Subject
Re: Non-VN Bibliography: Brian Boyd on Theory
Date
Body
Dear Sergey,
Perhaps one reason why Nabokov is not mentioned in Boyd's article is
that Nabokov's Bergsonian view of evolution makes in his works ill-
suited to an evolutionary psychology perspective. As a former student
of Menand, I understand (and agree with) many of his criticisms of
the academy. And I agree with Boyd that biology is important to
understanding literature. However, there are alternatives to the
evolutionary psychology perspective. Here's a review that I wrote
about a book that discusses one of those alternatives, Biosemiotics.
(The review does not mention Nabokov, but it does mention Boyd. It
will appear in the next issue of _Configurations_. ) Biosemiotics is
derived from Peircean semiotics, and although no direct link between
Nabokov and Peirce seems to exist, there is a link between William
James and Nabokov.
Tori
Wheeler, W. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the
Evolution of Culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, 192 pp.,
$24.95 ISBN 1905007302
Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the
Evolution of Culture is a finely-written, broadly-interdisciplinary
exploration of human social relations as natural and, naturally
semiotic. It is part of a small but growing number of studies
offering a refreshingly intelligent, inspiring, and uncommonly sane
solution to the problem of thinking in dichotomies -- the natural and
the artificial, the body and the mind, the individual and society --
arguably one of the greatest intellectual stumbling blocks. Given
the great importance of its message, The Whole Creature should have
found itself among a great number of books recognizing and expounding
the significance of advances made recently in the study of emergence
as both a philosophical and scientific concept. Most significantly,
these new findings allow us to re-conceive the hard problem of
selfhood, avoiding the disadvantages of constructivism and of
reductionism. But books with like theses, books that present new
evidence from contemporary sciences rather than simply rehearsing the
very long (and by many accounts, failed) traditions of organicism or
holism, are markedly few, and one wonders, since cultural theorists
stand poised for the next new wave, Why isn't biosemiotics more
widely recognized? The question becomes even more compelling when we
realize that much of what Wheeler advocates promises to bridge the
arts and sciences, an accomplishment, were it possible, might be as
welcomed (for readers of Configurations) as peace in the Middle East.
Reasons, relevant and otherwise, may abound for the relative
slowness with which critics (of all kinds) have adopted this new
perspective, but most probable is the case that, as a critique of
post-structuralism, an emergentist's thesis may be mistaken as a
retreat to humanism or, worse, a desertion to reductionism, into the
arms of the likes Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd, whose "Literary
Darwinism," sometimes also known as "Biopoetics" bears an unfortunate
similarity, in name only, to Wheeler's area of focus, Biosemiotics.
Wheeler proclaims herself to be neither enemy nor friend of post-
structuralism or reductionism. She understands the success of
developing a new theory of self depends on assimilating contradictory
views instead of exacerbating hostilities. One may say, without
paradox, that hers is a strong argument for a constructivism grounded
in nature. Through the triadic semiotics of C. S. Pierce, Wheeler
describes the possibility of a multi-vocal self that is also integral
and unified.
The difficulty of Peircean thought, his profligate
generation of "ugly" and awkward terms, is often noted, but such
difficulties should not intimidate a generation that cut its teeth on
deconstruction. It is curious, then, that Peirce, esteemed by more
than a few noted post-structuralists, should remain relatively
misunderstood and underused. Although post-structuralists have
praised the processual nature of Peirce's semiosis as an improvement
over Saussure's focus on the static structure of the signified-
signifier, what they either missed or declined to adopt is Peirce's
metaphysical realism. According to Peirce, reality is gradually (and
imperfectly) revealed in the semiotic process. His triadic semiotics
includes a "sign," which is comparable to Saussure's signifier and an
"interpretant," which is comparable to the signified, though it is
usually itself a sign in the interpreter's mind (or, in Peirce's
later writings, in a very generalized conception of mind, an
important consideration for biosemiotics). The most innovative part
of Peirce's triadic semiotics is the inclusion of "object," which is
fully part of the semiotic process. Peirce extended signs beyond
those that are conceptual, so as to include "indices," which are
contiguous with the object they represent. Indices are in reaction to
or opposition with an object and indicate the feeling of otherness,
which simultaneously indicates the self to which it is opposed. This
enables partial access to "brute" reality through signs. While
interpretation is fallible, it is constrained by the semiotic object.
For Peirce, "objective reality" is whatever we sense as external to
ourselves, whatever resists our will. In Saussure's semiotic, in
contrast, the conception of meaning derives from structure and the
systematic relations between and among signs and not by referring to
material things. In this view wherein language refers to itself
rather than to objects, language constructs our notions of reality.
By including the object in the semiotic process, Peirce connects the
semiotic web at much needed anchor points to the material world. For
Pierce, as Wheeler reminds us, the world is perfused with signs.
Semoisis is not an exclusively human process; it is at work in
organic nature generally speaking. More specifically, self-organizing
processes and the evolutionary process are semioitic, according to
biosemioticians.
As a "whole" creature, a human individual is primarily a social
creature, embedded, interconnected with everything else in the
system, and this is comparable to "post-human" conceptions of
selfhood, though Wheeler diverges from this view in her Peircean
metaphysical realism. According to Wheeler, the first person view is
not to be maligned as an illusion. Rather, subjective experience is
a fact of biological, social, and semiotic organization. Wheeler
depends heavily upon the complexity sciences, which are congenial to
Peirce's semiotics and give support to the assertion that emergent
objects, such as selves, are more than mere epiphenomena.
The Whole Creature must be praised for these insights. The only
legitimate way to speak of a self as coherent -- and not merely as an
effect of language nor as an atomistic, uncaused self as in the
humanist tradition -- is to speak of it in terms of an emergent
phenomenon. However, I must note, even as one fully invested in the
field, emergentists have yet to offer conclusive arguments for
ontological, as opposed to epistemological emergence. Nobel-prize
winner Robert Laughlin, whom Wheeler invokes for support, has written
a celebratory monograph, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics
from the Bottom Down, the style of which is not unlike Wheeler's own,
that is, enthusiastic, encyclopedic, an enjoyable read. Laughlin
maintains that the "Age of Emergence" has begun in science. While the
science of emergence has been revived with breakthroughs in nonlinear
dynamics research, there is no agreed-upon formalism for describing
the supposed radical novelty in complex systems (Goldstein), and a
precise definition of "complexity" has yet to be adopted by everyone
in the field (Feldman and Crutchfield). Such criticisms come from
within the community of complexity scientists and are not negative as
such, rather they form basis for most research programs. This is not
to say that Laughlin and Wheeler's optimism is misplaced, for very
promising work is being done in, for example, physics and
evolutionary theory, where semiotic analyses of nature are being used
(Ay, Flack and Kakauer; Deacon, Cashman and Sherman).
Such is the base on which Wheeler builds her argument for socialist
politics, suggesting that the complexity sciences compel us to
believe that societies are complex nonlinear evolving holisms, giving
credence to Marx's description of social organizations. But hers is a
tempered socialism, valuing the sense of propriety, power and
investment in the material world that control of your environment
brings. She would thus be critical of the forms of capitalism that
tend to prevent most people from owning property. Certainly, attempts
to eliminate imbalances, which are natural and inevitable outcomes of
all self-organizing processes, would be more effective if one
understood social organizations as complex systems.
Wheeler rightly contends that it is the role of governments (not
scientists) to suggest "intervening in complex totalities in
strategic ways so as to ensure the health, creativity, and
adaptability … of all." She furthermore writes, "in order to make
effective interventions in complex biological systems such as
ecologies and human societies, we need to have a good theory,
consistent with complexity science's general observations about the
characteristics of complex systems." Wheeler is careful not to say
that the complexity sciences offer a theory for intervention. What
she does say is a theory should be constructed based on the
observations of complexity science. I commend her caution here since
there is in fact no such thing as "complexity theory" or "chaos
theory" -- at least not in Popper's sense -- no way to falsifying the
claims being made by the workers in this field. And as yet,
complexity scientists cannot make predictions about the behavior of
complex systems, and so they can't offer any theories as to how one
might manipulate them predictably. However, according to one notable
complexity worker, James Crutchfield, soon enough it will be possible
to make predictions about the categories of complex objects that are
more likely than others (specific prediction remaining impossible),
and he recommends that some measure be taken now to include
marginalized people, such as artists, writers, and philosophers, in
discussions about what kinds of intervention might be desirable
(personal communication).
While capitalism may be founded upon the belief that people are
primarily "isolated and monadic self-interested individuals," human
freedom, argues Wheeler, is not best understood simply in terms of
possession and self-interest, but in terms of the ability to respond
to and get responses from one's environment. She acknowledges that
capitalism can be highly creative, but it can often be more faddish
than truly adaptive, and it currently tends to favor investment over
work. Moreover, even though capitalist systems are self-organized,
she points out that their boundaries are drawn to closely -- in the
minds of those with the most control -- excluding the wider context
of employees' relationships, family and community, health, and,
indeed, to the environment itself. Wheeler believes capitalism will
transform itself in time, but only if it is subjected to constant
intellectual and environmental pressures. A number of American
businesses have already responded, since they have an interest in
understanding how organizations work and getting them to run more
efficiently. One of the things frequently recommended by those
applying complexity science research to management is greater
interactivity among all workers: employee, management, and CEOs. Also
advocated is employee-ownership, which confers what Wheeler, after
leading biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer, calls "semiotic freedom."
If there is anything we have learned from complexity science (or
more correctly from cybernetics, one of its predecessors) is that
centralized control does not work to effectively manipulate a complex
system. Although socialism is often associated with ineffective and
inefficient bureaucracy, there are many varieties of socialism, and
Wheeler envisions a government and a society that generously
distributes the power of decision throughout its structure.
But to say that this book simply advocates the creation of self-
organized societies, businesses and governments would be to miss an
important fact. Any society, good or bad, is a self-organized
system. Not all self-organized systems are necessarily good. What
they are are robust, stable, resistant to change, even when they are
irrational. While (what we call) social progress may require
democratic socialism or self-organization (i.e, a system in which
every individual has an equal chance to be heard and to speak and to
effect and be effected), it might also require the occasional
intervention of a benevolent despot, who might overwhelm self-
organizing trends, bringing something new (which may be initially
viewed as perverse).
To conclude, Wheeler's book is a jubilant celebration of some
important key ideas for the humanities. Fully immersed in her
subject, her style is like her thesis, fluid, far-ranging, flowering
and musical. She writes well on a subject she feels deeply about. I
have but one criticism against her hopes for society with full
semiotic freedom: if everyone interacted equally freely and
frequently, too much homogeneity would set it, and our social system
would become too resistant to change, too self-affirming. One of the
things we understand from the complexity sciences is that imbalance
is sometimes healthy. Marginalization and extreme stress can actually
encourage favorable adaptations. This is something Thomas Pynchon
brings to our awareness in Crying of Lot 49, when he implies that
only the disenfranchised have the power to overcome the awful
homogeneity in which Oedipa is trapped. It may be that a society
needs marginalized people to occasionally disrupt the system and to
further evolution. Fortunately, hardship and isolation will be with
us forever because self-organization is constantly creating
imbalances--and creating writers like Wheeler, who partly because of
their relative isolation, are capable of having original ideas.
Ay, Nihat., Jessica Flack and David C. Krakauer. "Robustness and
Complexity Co-constructed in Multi-modal Signaling Networks." Special
Edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society. London. B, (in press).
Deacon, Terrance, Tyonne Cashman and Jeremy Sherman. "Disembodiment:
Absence as the Root of Intentionality" Working paper, 16 Dec. 2006.
<http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/info.pdf>.
Feldman, David and James P. Crutchfield. "Measures of Statistical
Complexity: Why?" Physics Letters A 238 (1998): 244-252.
Goldstein, Jeffrey. "Emergence radical novelty, and the philosophy of
mathematics." Nonlinear Dynamics in the Life and Social Sciences.
Eds. W. Sulis and I. Trofimova. NATO Science Series. 320. Amsterdam:
IOS Press, 2001, 133-152.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996.
Laughlin, Robert. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the
Bottom Down. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities
64 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013
Voice Mail: 212 696-7800
Office: 646 329-5398 (during exhibitions only)
Fax: 212 591-6226
www.dactyl.org
Support the arts! Go to http://www.dactyl.org/members.html to donate
to Dactyl Foundation.
On Jan 9, 2007, at 8:15 AM, Nabokv-L wrote:
> [EDNote: Perhaps we can justify sharing this item by suggesting
> that when VN is nowhere, it means he is everywhere? Surely many
> readers will be glad to learn of Brian Boyd's recent article.]
>
> Subject:
> Prof Boyd's article on Theory
> From:
> "Sergey Karpukhin" <sak5w@virginia.edu>
> Date:
> Mon, 8 Jan 2007 23:11:40 -0500
> To:
> "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>
> Sorry for the off-topic, but for those of the List Members who are,
> were, or will be in the academia:
>
>
>
> There is an article by Professor Boyd in the Autumn, 2006, issue of
> the American Scholar, which offers a refreshing view of Literary
> Theory as it is propounded in the West. The article is accessible
> online at http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gettingitallwrong-
> boyd.html. VN is not mentioned once, I’m afraid, in it.
>
>
>
> SK
> Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB
>
> Contact the Editors
>
> All private editorial communications, without exception, are read
> by both co-editors.
>
> Visit Zembla
>
> View Nabokv-L Policies
>
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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Perhaps one reason why Nabokov is not mentioned in Boyd's article is
that Nabokov's Bergsonian view of evolution makes in his works ill-
suited to an evolutionary psychology perspective. As a former student
of Menand, I understand (and agree with) many of his criticisms of
the academy. And I agree with Boyd that biology is important to
understanding literature. However, there are alternatives to the
evolutionary psychology perspective. Here's a review that I wrote
about a book that discusses one of those alternatives, Biosemiotics.
(The review does not mention Nabokov, but it does mention Boyd. It
will appear in the next issue of _Configurations_. ) Biosemiotics is
derived from Peircean semiotics, and although no direct link between
Nabokov and Peirce seems to exist, there is a link between William
James and Nabokov.
Tori
Wheeler, W. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the
Evolution of Culture. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, 192 pp.,
$24.95 ISBN 1905007302
Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the
Evolution of Culture is a finely-written, broadly-interdisciplinary
exploration of human social relations as natural and, naturally
semiotic. It is part of a small but growing number of studies
offering a refreshingly intelligent, inspiring, and uncommonly sane
solution to the problem of thinking in dichotomies -- the natural and
the artificial, the body and the mind, the individual and society --
arguably one of the greatest intellectual stumbling blocks. Given
the great importance of its message, The Whole Creature should have
found itself among a great number of books recognizing and expounding
the significance of advances made recently in the study of emergence
as both a philosophical and scientific concept. Most significantly,
these new findings allow us to re-conceive the hard problem of
selfhood, avoiding the disadvantages of constructivism and of
reductionism. But books with like theses, books that present new
evidence from contemporary sciences rather than simply rehearsing the
very long (and by many accounts, failed) traditions of organicism or
holism, are markedly few, and one wonders, since cultural theorists
stand poised for the next new wave, Why isn't biosemiotics more
widely recognized? The question becomes even more compelling when we
realize that much of what Wheeler advocates promises to bridge the
arts and sciences, an accomplishment, were it possible, might be as
welcomed (for readers of Configurations) as peace in the Middle East.
Reasons, relevant and otherwise, may abound for the relative
slowness with which critics (of all kinds) have adopted this new
perspective, but most probable is the case that, as a critique of
post-structuralism, an emergentist's thesis may be mistaken as a
retreat to humanism or, worse, a desertion to reductionism, into the
arms of the likes Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd, whose "Literary
Darwinism," sometimes also known as "Biopoetics" bears an unfortunate
similarity, in name only, to Wheeler's area of focus, Biosemiotics.
Wheeler proclaims herself to be neither enemy nor friend of post-
structuralism or reductionism. She understands the success of
developing a new theory of self depends on assimilating contradictory
views instead of exacerbating hostilities. One may say, without
paradox, that hers is a strong argument for a constructivism grounded
in nature. Through the triadic semiotics of C. S. Pierce, Wheeler
describes the possibility of a multi-vocal self that is also integral
and unified.
The difficulty of Peircean thought, his profligate
generation of "ugly" and awkward terms, is often noted, but such
difficulties should not intimidate a generation that cut its teeth on
deconstruction. It is curious, then, that Peirce, esteemed by more
than a few noted post-structuralists, should remain relatively
misunderstood and underused. Although post-structuralists have
praised the processual nature of Peirce's semiosis as an improvement
over Saussure's focus on the static structure of the signified-
signifier, what they either missed or declined to adopt is Peirce's
metaphysical realism. According to Peirce, reality is gradually (and
imperfectly) revealed in the semiotic process. His triadic semiotics
includes a "sign," which is comparable to Saussure's signifier and an
"interpretant," which is comparable to the signified, though it is
usually itself a sign in the interpreter's mind (or, in Peirce's
later writings, in a very generalized conception of mind, an
important consideration for biosemiotics). The most innovative part
of Peirce's triadic semiotics is the inclusion of "object," which is
fully part of the semiotic process. Peirce extended signs beyond
those that are conceptual, so as to include "indices," which are
contiguous with the object they represent. Indices are in reaction to
or opposition with an object and indicate the feeling of otherness,
which simultaneously indicates the self to which it is opposed. This
enables partial access to "brute" reality through signs. While
interpretation is fallible, it is constrained by the semiotic object.
For Peirce, "objective reality" is whatever we sense as external to
ourselves, whatever resists our will. In Saussure's semiotic, in
contrast, the conception of meaning derives from structure and the
systematic relations between and among signs and not by referring to
material things. In this view wherein language refers to itself
rather than to objects, language constructs our notions of reality.
By including the object in the semiotic process, Peirce connects the
semiotic web at much needed anchor points to the material world. For
Pierce, as Wheeler reminds us, the world is perfused with signs.
Semoisis is not an exclusively human process; it is at work in
organic nature generally speaking. More specifically, self-organizing
processes and the evolutionary process are semioitic, according to
biosemioticians.
As a "whole" creature, a human individual is primarily a social
creature, embedded, interconnected with everything else in the
system, and this is comparable to "post-human" conceptions of
selfhood, though Wheeler diverges from this view in her Peircean
metaphysical realism. According to Wheeler, the first person view is
not to be maligned as an illusion. Rather, subjective experience is
a fact of biological, social, and semiotic organization. Wheeler
depends heavily upon the complexity sciences, which are congenial to
Peirce's semiotics and give support to the assertion that emergent
objects, such as selves, are more than mere epiphenomena.
The Whole Creature must be praised for these insights. The only
legitimate way to speak of a self as coherent -- and not merely as an
effect of language nor as an atomistic, uncaused self as in the
humanist tradition -- is to speak of it in terms of an emergent
phenomenon. However, I must note, even as one fully invested in the
field, emergentists have yet to offer conclusive arguments for
ontological, as opposed to epistemological emergence. Nobel-prize
winner Robert Laughlin, whom Wheeler invokes for support, has written
a celebratory monograph, A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics
from the Bottom Down, the style of which is not unlike Wheeler's own,
that is, enthusiastic, encyclopedic, an enjoyable read. Laughlin
maintains that the "Age of Emergence" has begun in science. While the
science of emergence has been revived with breakthroughs in nonlinear
dynamics research, there is no agreed-upon formalism for describing
the supposed radical novelty in complex systems (Goldstein), and a
precise definition of "complexity" has yet to be adopted by everyone
in the field (Feldman and Crutchfield). Such criticisms come from
within the community of complexity scientists and are not negative as
such, rather they form basis for most research programs. This is not
to say that Laughlin and Wheeler's optimism is misplaced, for very
promising work is being done in, for example, physics and
evolutionary theory, where semiotic analyses of nature are being used
(Ay, Flack and Kakauer; Deacon, Cashman and Sherman).
Such is the base on which Wheeler builds her argument for socialist
politics, suggesting that the complexity sciences compel us to
believe that societies are complex nonlinear evolving holisms, giving
credence to Marx's description of social organizations. But hers is a
tempered socialism, valuing the sense of propriety, power and
investment in the material world that control of your environment
brings. She would thus be critical of the forms of capitalism that
tend to prevent most people from owning property. Certainly, attempts
to eliminate imbalances, which are natural and inevitable outcomes of
all self-organizing processes, would be more effective if one
understood social organizations as complex systems.
Wheeler rightly contends that it is the role of governments (not
scientists) to suggest "intervening in complex totalities in
strategic ways so as to ensure the health, creativity, and
adaptability … of all." She furthermore writes, "in order to make
effective interventions in complex biological systems such as
ecologies and human societies, we need to have a good theory,
consistent with complexity science's general observations about the
characteristics of complex systems." Wheeler is careful not to say
that the complexity sciences offer a theory for intervention. What
she does say is a theory should be constructed based on the
observations of complexity science. I commend her caution here since
there is in fact no such thing as "complexity theory" or "chaos
theory" -- at least not in Popper's sense -- no way to falsifying the
claims being made by the workers in this field. And as yet,
complexity scientists cannot make predictions about the behavior of
complex systems, and so they can't offer any theories as to how one
might manipulate them predictably. However, according to one notable
complexity worker, James Crutchfield, soon enough it will be possible
to make predictions about the categories of complex objects that are
more likely than others (specific prediction remaining impossible),
and he recommends that some measure be taken now to include
marginalized people, such as artists, writers, and philosophers, in
discussions about what kinds of intervention might be desirable
(personal communication).
While capitalism may be founded upon the belief that people are
primarily "isolated and monadic self-interested individuals," human
freedom, argues Wheeler, is not best understood simply in terms of
possession and self-interest, but in terms of the ability to respond
to and get responses from one's environment. She acknowledges that
capitalism can be highly creative, but it can often be more faddish
than truly adaptive, and it currently tends to favor investment over
work. Moreover, even though capitalist systems are self-organized,
she points out that their boundaries are drawn to closely -- in the
minds of those with the most control -- excluding the wider context
of employees' relationships, family and community, health, and,
indeed, to the environment itself. Wheeler believes capitalism will
transform itself in time, but only if it is subjected to constant
intellectual and environmental pressures. A number of American
businesses have already responded, since they have an interest in
understanding how organizations work and getting them to run more
efficiently. One of the things frequently recommended by those
applying complexity science research to management is greater
interactivity among all workers: employee, management, and CEOs. Also
advocated is employee-ownership, which confers what Wheeler, after
leading biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer, calls "semiotic freedom."
If there is anything we have learned from complexity science (or
more correctly from cybernetics, one of its predecessors) is that
centralized control does not work to effectively manipulate a complex
system. Although socialism is often associated with ineffective and
inefficient bureaucracy, there are many varieties of socialism, and
Wheeler envisions a government and a society that generously
distributes the power of decision throughout its structure.
But to say that this book simply advocates the creation of self-
organized societies, businesses and governments would be to miss an
important fact. Any society, good or bad, is a self-organized
system. Not all self-organized systems are necessarily good. What
they are are robust, stable, resistant to change, even when they are
irrational. While (what we call) social progress may require
democratic socialism or self-organization (i.e, a system in which
every individual has an equal chance to be heard and to speak and to
effect and be effected), it might also require the occasional
intervention of a benevolent despot, who might overwhelm self-
organizing trends, bringing something new (which may be initially
viewed as perverse).
To conclude, Wheeler's book is a jubilant celebration of some
important key ideas for the humanities. Fully immersed in her
subject, her style is like her thesis, fluid, far-ranging, flowering
and musical. She writes well on a subject she feels deeply about. I
have but one criticism against her hopes for society with full
semiotic freedom: if everyone interacted equally freely and
frequently, too much homogeneity would set it, and our social system
would become too resistant to change, too self-affirming. One of the
things we understand from the complexity sciences is that imbalance
is sometimes healthy. Marginalization and extreme stress can actually
encourage favorable adaptations. This is something Thomas Pynchon
brings to our awareness in Crying of Lot 49, when he implies that
only the disenfranchised have the power to overcome the awful
homogeneity in which Oedipa is trapped. It may be that a society
needs marginalized people to occasionally disrupt the system and to
further evolution. Fortunately, hardship and isolation will be with
us forever because self-organization is constantly creating
imbalances--and creating writers like Wheeler, who partly because of
their relative isolation, are capable of having original ideas.
Ay, Nihat., Jessica Flack and David C. Krakauer. "Robustness and
Complexity Co-constructed in Multi-modal Signaling Networks." Special
Edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society. London. B, (in press).
Deacon, Terrance, Tyonne Cashman and Jeremy Sherman. "Disembodiment:
Absence as the Root of Intentionality" Working paper, 16 Dec. 2006.
<http://www.mindreadersdictionary.com/info.pdf>.
Feldman, David and James P. Crutchfield. "Measures of Statistical
Complexity: Why?" Physics Letters A 238 (1998): 244-252.
Goldstein, Jeffrey. "Emergence radical novelty, and the philosophy of
mathematics." Nonlinear Dynamics in the Life and Social Sciences.
Eds. W. Sulis and I. Trofimova. NATO Science Series. 320. Amsterdam:
IOS Press, 2001, 133-152.
Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1996.
Laughlin, Robert. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the
Bottom Down. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities
64 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013
Voice Mail: 212 696-7800
Office: 646 329-5398 (during exhibitions only)
Fax: 212 591-6226
www.dactyl.org
Support the arts! Go to http://www.dactyl.org/members.html to donate
to Dactyl Foundation.
On Jan 9, 2007, at 8:15 AM, Nabokv-L wrote:
> [EDNote: Perhaps we can justify sharing this item by suggesting
> that when VN is nowhere, it means he is everywhere? Surely many
> readers will be glad to learn of Brian Boyd's recent article.]
>
> Subject:
> Prof Boyd's article on Theory
> From:
> "Sergey Karpukhin" <sak5w@virginia.edu>
> Date:
> Mon, 8 Jan 2007 23:11:40 -0500
> To:
> "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>
> Sorry for the off-topic, but for those of the List Members who are,
> were, or will be in the academia:
>
>
>
> There is an article by Professor Boyd in the Autumn, 2006, issue of
> the American Scholar, which offers a refreshing view of Literary
> Theory as it is propounded in the West. The article is accessible
> online at http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gettingitallwrong-
> boyd.html. VN is not mentioned once, I’m afraid, in it.
>
>
>
> SK
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