[chi] [alpha] Absolute chaos: the early romantic poetics of complex form.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-SEP-03

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DIVIDED BY ZERO AND WITH AN INDETERMINATE COUNTERVALUE, THE "numerator" chaos itself remains indeterminate--indeterminate enough, in early romantic poetics, to cover a broad conceptual field. Chaos is taken up into a calculus of speculative concepts. It is equated with poetry; determines "the modern" and "the interesting"; explains "the romantic"; is the "foundational idea" of mythology; becomes the organizing principle of the novel; defines enthusiasm and irony; and serves as a designation of epoch and style characterizing the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, and Goethe. As "ein Chaos von Systemen" ["a chaos of systems"], (1) even "the absolute" is determined by a concept whose popularized semantics indicates indeterminacy, disorder, and confusion. Mathematics, too, is proclaimed by Friedrich Schlegel "Princip des Chaotischen. Die [mu] [alpha] [theta] [mathematische] Form entsteht durch das Irrationale, Potenzirte, Combinatorische, Progressive pp." ["Principle of the chaotic. Mathematical form arises from the irrational, exponential, combinatory, progressive pp." S 16: 336]. Whereas Schlegel inclines to algebraic formalizations and simple equations for "chaos," Novalis draws on infinitesimal calculus to develop a poetics of involution when giving "vernunftige[s] Chaos" ["rational chaos"] the notation "Chaos (2) oder [infinity]" (["chaos.sup.2] or [infinity]"). (2)

The early romantic tendency to present an aesthetic concept of chaos in mathematical terms should not be mistaken as an anticipation of the mathematics of fractals. (3) Certainly neither chaos theory nor early romantic thought describe the beautiful by appealing to the traditional idea of "bel ordre," understanding it instead as the result of an oscillation between order and chaos. These are the terms in which Friedrich Cramer and Wolfgang Kaempfer conceive the beauty of fractal patterns, in "der offenen (irrationalen) Ordnung des Uberganges" ["the open (irrational) order of transition"]. (4) Indeed Novalis' mysterious "Chiffernschrift" ["cipher script"] of nature found in "Wolken ... im Schnee, in Krystallen und in Steinbildungen ... in den Feilspanen um den Magnet her, und sonderbaren Conjuncturen des Zufalls" ["clouds ... in the snow, in crystals, and in rock formations ... in the filings surrounding a magnet, and the unusual conjunctures of chance" H I: 201] might be understood as an intuitive anticipation of the self-similar structures described by Benoit Mandelbrot and already intimated by Leibniz. (5) For romanticism, chaos is a metaphor for the transition from an old to a new order, connected to the ideas of self-similarity, recursion, self-organization, and complexity; however, romantic thought also transcendentalizes this figure of transition through a poetological calculus with the infinite that relies on a self-generated indeterminacy.

Early romanticism did not yet have a mathematics for the description of non-linear, chaotic trajectories as they came to be described in the course of the nineteenth century: in 1824 Sadi Carnot almost discovered the second law of thermodynamics that in 1850 Rudolf Clausius formulated as the principle of entropy. Thermal energy, running chaotically along molecular turbulence, becomes distinguished from the orderly course of mechanical energy along visible lines of force. In 1892 Henri Poincare demonstrated that a system of only three components becomes unpredictable and no longer calculable with linear differentials. Earlier in the Newtonian tradition and following Laplace, it was assumed that the parameters of a system could be so precisely calculated that its development would be predictable. The swinging of a pendulum generally stands as the paradigm of such deterministic behavior. The path of a double pendulum, however, though subjected to Newton's laws of motion like the single pendulum, already becomes unpredictable. With the double pendulum, one pendulum is coupled to and simultaneously independent of the movement of the other, so that minimal effects loop back and thereby introduce unpredictable trajectories of motion. Despite the mechanical-deterministic path of motion, a chaotic trajectory arises whose surprising genesis cannot be foreseen and differentially calculated. "Deterministic chaos" indicates the feedback of minimal conditions at points of tipping or bifurcation that can grow to chaotic complexity. The transition from order to chaos can therefore also be understood as the transition from "swinging" to "tipping" (Cramer and Kaempfer 19). With its mathematical metaphors, early romanticism could not go beyond the differential modes of swinging. As an aesthetic counterpart to the mathematical concept of "threshold value," chaos describes transitional phenomena, comprehending them however not as breaks or discontinuities but instead in the sense of stable functions. Even when Novalis notes "Eigentliche romantische Prosa--hochst abwechselnd--wunderbar--sonderliche Wendungen--rasche Sprunge--" ("True romantic prose--highly varying--strange--unusual twists--sudden leaps--" H 2: 814), he binds the "leaps" of romantic poetic praxis to a poetics of approximation to the infinite oriented toward integral calculus. The novel in particular, through a perpetual and self-perpetuating progression of variations (what Friedrich Schlegel would term arabesques), is supposed to stage a play of form that integrates breaks, transitions, and discontinuities into complex new unities. In his comments on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795) and in the notes to Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), Novalis repeatedly calls for a method of "variations" analogous to the mathematics of infinite series that Newton and Leibniz had redefined through infinitesimal calculus as an exponential series. He considers Natalie and the Beautiful Soul in Wilhelm Meister such a "Variation" (H 2: 354): "Dasselbe Individuum in Variationen" ["The same individual in variations" H 2: 351]. Ofterdingen is similarly aimed at "Sonderbar vermischte Situationen. Haufung mehrerer Rollen und Zustande auf Eine Person zu Einer Zeit" ["Unusually combined situations. Accumulation of several roles and conditions upon One person at One time" H 2: 780]. Likewise in the multiple reflections of the novel's overall structure within its smaller parts, such as the embedded songs or the fairy tale that today might be described as recursion or self-similarity, the mathematical principle of frequency distribution becomes, in Novalis' mathematized poetics, one of serial variation in literary terms.

The loose late eighteenth-century transposition of the mathematical concept limes onto the limits of rationality by Kant and in Fichte's philosophy of the self-limiting subject filters into the romantic transformation of chaos as an aesthetic concept. The romantics also drew on early modern natural philosophy--the concept of chaos had been transformed from its obscure existence in Christian Creation theology by Ramon Lull, Paracelsus, and Jakob Bohme into a concept of potentia or possibilitas--and of course on ancient mythologies and cosmogonies. The early romantic enthusiasm for chaos does not only conceptualize transitional phenomena, if in a semantically iridescent fashion; this enthusiasm itself must be understood within the context of a transitional situation. The differentiation of functional systems in the eighteenth century entails a reconceptualization of older concepts of order, for the increasing complexity of modern institutional, semantic, and epistemological structures can no longer be explained with the customary oppositional hierarchy of order and disorder. (6) In early romantic poetics, chaos functions as a new concept of order that merges "order" and "chaos," redundancy and variation, derivation from rules and innovation. This new idea of order was to be embodied, above all, in novelistic form.

Chaos and Epos

The romantic concept of chaos captures a new notion of order, one directed toward complexity and including the old opposition between order and chaos. For the romantics, a relatively simple, deterministic concept of order in the sense of stability, derivation from norms, regularity, and lawfulness can neither explain nature nor stand as a normative concept for art. Batteux's "bel ordre," so influential for German poetics in the eighteenth century, no longer holds: order is no longer the basis of the beautiful. With this reevaluation of the concept of chaos, romanticism departs from the normative poetics derived from Aristotle and set down in Boileau's Art poetique (1674). Boileau rejected composite literary forms: every work was supposed to fulfill as much as possible the rules of a particular genre. Even the first stirrings toward a systemization of genres in Gottsched's Critische Dichtkunst (1730), sustained by the postulate of imitatio and an expanded concept of mimesis, retain the hierarchy of genres anchored in poetological tradition. Not until the shift toward historicization in the mid-eighteenth century--with Herder's insistence that literary genres be understood according to the manner of their origination--is there a break from normative-systematic classifications toward consideration of the interrelation between conformity and individuality, general rule and particular literary phenomenon. Any theory of genres can henceforth be constituted only as a history of genres, and internal conformities read in the light of the history of a literary form. Herder's genesis of genres hypostatizes so-called original or natural forms and...

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