This beautifully photographed new BBC documentary, The Secret Life of Chaos, evocatively illustrates one way of thinking about immanence, i.e., the spontaneous emergence of beauty and complexity from natural process. Morphogenesis, self-organization, the collapse of Newtonian physics (into chaos/complexity theory, etc.), the “butterfly effect,” fractal geometry, delicious little biographical details about Alan Turing, Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, and others — it’s all there. Iraqi-born physicist-host Jim Al-Khalili gives us the enthusiasm and hipness of a newfangled (and perhaps more respectable) James Burke, and the music, from Arvo Part’s opening strains (“Spiegel im Spiegel”) to Satie, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, et al, adds a great deal to the pleasure of watching it. Nice work on BBC’s part.
The doc provides helpful tools for visualizing dynamic systems, which are part of what’s making it possible for science and culture, Latour’s two poles of the “modern constitution,” to work their way toward a rapprochement. What’s still missing is the integration of first-person subjectivity — mind as opposed to body — which biosemiotics (drawing on Peirce, von Uexkull, Bateson, Sebeok, et al), Whiteheadian process metaphysics, enactive cognitivism, and related schools of thought, help to get at. To actually bring these together into a successful and convincing synthesis — one that would put Newton, Descartes, and the rest fully into the past and put cognitive science on a much stronger footing (in my opinion) — will require a lot more work, of course. Philosophers in particular have their work cut out for them (as my recent exchange with Levi Bryant might suggest).
The Secret Life of Chaos is in six 10-minutes segments, but if you only have a few minutes to sample it now, watch the bit on feedback loops and the butterfly effect that begins this segement:
Incidentally, John Law’s post-Actor-Network-Theory After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, which I’ve mentioned positively a few times here recently, has now been made available at the fabulous ever expanding scholar-hipster’s online library aaaarg.org. A few of the missing social-science pieces I mentioned work their way into Law’s book…
Thanks to Integral Options Cafe for blogging about the BBC doc, which just premiered in the UK this past week.
Thanks for this; it’s truly an amazing documentary!
Thanks for the link.
I have mentioned this before but my thesis/book ‘The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations’, UTP 06, does have chapters on von uexkull, Deleuze, Deely,… and many reference to Peirce (my M.A., 1992) was on Bateson.
Kalevi Kull published what became the Umwelten chapter in Semiotica – a special issue on von Uexkull.
I think PoS prefigures what is now called 000 – but I don’t mind not being ‘on board’.
Because of the title the book is probably not getting the audience it might have if it had been pitched toward something more groovy.
You might find the Zubiri Foundation website worth a look. Their ‘Review’ is interesting.
I forgot to mention the book also has a long chapter on Maturana and Varela ‘Autopoiesis and Languaging – drawn from earlier research.
Thanks, Paul – I ordered a copy of your book for the campus library and it recently arrived, so I’ll pick it up this week. I’ve been reading into biosemiotics lately and have been eager for anything that connects Peirce, von Uexkull, Sebeok, et al. with Maturana/Varela and other cognitivists (like Anthony Chemero, whose Radical Embodied Cognitive Science is worth reading) and, in turn, to Deleuze (/Guattari), Whitehead, et al. A lot of Deleuzians seem to be on this kind of track right now – among others, Ansell Pearson, Protevi, and some of the contributors to the (now) three volumes of work on D/G and ecology (two edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, and one that came out as a special issue of Rhizomes a couple of years ago). It’s all pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to reading your contribution.
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I’m a bit out of the loop now. PoS was completed in 2001 (KAP was an examiner, along with Alliez and Massumi). I felt pretty isolated then. I think you will be surprised by Maturana.
The main insight of the book is the ontological status of relations. Sounds rather dry but it isn’t really. I now look at these new developments with interest…