Review of Disrupted Patterns: On Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment, edited by Theodore E.D. Braun and John A. McCarthy

Now for something that has not been discussed in the pages of Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation for quite some time. Dr. Lynn Margulis of Boston University has a controversial theory of how nucleated cells developed motion. As summarized by Julie Reahard in the volume under review, “an oxygen-creating cyanobacteria entered a cell in search of food. The host cell tried to protect itself from the deadly oxygen by forming a nuclear membrane around its DNA. . . . Margulis believes fast-moving, corkscrew-shaped spirochete bacteria also entered into various feed-back relationships with these nucleated cells. They became flagella and cilia, which gave the new-nucleated cells mobility” (164). What has all of this got to do with Goethe (the subject of Reahard’s essay), the eighteenth century, or even with literary criticism? Welcome to the bleeding edge of interdisciplinary research.

The chain of cause-and-effect goes something like this: nucleated bacteria lead to microtubules, which lead to the dendrites which convey messages in the brain, which is all an example of positive feedback leading to emergent structure. This parallels physicist David Bohm’s ideas on form being a function of the motions contained within it, which leads him to speculate on language: “Is it not possible for the syntax and grammatical form of language to be changed so as to give a basic role to the verb rather than to the noun?” (qtd. 164), and from there Reahard takes us to Goethe and his concept of the “vertical force” that spirals all living things in nature upward. From this cause Reahard deduces the final effect, reminding literary critics to read in the full three dimensions of experience rather than the over-simplified two dimensions of plot or theme: “It is something to keep in mind when analyzing texts. Art is the culmination of natural activity, created from nature and the state of being of mankind” (173).

Cause and effect, it seems here, also exist in more than two simple dimensions. The movement is linear, from A to B, but also and simultaneously nonlinear, from A to oranges. There is a certain Dadaesque, stream-of-consciousness logic to all of this that has always been there as a counter-Enlightenment undercurrent in the works of Diderot, Sterne, Montesquieu, and Locke (all of whom are addressed at length here), as well as in Swift, Rousseau, and Smollett (who are not). But as in so many other ways, eighteenth-century thinkers are often shown to have been prescient of postmodern and post-postmodern thought that keeps pace, and at times even pulls ahead, of our own intellectual progress. Disrupted Patterns: on Chaos and Order in the Enlightenment demonstrates persuasively how chaos theory (or “nonlinear dynamical systems theory” to those in the inkhorn) is providing an entirely new way of looking at the relationship between cause and effect, with profound implications for science and literary criticism alike.

As “chaologist” Edward Lorenz once put it, can the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado later in Texas? Of course not — but only if one has a rather limited and dated sense of cause and effect. The tornado would have happened in any case, but the butterfly’s wings, along with innumerable other events like them on this world and others, prevents us from saying exactly when and where the tornado will strike. This is the famous “butterfly effect,” a cornerstone of chaos theory, which does not so much refute Newtonian physics outright as it disturbs science’s faith in exact measurements and predictive certainty. (The numerous parallels between this stance and Derridian deconstruction are enthusiastically made by N. Katherine Hales in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science and just as enthusiastically refuted by Alexander Argyros in A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos.) In stark contrast to the Newtonian laws which have governed physics from his time to Einstein’s, Lorenz sees a single cause as leading to multiple effects; or, to take the more extreme position, the entire notion of cause and effect is misleading since no single “initial condition” — a kind of molecular transcendental signifier — can ever be pinpointed free from its complex interactions and feedback loops with everything else even remotely connected to it. As Hayles puts it in her preface to Disrupted Patterns, these iterative feedback loops “are essential in creating a chaotic system’s signature behaviors. These include sensitive dependence on initial conditions, small effects leading to large changes, hidden structures of order underlying apparently random data, the generation of fractal patterns that show self-similarity across different scale levels, and the ability to engage in self-organizing processes that in living systems can lead to rapid evolutionary change” (1). In other words, what you had for breakfast this morning depended, somehow, on what Johnson gave Hodge for his. You cannot prove or disprove this assertion, and this crisis of confidence in scientific positivism is at the root of what many writers on chaos theory see to be that rarest of complex self-organizing events: a genuine paradigm shift in human consciousness.

Which leads us back to literature.

Editors Theodore Braun and John McCarthy begin with the obligatory dismissal of traditionalist claims that science and literature are inherently incompatible. The editors quite rightly claim that “learning to communicate across disciplinary divides is worth the risk of looking silly to the purists and dogmatists” (vi). This collection promotes chaos theory concepts that are, perhaps under different aliases, already perfectly at home in most theoretically engaged approaches to aesthetics: “scaling, emergence, nonlinearity, periodic centers, folds, information exchange at the edges, and the mutually determining relationship between order and dissolution” (vii). Technical concepts such as these are accurately and simply explained as they come up, and while this can slow down the pace of each essay somewhat for those interested only in the eighteenth-century applications, the editors have ensured that there is little unnecessary repetition throughout the volume.

The tone is set early in the volume with a useful overview by Aaron Santesso of “chaos” and “order” concepts in Milton, Dryden, and Pope. The applications of chaos theory begin in earnest with John A. McCarthy’s essay, bypassing Descartes in favor of Kant for a discussion of how challenges to simple binary oppositions establish a context, both in the eighteenth century and in our own literary criticism, for new ways of looking at the universe.

Diderot is especially well served by this approach, as articulated by Huguette Cohen: “Like Diderot’s texts on nature, Jacques le fataliste offers a positive view on the energizing role of chaos, with order and disorder engaging each other in an indefinitely self-renewing dialecting leading to an improved awareness of truth” (17–18). Jacques le fataliste is an inspired choice for treatment, with Diderot’s “fatalism” ringing overtones with chaos theory’s “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” Hilary Rhodes Bailey’s essay is a model of how various chaos theory concepts can find a new sense of order to aspects of a nonlinear text such as Jacques, but she stops short of seeing how the whole novel works as an integrated system.

At times the chaotic Muse seems to inspire this kind of unwelcome nonlinearity in the essays themselves. Patrick Brady makes several excellent points about rococo, catastrophe theory, and Marivaux, but it is not always clear why each of his topics necessarily belong in the same essay. Something similar can be said, in varying degrees, for essays by McCarthy, Braun, Reahard, and J.M. van der Laan. (Ironically, the essay with the most dispersive title, Kevin Cope’s “Locke on the Emergence, Development, and Branching of Knowledge, Education, Politics, Religion, and Hairdressing,” is one of the most tightly argued.) There is a tendency in many applications of chaos theory to literature, in this collection and elsewhere, to take selected aspects of the theory and link them with selected aspects of the literature in question. For example, the plot of a novel may hinge on the “butterfly effect,” repetition of key phrases later on may resemble fractals, the jumping timeline may suggest non-linearity, etc. While these individual applications may be compelling, even brilliant at times, what is often missing is a sense of how all of these elements of chaos theory depend upon one another. (A nonlinear system inevitably shapes itself around attractors because it has sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and the graphs of these processes reveal inevitably fractal structure.) The strongest stand-alone essays here are those that modestly isolate a particular part of chaos theory and stick to it, such as Thomas M. Kavanagh’s essay on the borders of order and disorder in Crébillon’s treatment of gender stereotypes, and Jo Alyson Parker’s subtle analysis of the overlapping nonlinear timelines in Tristram Shandy.

One of the lessons of chaos theory, however, is that nothing really stands alone. Viewing the combined essays in Disrupted Patterns as a self-organizing dynamic system in themselves, the volume provide a powerful endorsement of chaos theory as a subject, methodology, and fresh inspiration for literary criticism.

(Originally appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43:2 (Summer 2002), 175–78.)