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!