The Politics of Space, Time, and Entropy

Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, 2021

Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2017

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Metaphor and Symbol, 1986

The second law of thermodynamics holds that within a closed system energy degrades from more to less useful forms. Since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century this principle, the law of entropy, has exercised a fascination for thinkers far removed from the realms of physics: in much the same way that Newtonian physics served previous centuries, the idea of entropy has been turned to account as a world-ordering or root metaphor. Analysis of the "system of associated common-places" that attaches to the metaphor illumines the reasons for its popularity, and these reasons in turn offer grounds for judging the consequences and limitations of allowing the entropy metaphor to mediate the complex of relations between psyche, culture, and nature in the modern world.

Monatshefte, 2007

2007

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.orgA User's Guide to Entropy* YVE-ALAIN BOIS AND ROSALIND KRAUSS ENTROPY. Roger Caillois's example is simple: hot and cold water mixing together to settle into a uniformly tepid blandness.1 Robert Smithson's is only somewhat more complex. To explain entropy he asks his reader to imagine a sandbox filled on one side with white sand and on the other with black.2A little boy begins to run around the enclosure in a clockwise direction, kicking up the sand as he goes and mixing together dark grains with light. He is then told to reverse his course and run counterclockwise. This will certainly do nothing to undo the movement toward uniformity and re-sort the two colors into separate fields. As his legs continue to churn, the process of entropy will, irreversibly,only progress and deepen. Although both these meditations on the second law of thermodynamics were conceived at more or less the same time-Caillois's "Ladissymetrie" first presented as a lecture in 1970, Smithson's "The Monuments of Passaic"written in 1967-Caillois's argument reaches back to his earliest, brilliant essays from Minotaure, published in the 1930s. Medusa & Co., his book on the phenomenon of animal mimicry which in 1960 expanded the ideas of his 1935 "Mimicryand Legendary Psychasthenia,"works on some of the same material that will now concern him in relation to entropy, namely, the dissymmetry between left and right that runs right back from the rightward spiraling of the galaxies, through the superior dexterity of the right side of humans, down to the preference for the right half of the nucleic chain in the chemical compounds that make up life.3 This bridge to the subject of mimicry, plus the nature of the two examples, particularly Smithson's, could give the impression that entropy's import is particularly acute for visual analysis and most especially for that which concerns * The main body of the catalogue for the exhibition LInforme:moded'emploif,rom which this group of texts derives, is in dictionary form, divided roughly into four sections: Base Materialism;Horizontality; Pulse; and Entropy. As is clear from the alphabetical organization of the following entries, "entropy" puts in its first appearance near the beginning of the dictionary, and then forms a cluster at the end. Caillois'sargumentinLadissymetrieh,owever,isthatthisbreak withsymmetryisantientropic, producing the imbalance that allows for the break to occur between inorganic life, which is strictly crystalline and symmetrical in structure, and organic life. OCTOBER78,Fall1996,pp.39-88. ? 1996Yve-AlainBoisandRosalindKrauss. Butterfly"Roberlte Diable,"photographfrom Animal Mimicry byRogerCaillois.1963. 40 OCTOBER modernist painting. For the image of the sandbox's erasure of the division between white and black seems to rhyme very nicely with the photographs from Minotaureof insects so perfectly imitating the patterns of their habitats as to vanish completely into the uniformity of one, continuous texture. And this in turn makes it seem that what is at issue is a question of boundary or contour, which is to say,of the distinction between figure and ground. Indeed, in Caillois'searly essay the boundary condition is precisely what breaks down in what is described as a form of insectoid psychosis, as the animal is unable to hold the distinction between itself and its leafy milieu intact. Caillois compares this condition to that reported by schizophrenics who feel themselves dispossessed and even devoured by the space around them. In the grip of this, he writes, The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever of space. He feels himself becoming space. ... He is similar, not similar to something, butjust similar.And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession."4 The steady erosion of figure/ground distinction which ties the schizophrenic to what has been termed the "subjective detumescence" of the animal gripped by mimicry5 might indeed seem to blend imperceptibly into that clamor for the erasure of distinctions that characterized the world of avant-garde practice, such as the call for the collapse of the barrier "separating art from life." But more specifically, since the mimicry example apparently addresses the visual condition of figure/ground, it would seem to resonate with the ambition internal to "high modernism" to conceive a spatial condition unique to the perceptual modality specific to the arts of vision, one that would cancel all separations of figures from their surrounding spaces or backgrounds to produce a continuum unimaginable for our earthly bodies to traverse, but into which we as viewersmight easily slideor glide-in an effortless, soaring, purely opticalmovement.6 And "purity"is, indeed, the operative word in this ideological drive toward a visualist or "optical"dimension. For in sloughing off the inevitable separations of space as we normally experience it, in which objects stand apart from one another and space is discontinuous with them, this new optical continuum would be the result of what one vocabulary would call sublation-as figure and ground achieve a newandhighersynthesis-and anothersublimations,incethepurifiedspacewould, in dispensing with bodies, rid itself as well of all the drives to which bodies are 4. Roger Caillois, "Mimicryand Legendary Psychasthenia,"trans.John Shepley, October31 (Winter 1984), p. 30. 5. Denis Hollier, "Mimesisand Castration 1937,"Octobe3r1 (Winter 1985), pp. 3-16. 6. The operative text here is Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" (1960), in which he describes this opticality: "The Old Masters created an illusion of space in depth that one could imagine oneself walking into, but the analogous illusion created by the Modernist painter can only be seen into; can be traveled through, literallyor figuratively,only with the eye" (Greenberg, TheCollectedEssaysand Criticismv,ol. 4, ed. John O'Brian [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], p. 90).

Athens Journal of Philology, 2017

Keeping in mind that both science and literature bring complementary endeavors in the process of perception and creation as well as in the world through which those processes take part, this article deals with irreversible time and entropy as presented in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Even though Pynchon acknowledges the entropic pull and consequently the dissipation of energy, he also regards entropy in Claude Shannon's terms, as a proliferation of information. In this sense, the system gets activated toward increasing complexity rather than heat death, juxtaposing it to chaos theory so that its underlying principle encompasses both renewal and dissolution. In Pynchon's vision, just as closed mechanical systems gradually lose energy and dissipate, so do societies run down, tend toward disorder, and ultimately collapse if there is no input of external energy. Yet, despite the menacing, official notion of entropy as the irreversible movement toward the absolute end of time, Pynchon's novel shows systems' "correspondences" with their surroundings, which gives them new possibilities. Open systems are in a better position because they can evolve with the arrow of time facing forward. Consequently, as the paper argues, information (recognized as disorder) is growing so rapidly that the systems get overloaded, distorted, and buried in noise, augmenting the main character's (who acts as a "demon" and sorts out information) confusion and the systems' complexities.

Technophany: A Journal for Philosophy and Technology, 2023

This paper is dedicated to sketching out, in broad outline, a system of metaphysics that takes, as ontologically as possible, the notion of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. The 19 th century saw a dramatic transformation in the basic categories of knowledge. Following the Industrial Revolution, both in metaphysics (dialectical materialism) and in physics (entropy and the second law of thermodynamics), the notions of time and matter became, as is argued here, intertwined. In this paper, I examine the notion of entropy so as to form a notion of a material, emergent temporality. Such a temporality is strongly non-linear and is unevenly distributed among material systems. The goal of this will be to show what the consequences of the Industrial Revolution have been on our conception of the form of time itself. Rather than the formal time, linear time of Newtonian mechanics and Kant's transcendental idealism, I suggest that entropic time implies a world that is temporally nonorientable, relating back to itself in important ways. Taking some topological ideas from Deleuze's treatment of the third synthesis of time in Difference and Repetition (1969), as well as Žižek's concept of dialectical materialism from Sex and the Failed Absolute (2019), I will show how these disparate notions of material time bear on the topology.

The human mind, by its very nature, is a constantly curious, questioning thing – and as such, what is it that leads us to continuously ask ‘what if?’ Why has the concept of alternate realities remained so enduringly popular within the broader oeuvre of science fiction - that tantalising capability to delve into both past and future scenarios in an attempt to analyse the possibilities for something different, something profoundly ‘other’? In his essay on Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Ted Gioia argues that ‘the excitement of sci-fi is not derived from its science—which rarely stands up to scrutiny—but rather from its imaginative reconstructions of our perceived reality.’ This essay focuses on this notion of ‘reconstruction’ and the fabrication of the unfamiliar, fantastical and unsettling from the world we know. It is a tradition with roots stretching back through literature of the past two-hundred years to early Greek philosophical debate and classical poetry. As two of the most prolific authors of science-fiction, Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick provide an ideal crux to an examination of alternate realities and how this narrative premise can be employed as a tool to investigate a multitude of themes prevalent to contemporary society. Published in 1962, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle explores the concept of an alternate reality where Germany and Japan won the Second World War. With Europe completely dominated by Germany, America was forced to surrender to the Axis powers and was promptly colonised by Germany on the East Coast and by Japan on the Western Coast – the two powers separated by a neutral Rocky Mountain buffer zone. In an unstable Cold War environment unfolding between Japan and Germany, many of the remaining Americans eke out an existence selling antiques – both fake and real – to the Japanese, who have an obsession with objects of America’s past. Against this backdrop, a young woman called Julianna Frink seeks out the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy; a book that portrays a hopeful alternate world where Germany lost the war. Through this novel-within-a-novel technique, Dick explores the notions of alternate realities, the subjective nature of history and ideas of race within a conflicted society. As Eric Brown explains in his introduction to the novel, ‘[Dick] was obsessed with the idea that the universe was only apparently real, an illusion behind which the truth might dwell. Again and again in his work, we find that reality as perceived by both reader and protagonist is a hoax’. Ursula Le Guin engages with many similar themes within her novel The Lathe Of Heaven (1971). Dealing with protagonist George Orr, who suffers from dreams with the capability to change reality, the novel examines this mechanism and the problems created when it is abused by Orr’s doctor, William Haber. Utilising a brainwave machine that enhances Orr’s dreams, Haber attempts to change the world, with disastrous consequences – directing Orr to dream of an end to racism, everyone’s skin is turned grey. Ordered to dream of world peace, Orr creates an alien invasion, uniting the world’s nations to fight against them. With the world becoming increasingly unstable through repeat usage of the ‘dream-machine’, Orr is forced to fight for control against Haber and ultimately shut his operations down.