Abstract
The cyberneticist Gregory Bateson once defined information as “any difference that makes a difference,” thereby expressing at once both the idea that all information is the result of difference within signal codes and the notion that the manner in which these differences are manipulated will create real world effects. Six Degrees of Separation, John Guares celebrated 1990 drama (New York Drama Critics Circle Award, London Olivier Award for Best Play), was received by the mainstream press as a play “about” the transmission of information in the project of human interactions, about “the human need to communicate.”1
Name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say/a prayer for him.
Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna”
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Notes
Frank Rich, “A Guidebook to the Soul of a City in Confusion,” New York Times (July 1, 1990), 11:1:1. See also Rich’s second review, “‘Six Degrees’ Reopens, Larger but Still Intimate,” New York Times (November 9, 1990), C5:l, as well as Linda Winer, “‘Six Degrees’ Moves Up,” New York Newsday (November 9, 1990), 11:1 and David Patrick Stearns, “Confronting Chaos in Dazzling ‘Degrees,’” USA Today (June 19, 1990).
For an overview of information theory as it might pertain to literary and cultural analysis, see especially William R. Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (Cornell University Press, 1988) and the accompanying bibliography.
See Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. L. Schehr (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982).
John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 3.
See Michel Serres, Hermes: literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. and trans. Josué Harari and David Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). N. Katherine Hayles provides a useful overview of this aspect of Serres’s thought in Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Science and literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 175–208. See also Paulson, The Noise of Culture, 30–52.
Prigogine won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his theory of dissipative structures, and has since written several popular books expanding his findings into the philosophical and cultural realms. His theories are hotly contested by some scientists, who warn that his scientific conclusions are conjectural and his nonsci-entific applications of the theories purely speculative. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance: Métamorphose de la science (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Revised and translated as Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue With Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also Hayles, Chaos Bound, Alexander Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); and Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems (New York: Routledge, 1998).
See the work of Henri Atlan, especially “Disorder, Complexity and Meaning” in P. Livingston, ed., Disorder and Order. Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium, September 14–18, 1981. Stanford Literature Series, 1 (Stanford: Anima Libri, 1984), 109–128.
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© 2007 William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
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Vanden Heuvel, M. (2007). From Paradise to Parasite: Information Theory, Noise, and Disequilibrium in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. In: Demastes, W.W., Fischer, I.S. (eds) Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100787_15
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