Arrow of chaos : romanticism and postmodernity

272 Pages·1997·18.01 MB·English

by  Livingston

Arrow of Chaos
Sandra Buckley
Michael Hardt
Brian Massumi
THEORy OUT OF B O U N DS
...UNCONTAINED
BY
THE
DISCIPLINES,
INSUBORDINATE
PRACTICES OF RESISTANCE
9 Arrow of Chaos: ...Inventing,
Romanticism and Postmodernity Ira Livingston
excessively,
8 Becoming-Woman Camilla Griggers
in the between...
7 Radical Thought in Italy:
A Potential Politics Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, editors
6 Capital Times:
PROCESSES
Tales from the Conquest of Time Eric Alliez
5 The Year of Passages Reda Bensmaia
4 Labor of Dionysus;
A Critique of the State-Form Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
OF
3 Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition,
Media, and Technological Horizons Eric Michaels
2 The Cinematic Body Steven Shaviro
1 The Coming Community Giorgio Agamben HYBRIDIZATION
Arrow of Chaos
Romanticism and Postmodernity
Ira Livingston
Theory out of Bounds Volume 9
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
"Gains" and "Composition," from Bei Dao, Old Snow, copyright 1991 by Bei Dao, are reprinted
by permission of New Directions Publishing; Wallace Stevens, "Of Mere Being," from Opus Posthumous,
copyright 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens, and lines from "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,"
from Collected Poems, copyright 1942 by Wallace Stevens, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
and Faber and Faber, Ltd.; William Tay's translation of Gu Cheng's "Curve," from After Mao: Chinese Literature and
Society, 1978-1981, edited by Jeffrey C. Kinkley (Council on East Asian Studies, 1985),
reprinted by permission of Professor Tay and the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University;
and W. B. Yeats, "Second Coming," from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran,
copyright 1924 by Macmillian, renewed 1952 by B. G. Yeats, reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster and by
permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd., on behalf of Michael Yeats.
Chapter 6, "Traffic in Leeches," appeared in American Imago and is reprinted in revised form
with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Livingston, Ira, 1956-
Arrow of chaos : romanticism and postmodernity / Ira Livingston.
p. cm. — (Theory out of bounds ; v. 9)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2794-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8166-2795-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Chaotic behavior in systems in literature. 3. Romanticism.
4. Romanticism. 5. Postmodernism (Literature) I. Title.
II. Series.
PN771.L588 1997
809'.04 —dc20
96-21764
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is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xv
chapter 1. Introduction 1
Romantic Machinery l
Romanticism and Postmodernity 5
Romantic Chaos 7
Romanticism and Romanticism 9
Metastibility and Metastability 11
History Moves like a Snake 12
Worlds in Collision 14
Posthumanities 18
Panopticon and Pi: The School of Mirrors 2 0
chapter 2. Horrors of Order and Disorder 33
Reversal, Turning Inside Out, Horizontalization 3 4
Mixture and Fixture: Political Thermodynamics in Burke and Paine 4 2
The Hegemony of Hegemony: Wordsworth's Fractal Distinction 4 8
Mixing Mixture and Fixture: "The Clod and the Pebble" 5 3
Counterperformativity and Self-Difference: Elisabeth Hands 5 4
In the Wake of the Book: "The Mask of Anarchy" 5 8
The Roughness of the Beast: "The Second Coming" 61
chapter 3. Fractal Logics of Romanticism:
Concentricity and Eccentricity 69
Wheel within Wheel: Blake's Recursive Physics 6 9
Irony: A Vortex amid Vortices 8 4
Gyroscopophilia: Wordsworth's "Slumber" 9 0
Time in the School of Mirrors: "Tintern Abbey" and "Frost at Midnight" 104
Nesting-Doll Narrators: Frankenstein 111
Postmodern Postscript: Concentric Collapse in Twin Peaks 119
chapter 4. Fractal Logics of Romanticism: Binary Decomposition 123
Introduction: Paine's Headless Hydra 123
Gender in the School of Mirrors: Frankenstein 125
The Romantic Double-Cross: Keats's Letters 135
Interference of Text and Work in Stevens's "Palm" 148
chapter 5. Fractal Logics of Romanticism: Rhythming 159
Introduction: Romantic Dysrhythmia 159
Blake's Cycles 168
Irresolution and Interdependence 181
Parkinsonism, Romanticism, Postmodernism: Neurology as Ideology 183
chapter 6. Postmodern Postscript 199
The Traffic in Leeches: Cronenberg's Rabid and
the Semiotics of Parasitism 199
The Ends of Dreams 213
Some Semiotic Panoctopi 223
Chinese Romanticism, Postmodernity, and "Obscure Poetry" 229
Works Cited 243
Index 249
Preface
To begin, I'll try to indicate punctually what I think this book is about, and in the
process to suggest why punctuality is to an extent inimical to what this book is
about.
Arrow of Chaos is a "chaology of knowledge" insofar as it is a
study of chaos as a logic at work in epistemological processes. "Romanticism" and
"postmodernity" name the blurry beginnings and ends of a modernity that is for-
ever chasing its own tail.
In what sense do the historical and cultural formations of Ro-
manticism and postmodernity cohere in or between themselves, or as appropriate
objects for a chaology? In what sense does "chaos" (or "chaos theory") itself cohere
as a paradigm or logic? While I sometimes address these questions in the chapters
that follow, I do so less to resolve and more to sustain and/or displace what I hope
to show are generative ambiguities and constitutive contradictions in formations for
which discombobulation is as definitive as coherence.
Chaologies often identify certain thresholds (sometimes called
"singularities") at which occur "spontaneous self-organization" or "emergent behav-
ior" or "order out of chaos." This last formula is misleading since what follows a sin-
gularity may be more like another kind of order (or chaos) more or less at odds with
the order/chaos that precedes it and that may be ongoingly necessary to sustain it: this
contingency is why "self-organization" is also misleading if construed as simple au-
tonomy. Romantic ideologies of "self and "organism" continue to be involved in
generating these constructions and misconstruals.
Manuel De Landa, in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, rounds
up some of the usual suspects to illustrate one form of self-organization, so-called
"spontaneous cooperative behavior":
The individual spin of atoms in a metal "cooperate" to make the metal magnetic;
the individual molecules in a chemical reaction "cooperate" to create the perfectly
rhythmic patterns of a chemical clock; the cells making up an amoeba colony "cooperate"
under certain conditions to assemble an organism with differentiated organs;
and the different termites in a colony "cooperate" to build a nest. (7)
It would be possible to assert that these phenomena are related
metaphorically insofar as metaphor proposes a similarity between essentially differ-
ent realms. Here, though, De Landa puts the word "cooperate" in scare quotes to
indicate that it is only apparently an anthropomorphizing metaphor, but also that
metaphor cannot simply be dispensed with: the question of how a certain human
intentionality (e.g., "cooperation") has been attributed to nature should not assume
the difference between them; rather, we would have to look at how certain practices
(ideologies, technologies, and so on) differentiate "human" and "natural" by establish-
ing various correspondences and oppositions between them, and also, then, to use
this inquiry to question how human intentionality has been attributed to humans.
The notorious unscientificity of metaphor may enable the "got-
cha" effect of showing the absolute reliance of science upon metaphor, but at what
points does this dialectic begin to compromise the distinction between metaphor and
science? Taking another tack, would it be possible also to maintain that metaphor is
a process in nature, that "poetics" also has purchase on the world typically thought
to be monopolized by science, and not exclusively by critiquing science as a second-
order simulation? These are open questions.
Unfortunately, it is against metaphor that De Landa casts "re-
cent advances in experimental mathematics" as finding "deep" similarities between
the only apparently very different processes he assembles (7). In other words, De
Landa claims his examples as cognate epiphenomena of a single and definitive ab-
stract law (or "gene" or "machine"), more like an identity among members of the same
realm (dubbed "the machinic phylum" after Deleuze) and thus not metaphorical.
Clearly, De Landa doesn't want military historians to find that they're reading a book
on poetics. But setting aside De Landa's revamped Enlightenment masternarrative
v i i i, i x
of scientific progress, and even allowing the "depth" of the "family resemblance" he
remarks, what the resemblance means in practice—how it can be lived — remains an
open question: it may mean that some reconfigured discipline (probably not poet-
ics, but I'll do my best) could claim partial authority to study termite colonies and
magnets, but what opportunities and constraints does it offer for those who are or-
ganized only partly by the "emergent behavior" in question? Do termites and mag-
nets enjoy some special intimacy? Affiliations always sprawl across categories, and if
an organism is always a provisional (and high-maintenance) affiliation of multiple
and contradictory constraints and reducible to no single one of these (i.e., a "fuzzy
set"), why talk about an underlying identity? "Singularity" comes into question in turn;
metaphor opens up into a catachrestic and centerless orbit — a tail-chasing—which
is the kind of about that this book is about: less referentiality (about as "in regard to")
and more of a "strange attractor" (about as "around; by a circuitous way; here and
there").
Returning, then, to De Landa's assemblage, what does it mean
that the apparently scientific phrase "spontaneous cooperative behavior" seems to
be a roughly precise description of the effect of a kind of power (a typically modern
and postmodern power) already described in cultural theory as "hegemony"? To be-
gin with, looking at how scientists are "constructing" nature (and mathematics) in
the image of postmodern power may be a necessary—politicizing—step in correct-
ing the aestheticizing and scientizing that are rampant in the discourse of fractals
and chaos. I get tired of hearing the mandate that humanists must learn to engage
scientists on their (the scientists's) terms and to fight for a piece of the high ground
of "objectivity" and "truth," but maybe this mandate is better received as a perfor-
mative imperative (whose meaning is its always partial and selective recruitment
function) rather than a totalizing edict. In any case, it seems important to demon-
strate to one's own satisfaction that one who believes he has discovered an objective
fact of nature is only looking through the wrong end of an epistemological tele-
scope at his own cultural navel; however, as everyone knows, scientists are mostly
licensed to care almost nothing for such a "gotcha" — or may even laugh with you,
as they say, all the way to the bank (where you've got an account, too). In frustra-
tion, one may be driven to engage a more difficult double mandate: neither/both to
cop a certain authority by scientizing, nor/and to show how scientific claims are
driven and shaped — or at the very least thoroughly inflected — by economic and
political logics. At least, a historical truth-effect may be recognizable in its charac-
teristic doubling back onto itself: to study the "emergence of emergence" must be
to throw the paradigm back into its historicity. As in poetic self-reference, this dou-
P r e fa ce