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

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СКАЧАТЬ terministic screen provides Burke with a description for how his human-defining concept of “symbolicity” works in practice. Burke’s screen is, therefore, thrown into and is reproducing his humanist ideology, but it also adds new knowledge about the human, which Burke’s humanist ideology then comes around to legitimate. Similarly, Taylor’s definition of the screen is thrown into a posthumanist ideological scheme: “In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening” (200). Taylor’s is an ontological notion of the screen in which humans are information interfaces among other interfaces, and in fact, are composed of self-similar, micro- interfaces. For Taylor, screens are not, as Burke would have it, modes by which we interact with reality; screens are reality. Drawing upon Claude Shannon’s information theory, Taylor argues that being always exists at the apertural screen of noise and information (110 -11). Again, this concept of the screen is both reproducing and being legitimated by a posthumanist ideology, but it is also helping composition scholars to think of non-epistemic modes of rhetoric, particularly in network environments.

      Even within arguments for an ontological description of rhetoric and communication, the same line of discontinuity should be drawn. For instance, in his 1978 article, “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process,” Frank D’Angelo talks a lot about evolution and complexity. Specifically, he writes, “the composing process is analogous to universal evolutionary processes, in which an original, amorphous, undifferentiated whole gradually evolves into a more complex, differentiated whole” (143). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that D’Angelo is working with evolution as a metaphor for consciousness. The ontological unity D’Angelo is arguing for exists between individual consciousness and the composing process. The kind of evolution D’Angelo conceives of is “teleological” (141). Leaving behind for a moment the fact that Darwinian natural selection is resolutely anti- teleological, D’Angelo’s argument does not (actually, cannot) consider the mind itself as an assemblage, nor could it consider the monism of the mind and external stimuli. Complexity, instead, is here a product of the mind, which itself works through a kind of self-recognition process reminiscent of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic:

      In the composing process, it seems that both conscious and subconscious processes take part. The subconscious mind provides the design, and the conscious mind provides its development… . . Since the subconscious part of the mind is not always accessible for invention, the writer must aid the subconscious as much as possible by a deliberate and conscious effort, by defining the problem, by filling in the details, by carefully working out the design—in brief, by preparing the mind so that the subconscious can take over. (142 -43).

      For a complexity theorist, such as Douglas Hofstadter, the very idea of self-recognition is anathema. It is anathema not only because empirical observation does not support the existence of separate realms of the conscious and subconscious, but because the metaphysical foundations from which complexity science attempts to systematically describe a metaphysical problem like consciousness are univocal, as opposed to the equivocalism of the subconscious-conscious dialectic. Again, when comparing complexity theory to prior theories

      that may have used similar metaphors, it is important to resist the temptation to see complexity science as either a resurrection of an old idea for fashionable purposes or as being part of a progressive continuity of knowledge.

      The danger here is that while a critic like Fuller might dismiss the appropriation of complexity science as recycled or repackaged knowledge, complexity science advocates can use that same claim for indistinction in order to advance a messianic notion of complexity, which reifies the very logic of the neoliberal economics Fuller denounces. Taylor, whose The Moment of Complexity inspired a special 2004 issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition, argues that the emergence of network culture absolutely closes the door on any form of cultural analysis that does not begin with self-organization as a precept. Like Francis Fukuyama (The End of History), Taylor places an all -encompassing historical break in 1989, when both the Berlin Wall fell and when the Santa Fe Institute hosted its conference on “Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information,” which would become a major entry point for complexity science in the social sciences (Moment 99). At this point, “[t]he social and economic problems Marx and Engles [sic] detected and the cures they prescribed reflect an industrial society and its corresponding form of capitalism, which are passing away in the moment of complexity” (100). Finally, Taylor proclaims that “[o]ther than in certain corners of the university where the news of 1989 does not seem to have arrived, Marx has become irrelevant” (100). As a matter of fact, Taylor is more of a Fukuyaman than Fukuyama in his pronouncement. For Fukuyama, liberal democracy merely signaled the end to the ideological struggles that began with the French and American revolutions (4-5). But Taylor sees the emergence of network culture as constituting a unification of historically contingent cultural and economic practices with the timelessness of natural processes:

      One of the arguments in The Moment of Complexity is that physical, biological, social and cultural systems are bound in intricate loops of codependence and coevolution. This means that the cultural influences the natural as much as the natural influences the cultural… . We are coming to understand that physical, biological, economic, and political processes are to a large extent information processes. (“An Interview” 809)

      Taylor is here referring to Shannon’s information theory, as well as to subsequent work on information in complex adaptive systems, which cast biological processes (at both the levels of micro-mutation and of macro -speciation) in terms of the random, recursive transformation of information and noise (Moment 136-37). The random, recursive transformation of information and noise is, in turn, governed by the thermodynamic process of entropy. Thus, mutations in an individual organism are random noise until they are realized as information when they connect with their ecological networks, the possibilities of which are conditioned by macro -species contacts. (This process constitutes a positive feedback loop, which, originally an information trope, has become one of the most important terms in complexity science.) Evolution is here not a matter of a successful individual organism filling a niche and so distinguishing itself from its species. Evolution in a feedback loop model is a convergent rather than a divergent process; it depends upon both network formation and competition, or a “marriage of self-organization and selection” (Moment 190). This noise/information loop model not only eschews the Darwinian arboreal model of evolution, but in terms of its implications for economic and cultural phenomena, it also supersedes the simple analogy between natural selection and Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market. Taylor argues that the natural selection/invisible hand analogy was based upon a “doctrine of divine providence rewritten as economic theory” (180). However, it is clear that for Taylor the noise/information model demonstrates that thermodynamic processes, biological evolution, and market behavior are ontologically indistinct. This discovery that information threads through everything in nature not only makes the global information economy inevitable, but such an advanced state of capitalism simultaneously brings us to “the moment of complexity,” giving us a special insight into the nature of reality that we could not have had before. In other words, “Like it or not, global capital is the reality with which we have to deal and simply bemoaning that fact or devising futile strategies of resistance will accomplish nothing” (“An Interview” 811).

      The Mind and the Eco-Subject

      The messianic arrival of network culture and complexity knowledge, for Taylor, calls upon us to conceive of expanded notions not only of information, but also of subjectivity and writing (“An Interview” 809). The sense that literacy and mediated communication can no longer be accounted for in terms of grammatical structures and universal processes has been growing for decades, as both a complement to process theory and as an argument against it. Post -process theory is probably the most notable example of the rejection of a coherent, internal account of literacy and writing. Thomas Kent, with whom post-process is most closely associated, applies to the writing act Donald Davidson’s notion of “externalism,” which functions “in opposition to internalist Cartesian conceptions of the world” (103). Clearly, this represents a departure from the metaphysics of the mind, of which earlier cognitive scientists tried to construct СКАЧАТЬ