Wyschogrod Networking

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Networking the Unpredictable:The Lure of Complexity

Edith WyschogrodComplex systems are open, self-developingwholes capableofgenerating novelty without appealing to extrinsic causes and are operative indiverse domains. To read complexity in this way withMark C. Taylor isto be subject to its lure, the lure of the indeterminateness of relationsbetween the present state of a system and its history in conjunction withthe impact upon the system of external influences. I shall considerTaylor's analysis of complexity as inviting conversation with otheraccounts of complex systems and consider some possible responses tothese encounters. Paul Cilliers' description of the distributive nature ofsociety as "a connectionist network" will be seen as in consonance withsome ofTaylor's principal claims (116-17). Jean-PierreDupuy's discussion of cybernetic complexity in relation to subjectless processes inwhich "the subject is not a ghost in the cerebral machine but the machineitself' may help to illuminate Taylor's depiction of networking's"incarnationallogic" (160). Taylor's account of speed as the essence ofcontemporary life bears comparison to Eric Alliez's accountofquantityas, in his terms, vanquishing everything and ofphilosophy's history as aseries of conquests by time. 1 What links Taylor's version of complexityto the views of these analysts is a certain commonality of lineage inpoststructuralist thought, especially its repudiation of all-encompassingtheories or metanarrative that would explain and thereby subordinate thedistinctiveness and fluidityofindividual systems to its overridingclaims.In addition, the classical subject is rejected in favor of subjectlessprocesses. In contrast to Taylor, NicholasRescher, subscribes to the viewthat, once the ever-expanding complexityof the world is acknowledged,a return to a view ofexplanation conceived as rational inquiry groundedin the observation of available data is the best we can do.

jac 24.4 (2004)


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872 jacGoing beyond poststructuralism and its limited functionality as a

critique of representation, Taylor suggests ways in which distributednetworks actively create intelligent behavior in a variety o f contextsranging from art and architecture to biology and education. Thus, theGlobal Education Network (GEN) seeks to transform the universitythrough adopting network logic and thereby linking the university to the"real" world. The implications for action that follow from this viewwould seem to conformto pragmatist philosopher JohnDewey's stipulation laid down in the context o f an earlier technological world that it isnecessary for individuality to interactwith actual conditions. Fo r Dewey,such conditions were needed to foster his goal: individual flourishing(168). Yet, Taylor also argues that what does no t benefit an individualmay still benefit the whole. Can Taylor (if he were to update Dewey)redress the possible imaginative and intellectual disempowering ofindividuals and non-elites by harnessing the ne w technologies to abetindividual development? I consider Taylor's relation to the Deweyanproblem o f social utility in what follows. I cannot hope to address theissue in detail, bu t rather suggest that the possibilities for a Deweyanapproach warrant attention on the part o f complexity analysts. More-over, ca n Taylor's narrative accommodate the face-to-face encounters in densely populated cities that Hugo Lindgren, writing in Wiredmagazine, asserts are indispensable to superpowerful informationtechnologies?Parsing ComplexityTaylor proceeds by viewing the specific changes he tracks through theeyes o f seminal interpreters such as Luhmann, Gell-Mann, Dawkins andotherswhose theoretical works inbiology,mathematics and related fieldsexpress and create complexity. His summaries o ftheirworks are extraordinary feats ofcondensation and clarity. Cutting across the lines o fnatureand culture, Taylor wends his wa y through the manifestations o f complexity in art and architecture, in social, economic, mathematical, physical and biological systemswithout losing the intricate lines o fconnectionamong these varied expressions of complexity. Taylor points to thedifference between modem and postmodem cultures as a differencebetween grids, a figure o fan all-encompassing rationality for controllingn at ur e a nd society and their displacement in a variety of contexts bynetworks, interconnectednodes that communicate with o ne a no th erand that express the complexity of twentieth-century communicationtechnology.


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Edith Wyschogrod 873In analyzing the history and logical structures that enter into the

multiple formations of complexity, Taylor's concerns are clear. First,when complexity is viewed as the interaction of components in selfdeveloping wholes, there is no need to explain complex systems byrecourse to external teleology, to principles outside the systemthat causeor explain the whole. Because complex systems are openwholes, they arecapable of generating novelty without appealing to the deus ex machinaof extrinsic causes. Moreover, complexity is 'not totalization. Second,Taylor fully comprehends the glut of information that inundates contemporary life at every level, but, rather than excoriating the new technologies and the instability they bring, he opens perspectives that are morethan copingmechanisms. His standpoint is summed up in the phrase "theincamationallogic ofnetworking," logical modeling that is inextricablylinked to the real.

The claim that non-teleologically construed open wholes resistinclusion in totalizing structures and metanarratives has been consideredin awide range ofcontexts, from thework ofAmericanpragmatists to thatofFrench poststructuralist thinkers. Writing in a pragmatic vein, Nicholas Rescher asserts that complexity is a feature of the real and that asystem's complexity is a "a matter of the quantity and variety of itsconstituent elements and of the interrelational elaborateness of theirorganization and operational make-up." Rescher adds: "Complexity canin principle make itself felt in any domain whatsoever" (1). Yet, forRescher, complexity, especially that of the new information technologies, accelerates unmanageability. Far from conceding that computerprograms can generate novelty, he argues that "the classic dictum holdsgood: as far as the efficacyofcomputational informationmanipulation isconcerned, garbage in, garbage out." (178). What is more, the morecomplex the program, the greater the chance for mishap. It is not tocomputational instruments that one must tum for the understanding ofcomplexphenomena, but to oldermodes of scientific inquiry. The worlddoesnotexhibitan incoherent lawlessness. Chance in nature generates anorder that is amenable to "probabilities and plausibilities" that, whengrasped, at least allow us to muddle through (178). In an effort to salvagewhathe sees as rational intelligibilty, Rescher cordons offhis own viewsfromthose ofcontinental thinkers. He concludes that developments in thesciences are "outside the range of our present day [postmodem] culturegurus, so that the facts of life about the complex natural world in whichthey live are something they neither can nor wish to understand" (208).Taylor might respond that Rescher imposes a top down reading of


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874 jaccomplexity rather than one in which interpretation emerges from therecursiveness of the system's activities. To be sure, such complexity canbe seen as complicated in an additive sense, but not all that is complicatedexhibits complexity.

A conclusion opposed to that of Rescher, one with which Taylormight be in accord, is reached by research-engineer-turned-philosopherPaul Cilliers, whose account of complexity as involving the behavior ofsystems without fixed structures is, as such, not only amenable to butrequires postmodem interpretation. Complexity is the result of theinteraction of a system's components that may remind philosophers ofDerrida's view of language as a play of differences among signs, of "ameaning that is never produced but always deferred" (Cilliers 44).Complex systems are oftenassociatedwith living things, frombacteria tobrains and language, and are made up ofmultiple elements in dynamicinteraction. "There are loops in the interactions" that feed back on oneanother. Such systems have a history, "are ignorantof the behavior ofthesystem as a whole" and are responsive only "to local information" (4).Each system is self-organizing and has the capacity to store information.Cilliers contends that the postmodem stress upon a multiplicity ofdiscourses in constant interaction struggling for territory and upon "thedistributed nature of the society as a connectionist network" is itself anexamp1eofcompIexity. "SeIf-organizedcriticality," he continues, amarkofpostmoderndiscourse, "is themechanismby whichnetworks diversifytheir internal structures maximally"(116-17).

In still another rejection of teleology, cognitive scientist Jean-PierreDupuy endorses the deconstruction of the subject that he finds both inFrench postmodernism and in cognitive science. Tracing the forgottenroots of the latter to a cybernetics that construes thinking as a form ofcomputation, Dupuy argues that cybernetics was the first conceptualeffort to have recognized subjectless processes. On this view, "when Ithink, remember, desire, believe, decide and so on, the subject of thesepredicates is not a ghost in the cerebral machine, a concealed homunculus, as itwere, but the machine itself' (160). This notion, Dupuycontends,took on another form as "the product of a post-Nietzschean postHeideggerian thinking." Despite its pointed critique of the essence oftechnology, Heidegger's account shares with the cybernetic view "thedestabilizing of the anthropocentric conception of man" (108-09). Insum, for Dupuy, "the French Heideggerians were sensitive (and quiterightly so) to this aspect of cybernetics in what they had to say" (110).While Taylor does not comment on their work, his interpretations


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Edith Wyschogrod 875confirm key structural features to which Cilliers and Dupuy independently point.

Critical for Taylor is the conception of complex adaptive systems(cas) emanating from research devoted to natural and social processes atthe Santa Fe Institute, work on which he comments extensively. JohnHolland's conception ofgenetic algorithms is a case in point.2 In his ownaccount, Holland stresses the need for simulationmodels to interfacewiththe world. On the one hand, a cas simulation affords the opportunity toobserve alternative outcomes in fields as varied as ecology and economics, alternatives that could not be tried in real systems. On the other,because adaptive agents resist rigorous modelling, simulations alone arenot enough butmust have an interface with the "real"world (159-60). Itis the reciprocal imbrication of model and world that often blurs thedistinction between them that Taylor explores in a variety of complexsystems. Without shortshrifting complexity's manifestations in biology,cogni tive sc ience and information technology, Taylor analyzescomplexity's generative role in art and architecture as, for example, in thepaintings of Chuck Close or the buildings of Frank Gehry. What setsTaylor's work apart from the accounts of complexity I have touched onis not only the range ofhis interest, but his never-absent Kierkegaardianperspective. Considerhis readingofphysicistPerBak'sclaimthatwithincomplexactivities in nature "largesystems withmany components [tend]to evolve into a poised critical state, way out of balance, where minordistrubances may lead to events called avalanches. [...] Most of thechanges take place through catastrophic events" (qtd. in Taylor,Moment,148). Bak argues that it is possible to know that an avalanche will occurbut it is not possible to predict where and when it will happen.

It is the unthinkablity of critical turning-points that intrigue Taylor.In his earlier work nOts, a term intended to express what lies betweenbeing and non-being, Taylor weighs the meaning oftuming points in thecontext ofhuman existence. He cites a text ofKierkegaard, who, in thiscontext, takes on the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus: "When thedetermination ofmotion is replaced by the determination ofrest, it is theabsolutely different," for which no distinguishing mark can be found(nOts 80). The different, Kierkegaaard contends, cannot transcend itselfbut can only recursively think its own complexity, the many differentthoughts that are intrinsic to it.

Equally Kierkegaardian is Taylor's ongoing self-scrutiny. The complexity thathe analyzes is also a recasting ofhis own intellectual itineraryfrom his early work on Hegel and Kierkegaard to his analyses of


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876 jacpostmodern thought, from his groundbreaking accounts of modem artand architecture tohis discussionofvisual and information technologies.Moreover, the bookitselfis an instantiationofa complex adaptive systemthe description ofwhich is its theme. Seen in this light, the recommendations of the final chapter, the application of information technology toeducation as modeled by GEN, is intrinsic to the account ofcomplexity.In each of its parts, TheMoment ofComplexityembodies the complexityit depicts.Opportunities of the PossibleFor Taylor complexity entails speed, the essence ofcontemporary existence. But speed cannot be considered apart from economy. FollowingBaudrillard, Taylor notes that economymoves fromproduction to reproduction: "exchange value displaces use value." He goes on to say that"when economic relations are mediated by blips of light transmittedthrough fiber optic networks and displayed on computer screens, theeconomy and media become virtually indistinguishable" (68). Theirconvergence must be understood in the context of a global economy or,in journalist Tom Friedman's language, the world of the Lexus and theolive tree.

Despite its impossibleFrancophone density, Capital Times, the workof Eric Alliez, is an interesting foray in this direction. According tophilosopherGilles Deleuze, the force ofAlliez's work lies in its "discovering and analyzing the processes of extension, intensification, capitalization, subjectivation, that become something like the conditions for ahistory of time" (xii-xiii), In the context of this heady mix, Alliezanalyzes the historyofcapital as one oftransformingtime intomoneyand(later) money into time while the history of philosophy is viewed as ahistory 0 f the conquest 0 f time, inwhich "quantity conquers everything."Alliez distinguishes potential time as "the pure force of time shaking offits subordination to the world's movement, provoking aberrant movements of all kinds, and abstract time [. . . that captures] being withinrepresentation," an expression of which can be seen in modernity'sconversionoftime into money. "Man" (as Marx would have it) "becomestime's carcass" (xvi-xvii). Everywhere quantity overrides quality. ButAlliez does not stop there. He goes on to urge that time is to be studied asa function of its history, a history that has itselfunfolded through timesthat are never the same. This account of the genealogy of time and oftime's practices is not merely descriptive but promissory, pointing in thedirection ofwhat Alliez calls an archeology of potentiality.


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Edith Wyschogrod 877It is precisely the parsing of potentiality as opportunity that can be

found to guide Taylor's work. For Alliez, this archeology is an exhumingofthe relationbetweentime and the subject, "a subjectivitythat isnot oursbut time itself," a conclusion that Taylormight endorse (xix). It shouldbenoted that the workofTaylor and that ofAlliezare ventures in the interestof thought that is still to come and in a process of self-formation thatenables one to cut free of oneself.

Inwhat appears to be a contrary line ofinquiry,Dominique Janicaud' sHeidegger-inspired analysis ofthe relationofpower to reason, Powers ofthe Rational: Science, Technology and the Future of Thought, depictsreason as an all-encompassing submerging of difference. Janicaud seespower as an upheaval in rationality itself, born not out of rationality assuch but rather from a particularmode ofexcessive rationality. AlthoughTaylor speaks ofopen wholes, the all-embracing logic of techno-scienceis not inconsistentwith Taylor's claim that we are inundated by a globalsea of information. Is there no egress from the planetary expansion ofwhatJanicaud describes as the composite that is techno-science? Has notthe sacred, a sacrality that might have opposed the hegemony of technoscience, been altogether lost? However, in a complex analysis of time,Janicaud argues that the dimension of future time opens the power of therational to the possible, that "the future is the sacred in time" and that itunfolds in three parts, "the ethical, the political and the poetic" (260). CanTaylor's moment of complexity not be viewed as the emergence ofnovelty in these three domains construed as open systems?

It is his openness toward the future that precludesTaylor'sjoining thechorus of critics who excoriate the infoculture. Instead, he fashionspositions of integrative accommodation, confirming what Alliez calledthe archeology ofpotentiality. Taylor is not unwilling to draw upon theinsights to be found in critical analyses ofcontemporary culture, such asthose ofJean Baudrillard. He refuses, however, to endorse Baudrillard'sbleak vision of complexity's outcome. Rather than "mourning whatcannot be changed," Taylor prefers to envision the prospects ofnetworkculture (Moment 72).

I have yet to consider whether Taylor's rendering of emergingnetworks allows for the flourishing of the individual as insisted upon byJohn Dewey. What is needed for such flourishing or growth (Dewey'spreferred term) is, in the language of the industrial society of the 1920s,"equal opportunity, and free association and intercommunication" (18).These ideals, Dewey contends in Heidegger-like terms, have beensquelched in the interestof"quantification, ofesteeming technique as an


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878 jaeend, so that life is totally rationalized and standardized" (23-24). Deweyacknowledges that "today there are no patterns sufficiently enduring toprovide anything stable in which to acquiesce, and there is nomaterial outof which to frame formal and all-inclusive ends. [...] Fixed andcomprehensive goals are irrelevant dreams" (150). Dewey goes on to saythat individuality is formed only through interactions with actual conditions, and he concludes, surprisingly, that "only by accepting the corporate and industrial world in which we live and thereby fulfilling theprecondition for interaction with it [do we] create ourselves as we createan unknown future" (171). Can Taylor's account of the acceptance ofemergentcomplexitynot be seen as a foray into anunknown future earlierconceived by Dewey from the perspective of the grid?

In consonance with Dewey's view of the social configuring ofthought, Taylormaintains that "thinkingis impossiblewithout implicit orexplicit conversation with the living as well as with the dead. Conversation reveals that thinking is not just taking but also giving" (Moment 197).The struggle of concepts to adapt to one another, as Dewey also recognized, is neither smooth nor linear. But there is the otherTaylorwho goeson to say, "When a growing number of experiences and ideas can nolonger be adequately processed, thought is pushed far from equilibriumand approaches the tipping point. In this moment danger and opportunityintersect" (198). He acknowledges that some possibilities of thoughtpreclude others and that only some can be actualized. Is this seeminglycognitive dilemma, he asks, not akin to the Kierkegaardian moment ofdecision, of"self-organizedcriticality"? Has Taylor not fashioned a newmoment of complexity in which discriminative adaptiveness is joined toa Kierkegaardian subjectivity in crisis forced to recursively think itself?Taylor'sworkis oriented toward the future, a future that comes into beingin and through the labyrinthine paths of networking. The boundarybetween model and world is permeable. It is in this regard that GEN issignificant. As an educational process, it is driven by a concern with andfor the future, modeling and shaping what is to come. In this regard,Taylor is addressing the Deweyan question: what might the outcomes ofnetworking entail for the flourishing of the individual and the socialwhole?

Rice UniversityHouston, Texas


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Edith WyschogrodNotes

1.This is the general thesis argued in his Capital Times.2. The work of the Santa Fe Institute is chronicled in Waldrop.

Works Cited

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Alliez, Eric. Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest ofTime. Trans. GeorgesVan Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1991.

Cilliers, Paul. Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Sys-tems. London: Routledge, 1998.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Foreword." Capital Times: Talesfrom the Conquest ofTime.EricAlliez. Trans. Georges VanDenAbbeele. Minneapolis: U ofMinnesotaP, 1991.

Dewey, John. Individualism Old and New. New York: Milton Balch, 1930.Dupuy, JeanPierre. TheMechanization oftheMind: On the Origins ofCognitive

Science. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.Holland, John H.Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading,

MA: Perseus, 1995.Janicaud, Dominique. Powers of the Rational: Science, Technology and the

Future of Thought. Trans. Peg Birmingham and Elizabeth Birmingham.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Lindgren, Hugo. "New York 2.0." Wired. Sept. 2002.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/l0.09/start.html?pg=2 (6 May 2004).Rescher, Nicholas. Complexity: A Philosophical Overview. New Brunswick,

NJ: Transaction, 1998.Taylor, Mark C. The Moment ofComplexity. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 2002.--. nOts. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1993.Waldrop,M.Mitchell. Complexity: TheEmergingScience at the Edge ofChaos.New York: Simon, 1992.

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