Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-012
Wh a t in the present cultural moment has energized chaos as an important concept? Why does it appear as a pivotal concept for us here and now? I conjecture that disorder has become a focal point for contemporary theories because it offers the possibility of escaping from what are increasingly perceived as coercive structures of order. But in privileging disorder, theorists cannot extract themselves from the weight of their disciplinary traditions, even if they want to (and scientists, for the most part, do not want to). Thus there arise complex layerings in which traces of old paradigms are embedded within new, resistances to mastery are enfolded with impulses toward mastery, totalizing moves are made in the service of local knowledge. The convoluted ambiquity that arises from these layerings is the leitmotif of this chapter; it is deeply characteristic of what I shall call cultural postmodernism. For it to come into being, earlier paradigms first had to be understood as constructions rather than statements of fact. I define cultural postmodernism as the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions.1 We can think of this as a denaturing process. To denature
{"title":"10 Conclusion: Chaos and Culture: Postmodernism(s) and the Denaturing of Experience","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-012","url":null,"abstract":"Wh a t in the present cultural moment has energized chaos as an important concept? Why does it appear as a pivotal concept for us here and now? I conjecture that disorder has become a focal point for contemporary theories because it offers the possibility of escaping from what are increasingly perceived as coercive structures of order. But in privileging disorder, theorists cannot extract themselves from the weight of their disciplinary traditions, even if they want to (and scientists, for the most part, do not want to). Thus there arise complex layerings in which traces of old paradigms are embedded within new, resistances to mastery are enfolded with impulses toward mastery, totalizing moves are made in the service of local knowledge. The convoluted ambiquity that arises from these layerings is the leitmotif of this chapter; it is deeply characteristic of what I shall call cultural postmodernism. For it to come into being, earlier paradigms first had to be understood as constructions rather than statements of fact. I define cultural postmodernism as the realization that what has always been thought of as the essential, unvarying components of human experience are not natural facts of life but social constructions.1 We can think of this as a denaturing process. To denature","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"531 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123085194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-007
St a n i s l a w Le m has a formidable range of interests. Trained as a physician, he is seriously interested in mathematics, has taught himself cybernetics, possesses a good working knowledge of biology, knows quite a lot about cosmology, has read extensively in critical theory and philosophy, and writes in Polish, German, and English. The one thing he seems not to know is chaos theory— at least not in the explicit forms discussed earlier, in which chaos is identified with a new set of paradigms. When Lem writes about chaos, he understands it in the older sense of chance, randomness, disorder. Through his reading in cybernetics, he has had ample opportunity to learn about the principle of self-organization that underlies Prigogine’s work. However, he has not published anything to date that would indicate he has read Prigogine or knows about applications of the idea of self-organization to chaotic systems. Yet chaos is a topic of almost obsessive interest for Lem. His writing suggests that he considers accounting for randomness and disorder perhaps the most important issue in twentieth-century thought. Influenced both by his scientific training and by poststructuralism, he is concerned with the interaction between something and nothing as they collaborate to form human meanings. His fascination with disorder, his wide reading in cybernetics, and the influence of post-
{"title":"5 Chaos as Dialectic: Stanislaw Lem and the Space of Writing","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-007","url":null,"abstract":"St a n i s l a w Le m has a formidable range of interests. Trained as a physician, he is seriously interested in mathematics, has taught himself cybernetics, possesses a good working knowledge of biology, knows quite a lot about cosmology, has read extensively in critical theory and philosophy, and writes in Polish, German, and English. The one thing he seems not to know is chaos theory— at least not in the explicit forms discussed earlier, in which chaos is identified with a new set of paradigms. When Lem writes about chaos, he understands it in the older sense of chance, randomness, disorder. Through his reading in cybernetics, he has had ample opportunity to learn about the principle of self-organization that underlies Prigogine’s work. However, he has not published anything to date that would indicate he has read Prigogine or knows about applications of the idea of self-organization to chaotic systems. Yet chaos is a topic of almost obsessive interest for Lem. His writing suggests that he considers accounting for randomness and disorder perhaps the most important issue in twentieth-century thought. Influenced both by his scientific training and by poststructuralism, he is concerned with the interaction between something and nothing as they collaborate to form human meanings. His fascination with disorder, his wide reading in cybernetics, and the influence of post-","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131757603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-004
IN a sense, all language is metaphoric. When a carpenter says that a room is 7 yards long, he is comparing the length of the room with the length of an Anglo-Saxon girdle. When a scientist says that a molecule has a diameter of 2.5 angstroms, the standard has changed but the principle is the same; the object is still understood in terms of its relation to something else.1 A completely unique object, if such a thing were imaginable, could not be described. Lacking metaphoric connections, it would remain inexpressible.2 The question is thus not whether metaphors are used in science as well as literature, but rather how metaphors are constituted in the two disciplines, how they change through time, and how they are affected by the interpretive traditions in which they are embedded.
{"title":"2 Self-reflexive Metaphors in Maxwell’s Demon and Shannon’s Choice: Finding the Passages","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-004","url":null,"abstract":"IN a sense, all language is metaphoric. When a carpenter says that a room is 7 yards long, he is comparing the length of the room with the length of an Anglo-Saxon girdle. When a scientist says that a molecule has a diameter of 2.5 angstroms, the standard has changed but the principle is the same; the object is still understood in terms of its relation to something else.1 A completely unique object, if such a thing were imaginable, could not be described. Lacking metaphoric connections, it would remain inexpressible.2 The question is thus not whether metaphors are used in science as well as literature, but rather how metaphors are constituted in the two disciplines, how they change through time, and how they are affected by the interpretive traditions in which they are embedded.","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"582 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131578206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-003
{"title":"1 Introduction: The Evolution of Chaos","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"105 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131506980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-008
{"title":"6 Strange Attractors: The Appeal of Chaos","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127509804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-005
{"title":"3 The Necessary Gap: Chaos as Self in The Education of Henry Adams","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115302692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-31DOI: 10.7591/9781501722950-006
{"title":"4 From Epilogue to Prologue: Chaos and the Arrow of Time","authors":"","doi":"10.7591/9781501722950-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501722950-006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":133871,"journal":{"name":"Chaos Bound","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121349814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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