If, on the one hand, scientific knowledge feeds doubt and creates hierarchies by raising fundamental questions, on the other, artistic knowledge illuminates and brightens reality, placing or returning man to his vital context. They can’t go on artificially separated, but must, beforehand, reintroduce man into the complexity of the world. Science and art are intercommunicating knowledges, two ways of observing the world, opponent forces that may form a complementarity or the same unit of knowledge. They gather in themselves the multiplicity of knowledges, the ethical search and the aesthetic cosmovision of life. It is our understanding that literature and cinema always embody models of society, if not the ones we aspire, at least the ones we have and construct. Our objective is to show how the notion of time in literature may mediate our comprehension of the reality of space/time and of the world, collaborating with the transdisciplinary research program in the studies of complexity.ĥ From the epistemological point of view as well as from the methodological view, the studies of complexity and this article seek to establish a dialogue between science and art, understanding them both as a transdisciplinarity field itself.
Our presentation method and exploration of the material will be descriptive, interpretative and critical, and we intend to prioritize the analysis of time, relating it to the notion of chaos and catastrophe in the narratives of Cosmicomics (1992) and T Zero (1995), by Italo Calvino, in the movie Melancholia, directed by Lars Von Trier (2011), and also in the interpretations by the physicist and Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Ilya Prigogine 1.
Russian physicist-chemist with Belgian citizenship, specialist in non-equilibrium ther (.)Ĥ The theoretical-methodologic approach used springs from the premise that the narratives, imaginaries, poems, romances and tales are discourses engendered in our daily life, as well as in the various media which involve us, from the primary (the ones of present time and body), going through the secondary (those in which the sender uses a technical apparatus to send messages, elongating perception of time), to the tertiary (in which the sender and receiver need technical apparatus and can exchange messages without being simultaneously present, shortening time and making communication faster) (Romano 1993).
43).ģIn this article, we intend to discuss the notion of time, based on its closeness to catastrophe, as well as the notion of media, departing from its relation to literature. Based on the perception of these links Edgar Morin (1987) proposed a tetragram (order/disorder/interaction/auto-organization) as a conceptual articulation that permits conceiving communication as dialogic, regulated first by uncertainty, with a permanent tendency to chaos and disorder, close to what Prigogine designated as flotation, a “mechanism of irreversibility: once established, it differs from what it previously was” (Prigogine quoted in Pessis-Pasternak, 1993, p. John von Neuman ended up revealing the links which bonded phenomena of auto-organization to those of interactions. 14).Ģ Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby, founders of the cybernetics, worked to promote the notion of complexity.
The concept of media became important in the studies of complexity due to the perception of the “huge amount of interactions and interferences among a large number of units that defied our possibilities of calculation” (Pessis-Pasternak, 1993, p. 1 The relation between time, media and chaos integrated a research program developed inside the so-called studies of complexity, starting from the development of ideas of “order from noise” (“ordre à partir du bruit”) defended by Henri Atlan (1992), and of “complexity of disorder”, mentioned for the first time in 1948, by Warren Weaver, in the famous article “Science and complexity”.