Some readings from Frederick Turner on translation, semiotics, chaos, and evolutionFROM
THE CULTURE OF HOPE
(The Free Press, Fall 1994)Dissolving the Order-Disorder Dualism: Self-Ordering Chaos
Though the avant garde professes to anathematize all dualisms as leading to the hierarchicalprivileging of one term of the duality over the other, it is itself just as prone to dualism as anyother system of human thought. One of its most subtly paralyzing dualisms is the apparentlyharmless one between order and disorder. The idea of hope as liberation, under which we havelabored for so many years, is especially prone to the corruptions of this dualism. For instance,if order means predictability, and predictability means predetermination, and predeterminationmeans compulsion, and compulsion means unfreedom, the only way we can be free is if we aredisordered. The failed hopes of the last two centuries have been founded upon a deepdiscomfort 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 beinganything other than momentary individual preference.We have found ourselves forced by the logic of the duality to choose the random, thedisordered, the arbitrary, the
acte gratuite,
the unconditioned, the weightless, the unfurrowed.What, after all, were the alternatives? We could submit ourselves to the TranscendentalSignified, the old man with the white beard, Nobodaddy Himself, the ancestral authority figurewho bars the doors against our franchise, our potential for achievement, our free play of art, oursexuality, our political identity and self-expression. Or we could accept that the world was adead machine and we were merely parts of that machine, linear and deterministic. We wouldthus be fated to some kind of mechanistic social order determined by our genes, by the physicsof 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 thescientists and psychologists and sociologists and businessmen and commissars who preachedmaterialist determinism were really just the old white-bearded patriarchs and racial oppressorsin disguise. The psychic determinism of the nineteenth century, which had proven soconvenient when we wanted to argue that we had no choice but to follow the command of desire, could also be used to sanction sexist gender roles. The social determinism justifiedoppression, the historical determinism justified war, the biological determinism justified ideasof racial superiority.
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