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we should also develop a means to identify and critique the ideological baggage that the discourse of complexity carries with it. This essay represents the groundwork for such a critique. I shall argue that complexity science need not be a post-political project that naturalizes status- quo neoliberal capitalism, as many of the important voices of complexity science have presented it as doing. To the contrary, I will argue that composition studies has an opportunity to play an important role in describing how knowledge is produced and argued in a world of complex systems while offering new ways of critically examining the social conditions which make complexity-based knowledge claims valid and exigent.

      Composition Studies and Science

      The first temptation in a critique of a complexity science of literacy and writing might be to argue that appropriating descriptions and methodologies of complexity in the natural sciences for the social sciences or for the humanities constitutes a misunderstanding or misuse of legitimate scientific knowledge, just as Robert Connors argued vis-à- vis cognitive science and process theory. His 1983 attack on the scientific claims of process theory (“Composition Studies and Science”) provides what I would argue is an instructive example of the failure of such an argument. In her 1982 CCC article, “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing,” Maxine Cousins Hairston claimed that process theory, with its empirical methodology and scientific discourse, signaled the emergence of composition as a normal science. Composition, she claimed, had experienced a genuine paradigm shift from the disparate practices of current-traditional rhetoric to a relatively coherent, consensus-validated set of epistemological assumptions in process theory. Connors’s response to Hairston not only disputes the idea that composition had entered any such paradigm, but further denies that science could ever offer the discipline anything except useful metaphors. Connors saw the enthusiasm in composition studies for the Kuhnian paradigm as being no more than part of a larger fad:

      Many have taken heart at Kuhn’s description of the arrival of the first natural-science paradigms, which transformed chaotic, inchoate fields into orderly, normal-science endeavors over night … . The field of composition studies is by no means the only disciplinary area to be attracted to the image of the sciences and inflamed by Kuhn’s explanation of them. (4)

      At a most basic level, says Connors, compositionists are enamored with the elegant image Kuhn presents of the ossification of scientific knowledge being an inherently social process. But most powerfully, Connors argues that a Kuhnian description of the field offered compositionists “terms that were suitably vague,” for “the implicit promise of universal scientific maturity” (17). In other words, a properly scientific description not only offered the still young discipline the assurance of a coherent definition of what constitutes legitimate knowledge in scholarship, but it also offered scientific credentials at a time when the humanities had all but lost its ability to offer privileged insight into the human condition.

      Connors is happy to entertain empirical research for theoretical context, or to provide descriptive metaphors, but he warns that empirical context and scientific metaphors can never make the leap to applied scientific knowledge. Connors believes that making institutional practice work for descriptive, scientific analogies is not only deeply unscientific but it also leads to—and here I have a lot of sympathy for his argument—an erosion of the spirit of free inquiry, which, for Connors, the humanities embody:

      The push toward science in our field at the present time can lead all too easily to scientism, placing methodology at the heart of rhetorical education and tilting composition studies toward the sort of mechanistic concerns with neutral “techniques” that we wish in our best moments to transcend… . We should not in our search for provable knowledge forget that the essential use of all knowledge is in aiding humanity in the search for consensually arrived at truth. (19)

      It is important to first of all parse out the different ways in which Connors argues composition studies cannot be scientific. He is quite correct in that teaching writing cannot be scientific any more than teaching physics or chemistry can be scientific. But his assertion that descriptive knowledge about the writing act cannot be scientific is problematic. First, his argument against positivistic descriptions of writing is actually tautological, since the argument itself rests upon a logical-positivist definition of scientific knowledge. Connors borrows directly from Kuhn’s famous positivist rival, Karl Popper, to define exactly what scientific knowledge is, and therefore, why the theory 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

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