The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century

by N. Katherine Hayles

most essential to the field concept is the notion that things are interconnected.

a field view of reality pictures objects, events, and observer as belonging inextricably to the same field; the disposition of each, in this view, is influenced—sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly, but in every instance—by the disposition of the others.

the notion of the self-referentiality of language.

everything, in the field view, is connected to everything else by means of the mediating field, the autonomy assigned to individual events by language is illusory.

When the field is seen to be inseparable from language, the situation becomes even more complex, for then every statement potentially refers to ...

the literature is an imaginative response to complexities and ambiguities that are implicit in the models but that are often not explicitly recognized.

What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Werner Heisenberg

Characteristic metaphors are a “cosmic dance,” a “network of events,” and an “energy field.” A dance, a network, a field—the phrases imply a reality that has no detachable parts, indeed no enduring, unchanging parts at all. Composed not of particles but of “events,” it is in constant motion, rendered dynamic by interactions that are simultaneously affecting each other.

As the “dance” metaphor implies, its harmonious, rhythmic patterns of motion include the observer as an integral participant.

Its distinguishing characteristics, then, are its fluid, dynamic nature, the inclusion of the observer, the absence of detachable parts, and ...

Particles are not to be regarded as discrete entities, then, but rather (in Hermann Weyl’s phrase) as “energy knots.”2 What the particle was for the Newtonian paradigm, the field is for the new paradigm.

The mysterious essence of life requires for its understanding the sympathetic imagination.

But if a living being is dissected, the essential quality of life is destroyed; the remaining parts will never add up to the original whole.

the whole is something other than the sum of its parts,

But whereas the Romantics identified this dynamism with a specifically living force, the modern period links it with a breakdown of universal objectivity.

One of the important points of continuity between Romanticism and the field concept is the appearance of inherent limits on sequential, logical analysis.

when every cause is simultaneously an effect, and every effect is also a cause

Like the figure in a painting who wishes to gesture toward the picture that contains him, we can never arrive at a complete and unambiguous description of this reality because we are involved in what we would describe.

The realization that there are inherent limits on what can be spoken, and that these limits arise because language is part of the field being described, is at the heart of the revolution implicit in a field concept of reality. The stickiness of this situation, our inability to extricate the object of our description from the description itself, suggests that a more appropriate image for the field concept than the “cosmic dance” is the “cosmic web.”

Saussure argued that language systems should not be regarded as collections of discrete semantic units, but as unified systems in which meaning derives from the relational exchanges between signs.

a field notion of culture, a societal matrix which consists (in Whitehead’s phrase) of a “climate of opinion” that makes some questions interesting to pursue and renders others uninteresting or irrelevant.

In a field model, the interactions are always mutual: the cultural matrix guides individual inquiry at the same time that the inquiry helps to form, or transform, the matrix.

meaning in a literary text was deemed to derive not from a mimetic relationship between the text and “real life,” but from the internal relations of literary codes.

One turned inward, assuming that literature, like language, is an internal system that has no necessary reference to anything outside itself.

Because this inward-turning literature is nonmimetic in its orientation, the term “anti-realism” can properly be applied to it.

These texts, although they may possess “anti-realistic” traits, turn outward toward an apparently external referent. The nature of the reality being represented is, however, radically altered, for it is no longer simply external and objective, nor is it represented as an object separate and distinct from its verbal expression. Rather, it is assumed to be continuous with the text, interpenetrating the signifiers that re-present it.

so that the meaning exists, as the narrator asserts of Marlowe’s storytelling, not as the kernel of a nut but as a kind of luminous haze without a definitive locus in the signifiers themselves.

Here two implications of the field concept come into play: that the whole is composed of parts but cannot be reduced to them; and that the observers are an inextricable part of the field.

In more radical versions the external reality, though putatively existing, is irrecoverable, for the subject’s perceptions of it have so deformed and merged with it...

the impulse to represent a continuous reality need not necessarily be expressed as extreme subjectivity.

This immediately involves the author in paradoxes of self-referentiality, for the enabling premise that the text is part of the whole also implies that the whole can be contained within the part, leading to the infinite regress of a part containing a whole within which is contained the part.

well-known developments in the modern novel are part of a larger paradigm shift within the culture to the field concept.

authors are reacting not to science as such, but to a more general set of ideas pervasive in the culture.

the connecting link between these ideas is the field concept,

a writer can be concerned with issues that have been brought into focus by the paradigm shift without necessarily being familiar with those sources that most directly brought it about.

can the representation of a holistic field be accomplished within the linear flow of words, or is the attempt inherently limited by the fragmentation of the medium?

he juxtaposes the new “loss of certainty” with old certainties to render everything uncertain.

The style arises out of the interplay between the world and ourselves, or more specifically, between the spirit of the time and the artist. The spirit of a time is probably a fact as objective as any fact in natural science, and this spirit brings out certain features in the world.… The artist tries in his work to make these features understandable, and in this attempt he is led to the forms of the style in which he works. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

One of the most important of these implications is that the Cartesian dichotomy between the res cognitans and the res extensa, the thinking mind and the physical object, is not absolute, but an arbitrary product of the human mind.

On the first side of a piece of paper write the words “The statement on the other side is true.” Now turn the paper over and write “The statement on the other side is false.” Let us consider first Side 1 asserting that Side 2 is true. If Side 2 is true, however, then Side 1 is false. But if Side 1 is false, then Side 2 is not true, in which case Side 1 is true.

a “Strange Loop,”3 a loop of reasoning that cannot be resolved because to accept either statement as true is to begin a loop which circles around to say that the same statement must be false.

These paradoxes led to the same sort of circular reasoning we saw earlier,

any theory that is not demonstrably false cannot be demonstrated to be completely true.

The crux led Hermann Weyl to say that God must exist because mathematics is intuitively consistent, and the devil exists because it cannot be proven to be consistent.

this indeterminacy confined to axiomatic mathematics. It also appears in computation theory, in a problem that Martin Davis calls the Halting Problem.5 The question that the Halting Problem asks is whether it is possible to determine in advance if a computer will be able to find a definite answer—that is, come to a halt—for any given problem.6 The question has practical importance, for if it cannot be answered, one can suddenly find one’s computer involved in a Strange Loop of its own, which consumes expensive computer time and, in extreme cases (as in the infamous “page fault” error), renders the program useless.

The important point is that certain kinds of logical problems have no solution, not even using the most sophisticated computers imaginable.

“Note that we are not saying simply that we don’t know how to solve the problem or that the solution is difficult. We are saying: there is no solution”7

certain limitations in linear analysis are inescapable because of the problem of self-reference. It is because the tools for analysis are inseparable from what one wants to analyze that Strange Loops appear.

in suggesting that modern fiction is deeply concerned with the self-conscious use of language, Tanner has put his finger on a major characteristic of twentieth-century fiction.

Modern readers are experiencing the same kind of situation that mathematicians experienced when Gödel’s theorem burst upon the scene: the object for analysis (the text, number theory) refers self-referentially to that of which it is composed (language, statements within number theory). Like Gödel’s theorem and the Halting Problem, modern fiction tends to place us within rather than outside the frame,9 so that when we speak about it, we are speaking from within the picture that contains us. The resulting paradoxes have sparked important debates and theoretical work in literary criticism.