Complexity, Chaos and Catastrophe

Book: The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Mark Taylor.

Amy's Thoughts: Oh, for the love of all angst.

I've been trying to read this book all day. It culminated with a call to dear old Dad, who kindly explained chaos theory to me. Which I get. I really do. It's based in two premises: All systems have an inherent order and that any change to any part of the system, no matter how small, can cause huge, giant, catastrophic effects. (This is different from the so called "Catastrophe theory" which has something to do with nonlinear systems wherein resulting values make "quantum leaps" for certain given initial values plugged into an equation.)
And I get that within these systems, we cannot account for individual behavior, but the whole we can explain.
The idea of "Complexity" seems to blend the two, asking us to reconsider the second part of premises of chaos theory; instead of a single change introjected into a system, Taylor posits a series of overarching social changes that build up. The system remains stable, self-conserving, constant until a quantum moment where the critical mass of "newness" creates a change.
For Taylor, this newness began appearing in 1968. A lot happened that year. Chaos theory was invented (discovered? Articulated?). Derrida got massively popular. Some bad stuff went down in the South. More bad stuff happened in Vietnam. People began figuring out that the structures of structuralism could be a little scary in their oppositions. For Taylor, the "leap" (my words) happened in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Literal barriers between oppositions (east/west, communism/capitalism) were torn down brick by brick. And hovering in the background (or perhaps the cause? or the effect?) were new communication systems just ready to change us all. CNN, for one. The Internet was made public. And the happy, categorizing grids of structuralism got bent into the wire frames for fractals that are unpredictable. Yeah. And my generation was just learning long division and cursive writing. We're a new breed alright. We've got a new sense of communication, networking, persuasion, movement of individuals. We are fluid, as is our information (and our sense of what counts as information).
This is the new paradigm of theory? This is replacing poststructuralism? Isn't it a bit too utopian? My generation is still controlled by binary oppositions; it's stuck in our language. And what the hell does this have to do with Burke?
I could make some connections. Burke likes systems. The Grammar is his ultimate critical system for understanding human motives. But within that system of human motives, which we can describe as consisting of Act, Agent, Agency, Scene, and Purpose, we cannot predict the action of an individual, only use the terms of the system to describe what happened after the fact. We can show how the system of the "Human Barnyard" requires patterns of behavior as a whole, but cannot predict the movements of any one "wordling." Burke reminds us that language matters; his discussion of behaviorism reminds us that humans, unlike animals, choose options based on our understanding of the world as filtered through language (also a system, and much harder to break).
But, if we take the idea of systems seriously (which postmodernists would rather not), we can say that average persons will respond to stimulous X within the system in a given way, because we have seen it before. And we can even probably say that we know the limitations of the system, how much change it can hold before it collapses under the newness. The predictablility of this can lead us to create very effective rhetoric.
But isn't the purpose of rhetoric to incite change? To move a people? To do something new? Perhaps (and this is the dystopian/utopian problem) the system must have some amount of newness/change--perhaps the system is ready for such a movement, and even requires it (think of Matrix: Reloaded here). That to preserve our current democracy, we must have revolutionary, dystopian rhetoric, which reminds us just how bad things could get.
Burke says as much, when he says such rhetorics are largely conservative. What is being conserved is the system as it is now. We don't want a revolution; we want to maintain equillibrium.
And not all systems are chaotic, Dad points out. But that type of determinism, totalitarianism is too much for a humanist like me. I want to believe that I have the choice to move, even if it is within the system, even if the system requires it.
And where does that leave us Christians? Free Will? The Eschaton, where all systems everywhere collapse, unless you consider that right now we are in the largest, most complex system ever, moving according to Her/His equation, looping from beginning to end to beginning again until the ultimate moment of complexity arises, and S/He leads us to that next quantum leap into a new system.

Then what?


It doesn't say what happens after the thousand years, after the new heaven and new earth. "After," is, after all, a human idea based on a linear understanding of time. time feels linear; i won't get any sleep tonight.

What does this have to do with Burke and fanfiction and multiple interpretatins? Of laycriticism? Of rhetoric, and representative anecdotes and symbolic action and stylized, strategic responses to situations?

I don't know.

If you know, please post a comment! Or, you know, write my paper for me! Your Choice! Free will served up daily on unwiredmascot.blogspot.com!

Waiting for Studii

Back in the day, we used to make the plural of "Student" be "Studii." I think it had something to do with how we felt that "Biesecker-Mast" should be pluralized as "Biesecker-Masti." Both conversations were spawned (pun intended) from our concern over the plural of "penis."

None of which has anything to do with this teaching journal post.

I just finished grading 2/3 of my (remaining) class's verbal/visual portrait. While the visual portraits tend to be pretty good (at least they are talking about the person) the verbal portraits are all over the place. Some are like news articles, some like a diary. Some quote too extensively, some are all paraphrase. What did I DO?!

Because I'm pretty sure their abysmal performance is my fault. And it all boils down to how they see themselves (positioning) as part of this project.

When I said I wanted a "portrait," I initially talked about a verbal portrait putting into words those things you would capture on film. I suppose I should have been less metaphorical. I should have said, "This means a good argument in this genre includes X, Y, Z."

But how many times did I tell them that I need to "See" the person? That I need to intimately "know" the informant? To "show don't tell"? Did I only imagine that I got those things across? Did I ever look into their eyes to see if it was sinking in?

I can't remember.

And now I'm waiting for the last stragglers to email me their critical bibliographies. Some were holding out for me to push them back yet another few days, but I insisted this was it. And yet, this is a genre I know how to speak to; despite being a horrible bibliography writer myself, I know how to talk about this kind of audience, purpose and style. I'm comfortable with the language, with the expectations. I'd work with them forever on this if I could.

But, alas, I cannot. Time gusts swiftly past something about inspiration, imagination, the autumn wind and dying leaves as metaphor goes here I must not fail this class....

I will spend time tomorrow working on "issue identfication" with them. Although that seems more fit for conferences.

I love conferences. I don't know what people are complaining about. I feel they learn far more in small groups with me as facilitator than they do any other time. So much gets accomplished! And yet I was the only one in the conference room this morning. My kiddos sent me meaningful looks: "We could be in bed like these other classes."

They'll appreciate it later. I've built in lots of "Peer editing from your bed" in the last two weeks. They'll love it.

Twenty-four minutes to go.

My Prophetic Vision (for teaching)

Teaching is about being continually frustrated, about defering the resolution to a problem.
While I may be able to resolve Student X's difficulties with research, Student Y has different difficulties. For example, Student X doesn't know how to use online databases. Student Y doesn't have the ability to search those databases because she can't think critically about her overall goals, about her project as a type that can be categorized with terms. Student Z pulls up multitudes of information, but can't sort it. Student F sorts it, but can't synthesize.
By the end of the critical bibliography, I'd like them to be at Student Z's level, at least. I want them to be "wordlings" (Burke!) who see language and even objects as "entitled," belonging to categories. How critical they are of those categories doesn't really matter to me; first they need to see that there are ways of terming (ways of seeing, terministic screenings). And other than saying, with flashing lights and fireworks "Hey! Human language is categorical!" I don't know what to do.
As for argument. Oh geez. Today I said the term "rhetoric" and was met with absolute blankness. I talk about it all the time, but some students still don't know what I mean when I say argument. Case in point: One student's critical bibliography stated that the article "didn't have any arguments" because there was "nothing to fight about."
Did I miss something? Did I make some fatal assumption in some warrant somewhere? Do I have to go back again? Have they already forgotten the elements of persuasion and argumentation we did back in September?
I suppose I could point out the rhetoricality of the critical bibliography. Of course it's rhetorical in nature: it's addressed (Burke), it's strategic, it's "sly" in its formulations and organization. It is arranged to make sense of the world for a reader.
Guess I should have said that. Guess I'll have to say it soon.
They laughed at me for calling it "The Big Ethnography of Doom" at the beginning of the semester. Today they asked why I hadn't called it that on the assignmnet sheet. I guess I don't want to freak them out. Too late.
When it comes to style, I always think in terms of rhetoric as identficiation. This is one of my problems with Romantic Rhetoric and Shelley's Defence of Poetry, as you can see from my post a few days ago. But when it comes to Postmodern understandings of rhetoric and writing (is there a difference between rhetoric and writing? Should it be Rhetoric while Writing?), style is obviously one rhetorical method. I want my students to understand that.
Actually, I want to understand that, too. Just more theoretically.
Oh, Papa KB. Help.

New Levels of Patheticness, One Semester Only!

Death by Grad School

I keep telling myself various unhel[ful axiomatic phrases. Mantras, if you will (but you probably won't). Like, "You chose this," or "You know you love it."
I am right on both counts: I did choose this "life" and I do love it. In fact, if someone gave me $20 million, I'd probably go to grad school forever. And write bad poetry. And learn every langauge in the world.
But I did not choose to be this stressed out; I did not choose to have such restraints put on my time and body. Here's Amy's Monday, and Tuesday for example.
5:50 am Wake up. Swear about the Yankees.
6:23 am On Bus.
7:00 am Starbucks for a cup of salvation
7:15 am In office, picking up stuff to teach with
7:30-8:20 Teaching.
8:30-11:30 In computer lab, grading, answering student emails, finishing up my own work.
11:30-12:20 Class.
12:30-1:15 Lunch while reading.
1:20-3:30 Back in computer lab, doing same as above. Mental breaks at 20 minute intervals
3:30-4:30 Class
4:30-5:00 Bus
5:00-6:00 Dinner, staring blankly at tv
6:00-9:00 Attempting reading, but half asleep.
9:00 Shower.
10:00 Try to stay awake for Daily Show. Usually fails, wake up with drool running down face at 10:20ish
10:30: Drool free, attempt to read again in bed.
Tuesday
1:00: Wake up with pen bleeding on pjs. Curse the Yankees. Try to remember if I took my pills.
1:45 Give up on reading; it's making no sense anyway.
5:50 am. Wake up.
Ditto through 8:30.
8:30 am. Realize I forgot to do something for Tarez. Spend next half hour frantically trying to finish it.
9:00-10:20 Mentoring. Room begins to spin at around 10:00.
10:30-11:45 Burke class. Most fun class of all. Like coming home.
12:00-12:30 Bus.
12:30-1:30 Lunch, with the missed Daily Show
1:30-5:30 Nap. Pretty much the only quality sleep all week.
5:30-6:15 Dinner. Assuming I can stay conscious enough to make it.
6:15-10:00 Various readings. Might look at dishes and laundry, but little chance of doing either one. Observe the chocolate wrappers on the floor with a zen-like calm.
10:00 Shower
10:30-5:50 Attempt to sleep. Wake up at 2:00 with guilt for not reading better during Monday evening.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's not horrible, I guess. But not much of a life.
It's 8:00 now, and I'm too sleepy to do what needs done, i.e. write the outline of my paper. The words swim in front of my eyes.
Theory has made less and less sense lately. That's a bad thing, because abstraction is usually what I'm good at. I just feel that it's going too fast, that if I could slow it down even a fraction, by 10% or even less, I could hold on to the things flying by me.
In my dream last night, I was in high school again, in band. Playing those damned (sorry Laura) bells. The xylophone was clean, though, and freshly coated. It rung nicely when I struck the bars with my mallets. And Laura looked at me and said, "Do you know this song?" and for once, I did. It was one of the songs from the gospel show, I know now. "It's in B flat," I told her, and played the song perfectly. She stared at me in shock. "When did you get so good?" she asked. "That's how it always works with me," I reminded her. "I suck for a long time, then magically understand it, all at once."
Then the dream turned in on itself, and we were in the band room. Everyone was still alive and unscathed. Riley Kloos looked at me and said something about my sudden improvement. "This," I tell him, "is the result of what Kenneth Burke would call occupational psychosis." The "this" however, had multiple referents; first, I was refering to my new found percussion abilities. Second, I was refering the the dream itself. "Those create terministic screens," I say cheerfully. Then I say something about desire that apparently did not transfer. I spoke in good post modern academic language, explaining the Burkean system to Riley. Kamp stood short and silent. Jeff, Derek and Nick were in the back by the cages shaking their heads. I was brilliant.
If my dream was really an example of occupational psychosis, then I must ask "What are symbols of what?" "Ability" is something that has been bothering me of late; the one talent I ever had inately, I think, was music. And when I tried to play percussion and couldn't-- the only time I ever really gave up due to disease--I doubted the ability in which I had grounded my selfhood. If musical ability, that is, the ability to "see" chords and harmonies and the pathos of music, is somehow in my mind linked to academic ability, then what I was telling myself was that I need to stop forcing myself into something I can't quite do yet. Because forcing it will only result in what happened before, with the percussion line.
I have, of course, grown up since then. I no longer have any intimations of sacrifice for some abstract cause, like "honor" or "pride." Believing that killing my body in order to achieve some sort of greatness is something better left to those in teenage angst. I am far too pragmatic to belive in a mind/body split.
Am I supposed to be making a point here...? Oh, yes. Patheticness. Tarez is now emailing me reminders about what I'm supposed to do. They are working in the sense that things are getting done that ordinarily would not. But seeing them makes me feel like I've failed somehow. Don't be stupid. That silly little 15 year old with the swollen fingers and bad limp is giving me a guilt trip. She wants some kind of public service award or medal of honor. She wants a Lifetime Story about her heroic struggle through graduate school.
She's such a bitch.
The "crip myth" of the courageous handicapped person overcoming adversity to achieve genius is really cramping my style. Once they label you, they can't unlabel you. I want to disable every 20/20 reporter who featured a parapeligic; I want to give fibromyalgia to everyone who's ever said, "Hang in there!" and then walked easily out the door.
I think this is an anger phase?
I can't wait for Harry Potter 4 to come out. I need a distraction from without.