SOURCE: "Chaos as Orderly Disorder: Shifting Ground in Contemporary Literature and Science," in New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter, 1989, pp. 305-22.

In the following essay, Hayles explores contemporary chaos theory as it relates to postmodern literary analysis.

Imagine that you are in the bowels of a computer, and a sequence of ones and zeros floats by. Without knowing anything about the program, you have no way of knowing whether you have just seen a portion of the Manhattan telephone directory, the number 1,456, or "To be or not to be." At this level all information, whether Gödel's Theorem or Hamlet's soliloquy, exists in the same form. Carry the fantasy a step further and imagine that the computer itself, along with you, could also be specified by sequences of ones and zeros. We are now close to the world of Edward Fredkin, who asserts "the basic stuff that everything...