Stoppard's Arcadia, Cybernetics, and the Cyborg 1

I've been reading several books up here in the mountains, including David Golumbia's "The Cultural Logic of Computation" and (for perhaps the eighth time) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I promise to write more at length on both of these texts, but for the moment I want to mention that when one reads the history of cybernetics, one comes across Maxwell's Demon and the second law of thermodynamics all the time. It is as if entropy, the heat death of the universe, the irreversibility of time, all constituted not simply problems for thinkers like Norbert Wiener, but emotionally felt conflicts.

What I begin to see, as Stoppard lays out his always doubled drama, was that the attractions that Newton (and other scientists) include in their studies (gravitation, repulsion, etc) and "the

attraction which Newton left out" (sexual desire and love as a disruptive element in our lives) create a tension that itself disrupts. Desire is entropic; we suffer it, and feel more alive because of it, and iterate it just as one might iterate (as Thomasina the young female student does in 1809) an x and y equation, feeding the solution back into the equation and then solving it again, producing a graph, a picture, a sketch of feedback. And the results of such iteration in modern times - the analysis of animal populations, stock prices, weather - is that we see, as Valentine the scientist sees in the present day half of Stoppard's play, that numbers begin to behave like, or indeed represent, natural phenomenon. The language of computation, at least in Stoppard's play, does not yield order, or Order, or contol; it reveals that "the future is disorder." And in just the same way the weather is predictably unpredictable, so are we, given the other set of attractions (and here I would add not just sexual desire, but the range of emotions, aesthetic attractions, the imagined self and community and polis in predictably unpredictable orbits).

So beyond Classic and Romantic, the Two Cultures, the language of computation and the language of the attraction which computation leaves out...or rather, comprehending both, is...Arcadia. And if as Leo Mark wrote, the Machine in the Garden is a central and productive trope for American fiction and political imagination, then the Cyborg in the Garden - the Cyborg in Arcadia - may be the next iteration of this theme.

I'm off to ski. When I come back, I'll try to solve for this x and y, and I'll use other, noncomputational language, to embrace x and y. I think the result will be that for Norbert Wiener and the cyberneticists of the 50s, Arcadia turned out to be pools of counter entropy.