The Biologist's Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature, and Nature - Paperback

by Victoria N. Alexander (Author)

Drawing on her experiences as a complexity theorist, novelist and art theorist, Victoria Alexander takes us "inside" paradoxically purposeful self-organizing entities (which somehow make themselves without having selves yet to do the making), and she shows us how poetic-like relationships--things coincidentally like each other or metaphoric, and things coincidentally near each other or metonymic--help form organization where there was none before. She suggests that it is these chance language-like processes that result in emergent design and selfhood, thereby offering an alternative to postmodern theories that have unfairly snubbed the purposeful artist. Alexander claims that what has been missing from the general discussion of purposefulness is a theory of creativity, without which there can be no purposeful action, only robotic execution of inherited design. Thus revising while reviving teleology, she offers us a non-essentialist conception of selfhood as an achievement that can be more than a momentary stay against the second law.