B21-FT1
Values and Strange Attractors
Copyright ©
by Frederick Turner, 10/7/01
[reprinted
from the German, from Lettre International
One of our most subtly paralyzing dualisms is the apparently harmless one
between order and disorder. The
idea of artistic liberation, under which we have labored for so many years, is
especially prone to the corruptions of this dualism.
For instance, if order means predictability, and predictability means
predetermination, and predetermination means compulsion, and compulsion means
unfreedom, the only way we can be free is if we are disordered.
The failed artistic hopes of the last two centuries have been founded
upon a deep discomfort with the idea of order, and what are taken to be its
close relatives: hierarchy, foundationalism, norms, and essences--even with
value itself, if value is conceived of as being anything other than momentary
individual preference.
We have found ourselves forced by the logic of the duality to choose the
random, the disordered, the arbitrary, the acte gratuit,
the unconditioned, the weightless, the unfurrowed--over the ordered, the
intelligible, the shapely, the traditional.
Our art featured aleatory music, chance splotchings of paint, the random
word-choices of "language poetry"--John Cage, Jackson Pollock, John
Ashbery. What, after all, were the
alternatives? We could submit
ourselves to the Transcendental Signified, the old man with the white beard,
Nobodaddy Himself, the ancestral authority figure who bars the doors against our
franchise, our potential for achievement, our free play of art, our sexuality,
our political identity and self-expression.
Or we could accept that the world was a dead machine and we were merely
parts of that machine, linear and deterministic.
We would thus be fated to some kind of mechanistic social order
determined by our genes, by the physics of our energy economy, by economic
necessity or psychological drives. Indeed,
it began to look as if the second alternative was just a new avatar of the
first, that the scientists and psychologists and sociologists and businessmen
and commissars who preached materialist determinism were really just the old
white-bearded patriarchs and racial oppressors in disguise.
Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one, for freedom
and value and meaning appear impossible within them--though great philosophers
in the tradition of Nietzsche have struggled to assert them nevertheless.
But given the potential for abuse inherent in the deterministic position,
it seemed safest to opt for a definition of freedom as a random relationship
between the past and the future. The
problem is that if this were the case, memory and experience would be completely
useless, because to the extent that I act on the basis of past experience, I
would not be free. Any connection
with tradition would be oppressive.
The
postmodernist solution was to make meaning and value completely arbitrary,
imposed at the whim of the individual. At
least we could individually perceive events
as meaningful and valuable. One
person's perception would be as good as another's, so there could be no
political repression. And then--it
began to look promising--we could hold the universe to be unknowable because
inherently random, and dismiss all science and all objective knowledge as
irrelevant, or simply the means to rationalize the political interests of the
powerful. Did not quantum theory,
if we squeezed it a little and did not look too closely at its beautiful
mathematics, be made to say something of the same kind?
Were not the white lab-coated ones condemned out of their own mouths?
And this is more or less the present state of deconstruction and
discourse analysis in the arts.
But then, the knots and toils we tied ourselves into when we tried to
profess views such as these! We had
discovered a new sin: involuntary hypocrisy--hypocrisy when we were most
desperately trying to avoid it. When
we opted for simple disorder and randomness, we were faced with the problems of
how to mean the destruction of
meaning? how to publish the
discrediting of publication and public? how
to achieve institutional recognition, like Jenny Holzer in the Whitney, when
institutions are the legacy of the past and thus based on sadistic repression?
how to attack hierarchy in a language with a syntactical tree and
grammatical subordination? how to critique a work of art as good or bad?
how to get paid for paintings or sculpture where payment must be in the
coin of "mimetic desire," and private ownership of art is the
quintessence of commodification? how,
even, to act with a body possessed of an immune system of quite military rigor,
and a nervous system strikingly unified under central control?
And can freedom, seriously, be the same as random or disordered behavior?
According to classical physics the universe becomes more disordered over
time, that is, less intelligible and less able to do work.
Is freedom just our little contribution to the universal process of
increasing entropy? Is it our job
as free beings to assist in the destruction of this beautiful ordered universe
about us? Intention takes a highly
organized brain; can the only free intention be that which would tend to
disorganize that brain and disable intention itself?
What becomes of responsibility if freedom is randomness?
Can we take credit for what we do that is good, if there is no
responsibility? Can there be such a
thing as justice, for instance, if we cannot be held responsible for our
actions?
Until recently the best that we could do with the available intellectual
tools in cobbling up some kind of reasonable account of the universe, and of our
own freedom, was to devise some kind of combination between order and
randomness, linear determinism and disordered noise.
The title of Jacques Monod's book on biological evolution, Chance and
Necessity , puts it well. Perhaps
we could describe both the emergence of new species and the originality and
freedom of the human brain as a combination of random mutations and relatively
deterministic selection.
But even here there were deep and subtle theoretical objections.
Evolution seemed to proceed in sudden jumps, not gradually; a new species
did not seem to emerge slowly but rather leap into being as if drawn by a
premonition of its eventual stable form. Another
objection: without the right suite of species, the ecological niche wouldn't
exist; but without the ecological niche, the species wouldn't.
How do new niches emerge? Again,
from a purely intuitive point of view even four billion years didn't seem nearly
enough to produce the staggering variety and originality of form to be found
among living species--birds of paradise, and slime molds, and hermaphroditic
parasitical orchids, and sperm whales, and all.
Most disturbing of all, it became clear that the process of development,
by which a fertilized egg or seed multiplied and diversified itself into all the
cells in all the correct positions necessary for an adult body, was not a mere
following of genetic instructions embedded in the DNA blueprint, but was an
original and creative process in itself, which produced a unique individual out
of a dynamic and open-ended interplay of cells.
The miracle was that the interplay could produce something in the end
remotely resembling its twin siblings, let alone its parents. It was as if the individual organism were drawn
toward a beckoning form, and that the genes were not so much blueprints
specifying that form, as gates
permitting the developmental
process to rush to its conclusion.
And the same kinds of problems arose if we tried to apply the
chance-and-necessity model to the working of the human brain.
Maybe "nature and nurture" don't exhaust the inputs.
Can it make sense to speak of internal
inputs, or forms which draw an
appropriately prepared human brain into a specific competence, like language?
There seemed to be a huge mass of internal, newly-emergent laws and
principles in such systems that we have hardly begun to understand--and where
did they come from, all of a sudden?
The dualism of order and disorder was coming under increasing strain.
But within the arts and humanities the traditional avant-garde hatred of
any kind of essentializing, hierarchizing, (biologically-) determinist,
transcendentally significant and totalizing Order was so ingrained that the more
shaky that dualism became, the more passionately it was asserted.
The problem the avant garde was honestly trying to solve was that the
only alternative to repressive order that seemed to be offered was random
disorder, or on the psychological level, whim.
Suppose we were to try to specify what an escape from this predicament
might look like philosophically. We
would have to distinguish between two kinds of order, a repressive,
deterministic kind, and some other kind that would not have these disadvantages.
We would also have to distinguish between two kinds of chaos, one which
was simply random, null, and unintelligible, and another that could bear the
seeds of creativity and freedom. If
we were really lucky, the second kind of order might turn out not to be the
antithesis of the second kind of chaos; they might even be able to coexist in
the same universe; best of all, they might even be the same thing!
The extraordinary thing that has happened--an astonishing stroke of good
luck, an earnest of hope for the future--is that there really does seem to be
the second kind of order, the second kind of chaos.
And they do seem to be the same thing.
This new kind of order, or chaos, seemed to be at the heart of an
extraordinary range of interesting problems that had appeared as philosophers,
mathematicians, scientists, and cybernetic technologists tried to squeeze the
last drops of the imponderable out of their disciplines.
They included the biology and brain problems already alluded to; the
problem of how to describe catastrophic changes and singularities by means of a
continuous mathematics; the problem of how to predict the future states of
positive feedback processes; Goedel's paradox, which detaches the true from the
provable; the description of phase-changes in crystallography and
electrochemistry; the phenomenon of turbulence; the dynamics of open systems and
nonlinear processes; the observer problem in a variety of disciplines; the
failure of sociological and economic predictive models because of the rational
expectations and second-guessing of real human subjects; the theoretical
limitations of Turing machines (in certain circumstances they cannot turn
themselves off); the question of how to fit the fractal geometry of Benoit
Mandelbrot into orthodox mathematics; the classification of quasicrystals and
Penrose tilings; the whole issue of self-reflection, bootstrapping and positive
feedback in general; and most troubling of all, the question of the nature of
time.
In choosing the term "chaos" to describe this new imaginative
and intellectual arena, the discoverers of it pulled off something of a
public-relations coup without perhaps fully intending to.
They could have called it "antichaos," which would have been
just as accurate a term, in fact a better one, as its implied double
negative--"not not-order"--suggests something of its iterative depth.
But "antichaos" would have sounded too much like law 'n order
to avant garde artists and humanists, who would have dismissed it as yet another
patriarchal Western mystification. Indeed,
some humanists have taken "chaos" to their bosom, as they once did
quantum uncertainty, as a confirmation of their pro-random, pro-disorder bias.
In order to
understand the deeply liberating point of chaos (or antichaos) theory, we will
need to go into the differences between deterministic linear order and chaotic
emergent order, and between mere randomness and creative chaos. Let
us begin by considering an odd little thought experiment.
Suppose we were trying to arrange a sonnet of Shakespeare in the most
thermodynamically ordered way, with the least entropy.
We cannot, for the sake of argument, break up the words into letters or
the letters into line segments. The
first thing we would do--which is the only sort of thing a strict
thermodynamicist could do--is write the words out in alphabetical order: "a
compare day I Shall summer's thee to ?".
As far as thermodynamics is concerned, such an arrangement would be more
ordered than the arrangement "Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day? . . . " as composed by Shakespeare.
Here, in a capsule, is the difference between deterministic linear order
and chaotic emergent order.
We could even test the thermodynamic order of the first arrangement by a
further experiment. Suppose we coded the words in terms of gas molecules,
arranged in a row, the hottest ones corresponding to the beginning of the
alphabet, the coldest ones to the end, and so on in alphabetical order.
If left to themselves in a closed vessel the molecules would, because of
the increase of entropy over time, rearrange themselves into random alphabetical
order (the hot and cold would get evenly mixed).
Just as in a steam engine, where the energy gradient between hot steam
and cold air can be used to do work, one would be able to employ the movement of
molecules, as the alphabetized "sonnet" rearranged itself, to perform
some (very tiny) mechanical task. And
it would take somewhat more energy than we got out to put the molecules back
into alphabetical order, because of the second law of thermodynamics.
As arranged in Sonnet 18 those words are already in more or less
"random" alphabetical order. Yet
most human beings would rightly assert that the sonnet order is infinitely more
ordered than the thermodynamic, linear, alphabetical one.
And in other respects the poem does seem to exhibit the characteristics
of order. It could, if damaged by
being rearranged, be almost perfectly reconstituted by a person who knew
Shakespeare's work well. The sonnet
can "do work:" it has deeply influenced human culture, and has helped
to transform the lives of many students and lovers.
It is an active force in the world precisely because it does not have the
low-entropy simplicity of the alphabetical order that might enable it to do
mechanical work. Here lies the
basic distinction between "power" in the mechanical, political sense,
and the mysterious creative influence of art.
But though we have distinguished between the two kinds of order, it is
equally necessary to distinguish between the two kinds of chaos.
Otherwise we would be in the predicament of someone like Stanley Fish,
the "reader response" theorist, who has been forced by the
"order-disorder" dualism into asserting that any random sequence of
words, chosen perhaps by flipping the pages of a dictionary, would possess a
richness of interpretive potential equal to that of the sonnet; and thus that
the very idea of text is either meaningless or extensible to everything in the
universe.
If reader response theorists understood information theory, it would be
enough to show that their mistake is to confuse "white noise" with
"flicker noise." White
noise is made up of random amounts of energy at all frequencies.
One could certainly imagine that one was listening to the sea when one
heard acoustic white noise; there are even devices that make white noise to
soothe people to sleep. But there
is nothing there to understand or interpret.
On the other hand, flicker noise, which does not at first sound very
different, is the "sound" that a system makes that is ordered in
itself and at the same time highly unstable and going through continuous
internal adjustments by means of feedback: a good example is a pile of sand onto
whose apex new grains of sand are being dropped one by one.
There are many one-grain avalanches, fewer multi-grain avalanches, fewer
still mass avalanches, and only the occasional collapse of a whole slope.
The sequence of these avalanches obeys laws and forms an elegant fractal
pattern when plotted on a graph. What
one hears when one hears flicker noise is the combination of these events; and
if one analysed it carefully, one might be able to work out the size of the
grains, the interval of their deposition, and so on.
There is real meaning to be extracted.
Our reader-response theorist refuses to extract it.
But this example is perhaps rather abstract.
Flicker noise is not just the "sound" made by piles of sand.
It is also what we get when we "listen" in a crude way to
highly complex organic systems. For
instance, suppose we take the temperature of an animal: that reading is flicker
noise. The temperature is made up
of a combination of fantastically organized and intricate metabolic processes;
yet it is indistinguishable from the "same" temperature taken of a
simple chemical reaction, or of a random mixture of unrelated processes, which
would be white noise. The problem
is that a thermometer is a very crude instrument; but it is not enough to do
what reader-response theorists would do, that is, to accept its crudity as
accuracy, and to make up for it by imagining all kinds of exotic meanings for
the animal's temperature that had no necessary connection with its organic
metabolism. What makes it a crude
instrument is precisely that it makes no allowance for the nature of what it is
measuring.
Another example of flicker noise is what you would "hear" from
a set of electrodes applied to someone's skull if the electrical signal were
translated into sound. Just because one could imagine that the squeaks and booms and
whistles one would hear resembled perhaps the song of humpback whales, that
would not mean that the sound "meant" humpback whales.
But this mistake is exactly analogous to much contemporary art criticism
and interpretative theories of
literature, the arts, or history, which discount the inner personal intentions
and meanings of the author, whether the author authorizes a poem, a piece of
music, a painting, or an historical act. By
discounting those personal meanings, and perhaps substituting the crude
statistical measures (the "temperature") of gender or race or class
interest, we may avoid the bugbear of authorship--authority--but we lose any
understanding of what it is we are dealing with: we cannot distinguish a living
organism from a stone, and are in grave danger of treating them the same.
In the realm of artistic value, the idea of nonlinear systems generating
emergent forms of order can prove very illuminating.
When, in the move away from traditional societies to the modern state, we
abandoned the old religious notions of the soul, of beauty, virtue, higher
values, honor, truth, salvation, the divine, and so on, we suffered a genuine
loss. But perhaps now we can refound some of those beautiful
notions upon a new-old basis. The
strange attractor of a chaotic system can look very like an Ideal Form: though
any instance of the outcome of such a system at work is only partial and
apparently random, when we see all instances of it, we begin to make out a
beautiful, if incomplete and fuzzy shape. Might
not virtues, ethics, values, and even in a way spiritual beings, be like those
deep and beautiful attractors?--and might there not be larger systems still,
including many brains and the interactions of all of nature, that would have
attractors not unlike the Divine as described by religion?
Meaning itself can be redefined in terms of the relationship of strange
attractors to the physical processes they describe.
Any nonlinear dynamical system, when triggered by a stimulus, will
generate a sequence of unpredictable events, but those events will nevertheless
be limited to their attractor, and further iteration will fill out the attractor
in more and more detail. The brain
itself holds memories in the form of such attractors, the dynamical feedback
system in this case being circuits of Hebb cells.
Thus we can picture the relationship of a word to its meaning as the
relationship of a given trigger to the attractor that is traced out by the
feedback process it initiates. When
the word "refers" to a perceived object--say, a smell or a sight--that
object is one which can trigger a subset of the full attractor, as a Julia Set
is a subset of the Mandelbrot Set. Thus
a single word can trigger a "meaning-attractor," sections of whose
fine detail can also be triggered by various sensory stimuli.
This description rather nicely matches with our Proustian experience of
connotation and poetic evocation, and with the logical form of generalization.
It accords with the results of liguistic experiments concerning the
relative strength by which a given example--say, a duck, an ostrich, or a
sparrow--is recognized by a speaker
as belonging to the meaning of a word ("bird").
It also explains the difference between ideas and impressions, that
exercised the philosophical imaginations of Locke and Hume: the richly-detailed
subset evoked by the sight of an object would certainly make the general sketch
of the whole set evoked by the word look somewhat pale by comparison.
Since the trigger--whether the word or the sensory stimulus--is itself
part of the feedback system, it is encompassed by its description, which is the
attractor proper to it when it is allowed to iterate its effects upon a complex
neural network. Thus the represented, the representation, and the experiencer
of the representation are all part of the same physical system. The usual
critique of physical descriptions of representation--for instance, John Searle's
Chinese Room analogy for artificial intelligence--is that however a given object
is represented inside the physical system, it requires a smaller system inside
the system to see it and know it, or, as John Eccles believes, a detachable
non-physical soul. The
chaotic-attractor theory of meaning holds out the promise of an intelligible
physical description of meaning that does not require an inner homunculus or the
intervention of a metaphysical deus ex machina, with further attendant problems
of infinite regress--how does the god in the machine perceive and know the
representation?--to make it work. One
way of putting this is that the issue of reflexiveness, of self-reference or
self-inclusion, has been transferred from the metaphysical level where it can
only be interpreted as a barren infinite regress or reductio ad absurdum, to the
physical realm where it can be studied as we study turbulences of other kinds,
with their own emergent properties and self-generated orderliness. The
reflexiveness, we feel intuitively, should be there in any account of meaning;
the trick is to keep it from messing up our own thinking about it, and place it
where it belongs, in the operation of the brain itself!
It remains to suggest how this "attractor theory" of
signification might work itself out in the etymological history of a language,
and express itself in terms of phonology, morphology, and metaphor.
The social and cultural dimension of language, like the neurosensory
dimension, has the form of a nonlinear dynamical system with strange attractors
pulling it toward certain "archetypal" forms.
Those forms could be seen in the odd "targetedness" of the
great sound-shifts that periodically convulse a language; they can also be
observed in the way that metaphorization will take parallel paths in different
languages, so that when a colorful idiom from another language is presented to
us, we can almost always find an equivalent in our own.
Thus the words "spirit" in English and "Atman" in
Sanskrit have identical metaphoric histories, as do the words "kind,"
"nature," and "genus," all of which came together again in
English, having led separate lives in Germanic, Latin, Greek, and other tongues
for thousands of years since their original common root in Indo-European.
Metaphorization and sound-changes are every new human generation's way of
committing a sacrificial impiety against the tongue of its ancestors, an impiety
that commutatively atones for the crime of the ancestors themselves in similarly
appropriating the language for themselves from their own mothers and fathers.
And since meaning dies the moment it ceases to cut slightly against all
previous usage--a valuable if over-emphasized and not entirely original
contribution of Deconstruction--it is constituted by this continual low-level
feedback between the language and the world it contains.
Such might be the rudiments of a new, evolutionary poetics and a new
nonlinear theory of meaning and representation.
Obviously I have only scratched the surface here; the point is that we do
not need to sit helplessly in the morass of late poststructuralist despair and
misologism, and that there are still worlds for the literary humanities to
conquer.
And there are practical implications of this model of meaning.
(By now such phrases as "model of meaning," with their
invitations to further reflexive iteration, should hold no terrors for us, since
we hold a clue to the labyrinth, a clue whose own windings are equal to the
windings of that dark place we would discover.)
One implication is that many of the characteristics of the relationship
of word and meaning are already present in the relationship between a percept
and the experience of it. If a
sense-perception can generate a sort of "Julia Set," then in a way a
sense perception is like a word. That
is, we share with other higher animals the elements of a sensory language which
preexisted the more encompassing kind of language that uses words. Or we could put it the other way around, and say that
language is just a larger kind of sensing, using internal triggers to evoke
larger attractor-sets than any percept could.
Obviously we have here a further reason for exploring our relationship
with our animal friends: it is a way of understanding the fundamentals of our
own language, of discovering that ur-language we share with other parts of
nature than ourselves. One huge
advantage of that ur-language is that it is not riven by the linguistic
boundaries that divide the more fully human languages like English and French
from each other; and if we learn to speak it better, we may find more common
ground with cultural Others as well as with biological Others.
In one sense, of course, we already possess such ur-languages, in the
shared imagery of the visual arts and in the "universal language" of
music. But the theory of meaning
proposed here suggests that there is something analogous to music and visual
imagery that underlies language itself, obscured by its more recent evolutionary
achievements, to be neglected only at the cost of a vitiation and greying of our
expression and understanding. I
came to this conclusion by an entirely different route a few years ago, while
translating the poetry of Miklos Radnoti with my remarkable colleague Zsuzsanna
Ozsvath. In the following section I shall discuss the discoveries we
made together, and in this way give body to the critical and linguistic theory
proposed here, especially to the concept of the ur-language. Suffice it to say here that poetic meter turns out to be a
sure road to the ur-language, or to change the metaphor, meter is the lyre or
golden bough or magic flute that enables us to enter the underworld of that
language and to return with intelligible gifts for the community.
Meter, like music and visual imagery, is an ancient psychic technology by
which human nature and human culture are bridged; appropriately, and as we might
imagine from our discussion of the fractal harmonics of Hebb-cell circuitry,
meter is a rhythmic and harmonic system in itself, a way of inducing the wave
functions of the brain. The lyre
through which Rilke traces Orpheus in the Sonnets to Orpheus is the poetic form
of the sonnet itself.
If the words of a poet can induce in one brain the same strange attractor
that they proceeded from in the poet's brain, an extraordinary possibility
presents itself. This possibility
is that when those harmonics are in our heads we are actually sharing the
thoughts, and indeed the subjectivity, of the poet, even if he or she is dead.
The poet lives again when his or her attractors arise in another brain.
Poetry, then, is a kind of artificial intelligence program, that springs
into being when booted correctly into any good human meat-computer.
The notion of the strange attractor can be useful not only in
understanding artistic and poetic values, but also in the much more down-to
earth realms of history and sociology. Any
analysis of historical events we make, or any theory of social behavior we
formulate, is itself one of the determining factors in the situation it
describes. Thus there is no "meta" position, no detached Olympian
viewpoint from which objective assessments can be made, and therefore no escape
from the apparent chaos of mutual feedback.
Even economists are just another group of competitors over what
constitutes value.
Not that this struggle for ontological control is a blind one. We would
be totally ineffective at it if we were not able to assess the motives and
assume the worldview of others. And even this would not be enough. Our
imaginative model of the other must contain its own image of oneself--the gift,
said Robert Burns, is to see ourselves as others see us; and that image itself
must contain its own assessment of the other. And our outer negotiations take
place not just between our own persons but also among the entire dramatis
personae of the inner drama by
which we estimate the future. The confusion is not one of blindness, but of too
much sight; not of randomness, but an excess of determinants; not of chaos, but
of an order too complex to be explained before the next complicating event comes
along--of which the next, complicating, event is
the best explanation.
Indeed, this capacity to impose our interpretations on things is not only
our predicament but also what enabled us to second-guess, predict and control
the simpler systems of nature, such as the biological, chemical, and physical
ones. We bought our power over the rest of nature with the essential
uncontrollability of human events. We can control nature to the extent that we
stay one step of reflexivity ahead of it. Nor is even nature innocent, but is
itself the resultant and living history of a cosmic evolution which pitted many
forms of reflection against each other; the marvellous cooperation of nature is
a prudent and subtle form of mutual feedback. Even so, when we find we can
reduce another organism to a successfully testable set of laws and predictions,
it is a sign that we are dealing with a lower order of reflection than our own.
Thus to attempt to do so with human beings--to educe and apply the laws
governing them and to predict their actions--is, in human terms, a viciously
aggressive act, an attempt to get control at the expense of others' freedom. It
implicitly reduces human beings to the level of lower animals, even to that of
inanimate things. But this indeed
is what much social and economic history, much sociology and progressive
political theory, have attempted to do. The promise such studies held out was
not lost on those with the sweet thirst for power. Transformed into political
programs those systems appeared in our century as the great totalizing
regimes--Marxism, Fascism, National Socialism, International Socialism. We
should not be surprised at the vigorous counter-reaction of human cultures
against such systems.
In the light of this analysis it now becomes clear why, with the best
will in the world, all principled revolutions have ended up diminishing human
variety and freedom in their societies. For a revolution to be truly freeing it
must be unprincipled, in the sense that its intentions do not rest on a
predictive theory of human social behavior. Principles in this sense must be
sharply distinguished from values , which are much more complex products and
guides of human history, including within them the non-linear flexibility and
creativity of their past. The
American Revolution was an unpricipled revolution, which is why it succeeded
when so many failed. But unlike
most later revolutions it did not question the great values of human life, and
indeed recommitted itself to them. Such
principles as the American revolution possessed, enshrined in the Constitution,
really amount to a declaration of regulated intellectual anarchy or
unprincipledness. The separation of powers, which is, more than equality and
more even than democracy, the central message of the Constitution and the
thematic undertone of every article, is an intuitive recognition of the
reflexive, self-organizing, unpredictable, feedback nature of history, which by
reinterpreting its initial conditions is able to forget them.
Separation of powers makes politics into a drama, not a treatise. Perhaps
the true hidden presence behind the Constitution is William Shakespeare. All the
world's a stage. We are all actors, in both senses of the word. Our inherent
value derives from that condition, not from Kant's notion that we are ends in
ourselves. We can still keep our dignity even if we are, for immediate purposes,
means, as long as we are actors in the drama. Even if their function is to
serve, the crusty boatman or witty nurse or pushy saleslady are interpreting the
world from their own center, are characters, dramatis personae,
to be ignored by others at their peril; and are thus free.
But of course even this formulation
which I have made is itself a part of the situation it describes; it is a speech
in the play, to be evaluated by your own reflexive processes of assessment.
Let us see whether the line of thought it prompts is a more or less
freeing one than its competitors.
We immediately run up against a large problem. Does this critique of
historical and human studies mean that they must revert to the status of
chronicle and appreciative observation? Like amateur naturalists, must their
practitioners only be collectors, without testable hypotheses or laws? Should we
just admire the exquisite coiled turbulence of human events, wonder, and move
on? The French historian Fernand Braudel is almost such a historical naturalist;
there are moments as one contemplates his great colorful, slowly roiling paisley
of Mediterranean history, seemingly without direction or progress, that one
could wish for little more out of history.
Should not the historian be a sort of Giacomo Casanova, a picaro among
the courts and sewers of eternal Europe or China, remarking and "thickly
describing" the choice beauties to be seen on one's travels?
On the face of it, a very attractive approach; but it abdicates that very
activity--holistic understanding and the enrichment of the world by
interpretation--that characterizes the human Umwelt, the human species-world,
itself. The admonition not to totalize is the most totalitarian command of all,
because it essentially dehumanizes history. The feedback process of human
culture is a feedback of what deconstructionists would call totalizations. The
open-endedness of history is created by the competition and accommodation of
various candidates for the last word, the dernier cri, the formula of closure
(including this one); it is an ecology of absolutisms.
Nor is this ecology a random play of flows, without direction or growth;
technology, records, and enduring works of art constitute ratchets which prevent
any return to earlier, less complex states of the system, just as genetic
inheritance did in earlier ages. Thus history is an evolutionary system, with
the three factors required for evolution to take place: variation (provided by
the unpredictable paisley of reflexive events), selection (provided by the
competition and accommodation of "totalizations"), and inheritance, a
conservative ratchet to prevent what is of advantage from being lost.
We are already embarked on the venture of making sense of things.
The only way open is to seek forms of understanding and descriptive
categories that are proper to our own level of reflexive complexity. To do this
is essentially an artistic, a constructive, a performative, a religious
activity, and it cannot fully depend on the capacity for calculation by which we
claim to understand the rest of the natural world.
History is an art, even a technology, even a liturgy, as much as it is a
science; and it is so not only in the activity of historiography, but also in
that of research.
I am proposing, in other words, a change in our fundamental paradigm of
historical and human study. And here another set of major scientific advances
comes into play. Most workers in the historical and sociological fields still
accept the cultural determinism that was one of the first naive responses of the
West to the cultural diversity of the newly-discovered nonwestern world. Thus
for them the units of historical study, human beings, are tabulae rasae, blank
sheets to be inscribed by cultural conditioning or economic pressures.
More recently, however, in fields as diverse as cultural anthropology,
linguistics, twin-studies, paleoanthropology, human evolution, psychophysics,
performance studies, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, folklore and mythology, and
ethology, it is becoming clear that we human beings bring to history and society
an enormously rich set of innate capacities, tendencies, and exclusive
potentials. We uncannily choose,
again and again, the same kinds of poetic meters, kinship classifications,
calendars, myths, funerals, stories, decorative patterns, musical scales,
performance traditions, rituals, food-preparation concepts, grammars, and
symbolisms. We are not natureless. Indeed, our natures include, genetically,
much of the cultural experience of our species in that period of one to five
million years of nature-culture overlap during which our biological evolution
had not ceased, while our cultural evolution had already begun: the period in
which unwittingly we domesticated and bred ourselves into our humanity. The
shape and chemistry of our brains is in part a cultural artifact. We are deeply
written and inscribed already, we have our own characters, so to speak, when we
come from the womb.
Having taken away one kind of rationality from historical and human
studies, we may be able to replace it with another. But in so doing are we not
committing the very sin, of reducing a self-organizing and unpredictable order
to a set of deterministic laws, of which we accuse the determinist historians?
Are we not replacing cultural or economic determinism with biological
determinism? Not at all. First, to understand the principles governing the
individual elements of a complex system is, as we have seen, not sufficient to
be able to educe laws to predict the behavior of the whole ensemble. The
beautiful paisleys of atmospheric turbulence are not explained by the most
precise understanding of the individual properties--atomic weight, chemical
structure, specific heat, and so on--of its elements. Second, the peculiar
understanding of the human being that we are coming to is of a creature
programmed rather rigidly and in certain specific ways to do something that is
totally open-ended: to learn and to create. Our hardwiring--whose proper
development we neglect in our education at great peril--is designed to make us
infinitely inventive. Our nature is a grammar which we must learn to use
correctly, and which, if we do, makes us linguistically into protean gods, able
to say anything in the world or out of it.
Thus the paradigm change which this line of argument suggests is from one
in which a social universe of natureless, culturally determined units is
governed by a set of causal laws and principles which, given precise input, will
generate accurate predictions, to one in which a cultural universe of
complex-natured but knowable individuals, by the interaction and feedback of
their intentions, generates an ever-changing social pattern or paisley, which
can be modelled but not predicted. The meaning of understanding would change
from being able to give a discursive or mathematical account of something to
being able to set up a working model that can do the same sorts of things as the
original.
Fundamental political concepts like freedom, war, civil order, equality,
literacy, power, justice, sovereignty and so on would no longer be defined in
terms of a set of objective abstract conditions but as living activities in a
one-way unrepeatable process of historical change. It would be such a
revaluation as occurred in literary criticism in the nineteenth century, when
tragedy came to be defined as a process, an organic and recognizable activity,
rather than as conforming to such rules as the Three Unities.
Objective and abstract definitions of political concepts imply utopias,
ideal principled social states towards which historical polities should strive;
satisfy the definitions, and we have perfection, the end of history, an
objective rationality to judge all of the past!
Horrible idea; but it governs most political enthusiasm. Instead, let us
imagine a peculiar kind of progress--not the old one, towards Whig empire or
Hegelian state or proletarian or socialist or technological paradise, but a
progress in changing terms which themselves progress by subsuming earlier ones;
a progress that looks like decline or stagnation to those fixed to one idea of
it; a progress not along a straight time-line but along one that curves back and
fills up the holes in itself until it begins to look like a plane or a solid; a
progress forged out of the evolutionary competition of totalizations, in which
those most accommodating, most loving to each other, like the mammals, have the
best chance of survival.
And here we may be in a position to begin to redeem that promise, of
forms of understanding and descriptive categories proper to our own level of
reflexive complexity, which we implied earlier. The real forces at work on the
stage of history are values. And
values are uniquely qualified for a role both as tools to understand history and
as forces at work in it. One qualification is just that: they straddle the
worlds of action and knowledge, they admit candidly our involvement, our
partisanship, our partiality and our power. Objectivity in a historian is an
impossible goal in any case. Another qualification of values is that they give a
kind of direction to history, the possibility of progress, which is the logical
precondition of any inquiry. Values are essentially dynamic, readjusting,
contested, vigorous, as the word's derivation from the Latin for
"health," and its cognate "valor" imply.
We must reexamine those older partisan brands of historiography that wore
their values on their sleeves: heroic, exemplary, mythic history. Perhaps their
intellectual credentials were not as shaky as we thought; perhaps they were not
so naively unaware of the possibility of their own bias.
It might well be objected that I am advocating an outrageous abandonment
of objectivity, and giving license to the worst forms of ethnocentrism and
prejudice. Indeed I must plead guilty, but with mitigating circumstances. It was
the age of "objective" history that provided the fuel for scientific
racism, holocausts, colonialism, and the Gulag. The ideologue who believes he
has objective truth on his side is more dangerous than the ordinary patriot or
hero, because he calls his values "facts" and will disregard all
ordinary human values in their service. We are going to be ethnocentric anyway;
let us at least play our ethnocentrisms against each other on a level
playing-field and not attempt to get the objective high ground of each other.
Given such a game, adaptive success in the long run attends those versions of
our partisanship that have the widest, panhuman, appeal. Let us seek not to
avoid bias, but to widen our bias in favor of the whole human race, and beyond.
This approach especially questions the apparently straightforwardness of
the notion of political power. Events occur, and their meaning is rich and
complex. The events are made up of the actions of men and women; and if they
performed those actions then, tautologically, they had the power to do so. Do we
gain anything by inserting the idea of power? Suppose they didn't perform the
actions; could they have? Could we prove it? Power depends on values, and values
on the individual and collective imagination.
This means that the capacity to recognize beauty, the esthetic sense, is
the primary cognitive skill of the historian or sociologist. It is by beauty
that we intuit the order of the reflexive process of human history. On the
small, tribal scale the need for this essential function may well have been one
of the principal selective pressures that led us toward our extraordinary
inherited talents at storytelling and the interpretation of narrative. History
should be refounded on story, not the other way round.
The redescription of values as the strange attractors of certain complex
systems, especially human ones, rather neatly solves many of the problems
thinkers in various disciplines have had in identifying the nature of
values--problems so severe that many have denied the existence of values
altogether. Existing descriptions
include the following:
1. Values are clear,
intelligible ideal forms in the mind of God.
This description catches the transcendent flavor of values, the demand
they make for compliance, and the sense we have that they should be eternal and
independent of particular circumstances and appearances.
But it misses their rootedness in actual human situations, their cultural
setting, the extreme difficulty people have in discerning when and if they
apply, their processual nature, and the infinite subtlety and ambiguity they
display, especially in the work of the finest artists and moralists.
2. Values are nothing more
than abstract reifications of personal feelings, that can and should change when
those feelings change. This
description has the advantage of dismissing the problem, but it is now clear
that civil culture and personal happiness are impossible on this basis; and even
if values are such an illusion, they are an illusion shared by such large
communities of human beings that they constitute a social fact.
A huge, value-shaped hole is left in human language if this definition is
accepted, one which would be as hard to negotiate around as if we were to decide
that all ocular vision were simply a neural illusion.
Nevertheless, there seems to be some intuitive truth in the notion that
values have an internal, personal, and subjective dimension; and that they have
an immanent quality, and cannot be divorced from the processes in which they
arise--observations that should be saved in any more satisfactory account of the
matter.
3. Values are the
culturally-relative norms generated by particular societies to justify and
reinforce the power of the dominant ruling group to pursue its interests.
This description again avoids the problem, but only by substituting two
even more questionable abstractions ("power" and "society")
for the supposed abstractions of value. What
"interests" might consist of in a world in which values were entirely
relative is hard to say. Why
ordinary people should feel a duty to conform to values--why it is a value to
adhere to values--is also not addressed. Yet
this description has the virtue of pointing to something systematic and global
in the nature of values, involving complex relationships among a number of
players--another feature that must not be lost in a more accurate account.
4. Values are the human
terms for the genetically-determined evolutionary imperatives of our species.
This description ignores the very strong experience people report that
their values are bound up intimately with their personal freedom, the very thing
that separates us from the supposed automatism of lower animals.
It also contains a troublesome flaw in logic: if we are genetically
programmed to follow these evolutionary imperatives, we would have no need for
social and cultural norms and prohibitions: if people did not at times
wish to steal, lie, kill, disobey their parents and commit adultery, there would
be no need for the ten commandments. Other
animals have no decalogue. On the
other hand, this description points to very important characteristics of values:
that they largely transcend cultural differences, that they are rooted in our
evolutionary history, that they are ideally conducive to the survival of
ourselves and our fellow living things, and that they involve a tension between
individual and collective interests (for instance, in the sociobiological
account of altruism).
The beauty of the "strange attractor" description of values is
that it nicely includes all the characteristics of values that this analysis
suggests, while avoiding the flaws in the existing definitions.
Strange attractors are immanent in the processes they attract, yet have
an integrity, even an eternal and unchanging quality, that transcends them (the
Lorenz attractor exists before and after the particular dripping faucet or
rotating globular star-cluster it describes).
Strange attractors do not determine which data point will come next, but
rather the global shape of the ensemble of data points.
Though the data points (in so-called "deterministic chaos") are
indeed in an abstract sense deterministic, the universe itself, with its quantum
graininess and indeterminacy, does not have enough acuity and indeed data
processing power to predict their exact location in advance, and thus such
processes are for all practical purposes both unpredictable and ordered, a very
fine match with our minimum conditions for freedom.
Freedom, one of our supreme values and also a precondition for most other
values, resists any attempt at reduction to either traditional notions of order
or traditional notions of randomness--if freedom is traditional order, then it
is deterministic and not free, but if it is traditional randomness (the acte
gtatuit of the existentialists) its essential quality of responsibility is lost.
The unpredictable emergence of Prigoginian dissipative structures from
chaotic interactions, drawn by strange attractors, similarly defies traditional
notions of order and randomness.
Biological evolution, with its iterative algorithm of variation,
selection, and genetic inheritance, and its massively nonlinear ecological arena
of selection, is a fecund womb of strange attractors.
Among these, values might well be among the most complex and
sophisticated, since they arise out of the further interplay of biological and
cultural evolution. Strange
attractors, unlike drives or instincts, however, have the engaging if
frustrating feature that they can never be fully achieved; new data points can
always can be added that will deepen and enrich the detail, revealing new
self-similar but not self-identical depths.
Thus the requirement of a tension between the ideal and the real is
preserved. Drives push; attractors invite, or pull, in an unpredictable
way. Strange attractors have room
for both global collective features, and individual idiosyncrasies. The "meta" quality of values--it is a value to have
values--is also addressed by the essentially recursive, reflexive,
self-transcending character of strange attractors and the conditions of their
emergence. Further, it is a moot
point whether even the entire network of human social, cultural, technological
and economic feedbacks and communications over the globe is yet as complex and
multidimensional as the interconnections of a single human brain and nervous
system--a reflection that nicely suggests the importance of the individual
conscience in discerning and generating values. Finally, the oddity of these attractors when we try to fit
them into our existing categories--are they physical objects, or processes, or
relationships, or adjectival or adverbial qualities, or entities, or
abstractions, or essences, or tendencies, or vectors, or mathematical
idealizations, or what?--exactly matches our puzzlement when we try to identify
values.
If this identification of values as strange attractors can be upheld, the
implications for the discipline of history and the human sciences are enormous.
In seeking the key principles of historical change, social organization,
and economic development in forces or drives that force and push society and
individuals, we may have been deeply neglecting these mysterious, yet
increasingly intelligible, attractors that invite and draw society and
individuals. Even assuming we could
exactly specify the origins of present events, unlikely in the light of our
present understanding of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, the past
may be important not as the determinative cause of the present but as an archive
of value-attractors for future development. It may turn out that the real reason why human beings do
things is not that they are compelled into them by socio-economic causes or
political and cultural norms, but that they are attracted to them by their
goodness and their beauty.
[Fred
replies & Dan's Last word: On reflection, it was probably a mistake to
send this essay. It condenses
together material that is discussed in detail in nine of my books--Natural
Classicism; Beauty, the Value of Values: Essays on Literature and Science;
Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education; The
Culture of Hope; Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future; Biopoetics:
Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (an edited volume that clearly makes
the case for human universals and natural law, a very lively topic today in
evolutionary psychology and games-theory replication dynamics);
Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics; and the as yet unpublished Seven
Blind Men and an Elephant: A Study in the Interpretation of Religion. My
work on poetic meter has been tested in several scientific studies, but might
well sound odd to someone coming across it for the first time after a century of
(now-discredited) free verse theory. In
addition, the essay probably doesn't make sense without a knowledge of my two
science fiction epic poems, Genesis and The New World.
Dan ends it: Chronologically is the best way to engage such things- but 1st,
let me state 1 of the reasons I started the Cosmoetica website, other than
seeking to find publication for me & the other unpublished writers- that is
to actually engage ideas without having to kow-tow to people’s weak images of
themselves. My hope was to get people saying in public all the shit they hold
back & merely gossip about each other. The example of Carolyn Forché in my latest essay
is par for the course. When I bother criticize something it is almost always
because there is something worth the criticism- the vapid are just that. Having
deflated numerous literary ‘personalities’ in public, having endured reams
of hate emails, gone to court against a harasser from the TC press corps, staved
off a # of death threats & lawsuits, it’s always a disappointment when 1
merely has to defend the right to disagree- especially when the crux of
difference lies with the idea- not the author. Also, for me to post an essay so
very different in POV from my own takes on life & art- & not rebut-
would open me up to a valid charge of Forchévian hypocrisy: “What, just cuz
that guy’s a published writer Dan won’t stand up to him?” Sadly, such
simpering sentiments are rampant in the callow minds of too many artists- trust
me on that 1, Fred! That said- a brief commentary: 1) I don’t think free verse
theory is discredited; I think pretty much all poetic theory is- & slowly I
will knock them off 1-by-1. My next big S&D will probably be on the 20th
C’s Grand Critical Poseur- Randall Jarrell, & after that I’ll probably
take aim at the New Critics or the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Surrealist/Concrete/Abstract/Beatnik/Projectivist/Objectivist,
etc. Schools- you’ll probably love that 1! 2) I’ve read & own The New
World- didn’t think it good nor bad- but as with most long poems it could
have been alot less-& subsequently given alot more. My wife Jessica [who
incidentally took a class of yours @ UT-Dallas when her maiden name was Lester]
owns Genesis- but I’ve not read it. 3) As for Cage & the boys-
obviously there is structure; that they cannot see it, or willfully deny it is
cute, but no one really takes that seriously save a few of their suckbuds who
have a vested interest in things such as the vaunted Cult Of John (Ashbery- not
Cage). 4) That you say the essay was not possible to be understood seems
specious- but I ‘got’ it- that we disagree seems to not be a reasonable
cause to backpedal- but ultimately the folk who read this piece- here or
elsewhere/elsewhen- will decide on its success or not. 5) Those who know me
personally, & even just from a gleaning of my poems or essays online, would
be hard-pressed to find anxiety. Also, I read little fiction- most of my
non-poetic reading (from childhood on) is of science, cultural knick-knackery
from psi & religious/mythic stuff to pro sports & all sorts of
crapola- to quote Archie Bunker. Perhaps 1 of these days, if I’ve the
time & my poetic well [always the #1 priority!] runs dry I’ll try to
synthesize the common threads between art theories, science, pseudoscience,
religion, political screedism, paranormal beliefs, etc. There’s a guy named
David Icke, who’s apparently a Brit culty/sci fi writer on the order of L. Ron
Hubbard, who had some anti-Semitic screed floating around & forwarded to me
about the ‘Illuminati’. Here were a lot of the same techniques in that piece
that were in this- or any art theory I’ve read. I just feel if more folk spent
time attempting to maximize their art- it would improve. I don't aim to be
contrarian- just to cut through the BS that comes from all over- right or left,
Formal or Free Verse, etc. Most theories stack up as rationales to explain
failure. I’m sure you would agree if I turned that quote on Pollock. I just
applied it in another direction. 6) As for ‘Soft White’:
I saw them in ’79 as the overcard for The Godz- damn smokin’
shit they played! Ask Ben if you don’t get what I mean! In ending, as for
Academics- white we can agree on- the question is ‘soft or dead?’
La Chaim!
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