Clinamen and serendipity

I have been doing a lot of research and thinking today, but mostly feeling overwhelmed! To bring it back to two simple points of great interest, I will introduce to this, our scrapbook-o-rama, some wikipedia, some youtube, and some odds n' sods.


1. Clinamen:

Clinamen is a swerving motion, an unpredictable movement.

Lucretius, a Roman poet, wrote an epic poem entitled: De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Lucretius described the void - the 'beginning' of the universe - and he described atoms falling through the void in parallel to each other at a constant speed. According to Lucretius, for some unknown reason, an atom moves an infinitesimal amount - this is the clinamen - and thus precipitates a collision with other atoms which gives rise to larger matter being formed. The clinamen accounts for the concept of free will.

In our recent 20th century, the concept of clinamen became a source of fascination to many literary figures: Raymond Queneau, Harold Bloom, Lacan, Derrida, and a French polymath philosopher called Michel Serres (who has written a lot on clinamen and its use in theories of thermodynamics). Clinamen was important to the Oulipo group... in fact, the concept of clinamen is integral to their manifesto.

Here is an excerpt from an essay on the Oulipo and algorithms, which at this point is discussing how the group tackled the problem posed by computer-generated programs being used on texts removing the human agency involved in creating literature:

"During one of its reunions in the early 1960s the Oulipo anticipated the risk of automatism in the structures they were defining. The group attempted to make room for individual freedom but they were unable to reconcile freedom with automatism. Jacques Bens recognized that every structure automatized writing to a certain extent, and Claude Berge added that potential literature generated new automatisms [Bens 1980, 144]. Le Lionnais insisted that a sufficiently complex system of constraints offered writers a number of options from which they could choose.

The Oulipians wanted to avoid the unconscious automatisms of the Surrealists, but the conscious use of structures in their writing produced what they could not avoid describing as "automatic". Le Lionnais admitted that "it is true that the birth of machines has modified the current sense of the word 'automatic'" [Bens 1980, 185]. The Oulipo recognized that the problem of using computers to create texts stemmed from the writer's inability to remain aware of how the machine applied constraints.

In the 1970s the Oulipo introduced the notion of the clinamen, which helped to resolve this dilemma. Based on a conception of the movement of atoms in Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, the clinamen is the primordial anti-constraint: it makes creation possible by introducing chance and spontaneity in an ordered universe [Motte 1986b]. The Oulipo recovered a sense of the unexpected in the constraints they used..."

- Digital Humanities (journal) at Hartwick College, 2007
(http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/1/000005/000005.html)

2. Serendipity

Oxford English Dictionary:
"The occurrence of events by chance in a beneficial way"

I recently met someone who recounted a lecture he'd attended at Edinburgh recently given by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point among other things). The subject was serendipity and purportedly Gladwell described three levels of serendipity:

i) Columban
ii) Archimedean
iii) Galilean


The lecture is not available online as far as I can tell and I can't find any information about this sketched out concept either. Below are my interpretations of the anecdote relayed...

i) Columban

Christopher Columbus set sail for India but intended to approach it the long way, by sailing west. Of course we all know he hit the Americas. This then is an example of what I hesitantly call accidental serendipity. Columbus was not looking for the Americas; he intended to land elsewhere and yet he stumbles upon this discovery.

ii) Archimedean

So you know the story about Archimedes in the bath... He had been thinking about a way to work out the volume of matter, and one evening or whatever he was in the bath, and Eureka. This is coincidental serendipity in that although he was not actively seeking a solution through experiments with water, the problem and the bath had a potential relationship which he discovered by coincidence. Perhaps up until this moment whilst indulging in baths he usually had a massage which distracted him...

iii) Galilean

This is the third level. Galileo was actively seeking evidence to support his theory that the planets orbited the sun and not vice-versa. He looked into space keen to see something that would prove him correct. And on one occasion he witnessed the moons of a distant planet orbiting the planet. This provided him with enough evidence...

I must apologise for my vague reporting of this lecture, but I had no printout or alternative source to check my handwritten notes against. I think the principle remains clear though. This systematic description of serendipity poses interesting links with the concept of clinamen.

And now, I leave you with:


3. Odds 'n sods:

Radical composer, Olga Neuwirth's Clinamen/Nodus:


Olga Neuwirth - Ce Qui Arrive
("explores the subject of coincidence")
http://iem.at/Members/noisternig/arts/cqa/index_html/document_view

Olga Neuwirth - Lost Highway
An opera based on David Lynch's film.
Production information:
http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/catalogue/cat_detail.asp?musicid=31012

Excerpt:





Wikipedia definition of clinamen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinamen

Wikipedia on Lucretius:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius

Stanford Encylopedia entry on Lucretius:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/