Entropy and Constructed Worlds: Paul Kammerer’s “Law of the Series”

Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer’s controversial 1919 work Das Gesetz der Serie argues for a privileged ontological and epistemological status of anomalies, claiming that so-called “coincidences” reflect an underlying universal principle of the series that always reflects ordered lawfulness, regularity, and cohesion. This talk argues that Kammerer’s “series” may function better in constructed or literary worlds, which are premised on the idea that every anomaly and ambiguity can be recuperated as meaningful or symbolic. Reinterpreted as a hermeneutic-philological model, Kammerer’s law may thus prove useful as a sourcebook for “ways of worldmaking” (N. Goodman) – i.e., for designing and understanding rule-based constructed worlds.