I was amused to see Peter Dizikes' story The Meaning of the Butterfly in the June 8 Boston Globe. In it, he writes:
MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings.
Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.
Dizikes goes on to talk about how the idea of the butterfly effect has come to reflect mass culture's expectations of research - that it should be able to explain anything (he cites a line from a Robert Redford film as being evidence of this influence).
Yeah, whatever. I think Dizikes had some interesting things to say about the universe's ultimate randomness in his essay and our collective desire to compact such frightening complexity into Ashton Kutcher vehicles. But for the artists, there's something else the myth of the butterfly promises.
If we accept the premise that any tiny force can rock the world, we buy into a game in which we can work in relative obscurity in the hope that we'll be causing a cultural tsunami without even knowing it. To the butterfly effect, you can add the first few minutes of Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, in which the critic Rene Ricard talks about how a critic cannot miss the next big thing laboring in obscurity (this is Van Gogh's great lesson, not anything about what he saw or how he represented it...it's about how undervalued artists can be redeemed in death). Artists flap their wings in the obscure jungles of their studios hoping to trigger tidal waves on the shores of major cultural capitals.
And that would be great. If it didn't keep artists from being engaged in the world. The cultural butterfly effect decrees that an artist who actually tries to affect the climate is acting out of hubris, not in response to the necessities of his or her work. Art is too easily disentangled from politics, and attempts to reconnect art and daily life are sadly regarded as attempts to make your own weather.
Forget the butterfly. Forget looking for little things that can leverage large things. Maybe it's time to start using big causes to achieve big effects. Perhaps what that will lead to is great, big, messy failures. But at least there won't be any more self-marginalizing, intentionally 'minor' work to fret over.
