VORTEX TO VIRUS, MYTH TO MEME: THE LITERARY
EVOLUTION OF NIHILISM AND CHAOS IN MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
Julio Varela,
Humanities Scholar at Miami Dade College
The
emergence of nihilism and chaos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
offers us a case study in how memes work. Memes are bundles of cultural
information that display viral properties, sowing the seeds of reality in the
individual minds that make up a culture, sub-culture, or counterculture. In the
case of nihilism and chaos, the ongoing epistemological and ontological
revolution initiated by the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the collapse
of myth as a totalizing source of meaning, and the transition from a Newtonian,
deterministic worldview to a quantum-relativistic, chaotic worldview
transformed the Western cultural landscape, paving the way for the “viral”
spread of nihilism and chaos to different intellectual and cultural strata.
The
matrix model used in this dissertation provides a fruitful way of approaching
cultural dynamics and morphogenesis in general, and the evolution of nihilism
and chaos in particular. According to the model, culture evolves when memes (viral bundles of cultural
information) flow from the sociocultural
matrix (the evolving aggregate of paradigms and epistemes that define a
culture) to individual agents (authors and subjects, in this case). Authors and
subjects function according to the chaotic model of the self described in
chapter one, which defines the self as a radically intersubjective entity that
evolves through feedback, renormalization, and “locking in” to a battery of
attractor symbols in cognitive phase space. These agents assimilate the memetic
material, modify and recombine it with other memes, and incorporate the memetic
innovations in the work of art/cultural
artifact. The work of art/cultural artifact flows back into the
sociocultural matrix and changes it, adding the novel memetic material to the
body of cultural codes that make up the matrix.
James
Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s Three Novels, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow serve as focal points
in this study because each work represents a critical juncture in the memetic
evolution of nihilism and chaos during the modernist and postmodernist periods.
Joyce’s novel embodies the “lapidary” modernist aspiration to create the great,
totalizing work of art which serves as an antidote to the turbulence and anomie
of the early twentieth century. Beckett’s work occupies that liminal space
where late modernism and early postmodernism meet; his preoccupations in Three Novels focus on the insurmountable
problems posed by language in representing the subject and the futility of our
epistemological quest to understand the self amidst the “spray of phenomena”
that surrounds us. Pynchon’s sprawling Gravity’s
Rainbow captures that historical moment in time (the end of World War II)
when the modernist impulse toward totalizing systems of order and meaning is
eclipsed by the postmodern embrace of chaos and semiotic free play.
When
we discuss 1904 Dublin, the haunting abode of “The Unnamable,” and Pynchon’s
“Zone,” we examine three distinct matrices in which modern and postmodern
subjects struggle to find meaning in a world where the totalizing rationality
of the Enlightenment and the redemptive power of classical and Judeo-Christian
myth have failed. Lacking a firm epistemological-ontological-moral foundation,
modernist and postmodernist subjects prove vulnerable to the encroachment of
nihilism and chaos as cultural contagia that mold and shape the evolution of a
distinctive stream of consciousness.
Chapter one is devoted to presenting
the matrix model. The matrix model holds that the sociocultural matrix and the
author matrix interact via the work of art/cultural artifact. The sociocultural
matrix refers to the dynamic nexus of institutions, technologies, and
discursive practices that construct and define “reality” for a culture of
individuals during a period of time. Paradigms and epistemes serve as the
foundation upon which these institutions, technologies, and discursive
practices are established. The sociocultural matrix concept overlaps
semantically with Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony (egemonia). Antonio Gramsci coined the term "hegemony" to
refer to the pervasive system of assumptions, meanings, and values, the web of
ideologies that shapes the way things look, what they mean, and therefore what
reality is for the majority of people within a culture. A culture's web of
ideologies presents the dominant ideas and values as de facto reality, often preventing individuals from seeing how
society actually functions. To Gramsci, reality is perceived and knowledge
acquired, through moral, cultural, and ideological “prisms” and “filters” by
means of which society acquires form and meaning.
The author matrix designates the locus
where the creation of new texts and cultural artifacts takes place. By author I
am referring to creative agents of all kinds, from poets, novelists, and other
writers to creative agents in the other arts and sciences. From a functional
point of view, the concept of complex adaptive systems (CAS) helps us
understand the basis for the author matrix. In complexity theory, the operation
of complex adaptive systems is used to explain a broad array of natural and
man-made processes, from the inner workings of the mammalian immune system to
the dynamics of human cultural evolution. As a CAS embedded within the larger
culture, the author matrix represents that locus of convergence where the
sensory experience of everyday life’s random events and the internal nexus of
unconscious drives, instincts, and “potential” X-factors (archetypes,
epigenetic rules) test the cultural schemata internalized by the author over
time. As an adaptive entity, the author may perpetuate the status quo, act as a
catalyst for change, or generate some combination of new and old cultural codes
that make an impact on the evolution of the culture. Memes, the chunks of
culturally-coded information that comprise the building blocks of a society’s
myths, traditions, customs, et al., serve as the raw materials from which
authors synthesize new aggregates that feed their way back into the larger
cultural CAS via the work of art (literary text, musical composition, painting,
architectural structure, or other such cultural artifact).
Viewing
authors as CAS necessitates a paradigm shift in the way we look at the self.
The chaotic model of the self presented here owes a considerable debt to the
ideas presented in the work of Alexander Argyros (A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos) and
Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach:
An Eternal Golden Braid and Metamagical
Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern). In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter
theorizes that the human brain stores information about objects in the world in
multineuronal networks called symbols.
Symbols may be simple, such as those representing a physical object, or they
may be complex, such as those representing abstract concepts. In any event, a
large constellation of lower level neuronal communication is chunked into a symbol. Chunking is Hofstadter’s term for the
act of encoding a summary of lower level processes into an upper level
language. Argyros posits that ideas are dynamical confederacies of symbols that
exist in mental phase space. Any concept is thus a chunked society of other idea
societies, which in turn are chunked societies of other societies, and so
forth. Viewed as a complex adaptive system, the self is a dynamical process,
not a static entity, constituted by the never-ending flux of feedback
information streaming in from external stimuli and the equally constant
communication taking place via strange loops connecting the internal levels
that make up our conceptual constitution. Amidst the chaotic activity, the
self’s sense of relative stability comes from the process of locking-in, whereby a system such as the
self uses iteration and feedback to find its most stable configuration at any
point in time.
Out
of this delicate equipoise of chaos and order, literary texts (and other
cultural artifacts) surge into existence, offering culture “both a remarkable
data bank in which to store and transmit cultural knowledge and a flexible,
turbulent laboratory in which to invent new knowledge” (Argyros 319). As "tissues of quotations drawn
from the innumerable centers of culture" (Barthes’s Image-Music-Text 146), literary texts crystallize the unique
memetic structures that emerge from the interplay of the sociocultural and
author matrices.
In
Chapters two through four, the matrix model will be used to explore the memetic
evolution of nihilism and chaos in the sociocultural matrices that spawned
literary modernism and postmodernism. During the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the radical transformation of the western sociocultural matrix
precipitated a paradigm shift in our relationship to myth. Chapter two explores how our modern conception of nihilism began
evolving in the nineteenth century, crystallizing out of the cultural flux that
characterized western European intellectual circles. Politically-oriented
anarchism in Russia, Schopenhauer’s exploration of the “Will,” and Nietzsche’s
rejections of the Western metaphysical tradition and Judeo-Christian ethics and
morality all figured prominently in the embryonic development of
nineteenth-century nihilism.
The
strain of nihilism that emerged in nineteenth-century Russia has been generally
understood as a repudiation of German idealism and Romanticism in favor of
materialism. Russian nihilism was characterized by a longing for the
Promethean, for a new kind of human being who rises above the level of humanity
in search of autonomy. This nihilistic vision of a new superhumanity beyond all
gods represents a deeper, more radical permutation of the idea of absolute will
espoused by Fichte and the German Romantics. Bazarov, the protagonist of Ivan
Turgenev's Fathers
and Sons, embodies Russian nihilism, epitomizing this vision of the
Promethean nihilist and foreshadowing the appearance of Nietzsche's ubermensch. Like
the Romantics, Schopenhauer radically contradicted the Enlightenment worldview,
which glorified reason, by emphasizing the fundamental irrationality at the
heart of all existence. Unlike the Romantics, Schopenhauer's “Will” has no goal
and is in fact little more than a blind drive. According to Schopenhauer, what
drives the human subject is an ongoing perpetual striving that surges and
pushes humanity forward, oblivious to the dictates of reason. Through its blind
and aimless activity, the will makes this world into a hell. According to
Schopenhauer, human happiness is an impossibility. Where Schopenhauer thought
that the tragic quality of life can give no satisfaction and that man was
ultimately condemned to resignation, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy asserted
that a life-affirming, Dionysian will can transform man's suffering into joy
through the power of music. Dionysus is the deification of the will in its
strength, a source of rapture and ecstasy rather than resignation. Subsequent
to The
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche further developed his concept of the Dionysian,
a process that yielded the will to power, one of the signature
concepts in a philosophy that demolishes western metaphysics by revealing its
inherent emptiness. From the Greeks onward, the firm belief that we exist in a
world of stable "beings" and fixed origins served as the foundation
for western metaphysics. Nietzsche railed against this claim, asserting that
everything is in a state of flux, a perpetual becoming, driven by the will to
power. Nothing is stable, permanent, or transcendent. In this world of radical
contingency, nihilism reigns.
The
development and maturation of nihilism and chaos in the postmodernist
sociocultural matrix is the main thrust of chapter three. Where modernism had
witnessed the embryonic stages of contemporary nihilism and chaos (the crux of
chapter two), the postmodern period gave rise to a metastasis of evolving,
memetic trajectories (Barthes’s “death of the author,” Baudrillard’s “implosion
of meaning,” Derridean deconstruction, et al.). As a result, language is an
exercise in the endless play of signifiers. In the postmodern world of Deleuze
and Guattari, there are no antennae of the race, but rather schizophrenic
nomad-subjects fueled by libidinal flows. Beginning in the late 1960s, Jacques
Derrida took up where Nietzsche had left off, mounting a critique of philosophy
and language that proved to be fatal to totalizing, logocentric systems.
Derrida broke with structuralism and Saussurean linguistics, rejecting the
possibility of arriving at general laws that govern all discourses or formal
universals that reflect the nature of human knowledge. According to Derrida, the history of metaphysical thought records
the futile attempt to link a "transcendental signifier" with a
secure, stable "transcendental signified" (i.e., a logos), yielding fixed,
universal meaning in the process. The futility stems from the différance,
traces, and supplements that destabilize language and delocalize meaning. A
contemporary of Derrida, Baudrillard maintains that we have entered an
unprecedented historical period where signifiers obliterate signifieds and are
wholly self-referential. According to Baudrillard, postmodernity is
characterized by the proliferation of models and codes that have lost touch
with their referential origins and foundations. The depreciation of the value of myths and the subversion of
philosophical foundations that characterized the twentieth century represent a
phase transition toward a more dynamic, turbulent cultural system. Writers like
Joyce, Beckett, and Pynchon all explore the dramatic, philosophical
ramifications of the move toward nihilism and chaos that helped define the
culture of the last century. In chapters five through seven, I apply
the theoretical framework developed in the first four chapters to the modernist
(Ulysses), late modernist (Beckett’s Three Novels) and postmodernist (Gravity's
Rainbow) novels chosen for this dissertation.
Chapter five focuses on
Joyce's modernist tour de force. Ulysses epitomizes the thoroughly
"recombinant" novel, a work which splices together allusive memetic
fragments from Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and a myriad of other cultural,
historical references. It blurs the distinction between high and low culture,
finding memes in the cultural minutiae of 1904 Dublin. With these cultural
fragments, Bloom, as twentieth century Everyman, and Stephen Dedalus, as the
aspiring artist, piece together a makeshift, foundational bricolage with which
to sustain themselves. No longer nourished and energized by Europe's fractured
cultural legacy and enervate mythic past, Bloom and Stephen endeavor to create
a modernist ethos from the memetic shards available to them.
Chapter
six addresses the ontological and epistemological issues raised in Beckett's Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable).
These dark, cryptic works probe the very core of western metaphysical thought,
calling every cherished ontological and epistemological belief into question.
Molloy and company serve as the reader's tour guides, a perverse twist on
Dante's Virgil, only they are not guiding the reader through Hell, at least not
any metaphysical Hell the reader may recognize. As readers, we can know nothing
for certain, can glean no stable meanings from the characters, who know and
understand even less. The characters primarily long for an end to everything,
offering up a Godless petition for non-being, only to be willed to continue in
true Schopenhauerian fashion on an ostensibly aimless, endless trek.
After Beckett's minimalist approach to metaphysical
uncertainty, Thomas Pynchon treats this theme in a dramatically different way
in Gravity’s Rainbow, the subject of
chapter seven. Temperamentally as dark as Beckett's work, Pynchon's novel draws
from an incredible wealth of cultural sources for its memetic material. As we
follow Slothrop through his sexual escapades and political intrigues on a quest
that leads him not to the Grail, but rather to self-dissolution, we encounter
all manner of signs signaling death and sterility. The omnipresent V2 rocket,
the slave labor camp at Dora, the perversions on the Anubis, and the menace of the "Empty Ones" all point to a
world that has lost its moral compass and embraced a life of "mindless
pleasures," the original working title for the novel. Entropy pervades the
novel on both a structural and thematic level; while storylines unfold and fall
apart with no sense of closure, characters face disorder and decay in the
physical remnants of the war and the breakdown of myth and ritual. In the
post-World War II “Zone,” Western civilization’s slim hopes rest on the
postmodern subject’s ability to draw a “line of flight” and escape the
oppressive codes imposed by the ascendant technocratic elite. By remaining open
to the possibility of cultural negentropy, the postmodern subject is poised to
create meaning from the new cultural forms emerging amidst the chaos of the
post-war period.
In
conclusion, this document serves as a launching pad for a series of more
extensive investigations. I would like to follow up this project with a more
detailed, comprehensive study of memes as cognitive phenomena: what transpires
psychologically in people that makes certain ideas and images more “virulent”
and “contagious” than others? Is their a biological foundation to this
phenomenon? Secondly, this study presents the possibility of looking at the
self as a chaotic, complex adaptive system; I would like to further explore the
epistemological and ontological ramifications of that hypothesis. Finally, in
the “Preface” to The Will to Power, Nietzsche wrote that he was relating
“the history of the next two centuries” (3). He spoke of nihilism as something
to be overcome and called for a revaluation of all values. Modernism and
postmodernism represent Nietzsche’s first hundred-year phase in the reign of
nihilism. Historically situated at the beginning of the second hundred years, I
would like to explore what direction(s) nihilism might take in the century to
come. Given Western civilization’s current state of affairs, I can think of no
more pressing an issue than the future of nihilism.