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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 field of psychology against which Durkheim was defining sociology.
4. “The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goal: in the discourse of today’s financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power” (Lyotard 46).
5. Descartes is famous for his dualistic formulation of the human, being both animal body and eternal soul; however, he could not imagine the two entities co-existing without meeting in a real, physical space. He guessed, therefore, that the body and soul intermingle in the pineal gland, which is located at the base of the brain. This was, perhaps, an even more materialistic take on the mind than the one developed in nineteenth and twentieth century psychology, wherein the unconscious was not located anywhere spatially, but was nonetheless immanent to the brain.
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