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Entropy: Interpretations

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For Robert Smithson, architecture depends on the repression of entropy.
"The dream of architecture is to escape from entropy." (Informe: Mode d'Emploi )

In the late nineteenth century speculation about entropy intersected with the culture of colonialism, with the uneasy relations between technological progress (primarily through the heat engine) and a sense of cultural pessimism. Thus for Oswald Spengler, entropy "signifies today the world's end as a completion of an inwardly necessary relation." (see Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise, Energy and Empire )

In 1852 William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, predicted the death of the earth from heat loss in an article entitled "On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy." In it he wrote that "There is at present in the material world a universal tendency to the dissipation of mechanical energy. Any restoration of mechanical energy, without more than an equivalent amount of dissipation, is impossible...and is probably never effected by means of organized matter, either endowed with vegetable life or subjected to the will of an animated creature." "Within a finite period of time...the earth must again be unfit for the habitation of man as present constituted." (quoted and commented upon in Hayles, Chaos Bound, pp 39-42)

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B/Z Reaction

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B/Z Reaction

Chemical reactions do not generally display dynamic patterns or spatial order. The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, discovered in 1951, may be the first completely understandable laboratory example of pattern formation in a chemical system that involves nothing more than chemical reaction and molecular diffusion. That same year, in 1951, Alan Turing investigated the theoretical possibilities of pattern formation by reaction/diffusion as "The chemical basis of Morphogenesis." The B/Z reaction is an example of a chemical system that shows spatial, periodic and wave properties that suggests that morphogenetic self-organization might follow similar pathways in both inorganic and organic systems. (cf. Slime Mold)
from Arthur T. Winfree, When Time Breaks Down, p. 168

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writing

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Is writing merely a way of recording language by visible marks, or does it have its own linguistic function? Edmund Husserl describes writing as virtual communication. It makes communications possible without immediate or even mediate personal address. By means of writing, the socialization of humanity is elevated to a new stage.

From Assyrian time on, the bulk of writing is in administrative and economic documents, mainly in the form of lists. In referring to the "scriptural economy" Michel De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) points to writing as a "triumphal conquista of the economy, that has, since the beginning of the 'modern age' given itself the name of writing." (p. 131) For de Certeau, the installation of the scriptural apparatus is the triumph of a modern discipline." In modern western culture the practice of writing is a myth which gives symbolic articulation to the Occidental ambition to compose its history, and thus to compose history itself." Here, as elsewhere, de Certeau seeks to find archaic processes of resistance within the discipline itself, in this case, forms of orality, and to rehabilitate reading as a nomadic poaching.

De Certeau describes writing as "the concrete activity that consists in constructing, on its own, blank space (un espace propre ) --the page-- a text that has the power over the exteriority from which it has been isolated." (p. 134)

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