Chaos theory recognises the large consequences of small variations amplified over time. As Briggs and Peat point out with Taoist examples, the power of the small to effect large change requires critical attention directed to details. Ironically inattention to detail, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, affects Hayles's objection to Lyotard. She accuses him of basing his notion of paralogy on a misunderstanding of thermodynamics. However his concept emerges from morphogenesis as developed by René Thom's work in mathematical catastrophe theory (Lyotard, 58-60). Thom is not discussed in Chaos Bound. Nor does Thom's work in topology appear Gleick's book. To do so would undermine his American-centric focus and severely test his glorification of the eureka principle. Catastrophe theory is literally at the centre of Turbulent Mirror which produces a discourse that avoids both the (often tired) claims of novelty and a race-for- knowledge narrative.

For Briggs and Peat, chaos is not a destination, not a prize to capture. For Hayles it is both. This teleological bent abets the non-application of feedback to her own readings. For example, the standard of non-one way interaction implied by the feedback model, if applied, undercuts Hayles's critique of Gleick (Hayles 1990, 171-174). It forces a reflexive reading of her own reading when she remarks that in his vignettes of the experiential scene of chaos theory's intellectual development women are absent (172). This, she matches with the conversion structure of his narrative and

the larger view of chaos that Gleick presents. For many of the scientists whose words he records, chaos is more than just another theory. It represents an opening of the self to the messiness of life, to all the chaotic unpredictable phenomena that linear science taught these scientists to screen out. Once roused, they remember that the messiness was always there. (173)

That messiness is the other, the feminine and chaos itself. "Chaotic unpredictability and nonlinear thinking, however, are just the aspects of life that have tended to be culturally encoded as feminine." (173), according to Hayles. She betrays a strong link to this encoding's anti-rationalism when she observes that "chaos could no longer function in its liberating role as representation of the other" (173) if the scientist were to persist in forgetfulness.

In the slippage from chaos as paradigm to chaos as a metaphysical mystery and its subsequent promotion to a liberating role she forgets that the feminine is also encoded as order through the figure of the angel in the house. Hayles's text signals this other trope in Gleick for "when living quarters are discussed, they are depicted as eccentric or antidomestic." (172)

Learning from chaos theory, her text could easily maintain "the complex play of gender, individuality, and scientific theory in Gleick's text" (174) by modeling a strange attractor that could read the feminine as aligning itself close to order and close to chaos, never coinciding with either. Ironically the one vignette in Gleick's text to which she makes explicit reference is in the chapter on strange attractors. It relates a visit between male scientists. It introduces women only in their capacity as spouses:

With characteristic diffidence, Lorenz made the occasion a social one, and they went with their wives to an art museum. (Gleick, 141)

On the facing page is the diagram of a strange attractor. The paratext escapes Hayles's attention. The opportunity is missed. The chance lost.

Two approaches for unraveling the unseized randomness at work in Hayles's reading of Gleick have no status within chaos theory. An assertion from Scientific American makes this clear:

Random behavior occurs in very simple systems, without any need for complication or indeterminacy. (Crutchfield, 48)

To chaos, extrinsic approaches, they are. Yet indeterminacy and complication are conceptual categories intrinsic to literary criticism.

Indeterminacy plays an explicative role in understanding Hayles's reading of Gleick. The anecdote of the encounter is focalized from the perspective of the younger scientist, Ruelle, who

a decade later felt astonishment and excitement when he finally learned of Lorenz's work. He went to visit Lorenz once, in the years that followed, and left with a small sense of disappointment that they had not talked more of their common territory in science. (Gleick, 141)

It is not clear at this point in the text whether Ruelle had wanted the two to talk more during or before their meeting or both. The coordinating conjunction does not subordinate encounter to affect in any causal connection. The same grammatical structure follows in the next sentence:

With characteristic diffidence, Lorenz made the occasion a social one, and they went with their wives to an art museum. (Gleick, 141)

Of course, this second sentence would settle the small disappointment on the occasion at hand. However, Lorenz's decision is termed as "characteristic," a description that could emanate from Ruelle's perspective or could be a commentary from Gleick, the reporter of Ruelle's experience.

Supplementing the indeterminacy in the levels of narration, the mention of the wives opens a new indeterminacy in the text. Would they have talked more about their shared scientific concerns if the wives had been absent? This is the point at which Hayles connects her speculations with Gleick's text. Given the relegation of the wives to an adverbial phrase in a descriptive sentence, Hayles, in contradiction to her credo, reads the wives as a necessary and efficient cause of the distraction. Like a catalyst they remain unaffected. No mutual interaction here.

Hayles complicates Gleick by reading through the filter of genre. Within the conversion genre which Hayles identifies at work in Gleick's text, one may find a sub-genre: the encounter of master and novice.

According to such a scenario, Ruelle's disappointment with Lorenz's diffidence may be a problem generated by his misreading of the master. He is desirous of words and fails to gain a lesson from observing the master in action. He undervalues, if he identifies it as a factor at all, distraction, or at least its role in Lorenz's work.

Gleick relates how Lorenz first became aware of sensitivity in nonlinear systems (16). Distraction is a contributing factor. If Lorenz had not stepped out for coffee it is implied that he might have caught a tiny decimal place difference before it produced a pattern in his printout. He would have thereby aborted the opportunity for insight. Within this narrative construct, Ruelle does benefit from his art museum visit; Gleick concludes his chapter by citing Ruelle on the aesthetic appeal of strange attractors (153). And if the aesthetic is indeed coded as feminine, then Hayles's reading is consistent: the reconciliation to chaos is a reconciliation to the feminine as the trigger of creative distraction. However the wives are not mentioned again at the chapter's conclusion. Their association with the aesthetic is only contingent and fleeting. The exact trigger remains a mystery.

Feminine or not, Hayles's outcome, a new harmonious relationship, reconciliation with nature, chaotic or otherwise, is the avatar of a theocratic theme and it cannot serve to legitimate either science or criticism (or their isomorphism) in a postmodern age. A wholly secular, use of paradox gives us immersion stories. Conversion stories enlarge the meaning of chaos beyond that of the Scientific American popularizers who claim:

simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior. The randomness is fundamental; gathering more information does not make it go away. Randomness generated in this way has come to be called chaos. (Crutchfield, 46)

Is not such systemic randomness what non-scientists have long known under the rubric "aporia" which signal as always the polyvalent interactions that immerse theory and human experience in an ever shifting field of representations. Few who by custom sail those waters convert to the siren call of novelty.