Perhaps you've intuited by now that the study of literary systems is concerned with examining and discussing the forms of abstraction that riddle literary texts. From the Latin for "to draw away," abstractions, be they metaphorical, functional, or literal, lie at the heart of textual production. In his
A Hacker's Manifesto, Mckenzie Wark positions "abstraction" as the new analogue to Marx's
"labor", by providing an update to the
Communist Manifesto. He illustrates a theory of the production of intellectual property through hackers creating abstractions, which the vectorialist class (read capitalist) wants to control and use for profitable ends. The hackers, on the other hand, want abstractions to be free. For Wark, successful abstraction is: "To produce the plane on which different things come into relation." A maddeningly vague definition.
He charts a course for power and property, via three large paradigm shifts. Power starts in the hands of the pastoralists (the landowners), shifts to the capitalists (the factory owners), and now finds itself in the hands of the vectorialist class (the media owners). He names them vectorialist because
they control the vectors along which information is distributed. It's quite a persuasive update to classic communist thought for the 21st century. Vectorialists break the capitalist monopoly on the production of goods, and subordinate them to the production of information. As Wark writes: "Capital as property frees land from its spatial fixity. Information as property frees capital from its fixity in a particular object." As the creators of the abstractions which are the capital of the information economy, anyone engaged in textual production (writers, speechmakers, programmers) would do well to heed Wark's manifesto.
Literary forms are abstractions at the level of the text. As authors begin to use a language they start to develop common turns of phrase, and patterns of structure. These patterns, if successful, spread to others and eventually become cast into idiom, into literary forms. These forms serve as the foundation for a literary system. The authors use the system for a while, write literature in it, discover that they are making patterns, and then extend the system to include those patterns as foundational, idiomatic forms. Wash, rinse, repeat. As Douglas Hofstadter writes, in
Gödel, Escher, Bach:
""Every higher-level statement is in principle programmable at the lower
levels, but it would require supreme effort and discipline. The full
potential of the computer already exists in hardware (the machine
language). It is that the new concepts in a high-level language suggest
directions and perspectives by their very nature."
You can look at the four generations of programming languages. Machine code patterns get formalized into Assembly, and patterns from Assembly get formalized into C, and then C idioms and structures become embodied in a high-level language, like Ruby. All Ruby code is possible in assembly language, through the rigid and difficult use of patterns, accomplishing an identical meaning through a vastly more detailed and wordy message. Successful language design is the codification of these patterns into idiom.
These levels of abstraction have worked to help mathematics progress as well. Algebra is abstracted arithmetic, where you can exchange any fixed number for any member of that number's class. (Where x is a positive number, for example.) The usual chain of mathematical abstraction goes: Arithmetic ... Algebra of Magnitudes ... Classic Logic ... Deductive Logic ... Algebra of Propositions ... Algebra of Sets ... Symbolic Logic.
The hierarchy of the physical scientists is set up in a similar manner. Everything that you can say about Cell Biology is theoretically possible to model at the level of Atomic Physics. It's simply that the scale would be astronomically huge, and the amount of calculation overwhelming.
