programme http://web.archive.org/web/20041231005908/imv.au.dk/SLS-Europe... 1 of 14 12/12/06 9:05 PM Final Programme PLEASE NOTE THAT PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE NO LONGER THAN 20 MINUTES TO MAKE TIME FOR DISCUSSION. HOME Sessions Thursday May 9 Session TM 1: Science Formation Chair: Helge Kragh Room: Mødelokale 1 Dimitrios Akrivoulis Cosmopolis meets Chaosmos: Newtonian and Quantum Imaginaries of Order/Chaos Helge Kragh & Bodil Kragh Astronomy's Great Debate: How Rhetorical Strategies Shaped a Major Scientific Discussion Darin Hayton
PLEASE NOTE THAT PRESENTATIONS SHOULD BE NO LONGER THAN 20 MINUTES TO MAKE TIME FOR DISCUSSION.
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Sessions Thursday May 9
Session TM 1: Science Formation
Chair: Helge KraghRoom: Mødelokale 1 Dimitrios AkrivoulisCosmopolis meets Chaosmos: Newtonian and Quantum Imaginaries of Order/ChaosHelge Kragh & Bodil KraghAstronomy's Great Debate: How Rhetorical Strategies Shaped a Major ScientificDiscussionDarin Hayton
Science in Support of Political Reform: Joseph Grünpeck's AstrologyKathleen DuffyTexture Imagery in Teilhard de Chardin
Session TM 2: 19th Century Constructions of Cultural Stereotypes
Chair: Johanna M. SmithRoom: Mødelokale 1.1Johanna M. SmithLate-Nineteenth-Century Technologies of the Body: Anthropometry and DetectionMary RosnerMissionary Travels: Muddying the WatersChristine HankeBetween Science and Aesthetics: the 1900 German Physical Anthropology
Session TM 3: Representing Gender
Chair: Carol ColatrellaRoom: Kaffestue 1Merja PolvinenConsilience, Chaos Theory and Female Thought in Contemporary FictionCarol ColatrellaScience and Romance in Sena Jeter Naslund's Ahab's Wife, or the Star-GazerMaria MikolchakFemale Sexual Transgression in the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel: Literature and its Medical Background
Session TM 4: Reading as Technology
Chair: Sanja PerovicRoom: Kaffestue 2Sanja PerovicRevolutionary Calendar: Between Rupture and RegenerationPhillips SalmanJohannes Kepler on Geometry as LanguageMatthieu DuplayThe Gaze turned inside out: Inversion geometry in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the ArchbishopGabriel RuppOn the Edge of the Enlightenment: Bohrian Complementarities and the Shattered Self in Woolf, Joyce, and Nietzsche
Session TM 5: Chaos and Complexity in Science and Literature
Chair: Gordon SlethaugRoom: Kaffestue 3Gordon SlethaugChaotics and Many Degrees of Freedom in John Guare's Six Degrees of SeparationRodica-Gabriela ChiraFractal Perspective in L'Autre Monde (The Other World)Sema BulutsuzJohn Ashbery's Flow Chart as a Chaotic SystemSuradech ChotiudompantThe Labyrinth and the Crystal: The Emergence of Complexity in Borges's and Calvino's Narrative
Session TM 6: Deleuze and Machinism
Chair: Ian BuchananRoom: HornungstuenJohn MarksCelui qui marche est sans défense: A Deleuzian reading of W.G. SebaldIan BuchananWhat is the Machinic Assemblage?Bent Meier SørensenThe Territory and the Earth: Art and the Organisation of the Social
Session TM 7: Trans-science and Textuality
Chair: Brian RotmanRoom: Mødelokale 2Brian RotmanThe Period of Alphabetic GraphismClaudio CanaparoScience Writing and Writing of Science. Nature and Nature-lization of the Academic WorldSøren BrierTrans-Scientific Frameworks of Knowing: Complementarity Views of the Different Typesof Human KnowledgeAnnamaria LamarraThe Effect of Einstein's Theory on the New Protagonists of the Modernist Fiction: the Case of E. M. Forster
Session TM 8: Literature: Fact and Fiction
Chair: David HamersRoom: Mødelokale 2.2Palmira Fontes da CostaBetween Fact and Fiction: Narratives of Monsters and Strange Beasts in Eighteenth-Century Portugal
Peter ArndsThe Representation of Eugenics in German and French Literature: Günter Grass and MichelTournierDavid HamersDifferent tales for an accelerated cultureUte SeidererBodies Underneath Water: The Illegitimate Gesture of Fiction ? Drowned River Corpses ofthe 20th Century
Session TM 9: Art in Technology and Science I
Chair: Sisse FinkenRoom: Mødelokale 2.3Sisse FinkenSuave? Design, Literature Studies and Web TechnologyBo Kampmann WaltherTraces of a Digital Art SystematicsShulamith AlmogFrom Sterne and Borges to Lost Storytellers: Cyberspace, Narrative and Law
Session TA 1: Literature and Science
Chair: Mark M. FreedRoom: Mødelokale 1Sofie VandammeNarrative based medicine: a bridge between 'narrativity' and 'medicine'?Mark M. FreedMusil's Essayismus and the Critique of Machean PositivismLotte KragIntellectual Capital Statements - When Rhetoric Meets LogicAquiles NegreteFact via Narrative: Learning Science Through Literary Form
Session TA 2: Sound in Mind and Body
Chair: Florian DomboisRoom: Mødelokale 1.1Henrik Bødker Authentic Noises: the (ab)use of technology in Popular MusicAksel Tjora The Groove in the Box - The Socio-Technological Construction of Techno/Dance MusicAlexander WeheliyeComputer Love: Information Technologies in Black Popular MusicFlorian DomboisSound in Mind and Body
Chair: Charlotte KroløkkeRoom: Kaffestue 1Dorothea OlkowskiSpeed KillsEric Chia-Yi LeeData-Subject and Its Freedom: Reading a Ghost Event in CyberspaceSimon Løvind & Peter LauritsenSurveillance and Media ArtJenny Sundén The Cybernetic Strap-On: Queer Encounters with Online (Hetero)Textual Desires
Session TA 4: Romantic Science I
Chair: Alice JenkinsRoom: Kaffestue 2Alice JenkinsOersted, The Soul in Nature and Resistance to Disciplinary CultureMatthias DörriesEsthetics and objectivity in nineteenth-century physics and literatureKate PriceArthur Eddington's well-meaning kind of nonsense: reading science writing as literatureLawrence FaggThe Universality of Electromagnetic Phenomena: a Metaphor for Sacred Indwelling
Session TA 5: Representations of the Body
Chair: Christina LammerRoom: Kaffestue 3Otniel DrorConstructing Identities: Technologies of Emotion and the Mediated SelfAndrea Kuhn"I'm a stranger here myself": Gender and Motherhood in the Science Fiction FilmChristina LammerThe InVisible BodyPhilip SingerVaginal or Clitoral Orgasm - Sicilian Women Beliefs
Session TA 6: Stem Cell Technologies
Chair: Susan SquierRoom: HornungstuenSusan SquierThe Pluripotent Rhetoric of Stem Cells: Networking Liminality
Catherina WaldbyPosthuman Embryology: Stem Cell technology and the Ontology of the EmbryoStine AdrianVirtual Babies: Stories of Creation in the Cryo Bank
Session TA 7: New Scientific Understandings
Chair: Moses BoudouridesRoom: Mødelokale 2Bruce ClarkeLatour and/or Luhmann on Networks and SystemsSimon GlynnAtomism, Holism and the Methodology of the Natural and Human SciencesMoses BoudouridesFrom Inscription to Hybridization
Session TA 8: Metaphor in Science
Chair: Berit HolmqvistRoom: Mødelokale 2.2Ragna ZeissMoral and symbolic purity of water in periods of deterioration of physical purity: TheNetherlands, Norway and England comparedDirk VanderbekeSelf-similarity and the SynecdocheAlexandra LembertThe interplay of alchemy and natural sciences in Peter Ackroyd's "TheHouse of Doctor Dee"
Session TA 9: Doing Bodies, Doing Health
Chair: Kerstin SandellRoom: Mødelokale 2.3Kerstin SandellTheoretical tensions in (re)making "the normal". Studying plastic surgery and talking withSTS and feminist theoryKjetil RödjeThe Triumph of the will: the struggle for autonomy through disattachment of the bodyHelene Lundheim HauglinScores of clinical cacophonies: Networking bodies in medical records
Session Friday May 10
Session FM 1: Scientific Narratives and Quasi-Humans
Chair: Anne Scott SørensenRoom: Mødelokale 1Lisa NocksUltrahumanoid: (the curious connection between fiction and science)Ulrik ChristensenColonization of Cyberspace - Globalization of CultureJulie SommerlundNarrating Science
Session FM 2: Romantic Science II
Chair: Birgit ErikssonRoom: Mødelokale 1.1Birgit ErikssonGoethe and Bildung between arts and scienceStefan HajdukExperiment and Revolution. The aesthetic theory of historical NaturalismBarri GoldEnergy and Elegy: Victorian Thermodynamics
Session FM 3: Experimenting Sciences
Chair: Charlotte KroløkkeRoom: Kaffestue 1Katie VannTwo Modes of Enunciative Ethics?Mark ElamTechnologies of Honest Witnessing and the Changing Interface Between Science and thePublicSteve BrownThe aesthetics of experimentation: with reference to the Stanford Prison ExperimentCasper Bruun Jensen & Peter LauritsenMethod as Partial Connections: Experimenting (with) Big Brother
Session FM 4: War and Literature
Chair: Michael PrinceRoom: Kaffestue 2Michael PrinceArms races: Military metaphors in biological discourse; biological metaphors in militarydiscourseDaniel CordleStates of Suspension: Nuclear Technologies and Fiction of the Cold War Period
A. M. Nunes dos Santos & Christopher AurettaPrimo Levi: Chemist, Witness, Poet
Session FM 5: Technological Performances and Filmic Representations
Chair: Svante LovenRoom: Kaffestue 3Margarete VöhringerPudovkin's "Mechanics of the brain" - Film as physiological ExperimentNevena DakovicHigh Tech Narrative: James BondSvante LovenEven Better than the Real Thing? Technologies of Representation and Simulation in Science Fiction
Session FM 6: Modern Art and the Representation of the Invisible
Chair: Linda HendersonRoom: HornungstuenPeter GeimerTimes of PerceptionLinda HendersonCubism and the Fourth Dimension in Early 20th-Century Scientific ContextGavin ParkinsonInvisible, thermal, dynamic, magnetic, sonorous revelations." Modern physics and surrealist art and theory, 1934-43Mariam FraserMovement, Music and Matter
Session FM 7: Planetary Explorations
Chair: Catharina LandströmRoom: Mødelokale 2Robert Markley & Michelle KendrickDVD-ROM Technology and the Archaeology of Multimedia: Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with MarsCatharina LandströmBiological control performing Australian naturecultureRichard HorwitzGlobal Warming, Scientists and 'Stakeholders
Session FM 8: Epistemic Attitudes to Literature vis-à-vis Science
Room: Mødelokale 2.2Bernd KlähnThe Novel (and the) Spirit of Modern OpticsKristian Hvidtfeldt NielsenTilting at windmills: realism, performativity, reflexivityMaria Helena SantanaLiterature and Science: dialogue and incommensurability
Session FM 9: Design: Theory and Practice
Chair: Ellen ChristiansenRoom: Mødelokale 2.3Ina WagnerArtifacts and material practicesEllen ChristiansenContinuity mattersVirpi OksmanCreating virtual stables as girls' own computer cultureStefanie JenssenTranslations between physical and virtual spaces: How to Avoid the Void in Learning Environments
Sessions Saturday May 11
Session SM 1: Metaphors, Models and Design
Chair: Jamie BrassettRoom: Mødelokale 1Jamie BrassettTechno-PlumageJun Petersen YoneyamaClothes as metaphor : On establishment of semiotic identity in computer mediaAlmira KarabecApplication of Information Design to e-health
Session SM 2: Material and Fictive Cyborgs
Chair: Simon Kiilerich MadsenRoom: Mødelokale 1.1Simon Kiilerich MadsenFabrics of another World: Gore-Tex' and Nomadic PracticesPeter DanholtSkiing - a cyborg practice?Tina Andersen Huey
Artisanal and Technoscientific Foods: Narratives of Genius, Tradition, Tacit Knowledge,and the Laboratory
Session SM 3: Translations Between Cultures and Sciences
Chair: Maria AssadRoom: Kaffestue 1Wojciech KalagaThe ontology of the virtual and the question of deterritorializationMaria AssadTransversal discourse: The Fabulist Michel SerresRonald SchleiferThe Mobilized Mediations of Matter: Latour's Materialism
Session SM 4: Diagrammatics in Architecture and Poetry
Chair: Yves AbriouxRoom: Kaffestue 2Yves Abrioux Diagrams and the dynamics of discourseKen KnoespelDiagrams and the Anthropology of Scientific PracticeSylvain DambrineCo-enunciation and conceptual metamorphosis. Towards an epistemological jurisprudencewith Deleuze and GuattariJohn PeponisHow is Configurational Intention in Architecture Possible?
Session SM 5: Electronic Patient Records at Work
Chair: Randi MarkussenRoom: Kaffestue 3Brit Ross WinthereikTelling Patients' Histories by means of an Electronic Patient RecordHenriette Langstrup-NielsenHearing voices? The construction of noisy patients and silent technologiesSigne SvenningsenThe Socio-Technical Production Apparatus of a Physician's Note: Investigating the'Authoring' and Reading of the Electronic Patient Record Randi Markussen & Finn OlesenMaking Do-able Medications: Situated Readings of a Work Manual
Chair: Robert MitchellRoom: HornungstuenPhilip ThurtleThe Genomic Book of the Dead: Death, Life, and Representation in the 21st CenturyCarolyn Di Palma Theory and Life in Tension: Politics and Practices of Bodily ProductionRobert Mitchell$ell: Body Wastes, Information, and Commodities
Session SM 7: Artistic and Experimental Science Exposition
Chair: Adrienne MomiRoom: Mødelokale 2Mary FlanaganArt as Map : Tracing / Creating an Evolving DisciplineIlana HalperinThe Pursuit of Flora and Other Environmental AnecdotesAdrienne MomiInstallation Art as Scholarly Methodology: investigations into the distant past atTesetice-Kyovice, Czech Republic and Çatalhöyük, TurkeyNajwa MakhoulCan Theory be Leading History? The Portable Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Society as a Vehicle for Critical Inquiry
Session SM 8: Theatre and Science
Chair: Anne Marit WaadeRoom: Mødelokale 2.2August StaubScience and Theatre: The Embodied Mind and the Embodied ArtGabriele GriffinMachinations of Desire: Science and Technology in Contemporary British WomenPlaywrights WorkAnne Marit WaadeTheatre as Medium: Theatricalization of the spectator
Session SM 9: Constructions of Gender, Body, and Nature
Chair: Cecilie ÅsbergRoom: Mødelokale 2.3Cecilie ÅsbergTeratogeny - Producing freaks of nature/culture in popular scienceJulia GostevaThe Men's Myth about WomanBernice HausmanIs Breast-feeding Scientific?: Evidence as Discourse in Medical Breast-feeding Advocacy
Chair: Søren PoldRoom: Mødelokale 1Isabel WünscheNature in Abstraction: The Biocentric DialogueElfriede Wiltschnigg"Accelerated Motion" as challenge to the fine arts - by the example of the work of Erika Giovanna Klien Søren PoldDigital changes in the concepts of literature and textCecilia CavanaughReading Lorca Through the Microscope
Session SA 2: Virtuality and Embodiment
Chair: Jens PorsRoom: Mødelokale 1.1Marius HartmanSensing matters - visual phenomena as carriers of understandingJens Pors"This is not a Cyborg!" Locating cyborg relations in technologically mediated situationsBarbara Caci, Maurizio Cardaci, Guiseppina Guarneri & Philip SingerConstruction and De-construction of the Cyber-Self: a pilot study
Session SA 3: Literature as Experimentation
Chair: Bernhard DotzlerRoom: Kaffestue 1Einar Pihl HellelandLiving in England, England: tradition and authenticity in Giddens and BarnesBernhard DotzlerThe Idea of Litterature as Experimental PracticeWilliam MelaneyMateriality and Modernist Technique: Resituating Literary Practice
Session SA 4: Science Biographies Between Fact and Fiction
Chair: May ChehabRoom: Kaffestue 2May ChehabAuto-biography, auto-biology, tautology: Marguerite Yourcenar's Labyrinthe du MondePhilipp Storz
Travelling in Life-Forms. W. E. Richartz quest for melancholic ¨ responsibility in the timeof "extremely normal" scienceLilla VekerdyReflections of a Paradoxical Polymath: An Analysis of the Sieben Defensiones, theParagranum and Portraits of Paracelsus
Session SA 5: Animal performances and animal iconographies in science, science documentaries and nature programmes.
Chair: Nina LykkeRoom: Kaffestue 3Nina Lykke & Mette BryldInsect performances: between alien invaders and exotic othersHilevi GanetzThe King of the Woods and the King of the Beasts: Nature, Culture and Gender in Televised Wildlife Films.Lynda BirkeUK: Who or what is the laboratory rat?
Session SA 6: How Metaphors Matter: The Dynamics of Cultural and Scientific Practices
Chair: James J. BonoRoom: HornungstuenJames J. BonoThe Metaphorics of ImmunologyPeter WeingartDissidents - A Metaphor Organizing the Debate on AIDS in South AfricaSabine MaasenThe Consciousness Craze
Session SA 7: Literature and Science
Chair: Anne Scott SørensenRoom: Mødelokale 2Michael CollieSexual Selection in Darwin and GissingCharlotte RossMessages and autobiography: the anthropomorphisation and linguistic application ofscientific practices in Italian literatureElmar SchenkelUnwritten Texts
Chair: Berit HomqvistRoom: Mødelokale 2.2Johanna UotinenStudying ICT's Gender through Narratives and DrawingsJillana EnteenTinglish on the WWW: Strategic Thaisms in English Language, Women's WebsitesSari TuuvaCultural interpretations of information society
Session SA 9: Medical Relationships
Chair: Lynn UnderwoodRoom: Mødelokale 2.3Lynn UnderwoodTime and Eternity: An Epidemiological ApproachKatrien De MoorThe Doctor's "Role as Witness and Companion": Connecting Medical and Literary Ethics of Care in AIDS Physicians' MemoirsRobert L. Davis, Margaret Ann Goodman & Mary Jo GrovesPossibilizing Illness: An Approach to Medical Knowledge
NB: The Conference Wrap-Up Session will be held immediately after the last key-note presentation at 5. 30 PM on Saturday in Richard Mortensenstuen.
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1
Cosmopolis meets chaosmos: Newtonian and quantum
imaginaries of order/chaos
Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis, PhD Candidate in IR, Dept of Politics and IR, UKC
Please note: Paper presented at the 2
nd ISLS European Consortium. Akrivoulis, D.E. (2002).
"Cosmopolis meets chaosmos: Newtonian and quantum imaginaries of order/chaos." Paper
presented at the 2nd
European Consortium of the International Society for Literature and
Science (ISLS), "Experimenting Arts and Sciences." University of Aarhus, Aarhus, DK, May
8-12, 2002.
‟. (And in the very
beginning Chaos came to be.)
—Hesiod1
Nam certeneque consilio primordia rerum / ordine se
quo quaeque sagaci mente locarunt. (For certainly
neither did the first beginnings place themselves by
design each in its own order with keen intelligence.)
—Lucretius2
Chaos umpire sits, / And by decision more embroils the
fray / By which he reigns: next him high arbiter /
Chance governs all.
—Milton3
11:15 Restate my assumptions:
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and
understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
—π (pi)4
Representing the ratio between a circle‟s circumference and its diameter, with a value
calculated to an infinite number of digits, the exemplary irrational and
„transcendental‟ number π came to „numerify‟ the impossibility of any pattern
1 Hesiod, Theogony, edited with prolegomena and commentary by M.L. West, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1966, 116. 2 Lucretius Carus, T., De Rerum Natura, translated and edited by W.H.D. Rouse, revised by M.F.
Smith, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1975, Vol. 1, 1021-1022. 3 Milton, J., Paradise Lost, 2nd edition, edited by A. Fowler, London and New York: Longman, 1998,
Vol. 2, 907-910. 4 π (pi), Film, Director D. Aronofsky, USA: Hervester Filmworks/Truth and Soul/Plaintain Films,
1997.
2
repetition in nature.5 What strikes me most in this number, though, is especially its
relation to the geometrical pattern it corresponds to, the circle, for while the circle is
concisely definable, the order of π remains incomprehensible. What I find even more
intriguing and puzzling is that the mystifying ordering principle (π) underlying
probably the most ordered of all geometrical patterns (the circle) is the „darkest‟ and
most „chaotic‟ of all numbers, at least in terms of its irrationality, infinity,
unintelligibility, and indeterminacy. It seems to propagate, in a sense, that underneath
order there is chaos or, in terms of the Hesiodic theo-cosmogony,6 that chaos bears
order.
Having used the antinomical relationship between the circle and π as its
introductory metaphor, this paper will discuss the relation between chaos and order in
international politics. It will start by exploring the different meanings of order, aiming
not merely to denote an accepted definitional ground upon which my arguments will
unfold, but instead to investigate these meanings by shedding light to some of the
discursive practices from which they were born and which they bear. After situating
the quest for order in the wider context of the human quest for correspondence
between sociopolitical and natural order, which will be addressed as the quest for
cosmopolis, the role of Newtonianism in the notional metamorphosis and
oppositional-hierarchical structuring of order versus chaos will be brought into closer
focus. In order to denaturalize a similar structuring evident in IR theorizing, recent
evolution in the field of quantum physics, namely the quantum chaos theories, will be
further discussed and metaphorically employed for a reappreciation of the order/chaos
relationship in terms of mutual constitution and coexistence, qua chaosmos. My
central aim will be less to propose through this quantum chaology a new notion of
order, even a more chaotic one, or recognize order in chaos, but instead to explore
how quantum chaos theories could metaphorically help us contest the notion of order
in International Relations, and provide us with an alternative imaginary of
international politics that reconciles both order and chaos. For these purposes, some of
the most relevant points of the so-called „World (Dis)Order Discourse‟ of the
discipline will be further discussed.
5 „Transcendentality‟ is used here as the mathematical jargon for a rigorous algebraic form of
patternlessness. See Livingstone, I., Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity, London and
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 20. 6 Hesiod‟s Theogony is referred to here as a theo-cosmogony since, as West remarks, “when your gods
include the Heaven and Earth, a theogony entails a cosmogony.” Hesiod, Theogony, p. 192.
3
On Order: The Newtonian Cosmopolis
After the contributions of Der Derian and Constantinou, either through offering a
genealogical exploration of diplomacy or an etymological account of diplomatic
theory respectively, diplomacy has qualified as one of the most investigated terms of
International Relations. As the chosen heading of this section might have already
betrayed, my exploration of order will follow some of their steps, aiming not at
offering a proper genealogy of order, but rather, and more moderately, at recovering
its possible “originary meanings”.7 To paraphrase Der Derian, if we are to know what
order is we must know how it came into being,8 or, to put it differently, to know
„world order‟ we have to first know what the word „order‟ connotes.
One is clearly impressed both by the amount of meanings attributed to the word,
and foremost by the qualities almost all of them share. I will hurry the moment of
their discussion by presenting only some of the senses of the word presented in the
Oxford English Dictionary:
I. Rank generally; a rank, grade, class.
.... \2. A rank of the community, consisting of persons of the same
status (esp. in relation to other ranks higher or lower); a social
division, grade, or stratum; esp. in the phrases higher, lower orders.
3. A body of persons of the same profession, occupation, or
pursuits, constituting or regarded as a separate class in the
community, or united by some special interest.
4. A class, group, kind, or sort, of persons, beings, or things, having
its rank in a scale of being, excellence, or importance, or
distinguished from others by nature or character.
II. Rank in specific departments.
5. Each of the nine ranks or grades of angels, according to
mediaeval angelology. Also, any analogous class of spiritual or
demonic beings.
6. Eccl. a. A grade or rank in the Christian ministry, or in
ecclesiastical hierarchy. ...
7 In that sense, my aim is closer to Constantinou‟s etymological quest. Constantinou, C.M., On the Way
to Diplomacy, London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 51. 8 Der Derian, J., On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987, p. 2.
4
7. A body or society of persons living under the same religious,
moral, or social regulations and discipline; ...
8. An institution, partly imitated from the medieval and crusading
orders of military monks, but generally founded by a sovereign, or
prince of high rank, for the purpose of rewarding meritorious service
by the conferring of a dignity.
9. Arch. A system or assemblage of parts subject to certain uniform
established proportions, regulated by the office which each part has
to perform; ...
.... \11. Nat. Hist. One of the higher groups in the classification of
animals, vegetables, or minerals, forming a subdivision of a class,
and itself subdivided into families, or into genera and species.
III. Sequence, disposition, arrangement, arranged or regulated
condition.
.... \13. Formal disposition or array; regular, methodical, or
harmonious arrangement in the position of the things contained in
any space or area, or composing any group or body.
b. In wider sense: The condition in which everything is in its proper
place, and performs its proper functions. ...
.... \16. A method according to which things act or events take place;
the fixed arrangement found in the existing constitution of things; a
natural, moral, or spiritual system in which things proceed according
to definite laws.
.... \19. (= civil or public order.) The condition in which the laws or
usages regulating the public relations of individuals to the
community, and the public conduct of members or sections of the
community to each other, are maintained and observed; the rule of
law or constituted authority; law-abiding state; absence of
insurrection, riot, turbulence, unruliness, or crimes of violence.
.... \IV. The action or an act of ordering; regulation, direction,
mandate.
5
Ü22. The action of putting or keeping in order; regulation, ordering,
control. Obs. ...9
What then is order? One would say that it depends on the context of use. A
student of International Relations, for example, might base her conception of order on
the meaning of civil or public order (no. 19), and apply it at the international level
rendering it „world‟ or „international order‟. Depending on her theoretical affiliations,
she might keep or reject some of the terms used, like community or law, also
substituting individuals with states. Her possible preferences aside, it seems more than
certain that order will be negatively defined and understood as the absence of chaos, a
really popular presumption in IR theorizing. Yet, this hardly is an exclusively IR
phenomenon. As the result of any logocentric hierarchical process, order is more often
than not situated against chaos in an oppositional structuring of mutual exclusivity.
Flavoured by religious, scientific, and normative underpinnings order is then
naturalized as the elementary constituent of stability and peace. It is exactly this
oppositional structuring and hierarchical „ordering‟ of order vs. chaos that needs to
problematized, or better, denaturalized here, for making strange with order could
probably open up new ways of thinking about the notion in International Relations.
As noted above, a closer look at the various definitions of order reveals some
shared figures or constituents. In its first mythical sense, order was used for dividing
the ranks of angels and demarcating the heavenly hierarchy. Bearing the seeds of a
divine will, order was then used for the hierarchical arrangement of the first social
grouping, the angelic one, and similarly used later for ranking within the ecclesiastical
circles, fraternities of knights or crusaders, and monastic societies of Christianity.
With the organization and expansion of capitalism, order was used for social division
based on elements of sameness in status, class, or interests, and in its most
exclusionary moments on natural excellence. This social division seemed to reflect or
imitate the diverse groupings of the flora and the fauna in nature, while everywhere,
from science to the arts, it came to signify the regular and harmonious arrangement of
things, events, or phenomena.
Thus, from a form of ranking and division in nature and society, order acquired
its modern sense as a condition or method of regulating the social in terms of the
natural, where “everything is in its proper place and performs its proper functions”, “a
9 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, Vol. 10, pp. 902-90.
6
natural, moral, or spiritual system in which things proceed according to definite
laws.”10
It still conveyed, though, and presupposed all the other senses of the word,
like hierarchical and oppositional structuring, sameness, homogenization and
exclusion. Correspondingly, the act of ordering came to signify the act of regulating
and controlling social behaviour according to fixed laws found in the regularities of
human nature or cosmic order. Or, to put it in Bauman‟s terms, it came to be a
“licensing authority” that delegalizes any subversive “unlicensed difference” that
exceeds control and predictability. For, as he notes,
[t]he subversive power of unlicensed difference resides precisely in
its spontaneity, that is in its indeterminacy vis-‡-vis the decreed
order, that is in its unpredictability, that is in its uncontrollability. In
the shape of the unlicensed difference, modernity fought the real
enemy: the grey area of ambivalence, indeterminacy and
undecidability.11
As we have seen while discussing Newtonianism, evolution in science played
an important role in this „ordering‟ of order. Especially after the seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century scientific revolutions, when the confidence was strengthened that
there is such a natural order of things and moreover that this order is knowable to
human beings, the human quest for social order and control was directed towards the
scientific exploration of natural and cosmic order. Dialogically coexisting with the
sociopolitical discourses of the times, scientific discourses were mostly directed
towards explaining “why order exists in general, what universal laws it obeys, what
principle can account for it, and why this particular order has been established and not
some other.”12
In my doctoral thesis I examine how Newtonian metaphoricity gave
rise to sociopolitical imaginaries of sociopolitical organization, stability, and action,
and how these metaphorical imageries have imbued some of the theoretical
underpinnings of the IR discipline. In this section, I will attempt to further explore the
relationship or better the correspondence between natural and social order, that such
imaginaries promulgated. Borrowing Toulmin‟s term, I will refer to the quest for such
correspondence as the quest for cosmopolis.
10
Ibid., p. 904. 11
Bauman, Z., Intimations of Postmodernity, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. xvi
(emphases in original). 12
Foucault, M., The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London: Routledge,
1997, p. x. See also Der Derian, J., “S/N: International Theory, Balkanization and the New World
Order”, Millennium, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1993, pp. 485-506.
7
The origins of the quest for cosmopolis should be traced at least as back as
ancient Greece, or even before.13
Originating from the words cosmos and polis,
cosmopolis etymologically incorporates and presupposes a correspondence or
harmony between the order of nature and that of society.14
From Plato‟s Republic to
the Stoics of the Hellenistic period, natural order was always there to reinforce the
confidence or the practical idea that a „rational‟ social order is possible.15
After a
break which emanated from the writings of St Augustine, where the social order of
the City of Man reflected the theocratic order of the City of God, instead of being
explicitly treated as corresponding to a natural cosmic order, the idea revived in its
„naturalistic‟ origins during the seventeenth-century Renaissance along with an
increased interest in cosmology and evolution in science. As Toulmin suggests,
[t]he 17th-century philosophers‟ “Quest for Certainty” was no mere
proposal to construct abstract and timeless intellectual schemas,
dreamed up as objects of pure, detached intellectual study. Instead,
it was a timely response to a specific historical challenge — the
political, social, and theological chaos embodied in the Thirty
Years‟ War.16
The European system of states that emerged out of the Treaty of Westphalia
necessitated new forms of social order and stability both outside and within the
borders of sovereign states, a new conception of the polis. As we have also seen, the
discourses of Newtonianism through their mechanistic metaphors and the search for a
13
See Adkins, A.W.H., “Cosmogony and Order in Ancient Greece”, in Cosmogony and Ethical Order:
New Studies in Comparative Ethics, edited by R.W. Lovin and F.E. Reynolds, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1985. Similar cosmopolitical claims could be also found in ancient
Chinese philosophy-cosmology. See for example Gernet, J., A History of Chinese Civilization,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 87, 96-97. 14
“To say that the astronomical universe (ouranos) was a cosmos was to record that celestial events
happen, not randomly, but in a natural order ... [while] to say that a community (koinoneia) formed a
polis was to recognize that its practices and organization had the overall coherence that qualified it —
in both the ancient and modern senses of the term — as a „political‟ unit.” Toulmin, S., Cosmopolis:
The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, New York: The Free Press, 1990, p. 67. See also Eliade, M., Cosmos
and History, New York: Harper and Row, 1959. According to Kahn, the Homeric use of the word
cosmos denotes “in general any arrangement or disposition of parts which is appropriate, well-
disposed, effective.” Kahn, C.H., Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1960, p. 220. 15
It should be noted here, though, that „rationality‟ in classical antiquity referred to the orientation of
human action towards the „highest good‟, and thus should not be confused with later uses (i.e.
modernist-positivist). 16
Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 70.
8
universal language contributed to this goal.17
The new cosmopolis implied, in what
Cornelius Castoriadis calls a “unitary ontology”,18
that social order was regulated by
the divine, static, mechanical laws of nature that promulgate stability and hierarchical
structuring. It is in this context, that Newtonianism is evoked here as “a
„cosmopolitical‟ justification of the „modern social order‟.”19
Although the divine
origins of natural order were soon abandoned, especially after the writings of the
Encyclopedists, Newtonianism continued to offer a systemic metaphor for social
order. During the Enlightenment, it was still used “to fight from within the restrictive
tendencies inherent in the nation-state.”20
Yet, what seems even more problematic is especially the way such readings of
natural order were represented, how that is order was encoded through the Newtonian
call for a universal language. In his Of an Universal Language, Newton started with
the assertion that because the
Dialects of each Language [are] soe divers & arbitrary A generall
Language cannot bee so fitly deduced from them as from ye natures
of things themselves wch
is ye same in all Nations & by which all
language was at ye first composed.
21
It seems for a moment that with his reference to nature, Newton‟s universal language
excludes what Serres called “noise”.22
Yet, I believe that the issue is far more
complicated. Although Newton himself saw mathematics as a means of theorizing and
representing order, his voluntaristic conception of God‟s dominion committed him to
natural order as inherently complex and thus irreducible to any semiotic system. For
Newton, in other words, the universe was both complex and noisy, two attributes that
17
On the universal language schemes of the era, see Slaughter, M.M., Universal Language Schemes
and Scientific Taxonomy Theory in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982; Cohen, M., Sensible Worlds: Linguistic Practice in England, 1640-1785, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977. 18
Castoriadis, C., “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy”, in The Castoriadis Reader,
translated and edited by D.A. Curtis, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1997, p. 274. 19
Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 133. 20
Ibid., p. 142 (emphasis in original). 21
Quoted from Elliott, R.W.V., “Isaac‟s Newton‟s „Of an Universal Language‟”, Modern Language
Review, Vol. 52, No. 1, 1957, p. 13. 22
Serres, M., Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, edited by J.V. Harari, and D.F. Bell, Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, p. 66.
9
quite paradoxically are signs of God‟s continuing intervention in his creation.23
As
Markley has put it:
Paradoxically, precisely because order is [for Newton] a
fundamentally religious and mystical concept, it authorizes the
logocentric assumptions that underlie his various projects and
allows him to develop epistemological strategies to celebrate the
workings of an „absent‟ guarantee of transcendental perfection.24
Nevertheless, what is of interest here is less Newton‟s own thought, than its
reductionist systematizing in the discourses of Newtonianism characterised by the
more general cultural and theological tendency to represent the universe as ordered
and legible, an ultimate proof of God‟s infinite wisdom and authority. Reducing the
complexities of Newton‟s theological considerations, and abstracting his science to an
authoritative semiotics, Newtonianism strived to comprise both history and agency
within essentialized metanarratives of order. It thus promoted through its metaphors a
legitimating system of human intercourse, finally leading, to quote Joseph Waite‟s
verses, to “The Iliads in a Nut-shell; Tongues in Brief; / Babel revers‟d.”25
In a
Foucauldian taxinomia universalis,26
the same idealized order classified in a system of
signs was found in both nature and society.
In this Newtonian imaginary of cosmopolis, order seems then to emerge out of
the disorder of chaos through the harmony of universal characters or language, just as
the swords and the harmonious music of the good angels‟ trumpets suppress the
anarchy and noise of the fallen angels in Brueghel‟s painting The Fall of the
Rebellious Angels.27
Through its logocentric metanarratives and its cosmological
assertions about the order of nature, what Baudrillard called “the great Referent”,28
the Newtonian cosmopolis offered a system of foundational mimesis, a concrete
“imagined space” as its dominant representational axis, its “doxic acceptance of the
23
See Derrida, J., “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, translated by K. Frieden, in Languages of the
Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, edited by S. Budick and W. Iser,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 3-66. 24
Markley, R., Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740, Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 139, 134. 25
Waite‟s verses prefaced Cave Beck‟s The Universal Character. See Beck, C., The Universal
Character, London, 1657, quoted from Markley, Fallen Languages, p. 71 (emphasis in original). 26
See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 71-77. 27
For a short discussion on this painting, see Serres, M., Angels: A Modern Myth, Paris and New York:
Flammarion, 1993, pp. 88-89. 28
Baudrillard, J., The Mirror of Production, St Louis: Telos Press, 1975, p. 53.
10
world.”29
In that sense, and to connote the etymological irony, it was a cosmology
(cosmos+logos) that served as what could be called a monological polilogy
(polis+logos), ordering and prefiguring exclusionary and homogenizing “prescribed
courses of social conduct and human interdependence.”30
With the noise of the
different and the unpredictable silenced, the ordered was thus reduced to the
„ordinary‟, in terms both of its conformity to order and its sameness.
In the quest for cosmopolis, the discourses of Newtonian metaphoricity were
based on a view of science as able to mimetically represent the harmony, stability, and
hierarchy found in nature, mediating between the natural and sociopolitical order.
Indeed, these metaphors functioned both in a destabilizing and hierarchical manner, in
this quest. Nevertheless, they soon gave rise to an imaginary of order that excluded
anything it could not quantify, its legitimating authority deriving from an idealized
view of the way the cosmos operates. Recent evolution in science, though, has
disturbed this idealized view turning the focus towards the chaotic behaviour of
nature. How, then, could such a chaology influence the way we come to imagine
sociopolitical order? Metaphoricity is once again the medium that the following
section will attempt to explore.
Chaology and Quantum Chaos
The redirection of science towards the study of chaos is a rather new development,
with chaos and complexity theories as instances in this process that have opened up
new ways of understanding the cosmos. As recent evolution in the field of quantum
physics has led to an increased concern with chaos, the notion of „quantum chaos‟
came soon to form a separate field of scientific inquiry. By focusing on complexity,
diversity and quantum interaction as an exchange of all matter at the subatomic level,
chaos is understood as the turbulence implicit in these interactions.31
It is almost
impossible to give an accurate account or even summarize these approaches,32
most of
29
Bourdieu, P., Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, pp. 167-168. 30
Sandywell, B., Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason, London and New York: Routledge,
1996, p. 419. 31
Briggs, J., and F.D. Peat, Turbulent Mirror, New York: Harper and Row, 1981. 32
For a comprehensive review of the first scientific steps in this field, see Berry, M., “Quantum
Physics On the Edge of Chaos”, in The New Scientist Guide to Chaos, edited by N. Hall, London:
Penguin, 1992.
11
which follow what has been called the „postmodern‟33
revival in physics of the semi-
classical methods of Niels Bohr and the correspondence principle.34
Concerning its characterization as „postmodern‟ science, it has been suggested
so far in the literature that both quantum and chaos theories bear many similarities to
Derridean deconstructive thought. By focusing on issues like Heisenberg‟s
uncertainty principle, spacetime, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics, and the EPR experiment, Christine Froula has remarked that “the links
between the radically challenging representation of nature discovered by quantum
physicists and Derrida‟s critique of the dualistic structure of Western metaphysics
since Plato are strong and specific ones.”35
In a similar way, Katherine Hayles has
related some aspects of quantum and chaos theories with poststructural thought in her
discussion of the literary concerns of such authors as Pynchon, Borges, Nabokov,
Lawrence, and Pirsig.36
While acknowledging some differences between the two areas of thought
concerning their engagement with order and chaos, Hayles parallels them in her more
recent work as “isomorphic”, in the sense that they “share a common ecology of
ideas”:37
The new scientific paradigms challenge the primacy traditionally
accorded to ordered systems; deconstructive theories expose the
interrelation between traditional ideas of order and oppressive
ideologies. The scientific theories show how deterministic physical
systems become chaotic because initial conditions cannot be
specified with infinite accuracy; deconstructive readings operate
33
First coined by Robert Harris, the term “postmodern quantum mechanics” has been evoked many
times in the literature. See for example Heller, E.J., and S. Tomsovic, “Postmodern Quantum
Mechanics”, Physics Today, Vol. 46, No. 7, 1993, pp. 38-46; Carson, C., “Who Wants a Postmodern
Physics?”, Science in Context, Vol. 8, No. 4, 1995, pp. 635-655; Toulmin, S., “The Construal of
Reality: Criticism in Modern and Postmodern Science”, in The Politics of Interpretation, edited by
W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982; Toulmin, S., The Return to Cosmology:
Postmodern Science and the Ethology of Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982;
Froula, C., “Quantum Physics, Postmodern Metaphysics: The Nature of Jacques Derrida”, Western
Humanities Review, Vol. 39, No. 4, 1985, pp. 287-311; Hayles, N.K., The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field
Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. 34
See Bohr, N., The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Woodridge: Ox Bow, 1987. 35
Froula, “Quantum Physics, Postmodern Metaphysics”, p. 287. 36
Hayles, The Cosmic Web. 37
Hayles, N.K., Chaos Bound, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, p. 185. Thomas Weissert, on the
other hand, identifies their relationship more strongly as isotropic, claiming that “as we align our
subjective gaze along different discursive axes of the cultural matrix, we begin to recognize similar
patterns of dynamical structures.” Weissert, T.P., “Dynamical Discourse Theory”, Time and Society,
Vol. 4, No. 1, 1995, p. 112.
12
upon texts to reveal the indeterminacy that re-marks an absent
origin. The scientific paradigms embody a shift of perspective away
from the individual unit to recursive symmetries; deconstruction
writes about the death of the subject and the replicating, self-similar
processes that constitute individuals. The science of chaos reveals a
territory that cannot be assimilated to either order or disorder;
deconstruction detects a trace that cannot be assimilated to the
binary oppositions it deconstructs.38
Although having admitted the symmetries drawn by Hayles between chaos theory and
Derridean deconstruction, and despite the problematic elements of his own overall
argument, Alexander Argyros was perhaps right to observe that assimilating the
implications of the one to the other is to obscure “the deep incompatibility of their
basic presuppositions and political agendas.”39
Yet, the way quantum chaos theories are used here does not fully embrace all
these assertions. Especially with the cases of Hayles and Argyros, our fundamental
difference lies in the fact that my reference to quantum chaos is not to make a claim
similar to theirs, that this scientific turn signifies the search of a hidden order within
chaos. Instead, my aim is to use the assumptions of quantum chaos theories as
metaphors that could help us reimagine the relationship between chaos and order in
politics. To make my case more explicit, I will metaphorically employ their implied
chaology to destabilize our understanding of political order. Moreover, my reading of
these theories is closer to the Lyotardian one of chaos theory, as a „new class of
science‟ that contradicts and negates the modernist demand for predictability,
performativity and universality, while refining “our sensitivity to differences” and
reinforcing “our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”40
38
Hayles, N.K., “Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and
Science”, New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1989, p. 317. 39
Argyros, A., A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 238. Yet, even Argyros‟s approach to chaos theory seems quite
problematic, since he attempts to propose chaos theory as an all-inclusive cosmology that could replace
the deconstructive „world view‟. 40
Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, with a forward by F. Jameson,
translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p.
xxv.
13
The physicists involved in quantum chaos theories, usually addressed as
quantum chaoticians or chaologists,41
work in diverse and hybrid disciplines like
chemical and nuclear physics, quantum mechanics and acoustics.42
Yet, while the
field displays hybridity at the levels of discipline, domain of physics, and method, it is
united by a common central focus on the complexity and diversity of the quantum
world.43
It is this scientific turn of focus from order to chaos, this chaology, that could
perhaps metaphorically help us problematize the human quest for cosmopolis. For if
the relationship between order and chaos is recognized, what would this imply for our
search for international order? Moreover, with chaos thus decontextualized from its
oppositional structuring against order, what could be its new normative context?
Quantum chaos will thus be used here as the metaphorical starting point for this
decontextualization. This is not to propose a new notion of natural order, even a more
chaotic one, but instead as noted above to recognize disorder and chaos through
contesting the notion of order itself in International Relations.44
It is in the first ever textualized cosmology, Hesiod‟s Theogony, that chaos
meant as chasm, a yawning space or a dark gaping void is the first thing created in
nature from which everything, the Gods included, originated.45
But already in Hesiod,
as Castoriadis remarks,
41
The term chaology was originally used in 18th-century theology concerning the study of what
existed before the Creation. 42
See Wise, M.N., and D.C. Brock, “The Culture of Quantum Chaos”, Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Modern Physics, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1998, pp. 369-389. 43
See Bl¸mel, R., and W.P. Reinhardt, Chaos in Atomic Physics, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997; Gutzwiller, M.C., Chaos in Classical and Quantum Mechanics, Berlin: Springer, 1990;
