‘You see the paper?’ he said by way of greeting.
‘Let me guess: rationing on soap and water.’
Klein looked puzzled for a moment, then unselfconsciously sniffed at his armpit. An elderly administrative type at the next table snorted, but Klein didn’t notice.
‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’ve been working.’
‘What’s in the news?’ I smiled.
He handed me a copy of the Guardian, folded over to the Style page.
‘You fashion beast!’ I said. He grinned like a kid and pointed at the lead item.
It was about a new line of women’s clothing. The patterns were to be fractal-based and there was considerable to-do about how they mirrored nature’s own true design, with some outrageous pseudo-scientific doublespeak about chaos theory and complexity.
‘Old B. Bronski’s ahead of his time,’ I mumbled.
‘Heh?’
‘Nothing. Yeah, so what? You could have predicted something like this. I think people already have. Christ, the bookstore sells fractal postcards.’
‘Read the sidebar.’
I skimmed the accompanying article. It was about the manufacturing process that had been devised for producing the clothes. The process was also rooted in fractal concepts, so that a standard assembly line could be employed, but every item produced would be subtly different. The idea was to create complete uniqueness within the confines of mass production. The engineer who designed the system was quoted as saying that his software package was going to revolutionize every aspect of assembly line manufacturing.
‘Interesting,’ I said, digging into my salad, ‘but also a little scary in that zany, fin-de-millennial way.’
‘Scary how?’ Klein’s eyes were alight.
‘If this is right, it maybe changes — or changes again — the definition of “unique”. If you can mass-produce singularity, then what does it mean? What possible value could be left for such a notion?’
Klein nodded approval and handed me the business page with a short item circled in red. Grundrisse-Rand had commissioned Frank Gehry to design their new EU headquarters in Bonn. It would be the first corporate commission of a piece of deconstructivist architecture, and one of the few major deconstructivist designs to be realized.
‘Yeah, I heard about this the other day on Radio 4. I thought the deconstructivist thing was yesterday’s news, but I guess someone’s interested. Gehry’s still hot, at least.’
‘But what do you make of it?’
‘I can’t say I much care for it, at least not the sketches I’ve seen. The stuff makes me sort of dizzy with all those odd angles and exposed superstructure. Very Weimar, somehow. Decadent. The kind of thing that’s fun in theory, but awful for the poor saps who’ll have to live and work in it. But then I don’t really know much about architecture.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Klein said, slapping his palm on the spread-out paper. ‘I’m talking about two articles on the same day in the fucking Guardian! Fractals and deconstruction!’
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s the ideas, Steve. Don’t you see. The ideas.’
‘Yeah?’ I tried again.
‘It’s what I was talking about last night. You know that there are very precise mathematical models for how things are diffused in culture? It doesn’t matter what — VCRs, compact discs, AIDS — they’re all the same in these models. Threshold criteria and critical mass levels determining rates of adoption. It’s all very calculable and occurs along an exaggerated S-shaped curve, with a small number of people adopting early on, then an explosion during which most everyone else climbs on the bandwagon.’
‘Sounds reasonable.’
‘Well, the thing is that it works for ideas and concepts, too. And what’s more, I think that when certain ideas — in the form of the things we call theories — fulfil those critical mass requirements, they become something more. Something. substantial.’
‘Don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds neat,’ I said. ‘I can’t even balance my chequebook so I don’t know from math models, but…well…what do you mean substantial? You mean accepted, right?’
‘No, Steve. I mean substantial. Palpable. Real. And it’s dangerous as hell.’
I was shaking my head. ‘You said that on the phone last night — this morning — but I still don’t follow.’
‘There’s a very thin line separating conception from reality. From the idea of something being true to that selfsame thing becoming physical law.’
‘Ahem,’ I said.
‘Okay, look. You know that everything we do, everything we build, the entire design of the western world is more or less based on parameters set forth in Euclidean geometry.’
‘I suppose I know that somewhere.’
‘Exactly. Well, mathematicians have always known that Euclidean geometry is itself based on certain approximations of reality — lousy approximations, it turns out — but they’ve always just brushed that little matter aside and stuck it under the label of “assumptions”. They’ve gone ahead and said it doesn’t matter.
‘But Euclid is the law for most of us. For two thousand years we’ve regarded those Euclidean approximations as realer than Coca-Cola. For the vast multitudes, for you, to take an example, those assumptions about the logic of space and geometry aren’t ignored, they’re completely unknown. Let me ask you something. What was the world like before Euclid?’
‘I don’t know. It was. simpler, I guess. Smaller, more compact. Less technological, certainly.’
‘Yes!’ Klein practically jumped out of his chair. His glasses flew off his face and bounced on the table. He grabbed at them, smearing the lenses with butter, but stuck them right back on his nose.
‘Before Euclid this wasn’t a world of science and technology, it was a world of gods and magic. Euclid came along and reshaped geometry, yes, but at the same time he reshaped an entire cosmology!’
‘Whoa, wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Euclid dates back to what? 300 or so BC? That cosmology of Greek and Roman gods survived him by centuries. And even then you’re talking, what, hundreds of years more before things really caught on.’
‘Of course!’ Klein shouted. ‘Because it took that long for the Euclidean conception to approach its critical mass. You couldn’t pick up a paper in ancient Rome and read about how Euclid redefined the world! There was no Page Three girl to help spread word of the invention of this neat new geometry. There wasn’t any CNN to tell the masses: Greek gods dead, film at ten.’
Klein was sort of bouncing up and down as he spoke and alternately enthralling and intimidating me. Generally excitable, he was now at the edge of something more extreme. The room had emptied out, but those still around eyed him with nervous apprehension or undisguised mirth.
‘There was no mass media. It took hundreds of years for ideas to be made real. Now it happens in no time. Or practically no time. The first work to see chaos for what it was appeared barely three decades ago. Within a few years we have theories of fractal geometry and complexity, and philosophies of deconstruction. And now it’s on Yves Saint Laurent’s bloody knickers.’
‘Take it easy, Klein. Sit down.’
Klein looked around. He was breathing hard and his glasses were so filthy he might as well have been wearing shades. He stood still for a moment, ran his tongue over his dry lips and flopped back into the chair.
‘Two thousand years ago Euclid killed the gods. What’s going to happen this time?’
I had no idea, but strongly suspected that Klein didn’t have it quite right. The other diners went back to their affairs. I started to proffer a counter-argument when Klein’s already ashen pallor went even whiter.