Chaos Theory, Control Theory, and Literary Theory or: A Story of Three Butterflies

Author(s): Patrick Brady

Source: Modern Language Studies , Autumn, 1990, Vol. 20, No. 4, Literature and Science
(Autumn, 1990), pp. 65-79
Published by: Modern Language Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3195061

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 Chaos Theory, Control Theory, and Literary Theory
or: A Story of Three Butterflies

Patrick Brady

"The true revolutionaries are those researchers who are engaged in fields
where the mathematical models do not work so well, or maybe do not
exist at all, and who are using the ideas of chaos to explain things that
standard science cannot."
-Robert Pool, in Science, vol. 245 (7 July 1989)

Chaos theory is about (dis-)order, a mode or degree of (dis-)

organization: it is about how or how much things are, or are not,
organized-not about what is thus organized (let alone why). Control
theory is about why-about the drive to order, to organize. Central to
both theories is the issue of predictability. Chaos theory seeks to measure
and describe; control theory seeks to derive and explain. In other words,
chaos theory is phenotypical, while control theory is genotypical. Chaos
theory, then, like structuralism, is a mode of formalism,' dealing less with
content than with formal arrangement; as a result, it lends itself naturally
to investigation in a variety of different disciplines, as structuralism did.
Like structuralism, it holds out the prospect of renewing and radicalizing
a whole spectrum of fields of research. Control theory likewise suggests
ways of correcting and moving beyond certain positions adopted by
Freud, Derrida, and others.
The aim of the present essay is to indicate the basic principles of
chaos theory and control theory and then to verify their applicability and
usefulness to the humanities, particularly literary theory and criticism,2
which have been languishing since structuralism degenerated into
deconstructionism, and the history and philosophy of culture.3
In the early 1960s, several men carried out innovative research that
led to chaos theory. One was Ren6 Thom, who developed a new branch
of topology he called "catastrophe theory," which was devoted to the
description and analysis, and ultimately the prediction, of processes
which are abrupt or discontinuous. "The behaviour of continuous pro-
cesses can be understood by using calculus, invented by Isaac Newton
and Gottfried Leibniz three hundred years ago. But there has never been
an equally effective form of mathematics for explaining and predicting
the occurrence of discontinuous phenomena."4 Catastrophe theory was
hailed as "an 'intellectual revolution' in mathematics-the most important
development since calculus."5
A major feature of catastrophy theory is the use of "pictures":
"What Rene Thom has done is to prove that, despite the almost limitless
number of discontinuous phenomena that can exist in all branches of
science, there are only a certain number of different 'pictures' or
elementary catastrophes that actually occur."6
In 1977 I adumbrated the application of Thom's new perspective
to the problem of reconciling Michel Foucault's epistemes, which are
static, with history, which is dynamic. Thom's work suggested that the
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cultural-historical ruptures or coupures postulated by Foucault were not
really "arbitrary" but merely extremely complex.'
Other scholars working along similar lines in the early 1960s
included the mathematicians Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, and
Stephen Smale, whose research is referred to not as "catastrophe theory"
but as "chaos theory"--widely publicized by James Gleick's volume
entitled Chaos: Making a New Science.8 This volume makes no mention
of catastrophe theory, nor of Rene Thom nor his disciples Christopher
Zeeman and Alexander Woodcock. Nor does it mention any of the
participants in the Stanford symposium on "disorder theory" (1981)--not
even Ilya Prigogine, although this Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is a
leading contributor to chaos theory, even if not one of the aforementioned
pioneers.9
For some, chaos "offers a way of seeing order and pattern where
formerly only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable-in short, the
chaotic-had been observed,""' as in the ordered pattern produced by
random throwing of a die;" for others, it emphasizes that behind hidden
order there exists a state of disorder, as in the pathological orderliness
of certain emotionally disturbed families.'2 Joe Ford espouses the
dictionary definition of "chaos," as "a state of things in which chance is
supreme";'3 this looks suspiciously like "unconstrained randomness,"
which is precisely what chaos is not for other chaos specialists. If both
views are right, the message seems to be that appearances of order or
disorder often conceal their contrary; as Douglas Hofstadter puts it, "it
turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of
order-and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of
order."'4 Such a spiral of order/disorder/order is formally reminiscent
(especially if it is conceived of as open-ended) of the structures within
structures posited by Levi-Strauss and Piaget.15 Chaos theorists' apparent
contradictions (hidden order versus hidden disorder; predictability
versus unpredictability) may result from their concentrating on different
phases or aspects of the topic-like several blind scholars feeling different
parts of an elephant.
A further problem arises from the following: we may sometimes
have the impression that we perceive reality as totally disordered, but
actually our faculties of perception are such that they impose order on
reality in the course of perceiving it.16 Consequently, an impression of
disorder may merely reflect some sort of overload of those faculties of
perception; and the degree of order actually present independently of
our perception remains problematic, unknowable.
Just as catastrophe theory was hailed as revolutionary--the most
important development since calculus-chaos theory is claimed to be as
radical a break-through as relativity theory and quantum mechanics, all
three being revisions of Newtonian physics: "Relativity eliminated the
Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory elimi-
nated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and
chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability."'7
Chaos theory has affected not only mathematics but also such
sciences as physics, meteorology, astronomy, and chemistry, plus dis-
ciplines like medicine and economics.'8
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I Chaos Theory and the Sciences, "Hard" and "Soft"
Henri Poincar6 "was the first to understand the possibility of chaos
[and] unpredictability" (G1.46). He noted the intermittent character of
the energy picture of a shaken fluid; this intermittence would now be
termed "fractal" (G1.123). Poincar6 also enunciated in Science and
Method an early formulation of profound significance: "It may happen
that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones
in the final phenomena. ... Prediction becomes impossible .. ." (G1.321).
This (hyper-)sensitive dependence on initial conditions has now become
known as the Butterfly Effect.
Poincare's disciple George Birkhoff had among his students at
M.I.T. a certain Edward Lorenz. Working on weather prediction in 1961,
Lorenz accidentally rediscovered the Butterfly Effect; and because a
slight variation in the weather pattern could produce a great distortion
(non-linearity, chaos), he concluded that long-range forecasting was
impossible. It is arguable, however, that the Butterfly Effect does not-
cannot-prove that long-range forecasting is doomed, merely that it
cannot be carried out in the present state of our technology, and therefore
it is, for all practical purposes, (as good as) "impossible."'9 In any case,
Lorenz then went further: in his weather model, rather than mere
randomness he saw "a fine geometrical structure, order masquerading
as randomness" (G1.22). Lorenz devised a water-wheel whose rotations,
when mapped, "traced a strange, distinctive shape, a kind of double spiral
in three dimensions, like a butterfly with its two wings. The shape signaled
pure disorder, since no point or pattern of points ever recurred. Yet it
also signaled a new kind of order" (G1.30). This type of graphic represents
an "attractor," and this particular one, which we may call the Butterfly
Attractor, is representative of a new category of attractor known as
"strange attractors," which is specifically associated with chaos theory.
Benoit Mandelbrot studied several years of cotton price data,
which had been presumed to move in a manner that was random and
unpredictable in the short term, orderly in the long term. However, he
discovered that price movements for daily changes and those for monthly
changes matched perfectly: they produced curves that were symmetrical
from scale to scale. As Gleick reports, "the degree of variation has
remained constant over a tumultuous sixty-year period that saw two
World Wars and a depression. Within the most disorderly reams of data
lived an unexpected kind of order" (G1.86). Such an irregular
phenomenon or datum that remained constant from scale to scale
Mandelbrot called a "fractal." His studies of irregular patterns in natural
processes (cotton prices, river floods) revealed a fractal or self-similar
quality.
Poincare in 1892 disproved Newton's clockwork conception of the
universe, based on calculus, with everything knowable and predictable,
and opened the way to chaos-complexity, uncertainty, non-linearity
(last-straw effect), unpredictability (i.e., not predictable by Newton's
calculus). Contemporary astronomy builds on his intuitions. Thus many
bodies of the solar system have chaotic orbits, according to M.I.T.
astronomer Jack Wisdom. A more particular application of chaos in
astronomy: Jupiter's Great Red Spot defied analysis and comprehension
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until, in the early 1980s, Philip Marcus created a model based on
computer-generated images, which he assembled into an animated
movie. This movie turned out to produce the appearance of an oval very
similar to the Great Red Spot-an island of relative stability in the midst
of chaotic turmoil. In chemistry, chaos theory is represented by such
phenomena as the oscillations of the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction20 and
by the dissipative structures of Ilya Prigogine.21
From a structuralist point of view, the human brain and that
projection of its functioning that we term the mind are prisoners of their
own structure (or physiological organization), so that random activity is
impossible. This introduces a significant distinction between sciences
such as those we have just glanced at (physics, meteorology, astronomy,
chemistry) and disciplines whose object is the human body (medicine)
and human behavior either in general (psychology) or in particular
circumstances (economics), the arts being of course allied to the latter.
In the human body, specialists have looked at several organs:
1. the lungs: order is normal, disorder is pathological (e.g. caused by
cocaine); 2. the brain: order is abnormal, pathological (e.g. caused by
cocaine or epilepsy); 3. the pituitary gland: order is abnormal,
pathological (e.g. caused by cancer in pituitary cells); 4. the heart: here
we have opinions that appear to contradict each other.
A group at Cedar Sinai Medical Center asserts (as repeated in
Nova) that in the heart order is normal, disorder (e.g. fibrillation) is
pathological (e.g. caused by cocaine), and chaos can be fatal because
the heart is a rhythmic, periodic organ. On the other hand, Ary Gold-
berger declares that, despite common assumptions that the healthy heart
beats as regularly as a metronome, careful study shows that there is
considerable variation in the time that passes between heartbeats in
healthy people. By contrast, heart rhythm often becomes extremely
periodic or regular just before certain types of heart attack: "The route
to sudden cardiac arrest is marked in many instances by ... the loss of
healthy fractal behavior and healthy chaos. By looking at these beat-to-
beat fluctuations ... one may be able to anticipate sudden death before
it occurs." In other words, chaos results from the loss of that
desynchronization (apparent [i.e., constrained] randomness) of motor
units that helps avoid tremors.22
Perhaps we may conclude that chaos theory looks beyond
superficial, apparent order (Paul Rapp) to hidden, real disorder (Ary
Goldberger), but then attempts to determine the principles of
organization behind that disorder.
In the domain of psychology, we find Freudian and neo-Freudian
psychoanalysis, with its concentration on the individual and neglect of
relationships between individuals, less immediately relevant than
transactional analysis (Eric Berne) and group behavior theory (Murray
Bowen), which deal primarily with interpersonal dynamics. Apparent
behavioral order may be pathological, and conceal emotional disorder
(disturbance, instability). Such pathologically orderly behavior may
reflect a hidden agenda, or-at an even deeper level-be unconsciously
scripted; these are modes of "constrained randomness."
Paul Watzlawick's work in psychological therapy is related to
family behavior theory and transactional analysis-movements that are
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concerned with unhealthily symbiotic relationships (e.g. between mother
and child) that inhibit the development of emotional and psychological
autonomy. Both family behavior theory and transactional analysis have
been used in literary criticism over the last ten to fifteen years,23 and
Watzlawick himself has made a psychological analysis of a literary text,
namely the Albee play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"24
Disruption of order (when the latter is genuine, healthy, happy,
serene) may also be pathological, reflecting an inabiltiy to cope with an
"excessively" high bliss level: when the bliss tolerance level (BTL) is
reached, our low self-esteem drives us to disrupt the blissful state. Moral
license may well be an example of "testing the limits of permissibility,"
as children do, and serial killers, and certain television evangelists, who
almost seem to want to be caught. In all such cases, those behaving this
way may well be trying to provoke a punishment that will set limits to
their freedom, because such limits are reassuring manifestations of
order-and we all have a thirst for order.
Chaos theory may provide a key to sudden thoughts and intui-
tions, and to synthesis (right-hemisphere activities). Artists speak of their
creativity as rising from a mental churning of "confusion, disorder and
impurity" (sculptor George Segal) and of their "obsessive desire for
reducing chaos and for finding beauty" (cellist Janos Starker) (my
emphasis)." "Many writers, both male and female, use writing as a means
of putting order into a disorderly world";26 is such "creation" a distortion,
dissimulation, or deception?
According to Marilyn Yalom, women writers are subject to
psychosis triggered by "the trauma of childbirth, motherhood and its
entrapment and ways in which ability to procreate stirs memories of
parents' deaths or creates fear of death of one's own child."27 Such women
tend to view their writings as rivals or substitutes for children. "The core
concerns of maternity and motherhood, the existential realities of aging
and death, the crucial influence of mothers and fathers, and the perennial
conflict between creation and procreation constitute the dominant chords
in the fugue to madness.""28 The result is pathological emotional chaos.
From psychology, which deals with human behavior in general,
we can move quite logically to economics, which deals with human
conduct in specific circumstances.29 A leading chaos specialist in
economics is William Brock, who declares: "Efficient market theory says
returns are totally unforecastable. But my team has invented a test that
shows there are patterns."'3
Another human (or social) science worth mentioning here is
anthropology. The constrained randomness plotted by Lorenz in his
"strange attractor" (the Butterfly Attractor)--randomness within a
limited (because fixed) space-is analogous to the territorial randomness
of nomads like the Australian aborigines. Moreover, the aborigines don't
believe in chance or random events: sickness is always caused deliberately
by an enemy; weather changes only in response to rituals (man controls
nature, as in New Age thinking).

II Chaos Theory: Definitions and Principles

"Chaos" is, first, complexity, turbulence, discontinuous process;
second, it is disunity, fragmentation, and non-linearity; third, chaos is
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constrained randomness, or relative uncertainty, and centrally engages
the parameters of predictability and unpredictability. Chaos may be
defined as low-level31 deterministic non-linear dynamics. Chaos theory
casts doubt on (undermines) real randomness (total unpredictability) on
the one hand and exact predictability on the other; it denies the possibility
of unified order.32
Chaos theory manifests itself in the following features:
(a) the carpet effect-chaotic processes can produce orderly patterns;
(b) fractals--irregular shapes or number sequences that repeat
themselves on varying scales (e.g. tree/branch/twig);
(c) the butterfly effect-the fact that small causes can have great effects:
these exponential repercussions are based on (hyper-)sensitive
dependence on initial conditions;33
(d) strange attractors-[computer graphics of] random behavior within
set (i.e. system) boundaries.

III Chaos Theory and the Arts and Humanities

A. literary analysis. When it comes to literature, some analogies
with the search for hidden order are of course obvious-perhaps too
obvious. One example of this should suffice.
In 1966 I analysed Diderot's dialogue novel Le Neveu de
Rameau-a robust, disorderly work that was generally considered to end
in a stalemate or stand-off between the two speakers of the dialogue.
When I broke the text down into levels of discourse, I discovered that
one of these levels contained just four passages, similar in length and tone,
that revealed a definite progress through the work and gave it, in spite
of the superbly chaotic style, a clear and solid structure and a conclusion
in which one side comes out as dominant and therefore successful.34 This
order that governed the text had been concealed by a surface appearance
of chaos.
However, while the analogy with chaos analysis is obvious, I knew
nothing about chaos theory at the time, so the analysis owed nothing to
that theory, and does not represent an application of it.
The non-linear character of chaotic phenomena recalls the
distinction between tragedy, which is linear, and comedy, which is non-
linear. The "non-linearity" of comedy is taken to be cyclical in essence,
but after all, comedy, like history, never repeats itself exactly. Does this
mean that the non-teleological quality of comedy justifies its assimilation
to Edward Lorenz's Butterfly Attractor?35 I think not. The reason has to
do with the difference between the Butterfly Attractor (what Gleick calls
the "Lorenz Attractor") and the Butterfly Effect. The Butterfly Attractor
represents a theoretically infinite irregular (unpredictable) line within
finite set boundaries: in other words, random movement within con-
straints-a definition of chaos. This, however, is not a definition of the
non-linearity that characterizes chaos: "non-linearity" has to do with the
"sensitive dependence on initial conditions," otherwise known as the
Butterfly Effect.
What, then, is the relationship between the Butterfly Effect
(disproportion between cause and effect) and the Butterfly Attractor
(random movement within set boundaries)? While the two are quite
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distinct, they both seem to deal with modes of the irregular, the unpre-
dictable, the random. However, the Attractor emphasizes limits to the
proliferation, while the Effect stresses proliferation that is virtually
unlimited and therefore virtually unpredictable. They represent, re-
spectively, two opposite faces of chaos theory: the optimistic (Butterfly
Attractor) and the pessimistic (Butterfly Effect).
The "third butterfly" of our title is one of which Eugene Chen
Eoyang reminded me; I call it the Butterfly Perceiver. It is the butterfly
a Chinese philosopher dreamed he was; when he awakened, he didn't
know whether he was a philosopher who had dreamed he was a butterfly
or a butterfly now dreaming he was a philosopher. This crucial problem
of perception (see above) cannot continue to be ignored by chaos
specialists.
The "chaos game" mentioned by Gleick (pp. 236-240) involves the
chaotic (i.e. superficially random) quality usually associated with
throwing dice or shuffling cards. Such processes have directly inspired
certain literary works, whether thematically (as in a poem by Mallarme)
or structurally (as in a novel by Marc Saporta). Let us first set the historical
background to these works.
In French literature, a traditional determinism-sometimes
Jansenist (Racine, Pr6vost), sometimes not (Diderot, Hugo, Zola)-was
rejected at the outset of the twentieth century. Emile Zola, who
dominated the literary scene in the late nineteench century, had stressed
the determining role of heredity, varied not by individual uniqueness (let
alone by free will) but only by diverse environmental conditions. How-
ever, his contemporary, St6phane Mallarm6, thrust into the limelight in
the eighteen-eighties by Verlaine (Pontes maudits) and Huysmans (A
rebours), foreshadowed the new century in 1897 with his poem Un Coup
de d&s jamais n'abolira le hasard. This theme of the relationship between
dice-throwing and chance will be explored eighty years later by chaos
theory (see below).
Some thirty years younger than Mallarme, Andr6 Gide and Marcel
Proust virtually dismantled the traditional ideal model of psychological
consistency. Gide preached moral and experiential flexibility or avail-
ability (disponibilitd) and spontaneity (unpredictability); he also showed
a character acting in a manner not only independent of Fate, Providence,
and heredity but even independent of any motivation on his own part:
this was the famous acte gratuit perpetrated by Lafcadio in Les Caves
du Vatican, in which he pushed an unknown fellow-passenger from a
moving train. Of course, unmotivated actions are impossible if we follow
the reasoning of structuralism, since Man is not free: freedom is an illusion.
Finally, the famous structure en abyme illustrated by Gide in Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, in which Gide writes a novel called Les Faux Monnayeurs
in which the novelist Edouard is writing a novel called Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, is a good literary illustration of the concept of fractal, which
as we have seen is an irregular shape that repeats itself on various scales.
Proust, in his vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu, provides
several variations on various aspects of chaos theory. The opening
passage reflects psychological confusion, or chaos.36 Not total, pure
randomness, because within or behind this chaos there is a principle of
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order (unity in multiplicity, as Michel Serres puts it), namely the single
unifying point of view of the narrator."7 The latter, however, like all first-
person narration, is a tissue of statements that are all undecidable because
they are stuck in the web of self-referentiality. The principle of un-
predictability is also embodied in the father, who deliberately makes
arbitrary decisions to inure his son to the unreliability of life (particularly
interesting in association with his obsession with the weather, which
Edward Lorenz, as we have seen, views as archetypally unpredictable).
Moreover, in the name of a greater fidelity to life and reality, Proust
portrayed characters inconsistently-appearing very different in
differing circumstances, to the point that they hardly appeared to be the
same characters at all (after carrying out this bewildering manoeuvre,
Proust's narrator explains and justifies it in detail). The Butterfly Effect,
with its tremendous effect produced by a relatively insignificant cause,
is illustrated by the trivial but crucial incident of tasting that tea-cake
(madeleine) soaked in tea which produces from his simple cup of tea
the whole town of Combray with its gardens, and ultimately the entire
huge novel.
At a later date, in an effort to go beyond even the "constrained
randomness" of Julio Cortizar's novel Hopscotch, Marc Saporta created
a novel entitled Composition No 1 that is printed entirely on separate
cards which the reader shuffles to create his own "chaotic" novel.
Any confidence in human freedom was undermined by
structuralism, and this return to scepticism was reinforced when chaos
theory re-examined dice-throwing. The television special on chaos
(Nova, 31st January 1987) began with a discussion of this apparently
random activity-and a rather daunting discovery concerning it.
Statistical analysis has shown that the results of dice-throwing are not
genuinely random but merely chaotic-they are micro-indeterminate but
macro-determinate. That is, there appears to be no pattern, but this
appearance is false-a matter of scale: there is actually a highly ordered
pattern to which the results of casting conform when sufficiently
multiplied.
B. music, painting, architecture. The spontaneity of the Impres-
sionists, who revolutionized painting and music a century ago and so
opened the door to modem art, was viewed by their contemporaries as
anarchistic and chaotic.38 This Impressionism was thematized as a
program for the sister arts in Verlaine's Art po6tique.
In modern architecture criticism we find a similar attempt to relate
chaos theory to deconstructivist architecture and to such post-modernist
phenomena as deconstructionism. Thus we find Thomas Fisher asserting
the existence of ties between "the deconstruction theories of literary
critics, the chaos research of physicists, and the work of post-structuralist
philosophers."39 He does this by stressing that deconstructivism reflects
fragmentation and that deconstruction espouses the "idea that unity is
impossible and that order is always undercut by that which it represses."40
Chaos is then seen as a similar undermining of order, by the repressed
text. Such a repressed text might correspond to the hidden agenda or
script studied by contemporary psychotherapists, as in transactional
analysis (see above). Kurt Andersen, on the other hand, divorces decon-
structivism from post-modernism, referring to "architecture's tired to-
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and-fro between caricature modernism (the neurotic Rubik's Cubes of
the deconstructivists) and caricature classicism (the pretty confections of
the postmodernists)."41
C. period style. While it is tempting to see as "historically-
conditioned" the twentieth-century conjunction between modem art and
literature and chaos theory, the truth is more complex. Many of the central
tendencies of modernism, which was born from late-19th-century
Impressionism, are to be found in the rococo art and literature of the
early eighteenth century. In the domain of rococo art (architecture,
decoration, painting), we find fairly clear examples of the indeterminacy,
fractals and strange attractors, and butterfly effects associated with chaos.
(a) carpet effect. The rococo represents apparent disorder
(atheism, atechtonicity, etcetera) by comparison with Classical order, as
reflected in the rococo's dispensing with the orders of columns on
Classical facades. Indeterminacy is well illustrated by rocaille
ornamentation, in the analysis of it provided by Nicholas Pevsner: "The
forms in detail seem to be incessantly changing, splashing up and sinking
back. What are they? Do they represent anything? Sometimes they look
like shells, sometimes like froth, sometimes like gristle, sometimes like
flames."42 Compare with this David Ruelle's description of strange
attractors: "These systems of curves, these clouds of points suggest some-
times fireworks or galaxies, sometimes strange and disquieting vegetal
proliferations."43 However, as with strange attractors, closer inspection
reveals that the apparent disorder of rocaille and rococo is simply a more
complex mode of order-non-linear, unpredictable but constrained in its
spontaneity, studied in its negligence. Further still, this highly organized
disorder may be viewed as papering over the fundamentally disorderly
society that led to the French Revolution. In painting, a swirling, "chaotic"
movement is one of Boucher's most characteristic contributions to the
rococo.

(b) fractals. The rocaille constitutes, in fact, a

brot's sense, to the extent that it is an irregular sha
varying scales. The analogy is obvious. But is it mean
"metaphorical?" This is a problem that tormente
in the hey-day of structuralism, when there was
the validity of extrapolation from one field to an
signify beyond what it "represents" (e.g. in t
dissimulate techtonicity, for example), but now
fractals do, because fractals are merely graphics
other phenomena. Of course, what would be reall
would be to view the rocaille as a graphic re
amorphous social and psychological movements t
rococo period and are reflected in its aesthetic. W
problem into a challenge and an opportunity.
(c) butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is
rococo by such things as the tremendous role pla
great rococo specialist Fiske Kimball) by a mere m
Louis XIV to Mansart regarding the decoration of
young Duchesse de Bourbon: "de l'enfance r6pan
What of rococo literature?
(a) carpet effect. We find indeterminacy
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teleological narratives), non-linearity (predominance of comedy in the
theatre), spontaneity and unpredictability (the kiss-a whim or caprice-
in Goethe's Die Laune des Verliebten44). The "constrained randomness
of a chaotic system may be seen in the "studied negligence" of the rococo.
The "repressed text" of deconstructionism (post-modernism) finds its
counterpart in the existential anguish concealed beneath the rococo
hedonism of Voltaire's Le Mondain: this "mask of pleasure" has as goal
the "muting of pain." In plays like Le Jeu de ramour et du hasard (again
the theme of chance) and She Stoops to Conquer, we see the experimental
introduction of a perturbance of the social order (the Ancien Regime)
that is pathologically rigid-as in Watzlawick's procedures producing
rapid therapeutic change ("cure") of scripts. The inconsistency or
incoherence (mdlange de tons) in a novel like La Vie de Marianne provide
further illustrations of chaos.
(b) fractals. One example of a fractal is a chaotic or "strange"
attractor, which is a state towards which a system tends. A strange at-
tractor is stable, low-dimensional, non-periodic, and characterized by
complicated geometry, unpredictable, chaotic movement, and apparent
internal randomness. Since it has an infinitely long line within a finite area,
its true dimension is fractional-hence a strange attractor is fractal. One
example of strange attractor is the toying with the absurdity of class
distinctions in Marivaux: the writer allows himself complete freedom, at
least in appearance, but this is only possible because he accepts the
boundaries set by the comic convention and the rococo social system.
(c) butterfly effect. Examples of butterfly effect may be seen in
Marivaux's passage on rart de mettre un ruban (in La Vie de Marianne)
and in Pope's The Rape of the Lock, where a trivial incident inspires a
masterpiece which, in turn, inspires the whole of European poetry. This
magnificent treatment of a trivial topic is directly contrary to the neo-
Classicism of a writer like Montesquieu, for whom it is "comme de l'or
que vous mettriez sur l'habit d'un mendiant."45

IV From Chaos to Control

When we perceive order or disorder, we cannot know whether
what we perceive is real, "out there," as Rene Girard apparently believes,
or exists only in the mind, as L6vi-Strauss tends to suggest. Do we need
to introduce order into a genuinely disorderly external reality, or merely
to develop and project a perception, a conviction, of order?
Moreover, is the thirst for order a biological or physiological given,
stemming from the very structure of our instrument of perception (name-
ly, the brain), as structuralism asserts, or is it a psychological acquisition,
imposed on us by the trauma of birth and reinforced by the helplessness
of the human infant?
I am going to follow the latter line of reasoning, and argue that
we feel threatened by our perception at birth of the chaotic character
of our environment, which leaves us with a sort of "disorder neurosis"
that leads to a compulsion to control (not unlike Adler's libido dominandi,
except that the source is not libido but anxiety).
The determining effect of the birth trauma stems from the violent
rejection of the infant by the mother's body, which thrusts it out from
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the warm, dark, silent, liquid passivity of the nurturing womb through
a passage of life-threatening compression and out into the cold, blinding,
noisy, dry air and the necessity to breathe-such is the child's first
experience of rejection, of Otherness, and of the environment outside the
womb. In a word, this external reality is alien, hostile, incomprehensible,
unpredictable, uncontrollable.
As Freud argues very plausibly, the infant feels threatened by the
unpredictable and uncontrollable autonomy of the Mother, who comes
and goes at will, abandoning him at her discretion to the threatening
Otherness of his environment. The child attempts to inure itself to the
pain of this abandonment by means of the therapeutic ritual of fort/da,
or "hide and seek."
However, Freud claims that the child views its feces as a substitute
for the penis, a detachable "part" of his own body that he/she can give
as a gift in a kind of surrogate autocastration.
I suggest, on the contrary, that the feces represent not the penis
(symbolizing sex) but an Other (symbolizing alienation): excretion, by
showing the child that he or she can create an Other, has a twofold
therapeutic function associated with the drive to control. Excretion
involves both control of Self (through a mastery of the bodily function
that helps us to diminish the threatening unpredictability of life) and
control of Otherness (through the production or "creation" of a visible,
concrete Other). This latter becomes part of the child's environment, but
is non-threatening because created by the child him/herself. In fact, the
experience of congestion/expulsion/relief makes excretion an analogue
of the birth the infant has experienced, only now he/she is in control;
and the feces, as product of the activity, represent the new-born infant.
All of this contributes to the taming of the child's environment.
The idea of a Creator God is one which crystallizes in a
transcendental symbol the therapeutic reassurance of producing a non-
threatening external reality. For humans, of course, God is part of the
reality that is external to them; but this is compensated by the "controll-
ability" of God. God is controlled by our definition of God. If we define
Him as terrible and vengeful, as in the Hebrew Old Testament, then He
is predictable; if we define God as loving and forgiving, as in the New
Testament, then again God is predictable. God may be omnipotent, but
he is not free; our definitions tie His hands. Consequently, God does not
function as unknowable and hence frighteningly uncontrollable,
unpredictable.
The creative gesture of God is imitated by the creative artist,
whether painter, composer, or writer. Unlike the literary critic or theorist,
the creative writer is God-like in the arbitrary, gratuitous character of
his activity: like God, he imagines and creates something out of nothing.
The notion of a Creator God may well have been inspired by the
perception of the reproductive powers of Woman-and here it is well
to recall that God was once a Woman. How deeply primitive people,
who did not link their own role in intercourse to Woman's solitary role
in childbirth many months later, was impressed by Woman's ability to
reproduce-that is, in his eyes, to create Other Selves-has been demon-
strated by Bruno Bettelheim, who traces the symbolic wounds of male
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initiation rites back to womb-envy.46 Artistic creation provided Man with
an activity analogous to Woman's reproduction-but in the case of
literature it became analogous only when the oral tradition was replced
by written literature, which created an external object that was part of
a non-threatening (because personally fabricated) environment.
The conception of ecriture as alienating and therefore suspect
(Rousseau, Levi-Strauss) is taken even further by Derrida, who in 1972
appears to compare it with masturbation. However, while the pen, like
the penis, may be seen as similarly instrumental, this assimilation scarcely
supports the down-grading of kcriture, for it emphasizes the pen's need
for a partner (paper): if pen without paper is like penis without vagina,
that may surely be interpreted as throwing a more favorable light (in
Derrida's own terms) on dcriture than on mere parole. If such biological
analogies are desirable, surely more appropriate ones can be found; one
is tempted, indeed, to propose a revalorizing conception of &criture,
which unlike parole produces an externalized object that is concrete and
visible, thus creating a satisfying feeling of Otherness relating to the
creation of the universe by the Self. (This tames the feeling of menace
normally associated with the Otherness of the universe around us.) This
production of a visible object relates ecriture to certain biological
functions of prime significance to the organism, namely excretion and
female reproduction; on the social level, the corresponding function is
the expulsion of the scapegoat. There are two categories of function in
which the process of expulsion is preceded by congestion of the organism
involved, and followed by relief and satisfaction. (Girard speaks in
connection with scapegoating of unanimity of violence followed by
unification of the community.) These two categories may be termed the
category of the potential and ephemeral (ejaculation, menstruation,
parole) and the category of the actual and permanent (excretion,
childbirth, ecriture). The second category, then, would include all artistic
creation productive of permanent "residue": however lucid and rational
the actual process of creation, the drive to create (externalize, expel) art
works is rationally inexplicable, except as an analogue of the drive to
expel excreta, progeny, scapegoat. This perspective, of course, dis-
tinguishes the dcriture of creative writing from other modes of dcriture
(which have a rational and usually even a utilitarian basis), and thus may
provide a clue to the elusive criterion of littdraritd. The arts, then, are
related by this common drive to imitate the various movements of
expulsion and to tame the irreparable Otherness of the universe by
producing that universe oneself.
In When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone demonstrates con-
vincingly that the Hebrew story of the Garden of Eden was a propaganda
instrument of male chauvinism;47 the drawing forth of Eve from the body
of Adam then becomes a particularly vivid example of male womb-envy.
This idea is interesting to the student of the phenomenon of artistic
creation: the creative artist's imitation of the gesture of a Creator-God
may well have evolved by analogy with the primitive artist's imitation
of the more obvious act of Woman in producing new life.
This conception refines the theory of (artistic) creation I posited
(as an alternative to Derrida's masturbation) in 1976. The series is now
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conceived as follows:
Child: 1. fear of Otherness (birth trauma; survival fear inspired by
autonomy/unpredictability of Mother)
2. desire to eliminate unpredictability of Other, through control
3. feces analogon (control of Self; control of Other); creation of
Other (NOT autocastration, as in Freud)
Adult: 4. love-making analogon (control of Other), libido dominandi
5. creationism analogon (control of God-omnipotent, but
benevolent, therefore predictable)
6. reproduction analogon (creation of Other), womb-envy:
creation of Other Self (NOT masturbation, as in Derrida)
7. attempt at control of Otherness (external reality), art: magic
simulacrum.
Conclusion.-The challenges posed by chaos theory and control
theory are not of the same order. Control theory owes key elements to
Otto Rank (the birth trauma) and Bettelheim and therefore owes much
to Freudian theory, however much it may reject some aspects of the
latter. The challenge is simply that of winning acceptance. Chaos theory,
on the other hand, raises the question of extrapolation from one field to
another, and the status of such extrapolation. It is easiest when reduced
to fairly general principles, but more insightful when based on an
imaginative use of analogies. One risks falling between the two stools
of respectable banalities and over-adventurous use of the merest
metaphors. The former are of little interest, so the challenge here is one
of refining the analogies used so as to combine original insights with
plausible comparisons. "Plausible," "acceptable"-again, of course, we
find that the challenge ultimately comes down to winning acceptance.
In any case, a heightened sensitivity to chaos is evident in
contemporary intellectual life,48 and may be expected to grow in the
coming decade.

University of Tennessee

NOTES

1. On the radically formalist character of structuralism, cf. the f

formulation: "Dans le reel comme en math6matiques, toute form
contenu pour celles qui l'englobent et tout contenu est une forme p
qu'il contient" (Jean Piaget, quoted with approval by Claude L'vi-
in L'Homme nu [Paris: Plon, 1971], p. 561). Cf. Marshall McLuhan
that "the medium is the message."
2. For a similar verification of the validity and value of structuralis
Brady: Structuralist Perspectives in Criticism of Fiction (Bern: Lan
3. Cf. P. Brady: "Immanence, Semiotics, and the 'New Contex
Theory and Illustration of a History and Philosophy of Culture,"
lecture, Harvard University, December 1976; modified version p
as "Towards a Theory of the Rococo," The Comparatist, vol.
1985), pp. 4-17.
4. Charles Panati in Newsweek, 19th January 1976, p. 54.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
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 7. See my article "Period Style in the Light of Structuralism, Semiotics, and
Catastrophe Theory," French Literature Series, vol. IV (1977), pp. 119-130.
8. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987. Other sources of the present essay include
the television special (Nova, P.B.S. 31st January 1987).
9. Some catastrophe theorists (mathematicians) participated in the Stanford
symposium. The only disorder specialist mentioned by Gleick as involved
in chaos theory is the economist Kenneth Arrow-and then not in Gleick's
volume but in his article in The New York Times, 22 November 1987
(Section 3: Business). Incidentally, the first chaos conference took place
in 1977 (G1.183-184), four years before the Stanford conference on
disorder.
10. See Gleick, op. cit., cover.
11. See the discussion of "the chaos game," ibid., pp. 236-240; also Nova.
12. See Paul Watzlawick in Paisley Livingston, ed.: Disorder and Order:
Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium (September 14-16,
1981) (Saratoga, Ca.: Anma Libri, 1984), p. 63.
13. See Ford's letterhead. Jim Yorke, who apparently first used the term
"chaos" in this sense (in the early 1970s), is upset that scientists are looking
for order in chaos: see Robert Pool, in Science, vol. 245 (7 July 1989), p.
28.
14. Quoted in Gleick, op. cit. (inside front cover).
15. See above, note 1.
16. Maps in the brain model the world according to Michael Arbib: see his
In Search of the Person (Amherst: U. Mass. P., 1985), p. 36. Cf. "Perceptions
are to a large degree creations, and memories are part of an ongoing process
of imagination closely akin to literary creation" (John Roy: "Brain Theory
and the Poetics of Consolation," Mosaic, vol. 21, nos. 2-3 [1988], p. 85).
In this light, Yorke's objections (above, p. 4, note 4) seem naive.
17. Quoted, without attribution, in Gleick, p. 6.
18. On the crucial and ambiguous question of the validity and status of
extrapolation from one field to another, see above, epigraph, from Pool,
art. cit.
19. Since the difference between short-range and long-range forecasting is
merely one of degree, not of kind, it follows that if short-range forecasting
is possible (as Lorenz agrees) then long-range forecasting must also be
possible.
20. Pool, art. cit., p. 27.
21. See I. Prigogine and G. Nicolis: Self-organization in non-equilibrium
systems: From dissipative structures to order through fluctuations (N.Y.:
Wiley, c. 1977). Also I. Prigogine and I. Stengers: Order out of chaos (N.Y.:
Bantam, 1984), based on their La nouvelle alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1979).
22. Cf. Ary Goldberger: "Nonlinear Dynamics, Fractals, Cardiac Physiology,
and Sudden Death," in L. Rensing et alii: Temporal Disorder in Human
Oscillatory Systems (N.Y.: Springer Verlag, 1987).
23. See P. Brady: "Farms, Trees, and Bell-towers: The 'Hidden Meaning' of
Triads in Proust's Recherche," Neophilologus, LXI, 3 (July 1977), pp. 371-
377; Marcel Proust (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), pp. 48-55, 83-91; "Scripting,
Surrogate Mothers, Incest Taboo and Creativity: Zola's Twofold Self-
betrayal in L'Oeuvre," Neophilologus, LXIX, 4 (October 1985), pp. 533-
538; "Womb-envy, Counterscript, and Subversion: From L'Oeuvre to Les
Noeuds d'argile," L'Esprit Crdateur, XXV, 4 (Winter 1985), pp. 59-70.
24. P. Watzlawick et alii: The Pragmatics of Human Communication (New
York: Norton, 1967).
25. David Maxfield: "Creative Minds," Texas, Houston Chronicle Magazine,
7 February 1988, pp. 4-5.
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26. Marilyn Yalom: Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness (Penn
State U.P., 1989).
27. Beverly Beyette, reviewing Yalom in The New York Times.
28. Yalom, op. cit., quoted in Beyette, rev. cit.
29. Economists Richard Thaler of Cornell, Lawrence Summers of Harvard,
and Robert Schiller of Yale stress the role of psychological factors-
irrational emotions, unfounded optimism or pessimism, contagious enthu-
siasm or discouragement-in stock market performance. Cf. R. M. Hogarth
and M. W. Reder, eds.: Rational Choice: The Contrast Between Economics
and Psychology (Chicago: U.C.P., 1986). This volume details not only
differences but common ground and mutual influence between these two
disciplines.
30. Cf. his essay "Chaos and Complexity in Economic and Financial Science,"
in G. M. Furstenberg, ed.: Acting under Uncertainty: Multidisciplinary
Conceptions (forthcoming).
31. "Low-level" or "low-dimension" here means: "involving relatively few
variables, thus making prediction possible."
32. Chaos is related to aporia (undecidability) and entropy (decrease in, or
degradation of, energy).
33. Such disproportion between cause and effect is a mode of nonlinearity.
34. "Structure and Sub-structure of Le Neveu de Rameau," L'Esprit Createur,
Spring 1968, pp. 34-41. Hidden order in Lettres persanes is referred to by
Montesquieu as "une chaine secrete;" in Le Neveu it is described by Goethe
as "une chaine d'acier qu'une guirlande d6robe a nos yeux."
35. See above, p. 7, and Gleick, op. cit., opposite p. 114.
36. His style has been characterized as chaotic: see G. Antoine: "Proust ou le
chaos metaphorique," Cahiers de lInstitut de Linguistique, X, 1-3 (1984),
17-25.
37. See P. Brady, op cit. (Marcel Proust), Ch. 1.
38. The new "orderliness without repetition" represented by strange attractors
like Lorenz's Butterfly Attractor (above, p. 7) was prefigured by Debussy's
Impressionist goal of eliminating the repetition on which Classical music
had been based.
39. Progressive Architecture, December 1988, p. 7.
40. Ibid., loc. cit.
41. Time, 20 March 1989, p. 75. See also Gleick, op. cit., pp. 116-117. Chaos
theory has inspired art exhibitions: "Strange Attractors: Signs of Chaos,"
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, 13 September to 26
November 1989 and "Strange Attractors: The Spectacle of Chaos," Kaos
Inc. Art Show, Chicago, same dates.
42. N. Pevsner: An Outline of European Architecture (London: Penguin, 4th
ed. 1953), p. 195.
43. Gleick, op. cit., p. 153.
44. See P. Brady: "Rococo Style in European Theatre," in M. G. Badir and D.
J. Langdon, eds.: Eighteenth-Century Theatre: Aspects and Contexts
(Edmonton, Alberta: U. of Alberta [Dept. of Romance Languages and
Comparative Literature], 1986), pp. 53-73.
45. Montesquieu: Cahiers, 1716-1755 (Paris: Grasset, 1941), p. 70.
46. Symbolic Wounds (New York: Collier, 1962).
47. London: Harcourt Brace, 1978.
48. See for example the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's resistance to the
suppression of contingency and unpredictability in Francis Fukuyama's
influential essay "The End of History?" in The National Interest, Summer
1989, as reported by Richard Bernstein in The New York Times, 27 August
1989.
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