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beer_good_foamyFirst of all, I just discovered that I won some stuff at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wicked_awards! Check out all the winners here - I'm proud to be in such illustrous company.
Also... I hesitate to call this meta since I'm not exactly sure if it's fully thought through, but what the hell. So I'm watching Buffy s6 and I'm reading N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (which is interesting, especially if you're into cyborgs and Neal Stephenson and perception of reality and the nature of humanity as encoded information and so forth, but very heavy on theory). Anyway, I stumble onto this section on entropy which got me thinking.
Things Fall Apart. The Centre Cannot Hold. Should It?
Season 6 is the season with no Big Bad, no huge arc, no outside disturbance, all conflicts turned inwards. Everything comes from inside, dug up (quite literally in Buffy's case) from within themselves, all the old unaddressed conflicts unearthed to lash out at each other. (They even spend an entire episode locked in the same house with two complete strangers - failed attempts at making friends outside their warforged group - as if to hammer the point home.) Culminating in "Entropy", where everything gets ripped apart, every spanner in sight is thrown into the works, to lead to complete heat death in the next episode.
The title of "Entropy", of course, might remind you of the layman's version of the (not as simple as it sounds) second law of thermodynamics; within a closed system, entropy increases. Or as Tara defines it after they've spent a whole season with no new challenges, no new energy, no new information from outside their own closed circle:
TARA: Things fall apart. They fall apart so hard. You can't ever put them back the way they were.
Now this is, of course, normally seen as something bad. And obviously, "Entropy" and "Seeing Red" aren't exactly happy episodes. Order deteriorates into chaos, strong binds are ripped apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, etc. That thing we liked changes.
Hayles notes this common concept of entropy. And then she flips it, saying: Entropy is (can be) GOOD - or at least essential. Earlier, she's dismissed the notion that perfect communication of information only happens when the exact same information is received as was sent, when there's no noise to disturb the signal – that that's a misunderstanding of communication, since it would mean no new information ever turns up. With no changes (mutations) in the existing message, there's no evolution, whether biological or philosophical. Information, by definition, must be unique; otherwise, it's just noise. So if the world can be organized as information, then it follows that the more things stay the same, the less distinct one thing is from another, the stricter we organise everything into clearly defined boxes - the less information there is, since there are a limited and shrinking number of possible patterns and combinations.
...identifying entropy with information can be seen as a crucial crossing point, for this allowed entropy to be reconceptualized as the thermodynamic motor driving systems to self-organization rather than as the heat engine driving the world to universal heat death. (…) As a result, chaos went from being associated with dissipation in the Victorian sense of dissolute living and reckless waste to being associated with dissipation in a newly positive sense of increasing complexity and new life.
The end of season 6 is horrific and heartbreaking and things will never be the same again after that. Things fall apart into chaos. But it's also the season that starts with Buffy descending into hell and ends with her climbing out of her grave into a brightly lit multi-coloured garden, and gives way to a season that changes the entire basis of the show and ultimately turns it into something completely different, turning from The Slayer to Slayers. From entropy springs not annihilation, but increased complexity and new life. (There's a reason Destructionis was one of the Endless.)
In short, the much-maligned Beljoxa's Eye was right; the noise that got introduced into the signal when Buffy was resurrected ended up garbling the message. The signal that had passed unchanged for millennia mutated. One year later, there are thousands of Slayers, and millions of fans, all with their own version of the message.
JOSS: Write fanfic.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I found it interesting. Here's a song for ya.
The sun don't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning 'round.
wicked_awards! Check out all the winners here - I'm proud to be in such illustrous company.Also... I hesitate to call this meta since I'm not exactly sure if it's fully thought through, but what the hell. So I'm watching Buffy s6 and I'm reading N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman (which is interesting, especially if you're into cyborgs and Neal Stephenson and perception of reality and the nature of humanity as encoded information and so forth, but very heavy on theory). Anyway, I stumble onto this section on entropy which got me thinking.
Things Fall Apart. The Centre Cannot Hold. Should It?
Season 6 is the season with no Big Bad, no huge arc, no outside disturbance, all conflicts turned inwards. Everything comes from inside, dug up (quite literally in Buffy's case) from within themselves, all the old unaddressed conflicts unearthed to lash out at each other. (They even spend an entire episode locked in the same house with two complete strangers - failed attempts at making friends outside their warforged group - as if to hammer the point home.) Culminating in "Entropy", where everything gets ripped apart, every spanner in sight is thrown into the works, to lead to complete heat death in the next episode.
The title of "Entropy", of course, might remind you of the layman's version of the (not as simple as it sounds) second law of thermodynamics; within a closed system, entropy increases. Or as Tara defines it after they've spent a whole season with no new challenges, no new energy, no new information from outside their own closed circle:
TARA: Things fall apart. They fall apart so hard. You can't ever put them back the way they were.
Now this is, of course, normally seen as something bad. And obviously, "Entropy" and "Seeing Red" aren't exactly happy episodes. Order deteriorates into chaos, strong binds are ripped apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, etc. That thing we liked changes.
Hayles notes this common concept of entropy. And then she flips it, saying: Entropy is (can be) GOOD - or at least essential. Earlier, she's dismissed the notion that perfect communication of information only happens when the exact same information is received as was sent, when there's no noise to disturb the signal – that that's a misunderstanding of communication, since it would mean no new information ever turns up. With no changes (mutations) in the existing message, there's no evolution, whether biological or philosophical. Information, by definition, must be unique; otherwise, it's just noise. So if the world can be organized as information, then it follows that the more things stay the same, the less distinct one thing is from another, the stricter we organise everything into clearly defined boxes - the less information there is, since there are a limited and shrinking number of possible patterns and combinations.
...identifying entropy with information can be seen as a crucial crossing point, for this allowed entropy to be reconceptualized as the thermodynamic motor driving systems to self-organization rather than as the heat engine driving the world to universal heat death. (…) As a result, chaos went from being associated with dissipation in the Victorian sense of dissolute living and reckless waste to being associated with dissipation in a newly positive sense of increasing complexity and new life.
The end of season 6 is horrific and heartbreaking and things will never be the same again after that. Things fall apart into chaos. But it's also the season that starts with Buffy descending into hell and ends with her climbing out of her grave into a brightly lit multi-coloured garden, and gives way to a season that changes the entire basis of the show and ultimately turns it into something completely different, turning from The Slayer to Slayers. From entropy springs not annihilation, but increased complexity and new life. (There's a reason Destruction
In short, the much-maligned Beljoxa's Eye was right; the noise that got introduced into the signal when Buffy was resurrected ended up garbling the message. The signal that had passed unchanged for millennia mutated. One year later, there are thousands of Slayers, and millions of fans, all with their own version of the message.
JOSS: Write fanfic.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I found it interesting. Here's a song for ya.
The sun don't go down, it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning 'round.
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no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 12:16 am (UTC)This is right after season five, in which Glory is a bit of a perpetual motion machine, feeding her way through humans. Dawn is added to the show and she contains a seemingly infinite amount of energy (and story potential), but it gets used up on that tower. (Adam was a 100% closed system, relying on nuclear decay to keep him running. Until he started upgrading.)
And you know, Giles gets out in Tabula Rasa--he shouldn't, maybe, but he does--Tara leaves but comes back, and after seeing where Entropy gets him Spike leaves town. Because Giles got out he can add a new element to the system at the season's end. He comes in with something new, imbues Willow with new magic, deeper power and connection. And Spike asks for something that he has never had. Buffy's crawling out of the grave into spring (spring brings new flowers, new life), Spike's soul and Willow's power are the new-element trifecta that leads to the slayer spell and the end of the Hellmouth.
I just love the image of Willow wrecking the Magic Box at the season's end, at any rate. And I love that the finale in three acts is basically just Willow tearing at and apart the tiny, tiny world they've built together. But it's like that house falling down in Smashed. Left to itself, it has to fall down. And you need that before you can build something else. And season seven begins with the high school being rebuilt.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 01:08 am (UTC)Fascinating. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-01 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 05:42 am (UTC)I may have to quote you on that, it's absolutely perfect.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:11 am (UTC)The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(...)
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:17 am (UTC)One of those is surely the reason.
Heh. I have this image of Angel now as his own closed system, he's so prone to fall into himself and just remain there. And then he starts to reach out, only then he falls into himself and he drags the people closest to him into his drama. Angel as the tidal wave. Or quicksand.
Where as Buffy is the eye of the storm.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:05 am (UTC)And also (in-universe) already established characters. We know Jonathan. We've met Warren. We haven't met Andrew, but he's (repeatedly) introduced as the brother of someone we have met. They're outsiders, but they're not from the outside.
Dawn's vampire boyfriend
Not that the concept of vampire boyfriends is all that new to the story.
a second-rate druggy-magic dealer
...who's even played by an actor who's been on the show before. (OK, that's probably not intentional, but still.)
in which Glory is a bit of a perpetual motion machine, feeding her way through humans
Interesting choice of words; Glory is absolute opposite of any villain in s6, absolutely, but a true perpetuum mobile is one that doesn't need energy from outside - ie one that keeps operating within a closed system in defiance of entropy. Which is why it's seemingly impossible. Glory needs a constant feed of external energy (in the form of brains/sanity - information!) to survive. Without it, she descends into chaos. Likewise, cut off all the outside lines and s6 descends... not into chaos at first, but into dysfunctional stagnation that needs chaos. Buffy always worked within the confines of Sunnydale, but in season 6 it turns into a pressure cooker with the lid bolted on. When Buffy meets Angel it happens offscreen, and despite Giles' talk of only being a phonecall away, once he's gone for the second time nobody tries to contact him. The first villains of the season - the noseless bikers - come from out of town, and when they kick them out it's not in triumph; after that, they're left with what they've got, and the system they've put in place to fight outside threats starts grinding gears and eating itself.
Which means that the higher the entropy, the more possible orientations. It's right in the definition that more entropy means more "possibilities," even as there's less order.
Exactly. Hayles uses a very good analogy to explain why information is only information if it's distinct - which it isn't if it's already perfectly ordered and predefined. She teaches, among other things, literature. If she gives her students a reading list consisting of one single book - Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - then (assuming the students read, understand, and remember that list) she can't add any more information by telling them later on that they're supposed to read Gravity's Rainbow. They already know that; she's just making noise. But if the list contains both Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland, and she later orders half the class to read one book and the other half the other, this is brand new information since it takes a state of many possibilities and narrows it down. (Of course, in picking Pynchon she's already thrown them into complete chaos with endless possibilities of interpretation, but that's another story.)
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 03:26 pm (UTC)Poor Dawn, always in Buffy's shadow.
...who's even played by an actor who's been on the show before. (OK, that's probably not intentional, but still.
Yeah--and same with the Halfrek/Cecily thing.
Interesting choice of words; Glory is absolute opposite of any villain in s6, absolutely, but a true perpetuum mobile is one that doesn't need energy from outside - ie one that keeps operating within a closed system in defiance of entropy. Which is why it's seemingly impossible. Glory needs a constant feed of external energy (in the form of brains/sanity - information!) to survive. Without it, she descends into chaos.
Yes, I misspoke. I just wanted to use the phrase perpetual motion machine...and then I realized that it was wrong but didn't want to lose the phrase. Whoops.
Likewise, cut off all the outside lines and s6 descends... not into chaos at first, but into dysfunctional stagnation that needs chaos. Buffy always worked within the confines of Sunnydale, but in season 6 it turns into a pressure cooker with the lid bolted on. When Buffy meets Angel it happens offscreen, and despite Giles' talk of only being a phonecall away, once he's gone for the second time nobody tries to contact him.
Yep. There was a line in the Hell's Bells shooting script where Willow says Giles wasn't coming to the wedding because he was off fighting demons (or daemons). I don't know if it was cut for time, or to keep from mentioning Giles at all until the end of the season. But I think I'm glad they cut it; even if Giles would have come to the wedding (which, at this point...I doubt) the gang is pretty convinced he's out of the picture. And, well, he needs to be; he can't recharge his batteries and recreate order for himself in Sunnydale, and that's the key reason for his departure more than Buffy. He comes back shiny and new.
The first villains of the season - the noseless bikers - come from out of town, and when they kick them out it's not in triumph; after that, they're left with what they've got, and the system they've put in place to fight outside threats starts grinding gears and eating itself.
Yes exactly. And it goes down to everything. Xander proposed to Anya in part because it was the end of the world (despite his claims otherwise); their relationship can survive external demons but not itself.
Even new sources of energy are really just old ones. Anya gets her demon powers back.
And Jonathan and Andrew opt to get the hell out of Sunnydale at the end to recharge their batteries.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 12:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 12:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 08:59 am (UTC)Astrophysics for IdiotsWonders of the Universe series has already managed to convince me that entropy isn't so bad, and this argument fits right in with what he said.Your argument also lends weight to those of us who think the underlying themes of season 7 are wonderful, even if the execution is occasionally botched.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 09:24 am (UTC)That one sounds like something I should watch. I love BBC's science series.
the underlying themes of season 7 are wonderful, even if the execution is occasionally botched
Absolutely. It really is a perfect end to the series, blowing up the basic metaphor in a way that doesn't ruin the idea but rather sets it free by splitting it into a thousand possible futures. Entropy yay!
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 10:24 am (UTC):)
That one sounds like something I should watch. I love BBC's science series.
It was good, I thought, though there have been accusations of 'dumbing down', mainly because Prof Cox is rather pretty, and gets to stand around in lots of very impressive locations (like the Skeleton Coast and Patagonia) while talking.
Prof Jim al-Khalili's 2-parter, Everything and Nothing was also very good. It tied quantum theory to astrophysics (at any rate, his conclusion was that it was stuff doing what it does at the quantum level that triggered the big bang...er, I think). Very interesting, but sadly, as happens to me with most things scientific (much to my chagrin), I've forgotten the details already.
So annoying when you can't retain the facts of things that really, really interest you.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-31 11:25 am (UTC)Well, that's inevitable when you try to explain quantum physics to people who vaguely remember learning about the existence of atoms in school, isn't it? As long as the dumbing down doesn't result in incorrect information, I don't really mind.
Prof Jim al-Khalili's 2-parter, Everything and Nothing was also very good.
Oh yeah, I saw his series Atom a few years ago. Liked it a lot.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-17 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-18 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-20 08:10 pm (UTC)In regards to which, I really enjoyed your take on Beer Bad!
no subject
Date: 2012-08-21 01:46 pm (UTC)I'm actually writing about something like that right now, hope to have it up sometime this week.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-22 08:32 pm (UTC)I have my own thoughts about the link between those two, in terms of the First Slayer's message "Love, give, forgive...Death is your gift" and how that plays out in S7, that I want to write up but can't seem to get myself organized. (bad excuse)