2 Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition

      Noah R. Roderick

      Abstract: In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

      Any scan of the major rhetoric, composition, or literacy journals over the past ten years or so will show that complexity and ecology are rapidly becoming dominant metaphors in those fields. Given its position as a nexus between technology, communication studies, and the humanities, it is no surprise that many in composition studies, in particular, have eagerly taken up the banners of complexity science and ecocomposition. The epistemic and pedagogical possibilities of opening up scholarship and teaching in composition to complexity science and ecology studies are the subjects of countless dissertations, articles and books. Early overtures include Marilyn Cooper’s article, “The Ecology of Writing” and Margaret A. Syverson’s book, The Wealth of Reality: an Ecology of Composition, which took the crucial step of aligning the epistemology of complexity with the ethics of ecology. More recent works, such as Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity and Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition, continue to more fully develop the radical philosophical implications of appropriating the discourse of complexity science. Combining recent insights from the physical sciences with the post-humanist philosophies of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Mark C. Taylor, and Gregory Ulmer, these more recent arguments for complexity are examining the deep relationship between information technology, rhetoric, and the emergent properties of subjectivity, calling even for a post-subjective rhetoric.

      In this essay, I revisit the relationship between science and composition studies, claiming that the question of whether or not it belongs to the sciences or to the humanities was not settled with the decline of the internalist- cognitivist movement associated with 1970s process pedagogy, as Robert Connors argued. I claim that compositionists need to take seriously the potential of complexity science to describe the writing act, not because the past decade has yielded any positive knowledge about, for instance, the writer’s mind, but because the interface between the natural and social sciences has been radically altered. In other words, the interesting questions for when natural scientists and scholars in the humanities 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