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Reflections on the "Convergence" between Literature and ScienceAuthor(s): John NeubauerSource: MLN, Vol. 118, No. 3, German Issue (Apr., 2003), pp. 740-754Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3251945Accessed: 21/03/2009 00:57

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Reflections on the "Convergencebetween Literatureand ScienceJohn Neubauer

The invitation to this special issue of the MLN notes that "Literatureand Science" have become increasingly prominent over the pastfifteen years, due, in large measure, to "complementary tendencies inliterary studies and the history of sciences." There is much to be saidfor this view, though, as I shall try to show, the postulated parallelismproves to be more complicated upon closer inspection. The invitationseems to acknowledge this by closing the sentence with an ambiguousphrase: the complementary tendencies "seemed to eventually con-verge or even to coincide methodologically." Did the tendencies just"seem" to "converge"?Do they still seem to do so, or no longer? Andfor whom did (or does) this seem to be the case? I begin withreflections on these questions.A somewhat schematic overview of the relationship between liter-ary and scientific studies should note that earlierjoint studies tendedto focus on the impact of science and scientific ideas on writers andliterary texts. Studies of this kind, exemplified by the outstandingwork of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, belonged to a species of "influ-ence" studies in intellectual history that moved almost exclusivelyfrom science to literature and hardly ever the other way. Howeversuccessful and impressive such studies were, they remained quitemarginal to the mainstream of literary studies, and at best a sort ofcultural curiosity for scientists.

MLN118 (2003): 740-754 ? 2003 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press


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IThe new tendencies noted by the invitation originated mainly withtwo thinkers who are often lumped together but should be keptseparate: Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. Neither of them wrotespecifically about "Literature and Science" (that was the domain ofthe once much discussed but now mercifully forgotten C.P. Snow),but they initiated methodological reconceptualizations that deeplyaffect both fields, individually and jointly. If we date the beginning ofthe shift with the key works of these two thinkers, namely Kuhn's TheStructureof ScientificRevolutions(1962) and Foucault's Les mots et leschoses(1968), we might claim that the new life of "Literature andScience" started already in the sixties and early seventies, by nowsome thirty-not just fifteen-years back.We can dispense here with a summary of Kuhn's and Foucault'sthoughts. But we ought to ask, whom exactly they inspired to believein a convergence between literary studies and (both historical andphilosophical) studies of science. Though Kuhn's Structureof ScientificRevolutions nd Foucault's inter-discursivecultural studies both openednew perspectives, neither author actually believed in a convergence.Kuhn moved awayfrom a cumulative view of a history of science anda belief in the transcendental truth of scientific theories, yet heremained quite skeptical when humanists appropriated his ideas fortheir own purposes, and in the seldom quoted short article, "Com-ment on the Relations of Science and Art,"he found that the sciencesand the arts relate in fundamentally different ways to their past.1Foucault, in turn, tended to assign literature a marginal and transi-tional role in the historical epistemes of knowledge, and he explicitlyexcluded literature from the epistemic structure of the nineteenthcentury: "literature becomes progressively more differentiated fromthe discourse of ideas, and encloses itself within a radical intransitivity"(300).2The somewhat obscure intentions of Kuhn and Foucault becameavailable to all once they reached the public, and some degree ofconvergence did indeed take place in the post-Kuhnian and post-Foucauldian decades. This includes the following, certainly notexhaustive, areas of rapprochement. Scholars of the scientific process

1ThomasS.Kuhn,"Comment n the Relationsof Science and Art" n TheEssentialTensionChicago:University f ChicagoPress1977), 340-51.2 MichelFoucault, The Orderof Things (NewYork:Vintage1973), 300.

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now give more recognition to the role of conventions, institutions,and irrational psychological motivations in individual scientists (PaulFeyerabend, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Bruno Latour). These social andpsychological forces make the scientific enterprise less autonomousthan it was formerly thought. Another line of research studies thelanguage of scientific texts. While "classical" notions of scientificcommunication demanded a transparent, denotative, and strictlyreferential use of language, newer studies have shown that scientifictexts are actually permeated with tropes, narrativeforms, and rhetori-cal devices; they seep into the language of science, whether theirauthors intend it or not, because they circulate already in the generalcultural discourse of a historical moment at which the scientificcommunication occurs.A similar turn from formal and purely text-based studies tobroader, historical and cultural ones may be observed in recentapproaches to literature, best exemplified in new historicism,Foucauldian cultural studies, thematic studies, and gender studies.Since leading literary scholars of the past decades, for instanceStanley Fish, have relied directly on recent shifts in science studies, itcan no longer be said that the field of "Literature and Science" ismarginal to mainstream literary studies. Similarly, the present focuson the role of literary and rhetorical devices in scientific discourseturned studies of "Literature and Science" into a two-waytraffic.In all these respects there has indeed been a convergence. Yet I amconsiderably more skeptical than most of my colleagues about itsscope and epistemological foundations. To begin with, a considerablenumber of literary scholars and humanists regard the recent shifts intheories of science as a kind of infiltration and overcoming of thescientific Other, or as a return of the prodigal son. The invitation toan international conference on "The Future of the Humanities inEurope and the Americas," which was then held from July 30ththrough August 1st, 1997 in Santiago de Compostela (in preparationfor a yearly "International School of Theory in the Humanities") hasformulated this view in the following terms:

Recent advanced hinking n the sciences[...] has called into question heprimacyof positivistic,deterministicand technocraticworld views.Infor-mation theory,stochastics,chaos theory,models of emergence and com-plexity, poly-systemsheory,etc. point to a non-deterministicand non-totalizingworld outlook that goes beyond conflictivepolaritiesand ismindful of both local and globalconditions. The fundamentalprinciplesof thisworldoutlookhavealreadybeen articulatedn humanisticthought,

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and it is at the level of theorythat one can again elaboratea commondiscoursebetween the humanitiesand the sciences.Note that the envisioned "common discourse" becomes possiblebecause scientific discourse has, presumably, given up its self-chosenalienation from humanism and humanistic discourse. And this "com-ing home" of science actually represents a surrender to the humani-ties, cast in the role of the paternal, because they have anticipatedand articulated the platform of the common discourse. The agendahappily eschews reference to a Zeitgeist o explicate convergencesbetween the sciences and the humanities, but by envisioning asubmission of science to literature and the humanities it raises a hostof troubling questions.The agenda is by no means new: earlier versions of it may be foundin the writings of Goethe, Wordsworth,Novalis, and other Romantics,as well as in Alfred North Whitehead's Scienceand theModernWorld,which explicitly builds on Romantic precursors.3 But how are we tounderstand this (re)humanization of the sciences today? Recenthumanistic reappropriations of science adopt various strategies, someof which I have mentioned in connection with Kuhn and Foucault.But whereas I have indicated that these recent studies attribute majorsignificance to sociological and psychological (and hence non-rational)factors in the scientific enterprise, I have not yet discussed the mainargument of the passage quoted from the Santiago conference,namely that recent scientific theories no longer fit into the classical,mechanistic, and reductive models that dominated the early centu-ries of modern science. The rupture undoubtedly occurred, and itmay be traced from relativity theory and quantum mechanics in theearly part of the century to some of the recent theories mentioned inthe Santiago invitation. But humanists have often globalized andreductively generalized the meaning of scientific theories, whosemathematical structure and specifically local meaning they under-stood but little. This is true of relativitytheory and quantum mechan-ics, as well as more recent theories of fractals and chaos theory. To putit unkindly, humanists tend to jump all too readily on the recentbandwagon of science theory if they think that it may further theliterature/science rapprochement (which tends to mean the returnof scientific discourse into a humanistic one). Its most extreme, post-modern manifestation is the rather widely held view that science is

3Alred North Whitehead, Scienceand theModernWorld New York:Macmillan 1925).

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'just another" group practice and another discourse that has no morereferential confirmation than fiction.But the recognition that theories of science are tentative andfallible does not mean that they are non-referential, and mosttheorists of science, not to mention practicing scientists, hold on tosome form of philosophical "realism" (see Larry Laudan's wittydialogue Scienceand Relativism4). n opposition to them one couldinvoke Richard Rorty, who has moved from a "linguistic turn" to apragmatic-skeptical view of scientific realism (Philosophy nd theMirrorof Nature), and from there to a praise of literature for its power inhelping to foster an "ironic"worldview,but this would involve holdingup, as a hero of "convergence," a figure that does not represent theoverwhelming majority of the scientific community (and most of thephilosophical community in the US). Whatever we think of Rorty'sviews, they cannot serve as a rudimentary common platform.

IIHaving presented my caveats, I turn to the idea of "literarytechnol-ogy" in science, as presented in the announcement for this topic inthe MLN. I will offer some general reflections, followed by a casestudy to support my view. The announcement describes "literarytechnology" as "afacet of scientific work existing in conjunction withtechnology proper and the procedures of social communication."The subsequent list of "aspects" in the announcement may beassigned to three different phases in the formation of scientifictheories, phases that are distinct although they clearly affect eachother: first of all, the formulation of a theory on the basis of atechnological apparatus, existing theories, empirical data, and averbal, mathematical, and/or pictorial "vocabulary of representa-tion"; secondly, the conceptualization and rhetorical structuring ofthe material to maximize its persuasive power with respect to thespecialized disciplinary community by foregrounding the observa-tional and experimental dimensions and the "reliability" of theresults; and lastly,a reformulation of this highly specialized discoursein terms of concepts and ideas understandable to a broader laypublic. Each of these phases will take recourse to different sets of

4Laudan, Larry,Scienceand Relativism.SomeKeyControversiesn thePhilosophy fScience(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990).

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representational means and rhetorical devices, and, perhaps moreimportantly, each "context of reception" will actually demand a"rewrite"of the previous formulations. As we move from the "contextof discovery" to ever broader professional, social, national, andcultural groups of reception, the technology of representation andthe mode of communication radically change. In this sense, one mayindeed ask, as the invitation does, whether the changing modes ofpresentation and representation still cover the same problem. I donot think that this confirms the trivialized slogan "the medium is themessage," though I do recognize that the "message"is both medium-and public-dependent. As the circle of the audience widens, thespecialized, often mathematical, component of the discourse dimin-ishes; as popularization, vulgarization, and cultural transplantationmove into the foreground, the specialized discourse is recast in termsof newly introduced but already familiar tropes, images, verbalexpression, and cultural schemes that circulate among members ofthe intended audience. The "literary technology" is therefore notuniform and universal but "audience dependent"; the more accu-rately a theory's technology of presentation/representation can meetthe technology used by its specific target audience, the more persua-sive the communication becomes at that particular level. It is quitepossible, of course, that the communication fails on one level butbecomes very effective on another. Thomas Kuhn, for instance, hadmuch more success among humanists and non-scientists than amongscientists and his fellow philosophers of science.The following, severely condensed, case study involves a particularaspect of this "literarytechnology" that neither the invitation nor myabove presentation has touched upon, though it directly relates toliterature proper. In talking about the images, schemes, and meta-phors circulating among each of the three audiences of scientificideas, there is a specific category that is not recently generated andnot related to the latest technology. Rather, it is inherited, or, morefrequently, a recycled version of an old image or metaphor. GeraldHolton calls such persistent or recycled scientific discourse elements"themata," and he ascribes special importance to them in scientificthought.5 Similarly, Karl Popper has argued that outdated scientific

5See Gerald Holton, ThematicOrigins of ScientificThought (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press 1973); Ibid., "On the Role of Themata in Scientific Thought" Science188 (1975), 328-34.

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ideas do not simply disappear but will be remembered, and, at certainoccasions, be recalled to fulfill a new function. Wolf Lepenies has, inthis context, assigned a specific "conserving function" (konservierendeFunktion)to literature, giving it a "memory" unction in the making ofscience.6 Though he somewhat denigratingly calls literature a "lumber-room" (Rumpelkammer)f outdated science,7 he assigns it, neverthe-less, a crucial "storage function" (Speicherfunktion): utdated anddiscarded scientific alternatives can "hibernate" in literature, and maybe reactivated in scientific discussions after a longer period ofabsence.8The text I have chosen, Lucretius' De rerumnatura, is, of course,much more than a lair of hibernation. Lucretius may be said to havegiven a new life to Epicurian physics and ethics, so that it couldsurvive throughout a remarkable number of centuries in its new,aesthetic articulation and return into the discourse of modernscience. More specifically, Lucretius' atomic theory had a roller-coaster ride throughout Western history, due both to its controversialcosmology and Epicurian ethics. De rerumnaturaexperienced a greatrevival when mechanistic and atomistic theories emerged in the newscience of the seventeenth century (Gassendi, Newton, Descartes); itthen lost popularity once didactic poems went out of fashion around1800, but was revived when the atoms triumphed in nineteenth-century physics and chemistry.What interests me here is not so much the atomic theory itself butLucretius' related cosmology, which postulates that the invisibly smallatoms originally fell in a parallel, rain-like fashion, but deviated fromtheir straight paths by infinitesimally small and unpredictable swervesthat Lucretius calls "clinamen." The swerves led to random collisionsbetween the atoms and to the gradual formation of complex atomicclusters in macroscopic physical objects. Thus, according to Lucretius,the random clinamen explains how the physical universe came about.For him, the unpredictability of the clinamen also serves as a physicalfoundation for the human free will, which he needed in order to

6WolfLepenies, "DerWissenschaftlerals Autor. Uber die konservierende Funktionender Literatur," in Akzente25 (1978), 129-47. See also Ibid., "Uber den Krieg derWissenschaften und der Literatur. Der Status der Soziologie seit der Aufklarung" inMerkur40 (1986), 482-94.7Lepenies, "Der Wissenschaftler als Autor," 141.8Ibid., 145.

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make an Epicurean control of natural urges and a Stoic attitudetowards death and mortality possible.That atoms should unpredictably and inexplicably swerve fromtheir straight paths was alwaysregarded as the weak point in Lucretiancosmology, but precisely this notion of clinamen unexpectedly be-came the focus of both scientific and literary writing during the pastseveral decades. As far as literature and literary theory is concerned,it reentered most spectacularly in the chapter "Poetic Misprision" ofHarold Bloom's TheAnxietyof Influence,where it designates the first ofsix modes in which writers can "swerveaway" rom a "strong"fatherfigure.9 Bloom points out that the term occurs in Coleridge's Aids toReflection,'1 ut his own immediate source was probably AlfredJarry'sGestes t opinionsde docteurFaustus,which Bloom discusses at length."As Warren F. Motte Jr. shows in "Clinamen Redux," the concept ofclinamen underwent several of its own swervesin Bloom's articles andhis A Map of Misreadings 1976), representing though repeatedly "aninclination awayfrom what is perceived as a determinism too rigidlycodified, a conscious swerve away from the scientific criteria andphilosophical groundings that have characterized much of the criti-cal debate in Europe."12We have to skip Motte's interesting discussion of the role of theclinamen in the works of George Perec and the Oulipogroup,'3 inorder to turn to Ilya Prigogine's and Isabelle Stengers's Orderout ofChaos (1984), whose original French version, La nouvelle alliance,appeared already in 1979 (Motte quotes from an article by Prigogineand Stengers, but not from this book). Prigogine's pioneering workin thermodynamics involved a critique of "classical"dynamics thatrestricted its attention to reversible processes and states of equilib-rium. The Nobel Prize in chemistry that was awarded to Prigogine in1977 cites his work "on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particu-larly his theory of dissipative structures." He developed an innovativemachinery to deal with states far from equilibrium, because equilib-rium states were, according to him, rare. Orderout of Chaoshas beenan immensely successful popularization and generalization of

9Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (New York: OxfordUniversity Press 1973), 19-45." Warren F. Motte Jr., "Clinamen Redux," in: CLS23 (1986), 263-81.11Bloom, 42-45.12Motte, 273.13Motte, 273-76.

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Prigogine's thermodynamic work, made possible, no doubt, throughthe philosophical insights of Isabelle Stengers. Lucretius, andspecifically his theory of the clinamen, resurfaces in Orderout of Chaosas a means to exemplify Prigogine's notion of non-equilibriumthermodynamics. I have to give an extensive quotation from thesection "Far from Equilibrium" in order to show both the relevance ofthe Lucretian clinamen to Prigogine's central concern and its signifi-cance in developing a modern scientific cosmology based on sponta-neous deviations:

We must examine the way a stationary state reacts to the different types offluctuation produced by the system or its environment. In some cases, theanalysis leads to the conclusion that a state is "unstable"-in such a state,certain fluctuations, instead of regressing, may be amplified and invadethe entire system, compelling it to evolve toward a new regime that may bequalitatively different from the stationary states corresponding to mini-mum entropy production.Thermodynamics leads to an initial general conclusion concerning sys-tems that are liable to escape the type of order governing equilibrium. [...]it has long been known that once a certain flow rate of flux has beenreached, turbulence may occur in a fluid. [...] early atomists were soconcerned about turbulent flow that it seems legitimate to considerturbulence as a basic source of inspiration of Lucretian physics. Some-times, wrote Lucretius, at uncertain times and places, the eternal, universalfall of the atoms is disturbed by a very slight deviation-the "clinamen."The resulting vortex gives rise to the world, to all natural things. Theclinamen, this spontaneous, unpredictable deviation, has often beencriticized as one of the main weaknesses of Lucretian physics, as beingsomething introduced ad hoc. In fact, the contrary is true-the clinamenattempts to explain events such as laminar flow ceasing to be stable andspontaneously turning into turbulent flow. Today hydrodynamic expertstest the stability of fluid flow by introducing a perturbation that expressesthe effect of molecular disorder added to the average flow. We are not sofar from the clinamen of Lucretius!'4

IIIDo we have here a textbook case of the convergence betweenliterature and science, an illustration of what Lepenies meant byliterature's storing and conserving function? My answer is cautiously

14Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Orderout of Chaos,rev. trans. of La nouvellealliance(1979) (New York: Bantam 1984), 140-141.

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affirmative, though qualifications are in order. To begin with, let usnote in the spirit of my earlier remarks concerning different audi-ences that Prigogine and Stengers activate the Lucretian clinamenwhen they try to explain to a broaderpublic what thermodynamicsystems far from equilibrium are. The clinamen concept would havecarried no weight in communicating with specialists; it may even havediminished the persuasive power of the presentation. Secondly, theLucretian clinamen was not the inspirational idea behind Prigogine'snotion thermodynamics but a metaphor imported a posteriori. t is,strictly speaking, not a sign of convergence but an importationadopted for specific purposes. Thirdly, the application of clinamen tothermodynamics wasbased not on a direct encounter with Lucretius'stext, but on a modern reading of it, as the passagejust quoted makesevident: the text saysin my second ellipsis: "Michel Serres has recentlyrecalled that . .[.]"15Since several of the book's other references toLucretius are also associated with Serres,16we need to give someattention to his mediating role.The book in question is Serres' La Naissancede la physiquedans letexte de Lucrece.Fleuve et turbulence 1977), which in fact radicallyreinterprets Lucretius's clinamen notion.17 Fluids play a negligiblerole in De rerumnatura; the notion of an "atomic rain" is part of ametaphoric web to which Lucretius is forced to take recoursewhenever he treats the imperceptible world of atoms. Serres' substitu-tion of fluids for Lucretian atoms (the subtitle speaks of fluids andturbulences) is itself a clinamen, a swerve away from his parentalphilosopher. Instead of regarding the atoms as so many solid par-ticles, he looks upon their aggregate as a fluid. The unpredictablemicroscopic clinamens give rise to the kind of random turbulences infast-moving fluids that Prigogine is talking about, of which there is aphoto prefacing Serres' book. Serresinnovatively reinterprets Lucretiusbut retains a basic feature and function of the clinamen: for him, asfor Lucretius, the random and inexplicable disturbance becomes theconstructive principle that provides a mechanism for self-organiza-tion and allows the evolution of ever higher physical structures,without recourse to a prior creative act or plan.

15 Prigogine and Stengers, 141.16 Ibid., 303-305, 320, and 334.17Michel Serres, La Naissance de la physiquedans le textede Lucrece.Fleuve et turbulence(Paris:Gallimard 1977).

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Serres' second bold claim about the De rerum natura is thatLucretius made use of Archimedes and thus laid the foundations fora mathematical physics that historians usually ascribe only to theRenaissance. This, together with Serres' reinterpretation of theclinamen, suggests that he subscribes to a constructivist notion oftheory building. Yet the philosophy of science that permeates Serres'book is realistic, for it is premised on the belief that mathematicalmodels perfectly fit the objects and processes of nature. Whereasconstructivists regard models as competing heuristic devices that fitonly approximately, Serres finds to his own amazement that imaginedstructures of the mind provide keys to nature.18Moreover, in Serres'Lucretian scheme of things the same key, the same basic pattern, fitsnot only physical and biological structures, but also history, language,morality, and all other dimensions of culture: "Qu'il s'agisse desatomes, des especes, et plus tard, de la societe, le meme schema esttoujours au travail."19Language, for instance, resembles the structureof nature because it is a combinatorics of sounds or letters, just asphysical objects are combinations of the basic atoms: "Dufait aux lois,la distance est nulle; l'6cart des choses aux langues est r6duit a zero.[...] La langue nait avec les choses, et par le meme processus."20Similarly,the human free will has its analogue in the clinamen of theatoms, and, as Serres repeatedly states, the relationship is notmetaphoric.21As Shoshana Felman notes, one model fits all in Serres'pan-system, but the primal-figure of all the perfectly homologoussystems is paradoxically the clinamen, the infinitesimal swerve, vor-tex, or gyre that deviates from perfect uniformity: "the effort of theinvestigator is to articulate, withoutdifference, theoryof difference,ogeneralize a radical thought of difference, reducing or eliminatingthe very difference of that thought" ("L'effortdu chercheur est pourarticuler, sans ecart, une theorie de l'cart, generaliser une penseeradicale de l'6cart, en reduisant ou en eliminant l'6cart meme decette pens6e").22According to Felman's deconstructive reading, Serres'manifest negation of the metaphor is accompanied by another,

18 Ibid. 172.19Ibid. 218. See also 57, 63, 158, 162, 223, and 225.20Ibid. 153.21 Ibid. 175, 182, 185, 186.22 Shoshana Felman, "De la nature des choses ou de l'ecart a l'equilibre. MichelSerres: La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrece" in Critique pecial issue:"Michel Serres: interferences et turbulences" N. 380 (anuary 1979), 3-15; 10.

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implicit and subversive conception of language, according to whichthe clinamen is not a deviation from a (linguistic) norm but the normitself, so that it is the equilibrium that becomes the exception.23 InSerres's words: "Nous n'existons, ne parlons et ne travaillons, deraison, de science et de bras, que dans et par l'ecart a l'6quilibre."24The clinamen-vortex of this system seems to hearken back to Carte-sian physics, yet its function in Serres' book is precisely to break downthe Cartesian division between object and subject. For Serres/Lucretius the soul is also an unstable vortex or "tourbillon"because itis removed from equilibrium.25There is, consequently, a structuralidentity and a fundamental affinity between subject and object.26A closer, though still very condensed look at the relationshipbetween the ideas of Lucretius, Serres, and Prigogine/Stengersreveals a fascinating idea-shuttle rather than a "convergence" in thestrict sense. Prigogine performed his Nobel-Prize-winning experi-ments on unstable thermodynamic systems before Serres started topublish. Serres briefly mentions Prigogine in his Lucretius book,27but in response to my query he kindly replied on March 19th, 1997that he did not as yet know of Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structureswhen he wrote it. He may have known Prigogine himself via IsabelleStengers but surely not his work. The photo of the fluid that prefaceshis 1979 book came from a hydraulic laboratory. Hence we have toassume that the seven-year-long gestation of La Naissance de laphysique28 rofited from the general work done on fluid mechanicsbut not from Prigogine's specific work, even though Serres's bookseems in retrospect a "Prigoginian" rewriting of Lucretius. Let usremember in any case that the convergence occurred, strictly speak-ing, between philosophy and science rather than literature andscience-though, admittedly, in Serres's writing distance betweenliterature and philosophy gradually diminished.The lines of communication became somewhat more evidentduring the years after 1977, the year in which Serres's Lucretius bookwas published and Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize. InJanuaryof 1979 an issue of Critiquen. 380) was devoted exclusively to "Michel

23Ibid. 14.24 Serres, Lucrece, 3225 Ibid., 50 and 158.26 Ibid., 214.27 Ibid., 49.28Ibid., 237.

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Serres: interf6rences et turbulences"; it contained, next to thementioned article by Shoshana Felman and contributions from RegisDebray and Rene Girard, a longer article by Prigogine and Stengersentitled "La dynamique, de Leibniz a Lucrece" which starts toformulate the broader implications of Prigogine's thermodynamicresearch, making use of Serres' reinterpretation of Lucretius. Thisaddress to an audience of philosophers and literati in Critiqueparalleled the publication of Prigogine's and Stengers' La Nouvellealliance the same year, which successfully attempted to address aneven wider audience.

Prigogine's and Stengers's title reverses historical chronology byspeaking of a dynamics from Leibniz to Lucretius. One may read thisas a movement from Serres' book on Leibniz (1968)29 to that onLucretius (1977), but, more importantly and plausibly, as a move-ment from classical (seventeenth and eighteenth century) dynamicsto a new thermodynamics: the chronologically older Lucretian textsuddenly becomes the emblem of the modern view that supersedesthe classical, Leibnizian model.The first and longer part of the article expands upon a claim thatSerres put forward in his book on Leibniz that, contrary to thetraditional view, Leibnizian monadology was a blueprint for thedevelopment of classical dynamics: the parallel evolution of "window-less" and pre-programmed monads anticipated the worldview of theLaplacian demon, who could calculate the future if only it receivedthe positions and the velocities of all particles in the universe at aparticular, arbitrarilychosen moment.30According to Prigogine andStengers, the discovery of irreversible thermodynamical processes inthe nineteenth century raised serious questions about Leibnizian/Laplacian dynamics to which quantum mechanics continued toadhere, even though it introduced the notion of random andunpredictable atomic events-for instance, the jump of an electronfrom one orbit to another (accompanied by the absorption orradiation of energy) in Bohr's atomic model. In Prigogine's andStengers's view, Leibnizian dynamics is no longer applicable to allsituations and must be considered with regard to other models that

29Serres, Michel, Le Systemede Leibniz et ses modles mathematiquesParis: PressesUniversitaires Francaises 1968).30 Prigogine and Stenglers, "Ladynamique, de Leibniz a Lucrece" in Critique80, 40-43; see also Ibid., Orderout of Chaos,75.

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involve irreversibility.31According to them, the new dynamics nolonger allows deterministic predictions, and predicting the future inthe Leibniz/Laplacian manner has become unthinkable:32 not be-cause it is practically unrealizable, but because in systems involvingirreversible processes prediction is principally impossible. For in-stance, the motion of a rigid pendulum, which can normally bepredicted on the basis of given initial conditions, becomes unpredict-able if the pendulum passes the vertical position in an unstable state,i.e. with zero velocity; in this case, a vanishingly small perturbationcan lead to unpredictable behavior. To Prigogine and Stengers thismeans the death of Laplace's demon:33beyond the class covered byclassical dynamics there looms a larger class of irreversible andunpredictable processes that lead to auto-organization and evolution.The phrase "vanishinglysmall perturbation" already suggests thatPrigogine and Stengers consider the Lucretian clinamen as prototypi-cal of the new, non-Leibnizian/Laplacian dynamics that allows theemergence of "order out of chaos." Prigogine's research showed thatif the laminar flow of a fluid exceeds a certain threshold velocity itbecomes just as unstable as the pendulum passing through thevertical position with zero velocity. Serres' interpretation of theclinamen in the Lucretian primeval rain becomes for Prigogine andStengers the paradigm for such creative chaos in laminar flow. Theyquote Serres to argue that the classical dynamics of engineers aimedat perfect mastery and control.34 In the new physics, clinamens arenot exceptions to the law, but the basis for a physical model ofevolution: "Today,we discover the limits of laws, the limits of thedomain where nature presents itself as controllable, i.e. as indiffer-ent. We rediscover this truth, which Serres had announced a longtime ago already,and on which his Lucrece onstitutes a meditation."35

IVA letter that Ilya Prigogine wrote to me on March 20th, 1997 confirmsSerres's claim that the philosopher and the physicist worked out theiroriginal ideas independent of each other. In this sense the case I have

31 Ibid., "Ladynamique, de Leibniz a Lucrece," 48.32 bid., 50.33 Ibid., 51.34 Ibid., 54; Serres, Lucrece,106.35Prigogine and Stengler, "Ladynamique, de Leibniz a Lucrece, 55.

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discussed represents a true convergence rather than simply "influ-ence." But in the later phases in the history of my case study,ideas areindeed appropriated; they crisscross between the humanities and thesciences, each of which functions in alternation as host and parasite.De rerumnatura had chronological priority in the literal sense butneeded Serres's recasting to make it attractive to Prigogine andStengers.To what extent can we generalize from this very special case?Scientists often give philosophical meaning and popular access totheir work by making it relevant to perennial philosophical questions.Heisenberg, for instance, considered his uncertainty principle prooffor the existence of free will. But scientific theories, like literary texts,lend themselves to many different interpretations, and the philo-sophical meaning scientists give to their own theory is no morebinding than poets' reading of their own poems. For this reason, aswell as others, the scientific community tends to be skeptical ofphilosophical (let alone poetic) extensions of strictly physical theo-ries; according to an old adage, scientists turn into (questionable)philosophers when they are no longer genuinely creative.Such a "bare-bone" view of science forgets that scientific experi-ments and theories are alwaysembedded in worldviews-worldviewsthat do not represent distracting intrusions into science proper, butmay play a crucial role in forming scientific hypotheses. But we haveto recognize that the Serres/Lucretian extension of Prigogine'searlier research involved, among other things, changing its "literarytechnology." Future reformulations of it, whether responding tointernal or external pressures, or to a change in audience, maynecessitate similar modifications. The convergence between litera-ture and science, if there is one, will not be based on theories thatboth fields share (for that, each of them is in itself too fragmented),and humanists should be wary of climbing on the bandwagon of ascientific theory just because its world view seems amenable to theirown views. In this sense I consistently avoided the question of whatthe "truth value" of Prigogine's new approach to thermodynamics is.But building a bridge via the notion of a "literary technology" inscience seems fruitful to me, because it focuses on questions of "how"rather than "what."Introducing some distinctions and illustratingthem with a case study was the purpose of my paper.University fAmsterdam

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