Chaos Bound

Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science

N. Katherine Hayles

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501727924
• eBook ISBN: 9781501722967
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Hayles’s point is that the almost simultaneous appearance of interest in complex systems across many disciplinesâ•physics, mathematics, biology, information theory, literature, literary theoryâ•signals a profound paradigm and epistemological shift. She calls the new paradigm ‘orderly disorder.’ This is a timely, informative, and enormously thought-provoking book. — Nancy Craig Simmons â• American Literature 

N. Katherine Hayles here investigates parallels between contemporary literature and critical theory and the science of chaos. She finds in both scientific and literary discourse new interpretations of chaos, which is seen no longer as disorder but as a locus of maximum information and complexity. She examines structures and themes of disorder in The Education of Henry Adams, Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, and works by Stanislaw Lem. Hayles shows how the writings of poststructuralist theorists including Barthes, Lyotard, Derrida, Serres, and de Man incorporate central features of chaos theory.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Evolution of Chaos

I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am really rather optimistic.

—SIR HORACE LAMB, 1932

IT all started with the moon. If only the earth could have gone round the sun by itself, unperturbed by the complications in its orbit which the moon’s gravitational field introduced, Newton’s equations of motion would have worked fine. But when the moon entered the picture, the situation became too complex for simple dynamics to handle. The moon attracted the earth, causing perturbations in the earth’s orbit which changed the earth’s distance from the sun, which in turn altered the moon’s orbit around the earth, which meant that the original basis for the calculations had changed and one had to start over from the beginning. The problem was sufficiently complex and interesting to merit a name and a prize of its own. It became known as the three-body problem, and the king of Sweden offered a reward to the first person who could prove a solution was possible.¹ Instead, in 1890 Henri Poincaré (whose formidable talent was responsible for creating topology and half a dozen other new fields) published a paper proving that in general, a solution was not possible by means of Newtonian equations (Poincaré, 1890). With commendable foresight, the king of Sweden gave Poincaré the prize anyway. Perhaps he intuited that Poincaré’s work had opened a window on a kind of world that Newtonian mechanics had not envisioned. By proving that the introduction of small perturbations into linear equations was not in general sufficient to solve nonlinear problems, Poincaré implied that a new kind of science and mathematics was necessary to account for the dynamics of complex systems. From this realization the science of chaos was born.

But not immediately. Positivism was in full swing throughout Western Europe and America, and mathematicians were preoccupied by efforts to put mathematics on a firm foundation by formalizing it. By 1931, when Kurt Gödel dashed these hopes by proving that formal systems could not be axiomatized completely (Gödel, 1962), the clue that Poincaré’s work provided for the labyrinthine difficulties of complex dynamics was in danger of dropping out of sight. (An exception was Russia, where many important results were obtained during the 1930s and 1940s.) In the West, the study of complex dynamics did not come into its own until computers became widespread and readily accessible during the 1960s and 1970s.

The same two decades saw a significant intellectual shift throughout the human sciences. Its essence was a break away from universalizing, totalizing perspectives and a move toward local, fractured systems and modes of analysis. Just as new methods were being developed within the physical sciences to cope with the complexities of nonlinear systems, so new ways of reading and writing about literature were coming to the fore in critical theory. The (old) New Critics had taken for granted that a literary work was a verbal object, bounded and finite, however ambiguous it might be within. But the (new) New Critics saw textual boundaries as arbitrary constructions whose configurations depended on who was reading, and why. As books became texts, they were transformed from ordered sets of words to permeable membranes through which flowed the currents of history, language, and culture. Always already lacking a ground for their systems of signification, texts were not deterministic or predictable. Instead they were capable of becoming unstable whenever the slightest perturbation was introduced. The well-wrought urn, it seemed, was actually a reservoir of chaos.

Each of these developments appeared within a well-defined disciplinary tradition, and each is explicable in terms of what had preceded it within the discipline. Nonlinear dynamics, for example, traces its linage through Mitchell Feigenbaum and Edward Lorenz back to Poincaré; poststructuralism through such theorists as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man back to Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. From the specialist’s point of view, there is no need to go outside these boundaries to understand what happened. But there are also suggestive similarities across disciplinary lines. Suppose an island breaks through the surface of the water, then another and another, until the sea is dotted with islands. Each has its own ecology, terrain, and morphology. One can recognize these distinctions and at the same time wonder whether they are all part of an emerging mountain range, connected both through substrata they share and through the larger forces that brought them into being.

In this book, I argue that certain areas within the culture form what might be called an archipelago of chaos. The connecting theme is a shift in the way chaos is seen; the crucial turn comes when chaos is envisioned not as an absence or void but as a positive force in its own right. This is a three-sided study, triangulating among chaos theory, poststructuralism, and contemporary fiction. Also of concern is the cultural matrix from which all three sides emerge and with which they interact. Concerned with the physical sciences as well as literature, the study investigates language’s power to constitute reality, and reality’s power to constrain and direct language. It speculates about the broader cultural conditions that authorize the new visions of chaos, and inquires into how these conditions shape and are shaped by modern narratives.

The metaphor of the triangle implies, of course, that there are connections and relationships among the three sides. One of the challenges in literature and science is to develop methodologies that can illuminate convergences between disciplines, while still acknowledging the very real differences that exist. In my view, analogies between literary and scientific versions of chaos are important both for the similarities they suggest and for the dissimilarities they reveal. The similarities arose because of broadly based movements within the culture which made the deep assumptions underlying the new paradigms thinkable, perhaps inevitable, thoughts. They illustrate how feedback loops among theory, technology, and culture develop and expand into complex connections between literature and science which are mediated through the cultural matrix. The dissimilarities, by contrast, point to the importance of disciplinary traditions in guiding inquiry and shaping thought. To account for them, it is necessary to understand how and why certain questions became important in various disciplines before the appearance of the new paradigms. The dual emphasis on cultural fields and disciplinary sites implies a universe of discourse that is at once fragmented and unified. Cultural fields bespeak the interconnectedness of a world in which instantaneous global communication is a mundane reality; local differences acknowledge the power of specialization within contemporary organizations of knowledge.

The connections I explore among contemporary literature, critical theory, and science are not generally explainable by direct influence. Rather, they derive from the fact that writers, critics, and scientists, however specialized or esoteric their work, all share certain kinds of everyday experiences. Consider the following question: Why should John Cage become interested in experimenting with stochastic variations in music about the same time that Roland Barthes was extolling the virtues of noisy interpretations of literature and Edward Lorenz was noticing the effect of small uncertainties on the nonlinear equations that described weather formations? An influence argument would look for direct connections to explain these convergences. Sometimes such connections exist. It is possible that Barthes listened to Cage, Cage studied Lorenz, Lorenz read Barthes. But it stands to reason that, of all the interdisciplinary parallels one might notice, only a few will be connected by direct lines of influence, which are usually conveyed through disciplinary traditions. One could, for example, trace a clear line of descent from John Cage to Brian Eno to the Talking Heads and U2.

Interdisciplinary parallels commonly operate according to a different dynamic. Here influence spreads out through a diffuse network of everyday experiences that range from reading The New York Times to using bank cards on automatic teller machines to watching MTV. When enough of the implications in these activities point in the same direction, they create a cultural field within which certain questions or concepts become highly charged. Perhaps, for example, Brian Eno might first learn about Roland Barthes through Time magazine. Intrigued, he might read one of Barthes’s books. Or he might not. The brief article summarizing Barthes’s ideas would then become one of the elements in Eno’s cultural field, available to be reinforced by other elements until a resonance built up which was strong enough to be a contributing factor in his work.

Between 1960 and 1980, cultural fields were configured so as to energize questions about how stochastic variations in complex systems affected systemic evolution and stability. It is easy to see how the political movements of the 1960s contributed to this interest. Also important was the growing realization that the world itself had become (or already was) a complex system economically, technologically, environmentally. Along with the information capabilities of modern communication systems came the awareness that small fluctuations on the microscale could, under appropriate conditions, quickly propagate through the system, resulting in large-scale instabilities or reorganizations. A revolution in the Middle East, for example, could trigger a precipitous rise in oil prices, leading to energy shortages and inflationary spirals in the developed countries, which in turn could spark a global recession that would force major restructurings in international finance. When such cascading scenarios are ever-present possibilities, the realization that small causes can lead to very large effects is never far from consciousness. The ecological movement is a case in point. People concerned about the global environment are intensely aware that a seemingly small event—an inattentive helmsman on the bridge of an oil tanker, say—can have immediate and large-scale effects on an entire coastal area. Implicit in this awareness is increased attention to random fluctuations, and consequently to the role that chaos plays in the evolution of complex systems.

Another factor that helped to energize the concepts underlying the new paradigms was the realization that as systems became more complex and encompassing, they could also become more oppressive. In more than one sense, the Cold War brought totalitarianism home to Americans. As information networks expanded and data banks interlocked with one another, the new technology promised a level of control never before possible. In this paranoiac atmosphere, chaotic fluctuations take on an ambiguous value. From one point of view they threaten the stability of the system. From another, they offer the liberating possibility that one may escape the informational net by slipping along its interstices. In Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, chaos reigns supreme in the “Zone,” the free-floating, anarchical space that was Western Europe for a brief time at the end of World War II. Threatening as the Zone sometimes is, its chaotic multivalency marks the distance between Pynchon’s postmodern text and the nightmare vision of Orwell’s 1984.

In the assigning of a positive value to chaos, information theories and technologies played central roles. In addition to creating the necessary technological landscape, they laid the theoretical foundation for conceptualizing chaos as a presence rather than an absence. Later chapters will explore this transformation, showing how a crucial move in the transvaluation of chaos was the separation of information from meaning. Once this distinction was made, the way was open for information to be defined as a mathematical function that depended solely on the distribution of message elements, independent of whether the message had any meaning for a receiver. And this step in turn made it possible to see chaotic systems as rich in information rather than poor in order.

Suppose I send a message that contains the series 2, 4, 6, 8… and ask you to continue the sequence. Because you grasp the underlying pattern, you can expand the series indefinitely even though only a few numbers are specified. Information that has a pattern can be compressed into more compact form. I could have sent the message as “Enumerate the even integers, starting with 2.” Or even more concisely, “Count by twos.” By contrast, suppose I send you the output of a random number generator. No matter how many numbers I transmit, you will be unable to continue the sequence on your own. Every number comes as a surprise; every number conveys new information. By this reasoning, the more random or chaotic a message is, the more information it contains.

You may object that although the numbers are always new and surprising, they do not mean anything. The objection illustrates why it was necessary to separate information from meaning if chaotic systems were to be considered rich in information. Implicit in the transvaluation of chaos is the assumption that the production of information is good in itself, independent of what it means. Having opened this possibility by creating a formal theoretical framework that implied it, information and communication technologies actualized it in everyday life. Every time we keep a TV or radio going in the background, even though we are not really listening to it, we are acting out a behavior that helps to reinforce and deepen the attitudes that underwrite a positive view of chaos.

Stanislaw Lem in The Cyberiad has a fable that speaks to this point (Lem, 1974b). Two constructors, Trurl and Klapaucius, take a journey that brings them into the clutches of Pugg the PHT Pirate. Actually the name (which they know only from rumor) is a slight error. Pugg has a Ph.D, and what he craves above all else, even more than gold and obeisance from his subjects, is information. So Trurl and Klapaucius create for him a Demon of the Second Kind.

The First Kind of Demon (about which we will hear more later) was proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1859. To test the second law of thermodynamics, Maxwell imagined a mythical imp who presided over a box of ideal gas divided by a partition. The Demon’s task was to sort the molecules by opening and closing a shutter in the partition, allowing only the fast molecules to pass through. The resulting separation created a temperature differential, which in turn could be converted into work. Lem refers to this history by allusion to its difference from the Demon of the Second Kind, who is an upto-date version appropriate to an information age. Like his predecessor, the Second Demon also presides over a box of stale air. Instead of sorting the molecules, however, he watches their endless dance. Whenever the molecules form words that make sense, he writes them down with a tiny diamond-tipped pen on a paper tape. Whereas the First Demon uses randomness to produce work, the Second Demon uses it to produce information.

Pugg is delighted with the invention and immediately sits down to read the tape with his hundreds of eyes. He learns “how exactly Harlebardonian wrigglers wriggle, and that the daughter of King Petrolius of Labondia is named Humpinella, and what Frederick the Second, one of the paleface kings, had for lunch before he declared war against the Gwendoliths, and how many electron shells an atom of thermionolium would have, if such an element existed, and what is the cloacal diameter of a small bird called the tufted twit” (p. 157). As the list continues and the tape rolls on, Pugg is buried under its toils. The narrator informs us that he sits there to this day, learning “no end of things about rickshaws, rents and roaches, and about his own fate, which has been related here, for that too is included in some section of the tape—as are the histories, accounts and prophecies of all things in creation, up until the day the sun burns out; and there is no hope for him… unless of course the tape runs out, for lack of paper” (pp. 159–160).

The fable is at least as compelling today as it was when it was written in 1967. Like Pugg, we are increasingly aware that information is a commodity every bit as valuable as diamonds and gold. Indeed, it can often be converted directly into money (as recent insider trading scandals have demonstrated). What are the computer programs that large investment firms use for stock trading but Demons of the Second Kind? From random fluctuations in the market they extract information and money, thus justifying Maxwell’s intuition that the second law of thermodynamics may have left something important out of account. Whether this project will succeed in the long run or bury us underneath it, as Pugg was entombed by his information, remains to be seen. Not in doubt is the important role that such phenomena play in reinforcing the connection between information and randomness. The more chaotic a system is, the more information it produces. This perception is at the heart of the transvaluation of chaos, for it enables chaos to be conceived as an inexhaustible ocean of information rather than as a void sign...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Evolution of Chaos
• PART I SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
• PART II THE FIGURE IN THE CARPET
• Selected Bibliography
• Index