I recently began to interpret Erik Verlinde’s theory of emergent gravity in Lacanian terms [1]. We examined the primal scene in which a particle approaches the holographic screen and merges into its omniscience. Let’s examine another figure from the same paper [2]:

This figure shows the more general case in which multiple particles encounter the omniscient holographic screen in the shape of a blobby surface denoted by Φ. This blobby shape depicts a “general mass distribution inside the not yet emerged part of space enclosed by the screen.” The three particles attracted by this blob are “in the already emerged space outside the screen.” By moving towards the screen, the particles contribute to the entropy on the surface. Thus the surface is supposed to “know” about the particles, it’s a surface-supposed-to-know.

As you can see, we are now dealing with a “hole in the real” that has “knowledge in the real” on its boundary. The paper’s key message is that the blobby hole in the midst of the space is more real than the space outside it. The spatial manifestations of gravitational forces outside the hole are actually caused by its surface. The hotness of the surface-supposed-to-know accelerates the particles inwards into the hole. It is truly the effect of the surface, but in practice the particles “will have been” attracted by the gravitational forces [3].

There is a riddle about time. The space is emergent but what about time? Do they emerge together as space-time? Perhaps we should also talk about the “not yet emerged part of time” t₀ and the “already emerged time” t₁. If these referred to definite durations, t₀ would be in the future, t₁ would be in the past, and they would be delimited by the present instant.

But it’s more appropriate to think of t₀ and t₁ as taking place as if in two parallel worlds: t₀ is the time when space emerges, and t₁ is the time when particles get attracted. Let’s call them the time of emergence t₀ and the time of attraction t₁. This is the double time theory.

The paradox is that the space has always-already emerged in the time of attraction, yet this attraction itself has been caused by the holographic screen during the time of emergence. This means that the time of emergence t₀ is logically prior to the time of attraction t₁ which is logically posterior [4].

Erik Verlinde speaks about a “special direction in which space is emergent”. This is the direction in which the blobby hole gradually shrinks to reveal the space outside of it. This special direction sutures the combinatorial unworld of the time of emergence t₀ to the spatial world of the time of attraction t₁.

The catch is that every attraction is tainted by its own conditions of emergence: t₀ and t₁ relate like the symptom S(Ⱥ) and the Master-Signifier S₁.

(Turkish)

Işık Barış Fidaner is a computer scientist with a PhD from Boğaziçi University, İstanbul. Admin of Yersiz Şeyler, Editor of Žižekian Analysis, Curator of Görce Writings. Twitter: @BarisFidaner

Notes:

[1] See “Ideology is grave matter indeed!”

[2] Verlinde, E. (2011). On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton. Journal of High Energy Physics, 2011(4).

[3] This recalls Hegel’s enthusiasm about “universal attraction” in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). See “The self-repulsion ($) of the selfsame (S1) and the self-attraction (S2) of the unlike (a)”

[4] Compare to “The combinatorial ground of spatiality”