Cognitive Styles: Chaos and Its Stories

There is a strange attraction between conversion stories and chaos theory. Both leap. The one set jumps from one belief to another; the other models sudden qualitative changes in phase space. Predictably, a narrative of surprise informs this latest method of linking the humanities and science. It is characteristic of Katherine Hayles and James Gleick. They operate on the eureka principle and are wont to call readers to recognize the swirl of contingency floating about in a new vision of the world. But for others for whom chaos is an old friend not some new kid on the block, another principle, drives the respect they display for boundaries but not borders. These folk travel extensively but consider local etiquette and regional ontologies. The stories they relate have the flavour more of immersion than conversion stories; they also draw upon catastrophe theory and not just chaos theory. The niceties of this rather technical distinction and the consequences of its metaphoric applications will emerge as we peruse some of the popular literature.

Representatives of the less chaotic more catastrophic principle, John Briggs and David Peat in Turbulent Mirror describe the figure of the scientist at work as an exemplar of a person immersed in the wonder of the world. Geneticist Barbara McClintock is for them: "Both reductionist and holist, she strives to get to the bottom of things which she is aware have no bottom." (Briggs and Peat, 202) This attitude does not lead to a conversion story. The subject may change location but the subject herself is not necessarily transformed:

McClintock has evidently entered the turbulent mirror into a universe [...] more frightening than the one that has been portrayed by reductionist science. But [...] it's a friendly place because we are all in it together. (203)

The sensation of soldiatry with a playful universe is bolstered by the style. Peat and Briggs, with playful treatment, supply amusing examples, explicitly in their reporting and implicitly in the manner of their relating. Textual and visual allusions to the Alice of Wonderland fame, typographic variety and an intriguing chapter numbering system, all contribute to show, not just tell, the interconnections possible with such a world view.

Peat and Briggs display an ability to engage aesthetic and scientific discourses without collapsing them. This is lacking in Hayles's Chaos Bound. She links culture, theory and technology through a recursive loop (Hayles 1990, 187). This grafting of science and the humanities using positive feedback as the motor for change ignores negative feedback's role in homeostasis.

Hayles implies that change in one domain such as theory or technology necessarily results in change in the others like culture. The question of what degree of change is necessary in one domain before its effects are felt in others is not addressed. How stable are cultural systems when faced with perturbations in theoretical discourse? Does technological innovation serve theory making?

Feedback loops describe; they do not explain. The figure of the feedback loop as one-sidedly deployed by Hayles conflates explanation and description in the body of the cultural matrix:

feedback loops among theory, technology, and culture develop and expand into complex connections between literature and science which are mediated through the cultural matrix (4)

Specific mediations and connections apart from the overarching cultural matrix are not demonstrated. They are taboo. For example, she constructs the present cultural matrix to give to young television watchers the experiential monopoly of the emerging culture:

The case could be made that the people in this country [United States] who know the most about how postmodernism feels (as distinct from how to envision or analyze it) are all under the age of sixteen. (282)

Hayles's comment overdetermines the impact of a given technology. It also homogenizes youth. Furthermore "feeling" is a cultural and verbal construct.

Suspect here is Hayles's correlation of increased mediation with aging. Contra chaos, she slides deep into the framework of classical science where change is proportional to the degree of the forces operating on a system. Complexity, chaotic or otherwise, has disappeared.

Ironically, at the outset of her text, Hayles proclaims reduction avoidance:

The underlying forces that have fueled the new paradigms -- the rapid development of information technologies, the increasing awareness of global complexities, and consequent attention to small fluctuations -- do not depend on any single factor, especially one so slight as the choice of a name for the new theories. But the name is important, for in its multiple meanings it serves as a crossroads at which diverse paths within the culture meet. (9)

Attention to detail does fuel the so-called new paradigms. However it is a self-reflexive attention. A type the author of Chaos Bound does not readily display. Although Hayles recognizes that nonlinear functions "connote an often startling incongruity between cause and effect, so that a small cause can give rise to a large effect," (11) the choice of "chaos" as crossroad-word tends to orient her exploration to intersections, states and isomorphism rather than to movement, change and the non-meeting places marking jumps. A glance at catastrophe theory may have done otherwise. Chaos is. Catastrophes happen.

Hayles's early distrust of causal explanations is evident in the Cosmic Web where she claimed that "causal terminology implies a one-way interaction." (Hayles 1984, 20) Her statement that "every cause is simultaneously an effect, and every effect is also a cause" (20) fails to render interaction as multivalent. Interaction, for her, figures a mutuality and she

would insist that we not be misled by a causal perspective into thinking of correspondences between disciplines as one-way exchanges, for example, by asserting that the change in scientific paradigms caused a shift in literary form. In a field model, the interactions are always mutual: the cultural matrix guides individual inquiry at the same time that the inquiry helps to form, or transform, the matrix. (23)

This risks leaving us with very weak conceptual tools for dealing with valence. Cause and effect do imply hierarchies of power. Chaos theory does not promise to abolish them. Mutual interactions, such as predator-prey cycles, become unpredictable not acausal. As well, to perceive isomorphism between scientific and critical discourse is not enough. The recognition of distinct fields and disciplines is necessary to make the perception of the isomorphism into a nuanced complex story. Keeping details in mind like the distinction between catastrophe and chaos helps.