The Teleology of Complexity: A Response To Mark C. Taylor: Design Book Review
The Teleology of Complexity: A Response To Mark C. Taylor: Design Book Review
The Teleology of Complexity: A Response To Mark C. Taylor: Design Book Review
Taylor, Mark C., and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. New York:
Routledge, 1994.
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning From Las
Vegas. Cambridge: MIT P, 1988.
Michael Arner
By the time Al Gore invented the Internet, the history ofthat network's
privatization had already become complex, an interplay of ordering as
well as of disordering principles. The dot-com era's struggle to stake out
"mindshare"-to profitably wrap, label and own territories ofcyberspace,
ofcyber experience-s-can be understood, for example, as largely success-
ful efforts to linearize what we have come to think ofas the quintessentially
nonlinear field. After its origins in the academy and its widespread
adoption by the military, the Internet was transformed in its embrace by
the corporation in ways seemingly antithetical to the principles of its
conception, at least insofar as those principles valorized a "network" over
a "grid" topology. The websiteportal (Yahoo!, MSN), gave the "centerless"
network a center, a point oforigin, a frame, a direction, and a hierarchical
arrangement of content. The website application gave state (history,
narrative, ordered sequence) to the user's supposedly "stateless" sam-
pling of information. Everywhere the "free" network's contents were
Response Essays 1025
privatized, marketing and legal battles fought to own the most encom-
passing framework for accessing via the new medium, from the browser
(Netscape), to the Internet Service Provider (AOL, CompuServe), to the
entire desktop (Internet Explorer/Windows Exp lorer) .New technologies
were-to use Microsoft's insidious catchphrase-embraced and ex-
tended. They were adopted as "open" standards, languages, and methods
accessible and sensible to everyone. But these technologies quickly
individuated as they were "enhanced." In practice, to use the new
technology at all, one was coerced to use the conqueror's particular and
widespread dialect, the new, de facto standard.
These orderings are examples of intellectuallandrush that have less
glamorous precursors and analogues in the careerist academy, long
acquainted with the theory of carving out profitable virtual niches in the
"free" intellectual marketplace. The successful academic, even ofthe old
school, recognizes something of the inevitability with which order is
imposed upon a chaos so that it might be learned and so that it might be
owned. The particular and eclectic vicissitudes ofindividual personality
inflect such orderings.
The point is that the social use of adaptive systems in their various
incarnations will not be a revolutionary disengagement from linear,
hierarchical, and grid systems, but will be defined instead by their
necessary, necessarily productive, historical engagement with more
conservative paradigms. Emergence, and what we call progress, relies as
much upon erecting boundaries as upon dissolving them.
As the interdisciplinary discipline par exellence, and with its tradi-
tional love both for totalizing narratives inassimilable by the hard
sciences and for those narratives' beautiful interplay with the psycholo-
gies oftheir particular authors, literary studies is particularly well-poised
for reception of the new technologies offered by complexity theory. The
latter's assimilation as a tool for literary analysis, alongside the various
-isms, will necessarily entail both a diminution of its theoretical applica-
bility, strength, purity, and self-evident truth-and an increase in its
practical application, reach, rhetorical .sophistication, and sex-appeal. It
will simultaneously advance and obscure our understanding ofphysical,
literary, and cognitive structures.
With N. Katherine Hayles's work, Mark C. Taylor's is among the
most visible, learned, and lucid in this work's important advance wave.
His fine The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture is a
popularist account ofresonances between recent information theory and
recent critical theory, an account that concludes somewhat perplexingly
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Intrinsic Finality
Taylor is quite correct to oppose the positive knowledge offered by
complexity theory to the entrenched, negative knowledge offered by
critical theory and preeminently by deconstruction. Complexity theory
takes as its fundamental object of study a motion, latent in and intrinsic
to the order of things, toward higher and higher levels of self-organiza-
tion. Deconstruction can only regard the idea ofthis motion as "theologi-
cal," an agency or presence supposedly both free from and determining
of the physical signifiers which provide its trace.
The interconnectedness of agents (natural or synthetic) within dy-
namical network systems, in which minute local fluctuations may lead
quickly to vast global changes, makes these systems resistant to descrip-
tion in the terms 0 f classical methodo1ogies. Theyresist analysis, descrip-
tion ofthe whole in terms ofits component parts, because their significant
properties are rather those of the relationships between parts than prop-
erties of the parts themselves. Reifications of these relations will define
new kinds of entities describable in new schemas of "higher order." No
determinate relation exists between the two levels ofdescription; that is,
the new descriptors are increasingly formal, increasingly abstract. The
new descriptors increasingly efface any determinate connection to their
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Now Taylor becomes quite puzzling when he effects his own version
ofthe two mappings. In his contemporary schema, the concept ofthe grid
plays the outdated role of Nature falsely imagined as exhibiting an
external finality (as in the clockwork or mechanistic universe rejected by
Kant). The grid imposes a false, external ideal of orderedness upon, not
the chaos, but the complexity of experience. Taylor in this context has
earlier quoted Mandelbrot, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not
cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth nor does light
travel in a straight line" (40). Without whollyrejecting the idea ofthe grid
as something that might still lend a determinate character to experience
analogically, the network provides a model much more faithful to the
world's true intrinsic finality-to the organic, near ubiquitous, complex-
ity of self-organizing structures (which we now perceive everywhere in
natural and artificial systems). Good. But Kant's laudable transition from
an extrinsic to an intrinsic paradigm as it is described in Taylor's third
chapter becomes, in Taylor's final chapter, an insidious dichotomy
privileging uselessness over usefulness, privileging high art over popular
culture when it is translated into the terms of art appreciation-and an
elitist preference for peer review overjudgmentby the marketplace when
it is translated into the terms of architecting an academic institution.
Although Taylor now considers these translations in Kant suspicious and
unjustifi ed appIication 0 f the architectonic 0 f mental facul ties, first to art
criticism and second to the university, how are we to account for Taylor's
own precise repetition ofthe gesture in expansively mapping the adaptive
systems paradigm first onto a postmodem aesthetic criticism and next
onto his own plan for transforming education into something more like
these postmodem aesthetic productions? He condemns both the idea of
disinterested production-self-interest ala Mandeville or Adam Smith is
more to his taste, self-interest being the local interaction from which the
novelty of global behavior emerges-and condemns the interest of
faculty who wish to preserve a tenure system. (Academics are too well-
paid, profit-seeking, and protective of their consolidated power they
don't adapt readily enough to new technology or to new ideas they
should take their example from the ascetic, self-sacrificing, and quickly
adapting businessman!) How do we explain these seeming inconsisten-
cies? What precisely is the difference here between Kant's project and
Taylor's?
First, Taylor differentiates in practice between binarisms-which
are bad and should be mediated or obliterated-and transitions from one
mode in an epistemological duality to its other, which are good and which
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take place in history and which shouldbe embraced. The latermoment has
the character of Hegelian aufhebung or of the postmodernist revision of
any modernist epiphany: it simultaneously preserves, negates, and tran-
scends the earlier moment just as the network preserves, negates, and
transcends the grid (41, 257). The later moment, being later, is therefore
more advanced, and being more advanced, better. For Kant, there are
eternal verities, but for Taylor, it is fundamental that ideas obsolesce: "In
network culture, professors who continue to lecture from tattered notes
they have used for years are as obsolete as most ofthe ideas they continue
to promote" (262). This is in fact an assumption tacit but widespread in
the practical sciences, one concisely articulated in Marvin Minski's
disparagement ofthe history of science, "A dynamic science has no need
of its past, it forges ahead" (qtd. in Duput 43).
An academic course is a technology, already obsolete by the time of
its dissemination. The problem with faculty members who resist the idea
of subserving their thought and their teaching to the pressures ofa "time-
to-market" based economy is that they "do not realize that they remain
committed to a model ofthe university that is over two hundred years old"
(258). This unqualified bias toward the new, the possibility for which is
the "most important legacy" we can leave to our children, crosses
discipline and application. Kant himselfis not as bad as, say, Shakespeare,
but he is a far sight worse than Duchamps or Schoenberg, who have only
comparatively recently become obsolete.
Here, my own tone belies a sympathy with the modernist critical and
aesthetical projects of"making it new," which Taylor claims are identical
to the planning of obsolescence, unwillingly having supported the bour-
geois industrial proj ect it was meantby the early Modernists to undermine
(31). That each generation create and interpret its experience and its
inherited experience anew is necessary, not in order to progress but
merely in order to remain in the same place, to achieve some indepen-
dence from the tyranny ofreceived and ossifying structures. The misap-
plication ofthis revolutionary ideal to the university relies on an equation
ofthe artwork (specifically ofthe avant garde artwork) with the academy,
an equation for which there is no justification. The injunction for the
educator to always be revolutionary is an impediment to education, in
which received and even ossifying structures qua structure may have a
value they do not have for the artist.
This is a second point of distinction between Kant and Taylor. Kant
himself, in paralleling the work of the university with the work of the
subjective judgment, does not, even analogically, juxtapose the univer-
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sity with the artwork. The analogy is rather between the faculties of the
university and those ofthe subject, comprised of and mediating between
both interested and disinterested agencies. That the university, like the
work of art, is enmeshed in a complex market economy is, as Kant well
knew, as true of each as it is of the subject. What differentiates the
university from the artwork, what makes aesthetical judgment of the
university impossible, is precisely what Taylor both complains about in
its faculty and offers as the real politiknecessitating increased allegiance
with the corporate world: the university is characterized by our interest,
our practical investment in-apart from its mere form occasioning a
pleasing play of the faculties-its actual existence. This is a practical
interest in the actual existence ofa disinterestedfaculty.
Although Reason does not dictate the whole ofa subject' s actions, the
subject acknowledges the redemptive possibilities that the actual
existence ofthat faculty offers, loves them, desires their continuance.
At a time when the U.S. government, to fortify its economic interests
in the oil industry, is able to buy the dissent of a handful of scientists
from the near-universal assent of their peers in order to justify the
nonratification of the Kyoto treaty, it seems sinful to quote, as Taylor
does, these beautiful lines from the Conflict of the Faculties with
disparagement:
To my ears, the axioms with which Taylor begins his final chapter,
"Theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind" are
disturbing ones. It is not, of course, that theory and practice cannot find
constructive mediation: Kant's entire ethical theory, like his aesthetics
and his metaphysics, rely on the assumption that they can. The great
practical scientific advances ofthe twentieth century-eomplexity theory
eminently among them-lay in the realization ofunexpected application
for study long thought useless or purely theoretical. Concomitant with
these realizations, revolutionary new formulations of the good, the
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pro fitabIe, are 0 ften found. But the ability to conflate a theoretical faculty
with a practical one, or the theoretical faculty's receptivity to any
imposed good, whether religious, economic, or political-eannot be the
sole raison d'etre for the former's existence. One aesthetic privileges that
artwork which presents a cohesive epistemology, but the idea of the
university is to resist thought's hegemony-the necessary consequence
ofany universally accorded, single good, single notion ofprofit-not by
annihilating received structures but by preserving and presenting them in
all of their history and multiplicity.
supersensible force that unifies and determines it. It describes both the
moment of emergent structure in complex systems and the Kantian
mathematical sublime.
Cognitive scientists increasingly understand our assimilation, our
ordering, ofthe outside world also in terms of such chunking. The chaos
ofwhat are at first ununified physicial particulars are reified as higher and
higher-ordered constellations that themselves become the primorial
components of jumps to the yet next higher levels of abstraction and
organization. In this way, the entirety of experience is organized into
individual epistemology. We may speculate (as they themselves do in
other contexts) that the elation with which students ofcomplexity behold
the surprising appearances ofnew types and levels oforganization in their
models ofdynamic systems corresponds to a felt resonance with their own
fundamental cognitive processes-and that it is the same elation we feel
when, in aesthetic contemplation, the disparate elements ofan artwork's
manifold can be subrepted into an "aesthetic idea" that then becomes
treasured qua knowledge. Though it remains unarticulated, the motion
feels like progress toward the realization of an enlightenment goal: to
describe and so to circumscribe and thus to own the entirety of experi-
ence. In this way, the motion, not itself the good, nevertheless becomes
the symbol ofthe good and often mistaken for the thing itself. For it allows
to be felt a correspondence between "progression" that is strictly formal,
strictly internal to a system, and the notion ofan external, abstract end that
progression is supposed to serve.
I have earlier suggested that among the hard sciences complexity
studies, being in a real sense "the sciences of surprise," is particularly
susceptible to ideologies privileging novelty in and of itself-although
there is nothing in the science itself to justify the treatment of its subject
emergence in any way other than as a natural force, like gravity or the
reserves ofenergy latent in an atom, that might serve ends both desirable
and undesirable.
This force, like other natural forces, exhibits a real, intrinsic indiffer-
ence to human teleologies. Respect for it has prompted the most philo-
sophically engaged practitioners of artificial life to suggest reading
Frankenstein as a necessary ethical preliminary to one's research. The
contrary view, the pathetic fallacy that this force for the generation of
novelty is good in and of itself, becomes increasingly prevalent as we
move from the academic hard sciences to the corporation-and perhaps
oddly even more so as we move from the corporation to the academic
liberal sciences. Under such a rubric, whatever facillitates emergence,
Response Essays 1035
off' with one's camera. Taylor is quite right to see peer-review as an early
casualty of such a system. With it, the university's function of guiding
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Choosing "Yes"
Perhaps it is a shortcoming to be phased out with my generation, but, even
in the development of network technologies, with which I have been
involved since even before Al Gore's great reign, I have found purchasing
books (those O'Reilly Publications with the animals on the fronts are
nice) to be far more expedient in learning new technologies than the
perusing of their hyperlinked versions online. I think the imposition of
linearity upon their structures indeed has something to do with it-human
(or at least my) understanding, relying to some extent on this limited
spatiality. Once I have indeed learned something, I find the Internet to be
a fantastic research tool for updating, correcting, expanding, and testing
that knowledge-although before it can reach the smooth conduit ofmy
high-speed DSL connection, it must compete for clock cycles across the
network with the terrabytes of pornography which, by volume, still
comprise the greatest, most consistently profitable traffic on the web.
Both for my physical subsistence in a market economy and for the
intellectual edification offered especially by information that would not
otherwise be available to me in this country and in this age where the other
news outlets are monopolized by corporate interests, I am sublimely
grateful for the Internet. And it may well be that e-Ed obsolesces
classroom and office-hours interaction in the same way that the film has
obsolesced the novel; television, the film; and the video game, television.
But I think it would be a mistake to overestimate the democratic proper-
ties ofthe dynamical field per se. From what we currently know, it seems
far more routinely to offer possibilities for swift consolidation and
leverage of powers gleaned by initial, accidental advantages, after a
rather Darwinian fashion. I also think it misguided to overvalorize the
qualitative radicalness of the Internet, especially as an educational
medium, for reasons that I should like to suggest in conclusion.
Students of complexity theory are at this moment made particularly
sensitive to the question of eliminating peer review by the self-publica-
tion of Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, which has
become a runaway best-seller, accompanied by a story particularly
attractive to the mainstream media about the renegade scientist-author
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corporate America are still almost all being written by those who have
skipped a step.
Decrying binarisms throughout his smart and stimulating book,
Taylor nevertheless concludes by asking us to choose, somewhatprimor-
dially, between saying "Yes" and saying "No" to an immersion in
network culture, not simply as an object of study, but of emulation-
indeed, to the historical inevitability of which we should surrender. We
must choose "Yes." "If 'No' does not harbor 'Yes, '" he says, "it should
remain unspoken" (270). I have tried to express my reluctance even to
harbor such a "Yes." These structures, these complex adaptive systems,
and the logics that create them I have found and do find to be beautiful,
meaningful, fundamental. They provide extremely powerful means of
understanding natural, cognitive, and synthetic systems. The boundaries
Taylor questions have no doubt always already been illusory-profit!
nonprofit, education/entertainment, University/Marketplace, even Ivory
Tower/Real World-but their ideal positings are fundamental to a
schema of the academy that I am loathe to let go. In my perhaps already
nostalgic belief, liberal education is above all a series of difficulties, of
sublime interruptions in the flow of, the easy assimilation of, information.
It is as such fundamentally opposed to principles ofexpediency that must
be first in adaptive systems.
Works Cited
Darley, Vince. "Emergent Phenomena and Complexity." Artificial Life IV:
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and
Simulation ofLiving Systems. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. 411-16.
Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict ofthe Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln:
U of Nebraska P, 1992.