, did not prove at all difficult to identify. We found him in a dimly lit back room, surrounded by a group of men and women in their mid-twenties, who, judging from the way they were dressed, may have been graduate students, street artists, computer programmers, or professional anarchists, but, judging from the way they hung on his every word, were all acolytes. Graves himself was a spent matchstick in a stained v-neck t-shirt and black stovepipe trousers that ended above his ankles. He was around forty years of age, already greying at the temples, with thin lips, a thin nose, and eyes the colour the sun turns when you’ve stared at it for too long. He stood, slightly hunched, his elbows permanently tucked into his ribs, his hands dangling in front of his slightly hollow chest, simply rotating his long fingers to his lips whenever he fancied a sip from his glass or a draw from the spliff that was being passed round the circle.

  When we joined, a man in a black hoodie was asking him what lessons the left ought to take from the repression of the Seattle Uprising as it prepared for the upcoming G8 Summit in Genoa. Graves answered in a soft voice, barely audible over the swarms of sound coming from the other room, as if it pained him, physically or psychologically, to breathe.

  “Right now,” he said, “the single most important problem for the left to solve is the Problem of Number.”

  The one who looked to me like a graduate student accepted the spliff from him and asked, “How do you mean?”

  “We still don’t know what Number is or what its ontological status is.”

  Tori guffawed in disbelief. “You don’t know what numbers are?”

  “What Number is,” Graves corrected. “Take, for example, the set of natural numbers, the least ontologically controversial of all sets, even when you exclude the null set from the count. Natural numbers can be defined as abstract, iterable representations of pure multiplicity,” he continued. “But do they really exist? Common sense would dictate a nominalist approach to this question: numbers have the same ontological status as other empirical referents; they are mind-dependent fictions that were invented by human beings and will cease to exist when there is nothing left to count or, more likely, nothing left to do the counting. But numbers are also iterable and therefore transfinite, w
hich means that, even at this very moment, the cardinality of the set of all natural numbers exceeds the cardinality of the set of all empirical referents in the universe. Thus, the possibility of a non-material ontology cannot be, if you’ll pardon the pun, discounted. Number is not like a table, which has a referent, but nor is it like Justice, which has none whatsoever. It is some combination of both or neither. In short, a virtuality.”

  “Sorry, Niall,” said the man in the black hoodie. “I’m afraid I don’t see what this has to do with the anti-globalisation struggle.”

  “It has everything to do with it,” Graves replied, coughing into his fingertips from the exertion that had been required to emphasise the word. “In fact, it will determine the tactics and their success or failure. Given what neuroscience has learnt about the mind, a nominalist approach would suggest that Number, along with all other concepts, are the material epiphenomena of a purely material substrate, namely the brain. A purely materialist ontology would conceive of the political as a play of forces between material entities over various distributions of the Material. A lateral distribution of these forces would be best achieved by revolutionary violence, that is, by a direct confrontation with the repressive apparatus of the neoliberal State, with the aim of taking it over to facilitate this redistribution. The problem with this strategy is two-fold. First, the current force differentials make it an almost impossible undertaking. Second, even when successful, revolutionary takeover preserves ex vi termini the repressive State apparatus. But if it were shown to be non-material, Number would imply the possibility of a correspondingly virtual space, and open up a strategy of revolutionary escapism, a nomadic flight into the cracks and fissures of material reality, of whose existence the State is not and cannot be aware.”

  Claire whispered into my ear, “I think the warden’s as much of a nutter as the patients are.” Tori, whose tolerance for bollocks was much lower than ours, had drifted away from the circle halfway through Graves’ lecture, and was examining the bookshelves at the other end of the room. I took the spliff from Zach and inhaled the hot end through pursed lips.

  “But virtual space. That’s just a metaphor,” I observed. “Material bodies can’t very well flee into metaphorical space, now can they?”

  “It’s not just a metaphor,” the computer programmer said, coming to Graves’ defence. “Consider the Internet. If our research into synaptic networks confirms Niall’s hypothesis, there is every reason to believe it will one day be possible to upload free consciousness into a virtual space like the Internet. Moore’s law suggests that that day is not far off. All we need to do now is speed up the future.”

  “Moore’s first law,” Zach cut in. He’d been unusually quiet until now, listening considerately to what Graves had to say. But the turn the conversation was now taking was bound to displease him. “What about Moore’s second law? It’s not like technological progress occurs in some economic vacuum,” he said. “The kind of processing power you’re talking about requires levels of resource extraction and capital investment only defense departments and multinational corporations are capable of underwriting. By putting your faith in technology to solve the problem, you’d only make yourself dependent on the very institutions you’re trying to use it to flee from.”

  A hush fell over the group. Tori rejoined us and lay a hand on Zach’s shoulder. The computer programmer looked meekly at Graves to give the debate its final word. Instead, Graves squinted at Zach. “You’re the lad from Oxford who’s interested in Hans Abendroth, aren’t you?”

  Zach started. “How did you know?”

  “Sybille told me you’d be coming, of course.”

  “I mean how did you know it was me?”

  “You’re the only one at my party wearing a tie.” With his free hand, he pecked at it and rubbed the fabric between his fingers. “A silk tie, no less. If you give it to me, I’ll tell you where the book is.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Zach reached for his collar, loosened the knot, and eagerly placed the tie around Graves’ neck as if he were awarding him a medal: I think he would have given him the pin number to his debit card had Graves asked for it.

  “Now then. These three are your friends?” As we introduced ourselves, he took a small bag of what looked to me like Fizzers from his trousers pocket and pressed a chalky coloured tablet into each of our outstretched palms. A water bottle was passed round and we swallowed piously, without first asking what the tablets were or what they would do to us. (“It reminded me of taking Holy Communion,” Claire would tell us hours later, when we were in the taxi headed back to Greenwich, preferring to huddle together beneath Zach’s outspread overcoat rather than distribute ourselves more evenly throughout the cabin, perhaps because, like the dancers at the party we had just left, our hearts had emigrated into our hands, and these neither wanted nor were able to distinguish where one body ended and another began.)

  “The Zero and the One is somewhere up there, naturally,” Graves told Zach, pointing in the direction of the bookshelves with his lit cigarette. The daunting white shelves extended from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. They must have contained several thousand volumes, more than a lifetime’s worth of reading. “Alas, I can’t say where exactly, because I never did get the staff to alphabetise them. But I’d estimate that you have between half an hour and forty-five minutes to find it”—he turned to me with a wan, toothless smile—“before you discover just how metaphorical space can become.”

  WORD MADE FLESH.—The relationship between thought and language is the relationship between a wound and its scar.

  Again I had been directed. Again I’d followed along. Did as I was told. Passively submitted to a superior force. In this case, however, following along was in my best interests. I was grateful not to have to spend a second more on those starchy sheets on that swaying bunk in that miserable room. And I could not have done better than to have so quickly earned Vera’s trust—she who was clearly a central piece of the puzzle Zach’s life had made of my own. No doubt she sensed the same was true of me and that’s why this trust had been extended. We were going to share intelligence. To define the absent centre that bound us both, each would help the other draw the full circumference of the circle.

  Vera lives on the Lower East Side, which, according to my travel guide,

  is the latest of New York’s “it” neighbourhoods. The old countercultural flavour that has been gentrified out of Alphabet City can still be tasted here, below Houston Street, where hipsters occupy former tenements and where art collectives and experimental music clubs rub shoulders with working mazoh factories and turn-of-the-century synagogues. From bargain hunting on Orchard Street and long nights at the dive bars on Rivington to the city’s best deli (Katz’s) and its most surreal Chinese restaurant and Karaoke Bar (Congee Village), the L.E.S. is a must-visit for those who want to say they were there before (everyone knew) it was cool.

  Near the entrance to her building an impromptu street party is in progress. Old men sit in lawn chairs drinking long-necked bottles of yellow beer, keeping cool with portable fans, blasting salsa from their car radios. Sausages and tortillas are flipped on miniature barbeques. Young men in vests and blue-and-red bandanas throw dice against the wall; women sit on the boots of well-buffered muscle cars, languidly swaying to the music, talking to each other in rapid, nasal Spanish.

  In the lobby, a man is passed out, clutching a brown bag to his chest, a curve of ash that was once a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. The parquetted floor of the lift sticks to my shoes. For five floors I hold my breath in an attempt to quarantine the rancid sweet smell in my nostrils. Clearly my senses have still to adjust to the sorts of distinctions that make this neighbourhood different from the one in which my hostel was located.

  Her flatmate, Katie, welcomes me with the sort of long and soulful hug you might give to a friend you hadn’t seen in years. The familiarity of her gesture catches me completely off guard, and I botch it, getting the ha
nd I’d extended sandwiched against the bare skin of her stomach. She is wearing a bikini, with a saffron sarong tied around her waist. Sitting on the living room sofas are another girl, also in a swimsuit, and a bloke in nothing but his pants.

  The A/C blew out earlier today. So we’re sweating it out, Katie explains. It’s not like this every day, I promise. And you in that suit! I can’t believe you haven’t melted!

  It’s quite warm, isn’t it?

  She gives me a bemused smile. On account of my accent, I reckon. God Save the Yanks. They can’t tell whether you come from Bristol or Belgravia, whether you were born to the proletariat or the peerage, whether you were raised in council housing or a castle, simply by listening to your voice. And they probably wouldn’t care, even if they could, so innocent are they to gradations of social class. To them, you’re all the same strange specimen. The Brit. The foreigner whose language you happen to speak.

  Katie turns to her friends. Hey guys, this is Owen, Vera’s brother’s friend from Oxford. That’s Jake. And that’s Marissa. They live in the apartment upstairs.

  Jake and Marissa respond to her perky introduction with slow waves and a distended collective H-e-e-y-y-y. They inspect me for a moment, not knowing what more to say to a person who has just come from the funeral of a friend who has killed himself. Marissa looks at me with pity and Jake with slight revulsion, as though I’ve been infected by some invisible contagion that might rub off on him if he isn’t careful.

  Embarrassed by the sudden unsociable silence, Katie says, Why don’t you put your stuff in Vera’s room for now and make yourself comfortable. When you’re done grab a beer from the fridge and join the rest of us on the roof, okay?

  Cheers, I say and solemnly walk in the direction of the door Katie pointed out to me. The three of them make their way through the small window next to the kitchen sink and disappear up the fire escape.