CONCEPT
Quantum Poetics
McGann's late-career framework for understanding texts as recursive, indeterminate, n-dimensional fields analogous in complexity to quantum mechanical systems — and his 2022 intervention on AI.
Quantum poetics is McGann's theoretical vocabulary for describing the complexity of human textual communication. Developed across work in the 2000s and articulated in The Poetics of Sensibility and subsequent writings, the framework treats texts not as closed systems with stable meanings but as recursive, indeterminate fields whose interpretive possibilities resist enumeration. The 'quantum' metaphor draws on the mathematical richness of quantum mechanical systems — their n-dimensional state spaces, their superpositions, their observer-dependent collapse — as an analogy for the interpretive complexity of human texts. The framework informed McGann's 2022 statement on AI, in which he argued that AI computational networks, however sophisticated, are minimal compared to the distributed computational network of embodied human communication.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from McGann's engagement with digital humanities and his growing concern that computational models of textuality were inadequate to the phenomena they claimed to address. Machine processing of text, he argued, captures certain dimensions — lexical frequency, syntactic pattern, semantic clustering — while missing others that are