Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов
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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 and sameness. This is achieved by the continuous invention of subjectivity by 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