SOURCE: "The Authorization of Form: Ruskin and the Science of Chaos," in Chaos and Order. Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 149-66.

In the following essay, Emerson examines how order and chaos function in Ruskin's theories of artistic composition and in his autobiographical writings.

Ruskin's relentless discriminations between order and disorder seem to leave no intervening space for what is now named the science of chaos. Yet he would not have been the least bit surprised to learn that in 1984 one of the world's leading physicists would be reported to

have begun going to museums, to look at how artists handle complicated subjects, especially subjects with interesting texture, like Turner's water, painted with small swirls atop large swirls, and then even smaller swirls atop those. "It's abundantly obvious that one doesn't know the world around us in...