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

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СКАЧАТЬ choices of a discipline like composition studies could never be understood as being scientific. Connors’s third “gate” criterion for the existence of a genuine science states, “Hypotheses in scientific fields should be falsifiable and should result in successful predictions, the success of which should be explicable” (6). One of Kuhn’s main objections to Popper, however, was precisely that the grounds on which a theory is falsifiable are historically determined, and furthermore, that the establishment of a normal science can be described by the potentially falsifying anomalies to its theories that it chooses to overlook (until, of course, a paradigmatic crisis finally occurs).

      Connors’s other problematic objection to an accord between composition and the sciences is that the very status of cognitive science—to which process theorists attached their research—as a science is doubtful. Connors once again locates the essence of a science in its experimental methodology rather than in the metaphysical phenomena (the mind, evolution, etc.) it seeks to systematically describe. Experimental method, then, is where he locates the shortcomings of psychology as a science. Connors claims that some of the observational methods psychology has borrowed from the physical sciences were borrowed before psychology “had any definite content”:

      The natural science experimental method presupposes objectivity, an ideal whose meaning in the human sciences is exceedingly problematical… . Psychologists have found much to their chagrin, however, that the transaction between two atoms of hydrogen is not necessarily an accurate analog for the transaction between two human beings. (11)

      But an analog between such micro- and macro -processes is precisely what methodologies of complexity attempt to do to studies of cognition and human interaction. Indeed, complexity science proposes nothing less than a fundamental reevaluation of our concept of analogy so that phenomena which would be essentially distinct in a mind-body epistemology occupy a single ontological plane, at least in terms of how they emerge. In his foundational text, Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter famously analogizes the relationship between individual neurons and cognition to individual ants and the ant colony. Each neuron, like each ant, reacts not to a central command, but to the activity of the neurons around it. What emerges from that recursive process then appears as if a response to a central command. The important insight of Hofstadter’s view of complexity is that the self-organization of neurons/ants is not a single chain of responses from an external stimulus but rather a continual up-scaling of multiple chains of responses, a general process applying to all self- emergent phenomena. What’s more, the same models of hierarchical clustering that describe self-organization at the cellular level are being directly analogized to systematically describe what we would more readily recognize as network phenomena, such as social organization and market behavior (Barabási 238). Given that it does call upon us to reconceive of analogy in ontological terms (in which case, isomorphism is more appropriate than analogy), it is not hard to see how externalist or post-process theories of literacy and rhetoric could be not just in productive conversation with complexity, but actually incorporated into the general matrix of a complexity science.

      The Eternal Return of Complexity

      Outspoken critic of sociological complexity science, Steve Fuller, dismisses the discourse of complexity in the social sciences as “metaphorical gas,” unfavorably comparing it to nineteenth-century positivism. Indeed, the chief difference between the two movements, for Fuller, is that positivism was originally an anti-jargonist movement that was meant to provide some measure of public accountability for claims made in the social sciences, whereas complexity science, he claims, is actually a turn inwards, towards jargon. Moreover, Fuller argues that the social sciences’s embrace of complexity theory has yielded no epistemic gains. Citing Émile Durkheim’s theory of population and the division of labor, among others, as an example of what could be recast as in the light the popular complexity concept, tipping point, Fuller concludes, “these metaphorical extrapolations [from complexity science] that we make in social science are ones we already have.” The question, then, is why, if complexity theory does not tell social scientists much they do not already know, has it been so enthusiastically adopted in the first place ? Fuller gives two explanations, with the first being a simple question of funding. Natural sciences are prestige knowledges, both in terms of state and of corporate funding. And among the natural sciences, genomics and cybernetics—from which a large section of complexity knowledge emerges—tend to generate the most excitement, both for the general public, and for their potential for several industries to generate new wealth. It is only natural that the social sciences would want to attach themselves to those revenue sources. Furthermore, Fuller argues that there is an “elective affinity” between postmodern politics and the rhetoric of complexity. {2} Social scientists have, by and large, abandoned the grand narratives of the nation-state and class struggle to explain social phenomena, instead embracing the permanence of global capitalism. And complexity science appears in most cases to affirm the economic wisdom of Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman.

      Fuller is absolutely correct in both of his explanations for the enthusiasm for complexity science in the social sciences, and the remainder of this paper will focus upon that elective affinity between neoliberal ideology and the appropriation of complexity in writing and literacy studies. But he is wrong to say that complexity science is just positivism in a sleek, new package. I argue complexity science cannot be the same thing as positivism, first of all because positivism, as it were, has no positive content to it as complexity science does. Positivism is a stance towards methods of knowledge making rather than a particular theory of natural processes. Furthermore, as I have indicated with regards to Connors’s claims about cognitive science, positivist methods in the social sciences attempt to understand and predict individual and collective behaviors by building systematic descriptions of the mind, which, as a metaphysical object, is irreducible to the sum of its parts.{3} I argue that complexity science must be understood and critiqued through its own metaphysical foundations, and not by the metaphysics of the mind. The first challenge of critiquing complexity science in the social sciences is, therefore, not to try to prove how unoriginal it is but to identify precisely where and how it becomes new knowledge.

      We could, for example, take a key concept for complexity compositionists, such as the screen (Bay; Hawk, “Toward”; Taylor, Moment; Hayles) and claim that it is merely a repackaging of Kenneth Burke’s well-known concept of terministic screens. Consider one of the attributes of the terministic screen Burke gives against Mark C. Taylor’s definition of the screen:

      Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality … . Here the kind of deflection I have in mind concerns simply the fact that any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others. (Burke 45)

      A screen, then, is more like a permeable membrane than an impenetrable wall; it does not simply divide but also joins by simultaneously keeping out and letting through. As such, a screen is something like a mesh or net forming the site of passage through which elusive differences slip and slide by crossing and criss-crossing. (Taylor, Moment 199-200)

      From the outset, these two identifications of the screen match up pretty well. They both claim that any selection or ingress of reality/information is simultaneously a deflection into multiple contextual channels or passages. The difference lies in the context into which each of those identifications is articulated. For Burke, the screen extends— and extends from—what he already gives as his description of the human: “Man is a symbol-using animal” (3).

      Against any previous definitions of the human as an inventor or communicator, he provides the example of a wren, who exhibits “genius” by using a bit of food as a way of baiting a reluctant chick out of its nest. Although other birds might be able to imitate the behavior, the wren would not be able to abstract the invention into a symbol in order to set off a chain of communication across the wren world. Communication, for Burke, both makes humans one with, and distinct from animals: “When a bit of talking takes place, just what is doing the talking? Just where are the words coming СКАЧАТЬ