Bifurcation
This afternoon, I’ve been reading a series of interviews with Foucault collected as Power/Knowledge. It’s quite good so far, but I don’t really want to write about it yet. However, it did get my brain worked up enough to think about some things in complexity.
So, in the first interview, Foucault is debating some pro-Mao prick – I mean, he’s not a prick in the debate, but, well, knowing what we know about the Cultural Revolution, it’s tough to not think of this putz as a schmuck, especially (and I’m guessing here) since he/she’s probably some bourgeois prick slumming it, like the rich kids that live in poor neighborhoods on their parents’ dime because the working class possesses some ineffable air of coolness that cash can’t acquire (which is the name of my sequel to that movie starring McDreary from that shitty show).
Anyway, he starts talking about class contradictions, and it gets me thinking. I’m teaching a logic class this semester, and I spent the first week or so explaining why this will never help them actually understand how people reason and that if they forget that supposedly this has to do with the real world, they’ll be better off. So, it’s just an elaborate game, something to stimulate their brain, puzzles to figure out – and not a system for finding truth.
And I mentioned briefly that real logic – dialectical logic -works because it acknowledges that all systems of thought are inherently contradictory and the contradictions internal to the system are what cause it to transform into the next system of thought. Some things are negated, some things are preserved: Aufhebung. You know, the whole Hegelian rap.
Right, so contradictions.
I’m thinking about this, and I’m thinking about how complexity theory works as a theory about how systems – any systems in general – and here, specifically, a system of thought – that have complexly interacting components and that move with a patterned regularity but are unpredictable (i.e., there is a pattern, but it never repeats itself), how these systems can move into regimes where there is contradictory behavior and how this behavior can quickly send the system into chaos.
That’s a short form of it. But, and I don’t know how to articulate it yet, the idea of bifurcations in a physical system:
and contradictory modes of thought within a single social system…I wonder how far the analogy can go, and what use it could have in the analysis of belief systems, an analysis using some kind of dialectal logic.
Filed by andyb at September 15th, 2007 under philosophy
Language and logos, logic and math included, can only approach and never touch their object. I’m thinking of Lacan and his phrase “the role of the logos is wedded to the advent of desire”, which comes within a very abstruse discussion. Unfortunately, my books are in the US and I’m in the 3rd world and it’s impossible to find Lacan here. In any case,the “mist” or “fog” of language (don’t physicists describe an electron “fog”? what are those little buggers “fogging” around anyway? what condenses electrons? no simple answers, please) occurs within an impossible-inevitable “not-language” (the Lacanian “Real”, what condenses language, what condenses logic), which is no excuse for not talking, especially when “on-the-make”, whether logically or not, as language is all we have besides not-language, and who wants to sit with a girl/guy and not-talk? (“He didn’t say anything so elequently. It was wonderful.”) But my point – I don’t really have one – is that using language with one eye on the “can’t get there from here” (which to say is simply “desire” is a childish self-indulgence, a kind of hiding under the covers) can give experimental literature a discipline, as language becomes something to purposefully BREAK, rather than use or produce, or to use/produce in order to escape – however impossible that finally may be. Br. .k. Like LX-sT+r1-eS. Atom smashing. Adam (origins) smashing (getting drunk, making wonderful), Adam’s apple smashing (breaking the voice, doing something with that fruit of knowledge).
In other words, I’m wondering if complexity is not generated by desire (again, not simply “desire” but the thing outside of language which that word points to) and must 1) continually develop, because to stop is to reach no-desire, an impossible psychic condition; 2) be patterned and yet never repeat, I’d have to explain how this is inherent to desire – something about the psyche’s cohesion; 3) not simply depend on contradiction but actually “incorporate” (literally) contradiction, opposition, Other-ness (explaining how this happens is one of Lacan’s brilliant feats). Through a Lacanian lens, “chaos” would be the impossibility of psychic cohesion, psychosis (or neurosis?).
A final Freudian question: “What does Hegel want?”
Comment by Chris Hall — November 2, 2007 @ 9:28 pm