Chaos, Fractals & GR

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

On Sun, 21 May 1995, Tim Ware wrote:

> This actually gets down into that scalar fractal stuff of earlier posts.  
> Systems, like people, like insects, like mushrooms, have the primary 
> impulse to survive.  Their components are people.  Systems are always 
> traceable to humans (well, perhaps not "natural" or at least "nature's" 
> systems, though, hey, what IS "natural").  Systems don't lead to 
> genocide, people and their fucking need to point the finger, find 
> scapegoats, drive genocide.  I knew when I said "people kill" there would 
> be a knee-jerk "oh, this guys just like those anti-gun-control assholes, 
> etc" reaction, but there is a tendency to blame things on "systems".  
> "Systems kill" -- come on!  I'm sure it was pretty hard to find a German 
> after WWII who didn't blame it on the Nazis ("I'm not a Nazi, I just live 
> here").  I think any talk of "systems" as a class has about the same 
> resonance as talking about classes of people.  The tension that exists in 
> the Zone between the Force and the Counterforce is a dance that occurs at 
> every level of existence (or at least so I assume, having only checked 
> out a relatively small number of them).  
> 
> You really can't have one without the other.  Thesis/antithesis.  The 
> dance.  The interface.  The taming/ordering of charisma.  Systems exist 
> between the 0 and 1, not one or the other.  Not good system/bad 
> system--just systems.  To tame "the green uprising" into a garden is not 
> necessarily a bad thing.  

Well now, I'll just chime in here and say that this is what I suggest in 
my article on _Vineland_;  that we see "not good system/bad system--just 
systems."  In fact, the diction is very similar to Tim's (talk about the 
interface.)  Rushdie says something about the redeeming qualities of 
"community."  Katherine Hayles speaks of "snitches" and "families," as 
opposing forces that operate in the novel.  I believe that the nature of 
suggests that we see "just systems," that ultimately follow one path.  
I find that the locus of our understanding of this path is rhizomatic, in 
nature. TV in _Vineland_ forces an impression of "language. . . pounded 
flat," and as language is bound up in thought, expression, reality (and 
these, the business of fiction--thus, this textual system.)

And now, back to our . . .

Bonnie