I mean, everyone loves a rebel, but this just needs to stop. Across the board, honestly. I'm sure characters in Buffy subvert gender paradigms, I believe you. But an enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and recognizing that a text agrees with our politics or seems to be doing something noble doesn't legitimize your argument, book project or life.
In any case, though I've been reading a lot of contemporary criticism in the literature/science area, I've actually returned to good old Hugh Kenner on this one. I found an article of his that really surprised me--“Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos” which came out in ELH in '88.
While the term “fractal” was not available until Benoit Mandelbrot’s studies of fractal geometry in the 1970s, the study of fractal structures has been around since at least the nineteenth century. As one of the cardinal concepts of Chaos Theory, fractal structures reveal that what appears random or chaotic in nature or otherwise can have its own order, a structure containing similarities at different levels of scaling, or magnification.
Mandelbrot, famous for work in set theory and fractal geometry, coined the term “fractal” to describe seemingly irregular shapes or structures which when viewed at varying scales show self-similarity. Fractal structures look messy at one level of magnification but reveal fine and detailed structures at smaller scales. These structures, while ordered, are too irregular to be described or modeled in terms of traditional Euclidean language. As Mandelbrot writes in The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982):
In the mid 1990s, Richard P. Taylor, professor of physics at the University of Oregon, began applying fractal geometry to the study of Jackson Pollock’s work. Using computer analyses to reveal the complex patterns inherent in the paintings, Taylor found that Pollock’s presumably random messy splatters showed fractal structures. Taylor has used these findings to contribute to theories of the aesthetic appeal of fractals in natural and artificial images, to strike against those who label Pollock’s work as “child’s play” or the work of “a drunk who mocked artistic traditions” and even to authenticate alleged Pollock works. (See Taylor's “Order in Pollock’s Chaos.” in Scientific American, December 2002.)
Kenner alluded to the fractal quality of Pollock’s work almost ten years before Taylor’s analyses, in “Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos" a short piece on using fractal geometry to account for Pound’s structuring technique in Hugh Sewelyn Mauberly and the Cantos. Kenner explores the principle of “self-similarity” and “scaling” techniques in both texts, and sees in Mandelbrot’s “fractal geometry of nature” Pound’s dominant structuring technique.
By discussing self-similarity in the natural and mathematical context operating in Pound’s poetry, Kenner moves the critical conversation about Pound’s structuring style from the fugue to the fractal. Though music has provided much critical apparatus for thinking through the structures of repetition and recurrence in Pound’s work, Kenner argues that more attention should be paid to the mathematical quality of Pound’s composition. As he writes, Pound’s
Kenner sees Pound anticipating not only fractal geometry but also the birth of its master. Taylor also establishes Pollock’s work as prophetic, placing Pollock ahead in a narrative of discovery: “25 years before their discovery in nature, Pollock was painting fractals.”
So it seems that what’s at stake in both articles is not the influence of scientific concepts on modernist composition, but modernist composition’s understanding, or anticipation, of a later theory of natural structures.
The final upshot of “Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos” is Kenner’s use of fractals to dispute arguments about Cantos's incompleteness, a predominant critique of the modern long poem in general. Kenner combats the antiquarian value of the “complete” epic artwork in the same way that Mandelbrot challenges the mapping of Euclidean shapes onto natural objects. Kenner’s phrasing echoes Mandelbrot’s terms explicitly in the final line of his article when he writes,
In the same way that Kenner saves Pound from accusations of incompleteness, Taylor attempts to save Pollock from accusations of randomness, asserting the fractal structures of Pollock’s work as part of a complex technique, not incidental shapes formed by indiscriminate splatters of paint.
Whether implicit or explicit, the argument in both Kenner and Taylor’s work on Pound and Pollock seems to be that these figures were “on to something.” Otherwise their fractal structures, which potentially save their disorderliness from childishness or madness, would be merely natural occurrences outside of their creative power.
But as self-similarity, or fractal structuring in nature is not new--rather the mathematical model and understanding are--and because fractals appear in nature--and appear “randomly”--it’s difficult to decide whether a fractal structure appears in a painting because of natural phenomena alone—the movement of the arm and the wrist, an instinctual drive to recreate a natural structure—or whether they simply appear everywhere, as some argue that fractals can be found in all natural and man-made objects when examined on microscopic scales. In other words, finding fractals in art places one in the revolving door between techne against physis.
Here we see one problem facing the critic who applies later scientific discourses to earlier artworks. Lacking an empirical, influential link between Pound or Pollock and fractal geometry, one needs to decide whether an artist understands and intentionally puts to use a certain principle or phenomena, or the artist is on the cusp of a scientific discovery still to come, or the artist’s work can simply be subsumed under expressions of a natural principle which won’t be modeled until the language is available to us, or whether it is all unconscious, natural phenomena.
Depending on which choice the critic or readers of the critic takes, Kenner and Taylor’s work can potentially appear ad hoc—what is the relationship between theory and observation in their analyses of these paintings and poems?
That one of the contributions of Taylor’s fractal analyses of Pollock’s paintings is the authentication of disputed Pollock works is telling here; one of the motives for applying scientific concepts to literature or art may be modern art’s legitimation crisis. Though mechanically and interpretively Taylor and Kenner’s studies seem to check out, one wonders whether the science really inheres in Pound and Pollock’s work or whether there is a critical impulse to find a theory to save the phenomena.
So two thumbs up to the Kenner article for the most part--it was a joy to read, and gave me some great ideas in the end. But I'm suspicious of what recognizing these structures actually does. And I suppose I still haven't found my model. I can get far enough in the litcrit world with the Benjaminian constellation way of reasoning, but sometimes what I'm doing feels sneaky, or seems sneaky to others (particularly those in the sciences). But I'm not ready to give up on thinking certain things together, whatever it might look like and whatever it might mean. If you have suggestions, please speak up.
My “problem” with the Kenner is that it sounds too much like the things he says about Pound and Chinese — that he was a genius, that he intuited it, etc etc. So it feels as though you've got a couple different complex objects (Kenner on Pound and China, Kenner on Pound and math) which don't resemble one another too much, but if seen from the right scale look, well, fractal.
As for how to get around Benjaminian constellations, or rather, how to deal with the suspicions of people who think they're sketchy, I think the search for a method might best be thought of as one inside the constellating method rather than one that provides a total alternative to it (as the “influence” model does): that is, there are good and bad ways of doing it, and what's hard is to figure out how to do it well instead of how to do it sketchily.
Or, alternatively, you could say this: the “constellation” move (already a science metaphor, btw) depends on the work of epistemological markers that may not mean much in the non-quantum sciences, in which one pool ball always has to hit another, but which are widely recognized in the humanities as legitimate and even “real” forms of the production and circulation of knowledge, namely, metonymy and metaphor.
Fractals happen inevitably when the same forces are exerted on an object over a very long time. Maybe the fractal patterns in art and literature are the effect of thousands of hours of highly attentive observation, reproducing themselves automatically (~unconsciously) by the well-prepared hand.
That way, you get the artist, you get the constellation, and you avoid the Cult of Personality bummer.
In painting, the principle of “self-similarity” is not strictly mathematical but merely a matter of building resemblances to create a sense of internal conistency in the work. Kenner was always overstating things.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
