The Cultural Phenomenology of Literature
To consider the whole cultural phenomenology of literature, one has to shift levels of perception. Think of it in terms of a Landsat satellite view of the Earth below; at that level from above all kinds of configurations are visible, but you don’t see the warring ideologies, though you do see the impact of human cultures on the biosphere. My generation, I guess because of the dramatic break with conventional history marked by the explosions of nuclear weapons, was drawn toward interdisciplinary macrohistory. But, as the ancient Taoists say, “reversal is the movement of Tao,” so the younger generation is more interested again in single disciplines and microhistorical studies that have more compatibility with “les petits récits” that Lyotard says is characteristic of postmodernism. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a postmodernist, and my 1968 humanities course here at York tried to look at history through the quantum steps of cultural evolution. My course looked like this:

I. Hominization, 2,000,000 BCE
II. Symbolization, 200,000 BCE
III. Agriculturalization, 8,000 BCE
IV. Civilization, 3500 BCE
V. Industrialization, 1500–1851 CE
VI. Planetization, 1945 CE

As you can see, the chronology presents us with a logarithmic progression in which the rate of change contracts from millions of years with the hominization of the primates to decades with the planetization of humanity. The transformation is now visible within the time scale of the individual life, so the students’ consciousness of historical unfoldment could affect the coming unfoldment of history, or so I thought at the time that I designed this course for York students.

Ralph Abraham, a chaos mathematician from U.C. Santa Cruz and a Lindisfarne Fellow, and I have been collaborating on various projects through Lindisfarne for over twelve years. In response to Ralph’s papers and book, Chaos, Gaia, and Eros, I developed a theory that there were five archetypal literary and mathematical mentalities in cultural history from the Ice Age to the present.⁹ These mentalities are based upon a configuration, in which objects are articulated in a constructed space, and a configuration of time, a narrative, in which identities are unfolded. The former is a world, the latter, a self.

The Arithmetic (Ancient)
The Geometric (Classical)
The Algebraic (Medieval)
The Galilean Dynamical (Modern)
The Complex Dynamical (Contemporary)