Things are lazy but want to be free

This piece joins the rich tra­di­tion of non-spe­cial­ized lit­er­a­ture abus­ing the con­cept of ​“entropy”. But it does so with the hope of pro­vid­ing a fair­er read­ing — just like all oth­ers have sure­ly tried.

We do not feel entropy as a phys­i­cal quan­ti­ty, unlike grav­i­ty (which makes our bones weigh), fric­tion (which makes our bones hurt) or ener­gy and force (which makes us move what remains of our bones). Still — or pre­cise­ly because of this — entropy as a metaphor seems to inspire more than all these oth­er con­cepts. Every­one knows that entropy is chaos and dis­or­der. Worse: every­one knows that dis­or­der only increas­es, that chaos only spreads. Every­one knows that it is the sec­ond law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics (although few peo­ple know what exact­ly ther­mo­dy­nam­ics might be). The fullest pic­ture is not this sim­ple, of course. If that were the case, how could we explain biol­o­gy, which takes pre­cise­ly dis­or­ga­nized mat­ter and recon­sti­tutes it into com­plex organizations?

A bet­ter account of entropy would then be: in how many dif­fer­ent ways can we recon­struct the same com­plex whole from its con­stituent parts? How does a prob­a­ble bal­ance emerge from chaos (whether the word is under­stood in its most col­lo­qui­al, philo­soph­i­cal or tech­ni­cal mean­ings)? This has been, in fact, the dri­ving ques­tion behind much of my recent pro­duc­tion, espe­cial­ly in the pieces that make use of alea. How to design sys­tems that absorb a cer­tain type of ener­gy — or what ener­gy is expressed in a cer­tain type of systems?

The sounds of this piece, orga­nized along the deic­tic axes of sev­er­al Greimas squares, are in per­ma­nent ten­sion — some­thing that the sub­ject does not usu­al­ly like, as the read­er’s expect­ed reac­tion to the pre­vi­ous sen­tence can attest to. This ten­sion releas­es more and more ener­gy, which frees itself from the struc­tures that con­tained it and is left inca­pable of work. The play’s dra­matur­gy then stages a con­stant recon­fig­u­ra­tion of musi­cal tex­ture and ges­ture — of the envi­ron­ment in which they exist — in order to res­cue life from the chaos of freedom.