Fuller is absolutely correct in both of his explanations for the enthusiasm for complexity science in the social sciences, and the remainder of this paper will focus upon that elective affinity between neoliberal ideology and the appropriation of complexity in writing and literacy studies. But he is wrong to say that complexity science is just positivism in a sleek, new package. I argue complexity science cannot be the same thing as positivism, first of all because positivism, as it were, has no positive content to it as complexity science does. Positivism is a stance towards methods of knowledge making rather than a particular theory of natural processes. Furthermore, as I have indicated with regards to Connors’s claims about cognitive science, positivist methods in the social sciences attempt to understand and predict individual and collective behaviors by building systematic descriptions of the mind, which, as a metaphysical object, is irreducible to the sum of its parts.{3} I argue that complexity science must be understood and critiqued through its own metaphysical foundations, and not by the metaphysics of the mind. The first challenge of critiquing complexity science in the social sciences is, therefore, not to try to prove how unoriginal it is but to identify precisely where and how it becomes new knowledge.
We could, for example, take a key concept for complexity compositionists, such as the screen (Bay; Hawk, “Toward”; Taylor, Moment; Hayles) and claim that it is merely a repackaging of Kenneth Burke’s well-known concept of terministic screens. Consider one of the attributes of the terministic screen Burke gives against Mark C. Taylor’s definition of the screen:
Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality … . Here the kind of deflection I have in mind concerns simply the fact that any nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others. (Burke 45)
A screen, then, is more like a permeable membrane than an impenetrable wall; it does not simply divide but also joins by simultaneously keeping out and letting through. As such, a screen is something like a mesh or net forming the site of passage through which elusive differences slip and slide by crossing and criss-crossing. (Taylor, Moment 199-200)
From the outset, these two identifications of the screen match up pretty well. They both claim that any selection or ingress of reality/information is simultaneously a deflection into multiple contextual channels or passages. The difference lies in the context into which each of those identifications is articulated. For Burke, the screen extends— and extends from—what he already gives as his description of the human: “Man is a symbol-using animal” (3).
Against any previous definitions of the human as an inventor or communicator, he provides the example of a wren, who exhibits “genius” by using a bit of food as a way of baiting a reluctant chick out of its nest. Although other birds might be able to imitate the behavior, the wren would not be able to abstract the invention into a symbol in order to set off a chain of communication across the wren world. Communication, for Burke, both makes humans one with, and distinct from animals: “When a bit of talking takes place, just what is doing the talking? Just where are the words coming from? Some of the motivation must derive from our animalality, and some from our symbolicity” (6). The terministic screen provides Burke with a description for how his human-defining concept of “symbolicity” works in practice. Burke’s screen is, therefore, thrown into and is reproducing his humanist ideology, but it also adds new knowledge about the human, which Burke’s humanist ideology then comes around to legitimate. Similarly, Taylor’s definition of the screen is thrown into a posthumanist ideological scheme: “In network culture, subjects are screens and knowing is screening” (200). Taylor’s is an ontological notion of the screen in which humans are information interfaces among other interfaces, and in fact, are composed of self-similar, micro- interfaces. For Taylor, screens are not, as Burke would have it, modes by which we interact with reality; screens are reality. Drawing upon Claude Shannon’s information theory, Taylor argues that being always exists at the apertural screen of noise and information (110 -11). Again, this concept of the screen is both reproducing and being legitimated by a posthumanist ideology, but it is also helping composition scholars to think of non-epistemic modes of rhetoric, particularly in network environments.
Even within arguments for an ontological description of rhetoric and communication, the same line of discontinuity should be drawn. For instance, in his 1978 article, “An Ontological Basis for a Modern Theory of the Composing Process,” Frank D’Angelo talks a lot about evolution and complexity. Specifically, he writes, “the composing process is analogous to universal evolutionary processes, in which an original, amorphous, undifferentiated whole gradually evolves into a more complex, differentiated whole” (143). It quickly becomes apparent, however, that D’Angelo is working with evolution as a metaphor for consciousness. The ontological unity D’Angelo is arguing for exists between individual consciousness and the composing process. The kind of evolution D’Angelo conceives of is “teleological” (141). Leaving behind for a moment the fact that Darwinian natural selection is resolutely anti- teleological, D’Angelo’s argument does not (actually, cannot) consider the mind itself as an assemblage, nor could it consider the monism of the mind and external stimuli. Complexity, instead, is here a product of the mind, which itself works through a kind of self-recognition process reminiscent of Hegel’s master-servant dialectic:
In the composing process, it seems that both conscious and subconscious processes take part. The subconscious mind provides the design, and the conscious mind provides its development… . . Since the subconscious part of the mind is not always accessible for invention, the writer must aid the subconscious as much as possible by a deliberate and conscious effort, by defining the problem, by filling in the details, by carefully working out the design—in brief, by preparing the mind so that the subconscious can take over. (142 -43).
For a complexity theorist, such as Douglas Hofstadter, the very idea of self-recognition is anathema. It is anathema not only because empirical observation does not support the existence of separate realms of the conscious and subconscious, but because the metaphysical foundations from which complexity science attempts to systematically describe a metaphysical problem like consciousness are univocal, as opposed to the equivocalism of the subconscious-conscious dialectic. Again, when comparing complexity theory to prior theories
that may have used similar metaphors, it is important to resist the temptation to see complexity science as either a resurrection of an old idea for fashionable purposes or as being part of a progressive continuity of knowledge.
The danger here is that while a critic like Fuller might dismiss the appropriation of complexity science as recycled or repackaged knowledge, complexity science advocates can use that same claim for indistinction in order to advance a messianic notion of complexity, which reifies the very logic of the neoliberal economics Fuller denounces. Taylor, whose The Moment of Complexity inspired a special 2004 issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition, argues that the emergence of network culture absolutely closes the door on any form of cultural analysis that does not begin with self-organization as a precept. Like Francis Fukuyama (The End of History), Taylor places an all -encompassing historical break in 1989, when both the Berlin Wall fell and when the Santa Fe Institute hosted its conference on “Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information,” which would become