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Values and Strange AttractorsFrederick TurnerOne of our most subtly paralyzingdualisms is the apparently harmless one between order and disorder. The idea ofartistic liberation, under which we have labored for so many years, is especiallyprone to the corruptions of this dualism. For instance, if order meanspredictability, and predictability means predetermination, and predeterminationmeans compulsion, and compulsion means unfreedom, the only way we can be free isif we are disordered. The failed artistic hopes of the last two centuries havebeen founded upon a deep discomfort with the idea of order, and what are taken tobe its close relatives: hierarchy, foundationalism, norms, and essences--even withvalue itself, if value is conceived of as being anything other than momentaryindividual preference.We have found ourselves forced by the logic of the dualityto choose the random, the disordered, the arbitrary, the acte gratuit, theunconditioned, the weightless, the unfurrowed--over the ordered, the intelligible,the shapely, the traditional. Our art featured aleatory music, chance splotchingsof paint, the random word-choices of "language poetry"--John Cage, JacksonPollock, John Ashbery. What, after all, were the alternatives? We could submitourselves to the Transcendental Signified, the old man with the white beard,Nobodaddy Himself, the ancestral authority figure who bars the doors against ourfranchise, our potential for achievement, our free play of art, our sexuality, ourpolitical 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 would thus be fated to some kind of mechanistic social order determined by ourgenes, by the physics of our energy economy, by economic necessity orpsychological drives. Indeed, it began to look as if the second alternative wasjust a new avatar of the first, that the scientists and psychologists andsociologists and businessmen and commissars who preached materialist determinismwere really just the old white-bearded patriarchs and racial oppressors indisguise. Nobody wants either a random universe or a deterministic one, forfreedom and value and meaning appear impossible within them--though greatphilosophers in the tradition of Nietzsche have struggled to assert themnevertheless. But given the potential for abuse inherent in the deterministicposition, it seemed safest to opt for a definition of freedom as a randomrelationship between the past and the future. The problem is that if this werethe case, memory and experience would be completely useless, because to the extentthat I act on the basis of past experience, I would not be free. Any connectionwith tradition would be oppressive. The postmodernist solution was to makemeaning and value completely arbitrary, imposed at the whim of the individual. Atleast we could individually perceive events as meaningful and valuable. Oneperson's perception would be as good as another's, so there could be no politicalrepression. And then--it began to look promising--we could hold the universe tobe unknowable because inherently random, and dismiss all science and all objectiveknowledge as irrelevant, or simply the means to rationalize the politicalinterests of the powerful. Did not quantum theory, if we squeezed it a little anddid not look too closely at its beautiful mathematics, be made to say something ofthe same kind? Were not the white lab-coated ones condemned out of their ownmouths? And this is more or less the present state of deconstruction anddiscourse analysis in the arts.But then, the knots and toils we tied ourselvesinto 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 problemsof how to mean the destruction of meaning? how to publish the discrediting ofpublication and public? how to achieve institutional recognition, like JennyHolzer in the Whitney, when institutions are the legacy of the past and thus basedon sadistic repression? how to attack hierarchy in a language with a syntacticaltree 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 ofcommodification? how, even, to act with a body possessed of an immune system of
 
quite military rigor, and a nervous system strikingly unified under centralcontrol?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 littlecontribution to the universal process of increasing entropy? Is it our job asfree beings to assist in the destruction of this beautiful ordered universe aboutus? Intention takes a highly organized brain; can the only free intention be thatwhich would tend to disorganize that brain and disable intention itself? Whatbecomes of responsibility if freedom is randomness? Can we take credit for whatwe do that is good, if there is no responsibility? Can there be such a thing asjustice, for instance, if we cannot be held responsible for our actions?Untilrecently the best that we could do with the available intellectual tools incobbling up some kind of reasonable account of the universe, and of our ownfreedom, was to devise some kind of combination between order and randomness,linear determinism and disordered noise. The title of Jacques Monod's book onbiological evolution, Chance and Necessity , puts it well. Perhaps we coulddescribe both the emergence of new species and the originality and freedom of thehuman brain as a combination of random mutations and relatively deterministicselection. But even here there were deep and subtle theoretical objections.Evolution seemed to proceed in sudden jumps, not gradually; a new species did notseem to emerge slowly but rather leap into being as if drawn by a premonition ofits eventual stable form. Another objection: without the right suite of species,the ecological niche wouldn't exist; but without the ecological niche, the specieswouldn't. How do new niches emerge? Again, from a purely intuitive point of vieweven four billion years didn't seem nearly enough to produce the staggeringvariety and originality of form to be found among living species--birds ofparadise, and slime molds, and hermaphroditic parasitical orchids, and spermwhales, and all. Most disturbing of all, it became clear that the process ofdevelopment, by which a fertilized egg or seed multiplied and diversified itselfinto all the cells in all the correct positions necessary for an adult body, wasnot a mere following of genetic instructions embedded in the DNA blueprint, butwas an original and creative process in itself, which produced a unique individualout of a dynamic and open-ended interplay of cells. The miracle was that theinterplay could produce something in the end remotely resembling its twinsiblings, let alone its parents. It was as if the individual organism were drawntoward a beckoning form, and that the genes were not so much blueprints specifyingthat form, as gates permitting the developmental process to rush to itsconclusion. 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, orforms which draw an appropriately prepared human brain into a specificcompetence, like language? There seemed to be a huge mass of internal, newly-emergent laws and principles in such systems that we have hardly begun tounderstand--and where did they come from, all of a sudden?The dualism of order anddisorder was coming under increasing strain. But within the arts and humanitiesthe traditional avant-garde hatred of any kind of essentializing, hierarchizing,(biologically-) determinist, transcendentally significant and totalizing Order wasso ingrained that the more shaky that dualism became, the more passionately it wasasserted. The problem the avant garde was honestly trying to solve was that theonly alternative to repressive order that seemed to be offered was randomdisorder, or on the psychological level, whim. Suppose we were to try to specifywhat an escape from this predicament might look like philosophically. We wouldhave to distinguish between two kinds of order, a repressive, deterministic kind,and some other kind that would not have these disadvantages. We would also haveto distinguish between two kinds of chaos, one which was simply random, null, andunintelligible, 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 theantithesis 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 extraordinarything that has happened--an astonishing stroke of good luck, an earnest of hopefor the future--is that there really does seem to be the second kind of order, thesecond kind of chaos. And they do seem to be the same thing. This new kind oforder, or chaos, seemed to be at the heart of an extraordinary range ofinteresting problems that had appeared as philosophers, mathematicians,scientists, and cybernetic technologists tried to squeeze the last drops of theimponderable out of their disciplines. They included the biology and brainproblems already alludedto; the problem of how to describe catastrophic changes and singularities bymeans of a continuous mathematics; the problem of how to predict the future statesof positive feedback processes; Goedel's paradox, which detaches the true from theprovable; the description of phase-changes in crystallography andelectrochemistry; the phenomenon of turbulence; the dynamics of open systems andnonlinear processes; the observer problem in a variety of disciplines; the failureof sociological and economic predictive models because of the rationalexpectations and second-guessing of real human subjects; the theoreticallimitations of Turing machines (in certain circumstances they cannot turnthemselves off); the question of how to fit the fractal geometry of BenoitMandelbrot into orthodox mathematics; the classification of quasicrystals andPenrose tilings; the whole issue of self-reflection, bootstrapping and positivefeedback in general; and most troubling of all, the question of the nature oftime. In choosing the term "chaos" to describe this new imaginative andintellectual 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 itsiterative depth. But "antichaos" would have sounded too much like law 'n order toavant garde artists and humanists, who would have dismissed it as yet anotherpatriarchal Western mystification. Indeed, some humanists have taken "chaos" totheir 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 ofchaos (or antichaos) theory, we will need to go into the differences betweendeterministic linear order and chaotic emergent order, and between mere randomnessand creative chaos. Let us begin by considering an odd little thought experiment.Suppose we were trying to arrange a sonnet of Shakespeare in the mostthermodynamically ordered way, with the least entropy. We cannot, for the sake ofargument, break up the words into letters or the letters into line segments. Thefirst thing we would do--which is the only sort of thing a strict thermodynamicistcould do--is write the words out in alphabetical order: "a compare day I Shallsummer's thee to ?". As far as thermodynamics is concerned, such an arrangementwould be more ordered than the arrangement "Shall I compare thee to a summer'sday? . . . " as composed by Shakespeare. Here, in a capsule, is the differencebetween deterministic linear order and chaotic emergent order. We could even testthe thermodynamic order of the first arrangement by a further experiment.Suppose we coded the words in terms of gas molecules, arranged in a row, thehottest ones corresponding to the beginning of the alphabet, the coldest ones tothe end, and so on in alphabetical order. If left to themselves in a closedvessel the molecules would, because of the increase of entropy over time,rearrange themselves into random alphabetical order (the hot and cold would getevenly mixed). Just as in a steam engine, where the energy gradient between hotsteam and cold air can be used to do work, one would be able to employ themovement of molecules, as the alphabetized "sonnet" rearranged itself, to performsome (very tiny) mechanical task. And it would take somewhat more energy than wegot out to put the molecules back into alphabetical order, because of the secondlaw of thermodynamics.As arranged in Sonnet 18 those words are already in more orless "random" alphabetical order. Yet most human beings would rightly assert thatthe sonnet order is infinitely more ordered than the thermodynamic, linear,
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