Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов
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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 a systematic description. In addition to Davidson and Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, Kent draws heavily 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