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

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СКАЧАТЬ from Jean-Francois Lyotard’s theory of postmodern knowledge (from whom he gets the paralogy in “paralogic rhetoric”) and Lyotard’s claim that the master narratives which provided legitimacy for universalist/objectivist scientific knowledge, such as nationalism and Marxism, are in irreversible decline. The consequence of this decline for Kent is a “grand aporia that lies at the heart of the master narrative of objectivity: the impossibility of representing an objective world through the subjectivity of language”—in other words, Lyotard is announcing the decline of the autonomous subject (71). For postmodernists in the humanities, the decline of grand legitimating narratives and the autonomous subject was generally something to be celebrated. Lyotard’s proclamation represented a kind of liberation from the homogenizing constraints of scientism, which was particularly attractive to compositionists who, like Connors, were suspicious of scientific prescription in the humanities. Although he would later make it clear that the decline of grand narratives was something worth affirming, Lyotard’s actual position in The Postmodern Condition—and this is something much less talked about— was not that science realized it could no longer account for the big metaphysical questions, but that it simply lost interest in them because of the divergent capitalistic interests that began providing most of the support for science’s growing price tag in the late-twentieth century.{4} The inability to pose metaphysical questions for systematic description was not, therefore, the defeat of scientism, but the failure of the humanities to develop such questions for science.

      The externalism of post-process theory, with its deep roots in neo-pragmatism, would certainly not forward a metaphysical phenomenon around which to build a systematic description that the writing act could be included in.

      As Byron Hawk argues, Kent is still mired in an epistemic conception of rhetoric and “a reified notion of language use” (Counter-History 222). Hawk asserts that paralogic rhetoric cannot work beyond the linear, if not recursive, relationship between the “reader, writer, language, and text,” in the communication triangle (221). Kent, therefore, reproduces the “subjectivity of language” that his anti-Cartesian stance is supposed to move beyond. There is indeed a growing consensus in composition studies (particularly among New Media specialists) that the increasing, post-genomic interconnection between technology and nature, as well as the rapid proliferation of rhetorical genres is exceeding our ability to account for the communicative act by language alone, even by such open-ended interpretive strategies such as Kent’s. As Jennifer Bay puts it: “Taking complexity theory into consideration means we can no longer envision rhetoric as merely verbal, visual, and oral. Rather, rhetoric is networked among all three components through the ultimate screening device that is the body” (30). Thus, it is clear that it just will not do to drop the metaphysics of the mind without asking new kinds of metaphysical questions. This is why I don’t think it is enough to characterize this new stance towards making knowledge as being “post-humanist,” the term with which Katherine Hayles, Mark C. Taylor and others identify. Indeed, the “post- humanist,” in this case appears to signify a negation of humanism, which is itself a very modernistic, dialectical stance. Rather than a negation of metaphysical boundaries (in this case, the parameters of the human), I prefer to think that we are in the midst of an epistemic break, in which new metaphysical boundaries are being drawn. In other words, we can think of ourselves as post-human, as long as we don’t go thinking we’re post-metaphysical.

      I would argue that the metaphysical object that is emerging in the sciences in general, and to which complexity- and ecology-based theories of writing are attaching themselves is not a negation of the human subject (“Man”) that gave rise to modern sciences, but an expansion of the reflexive subject. Instead of the human subject, we can perhaps call it the eco-subject, but it shares many of the key attributes that helped European science develop as a relatively coherent project (what Lyotard might include as a grand narrative of human progress) from the seventeenth century onwards. It must be noted first of all that the modern sciences of language, economics, and government, as well as the physical sciences, could not have developed as they did without a general understanding of the mind (as transcendent to the brain) as the core of the human subject. Michel Foucault argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century knowledges (collectively, the “Classical” episteme) were governed by the Cartesian idea that the human, with its ability to represent through language an already tabularized world, was exceptional in its relationship to nature. Furthermore, in “Classical thought, man does not occupy a place in nature through the intermediary of the regional, limited, specific ‘nature’ that is granted to him, as to all other beings, as a birthright” (310). At the end of the eighteenth century, however, Foucault claims that the relationship in the cogito between “I think” and “I am” became opaque, as the human became not just an outside observer of nature, but an object in nature to be observed as well (311 -12). The idea of the mind as being opaque to the self, but nonetheless constitutive of Man within nature, provided the moderns with what Foucault termed an “empirco-transcendental doublet,” which was a subject capable of making truth about the objective world only by rendering itself knowable as a historical object (318). This “finititude” of the mind served to productively limit what was and was not possible to know about the objective world, as well as how knowing was itself possible (i.e. epistemology).

      Like Man, the eco-subject is the locus of knowledge, and as it is opaque to itself, it is also an object of knowledge. In other words, like Man, the eco-subject is a fully self-reflexive being. However, in the case of the latter, knowledge production is no longer the exclusive property of the mind. Additionally, the mind itself is no longer an organic brain which embodies a self-conscious and autonomous being.{5} The brain instead is immanent to the environment around it, a self-organizing collection of neural networks wherein thoughts happen as a result of individual neurons perceiving “signals from other individuals, and a sufficient summed strength of these signals causes the individuals to act in certain ways that produce additional signals” (Mitchell 6). The conscious mind is no more a centralized unit than a colony of ants or a traffic system. But that is not to say that consciousness is no more than the sum of the brain’s neurons. Instead, consciousness is actually extended to stimuli the body experiences as it connects to its environment and other bodies. If consciousness is a series of complex networks that transcend the individual body, then thought is affect, rather than a dialectic between an immaterial unit and a material body. But although the eco-subject makes no distinction between the mind and objective reality, it is still a metaphysical unity because there remains an assumption that even phenomena which we have not apprehended operate on the same plane on which thought operates. It is, therefore, not so different from the Newtonian universe, which operated under the singular logic of God’s mind, which itself was only different from the human mind as a matter of degree rather than substance.

      Consequences for Composition Studies

      One of the consequences of the natural and social sciences galvanizing around the eco-subject, for composition studies, is that epistemology is being jettisoned in favor of ontology in the description of writing. Under this new knowledge regime, for instance, it is anathema to conduct research on topics such as the psychology of rhetorical invention, as process theorists had once done. Furthermore, the search for generalizable foundations of knowledge or for the conditions in which knowledge is created, which was at the heart of James Berlin’s socio- epistemic rhetoric, are not interesting for complexity theorists, because in self-emergent, adaptive networks, those foundations are in such flux so as to be unobservable in any synchronic way. A further consequence of jettisoning epistemology is that the critical categories of race, class and gender are subsumed under the onto-political category of ecology. Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser argue, for instance, that ecology is just as valuable a critical category as the others (567), whereas Hawk goes further to claim that “race, class, and gender are reductive inventional topoi … which may or may not connect to students’ local lived lives” (Counter-History 214). This is not a reactionary stance, but rather an expression of Deleuzean micro-politics, which is particularly well- suited to posthumanist complexity science. For Berlin, the power of race, class, and gender to produce social subjectivity is exerted though language, and so it is through critique of language that they are resisted. But from a micro-political perspective, resistance is exercised against totalization СКАЧАТЬ