Victoria N. Alexander                                                                                                                              

Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities

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C. S. Peirce's Theory of Self-Organization and The Crying of Lot 49

The possible relevance of the unusual names "Oedipa," "Thurn and Taxis," and "Pierce Inverarity" to themes in The Crying of Lot 49 has intrigued Pynchon critics since the novel's publication. Oedipa's name, many agree, points to her role as a solver of riddles after Oedipus who answered the riddle of the Sphinx. Investigations have been made of the historical postal family Thurn and Taxis, but nothing particularly significant about the name itself has been found. Regarding a Pierce/Peirce link, as John Johnston observes, "in a novel so concerned with signs and the processes of signification . . . Pierce's name evokes the name of the American founder of semiotics, C. S. Peirce" (55-56). Evidence suggests these three names are linked together through C. S. Peirce, not his semiotics necessarily, but his less well-known theory of self-organization. The way each of these names functions can be understood in relationship to what I consider the main question of the novel: What is responsible for organization that emerges out of an essentially anarchic world, a world without a centralized source of direction?

 

Self-Organization and Teleology

Self-organization is a subject that has received much critical attention in the sciences and in philosophy since the early nineties as the study of nonlinear dynamics entered the mainstream under the name "complexity sciences." C. S. Peirce's theory may be considered a predecessor of these new theories,[1] which provide simple models with which we may more easily recognize the Peircean elements operating in Lot 49. The sciences of complexity define "self-organizing phenomena" as systems composed of stochastically interacting parts that spontaneously produce structurally complex wholes. Due to nonlinear relationships that exist in the interaction of the parts, the whole is more than the sum of the parts: it cannot be described reductively. The complex outcome of the low level mechanistic behavior seems to require additional guidance. Weather systems like tornadoes are self-organizing, as are economic systems in free-trade environments, but generally self-organization is a property associated with biological organisms. As Immanuel Kant writes:

every part [of an organism] is thought as owing its presence to the agency of all the remaining parts, and also as existing for the sake of others and of the whole, that is as an instrument, or organ . . . the part must be an organ producing the other partsãeach, consequently, reciprocally producing the others . . . . Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and self-organized being, and, as such, be called a physical end. (ß65)

Kant argued that, since the interactions of parts of a complex system are stochastic (individually determined but not directly correlated as a group), they must owe their self-organization to telos, the universal laws that govern the functional relationships between parts and wholes. Any discussion of self-organization inevitably entails teleology, the study of the appearance of inherent design. As James P. Crutchfield has noted, even contemporary descriptions of the phenomenon continue to use the term self-organization, attributing a teleological "self," a consciously directing self, to a system that simply, albeit surprisingly, "organizes" according to the underlying dynamical constraints operating in a nonlinear system (480).[2]

Teleological behavior is commonly misunderstood today as a "linear" phenomenon. In Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines, J. Hillis Miller claims a linear narrative "tends to organize itself or to be organized in a causal chain" and follows an "inevitable sequence," according to a "telos, arche, or ground" (18). Derrida critiques the notion of telic order insofar as it derives from "a linked chain of determinations from the center" (960). He equates the "center" with both arche and telos. Given that the understanding of teleology as "linear" contradicts the way teleologists have thought of their own work and the way that self-organization is understood today in physics, some clarifications must be made so there is no confusion about my use of this concept. While teleology is partly concerned with developmental stages of increasing complexity, the transition from one stage to the next is not linear. Each new stage is surprisingly more complex than reductive analyses of the initial conditions imply. The idea that teleological or goal-directed activity is linear may derive from most late 19^th and 20^th century analytic philosophers who, in direct contrast to early 19^th century teleologists, tried to fit telic behavior into a reductionist paradigm. As Lowell Nissen has demonstrated analyzing the seminal literature, this cannot be done.[3] In this paper, telos is regarded as follows: A teleological explanation is only necessary if a purpose is fulfilled in a way that could not have been predicted by analyzing the initial conditions, or the starting point that led to the goal. In retrospect, however, it appears as if each stage in the process was a precondition for the advantageous or more complex property, quality, or event that eventually emerged. This is the very situation that nonlinear dynamics theorists now explain: they claim self-organizing systems, while completely deterministic, are irreducible and hence unpredictable because effective factors (e.g., function or context) unaccounted for in the system's initial measure of energy are later generated by the dynamics, the interactions of the parts and the whole. Thus, one may say that these complex systems are capable of spontaneous increase in complexity or "progressive" behavior. At the same time, however, the degree of unpredictability is constrained by the dynamics that govern the system as a whole. Behavior, then, is directed as well as original. Only a nonlinear feedback situation could result in an act that could be considered intentional, that is, determined and yet free.[4]

According to Kantian philosophy, telic systems are purposeful, that is, designed in such a way as to create and then to sustain the whole by sometimes resisting change and sometimes adapting to it. Retrospectively, behavior seems goal-directed, progressive, creative, autonomous, or intentional. Most importantly in regard to an analysis of Lot 49, according to a strict understanding of teleology, the design of telic systems is inherent, given in the dynamical interactions of the parts, not imposed arbitrarily from without by a Designer.

In Pynchon's novel, telos appears as the counterforce to entropy. By definition, all telic systems are anti-entropic or far from equilibrium. Eventually any self-organized system will begin to expend more energy than it takes in, and it will no longer be able to maintain its organized structure, slowly becoming as disorganized as its environment. Although self-organized systems eventually do expire, it is nevertheless nothing short of miraculous that organization arises in the first place from disorganization. Given the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder is more likely than order, the occurrence of spontaneous organization in our (presumably closed) universe is truly surprising. The mysterious appearance of order out of chaos, investigated perennially by teleologists, is also investigated by Pynchon.

Throughout history, the debate over teleological phenomena has taken several forms. I make distinctions between, for example, "argument from design" teleology, Aristotelian/Kantian teleology, and a pseudo-teleology commonly known by the name Providence. These competing theories of the origins of design-like structure are, I argue, sources of tension in Lot 49. I will return to the subject of Providence a bit later. First, I will look at "orthodox" teleologies.

Teleology is usually associated with the "argument from design."[5] These teleologists contend that apparent design in nature proves the existence of a supernatural designer, external to the universe, who is able to look ahead, plan, and program events according to his ideas of fitness, harmony, cooperation, and perfection. After setting his universe in motion according to his laws, the designer left it to run on its own, maintaining itself, through checks and balances, like a fully independent telic system. If one wants to stress the notion of a timeless designer, one would say his telic laws are given "beyond" the material universe rather than "before time." But the important thing to consider here is that, in this form of teleology, the existence of telic laws led to the supposition of a Lawgiver. These teleologists, which I associate below with Thomas Aquinas, locate the source of the laws somewhere outside the system in which they function.

A second group of teleologists argues that inherent design (i.e., pattern/orderliness) in biological systems or in the universe as a whole is created by internal automatic principles. A nonphysical cosmic intention is believed to be immanent in physical interactions of the parts of the system itself. This is the teleology that is associated with Aristotle and Kant. They posit an internal set of constraints, implying not a rational Creator but a rational universe.[6]

 

C. S. Peirce and Norbert Wiener on Self-Organization

C. S. Peirce is related to the Aristotelian/Kantian group of teleologists, but he went a step farther.[7] He provided the first naturalistic answer to the question about the origin of supposed internal automatic principles. Aristotle and Kant had left the origin of telos unexplained in their teleology/physics and dealt with it in their metaphysics instead.

Like many other readers of Pynchon, I had long suspected that C. S. Peirce is implicated in Lot 49. When Louis Menand pointed out recently that Peirce's obsession with the phenomena of self-organization was actually an obsession with the Maxwell's demon problem, I resolved to investigate the possible link more carefully (Menand 189-199). Peirce believed the demon's effects were produced by a sorting mechanism comparable to Darwin's mechanism of natural selection. He generalized natural selection and applied it to the laws of physics. Dealing strictly with the way mathematical probabilities interact over time, Peirce's notion of selection does not depend on any kind of "Darwinian fitness" but on the fact that chances narrow themselves as systems engage in feedback.

The theory of self-organization that is usually identified with Lot 49 is Norbert Wiener's theory of cybernetic self-organization.[8] In Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, he acknowledges the influence of Wiener's theory and thus, in effect, discourages further search for an additional or competing influence (14). Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" based on the Greek term "kubernetes," which means "steersman" and is also the source of our word "governor." This is an apt appellation because a self-organizing system does appear to have a self that governs it. In Maxwell's terms, such a self is called a "pointsman for flying molecules" (qtd. in Leff and Rex 39). Maxwell's "pointsman" was later dubbed "Maxwell's demon."

The main thrust of Wiener's work was to critique the supposed efficiency and practicality of a constantly interfering centralized control, a demon if you will, that watches over and organizes a system according to a predetermined plan. He argued persuasively that feedback and distributed systems work better because they function intelligently in their environments by interacting with their surroundings and adjusting themselves accordingly. For example, a heating system that is controlled by a thermostat is more efficient than one that has to be manually adjusted as the temperature changes. Note that Wiener dealt with "intelligent" or "intentional" machines built by humans. His self-organizing machines can run on their own and maintain themselves through feedback processes after their designers have set them running.

Peirce, in contrast, was more interested in "design" that emerged spontaneously in nature through feedback processes without the help of a designer. Peirce's theory is truly automated. It requires neither designer nor Prime Mover. Although some may consider Wiener a critic of the teleological view of the world he, like many others, mistakenly associated teleology with the idea of a rigid plan of action imposed by an external and constantly intervening central control. This, however, is pseudo-teleology and is better understood as "special" Providence. Real teleology is as concerned with self-organization as Wiener was. Wiener's theory, which does not attempt to explain how design itself emerges without a designer, actually has a great deal of affinity with conventional teleology, properly understood. The main and important difference is that Wiener's theory is reductive: he had no concept or intuition of nonlinearity. (Kant seems to have some suspicion of nonlinear effects.) Wiener tends to conflate anti-reductionist teleology (which some deist-teleologists referred to as "general" Providence) with "special" Providence. Believing in ontological emergence of either telos or chaos was to Wiener tantamount to believing in Manichean forces of Good and Evil (188).

According to Frank Kermode, Lot 49 explores a question similar to the one I argue is operating the novel: "Is there a hidden plot concerning an almost Manichean conflict, which makes sense, whether evil or benign, of the randomness of the world?" (162). While Peirce would not have been interested in framing the question this way, Wiener was. His answer was no; only paranoia makes it seems so. Wiener held to reductive determinism.

Peirce was more ambitious in his approach to the problem. He sought a description of the appearance of the generative forces of "good," or rather telic order, that was scientific without succumbing to reductionism. According to Peirce, order is emergent, neither predetermined nor derived from Platonic essentialism, but it is in some sense objective, and it is governed by the laws of chance. Peirce did not, however, think enough about the generative forces of "evil" to allow him to develop a notion of deterministic chaos, which, one might say, is one side of the coin of nonlinearity, dynamical constraint being the other. He believed, with the Pre-Socratics, that the decaying forces of "evil," or rather primordial chaos, was "nothing" in the sense that absolute undifferentiation can have no effects. Peirce imagined the ultimate fate of the cosmos would be the reverse of heat death: everything would become more ordered or crystalline.[9] However, since nonlinear systems can generate novel randomness, such a fate is unlikely. I also note that Wiener, as a reductionist, rejected the idea of a force that could actively generate chaos. He thought disorder was due only to the predictable effects of the second law of thermodynamics.

Peirce's theory contrasts in several interesting way to Wiener's ideas about cybernetic self-organization that are relevant to Lot 49. Peirce offered an alternative to Wiener's belief, given the second law, that

the whole universe around us will die the heat death, in which the world shall be reduced to one vast temperature equilibrium in which nothing really new ever happens. There will be nothing left but a drab uniformity out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local fluctuations. (31)

Peirce argued that local fluctuations were not insignificant because they could be spontaneously magnified over time. In fact, he thought the appearance of infinitesimal irregularities in the "original chaos" were the very source of all order and physical laws, which emerged in time. It is now believed that Peirce's hypothesis is closer to the truth than Wiener's. As, for example, Stephen Hawking has argued (drawing from Linde's chaotic inflation hypothesis), if the fluctuations in the positions and velocities of the particles in the highly entropic early universe were amplified to a sufficient degree, this would "explain the origin of the structures we observe around us" (114).[10] According to this theory, no intelligent agent would be required to provide the design for the creation of structure or its evolution. The laws of structure would evolve spontaneously.

 

From Sameness to Variety

In discussing the entropy theme in Lot 49, I want to emphasize specific terms that relate to self-organization. A system in equilibrium (at maximum entropy) is not structured, is on average homogeneous, or is uniformly disorganized. However, the entropy of a system is only a statistical quantity. Due to fluctuations around equilibrium, there may exist small subsystems of molecules that are by chance more similar relative to each other than to others in their neighborhood. These fluctuations would constitute a local difference.

C. S. Peirce's exploration of self-organization opens with the question of how variety (difference) can spontaneously arise from sameness (entropy). It is significant to Peirce that he uses the term "variety" to describe difference because this is the term that is historically associated with the pre-Socratics in their analysis of the problem. As Tony Tanner has noted, Pierce Inverarity's last name sounds likes "in variety" (176). Peirce argued that primal matter (which the pre-Socratics called the arche) could come to exist spontaneously as fluctuations around equilibrium. These fluctuations would emerge as subsystems having some regularity when compared to their more entropic surroundings. According to Peirce, "The existence of things exists in their regular behavior" (278). Primal matter would be the kind of structure or difference that a Maxwell's demon might recognize. But to avoid introducing a localized director into a spontaneously organizing process, Peirce thought it better to say that the structure of primal matter would lead to self-reinforcing effects and eventually telic behavior. In contrast to Derrida, C. S. Peirce is careful to preserve a distinction between the arche (chance structures) and telos (the dynamical constraints and physical laws that emerge out of stochastic interactions of chance structures).

In "Design and Chance" (1883-84), Peirce demonstrates how an even distribution of elements might segregate itself spontaneously. He uses the analogy of a game of chance. While the outcome of a throw of a single die may have equal probability of being one, two, three, four, five or six, a sequence of two throws would more often produce a sum of seven than of two. Seven is more likely because it can result from a number of combinations: one and six, six and one, two and five, five and two, three and four, and four and three. Thus, not all bets are equal. To illustrate how chance has its own biases built-in that become important over time, Peirce asks his readers to imagine a million gamblers at a table:

Each bets one dollar each time [with] an even chance of winning or losing. Now it is a curious and apparently paradoxical result that although everything is supposed to happen by pure chance yet we know . . . how those million players will stand at the end of a million bets. About ten will have lost $2,000 or more, no one over $3,000; and half of them after playing day and night for nearly a fortnight at the rate of one bet a second will stand within $300 of where they started.

. . . But now we will suppose that the dice used by the players become worn down in the course of time. Chance changes everything and chance will change that. And we will suppose that they are worn down in such a way that every time a man wins, he has a slightly better chance of winning on subsequent trials. This will make little difference in the first million bets, but its ultimate effect would be to separate the players into two classes those who had gained and those who had lost and these classes would separate themselves faster and faster. (220)

Significantly, Peirce stresses that nature is forced to build upon the past, further narrowing choices and increasing the biases in the game. By speculating about such feedback mechanisms, Peirce was in effect beginning to describe nonlinear dynamics, which complexity scientists now use to understand the kind of self-organizing phenomena that Aristotle and Kant identified as telic. Peirce's theory explains order out of chaos and does not require an external intelligence to activate the mechanism that creates order. That mechanism is chance itself.

 

Oedipa Maas

The idea that chaos is actually the source of order, rather than the enemy of order, bears on the function of Oedipa Maas' name. Some attempts to interpret "Oedipa" have assumed that a "postmodern" reading is implied. To quote Chris Hall as an example, "the name Oedipa comes to signify, albeit paradoxically, postmodern dilemma [sic] . . . Oedipa, like Oedipus, is a solver of riddles" but, argues Hall, she exists in a world unlike Oedipus' "'classically' ordered world, [where] riddles have solutions; for Oedipa . . . riddles are posed only in fragmentary and indeterminate terms, and any solution is probably unattainable" (67). Hall supposes that quantum indeterminacy makes finding solutions to riddles unlikely. According to Peirce, initial indeterminacy of the universe is the solution to the question of the origins of order. If Peirce can be linked to Lot 49, then Oedipa's name indicates her potential as a successful solver of the riddle of the universe, even if the novel's ending before the crying of lot 49 leaves her ultimate success in question.

There is strong circumstantial evidence to support the hypothesis that Oedipa's name points to Peirce. Peirce's principle essay on spontaneous organization is entitled "A Guess at the Riddle" (1887-89), which is an explicit reference to the riddle of the sphinx answered by Oedipus. He requested that a drawing of the sphinx accompany the essay in publication. Finally a connection has been found between Oedipa as a solver of riddles and the kind of riddle posed in Lot 49: What is the source of apparently telic order? The answer, like the answer to any good riddle, is delightfully surprising: disorder.

If both Wiener's and Peirce's theories are explored in Lot 49, then Oedipa Maas is a divided character asked to consider several different theories about the origins of order in the universe and the appearance of purposeful phenomena in nature. On this issue it is interesting to note that Bernd Herzogenrath suggests that Oedipa's last name, "Maas" derives from Helmholtz's title "Entropie als das Maass der Unordnung," which contains an unusual spelling of Mafl. (108). He claims Helmholtz made the first explicit prediction of the heat death of the universe. In support of Herzogenrath's assertion, I note that Helmholtz is also known for having made a fatally destructive argument against German teleomechanism (i.e., 19^th century theoretical biology derived from Kantian teleology) and its theory of self-organization (Lenoir 195-215). Years later, Helmholtz's argument was found to be incorrect, but by that time, biologists were interested in Darwinism as the theory to explain the appearance of order in the biological world, and teleomechanism, which depends upon a "neutral" form of selection rather than a form of selection on based on reproductive fitness, was not revived. An altered form of teleomechanism has since returned (and now supplements Darwinism) as "structural evolution" and "complexity science," and, as I have already suggested above, these areas of scientific inquiry have affinities to Peirce's theory of self-organization.[11] If I am right about Peirce and Herzogenrath is right about Helmholtz, Oedipa Maas' first and last names suggest she owes her existence, as all life forms do, to her complex position between the forces of telos and entropy.

 

Teleology versus Providence

There is a third theory of the origins of order operating in Lot 49, mentioned briefly above, which contrasts to theories of automatic self-organization: Providence. Providence is similar to teleology insofar as it also depends upon a notion of "reverse cause": events are thought to be caused by the purposes they eventually serve. (Teleology approaches the notion of "reverse cause" with a different emphasis: the behavior of any part is shaped by the irreducible context in which it functions; the preexisting laws that guide functional relationship determine this interaction, and thus determine the parts.) However, what I will call "special" Providence relies upon unnatural or supernatural intervention, which can be quite arbitrary or unpredictable. In Lot 49, Pynchon refers to "a Hollywood distortion in probability," which, for example, might implausibly delay the death of a character so that he can make a farewell speech (12). Providence operates beyond time and space, thus it is not constrained by the laws of physics (it may not break the laws, but it is indifferent to them). Its ways are mysterious to those existing in time who cannot understand how the end could affect the beginning. A belief in Providence encourages a way of looking at life as if it were a narrative composed by an author (outside of narrative time), who reworks the various parts so that they all contribute to an overall theme. "What Oedipa is doing is very like reading a book" (Kermode 163). In a world that is above normal laws of cause and effect, coincidences may be indicative of a different kind of causal force: authorial intention. This is a fine way to read a novel, but, as a way of reading life, it may constitute a form of paranoia. Edward Mendelson has found signs of (a demonic) Providence in Tristero, whose (potentially false) continuity manifests itself in the muted post horn that "recurs in countless settings, in children's games, in postmarks, lapel pins, tattoos, rings, scrawled on walls, doodled in notebooksãin dozens of contexts that cannot, through any secular logic, be connected" (132). Trystero, as demonic Providence, reflects Wiener's notion that belief in Manichean Evil is the product of paranoid delusions.

Distinguishing between mere coincidental patterns, or luck, and real self-organized patterns has always been a main concern of teleologists. Aristotle insisted that telos guides only those events that are probable. His teleology attempted to distinguish telic purpose (caused by inherent laws) from accidental functionality (thought to be caused by an external super intelligent agent). In philosophy, a standard example of accidental functionality is that of a rock that accidentally drops on one's desk, preventing one's papers from blowing away, thereby functioning as a paperweight. In Physics, Aristotle relates the story of a debtee who runs into his debtor at an opportune moment and thus is able to collect the money he is owed. Aristotle criticizes superstitious people for seeing such a lucky event as telic just because it happened to serve a purpose. He claims telic events are only those that happen "always or usually" (52; bk. 2 pt. 5). In Poetics, Aristotle relates another story of a statue of Mitys that happened to fall and kill Mitysπ murderer (sec. 1 pt. 4). Believers in Providence might regard such events as being guided by divine ends, but orthodox teleologists would not.

C. S. Peirce also distinguished between what he called "real thirds," feedback relationships in self-organizing phenomena, and "accidental thirds," accidental functionalities, which he associated, like Aristotle, with superstitious reasoning. Peirce explains that accidental thirds introduce "an idea not contained in the data, which gives connections, which they would not otherwise have had" (261). This describes Oedipa's situation when she realizes, there are "coincidences blooming everywhere she looked," but "she had nothing but a sound, a word, Trystero to hold them together" (107). As Mendelson has made clear, the Trystero "and all that accompanies it, are always associated in the book with the language of the sacred and with patterns of religious experience" (117). To a teleologists, the "accidental correlations" that suggest a intervening supernatural control are just accidents.

One of Oedipa's tasks seems to be that of distinguishing mere luck and coincidence from telic order. Near the end of the narrative, she explicitly recognizes self-organization as such. For example, a group of deaf dancers, each following an idiosyncratic rhythm, spontaneously produce an organized dance:

Each couple on the floor danced whatever was in the fellow's head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop. But how long, Oedipa thought, could it go on before collisions became a serious hindrance? There would have to be collisions. The only alternative was some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all meshed easily, predestined. Something they all heard with an extra sense atrophied in herself. She followed her partner's lead . . . . She was danced for half an hour before, by mysterious consensus, everybody took a break, without having felt any touch but the touch of her partner . . . an anarchist miracle. (131-132)

Oedipa thinks the orderly dance that arises out of the stochastic interactions would require too many unlikely coincidences of people making the right steps at the right times. Therefore she speculates that the emergent self-organization is somehow predetermined by law. Such speculations are characteristics of all forms of teleology.

Thus far, I have teased out a lot of the subtle differences in various versions of final causality, and I have argued that they are all operating in Pynchon's novel.

 

Thurn and Taxis and Teleology

"Thurn and Taxis" is a name associated with an historical postal service. The question is: Why does Pynchon give it to postal carriers depicted in Lot 49? In this section, I will demonstrate first that Thurn and Taxis is linked--by a fascinating coincidence, of which Pynchon may have been aware--to Medieval "argument from design" teleology. Second, it is also linked through a pun to one of the most common forms of self-organization studied in 20^th century biology.

In the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas reinterpreted Aristotelian teleology to accommodate his notion of a Creator. In the Thomist view, a person's nature is a telic force, implanted by God, which guides the individual in the right direction. The right direction for Aquinas was to move toward "the light." A surprising accidental correlation between the postal service name and Thomist teleology has already been mentioned by Joseph Slade. He discovered that Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis was Rilke's patroness when he wrote about El Greco's painting, Ascension. Rilke observes that the upward movement of the angels depicted in the painting seems unavoidable, unable to "help itself. This is the physics of Heaven" (qtd. in Slade 121). El Greco's angels, by nature, can only rise toward the light. This indirect link between Marie von Thurn and Taxis and Thomist teleology is just a coincidence. However, this form of teleology can be linked more directly, through Norbert Wiener, to Thurn and Taxis.

While Aquinas thought of telos as a natural tendency, particularly strong in angels, to turn toward the light, Wiener wrote quite a bit about phototropism and what he called "tropism machines," which are, like angels, programmed to detect and move toward light (165). One might say that both Wiener and Aquinas were interested in created automatons that had been designed to act in a specific way using feedback mechanisms. Significantly, phototropism is very similar to another form of self-organization, which is called thermotaxis

Thermotaxis involves spontaneous movement toward heat. An evenly distributed collection of biological cells will sort themselves into clusters around a heat source. If Pynchon knew of thermotaxis, there can be little doubt that he intended the pun that can be made on the name of the historical postal family, Thurn and Taxis, whose function is to sort mail before delivering it.

Thermotaxis, as well as a similar mechanism known as chemotaxis, has been most widely studied not in angels but in Dictyostelium discoideum, a type of amoeba also known as "slime mold" (See Marede). Chemotaxis describes how individual slime mold cells spontaneously self-organize in response to chemical "signals" in the environment. Slime mold studies are numerous, and Pynchon, as a student of basic biology, likely had some introduction to slime mold aggregation, the standard example of self-organization.[12] As John Krafft has pointed out, Pynchon refers to slime producing "Fungus Pygmies" in Gravity's Rainbow (523).[13]

While Pynchon was writing Lot 49, most biologists were convinced that there must be some sort of predetermined "founder cell" or special "pacemaker cell" that initiated the movement toward it with a chemical "signal" and thus governed slime mold organization (Keller). These biologists' search may be compared to Nefastis' search for a demon. There were other biologists, for example Evelyn Fox Keller, who advocated a Peircean form of spontaneous self-organization instead, but they were the minority. Pierce Inverarity, perhaps not incidentally in this regard, is referred to as a "founding father" by those who misinterpret his role (26).

Any slime mold cell will produce a chemical called acrasin when food sources have become scarce and it is beginning to starve. Acrasin propagates (or diffuses) through the medium in which slime-mold cells are suspended. When a cell detects acrasin, it moves toward the source. Starving cells near to each other clump together quickly and begin drawing more cells (and even smaller clumps) toward them (Keller and Segel). Because acrasin goes from one cell to another throughout in the medium, biologists say there is "communication." This links self-organization up with another Lot 49 theme: "Communication is the key," as Nefastis says, for systems that self-organize (105).[14] Because communication between the cells occurs, an overall pattern can begin to "habituate," to use a Peircean term, within the group. After slime-mold cells aggregate, they die, but their bodies pile up to form stalks, which release spores, which travel to other regions with possibly better food sources. The aggregating cells are teleological in the sense that they appear to sacrifice themselves for the sake of ensuring the survival of the species.

In contrast to this constructive form of communication, the Trystero may be seen as an anarchic underground force of miscommunication, which results in typos and textual variants and the eventual dissolution of any system. Depending on the dynamics, stochasticity can result in either order or chaos. Trystero is the "blind, automatic anti-God" opposed to Thurn and Taxis telos (165). In the novel, Trystero sometimes appears to be a delusion and merely due to the forces of entropy (this as Wiener would argue) and other times it appears to be a demonic force of organized disorganization.

Before communication begins to take place, the spatial field is evenly distributed. It is symmetric, that is, approximately the same degree of disorder/order is found anywhere one looks. A maximum amount of bits of information is required to describe a symmetric field. When the field becomes differentiated, this symmetry breaks. Oedipa, we recall, waits for "a symmetry of choices to break down" (181). When symmetry breaks, a field of evenly distributed slime-mold cells begins to organize into clumps. Fewer bits of information are required to describe a field that contains some structure. In other words, the entropy of the field decreases.

Just as C. S. Peirce thought "primal matter" forms spontaneously, self-organization begins to occur in slime mold, without the direction of a special founder cell, if the initial conditions of the slime-mold cells are not perfectly equal. It is highly unlikely that a random distribution of cells would be perfectly random (i.e., without some chance regularities or fluctuations around equilibrium). Slime-mold cells that happened to have had the worst luck in their lives and have reached the point of starvation sooner than others would begin producing acrasin before the others and might end up being the center around which other cells aggregate. Bad luck for particular cells might not be due to a God-given less-fit nature (as a Thomist might argue), but due to the chance that they had found themselves relatively close to other cells, and in any high concentration area, the food source would have been exhausted more quickly. I think this may come to bear on why Pynchon chose disenfranchised groups in the novel to represent those who are likely to self-organize, through the anarchic politics, for example, of Jesus Arrabal. Unlike the old system headed by the aristocratic Thurn and Taxis family, which embodied Thomist teleology, the new Peircean system (characterized by a similarity to thermotaxis) is anarchic. The selected "pacemaker" cell, the leader of the new social organization, would not need to be specially programmed for that function, but could become the pacemaker by virtue of the bad luck that he or she had begun to starve to death first.

The general principles behind the self-organizing tendencies found in slime mold studies are relevant to the study of the tendency toward increased structural complexity in biological organisms and other natural systems. These studies reveal a sorting mechanism that only seems to be organized by an "intelligent" force (i.e., a cell with a special design that makes it produce intelligible signals drawing other cells toward it). This sorting mechanism is attributable to chance (and feedback); in the case of slime mold, to a nonuniform distribution of cells in a field, in the case of the universe, to fluctuations around equilibrium in the primordial quark soup.

A link between Pierce Inverarity and C. S. Peirce would indicate that Pynchon explored an alternative to Wiener's belief in the inevitable increase of entropy. Furthermore, Pynchon might also have recognized that Wiener's theory of self-organization, while it does describe how to build machines that work efficiently, using feedback mechanisms rather than relying on a centralized control ("automatic as the body itself" [Lot 49, 120]), Wiener still did not provide a theory explaining how spontaneous organization might initially arise from chaos without some external intelligence. In this regard, Wiener's cybernetic self-organization is not essentially different from Aristotelian or Kantian teleology. C. S. Peirce's self-organization is, by contrast, explicitly leaderless.

Social and political anarchy, the theme on which Pynchon bases the denouement of his novel, is a form of stochastic behavior very like that of individual amoebas in slime mold aggregation. Such anarchy spontaneously produces order. As Oedipa learns from Jesus Arrabal,

You know what a miracle is? . . . [R]evolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet seÒ·, if any of it should ever really happen perfectly, I would have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. (120)

C. S. Peirce, after Oedipus, offered a "guess at the riddle," a theory of the origins of variety (difference) from sameness (entropy) that he saw as a solution to the Maxwell's demon problem. His theory names no predetermined "leader," and thus supports Pynchon's anarchy theme. The mechanisms described by Peirce's theory resemble those of the self-sorting mechanisms behind thermotaxis, and this supports Lot 49's mail-sorting/information-sorting theme and puns of the name Thurn and Taxis. The cumulative weight of this evidence compels us to believe that C. S. Peirce is behind Pierce Inverarity.

 

Acknowledgements: I thank Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women and the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities for the financial support of this research; the Santa Fe Institute for providing me with resources and opportunity to refine my concept of teleology and intentionality; Louis Menand and Joan Richardson for introducing me to Peirce; and Jim Crutchfield for giving me some understanding of nonlinear dynamics and for helping me write an earlier version of this paper.

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Notes