Contingency and Freedom, Prosaics and Process.

I. The Unfitting

Thomas Pavel correctly sees that the neologisms I derived from the study of literature—prosaics, sideshadowing, and tempics—were designed to provoke reconsideration of nonliterary issues as well. ¹ The questions that led to their coining concern two closely related problems. First, the “unfitting”: the world does not resemble a well-made poem, where everything fits into an overall pattern. In life, countless facts seem to make no sense or to be unrelated to each other. That is why, when real events do seem exquisitely ordered or complications work out too neatly, we suspect that they have been staged. Literature differs from life because authors can go over their works until everything fits. But life always contains the unfitting.

Pockets of order do arise, of course, but by and large the natural state of the social and historical world is mess. Order, as Bakhtin liked to say, is temporary, unstable, and always the result of work; it is a “project.” The world more closely resembles the unchartable chaos of Tolstoyan battle than the punctilious precision of soldiers on parade. Nevertheless, after battles are over, official reports are composed to make them seem orderly (the left flank advanced, while the right flank retreated into the forest . . .). War and Peace repeatedly contrasts the messy fact with the orderly description. In daily life, our very memories make spurious order out of ungainly experience. Intellectual work in particular proceeds by what Tolstoy calls “stencil work”: regardless of what actually happens, our pictures reveal only what fits the stencil. ²

What is unfitting is not seen. As in the much-told story of the man who searches for his lost keys, not where he dropped them but under the street lamp where he can see, too many disciplines have turned away from the unfitting because it is harder to study. Such a selective perspective has shaped much of the history of the social sciences, which (as the very term implies) are too often afflicted with physics envy. Had their chosen model of a science been biology or geology, rather than astronomy or geometry, they would have paid more serious attention to ill-fitting particularities.

Behind all that mess, there are—there must be—relatively simple laws to account for it: that is the faith (Tolstoy said superstition) animating the great social and cultural systems of the past few hundred years. Just as Newton’s laws resolved all the complexity of planetary motion—all those slowdowns and retrograde movements that had generated countless decenterings and epicycles in the Ptolemaic model—so social laws with analogous power will be discovered. Culture and culture’s laws lie hid in night; come Newton Two and all will soon be light. For how else could things be? Although they are yet to be discovered, deterministic laws must govern the social world. Randomness must be entirely apparent; we can know that much a priori. From La Mettrie and Laplace to Lévi-Strauss, from seventeenth-century rationalism to contemporary rational choice theory, the odd, individual, surprising, and unfitting have usually been seen as things any good theory must banish.

Prosaics rejects this entire way of thinking, which, for all its supposed rationalism, derives from a leap of faith that order is primordial. The thinkers in the prosaic tradition, from Montaigne to Tolstoy and from Bakhtin to Bateson, discover in this faith the vanity of human wishes, which attribute to the world what our minds can most easily grasp. ³ From the fact that some order exists it by no means follows that nothing but order exists, any more than one could conclude that the presence of some disorder rules out the possibility of any order.

Bakhtin referred to this faith in primordial and total orderliness by a variety of terms, including “rationalism” (he has in mind the great thinkers of the seventeenth century), monologism, and (most broadly) theoretism, the idea that the right theory can in principle account for everything with no remainder. To vindicate this idea, theoretists first “transcribe” the world into a form their systems can handle and then overlook or deny whatever...