Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ and social sciences talk are no longer so much about what the mind is or how to understand humanity through the mind, but on how, for example, information flows, social networks, and animal metabolic rates can occupy the same ontological field. Science, I argue, has traded in the metaphysics of the mind (as coherent unit) for the metaphysics of the eco-subject—a singular field where seemingly unrelated phenomena become indistinct in their processes of emergence and transformation. Under this new metaphysical goalpost, then, the writing act can be described as being a function of network behavior rather than an effect of generalizable mental processes.

      Briefly, the science of complex systems concerns itself with the way seemingly simple things or actions emerge from a multitude of actors, actions, and interactions. Complex systems emerge out of positive feedback loops, rather than linear, cause-and-effect relationships. In its origins, the study of complex systems is a composite of a diverse group of theories that date back over the past 130 years or so, including James Clerk Maxwell’s kinetic theory, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, Friedrich von Hayek’s microeconomics, and Claude Shannon’s information theory, to name only a few. Objects of complexity science commonly include what we would normally think of as networks or systems, such as animal metabolic systems, aviation hubs, fractal topography, internet search algorithms, morphological computation environments, and information economies. It also offers descriptions of metaphysical phenomena (in that they are beyond spatial and temporal apprehension), such as consciousness, cognition, intelligence, experience, as well as questions of origins and existence (natural theology, natural history, evolution, cosmology). Indeed, as I will argue, its existence as a science of complex systems, beyond the sum of its composite theoretical parts, can hardly be conceived of without the exigency of such metaphysical questions to call it into being.{1}

      The study of complex systems should not be conflated with quantum physics or chaos theory, because although the fields often share common theoretical origins and interact seamlessly, they differ in the range of things they attempt to explain. Chaos theory tends to refer to the way small actions or actors can have large or cascading effects inside of dynamic systems. For example, Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and effects a tornado in Texas. That kind of dynamic is indeed part of emergence in complex systems. But what those who study complexity are more interested in are how the many random actions of multiple actors regularly produce simple actions on a different scale (e.g., when a school of fish suddenly changes direction without a central command). This interest in the emergence of wholes also distinguishes (but does not separate) complexity science from the study of quantum mechanics. The latter is more fascinated by the way the physical world operates in qualitatively different ways at the subatomic level. Complexity science, too, is interested in such qualitative differences between the behaviors of a system and those of its component parts; however, complexity science extends its focus to comparisons of qualitative differences between emergent systems and their component parts. Complexity science therefore emphasizes a univocal view of reality, so that, for instance, as long as neural networks and social networks can be conceptualized as complex-adaptive systems, they are essentially the same substance—they just operate on different scales. Insofar as composition studies goes, rhetorical ecologies such as genre and activity systems may also emerge and behave as complex-adaptive systems. That point becomes particularly salient as the composing of texts, both inside and outside of the classroom, happens in a multimedia environment. Such digital and virtual forums act as accelerants in the proliferation of genres (by means of feedback loops), wherein relationships between writing subjects, media, audiences, institutions, and kairotic moments are constantly co-evolving.

      A return to science is nothing for compositionists to shy away from, but as our knowledge-making practices become part of the constellation of complexity sciences, we should also develop a means to identify and critique the ideological baggage that the discourse of complexity carries with it. This essay represents the groundwork for such a critique. I shall argue that complexity science need not be a post-political project that naturalizes status- quo neoliberal capitalism, as many of the important voices of complexity science have presented it as doing. To the contrary, I will argue that composition studies has an opportunity to play an important role in describing how knowledge is produced and argued in a world of complex systems while offering new ways of critically examining the social conditions which make complexity-based knowledge claims valid and exigent.

      Composition Studies and Science

      The first temptation in a critique of a complexity science of literacy and writing might be to argue that appropriating descriptions and methodologies of complexity in the natural sciences for the social sciences or for the humanities constitutes a misunderstanding or misuse of legitimate scientific knowledge, just as Robert Connors argued vis-à- vis cognitive science and process theory. His 1983 attack on the scientific claims of process theory (“Composition Studies and Science”) provides what I would argue is an instructive example of the failure of such an argument. In her 1982 CCC article, “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing,” Maxine Cousins Hairston claimed that process theory, with its empirical methodology and scientific discourse, signaled the emergence of composition as a normal science. Composition, she claimed, had experienced a genuine paradigm shift from the disparate practices of current-traditional rhetoric to a relatively coherent, consensus-validated set of epistemological assumptions in process theory. Connors’s response to Hairston not only disputes the idea that composition had entered any such paradigm, but further denies that science could ever offer the discipline anything except useful metaphors. Connors saw the enthusiasm in composition studies for the Kuhnian paradigm as being no more than part of a larger fad:

      Many have taken heart at Kuhn’s description of the arrival of the first natural-science paradigms, which transformed chaotic, inchoate fields into orderly, normal-science endeavors over night … . The field of composition studies is by no means the only disciplinary area to be attracted to the image of the sciences and inflamed by Kuhn’s explanation of them. (4)

      At a most basic level, says Connors, compositionists are enamored with the elegant image Kuhn presents of the ossification of scientific knowledge being an inherently social process. But most powerfully, Connors argues that a Kuhnian description of the field offered compositionists “terms that were suitably vague,” for “the implicit promise of universal scientific maturity” (17). In other words, a properly scientific description not only offered the still young discipline the assurance of a coherent definition of what constitutes legitimate knowledge in scholarship, but it also offered scientific credentials at a time when the humanities had all but lost its ability to offer privileged insight into the human condition.

      Connors is happy to entertain empirical research for theoretical context, or to provide descriptive metaphors, but he warns that empirical context and scientific metaphors can never make the leap to applied scientific knowledge. Connors believes that making institutional practice work for descriptive, scientific analogies is not only deeply unscientific but it also leads to—and here I have a lot of sympathy for his argument—an erosion of the spirit of free inquiry, which, for Connors, the humanities embody:

      The push toward science in our field at the present time can lead all too easily to scientism, placing methodology at the heart of rhetorical education and tilting composition studies toward the sort of mechanistic concerns with neutral “techniques” that we wish in our best moments to transcend… . We should not in our search for provable knowledge forget that the essential use of all knowledge is in aiding humanity in the search for consensually arrived at truth. (19)

      It is important to first of all parse out the different ways in which Connors argues composition studies cannot be scientific. He is quite correct in that teaching writing cannot be scientific any more than teaching physics or chemistry can be scientific. But his assertion that descriptive knowledge about the writing act cannot be scientific is problematic. First, his argument against positivistic descriptions of writing is actually tautological, since the argument itself rests upon a logical-positivist definition of scientific knowledge. Connors borrows directly from Kuhn’s famous positivist rival, Karl Popper, СКАЧАТЬ