Обсуждение:Сложная система

Serres о сложных системах

Fold and Knot

I do not know, I know what takes place in the center. I know the overlap, I named it the bandage, the cross or the crossing. Which strip passes over, which under? This elementary question is posed when one takes two threads in hand and gets ready to tie a knot, an ancient practice, in seafaring or weaving, or, in the theory of graphs, rather new. Below, above. One would say that we are playing hot potato. Penelope the weaver intertwined the stitches in this way: over, under. Every complex knot is resolved in so many local folds where the same question is again posed: above, below? Another way of linking the left and the right, you only have to lean a little to notice it right away. The two hands, complementary, weave or knit together just as a moment ago they were competing/converging on the keyboards. Single and double, they cross: in what sense? Before teaching children the console or the keyboard give them something to weave or knit.

Now then, if one follows language attentively, the term complex, coming from fold or knot, designates and even describes a situation that is a bit more constrained than multiplication. Dedicated only to the number, the latter cares nothing for place, whereas the term complex takes it into account. Complex designates a group of folds when it passes from arithmetic, pure counting, to topology, which has a penchant for crumpled bits of cloth. Mter all, the complex never described anything but this kind of situation, and, in physics, for example, a network, electrical or otherwise, where numerous threads pass one over the other and some under certain others-these to the left or the right of those as much as you like-the outline of a combinatorial topology, a systemic knot, named complex for the first time by J. B. Listing, in German, and used by Maxwell in his theory of electrical fields. Such a network of threads or of forces-sometimes intercepted by resistors or capacitors-is usually called a Wheatstone bridge by physicists. When such a bridge is balanced between two limits, no measuring device can detect it. Thus the complex cannot be observed: neither seen nor known. Extant then, enormous and sometimes troubling, difficult to comprehend, intertwined, but yet knotted in and by this nullity of difference in potential, it only exists as capacity, as a black memory, a middle between presence and absence, forgetting and memory, local energy and global incapacity. Discovered there, the unconscious, admirable network of strange stitches and knots, it is part of the logical family of thirds. If it exists, it lies toward the middle and, like it, has a tendency to get lost in the blackness of memory, then to occupy all of space and time.