Wallace Stevens: Chaos, Complexity, and System of Self-reference
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This paper examines Wallace Stevens’s self-referential repetition, ametaphor-making mechanism, through the ideas of chaos and systems inorder to show how his writing shares common cultural concerns of thechanging scientific paradigms in the 20th century. I will demonstratehow his poetry acts as a self-organizing system, growing through thechaotic feedback loops of self-reflective metaphors towards higherorders of autopoietic organization. Steven’s poetry reveals an infinitelybifurcated self-similar structure, an instance of fractality, in which eachpart of the structure resembles each other and the whole. This fractalgeometry is created by predictable periodicity of certain patterns intermingledwith unpredictable variation. The constant movement of repetitionis precisely what generates the creative natural force, which, in turn,provides the energy of the textual system to consistently self-organizeand produce itself anew. Stevens’ idea of making it anew through “decreation”is particularly analogous to Prigogine’s “dissipative structure,”which maintains itself far from equilibrium through a series of bifurcations,and which also describes the autopoetic structure of a living system. Stevens’ poetry organizes itself by means of an interlocking series ofself-referential metaphors that generate contextual dependencies betweensimilarities and differences of its terms. This may be what Maturana callsan “autopoiesis,” which is organized as a network of process of productionof components that produces the components. Stevens’s poetry communicatesnot through propositional content of its utterances, but by thestructure of the self-referential system. The idea of ‘autopiesis’ provideshelpful language to illuminate Stevens’ textual dynamics, which enablesus look deeper into Stevens’ rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns.
Abstract
This paper examines Wallace Stevens’s self-referential repetition, ametaphor-making mechanism, through the ideas of chaos and systems inorder to show how his writing shares common cultural concerns of thechanging scientific paradigms in the 20th century. I will demonstratehow his poetry acts as a self-organizing system, growing through thechaotic feedback loops of self-reflective metaphors towards higherorders of autopoietic organization. Steven’s poetry reveals an infinitelybifurcated self-similar structure, an instance of fractality, in which eachpart of the structure resembles each other and the whole. This fractalgeometry is created by predictable periodicity of certain patterns intermingledwith unpredictable variation. The constant movement of repetitionis precisely what generates the creative natural force, which, in turn,provides the energy of the textual system to consistently self-organizeand produce itself anew. Stevens’ idea of making it anew through “decreation”is particularly analogous to Prigogine’s “dissipative structure,”which maintains itself far from equilibrium through a series of bifurcations,and which also describes the autopoetic structure of a living system. Stevens’ poetry organizes itself by means of an interlocking series ofself-referential metaphors that generate contextual dependencies betweensimilarities and differences of its terms. This may be what Maturana callsan “autopoiesis,” which is organized as a network of process of productionof components that produces the components. Stevens’s poetry communicatesnot through propositional content of its utterances, but by thestructure of the self-referential system. The idea of ‘autopiesis’ provideshelpful language to illuminate Stevens’ textual dynamics, which enablesus look deeper into Stevens’ rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns.
참고문헌 (32)
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