[Chi] [Alpha] Absolute Chaos: The Early Romantic Poetics of Complex Form.

DIVIDED BY ZERO AND WITH AN INDETERMINATE COUNTERVALUE, THE "numerator" chaos itself remains indeterminate--indeterminate enough, in early romantic poetics, to cover a broad conceptual field. Chaos is taken up into a calculus of speculative concepts. It is equated with poetry; determines "the modern" and "the interesting"; explains "the romantic"; is the "foundational idea" of mythology; becomes the organizing principle of the novel; defines enthusiasm and irony; and serves as a designation of epoch and style characterizing the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Calderon, and Goethe. As "ein Chaos von Systemen" ["a chaos of systems"], (1) even "the absolute" is determined by a concept whose popularized semantics indicates indeterminacy, disorder, and confusion. Mathematics, too, is proclaimed by Friedrich Schlegel "Princip des Chaotischen. Die [mu] [alpha] [theta] [mathematische] Form entsteht durch das Irrationale, Potenzirte, Combinatorische, Progressive pp." ["Principle of the chaotic. Mathematical form arises from the irrational, exponential, combinatory, progressive pp." S 16: 336]. Whereas Schlegel inclines to algebraic formalizations and simple equations for "chaos," Novalis draws on infinitesimal calculus to develop a poetics of involution when giving "vernunftige[s] Chaos" ["rational chaos"] the notation "Chaos (2) oder [infinity]" (["chaos.sup.2] or [infinity]"). (2) The early romantic tendency to present an aesthetic concept of chaos in mathematical terms should not be mistaken as an anticipation of the mathematics of fractals. (3) Certainly neither chaos theory nor early romantic thought describe the beautiful by appealing to the traditional idea of "bel ordre," understanding it instead as the result of an oscillation between order and chaos. These are the terms in which Friedrich Cramer and Wolfgang Kaempfer conceive the beauty of fractal patterns, in "der offenen (irrationalen) Ordnung des Uberganges" ["the open (irrational) order of transition"]. (4) Indeed Novalis' mysterious "Chiffernschrift" ["cipher script"] of nature found in "Wolken ... im Schnee, in Krystallen und in Steinbildungen ... in den Feilspanen um den Magnet her, und sonderbaren Conjuncturen des Zufalls" ["clouds ... in the snow, in crystals, and in rock formations ... in the filings surrounding a magnet, and the unusual conjunctures of chance" H I: 201] might be understood as an intuitive anticipation of the self-similar structures described by Benoit Mandelbrot and already intimated by Leibniz. (5) For romanticism, chaos is a metaphor for the transition from an old to a new order, connected to the ideas of self-similarity, recursion, self-organization, and complexity; however, romantic thought also transcendentalizes this figure of transition through a poetological calculus with the infinite that relies on a self-generated indeterminacy.