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

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СКАЧАТЬ means of linking up desires between individuals, which, in turn, is experienced in terms of affect instead of as the result of a dialectic. In the classroom, this means that students “would need to, and be encouraged to, work out their own constellations that would mix our curriculum with their context, our theories and methods with their own political interests—should they have them” (Hawk, Counter- History 219). Thus in the place of politics and critique, the sciences of ecology and complexity gives us the ethics of linking and locality.

      To the extent that a socio-epistemic understanding of writing is merely politically prescriptive without actually describing anything new about the embodied or localized conditions of knowledge production, the desire to leave it behind is understandable. But I argue it is equally undesirable to take a post-political stance, wherein we simply focus on developing pedagogical strategies which adapt and conform to the sciences of complexity and ecology. In order to cultivate a more productive interface with those sciences, composition studies should not only be engaged with the new knowledge regime concomitantly, but critically as well. Therefore, in addition to experimenting with eco- and complexity-based pedagogies, compositionists should also focus on (a) researching and teaching how knowledge is argued and produced under the regime of the eco-subject, and (b) critiquing the ideological assumptions of that knowledge regime.

      Where I see work in rhetoric and composition making a critical contribution to the constellation of complexity sciences is on the question of invention. If indeed the cognitivist -process movement constituted a Kuhnian paradigm, the necessary crisis that called that paradigm into existence was the persistent lack of a coherent way to describe invention. It was the problem of invention that turned research in rhetoric and composition towards the writer’s mind, and which led to a general consensus in the discipline that the relationship between mental processes and the writing act is recursive. Furthermore, as Anis Bawarshi argues, in understanding invention as internal to the mind, the cognitivist -process movement also “’invents’ the writer as the primary site and agent of writing,” therefore circumscribing agency to within the writer (51). That rhetorical invention is a non-linear process is not in question, but the fact that the mind as the agent of invention is being superseded by the eco-subject means that invention, and, therefore the writer’s agency, are, once again, in need of coherent descriptions. The discourse of complexity seems to be able to provide such descriptions. A complex-ecological understanding of invention maintains that it happens through the emergence of schemata, in which experience is adapted to new contexts (Taylor, Moment 206). Hawk argues that in turn, “[e]nvironment, rhetoric, texts, and audiences are complex adaptive systems in themselves and together form other complex adaptive systems,” and so “[w]hat we have are networks linked to other networks” (“Toward” 150). The convergence of singularities that create these contexts thus have as much part in the moment of invention as the writer does. Whereas a writer’s agency in a cogntivist understanding was conditioned by her ability to gather objective knowledge about her audience and genre (a kind of gestalt), the writer’s agency in a complex ecology depends on her ability to successfully adapt to new settings by making analogies to her experience of prior settings. That analogy is both the foundation of descriptive knowledge in complexity science (e.g., the analogy between traffic patterns and ant colonies) and also the means by which rhetorical invention occurs in complex networks actually affirms the disciplinary ethos of rhetoric and composition—that argument is not simply an arrangement of knowledge, but is inseparable from the very creation of knowledge.

      While it is obviously valuable to teach students about the connection between analogy and invention as they negotiate their way through multimedia and multi-disciplinary environments, it is also essential that we not ignore the political dimension of analogy. Analogy is potentially political because it can provide the bridge between descriptive and prescriptive knowledge—in other words, what is and what should be. On one level, analogical invention could mean moving between texts in a genre, such as encyclopedic writing, in order to write a successful Wikipedia article. But it could also mean something more radical. For example, researchers from the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment, working with agencies such as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, are developing a science of analogy between animal immune systems and global security against the decentralized threats of global terrorism and pandemic disease. The research team behind the project, Sagarin et al., claims: “The most potent biological analogy for human security is the immune system, which shifts from early, generalized responses to more adaptive responses as pathogens become more threatening” (293). Using a metaphor like “pathogen” to describe threats to security is nothing new. But Sagarin et al. are not, as propagandists and political leaders have done in the past, forwarding the comparison in order to strip the security threats of their humanity so that they can have license to treat them in inhumane ways. The question of humanity simply does not arise, as the difference between cell-level pathogens, global pandemics, and international security threats is a matter of scale rather than one of substance. The descriptive claim that global disease pandemics and terrorist groups organize and reproduce like pathogens in the body causes the prescriptive statement that those threats to security should be dealt with in ways analogous to the ways in which antibodies respond to pathogens. The overall descriptive analogy is incomplete without conceiving of the existence of scaled antibodies for both global pandemics and for people considered terrorists.

      The student writing the Wikipedia article and the Sagarin team’s study on global terrorism are both examples of invention because they are forging new links between phenomena in order to make new knowledge. But in neither case is there necessarily a historical understanding of the conditions that make those analogies valid or exigent, such as the revival of an Enlightenment project to make the world’s knowledge universally accessible in the case of Wikipedia, or the phenomenon of post-nation-state sovereignty in the case of the pandemic/terrorist analogy. In order, therefore, to understand the social conditions that make an analogy valid or exigent, it is necessary to continue to call upon those sometimes reductive critical categories of class, race, gender, sovereignty, etc.

      While I strongly reject Mark C. Taylor’s assertion that a big political project like Marxism is an anachronism in the age of complex systems, it must be conceded that much of our talk in the humanities and social sciences about ideology and language falls on deaf ears, as far as the physical sciences are concerned. But this is not because complexity science can now explain social structures, communication, and lived experience ways that make social critique obsolete. Rather it is because for the past thirty years or so, basic science has been regarded and funded not as a big social project, but as a means to the fractured ends of the applied sciences. (In this respect, compositionists and those in the basic sciences already have a lot in common.) But with global economic and ecological catastrophes looming, capital “S” Science may again become a coherent, social project. That can only be a good thing for the humanities and social sciences, provided that we ask interesting questions which guide the project. Critical analysis of analogical invention, I believe, is the best way to start that conversation.

      Notes

      1. Throughout this essay, I will talk about complexity “science” instead of “theory.” Although “theory” is the currency of the realm n the humanities and the social sciences, my interest is in the moment at which composition studies appropriates the science of complexity, and in the social conditions that enable that moment.

      2. Fuller uses the term, elective affinity knowing that it has strong resonance for sociologists. It was used in eighteenth century science to describe and predict chemical reactions. Max Weber later took the term up (from Goethe) in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

      3. In his The Rules of Sociological Method (one of the foundational texts in the social sciences), Durkheim goes to great pains to make a sharp distinction between sociology as a “science of institutions,” and psychology, which is the science of the individual mind (lvi). However, Durkheim’s central and very influential idea of the collective consciousness—radically different though it may be from individual consciousness—is still subject-object orientated, and is, therefore, just as tied into the Cartesian conception of the mind as was the СКАЧАТЬ