Microworlds Page 16

  At first, this new cosmogony was roundly attacked, but it also gained adherents when it became clear that its hypotheses allow for deductions that agree with observed phenomena. For instance, the theory explains the expansion of the universe, since an expanding universe would be the most comfortable home for all the leading civilizations participating in the game at the same time. As soon as life appears on the planets of second-generation suns, followed by the flowering of intelligent societies, the psychozoic density (the frequency of the presence of intelligent beings) of the cosmos is altered as more and more civilizations occupy each unit of space. Should neighboring civilizations reach agreements, they might form coalitions whose activities could disturb the progress of cosmic processes. Therefore, in order to keep the psychozoic density of the cosmos constant, the ancient civilizations effected the continuous expansion of the universe. This at once explains why terrestrial astronomers have not been able to discover a single civilization near the sun: the distances between civilizations must remain great. Pulsars, those great, pulsing founts of radiation, are instruments used to synchronize and keep in phase the activity of still more gigantic, but imperceptible, systems determining the measurable aspects of space. And quasars, each of which is a cosmic furnace so mighty that its capacity exceeds the total radiation capacity of the Milky Way, are devices for radiating energy into space: or, rather, this is how they functioned several billions of years ago, since, due to their great distance from the earth, we see them in their distant past, when the exalted partners had just begun their cooperation.

  The new cosmology also explains the fact, known since the 1960s, that mathematics takes many forms, and the form in which it developed historically on earth is only one of many possible varieties. The foundations of the universe were changed and reconstructed precisely through these different mathematics. The multitude of mathematical systems is an image of the multitude of possibilities of cosmogonic creation available at the dawn of cosmic history.

  We will not dwell further on this new cosmogony of the twenty-first century, which considered the universe to be the result of intentional actions; nor will we describe at length the new philosophical syntheses based on its models. In brief, these posited a dialectical triad composed of a thesis: the universe created by God; its antithesis: the universe as a nonintentional object; and their synthesis: the empirical interrelation of the two previous models, which, developed further, does away with transcendence and replaces it with metagalactically plural reason. Let us instead point out the relations between the three variations of science fiction we have cited above and the canons of literature.

  The first work — on preventing earthquakes — might be best treated as an adventure novel or a technological “project” novel. What could be easier than to populate its setting with conventional literary characters. The second text — a hypothesis about human nature — might be written in a number of modes, from pseudorealistic to extravagantly grotesque. But whatever mode the author chooses, the central protagonists, whose personal histories are the individual embodiments of general phenomena, will conform to the canons of literature.

  The third theme, however, does not seem conducive to the same kind of literary treatment — at least if the traditional narrative structures are upheld, complete with the characterization of heroes bound to specific situations. The intellectual adventures of the new cosmogony’s creators will not be contained by traditional naturalistic or realistic narrative structures. We need not know about these scientists’ wives, children, and acquaintances, any more than about Newton’s or Planck’s social and marital lives. Here we cannot simply present a social-cultural background against which purely personal events take place; the concept requires the chronicle of an idea, not of the vicissitudes of a few individuals. Of course, with sufficient obstinacy, we could apply the traditional solutions to this situation as well; but then all higher abstractions would be systematically detached from the minute human gestures, reactions, recognitions, personal conflicts, separations, etc., that make up the ordinary substance of the novel. Narrative structures of literature are incapable of synthesizing the “microscopic” elements of the cosmogonic scientists’ everyday lives with the general hypotheses of their new cosmogony. To attempt such a synthesis would lead to a fractured work, with literary fragments, on the one hand, and discursive passages summarizing the new cosmogonic views, on the other. What is needed is an entirely new narrative structure, one that might be modeled on historiography, the biographies of scientists, or perhaps a collage of excerpts from scientific texts, press clippings, the addresses of Nobel laureates, or other facsimiles.

  We are in no way suggesting that science fiction should renounce altogether its traditional structures of writing, in order to substitute as yet entirely unproven ones. Our example has a different purpose: it seeks to demonstrate that not all dramas and adventures of the human spirit in search of knowledge can be adequately represented through the traditional canons of the novel or epic narrative. In other words, the potential treasury of the narrative structures of science fiction has not yet been satisfactorily exploited.

  In the course of writing this book, we suppressed the temptation to elaborate a metatheory of literary activity that would have dealt with the central structures of literature. Had we attempted it, we would have shattered the already too confining framework of this monograph. Our task here is not to elaborate a metatheory of science fiction, or even of literature in general, but to determine the extent of the field of paradigms, to define the boundaries that can contain the fruits of every possible creative production. Any metatheory of creative work must embrace every kind of cultural and intellectual effort that produces articulated and systematic products, such as music, novels, poems, buildings, sculptures, and philosophical systems. Such an inclusive theory cannot as yet be elaborated, but the time is approaching when it may be fully articulated. Its portents are visible in many fields. The philosophy of science, for example, strives for a metaperspective on the structure of scientific theories. There are analogous attempts in mathematics to define all those structures that are invariant elements of every branch of pure mathematics. Similar researches are being pursued in other fields, such as linguistics and anthropology. It would be most desirable, therefore, to extrapolate the system of universal constants shared by all researches operating with the technical term “structure.” But this term does not mean the same thing to the linguist, the mathematician, the anthropologist, and the literary scholar — indeed, the latter two cannot even define it unambiguously. Now that structuralism has become a fashionable movement, its practice is full of abuses. But these should not be permitted to blind us to the generalizations -even though distant and difficult — to which this method can lead us. We suspect -although this has not yet been expressed as a definite hypothesis — that every kind of creative activity whose goal is constructive and whose starting point is an ensemble of elements and the rules for their treatment has the characteristics of a process unfolding in a theoretically closed configurational space, and that the topological qualities of this space are determined equally by the multitude of potential objects to be constructed and the unsurpassable limits of the space.

  Structuralism, as a word and a method, had hardly been born when, in 1945, G. Evelyn Hutchinson — reviewing the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s book Configurations of Culture Growth, in the third issue of American Scientist— proposed a hypothesis worth recalling. In his book, Kroeber compares the various periods of world history that were made memorable by extraordinary developments in philosophy, science, philology, sculpture, painting, drama, music, etc. In each of these cultural activities we can distinguish the embryonic and initial stages, when the parameters of all potentially realizable constructs that can be derived from the culturally accepted paradigms of artistic creation are already set — as yet, without anyone’s being aware of it. (Where such newly accepted models originate is a different question altogether. But it is no more ne
cessary for us to answer this question than for a biologist concerned with the evolution of organisms to answer the question, How did life originate on earth?)

  In this early stage of the model, the whole stock of structures that can be derived from it is markedly indeterminate; in the course of their creative work, succeeding generations gradually determine the field of possible configurations, until it is completely delimited and exploited. The creative work of every historical period has developed within such limits or boundaries. Indirect evidence of this is provided by the following phenomena. Since the individuals more talented than the norm, whom we call geniuses, are the results of the rare intermingling of genotypes (the “winning numbers” in the “chromosome lottery”), and since these exceptional coincidences of genotypes are determined by the statistical regularities guiding population genetics, we might expect geniuses to be distributed uniformly along the axis of historical time. But in reality, this is not the case; the distribution of highly talented individuals is definitely not uniform and fortuitous. Hutchinson therefore constructs the following hypothesis based on Kroeber’s insight: the chances of becoming an outstanding creator under different historical circumstances are not uniform, since an individual can create only within the field of paradigmatic structures that he finds prepared for him when he comes into the world. Those who are born in an early phase of the exploitation of a given “family of structures” face an enormously broad and difficult task, since the mass of virtual possibilities has not yet been defined. Those born in this state, writes Hutchinson, may perhaps gain the recognition of a small circle of enlightened cognoscenti, but they will not become as well known, or be able to found schools or movements quite as easily, as those who begin their work in the stage of maximal development of a given creative tradition. Thus, the sooner a genius is born within an artistic tradition, the more he can create; but if he arrives too early, he may go unnoticed, and, lacking “social reinforcement,” may remain merely an unknown precursor. The person who arrives at the peak stage of a particular tradition can create a great deal, backed by strong social reinforcement. The artist who appears when most of the possibilities have already been exploited can, at best, become an original representative of a decaying tradition. Thus, the ascents and declines in cultural production — which are evident only in retrospect — are actually movements first toward, then away from the maximum of a certain curve. As a whole, this curve — which expresses the rate at which original productions derived from the embryonic stage proliferate — is additive, and is therefore only minimally dependent on individual successes. Thus, we do not consider 1616 the final date of Elizabethan drama as a whole, but as the year of Shakespeare’s death.

  Hutchinson attempts to formalize this process of slow growth, quickening, peaking, and decay in a logistical curve used in the study of demographic dynamics. The curve resembles a letter 5, the center of which is characterized by exponential inclines, its beginning and ending by slight inclines (the Verhulst-Pearl curve). I will not cite the math with which Hutchinson supports his hypothesis, since it is, in any case, far too simple to grasp the phenomenon — as Hutchinson is well aware. The introduction of only two parameters — the quantity of still exploitable “degrees of freedom” and the quantity of already exploited degrees at time T, when a certain creator X appears in the world -cannot be adequate. The mass statistical (stochastic) nature of the process would certainly require a greater number of variables. But the greatest problem with any attempt to quantify creative phenomena is that, in order to verify the effectiveness of the formal apparatus, the works of certain artistic periods must be enumerated as elemental facts, a process that would unequivocally classify them in terms of their originality, and, coincidentally, in terms of their relative value — a hopeless task.

  But we do have at our disposal a unique creative territory where the researcher is spared the problems caused by the subjective nature of any evaluation of cultural products, since, in this case, the evaluation has already been done for him, in an entirely unambiguous and incontestable way: this is the realm of natural development. Every emergent organism — such as the prototypes of “insect,” “fish,” “reptile,” or “mammal” -is generated in a manner equivalent to those structural paradigms within which further evolutionary development “exploited every possible advantage for construction.” In other words, the “insect” or “reptile” represents a certain stabilized “tradition” of creation within the field of variables determined by the given system’s typology. The evolutionary process inexorably strives to exploit every possible organic combination inherent within the given prototype. (We need not puzzle over the quality of the various consecutive solutions that emerged in this way; evolution performs the evaluation of the product “in our stead,” since only the “good” product survives.)

  It is worth noting that not all of the prototypes mentioned above have developed an equal, or even a similar, number of variations in the course of their evolution. The structural paradigm of insects, for example, has proved to be an incredibly “fertile creative principle”: at least as many species have developed from it as from all the other prototypes combined. Evolution also has its “creative stages,” and its own “different schools and traditions.” Its first triumphs were the creation of fishes, then it moved on to reptiles, while in our time it is primarily engaged in variations on the “theme” of mammals. Each type has, in its turn, gone through a slow initial stage of specialized differentiation, to arrive at a stage of the maximum richness of possible forms (consider but the variety of evolutionary reptile modifications), and finally to end up in an “age of epigonism” or repetitive fulfillment. Such a correspondence of natural and cultural creativity can hardly be an accident. The hypothesis immediately offers itself that there are, still unknown to us, higher regularities that determine the field of potential structures, regularities moreover that operate universally in the case of every type of material-information creation.

  Recently, two English scientists, M. A. Ede and J. T. Law, used a computer to construct models of the embryonic formation process of certain organs, specifically the extremities. They fed the machine five series of data: four had to do with the behavior of embryonic cells, the fifth provided a model of the gene mechanism guiding their growth. In the course of its work, the computer produced only such models of extremity structures as had actually come about in the evolution of the different species of vertebrates, from fish to human. A slightly retrograde modification of the gene program resulted in the transformation of the structure of a leg into the structure of a fin. Neither machines nor programs exist for making models of complete organic systems; nonetheless, as the above example shows, we can already observe in experiments how the initial paradigm “determines” the field of possible constructions.

  In order to continue the original creation, we must always introduce new elements into the paradigm’s system. In literature (which is of greater interest to us here than evolution), there is a fairly universal intuition that every “great,” “original” narrative model has already been discovered (and, moreover, quite long ago). But this is only a relative truth. While it is true, with respect to historically known conditions, that the narrative structures have been exhausted, it is equally true that civilization, by creating new problems, also provides new possibilities for literature. Our age, for example, is marked by the decline of conventional structures of ethical judgment all over the planet, since it is now within our power instrumentally to execute the Last Judgment. This fact is lost on the writer who would bring alien visitors to a destroyed earth and have them deliberate among the ruins about “which side was right.” One can speak of one’s rightness, i.e., as representing the correct path, only as long as someone is left behind to evaluate what has happened. It is meaningless to discuss either side’s being right or wrong when total destruction has become possible; the only argument worth articulating on the verge of the ultimate catastrophe is that the catastrophe must be ave
rted. At that point, truth, in the sense of “good” and “bad,” is irrelevant as long as it is not bound up with the only program that has not lost its meaning, namely, the project of preserving humanity. The type of writer referred to above wishes to preserve the traditional standards of judgment of the pre-Atomic Age, but since he is writing in a pseudo-realistic style, he does not want to bring the Good Lord Himself down to the ash-covered earth -and so sends “aliens” instead, to continue the same argument that led to the cataclysm, on behalf of the no longer existing earthlings. This is a classic example of the helplessness of thought when it is shackled by inadequate narrative structures.

  Every culture has codes that delineate the phenomena it considers “normal,” and others that “deviate” from these and come into different degrees of conflict with the regulating norms. When phenomena that are predominantly associated with the stock of normal descriptive structures are depicted through discrepant structures, the result is often comic. Indeed, many humorous works owe their existence to this rule of displacement -they are intentionally “erroneous messages,” cast in descriptive structures that are normally inappropriate to the phenomena described (for example, the description of a family quarrel in terms of natural phenomena, such as typhoons and volcanic eruptions; or, inversely, anthropomorphizing the volcano or storm). Generally, comic effects are generated when the use of alien descriptive structures does not quite amount to a fundamental transgression of the given culture’s decrees and prohibitions. Still, the more the described phenomenon’s structure is subject to codification (social ritualization), the stronger the effect; thus, a chase scene presented on speeded-up film is not as comic as a speeded-up funeral.