χα Absolute Chaos: The Early Romantic Poetics of Complex Form

Abstract

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. is taken up into a calculus of speculative concepts. It is equated with poetry; determines modern and interesting; explains romantic; is the foundational 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 von Systemen [a chaos of systems], (1) even 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] [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. …