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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.

The ramifications of this predicament confronted us wherever we turned. For instance, themost fundamental problem of any natural philosophy is time. We were faced with threedifficult choices in talking about the relationship between the the past and the future: one isthat some external and ineffable divine will governs the relationship and makes it partlyintelligible and meaningful; one is that the relationship is deterministic, and that the past causesthe future in a linear and mechanical way; and the third is that the relationship is essentiallyrandom, and that any sense it seems to make is in our perception of it only.The problem with divine will is that it simply begs the question: how does

God

know what toordain, what is good and valuable? And can God's will meaningfully be free, if its future stateis only random with respect to its past? If freedom is simply randomness, is not God's will, inthe absence of a further, superior divine guarantee of its validity (which would be subject to thesame objection), simply autocratic whim, arbitrary in the worst sense? But would it not beworse still if God's future state were deterministically governed by His past state--how couldGod be free in any sense if this were so? And should we obey a God who is less free--less,therefore, of a person--than we are? This was Socrates' question: is an act good because thegods will it, or do the gods will it because it is good?Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one, for freedom and value andmeaning appear impossible within them--though great philosophers in the tradition of Nietzsche have struggled to assert them nevertheless. But given the potential for abuse inherentin the deterministic position, it seemed safest to opt for a more or less random relationshipbetween the past and the future, despite the fact that if this were the case, memory andexperience would be completely useless. At least we could individually

perceive

events asmeaningful and valuable. One person's perception would be as good as another's, so therecould be no political repression. And then--it began to look promising--we could hold theuniverse to be unknowable because inherently random, and dismiss all science and all objectiveknowledge as irrelevant, or simply the means to rationalize the political interests of thepowerful. Did not quantum theory, if we squeezed it a little and did not look too closely at itsbeautiful 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, as we have already seen.But then, the knots and toils we tied ourselves into when we tried to profess views such asthese! We had discovered a new sin: involuntary hypocrisy--hypocrisy when we were mostdesperately trying to avoid it. When we opted for simple disorder and randomness, we werefaced with the problems of how to

mean

the destruction of meaning? how to publish thediscrediting of publication and public? how to achieve an institutional position, say in the

University of Paris, when institutions are the legacy of the past and thus based on sadisticrepression? how to attack hierarchy in a language with a syntactical tree and grammaticalsubordination? how to get paid for copyrights where payment must be in the coin of mimeticdesire and copyright is the quintessence of commodification? how, even, to act with a bodypossessed of an immune system of quite military rigor, and a nervous system strikingly unifiedunder central control?And can freedom, seriously, be the same as random or disordered behavior? According toclassical physics the universe becomes more disordered over time, that is, less intelligible andless 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 beautifulordered universe about us? Intention takes a highly organized brain; can the only free intentionbe that which would tend to disorganize that brain and disable intention itself? What becomesof 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 beheld responsible for our actions?Until recently the best that we could do with the available intellectual tools in cobbling up somekind of reasonable account of the universe, and of our own freedom, was to devise some kindof combination between order and randomness, linear determinism and disordered noise. Thetitle 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 freedomof the human brain as a combination of random mutations and relatively deterministicselection, the

clinamen

of the random swerve and the

ananke

of the survival of the fittest, asmapped onto a genome that would record and reproduce the results.But even here there were deep and subtle theoretical objections. Although evolution wasclearly a fact, its precise mechanism was under heavy debate. Several mysteries complicatedthe picture. One was that evolution seemed to proceed in sudden jumps, not gradually; a newspecies did not seem to emerge slowly but rather leap into being as if drawn by a premonitionof its eventual stable form. Another was the odd bootstrap logic of species and their ecologicalniches; without the right suite of species, the ecological niche wouldn't exist; but without theecological niche, the species wouldn't. How do new niches emerge? Again, from a purelyintuitive point of view even four billion years didn't seem nearly enough to produce thestaggering 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; especiallywhen, as was the case, the huge majority of present species only evolved in the last few tens of millions of years, and most of the major classes and phyla in the last few hundred million.Other problems, like the fact that RNA, which can be altered by the experience of an individual