爱伦·坡与控制论

Edgar Allan Poe and Cybernetics

从拉康到维纳,从马图拉纳到海尔斯,从卢曼到贝特森,本文拟因循这条控制论思想线索,重新考察坡的诗学操控策略如何在“诗性直觉”与“机械理性”以及“情节偏离”与“整体效果”之间实现对立统一,指出:(1)文本系统同样拥有“反馈”与“稳态”这两大控制论核心逻辑;(2)文学审美操控如坡的职业分裂人格所例释的那样,往往会陷入到“无意识”的习惯认知与“有意识”的技术控制所造成的悖论当中,“朴素地”映射了控制论在20世纪70年代进行的理论扬弃;(3)热力学第二定律基于“爛增”所引发的“悲观目的论”使得文学控制论能够借助艺术的拟真机制,将“美”从维纳眼中那针对爛增所作的“暂时的抵抗”转化为莎翁笔下那“永恒的抵抗”。

From Lacan to Wiener, from Maturana to Hayles, and from Luhmann to Bateson, this article traces the cybernetic trajectory that bears upon the literary scholarship in terms of cybernetic fiction or cybernetic narrative studies, and, in this context, revisits Poe's "poetics of control," in particular, as a prototype of "literary cybernetics," where the duality of poetic intuition vs. mechanic rationalism, and that of plot deviation vs. totality of effect synthesize themselves into a dialectic of negation. By means of a cybemetically-oriented close reading of Poe's fiction and its philosophy of composition, this article concludes that (1) Textual system, too, boasts “feedback" and "homeostasis" as from the cybernetic epistemology;(2) The literary aesthetic control, as illustrated via Poe's occupational "schizophrenia" both as a writer and as a critic, tends to be trapped in the paradox caused by the unconscious of habitual cognition and the conscious of technocratic control, which has in a naive manner foreshadowed the modem cybernetics' theoretical sublation during the 1970s;(3) The "tragic teleology," based upon entropy as in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entails a literary cybernetics which, by means of artistic simulation, transforms the concept of "beauty" from what Wiener called "a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy" into the Shakespearean "eternal lines" that "gives life to thee."