- / Design e Architettura
L’uso dei materiali e il catalogo per Angelo Mangiarotti: la forma non si impone ma si ottiene per incastri, gravità e resistenza. Il libro Framing the Project (Corraini) ne ripercorre il gesto
ISSUE NO. 31
The Maniac is Benjamín Labatut’s most recent book. Here the writer explores the lives of scientific minds in a literary triptych that starts a hundred years ago with Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, moves on a couple decades later to Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, and ends close to the present day with South Korean Go master Lee Sedol. The accounts are part biographical but also venture into fictionalized terrain to make sense of how pivotal historical episodes unfolded, including the birth of the first programmable computer and more recent AI breakthroughs.
Benjamín Labatut: My writing is always in the past. I’m more interested in speculating about the strange ways in which things have happened, and the strange meanings that arise from. Not just the way things have happened, but how different people have lived them. I’m not interested in the science fiction kind of part of imagining possible worlds. Nowadays, I feel like we’re moving so fast that we’ve sort of entered a fog. It’s like when a plane cuts through the air and it creates its own turbulence. It creates its own conditions for nearsightedness, moving too fast to be able to focus on what’s ahead. That is one of the reasons why I feel that even our most wild imaginations regarding the future are not really cutting it, because there is a certain fogginess to the present. It has become hard to comprehend, because of the level of information and the speed at which things are happening. You can’t get a clear picture of the present by imagining the future near or far. What I try to do in The Maniac is show we’re going through revolution right now. We should look back a hundred years ago. Most if not all my characters are long dead. I’m interested in their spirits much more than their lives. Not a spirit like it’s something left behind. It’s not really who a person was or what the person did. It’s something incorporeal.
Kelsey Nowakowski: Reviewers of your work have questioned if it’s responsible for a history writer to blend fact and fiction.
Benjamín Labatut: I’m not a history writer. I write fiction and clearly nothing else. The responsibility is the same all writers have which is to beauty and to truth the mysteries that you’re trying to write around if you stay close to that heart. You have to get at the heart of something that’s dark using the tools that fiction gives the writer to sort the inner landscapes that we have as human beings: our myths, our dreams, our nightmares, our desires. Those are things the facts of reality can’t give a good sense of because we have entire other experiences of the world that we cannot really share with others.
Most of the best things in my books come from academic papers that nobody reads or cites. I’m on the lookout for miracles. A writer’s job is to spot when a miracle happens or to bring back forgotten miracles. In the case of Lee Sedol there are those two moves during the game between the man and the machine that are so miraculous that they are otherworldly. Those are the things that contain the essence around which you can write a piece of literature. Paul Ehrenfest is someone who saw the world fall apart all around him. He was seeing his own branch of beloved physics turning into something that was machine and esoteric in its darkness, at least to him. It’s a profound sense of despair. It’s like a little tiny human-sized black hole. Those points of unknowability are the ones that draw me as a writer. I’m interested in understanding, but there’s something that goes beyond understanding – or that falls short of understanding which I’m even more interested in. It’s like when you remain puzzled and awed and feel a slight twinge of despair because there’s something about the world or human beings or an idea or a piece of math or a particular episode in history that nobody really understands. Those are the materials which I think you can make literature.
KN: What is your research process like and how do you go about weaving the stories together?
BL: It’s just mostly reading and underlining. What I realized is that just like when a photographer goes out and takes a snapshot, there is a point of view in the reading. Bruno Schulz and Roberto Calasso are writers that draw my eye. They kind of train your attention for certain things. It’s like I’m trying to do a little physics. I’m trying to tear something fundamental apart, and that’s how you come at the materials that you’re interested in and the things that you then do with those materials are in the service of something. I am trying to fashion some sort of ritual or spell with the information. It’s then simply telling a story. It’s not normal research. It’s sort of occultism.
KN: I’ve read that reading about math creates a mental block for you, but you research and write extensively about the work of mathematicians. How do mathematics and literature work together in your writing?
BL: If you can imagine being told that just on the other side of a hill or deep in the heart of some nearby forest there is this fundamentally powerful inspiring thing that is there because you can see its effects on the world, but you don’t even have the sense organs to perceive it. That’s like being blind and someone telling you that there is an entire Louvre filled with paintings. You still know they’re there because you hear people reacting to the work, but you can’t see it. That’s what happens with me. I don’t understand mathematics. I have no gift for it at all. I come at it from a sort of profound I’m very lacking in that respect and yet I know. The mathematical mind of human beings is to me something that is incontrovertibly mysterious and dark and powerful and dangerous. I come at it from that point of view. I know that some great behemoth is there. I know that it underlies my daily life. And yet I have no way to get at it. I kind of chase after it with words and you don’t get very far. But you do get a sense that at least it’s there.
People tend to think that writers are smarter than we are because we do sleight of hand. If you really comprehend something, there’s really nothing interesting you can say. I have found a very fertile territory in this massive mathematical landscape which is teeming with beings that I know are to my mind very much akin to what we think of when we think of angels and demons. They have this kind of strange parallel existence, which is connected to our daily lives and in strange ways. I am kind of haunted by these ideas. They will remain dark no matter how much I study them.
KN: Do you think it’s possible to find serenity in the rules of mathematics – even though they confront us with the rawness of reality. Or can one be overcome by the realization some math can veer into the realm of pure imagination?
BL: I don’t know where serenity comes from or if it lasts in any respect. What I’ve found from studying mathematicians is a fascination with this alien landscape. It’s occultism from the point of view of anybody who is not in mathematics. They are playing games which have no relationship with the world. Pure mathematics is not even knowing how many dimensions they need for these equations to come out. The way that it relates to everyday objects is one of those things that is to me so profound that I don’t even spend much time thinking about it because there’s things that I know exceed not only my understanding but so many other people.
The mathematicians can argue endlessly about if mathematics is created, if it’s discovered, if it’s part of the sort of secret workings of the universe or if it’s just a tool or a language and from what I’ve read there are no good answers for that. It really comes down to sort of choice, flavor, personal belief. I think the most obvious thing that I haven’t said because it’s so overt in my work and in the books is that I’m treating mathematics as if it was our lost realm of gods, goddesses, and spirits, because there is so much that they share. It goes all the way back to the beginning of math. I find these links that may in some parts explain why all this technology that we live with is so haunted. They never seem to be sort of neutral. There is something devilish about mathematicians and mathematics itself. I think writers have all made some sort of pact with one devil or another. To me it’s kind of obvious the links that exist between God, Math, and Literature. It’s all kind of one word.
KN: In The Maniac, you write that Johnny von Neumann, nearing the end of his life, says that “Gods are a biological necessity,” likening them to a guiding star that helped us advance. He notes people are losing faith in gods and that technology must fill the void. Is this transition happening in today’s world, and if so, where do you think it’s taking humanity?
BL: Let’s look back. I think we have grown accustomed to something that is profound and strange, which is just our dealings with computation and information. These things we created beginning in the 1930s and the 1940s are kind of just now coming alive in a way that it shows everyone that secret power that we uncovered. That’s why I make references to atomic power in the book because people have to understand that there is greater power than our capability of ripping atoms apart. We’re peering into information. We’re using computation. We’re beginning to get a feel for computation. The things that these people created, right? We kind of got used to them being just apps or better video graphics. I don’t think there’s any way in which a human being like you and me who were born in the information age can understand the gigantic leap that really is. If you think about it in spiritual terms, it is really a sort of second coming. We are handling the power that we used to ascribe to gods. I’m not saying, hey go pick up the Bible and believe in that. I’m saying look at the things that we’re doing with computation. This is fucking miraculous. These are the things that we used to believe we’re in the hands of divine creatures and they’re in our hands. That is why references to religiosity and spiritual imagery are in so much of the book. I’m really trying to say there is this new god in the world. It’s called the computer, and you carry it in your phone, and you look down and pray on a screen but we don’t realize it at all because it’s everywhere. I only sort of knock at the door or scream at the altar. I can just babble like people who have naive beliefs. They kind of repeat certain phrases in the hope of getting closer to that essence, but I do the same in my writing.
KN: Do you think humanity will get to a point where we look back at technological innovations as miracles and realize the amount they have changed our lives?
BL: One of the weird things about our brains is that we can adapt so quickly to the new and in ways that the extraordinary becomes commonplace fast. We are highly adaptive. We carry these things around with us disregarding the magic that it implies, which is fine because we have to go about our lives. Our lives are not about these great breakthroughs. We’re all concerned with minor things which are not minor: people you love, health, if your humor is up or down, you have energy or not. We are living beings. Most of our concerns have to do with that and it’s fine because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to live. Yet one of the jobs of art is to remind us of the horrors and the wonders of the world. Just to get a feel for what the human phenomenon is really about. It’s great to suddenly come in contact with the wonder that we are.
KN: When professional Go player Lee Sedol beat the AI-powered AlphaGo at this ancient game, people celebrated, as you note in The Maniac, like it was a victory for our species. Do you ever think about the paradox of humans creating something non-human that we hope can help us solve pressing issues such as climate change but that we also fear and celebrate when we outsmart it?
BL: It is one of the rare things about human beings that we continually overstep and push ourselves to the limit in following the better angels of our nature and also the most horrific impulses. These are contradictory, paradoxical things. We really tend to focus as we should on our lighter aspects, right? We have such a large looming shadow behind us. As much as we would like for the world to be simpler in the sense where we could just kind of marvel at the products of our imagination, we’re also petrified and horrified by it because we never know what kind of future we’re going to step into. We really are this strange thing. The strangeness of humanity is something awe-inspiring and scary. It doesn’t necessarily follow from the fact that we have intelligence that we can make all these grand imaginings come true. We’re extruding a part of ourselves into these AIs and mirroring our faults and our prejudices and our delirium, which I find fascinating. It’s sort of telling us that there is no thought without delirium, there is no reason without tinges of madness, and that even while we’re trying to search for these beings of pure logic and high reason, they will be infected by the same ghosts that we carry around within us.
KN: With all that in mind, I can’t help but be focused on and somewhat fearful of the future.
BL: Forget about the future. You’re focusing on the wrong thing. We’re all scared. When human beings are scared, they start to chart out the future. It’s the way we deal with our anxiety. As soon as we have an image of what we think is coming we can live with it. The world doesn’t work like that. Whatever monsters were beneath your bed when you were a kid, they will come back in forms of technology that will make you shit your pants. There’s no way around that. Fear is also a part of the human experience. Think back on the horrors of the near past and just realize that we’re still here. For now, at least randomness has favored us.
Born in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 1980, Benjamín Labatut grew up in The Hague, Buenos Aires and Lima before settling in Santiago, Chile at the age of 14. In this city he studied journalism at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Benjamín Labatut achieved international success in 2021 with the book When We Stopped Understanding the World, translated into dozens of languages and won the following year of the Galileo Literary Prize for popularization of science.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
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