Participant: GiTaek Ryoo
Affiliation: Daegu Haany University
Format: Poster and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

This paper proposes a work of art as a self-organizing system, apart from the pre-modern understanding of art as representation or imitation of nature, examining Wallace Stevens’s self-referential repetition, a metaphor-making mechanism, through the ideas of complexity and systems. This paper will show how his writing aesthetically embodies a changing scientific paradigm in the praxis of poetry. Steven’s poetry reveals an infinitely bifurcated self-similar structure, an instance of fractality, in which each part of the structure resembles each other and the whole. This fractal geometry is created by predictable periodicity of certain patterns intermingled with unpredictable variation.

The constant movement of repetition is precisely what generates the creative natural force, which, in turn, provides the energy of the textual system to consistently self-organize and produce itself anew. Stevens’ strategy of making it anew is particularly analogous to Prigogine’s “dissipative structure,” which maintains itself far from equilibrium through a series of bifurcations, and which also describes the autopoietic structure of a living system. Stevens’ poetry organizes itself by means of an interlocking series of self-referential metaphors that generate contextual dependencies between similarities and differences of its terms.
In this way the entire network continually ‘makes itself.’ Stevens’s poetry communicates not through the propositional content of its utterances, but by the structure of the self-referential system. The movement of circulation or repetition, for Stevens, is thus carried out “without human meaning, / Without human feeling” and without reference to any totality or external reality. Stevens constructs a reality not opposed to nature but, as William Carlos Williams put it, “apposed to nature,” as it operates itself by the creative force of self-referential repetition.