Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

8 On Meaning

8 On Meaning ฀ Occasionally, when I’ve been bored with a book I’ve been reading, I’ve flipped ahead through the pages and thought,there is nothing but words here! What was I expecting? Never mind that people have lived and died for what is written in books; at these moments, it is thoroughly dispiriting to reflect that the text to come— no matter how informative or meaningful—will only be, after all, more of the same,word following word,eyes scanning back and forth,back and forth, back and forth. The sky will not open. The world will not change. This must be why Shakespeare has Macbeth, in a moment of hopeless fatalism, seem to describe living itself as the reading aloud of an already written text: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time . . . (5.3.19–21) The repeated words “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” mark the repetitive sameness of reading, not only in the eyes scanning back and forth but also in the very marks on the page: the same thirty or so letters and punctuation marks, again and again, and mostly the same words, too, and in the very same grammatical patterns, repeated over and over with only petty permutations. This is information: a controlled mix of redundancy and predictability with novelty. Of course, it doesn’t stop with language. 06-10.31-57_Livi.indd฀฀฀39 9/6/05฀฀฀10:39:02฀AM 40 . between science and literature As Macbeth sees it, days, like words and syllables, follow one another with stultifying predictability. We might as well add conversations,฀meals,฀dreams,฀ sex฀acts,฀wars,฀generations,฀worlds,฀universes. It doesn’t stop with language, but maybe this steamrolling ennui starts with language, whose every single word seems to aspire to flatten all its referents to more of the same. This is the depressive view of language, the flip side of which would seem to be a yearning for apocalyptic escape. To one so deeply bored one wants to ask: how is it that you have inoculated yourself so effectively against thinking that nothing could move you? On the other hand, one might emphasize difference and novelty.After all, every sentence in this book,with the exception of a few scattered quotations, will be unique to this book, and thus will be occurring here for฀the฀first฀time฀ in฀the฀history฀of฀the฀universe, as far as we know. And this very same book, read by different people, will bear radically different fruits, and all the more so if it travels between cultures, in time and space. Even for a single reader, this book may well function at one moment to spark a long-lost memory or a new inspiration, at another a headache or a nap or just the blink of an eye. Far from being oppressively the same, arguably, a book is oppressively plural and different: its wake is too choppy and too fleeting; its meaning is too slipperily, swarmingly different at every moment even to handle, much less to master. The meaning of a book is its wake, the little ripple of turbulence that often seems only to disappear (or may only seem to disappear) as it widens. Its meaning is how it is in฀the฀loop, how it is wired into the circuit of things, the circuit of making things and of making things happen, and humanity in turn is wired together and to the world through language (among other things). A book changes (though perhaps only slightly) the way we think and know, like a switchboard operator, reconfiguring synapses maybe even one at a time, and the wiring of the brain is wired to the circuitry that wires people together and to the world: “Puppet strings . . . are not tied to the supposed will of a puppeteer but to a multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in other dimensions connected to the first” (Deleuze and Guattari 8). A book is a node in a network of nodes that are themselves networks . It is a variegated network with all kinds of gaps and disconnects and degrees of freedom wired into it, but it could not be a network at all if that were not the case (since if everything were connected perfectly to everything else, it would constitute an adamantine and eternally frozen crystal). There is no such thing as an independent thought: there is no...