tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47172203595326459732024-03-13T17:46:26.377-04:00Learning Complexitykeith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.comBlogger299125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-35915782052419163382024-01-20T22:33:00.002-05:002024-01-20T22:33:13.675-05:00Rhizo Narratology: Narratives and Social Systems<p>I'm listening to a podcast from <i>Complexity</i> by the Santa Fe Institute entitled "<a href="https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9" target="_blank">Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-making</a>" in which Galesic, SFI Professor & Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics, discusses her work into "how simple cognitive mechanisms interact with social and physical environments to produce complex social phenomena…and how we can understand and cope with the uncertainty and complexity inherent in many everyday decisions". I think I can draw some important points about rhizo narratology from both her discussion and a couple of her scholarly articles.</p><p>Galesic does not address narrative directly; rather, she explores how people work within and through social networks to address issues in their lives. Along the way, she addresses how the beliefs and behaviors of people spread through a social system, informing and perturbing it. Throughout her discussions, she assumes that social systems are complex, self-organizing entities that both inform and outform to create their own identities within their ecosystems. This works very well for my concept of rhizo narratology which posits that narratives are linguistic entities that inform and perturb the complex social systems within which they find echoing expression. Stories encode how a social system sees itself, how it chooses to behave and believe, and how it engages its ecosystems, including other social networks. My reading of Galesic and her co-researchers allows me to express this view of the function of narratives more succinctly than I have until now, but I think I can glean some more nuggets from her discussions. As always, keep in mind that I make no claim that Galesic would approve of any of my ideas about rhizo narratology. Rather, I use her ideas to spark my own.</p><p>First, I like Galesic's use of the trade-off between exploitation and exploration to frame how beliefs and behaviors propagate through a social system – or in my case how narratives propagate. This trade-off refers to the dilemma of how to allocate resources between trying new things (exploration) and sticking with what is known to work (exploitation). In their article "<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13109" target="_blank">Social learning strategies modify the effect of network structure on group performance</a>", Barkoczi and Galesic argue that the balance between exploration and exploitation is crucial for group performance, and that any given balance emerges from the dynamic interactions of the social learning strategies used by individuals, the structure of the network in which they are embedded, and the relative complexity of the task they are addressing. They say: </p>
<blockquote>We show that efficient networks outperform inefficient networks when individuals rely on conformity by copying the most frequent solution among their contacts. However, inefficient networks are superior when individuals follow the best member by copying the group member with the highest payoff. In addition, groups relying on conformity based on a small sample of others excel at complex tasks, while groups following the best member achieve greatest performance for simple tasks.</blockquote>
<p>I can easily adapt their insights to rhizo narratology: Efficient networks outperform inefficient networks when individuals rely on conformity by echoing the best, usually most frequent stories among their contacts. This makes great intuitive sense to me. As I understand it, efficient social networks are composed of people who share significant characteristics: language, organizations, practices and rituals, dress, goals, worldviews, and so forth. Such homogeneous networks present fewer barriers to the propagation of memes such as stories that embody the group's worldviews. Of course, Evangelicals are an efficient network, but so are neurosurgeons, Starbucks baristas, Cobol programmers, feminists, army platoons, and Man City futbol players. We humans form many efficient networks to harness the power of various groups to play and work, and most of us belong to several or many such networks. Stories circulate quickly within these efficient networks, and because the stories resonate within a group that we choose and identify with, we tend to accept them and retell them. Stories tend not to circulate within a group unless they echo and reinforce the views of the group.</p><p>I tend to dismiss this efficient network behavior as an echo chamber, but Barkoczi and Galesic remind me that when a group is addressing a simple problem, a problem with one or very few known, optimum resolutions, then this efficiency makes great sense and works very much in favor of the group. The group can respond quickly to a problem and move on about its business. A group can use its accepted stories to frame an issue and respond appropriately from its point of view. However, this efficiency is undermined when the group mistakes a complicated or complex problem for a simple problem. People are prone to frame an issue as simple rather than as complicated or complex, and groups may be more prone to this behavior.</p><p>In her interview with SFI host Michael Garfield, Galesic notes that people are not as biased as we commonly believe, especially about those people in their own social networks. She says:</p>
<blockquote>People are not that biased when it comes to judging their immediate friends. They have a lot of useful information about their friends. And pretty accurate. The biases show up when people are asked about other populations that they don't know so well, and they can be mostly explained by the structure of their own personal social networks. The more biased your social networks are, the more biased your estimates will be about the general population. … these kind of biases of judgements of the broader population can be explained by the structure of [the] social network and not by some cognitive deficits or motivational bias, [by] some desire to be better than others or some idea that everybody's like me or some cognitive deficits that people … are too stupid to understand how other people live. It's really determined by the context of memory — by the content of one's memory, which comes from one social circle.</blockquote><p>If she is correct, then I must correct my own tendency to assume and to say that people who follow Donald Trump must be stupid, cognitively deficient in some way, or blinded by some false rhetoric or story. Their simplistic bias toward Trump and away from correct-thinking progressives (my group, of course) is more likely a function of their social networks rather than of their personal intellectual disabilities.</p><p>Just as my biases are. Ouch.</p><p>Our biases of judgement often follow not from any personal mental defects, then, though such defects do exist, but from the memories we form and rely on within our social networks. Our social networks help us identify which features of our landscapes are significant and how and why – think informal and formal education here – and we usually learn and remember those features within the frame of some narrative, even if it's a narrative as simple as how to get from the house to the food store and back (instructions on GPS) or as complex as how to make a successful life as a young black woman in rural Georgia (<i>The Color Purple</i>). Our social networks give us the stories that we live by, and most of us accept those stories whole cloth. Even if we eventually challenge and abandon our earlier family, school, and church stories, we spend much of our lives working through and within those stories to make sense of our lives.</p><p>Our biases are often directed toward those outside our own groups. Galesic says, "People are not that biased when it comes to judging their immediate friends." Proximity has its privileges, and we tend to have rich, nuanced knowledge about those we most interact with. We do not have that same rich network of memories about other people outside our networks. Moreover, we have stories about those people which simplify them into more easily managed and addressed stereotypes that gloss over the paucity of our information about them. And we all do this to some extent, especially when an issue requires an immediate response. In times of crisis, we tend to reduce an issue to a simple binary: fight or flight, good or bad, buy or sell. This can work to our advantage, but in complex human social networks, it can just as often land us in hot water.</p><p>Barkoczi and Galesic note that inefficient networks – those composed of diverse heterogeneous agents – are more effective for addressing complex issues with no single, known resolution as inefficient networks are more likely to contain individuals with diverse information and strategies, which can lead to more creative effective solutions. This leads me to believe that inefficient, heterogeneous networks propagate a wider range of stories that are less widely accepted by the people within the network. The advantage of a greater variety of stories is that the heterogeneous social network is able to address a greater number of complex issues than can a homogeneous social network.</p><p>However, Barkoczi and Galesic note that this relative advantage of inefficient networks depends on the social learning strategy used by the agents within the network. If individuals are using a conformity strategy, then efficient networks are more effective because they allow individuals to copy the solutions of others quickly and easily. Thus, efficient, homogeneous networks tend to have fewer stories that address simpler issues, and as a result, those networks can act more quickly and decisively than can heterogeneous, inefficient networks.</p><p>I'm disturbed, however, by Barkoczi and Galesic's distinction between simple and complex issues. They define simple tasks and complex tasks based on the number of optimal solutions. A simple task is one that has a single optimal solution, while a complex task has multiple optimal solutions, including one global optimum and several local optima. I prefer the more nuanced understanding of Dave Snowden's <a href="https://thecynefin.co/about-us/about-cynefin-framework/" target="_blank">Cynefin framework</a> which categorizes issues from simple with one optimal approach and resolution, through complicated, then complex, and finally chaotic issues with no optimal approaches or resolutions.</p><p>I am troubled by the tendency in society to reduce all issues to the simple domain, often a simple binary: us/them, good/evil, right/wrong, male/female, black/white, and countless others. Popular self-help often advises us to simplify life, to lead a simple life. I understand this drive, as complexity implies a constant tension: intellectual, emotional, social, technological, physical, and so on. Complexity can be exhausting; yet, I believe life to be complex. To my mind, simple systems are the rare exception to the complicated, complex, and chaotic domains. Without constant attention and maintenance, any simple domain will give way to the complicated, complex, and chaotic domains.</p><p>It seems to me, then, that stories arise and propagate easily throughout efficient, homogeneous networks, such as Evangelicals, because those networks have few barriers to stories that echo and reinforce their beliefs and because Evangelicals tend to echo the stories that their fellow Evangelicals believe. Evangelicals tend to a simple, binary view of life: good and bad, us and them, saved and sinner, holy and profane, Heaven and Hell. This makes them very efficient and coherent. They are able to respond to most socio-political issues quickly and forcefully, unlike progressives who must muddle through a fragmented world-view. The right stories told well can spread quickly through Evangelical circles. However, Evangelicals are more susceptible to misreading a complex situation and to misapplying a simplistic response.</p><p>Obviously, I will need to find evidence to support these ideas, but I think that I can do it.</p><p>Finally, it's been months since I last posted to this blog, and I apologize to those who have followed it until now. I have been writing lots of fiction since the summer and fall of 2023, and I've been applying many of the lessons about rhizo narratology to my stories. I won't publish my stories on this blog as that can interfere with publishing them in other venues, but I will begin to discuss the stories in terms of rhizo narratology.</p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-41857962146786046512023-05-06T11:13:00.000-04:002023-05-06T11:13:46.746-04:00Rhizo Narratology: Narrative Decentralized<p>In my last post, I explored Dan McAdams' concept of <i>narrative identity</i>, a psycho/social image we each construct of ourselves largely through stories about how we interact with the world. I found McAdams' view of narrative enlightening but also limited. Like most stories, his own story about storytelling reveals a unique point of view that leaves out lots of details, and in the case of rhizo narratology, those omitted details are important. My problem is that McAdams' approach results in the creation of a centralized agent, actor, and author with a centralized voice and identity. Indeed, creating this identity is the purpose of <i>narrative identity</i>, and it is a traditionally Western approach to narrative. We love these strong voices and identities: Moses in the wilderness, Oedipus on the road, Huck Finn on the river, Luke Skywalker in hyperspace.</p><p>I typically thought of narrative this way, as do most of the theorists that I read: a unified narrator tells a story to someone about something. In the book <i>Narrative Theory</i> (2012), Phelan and Rabinowitz define narrative as "somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something" (3). Though they expand on the various elements of their definition, this is the core or kernel of their thing <i>narrative</i>. Thus, they reduce narrative to its core constituents: at some spacetime and for some purpose, an author tells an audience a story about the series of actions of some human or non-human actor. Their definition assumes a discrete and centralized author, audience, and event. They assume a Donald Trump telling the nation that the 2020 election was stolen from him by evil people who hate God and country.</p><p>A big difference between rhizo narratology and more traditional narratologies lies in the concept of narrator, especially in the unity of the narrator. Some narratologies want a single narrative voice, as the Jews and Muslims want a single God with one voice. Some narratologies allow for two or three narrative voices (at least an author and a narrator), as Christians want a trinity God, sometimes with different voices. A rhizo narratology wants an infinite number of narrative voices, a swarm voice, recognizing full well that sometimes a single voice will emerge from the general hum and will appear for a time to orchestrate the swarm narrative. Still, the emergence of a single voice does not negate the swarm voice. </p><p>I can distinguish between a more centralized narrative voice and a more decentralized swarm voice by comparing the swarm voice of the #MeToo narrative with the single voice of Donald Trump. The #MeToo narrative emerged from a chorus of millions of people, overwhelmingly women, all riffing on a similar theme. Like the voice of a billion cicada, the #MeToo voice swells and ebbs, phasing in and out, from no particular direction and under no central control until its narrative power envelops and perturbs. Trump's story about the 2020 election, on the other hand, emerges largely from a single voice amplified by position and technology until its narrative power envelops and perturbs. The #MeToo narrative voice is clearly decentralized, even if we factor in the distinctive voices of Alyssa Milano and Tarana Burke, and Trump's stories about himself are clearly centralized around the distinctive voice of Donald Trump.</p><p>I think that this distinction is misleading, tending to focus too much on the single, centralized narrative voice. All narratives involve the interactions of a centralized voice with a swarm of other voices: usually just a handful of other voices, but sometimes millions of other voices. If I am to understand a narrative as a complex system, then I must consider not only the single voice of an author or narrator who initially tells a story, but I must consider and account for the myriad of other voices out of which this narrative emerges and into which it feeds. For a time, any given voice may be distinguishable and noteworthy for its clarity and vibrancy, but ultimately a narrative lives or dies in the swarm, the chorus, that takes up a narrative and retells it, or doesn't.</p><p>Approaching narrative voice as a complex system, a swarm, forces me to think differently about a narrative such as a novel or a speech. It forces me to consider its decentralized nature. This reorientation is not peculiar to literary studies. Rather, it's a reorientation for any researcher who takes up complexity. When arguing in his 2020 book <i>The Paradigm of Social Complexity</i> for a new way of studying complex social phenomena, Gonzalo Castañeda says of complexity theory:</p><blockquote>This theoretical framework is built on the following premise: macroscopic behaviors are usually generated in decentralized and uncertain environments, in which heterogeneous agents with limited cognitive abilities learn and interact in local contexts. In other words, society, markets, and the economy in general are conceived of as complex adaptive systems. (38)</blockquote><p></p><p>I can rephrase Castañeda's definition and say that the story about the stolen 2020 US Presidential election was generated in the decentralized and uncertain environment of the American public, in which heterogeneous people with limited cognitive abilities and resources learned and interacted within their local contexts composed of states, churches, schools, families, political parties, television networks, and so on trying to make sense of what was happening and what the story meant for each of them and for their groups. </p><p>Stories emerge from the noise of our living spaces as we interact with people, things, and processes, using stories to make sense of the stories we engage. Over the course of my lifetime, I have engaged countless stories. Some of them were famous or notorious, with a wide reach across space and time, but most of them reached no further than my own ears or the ears of a close group of friends or family. If closely analyzed, all these stories revealed the "limited cognitive abilities" of the narrative space. We all have limited vision with constrained horizons, and we use stories to extend our vision beyond the horizon to detect larger patterns, but stories are imprecise instruments that often miss significant landmarks, landing us in the wrong country.</p><p>If we think of a narrative as a complex adaptive system, then we are forced to consider its decentralized character, which is opposed to the usual centralized role of the author or the narrator in a novel. Swarm authors and narrators challenge the way that we think about narratives; however, swarms are the norm in nature. Any given narrative is composed not only of the often single voice of the author or narrator, but also of the swarm voice of the editors, producers, and readers who tell the story as they read and then echo the story, or not. A successful story depends more on the retelling by and the echoing through an energized and engaged swarm than on the initial telling of an author. Most stories, like most evolutionary adaptations, die with the initial expression and never extend beyond the author or first audience. Successful stories require the amplification of an engaged swarm. Once the swarm begins to hum and echo the story, then the story finds a narrative space within which its properties and patterns, its themes, symbols, and meanings, can emerge and be expressed.</p><p>Stories, then, behave like other natural and social systems — like plants, for instance, which require a seed, of course, but which also require a garden, an enclosing, nurturing ecosystem within which the seed can emerge and express itself. Stories without a swarm voice are stillborn. Thus, a swarm voice is a necessary feature and concept of rhizo narratology. A rhizo analysis can speak of the single, centralized voice of an author or narrator, but must always account for the interactions of voice with the swarm voice. A story is the product of a swarm voice, and the individual author is a recognizable, often distinguished, part of the swarm, but it is never the sole narrative voice.</p><p>Castañeda notes that this shift from the centralized view of how things work to the decentralized view runs counter to the prevailing orientation in Western culture, which largely persists in understanding the world through a centralist point of view. Castañeda says:
</p><blockquote>Today, it is common to find points of view indicating that a country’s future is at the mercy of whoever is elected as president, or that a company’s potential depends only on its majority shareholder or chief executive officer. This same centralist propensity explains why conspiracy theories are easily propagated, which attribute a society’s political and economic events to a small number of individuals, or why the public in general – and some academics – assign the misfortune of economically backward countries to the designs of the powers ‘controlling’ the international economic order.</blockquote><p></p><p>We want a single, central voice, and we are uncomfortable trying to think about the swarm voice, a discomfort that Michel Serres captures so well in the beginning of his book <i>Genesis</i> (1995):
</p><blockquote>We are fascinated by the unit; only a unity seems rational to us. … We want a principle, a system, an integration, and we want elements, atoms, numbers. We want them, and we make them. A single God, and identifiable individuals. The aggregate as such is not a well-formed object; it seems irrational to us. (2,3)</blockquote><p>
</p><p>Nature is noise and swarm, and we form things in our world and stories about our world out of the noise. We create contained spaces (a galaxy, an atom, or a human being, for instance) as agents that interact in certain ways and at certain scales of reality. Our intellectual tendency in the west is to form these individual things. It's how we conventionally structure the world and conduct our lives, but according to complexity, it isn't how nature works. Castañeda says that complexity: </p><blockquote>adopts as a fundamental premise the decentralised character of natural and social systems. In these systems, the continuous interaction of agents at a certain level of analysis (e.g., cells, species, companies and political parties), gives rise to properties and patterns at another level (e.g., organisms, ecosystems, economic cycles and electoral tendencies, respectively). (61)</blockquote><p>A narrative does not exist without the swarm, and the swarm, not the single author, defines the extent and character of a narrative space. The swarm is the ecosystem within which the narrative's properties and patterns emerge, or don't emerge. Trump's 2020 Election story is a perfect example. The properties of the story depends somewhat on the initial telling but more so on the system within which the story is expressed. Of course, Trump brought to the initial telling certain features, purposes, and narrative skills, the DNA of the story, but the unfolding of that DNA depended on the swarm. Within some communities, the stories are echoed as gospel truth, and within other communities, they are echoed as hellish lies. The stories find purchase in both systems, but the meanings that emerge are quite different and depend as much or more so on the swarm as on the author.</p><p><br /></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-38762467438666925442023-03-11T13:57:00.003-05:002023-04-22T09:22:49.508-04:00Rhizo Narratology: Narrative Identity<p>I confess that I am losing interest in Donald Trump, as evidenced by the long pause in my blogging here; however, I am not losing interest in rhizo narratology. Rather, my interests are expanding as I learn more about narrative and as I write my own stories. I'm writing, but in other spaces. Still, I've recently read several articles by Dan P. McAdams about <i>narrative identity</i> and how he uses the concept in his study of the life stories of people, and I want to discuss his ideas here, drawing implications for how I might apply the concept to stories in general and Donald Trump in particular.</p><p>I'm working mostly with McAdams' article <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.26613/esic.3.1.110" target="_blank">"'First we invented stories, then they changed us': The Evolution of Narrative Identity"</a> found in <i>Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture</i>,
Vol. 3, No. 1, Symposium on Evolution and Narrative Identity, Spring 2019, pp. 1-18.</p><p>McAdams defines <i>narrative identity</i> as "a person's internalized and evolving story of how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming" (2). This definition embodies McAdams' own psychological orientation to narrative; however, he clearly considers <i>narrative identity</i> as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary concept, quoting a range of scholars from biology through sociology to humanities. Still, he focuses on the emergence and evolution of narrative identity in the scientific sense to the exclusion of the literary senses, for instance. He views storytelling first as a social mechanism for providing groups of hominids evolutionary advantages for getting along and getting ahead in the world and then as a psychological mechanism for providing "the self with temporal coherence and some semblance of psychosocial unity and purpose" (2) within their worlds.</p><p>I am not criticizing McAdams' point of view, which I think is quite important for understanding why people tell stories to themselves and to each other. The important lesson for me is that storytelling, narrative, is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. We've been telling stories since we became human, or possibly, we became human as we began telling stories. I can't say which was first, but I believe that telling stories is intimately bound up with the emergence of humanity along with speaking and writing, counting sheep and cattle, building fires, burying our dead, and singing and dancing in our rituals. Indeed, I tend to put story ahead of those other early human capabilities, except for speaking. I think we learned to count sheep in order to support our stories about whom these sheep belonged to and how much you owed me if I transferred some of those sheep to you. Though that is speculation and probably scholarly bias on my part, I am confident that story emerged very early as one of the key ways that humans make sense of themselves and their world, to the point that storytelling was one of the features that distinguished humans from the other hominids. Storytelling is core.</p><p>McAdams traces this evolutionary arc in our species within the life of each individual. He claims that most humans follow an arc from <i>actor</i>, to <i>agent</i>, to <i>author</i>, all roughly corresponding to three levels of narrative maturity, hence the literary terms for each stage.</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Actor</i>, roughly age 0-3: humans act within a social context, expressing "temperament dispositions that dictate the characteristic emotional and interpersonal styles they display as they engage the social moment" (5). By the age of 2, most humans become aware of themselves as actors on a stage (social context) among other actors, but they have little sense of a narrative arc, consequently very little memory or sense of a past or future.</li><li><i>Agent</i>, roughly age 3-adolescence: humans become more sharply aware that they and other humans are <i>motivated agents</i>, acting as they do because they are pursuing or avoiding some outcomes. Humans also develop a sense of time, with a present, an <i>autobiographical memory</i>, and <i>episodic future thought</i>, all encoded and expressed through a growing command of language.</li><li><i>Author</i>, roughly adolescence to adult: building on capabilities developed as actors and agents, humans create a <i>narrative identity</i> which provides each life with meaning, unity, and purpose and "situates the individual as a moral agent in the world" (8).</li></ul>
The emergence of the narrative identity forever changes the author, fixing the framework through which the author sees herself and her world. As McAdams puts it:<p></p>
<blockquote>There is no going back to a simpler time when I was nothing more than a social actor, or a motivated agent striving to achieve a handful of goals. Now I cannot help but make narrative sense of what I do as a social actor and what I want as a motivated agent within the encompassing frame that explains to me, and to others, what it all means for the story of my life. (8)</blockquote><p>Narrative identity, then, is a core characteristic of humans. This does not mean that our stories are all the same, though. Like fingerprints, narrative identities may look the same in general, but they all look different in details. The details come from our own peculiar mixes of inherent capabilities and dispositions in dynamic interactions with our particular ecosystems. Narrative identity is that sense we create, almost always conceived and expressed in story, of ourselves as unique characters inter<i>acting</i> with other actors on a particular stage, and this identity is precious to us. We will do most anything to develop and to protect our narrative identity.</p><p>Note that this narrative identity is not merely veridical but also imaginative. While our narrative identities certainly include actual facts and incidents drawn from our own experiences, they also include imaginative facts and incidents. To my mind, the narrative structures we use to arrange the facts and incidents are more often a work of imagination than of fact and are usually informed by the stories of our cultures.</p><p>Cultures create and are defined by what McAdams calls <i>master narratives</i>, or what I think of as <i>myths</i>. In other words, cultures have narrative identities, and our individual narrative identities are informed by those larger stories. McAdams explores the master narrative of <i>the redemptive self</i> in which the protagonist (1) has some early special advantage, (2) recognizes and empathizes with the suffering of others, (3) suffers their own setback and trauma, (4) which leads to the redemption of positive outcomes or lessons learned, and (5) the emergence of goals to improve the lives of others. This narrative structure, of course, is informed with the details of each individual who tells the story. </p><p>The United States has a number of these master narratives, or myths, that people apply to their own stories. My favorite, and one that applies particularly well to Trump, is the gunslinger myth: the lonely, brooding, exceptional man (almost always a man) who sweeps into town on the wind, shoots all the bad guys to save the day from extreme evil, kisses the pretty girl, and rides back onto the lonely plains of his exceptionalism. We Americans love this myth, as evidenced by the many movies and television shows that use it. Many Trump stories follow this narrative arc, and it made the careers of John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Vin Diesel, and many other male actors with a limited range of acting skills.</p><p>Narrative identity, then, emerges from the interactions of our individual details with the general narratives of our cultures. McAdams identifies five characteristics of master narratives that help shape our own identity narratives:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><i>Utility</i>: Myths provide the guidelines, goals, and meanings of the culture with which individuals identify.</li><li><i>Ubiquity</i>: Most everyone in a given culture knows the myths of that culture, even if they don't agree with them.</li><li><i>Invisibility</i>: People absorb the big stories without thinking about them much, instinctively coming to know what it means to be good or bad in a culture. Usually, people don't examine the big stories until they are violated or challenged.</li><li><i>Compulsory</i>: Myths carry a moral dimension which tells people how to feel, think, and act.</li><li><i>Rigidity</i>: Because myths reinforce cultural power and privilege structures and affirm deeply held values, they are not particularly elastic or negotiable. (12)</li></ol><p style="text-align: left;">McAdams concludes that narrative identity is a compelling construct for most humans. We each must go through the agony of creating a story that makes sense of our own life, but we do not struggle alone. We are supported and informed by the culture within which we work. As McAdams summarizes it:</p><blockquote>In constructing narrative identity, human beings plagiarize shamelessly from their respective cultures, borrowing and appropriating master narratives, common images and metaphors, and prevailing plotlines from a set of canonical cultural forms, each culture showcasing its own favorites. Biology guides and culture fills in the details. Narrative identity, therefore, is a joint production, an invention of the storytelling person and the culture within which the person’s story finds its meanings and significance. Other people in the author’s life, along with groups and institutions, may also exert an authorial force. Therefore, the autobiographical author is, in reality, a co-author. (14)</blockquote><p>I like much of what McAdams has to say about narrative identity, but I can't help applying the concept of master narrative, or myth, to his own writing. McAdams concludes his article with a broad overview of the benefits of storytelling to the rise of humanity:</p><p></p><blockquote>The story of narrative identity begins with the evolution of hominid hypersociality and runs through the emergence and proliferation of cultural modernity. From the beginning, stories have served the individual function of simulating social experience, providing those who are able to create and tell scenarios a significant adaptive advantage in social life. For hunting-and-gathering human groups, stories helped to coordinate diverse activities of different individuals while consolidating group cohesion and morale. As humans became more proficient in using language, they were able to refine and expand their narratives, paving the way for significant expansion and increasing complexity in social life. For good and for ill, stories continued to serve individual and social needs, through the invention of agriculture, the rise of kingdoms and city-states, and the further transformations of human society and culture that have transpired over the past 3,000 years, leading up to the current historical moment. (14)</blockquote><p>Note that McAdams is using a master narrative, a myth, common to modern anthropological studies. In his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/" target="_blank">review</a> of <i>The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity</i> (2021) by David Graeber and David Wengrow, William Deresiewicz summarizes the conventional story told by scientists from Hobbes and Rousseau to Diamond and Harrari to McAdams:</p><p></p>
<blockquote>Once upon a time, human beings lived in small, egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers (the so-called state of nature). Then came the invention of agriculture, which led to surplus production and thus to population growth as well as private property. Bands swelled to tribes, and increasing scale required increasing organization: stratification, specialization; chiefs, warriors, holy men. </blockquote><blockquote>
Eventually, cities emerged, and with them, civilization—literacy, philosophy, astronomy; hierarchies of wealth, status, and power; the first kingdoms and empires. Flash forward a few thousand years, and with science, capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution, we witness the creation of the modern bureaucratic state. The story is linear (the stages are followed in order, with no going back), uniform (they are followed the same way everywhere), progressive (the stages are “stages” in the first place, leading from lower to higher, more primitive to more sophisticated), deterministic (development is driven by technology, not human choice), and teleological (the process culminates in us).</blockquote><p>It's a wonderful mythic story of human progress, widely accepted by the academic community and very complimentary of us moderns as we are the crowning achievement of humankind, the very best that humanity has to offer, perhaps the best the Universe has to offer. </p><p>But Graeber and Wengrow say the story is wrong. They offer exhaustive facts dug up in the past 100 years that counter the story. Still, academics are more than reluctant to give up the story and what it implies about humanity and themselves. They like their myth, and they will fight to protect it.</p><p>So do we all, including supporters of Donald Trump.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-90828277276624082332022-11-17T13:01:00.001-05:002022-11-17T13:01:21.439-05:00Rhizo Narratology: Infinite Descriptive Depth<p>My sidetrack into complexity thought in socioeconomic theory has led me to Bob Jessop's 2001 essay <a href="https://www.academia.edu/30101809/Complexity_critical_Realism_and_the_strategic_relational_approach" target="_blank">"Complexity, Critical Realism, and the Strategic-Relational Approach"</a> which attempts to turn the chaotic conception of complexity into a "coherent explanatory principle" that can frame and sustain coherent scientific research, especially in the social sciences. I cannot judge if he accomplishes his goals for the socioeconomic fields that he is addressing, but he makes some nice observations that I think will be useful for clarifying rhizo narratology.</p><p>In this essay, Jessop explores the connections between complexity and the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar. To explore those connections systematically, Jessop explains that he must "reduce the complexity of complexity", noting that "such an act of simplification is an inevitable task for any agent (or operating system) in the face of complexity" (2). I find echoes here of Paul Cilliers' claim that anyone investigating complex phenomena must simplify the complexity in order to make sense of it. Our minds cannot comprehend the infinite richness of complexity, which always exceeds our knowing, which always extends infinitely beyond the horizons of what we know. </p><p>Part of this excess of meaning stems from what Jessop calls the descriptive complexity of reality, the infinite descriptive depth of all phenomena, even the most simple. Jessop quotes Nicholas Rescher's book <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Complexity-A-Philosophical-Overview/Rescher/p/book/9781138508378" target="_blank">Complexity</a></i> (1998): "There is no limit to the number of natural kinds to which any concrete particular belongs" (4). This means that we can never fully know anything, nor can anything ever fully reveal itself either to us or to itself, even if it wants to. As quantum uncertainty suggests, when a particle reveals its position to us, it necessarily hides its velocity. All of it can never be revealed simultaneously. </p><p>Jessop takes this ultimate unknowability of complex reality as evidence that reality is independent of the human mind. He again quotes Rescher:</p><blockquote>It is the very limitation of our knowledge of things — our recognition that reality extends beyond the horizons of what we can possibly know or even conjecture about — that most effectively betokens the mind-independence of the real. A world that is inexhaustible by our minds cannot easily be seen to be a product of their operations. (Rescher 1998: 52)</blockquote><p></p><p>I connect this infinite descriptive depth — a poetic phrase that captures my imagination — to Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam's claim that complex systems are impossible to fully describe. They say, "A full description of all the small-scale details of even relatively simple systems is impossible" (2). So if we cannot completely know a complex system, even a relatively simple system, how are we to proceed in understanding a system such as the Trump narratives. Fortunately, Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam provide a strategy for analysis that seems promising to me:</p><blockquote>… considering general properties of systems as wholes, complex systems science provides an interdisciplinary scientific framework that allows for the discovery of new ideas, applications, and connections. … sound analyses must describe only those properties of systems that do not depend on all these details. (2) … while attempting to characterize the behavior of a particular state of a system (e.g., a gas) may be entirely intractable, characterizing the set of all possible states of the system may not only be tractable but may also provide us with a model of the relevant information (e.g., the pressure, temperature, density, and compressibility). In other words, taking a step back and considering the space of possible behaviors provides a powerful analytical lens that can be applied not only to physical systems but also to biological and social ones. (3)</blockquote><p></p><p>This requires a bit of unpacking.</p><p>First, we can consider the "general properties" of the Trump narratives "as wholes" or of any given Trump narrative as a whole. To do so, we must be mindful of the scale at which we are working. We can legitimately consider all the Trump narratives, stories both Trump-positive and Trump-negative, as a functioning entity with its own emergent properties. Then, we can consider those Trump-positive narratives as an entity with its own emergent properties. Finally, we can consider a single narrative (for instance, that Trump has been appointed by God to lead America back to righteousness) as an entity with its own emergent properties. We must be aware of the scale at which we are working, being mindful that some properties are legitimate properties of the entity at one scale but not necessarily properties of entities at other scales. Properties that we observe of all the Trump stories may not be properties of any single Trump story and vice versa. For instance, I suspect that the "Trump Appointed by God" story has religious properties that may not hold for all Trump stories as a whole.</p><p>Then, we know that we cannot fully describe any narrative or system of narratives, but by focusing on a given scale, we can narrow the scope of what we are trying to describe and thereby say more. I like this paradoxical turn of complexity studies: we can say more by saying less. We can say more by describing "only those properties of systems that do not depend on all those details" (2). This means to me that we must recognize the scale we are analyzing and work with the properties that emerge at that scale, temporarily ignoring the properties that emerge at different scales but do not significantly perturb the interactions at this scale. This reduction may be necessary for a systematic, useful study, but for me it carries inherent risks that the researcher must constantly remain sensitive to: determining what properties at other scales do or do not significantly perturb the properties and interactions at this scale is always problematic. As Cilliers says in his essay "Knowledge, limits, and boundaries":</p><blockquote>In building representations of open systems, we are forced to leave things out, and since the effects of these omissions are non-linear, we cannot predict their magnitude. This is not an argument claiming that reasonable representations should not be constructed, but rather an argument that the unavoidable limitations of the representations should be acknowledged. (608)</blockquote><p></p><p>For example, I can conceive of two complex narrative systems within the Trumpian narrative ecosystem that I might term <i>religious</i> and <i>political</i> stories. My friends and family tell both kinds of stories, and I can distinguish and consider those sets of stories independently as they have some emergent properties that are not shared (For instance, the <i>religious</i> stories define American exceptionalism in terms of a relationship between America and the fundamentalist Christian God, while the <i>political</i> stories conceive of American exceptionalism more in terms of a neoliberal free market.) However, I must always be aware that both camps are aware of each other and that the narratives of one may well perturb or be used by the other. Any reduction of a complex system to a single scale or single analytical lens is problematic even if necessary.</p><p>However, when we use an "interdisciplinary scientific framework" that encourages more researchers working at various scales and through different research lenses, then we as a swarm can say more. Such a swarm approach can mitigate the risks of reductionism. The risk of swarm writing, of course, is the resulting incoherence, at least to our minds, of the swarm voice. The swarm confuses our need for authority and identity, and this confusion is multiplied if the swarm is speaking about a swarm narrative. I will have to write more about the differences between expert authority and swarm authority, given that I am framing the Trump stories as swarm stories best studied by swarm researchers.</p><p>Finally, another strategy suggested by Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam for reducing the overwhelming infinite descriptive depth of any complex entity is to characterize "the set of all possible states of the system" (3). They are suggesting that we identify the phase space of the system in question and identify how the system fills out its place in an ecosystem, much as how a tree fills out its space in a forest or how a forest fills out its space in a landscape, and functions as a complex system. For instance, I might define the phase space of all the stories about Trump (probably too many for me to accomplish), or I could focus on a narrower scale of only Trumpian Christian fundamentalist religious stories to identify their phase space. I might actually be able to accomplish the latter. This reductionist strategy is not new as most researchers across the sciences and humanities try to limit their areas of investigation to reduce the amount of data that they have to process and to maximise their chances of saying something insightful and useful, if not novel. One of the first tasks of the mindful researcher is to identify both the system in question and the systematic approach, or lens, through which they intend to approach that system. I don't think I've successfully done that in this blog, but likely that's a task for an essay I might write.</p><p>I might say that a rhizo narratology, then, insists that story is one of our primary methods for reducing the complexity of life to an understandable, transferable, and manageable model that helps us understand the world. However, because of the infinite descriptive depth of the world, we will never run out of stories. There is always one more way to describe most any aspect of the world, even the limited part we consider human experience.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-9044453359621490852022-08-06T13:12:00.000-04:002022-08-06T13:12:13.680-04:00Rhizo Narratology: Systems, Parts, and Scales<p>I'm still learning about how complexity informs my understanding of narrative. I recently read Alexander F. Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam's wonderful article <a href="https://www.hindawi.com/journals/complexity/2020/6105872/" target="_blank">"An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications"</a> published 27 Jul 2020 in <i>Complexity</i>, and as often happens when I read good stuff, I have new things to think about. While their article focuses on the sciences, they have insights that I find illuminating in my study of narrative. As always when I draw from a scientific essay, I have to state that I am not explaining the scientific concepts in the essay. I am not trained scientifically and don't have the math background to follow much of what I read; rather, I am playing with the ideas that the scientific writings spark in my own thinking. I make no claims about the connections between my ideas here and Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam's ideas there. I may misunderstand them completely, and I certainly do not understand them completely.</p><p>Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam begin by distinguishing complexity's relational approach to science from traditional science's focus on things in themselves. They say, "… while most scientific disciplines tend to focus on the components themselves, complex systems science focuses on how the components within a system are related to one another" (1) with the result that "systems may differ from each other not because of differences in their parts but because of differences in how these parts depend on and affect one another" (2). From a complexity point of view, then, entities will differ from one another not necessarily because they have different parts but because of the different ways that those parts relate and interact. Conversely, they may be similar not because of similar parts but because of the manner in which their parts relate and interact. Complex systems can have the same parts but be different things if the parts interact differently. Common water, for instance, can be a gas, liquid, or solid — steam, water, or ice with different behaviors and properties — depending on how the same molecules, or parts, interact with each other. Inversely, entities composed of different parts can still resemble each other if the parts relate and interact with each other in similar fashions. Thus, gases, pond life, and human crowds (physical, biological, and social systems with very different parts) can all manifest similar sorts of random behaviors when viewed at sufficient scales and can appear to be similar things. For complexity science, then, the meaning and identity of an entity is expressed in the interactions and arrangements of its parts.</p><p>But an entity is also defined by its own interactions and arrangements with other entities functioning at the same scale. An entity must find both its place and function among its attendant, proximate entities existing at its own scale. Then, an entity defines itself as a part within a larger entity, an ecosystem functioning at scales beyond the scale of the entity.</p><p>Thinking this way requires the concept of scale. An entity emerges at a scale above or beyond the scale of its parts, functions as itself at its own scale, and then submerges its identity as a part of a system or systems at higher or larger scales. Everything works this way.</p><p>Obviously, this has implications for viewing a narrative — a story in any form — as a complex system of interacting parts. First, a narrative as an identifiable, meaningful thing emerges from the interactive relationships among its parts. For instance, this blog post I'm writing is composed of letters, words, sentences, and paragraphs that will eventually result in a post — parts made of parts that make up parts. Of course, this post itself is one of many posts that make up this blog, and this blog is one of many blogs that make up the blogosphere, and so on. Supposedly, at the infinitesimal end of the spectrum are subatomic strings, the vibrating, harmonic parts that make up everything else, and at the infinite end is the universe that contains all the strings and everything they compose. But practically speaking, all the scales of this post have scales above them and scales below them, and each scale can express different meanings and identities and can interact with the other entities at different scales in different ways.</p><p>An entity at each scale has a complex identity: it is, of course, itself, but it is also a collection of parts that are themselves wholes at a smaller scale and a part of something that is a whole at a larger scale. For instance, the words in this post are themselves composed of letters arranged in different ways, and that collection and arrangement of letters has identity and meaning at the scale of words. Of course, the letter <i>A</i> has its own identity and meaning as the first letter and vowel of the Roman alphabet apart from its grouping in the word <i>apart</i>, but when it appears in the word <i>apart</i>, a different meaning and identity emerges that was not obvious in the letter <i>A</i> by itself. Likewise, the word <i>apart</i> has its own meaning and identity at the scale of words, but a different meaning and identity emerges when <i>apart</i> appears in a sentence. This becomes obvious when we compare two different expressions of the word <i>apart</i> from one of the sentences above:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Of course, the letter <i>A</i> has its own identity and meaning … apart from its grouping in the word <i>apart</i>.</li></ul><p style="text-align: left;">In the first expression, <i>apart</i> functions as an adverb indicating the separation between the letter <i>A</i> and the word <i>apart</i>. In the second expression, <i>apart</i> functions more as a noun naming a particular word but implying no separation between anything. The two identical assemblages create, in effect, two distinct words with two distinct meanings based on their arrangement and relationships with the words around them. Prepositions are infamous shape-shifters whose identity and meaning emerge depending mostly on the words that they are linking, as the preposition <i>on</i> does in this sentence, indicating more a causal relationship between meaning and words rather than a position of one thing atop another, for instance. (My online dictionary has about 15 different meanings for <i>on</i>, none of which quite captures for me the meaning of <i>on</i> in my previous sentence.) The point is that <i>on</i> doesn't mean much, or means almost anything, until I use it in a sentence. Then a functioning, temporary meaning and identity emerges.</p><p style="text-align: left;">This does not mean, however, that I can use the word <i>on</i> as I wish, to mean <i>bird-feeder</i> for instance — at least, not without some serious textual and extratextual scaffolding that will help a reader make and understand that substitution. The identity of any part of a story, then, from individual letters to mythic universes, must maintain its integrity and identity at its own scale to enable it to perturb and shape the entities operating at its own scale as well as the scales above and below it, beyond and within it. While the entities and interactions at one scale perturb the entities and interactions at other scales and are, in fact, necessary for those entities and interactions, they do not control them. Each scale can give rise to entities and interactions that are novel and peculiar to that scale. </p><p style="text-align: left;">Thus, an entity works out its own meaning and identity through its interactions with other entities at its own scale and with all those entities at all those other scales. In my example above, the word <i>apart</i> emerges in two distinct identities within the same sentence, both depending on the positioning and interactions between <i>apart</i> and its collegial words. Both of those meanings depend on the arrangement of letters at the scale below them. The work done at the smaller scale is necessary but not sufficient for the identity of the two words. Indeed, at the scale of the sentence, <i>apart 1</i> and <i>apart 2</i> become two different words with two different meanings, and we will misunderstand the meaning of the sentence if we don't distinguish these two words. In addition to the input from the scale of letters, the meanings of the words <i>apart 1</i> and <i>apart 2</i> are shaded by their paragraph (the immediate enclosing ecosystem) within which the words appear. The meanings of <i>apart 1</i> and <i>apart 2</i> would take on very different shades if the paragraph was about my sense of loss in the two years since my mother passed away and the previous six months she spent quarantined in a nursing home.</p><p style="text-align: left;">We can continue to trace the perturbations and interactions from scale to scale, both inward and outward, connecting to ever smaller and ever larger contexts that all, however subtly, perturb the meaning of <i>apart</i> wherever it appears, but eventually, we begin to lose the meaning of whatever entity interests us as scales slip further and further apart. For instance, I am convinced that this post means something slightly different by being rendered on a computer screen rather than on a printed page, but to begin to delineate and understand those differences, I must work at a scale where I can trace the differences between light being emitted from a screen and light being reflected from a page. Only at that deep scale can I begin to understand the differences between a text with an internal light versus the same text with an external light. I'm confident that the change in the direction of light perturbs the meaning of this blog post, yet those perturbations are so subtle that I can, in most situations, treat the printed copy of this post as identical to the electronic copy. I can say they mean the same thing, when what I actually mean is that at the scale of the post as a whole the electronic copy and the printed copy mean about the same thing — even when I know that in other senses they don't mean the same thing.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Of course, most any textual scholar is aware that the meaning of any text at any scale depends upon its context and the disposition of its constituent parts and their interactions. And Siegenfeld and Bar-Yam note that establishing the scale of the entity under investigation is key. Meaning shifts from scale to scale as each scale arranges itself and copes with the perturbations from the scales beyond itself. Skillful writers and speakers have long known how to use the shifts in meaning between different scales to their rhetorical advantage. Donald Trump was a master at it.</p><p style="text-align: left;">In her <i>BrandeisNOW</i> post <a href="https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/october/election-trump-code-mcintosh.html" target="_blank">"How does Trump use coded language to speak to his base?"</a>, Janet McIntosh demonstrates how Trump uses coded language to whip up his base while protecting plausible deniability about the racist overtones of his message:</p><blockquote>On the 2015 campaign trail, for instance, Trump mocked Mitt Romney for politically “choking” in competition with Obama by wrapping his hands around his own neck with his tongue out, saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!” This "imitation" of Romney was a thinly veiled, mocking allusion to Eric Garner’s last words during his death by choking at the hands of a police officer the year before.</blockquote><p>Trump has been quite clever in mining the different layers of meaning at the various scales of any conversation. He can, of course, later claim that he was merely mocking a failed colleague, Mitt Romney, all the while knowing that his base would pick up on his mocking the police abuse of a dying black man. This dynamic interplay between scales is well-recognized by all talented storytellers, audiences, and analysts, but it is also the basis for the entirety of creation. Not only do novels emerge from this multi-scalar interplay, but so does the Universe — or perhaps the Multiverse.</p><p>So what does this allow me to say about story, about reading, writing, and analyzing stories? A story is a complex system that, like all complex systems, functions at almost infinite scales. A story as such emerges at a certain scale out of the arrangement and interplay of various parts at other scales. Likewise, story emerges within an ecosystem of other stories and other systems: social, economic, religious, technological, and more, all of which are themselves parts of even larger complex systems. The emergence of the story perturbs and informs the entities at the scales above and below as it is itself perturbed and informed by those entities by exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization, and it processes those exchanges to better express itself, or it dies. The identity and meaning of the story is dependent upon the interactions of all the elements at all the scales that bear upon the story, and a shift in any of those scales, most obviously the scales proximate to the story, will shift the meaning and identity of the story. Telling, hearing, and analyzing stories requires the ability to move among various scales to trace the interactions deep into the heart of story and out into the ecosystem. We must be able to focus and refocus as we jump scales from alphabets, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs, and back again. These narrative activities require a willingness to evolve with the story as it finds its way through new media, different ecosystems, other languages. One's comprehension of a story always falls short of the story itself.</p><p>These are the ideas that occur to me now, but the big benefit of this post is that I have been able to distinguish my own thinking about narratology from those narratologies that I find in such books as <i>Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates</i> (2012) by David Herman, et al. Those narratologies all apply a particular focus at different scales on a selected story. In that book, Phelan and Rabinowitz focus on the rhetorical act of presenting a story to an audience. For them, "<i>Narrative is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something</i>" (p. 3, italics in original). This approach is perhaps closest to my own of the approaches discussed in the book. At least, I can see how it sets me up to explore issues with Trump's stories that I find engaging, especially when they expand their definition of narrative by calling it "a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience" (p. 3). I don't claim that they mean exactly what I mean by <i>multidimensional</i>, but I can easily work within this frame and go beyond it.</p><p>Then, Robyn Warhol employs a feminist lens to analyze narrative. She reads a narrative from the conviction that "dominant culture and society are organized to the disadvantage of everyone who does not fit a white, masculine, middle- or upper-class, Euro-American, not-yet-disabled, heterosexual norm" (p. 9). She notes that this third-wave feminism is itself an enlargement of earlier waves that "focused on the impact of culturally constructed gender upon the form and reception of narrative texts" (p. 9). While I recognize the value that such a focus brings to understanding narrative texts and while I know that a feminist lens has much to reveal about Trump stories in particular, I suspect that I will want to talk about more. </p><p>Next, David Herman approaches narrative through the frame of <i>narrative worldmaking</i> within the nexus of narrative and mind. Herman says: </p><blockquote>… worldmaking encompasses the referential dimension of narrative, its capacity to evoke worlds in which interpreters can, with more or less ease or difficulty, take up imaginative residence. I argue that worldmaking is in fact the hallmark of narrative experiences, the root function of stories and storytelling that should therefore constitute the starting-point for narrative inquiry and the analytic tools developed in its service. (p. 14)</blockquote><p> I like that Herman sees narrative worldmaking as a starting point for narrative inquiry, which makes me think that these narratologists are all choosing starting points which can lead in any direction. Warhol, then, can start with feminism and end up talking about narrative worldmaking or rhetorical acts. Each of their theoretical stories about stories have to begin somewhere, and they've chosen according to their own sensibilities and interests a consistent starting place from which to tell their respective stories about Twain's <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>, Austen's <i>Persuasion</i>, MeEwan's <i>On Chesil Beach</i>, or Rushdie's <i>Midnight's Children</i>.</p><p>Rushdie's 1981 novel brings me to the last approach to narratology in <i>Narrative Theory —</i> Brian Richardson and his antimimetic, or unnatural, approach to narrative. Richardson begins with the act of construction by the storyteller, who can assume either a mimetic stance toward telling a story or an antimimetic stance. Mimesis ignores or even hides the constructive nature of storytelling, while antimimesis plays with the constructive apparatus of storytelling. As Richardson explains it:</p><blockquote>Mimetic narratives typically try to conceal their constructedness and appear to resemble nonfictional narratives, while antimimetic narratives flaunt their artificiality and break the ontological boundaries that mimetic works so carefully preserve. (p. 20)</blockquote><p>This starting point for analyzing a narrative is particularly relevant to stories told by and about Donald Trump as Trump's relationships with the stories that he tells are often problematic, at least for me. I can never be quite sure if Trump is telling stories he believes to be factual (mimesis) or if he is consciously concocting fiction (antimimesis) or if he is deftly exploring the tensions between those two approaches.</p><p>One can easily start here with Richardson and then move on to feminism, the rhetorical situation of storytelling, or the psychological dynamic of narrative worldmaking. All of these starting points work, but I think the rhizo narratology approach will work as well, and it encourages me to continue reading about complexity theory — which I'm going to do anyway. Win-win.</p><p></p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-67416736708192434702022-03-23T11:19:00.001-04:002022-03-26T11:19:11.344-04:00Rhizo Narratology: Decentralized Processes<p>A friend has asked me to work with him on applying complexity to the academic field of public policy. Our cooperation may lead to an article or two eventually, but it has already led me to some interesting reading in Gonzalo Castañeda's recent textbook <i><a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Paradigm_of_Social_Complexity/iz32DwAAQBAJ" target="_blank">The Paradigm of Social Complexity</a></i> (2020) and Bob Jessop's studies in complexity and critical realism. I think their applications of complexity thought to socioeconomic theory have something instructive to say about how I can apply complexity thought to the study of narrative. I'll start with the more accessible text from Castañeda.</p><p>Castañeda opens his textbook with an argument about why the social sciences need to change to the complexity paradigm for creating new knowledge about social reality. I'm sure his argument is important to social scientists, but for me, he becomes relevant in the second chapter: <a href="https://www.social-complexity.com/_files/ugd/db3d3d_bc199c52fa694fdea0cc1efa1913fdcf.pdf" target="_blank">"Vision and modelling of complexity"</a> in which he "contextualizes the paradigm of complexity within the socioeconomic field" (61). He begins by insisting that the "paradigm of complexity offers a universal vision of how the world works" (61). It's a bold statement, but I suppose it's an engaging way to begin a textbook that is arguing for a new way of thinking about the natural and social world. Castañeda's new vision begins with two characteristics of complexity: decentralized systems and emergence. He says that complexity "adopts as a fundamental premise the decentralised character of natural and social systems" in which "the continuous interaction of agents at a certain level of analysis … gives rise to properties and patterns at another level" (61). This position has a couple of immediate implications for narratives.</p><p>First, if Castañeda is correct, then a narrative is a complex system of meaning-making that is decentralized. This view renders highly problematic the traditional view of authorship, which says that a story is the product of a single author, often a genius if the work is deemed of high value. In other words, a story is the work of a single, centralized agent, and typically, that agent gets all the praise or blame for the work. Castañeda provides an alternative, complex view of the emergence of complex systems such as stories, and though he is speaking almost exclusively of socioeconomic systems, I find his perspective useful in my own emerging narratology.</p><p>In his section about "Decentralized processes" (63-67), Castañeda addresses directly the issue of modern society's tendency to attribute the emergence of socioeconomic systems to centralized players, or great men — and they are still mostly men — who make things happen: Steve Jobs, Lennon-McCartney, Nelson Mandela, or Donald Trump. We progressive-minded people can celebrate that at last some women are being included in this conversation about movers and shakers, but that blinds us to the fact that we are still characterizing complex systems as the result of central agents of whatever gender or social status. Complexity science, however, demonstrates — convincingly to my mind — that complex systems emerge from the interactions of all the agents within a system with little or no centralized control.</p><p>But! we protest, Jobs, Lennon-McCartney, Mandela, and Trump did all those things, and certain socioeconomic and artistic systems — the effects of their work — can be traced back directly to those great minds and to their work in a clear cause-effect relationship. Can't it? Well, yes, it can. But as Castañeda notes this reductionist view of a single, simple cause-effect blinds us to the work of the complex system without which none of these truly powerful agents could have accomplished what they did. The problem is that even within a complex system of interacting agents, some agents gain more power and status than other agents, which focuses our attention on them, but this in no way cancels the overwhelming power of the system. Yes, Steve Jobs and his iPhone perturbed the socioeconomic systems of much of the world — certainly more than I ever will — but this does not cancel the fact that the socioeconomic systems perturbed him more or that those larger systems enabled all that he accomplished. As Castañeda says:</p><blockquote>The fact that theories of complexity emphasise the relevance of decentralised processes does not mean that all the agents of a system impact the observed macroscopic regularities in the same way. The decentralisation of these systems has to do with the interaction of a multiplicity of agents with potentially very diverse behaviours. For example, … the presence of absolutist monarchies and dictatorships does not rule out that historical processes and the construction of formal and informal institutions are the product of the interactions between agents and their mechanisms of adaptation to the environment. (63)</blockquote><p></p><p>Likewise then, the presence of Steve Jobs does not mean that the iPhone is directly attributable to him as the sole causal agent. This is too simple a view. Rather, the iPhone emerged from "the interaction of a multiplicity of agents with … very diverse behaviors." While focusing on Steve Jobs can help us learn much about the iPhone, it blinds us to the larger systemic forces that worked with and supported the brilliant efforts of Steve Jobs to change the world and make a billion bucks in the process. Yet, too many stories in the popular press about the iPhone make Jobs the sole protagonist, the hero, and they promote our human tendency to hero worship. To understand the iPhone, we must consider the complex system within which it emerged. Castañeda argues that this focus on a central agent is akin to our ancient tendency to see first the Earth and then the Sun as the center of the universe. Those two agents, of course, pulled harder on us and shined brighter and blinded us to the fact — only recently discovered in history — that we are not the center of the universe or the pinnacle of evolution. Our focus on a central, causal agent obscures our vision and truncates our understanding of the system in question, such as the iPhone.</p><p>Modern science and even many modern social movements such as the #metoo, the Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter plainly demonstrate the operations and character of complex systems, yet we are still dominated by a centralist mental scheme that makes more sense to us. We need a Jobs or Mandela or a Club of Rome to make sense of events. As Castañeda explains it:
</p><blockquote>At the end of the 20th century, the world experienced decentralising movements that emerged in different socioeconomic arenas. … In spite of this clear tendency in the contemporary world, Resnick (1997) maintains that the human being interprets his/her environment with a centralist mental scheme. In the field of academia, this vision is not innocuous, since it affects the way in which a large number of researchers explain social and natural phenomena. … This same centralist propensity explains why … the public in general – and some academics – assign the misfortune of economically backward countries to the designs of the powers ‘controlling’ the international economic order. (64-65)</blockquote>
<p></p><p>I think this centralist mental scheme still holds sway in most narratologies. We need a single agent to explain a text — a Mark Twain to account for <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>. In a rhizo narratology, Mark Twain is insufficient — necessary, but insufficient — as the sole source of <i>Huckleberry Finn</i>. Clearly, Twain is a primary source, but like the Sun, he can blind us to the fact that <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> has emerged from the complex interactions of countless agents in the 138 years since it was first published. Reading the novel today, for instance, must account for its presence in hundreds of classrooms across the United States and the interactions of all those students and teachers engaging the great American novel and the interactions of all those literary scholars who declare <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> to be the great American novel and those who disagree and the interactions of all those other story tellers who are trying not to echo <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> too closely. The text has quite gotten away from Mark Twain — if we can even claim that he ever had it — and has taken up its own life in a complex world that Mark Twain could have hardly imagined.</p><p>I think I will have to change the ways that I talk about narrative. For instance, I speak of Trump's incompetence in handling the pandemic, when I know that the American response to the pandemic emerged from the complex interactions of millions of agents, including Trump, but not limited to Trump. Trump, of course, is a prominent character in the American pandemic story, perhaps even a prominent author of that story, and it is convenient and familiar to speak of him as the central author or character, but it is misleading to do so. Our pandemic story emerged from the swarm, not from a central character or author.</p><p>This does not mean that we cannot learn something about the pandemic by looking closely at the words and actions of Donald Trump. We can. But it does mean that if we look only, or even primarily, at Trump, then we will not understand the pandemic narrative. Almost all of the story came from the swarm. Trump channeled that story, giving it focus and prominence by association with his already prominent status in America. He did not craft that narrative alone. At most, I might say that Trump channeled the pandemic story as well as the stolen-election story to his own ends, but those stories would have been stillborn if not for all the other systems that engaged the stories positively, negatively, or neutrally. We all wrote those stories.</p><p>I'm thinking now that Mark Twain did not craft the <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> narrative alone and that to frame the novel that way is ultimately misleading even though it provides scholars and general readers some useful focus and insight. It also helps explain certain socioeconomic aspects of the novel. Society knows who to credit with fame and money or who to blame and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/banned-adventures-huckleberry-finn/" target="_blank">ban</a>: Mark Twain. As Castañeda explains, our Western culture is trapped in its centralist mental scheme. We want authors and protagonists. As Serres explains in his book <i><a href="https://www.press.umich.edu/14807/genesis" target="_blank">Genesis</a></i>, we do not like the swarm. We don't know how to count or account for the swarm.</p><p>Little clarifies this centralist tendency more than the #metoo narrative which emerged on social media — mostly Twitter — in 2017, catalyzed by a tweet from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement" target="_blank">Alyssa Milano</a>. Millions of women worldwide engaged the narrative over the next year, swarm writing a narrative about the abuse of women by men. Popular stories about #metoo almost always focused on Milano as the <i>author</i> or at least the catalyst for #metoo, and when someone discovered that activist Tarana Burke had used the term, if not the hashtag, on MySpace in 2006, then public media scrambled to make sure that Burke got the credit, or blame. I'm insisting that neither Burke nor Milano wrote the #metoo narrative. Rather, millions of women wrote it, but we don't really know how to speak of that. What do we call all those nameless, unknown people? It's much easier to speak of the well-known Milano or the woke Burke as the true author of #metoo, when they are not.</p><p>I am not dismissing or denigrating the roles of Milano or Burke. Both were prominent agents in the #metoo narrative, and we can truly learn something about #metoo by examining them closely. However, if we ignore the overwhelming contribution of the swarm, then we misunderstand the narrative. Had those millions of women not engaged Milano's original tweet, then I would not be discussing the #metoo narrative, Milano, or Burke. Neither would anyone else — at least, not in this context.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-16138450935188563022021-12-01T09:30:00.000-05:002021-12-01T10:44:20.209-05:00The Trump Stories: Sketching a Rhizo Narratology<p>So it's time for me to start defining narratology in a way that allows me to approach the issues I have with the stories about and by Donald Trump and with the people who share and believe those stories. I think I can benefit from the narrative theories of Herman, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Robinson, and Warhol, but I also think those theories are too restrictive.</p><p>For instance, they all focus on literary narratives, even the ones that recognize non-fictional narratives. Phelan and Rabinowitz use Mark Twain's <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i> (1884) to explore their rhetorical narratology, Warhol uses Jane Austen's <i>Persuasion</i> (1817) to explore feminist narratology, David Herman uses Ian McEwan's <i>On Chesil Beach</i> (2007) to explore mind-oriented narratology, and Brian Richardson uses Salman Rushdie's <i>Midnight's Children</i> (1981) for anti-mimetic narratology. Novels, all. Trump's stories, on the other hand, are hardly literary narratives, and whether or not they are fiction is problematic, whereas these four novels are clearly works of imaginative fiction. Yet, I need ways to discuss the Trump narratives — those about him and those by him, often the same.</p><p>I begin by recognizing narratives as complex systems, and one of the most important things I've learned about complex systems is that they are sensitive to initial conditions. Thus, I'm likely to end up in a different place with a different view by beginning with a theoretical attitude drawn less from literary theory and more from General Systems Theory, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence, as Rika Preiser says in her dissertation <a href="https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/71629" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Problem of Complexity: Re-Thinking the Role of Critique</a> (2012). I've also read much from the harder sciences which have developed a complexity paradigm that <a href="http://www.cogprints.org/5217/1/Morin.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Edgar Morin</a> calls <i>restricted complexity</i>, distinguished from what calls <i>general complexity</i>, or <i>critical complexity</i> as Paul Cilliers terms it. Though restricted complexity has much to say about complex systems, its insistence that even complex phenomena can be reduced to number and regular rules chafes me. Like Morin, Cilliers, and Preiser, I think that complex systems such as narratives "ultimately cannot be measured and calculated but remain in principle too complex to model in theoretical equations" (<a href="https://blog.keithwhamon.net/2020/11/the-problem-of-complexity-definition.html" target="_blank">"The Problem of Complexity: Definition and Knowledge"</a>). I don't think the Trump narratives that I want to study are reducible to number and regular rules, but even if they are, I don't have the mathematical background to do it. I'm aware that some wonderful work is being done in the digital humanities, and if someone manages to measure and calculate narrative in a mathematical fashion, then I am quite willing to consider their insights.</p><p>I'm not alarmed at starting from the science side of the Science/Humanities divide. In her books <i>The Cosmic Web:
Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century</i> (1984) and <i>Chaos Bound:
Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science</i> (1990), N. Katherine Hayles convinces me that the divide between science and humanities, while real, is perhaps not so great as C. P. Snow suggests. In the "Preface" to <i>Chaos Bound</i>, Hayles asks why dissimilar disciplines "should nevertheless focus on similar kinds of problems about the same time and base their formulations on isomorphic assumptions" (xi). She asserts that it's because people are of an age, whether scientists or humanists, and that they tend to be perplexed and intrigued by the issues of the age. She says:
</p><blockquote>Different disciplines are drawn to similar problems because the concerns underlying them are highly charged within a prevailing cultural context. Moreover, different disciplines base the theories they construct on similar presuppositions because these are the assumptions that guide the constitution of knowledge in a given episteme. This position implies, of course, that scientific theories and models are culturally conditioned, partaking of and rooted in assumptions that can be found at multiple sites throughout the culture.</blockquote><p>This rings true to me, and I think that complexity guides "the constitution of knowledge" in our current episteme however unevenly. Hayles, then, emboldens me to borrow useful insights from whomever in whatever discipline. I will certainly borrow heavily from Hayles. Of course, as complexity studies have demonstrated, a shared starting point does not necessarily mean a shared ending point, and the sciences and humanities can still arrive at quite different insights pursuing the same issues in the same complex systems.</p><p>Working within a framework of general complexity suggests that I view narratives as complex systems, complex phenomena, but what does that mean? Preiser says that all complexity theories use an economy of concepts to approach complex phenomena in states of non-equilibrium that display characteristics of non-linearity, self organisation, and emergence and behave in a manner in which time and energy expenditure is irreversible (41). This is a mouthful and requires some unpacking. First, it means that I assume narratives take in and expend energy and information to change over time and almost always in ways that are not easily modeled and predicted. They exist in a state of non-equilibrium until death, and even death seems to be a notable transition stage into different kinds of change and non-equilibrium. The Trump narratives are early in their life cycle, so it's rather easy to trace the changes and developments in them. Like most infants, they are energetic and noisy, but I find it easy to imagine that eventually they, too, will die, but for me that means mostly that they will be forgotten as an individual entity while they continue to echo through the infosphere — much as the plays of Shakespeare continue to echo even though most people can no longer connect the echoes to the Bard.</p><p>Of course, everything in life changes, and that change requires time, space, energy, and information. I agree with Kurt A. Richardson that complexity is "reality without the simplifying assumptions" (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265063687_Complex_Systems_Thinking_and_Its_Implications_for_Policy_Analysis" target="_blank">"Complex Systems Thinking and Its Implications for Policy Analysis"</a> 190). So if everything is a complex system, then why bother claiming that narratives are complex systems? Because all models of reality, including models of narrative, include simplifying assumptions, as I have learned from Paul Cilliers (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291337692_Introduction_to_Critical_Complexity_Collected_Essays_by_Paul_Cilliers" target="_blank">"Why We Cannot Know Complex Things Completely"</a>). Any model of narrative, such as the ones from Herman, Phelan, Rabinowitz, Robinson, and Warhol, include simplifying assumptions that leave out something with no way of determining ahead of time if that something omitted is critically important to grasping and understanding the actual narrative. My own model of narrative will leave out something, and I'm almost certain to learn later that it was important. The only narratology that completely encompasses a narrative is the narrative itself. Our models of the narrative make the narrative handy but at the cost of leaving something out. It's like a picture of Yellowstone's Old Faithful. It's a great model that you can keep in your phone, travel home with, and then show your friends, but it leaves something out. Actually, it leaves out almost everything else (it certainly leaves out the hour plus intervals between eruptions) and includes distortions that are not obvious until the model fails us. All models do that.</p><p>This mention of modelling and models brings me to a related claim that I make: narratives are themselves models of reality. They are knowledge systems. As such, they always include simplifying assumptions about reality, omitting important details and including distortions of reality. Always and all: my stories, your stories, and their stories. I believe with Walter Fisher that narrative is one of the core features — if not <i>the</i> core feature — of human language and culture. I don't know if story came before language, or language before story, or if they co-emerged in the struggles of primitive humanity to make its way in the world, but I'm convinced that the urge of a group of early hominids to tell a story about where they had come from and where they might go next — in other words, to make sense of their world and their place in it — that narrative kernel led to the emergence of humanity as we know it. Language and story give us one of our most reliable connections to reality. Story shapes our worlds and informs us in turn. A two-edged sword, story enables the world and limits the world. Story is the ground of knowledge. However, I also believe as Fisher insists that story is ontological, not just epistemological. Becoming human requires story. Knowing humans requires another story. I'll try to explain later, if I can, but for now, I can insist that exploring the Trump narratives should lead me eventually to the heart of being human and knowing humanity, of being myself and knowing myself. Like all complexity theorists, I'm in the thick of it.</p><p>But back to Prieser's claim about complexity science: complexity theorists use an economy of concepts. By this I mean that I will not use a single concept such as rhetoric or feminism to approach narrative, but I'll use whatever concepts, tools, and processes I can find that will help me lift the Trump narratives into the light of day. Feminism and rhetoric, of course, have something to say about the Trump narratives, but the complexity of those narratives requires more than one tool, one approach, one meta-position. A complex system requires a complex approach. Given that complex systems are composed of complex systems and themselves compose other complex systems, any complex system is ultimately connected to everything else, and the diligent researcher can trace flows of energy, information, matter, and organization within and without the target system to all other systems. To do the Trump narratives justice, then, I would have to read and know everything. I can't do that, of course, so I accept up front that I cannot do the narratives complete justice. I must be humble, and shine what light I can from as many angles as possible, trusting that some useful insights will emerge.</p><p>Preiser lists five characteristics of complex phenomena that distinguish those phenomena from the simple phenomena of the traditional Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm. I have other lists with different numbers of characteristics of complexity, but these five will suffice for a large, beginning sketch of a rhizo narratology, I think.</p><p>First, narratives are <b>open</b> to their environments. While this is perhaps easy to see in the interactions between Trump stories and Trump believers and doubters, this openness can be more obscure in traditional literary narratives such as <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> which we encounter in books with covers that can, in fact, be closed and put away on the shelf with their definitive texts that will not change before we again open the book. The words in <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> can appear closed and finished. Those narratives can seem closed, especially when compared to modern narratives composed on electronic media such as Twitter, but they are not. Indeed, all narratives, so long as they live and circulate, continue to exchange energy, matter, information, and organization with their environments so that determining where the narrative ends and the environment begins is difficult. According to Cilliers, clearly defining the boundary of a complex system is problematic and is often "a function of the activity of the system itself, and a product of the strategy of description involved". Any narrative, then, is an expression not only of its own internal resources (genre, diction, narrator, plot, characters, etc.) but also of the language, the readers, and the knowledge, social, and technological systems within which it circulates. And more. Any living narrative interacts with its environment and expresses itself anew through those engagements and interactions. <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> is not the same narrative for Nineteenth century mostly white Americans that it is for Twenty-first century mixed Americans. Black Lives Matter is now part of the energy of the narrative. Huck's use of the term <i>nigger</i> just doesn't mean the same today as it did then. It doesn't mean the same thing as it means in Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i>.</p><p>Second, narratives are not single things, but a <b>complexus</b> of dynamically interacting parts, which are themselves each a complexus, and the narrative as a coherent, functioning entity is an interacting part in a larger complexus. Narratives such as the Trump stories are constituted relationally both inside and out, and the relations are dynamic, manifold, and nonlinear. The meaning of a narrative, then, is not in the narrative itself but in the relationships among all the parts both within and without the narrative, just as the color red is not an inherent feature of an apple, but is the emergent phenomenon of the interacting relationships among apple, light, eye, brain, and more. If any of those elements shift, then the red shifts. If the light fades, so does the color. If the viewer is color blind, then the apple is — in fact — a shade of gray. After #MeToo, the meaning of the interactions between Huck and Aunt Polly and the Widow Douglas changes. Different energy and information is feeding into the narrative, and in response, the narrative expresses different meanings. The narrative becomes something else.</p><p>Third, narratives are comprised of a number of <b>heterogeneous</b> components with multiple, dynamic pathways among them that create rich and diverse interactions which become too complex to calculate or to manage. Moreover, the elements and their interrelationships change over time and scale. <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> has no standard, monolithic reader. It doesn't even have a monolithic writer. Sam Clemens is not Mark Twain is not Huck Finn; rather, all take turns at telling the story, and they all seem to be aware of each other, as Huck makes clear in the very beginning:</p><blockquote>You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of <i>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer</i>; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.</blockquote><p></p><p>And it's clear through most any reading that each of these fellows is jostling with the others to have his say, and none of them see the story in quite the same way. You can read <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> without thinking much about the different narrators, but any reading is enriched by a sensitivity to the tensions among the various narrators. Add the millions of readers since the book was published in 1884 and the different sensibilities each brought to the reading, and we begin to see the complexity of the relationships that create this particular narrative. Add the different languages used in the book: 19th century realism, river talk, slave talk, folksy humor, and then add the various translations of the book over the past 130 years. Now consider the various formats of the book from Clemens' original handwritten manuscript through 19th century printing presses to movies, comic books, and Kindle and <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/7100/pg7100.txt" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg</a>. We can consider more components still, but this is sufficient to see how the narrative is smearing across culture like the rhizome that it is. As anyone who has ever weeded a garden can attest, tracing a rhizome is damned near impossible. The Trump stories, of course, are even more complex than <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> as they involve more narrators, more readers, social media, and rich language resources. That's the complexity I intend to explore.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Fourth, a narrative always means more than the sum of its parts, to borrow an old phrase. In more precise terms, narratives manifest <b>emergent properties</b> that can be understood only in terms of the organizational structure of the system and not simply in the properties of the components. Emergent phenomena depend on and yet are independent of constituent parts. For instance, you can understand all the words in <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> and still not understand the novel. Though they had some great insights, the new critics were wrong: no narrative contains within itself all that is needed to understand it and to explain it. There are no inherent properties of a narrative, only emergent properties. (I'm not sure I actually believe this, but I think that trying to support such an absolute statement will take me in directions I want to go, so let's play with it. No harm, no foul.)</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"></p><p style="text-align: left;">These emergent phenomena suggest certain characteristics of any complex system such as narratives, and Preiser lists five characteristics of emergence that I want to consider. The first feature of emergence is <b>radical novelty</b>, which suggests that narratives are neither predictable nor deducible from micro level components such as words and sentences, which are necessary but insufficient for understanding stories. Most of Trump's words and sentences are common, simple, and easily understood, <i>covfefe</i> notwithstanding, but we must look for the connections among them and to the environment in which they are expressed to understand their meaning as a narrative. Words are something like DNA: the basic vocabulary is necessary for expressing an emerging organism such as myself, but it is not sufficient for explaining a life such as mine. My life has features that emerge from the dynamic unpacking of my own DNA, but are not deducible from that DNA — just as my thoughts are not deducible from the firing of any given neuron or group of neurons. As it happens, it's these emergent features — not the DNA — that mostly characterize me both to myself and to others. As far as I know, only one lab has ever had the privilege of looking closely at my DNA.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The emergent properties of narratives are <b>coherent</b>. They maintain their identity and meaning over time, even though that meaning can and does evolve. We can, then, expect and talk about coherence and identity in the Trump narratives, knowing full well that they will change over time. Eventually, of course, we can trace the evolution of any narrative, but even now this early in, we can see the shifts in Trumpian narratives from the campaign of 2015 to the final days of his administration in early 2021. Narratives, then, are coherent in the same way that I am coherent from my youth to my old age: recognizable, but changed. <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> has the same coherence.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The emergent properties of narratives are <b>multi-scalar</b>, occuring at a macro level compared to their micro level components such as words and sentences, or in Trump's particular case, in tweets. It's key, however, to keep in mind that the Trump narratives also function as micro level components within larger systems such as the Twitterverse and American political discourse. Words function at both the macro level of letters and the micro level of sentences. Any narrative itself functions at the micro level of its encompassing field of discourse. Both micro and macro levels have implications for the levels above and below. All scales of a narrative perturb and are perturbed by all the other scales. Narratives operate through both upward/downward, or inward/outward, causation. Words shape the meaning of a sentence, and the sentence in turn shapes the meanings of the words, and both words and sentences shape and are shaped by the language and knowledge systems, sociopolitical systems, technological systems, and other systems within which they are expressed. Tracking all the flows of forces across and through the Trump narratives is impossible, but we will catch some traces like arcs in the Large Hadron Collider.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The emergent properties of narratives have a <b>life arc</b>. They are not a priori wholes but appear gradually as a complex system that dynamically develops over time. Of course, we often perceive a narrative as a whole especially when it is presented to us in a single place and time, but we know that this is deceptive. We see a story whole as we see a mountain whole, lifting high, trimmed in forests and capped with snow. But we know enough geology now to know that the mountain did not arrive whole; rather, it has a story. Like a mountain, each story has a story. A narrative has a life, and whatever we say about the narrative must keep this life trajectory in mind.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Finally, Preiser says that the emergent phenomena of complex systems such as narratives are <b>ostensive</b>, recognized in terms of their presentation, purpose, discernable structures, and meaningful behavior. This is, of course, the scale at which most of us engage a story. It's what we first learn as story before we even know it's a story. It's that experience of snuggling in closer to mommy as she tells us things we can't understand but we like the way she's saying it and holding us. Stories, of course, get more sophisticated than that, but I don't know that they get any better. The ostensive parts of the story are like the flowers in a garden — the reason we look, or listen — but it's the rhizomatic flows of light and minerals and other plants at work underneath, through the yard, and up to the blue sky that makes the magic happen.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The fifth and last characteristic of complex systems that Preiser mentions is <b>self-organization</b>. Narratives such as the Trump stories or <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> are able to evolve new structures and relationships in order to cope better with their changing environments. This ability to self-organize is perhaps easiest to see in the struggle of the author — say, Trump or Twain — to craft a story that achieves whatever sociopolitical or artistic goals the author has, but eventually, the story gets away from the author and takes on a life of its own. Once released into the wild, the story must self-organize or die. Like other living organisms, the DNA, or the words, of a narrative may not change after parturition or publication, but the organism itself will continue to change as it struggles to fit within its environment. The more the environment changes, the more the narrative changes.</p><p style="text-align: left;">A complexity approach to narrative, then, is first a problem of observing and studying narratives that themselves have incalculable interrelationships and interactions and unpredictable properties. Secondly, a complexity approach is problematic in that I can observe only from the inside as part of the narrative. I have no objective, outside, meta point of view, but only a subjective, inside point of view that affects — often non-trivially — the narratives I'm observing and studying. Finally, complexity is not so much a theory as a pilot notion, one as Preiser says "that allows for an integrative theoretical approach that remains critical of the scientific assumptions that emerge from studying complex phenomena ... exposes the limits of each discipline and ... [problematizes] the status of knowledge and knowledge generating practices" (75). I hope to shine some light inside the Trump narratives to illuminate them. I am not intending to define them from the outside.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-41716963758648600072021-10-30T15:34:00.004-04:002021-10-30T15:34:49.246-04:00The Trump Stories: An Antimimetic, Unnatural, and Postmodern Narratology<p>The last of the four approaches to narrative discussed in <i>Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates</i> (2012) is the antimimetic approach of Brian Richardson, who focuses on the ways that narratives do or do not conform to the usual expectations of representation. As he says:</p><blockquote>… nearly every narrative represents some portion of the world we inhabit in one way or another. … That manner of representation may be conventional or unconventional, stylized or straightforward, unmarked or outrageous, clumsy or artistic; it is always constructed. Mimetic narratives typically try to conceal their constructedness and appear to resemble nonfictional narratives, while antimimetic narratives flaunt their artificiality and break the ontological boundaries that mimetic works so carefully preserve. (p. 20)</blockquote><p></p><p>In broad strokes, then, narratives, whether fictional or factual, are always constructed (certainly by authors — I'm not sure if Richardson considers co-construction by the audience), and while most narratives try to hide or ignore that construction, some narratives play with the details of construction. This distinction holds even for clearly fanciful narratives: on the mimetic hand, <i>Star Wars</i> tries to hide the scaffolding for its outrageous characters, props, and plot lines, whereas the antimimetic <i>Spaceballs</i> reveals the scaffolding, largely to mock it.</p><p>Fictional narratives have more flexibility in this respect as factual narratives are usually held to higher standards. Even when a fictional narrative uses a historical event, readers are usually more tolerant of factual inaccuracies — at worst, considering it sloppy writing; at best, creative license. Not so with Trump's tales of the stolen election. Those of us who do not believe that the story matches the facts probably believe that Trump and his followers are at best delusional and at worst liars and cheats. Richardson says that he is dealing primarily with fictional narratives. Still, I think I can make use of this rather focused approach. Again, it will not by itself provide me the resources to discuss all the issues that I want, but it should give me some tools to explore the Trump stories.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-77182052902016948032021-10-29T12:40:00.000-04:002021-10-29T12:40:05.810-04:00The Trump Stories: A Mind-Oriented Narratology<p>Mind-oriented narrative theory focuses on how the human mind uses narrative to create worlds that humans can imaginatively enter and, presumably, leave. David Herman says that he focuses on "narrative worldmaking as a central heuristic framework" and that this worldmaking "encompasses the referential dimension of narrative, its capacity to evoke worlds in which interpreters can, with more or less ease or difficulty, take up imaginative residence" (<i>Narrative Theory</i> 14). Herman supports his focus with the insistence that worldmaking is the root function of stories and the correct starting point for any critique of a story. I agree with him. I will have to read more of his narratology to make sure I understand what he is saying, but what I understand now makes sense to me and resonates with the questions I have about those people who believe in the stories of Donald Trump. They so clearly live in a different world than I do, and I want to understand that world.</p><p>Herman is interested in "how storytellers, using many different kinds of symbol systems (written or spoken language, static or moving images, word-image combinations, etc.), prompt interpreters to engage in the process of co-creating narrative worlds" (15). I share this interest. I want to know how Donald Trump (storyteller) used Twitter and other social media to prompt his followers (interpreters) to help him create a narrative about how the Democrats stole the election from him and them. Like Herman, I want to understand the protocols and practices necessary for this kind of worldmaking. Herman claims that understanding these protocols requires closer engagement with the sciences of the mind.</p><p>Herman relies on his reading of Wittgenstein to contend that the protocols and practices of our various symbol systems frame our understanding of the world — they inform and structure our worldmaking. This both enables and limits the worlds that we can create and inhabit. I would say it like this: once we adopt a certain conversation space, then the DNA of that space unpacks in certain ways, often rich with variation, but it won't unpack in other ways. Once you inherit human DNA, you can develop (if you develop at all) in a rich variety of ways, but you will not develop as a dog or a carrot or an automobile. Those conversations are not available to the human DNA. One of the wonderful riches of language is that we are able to adopt many different conversations — though it does require some effort, often extreme effort, to shift from one conversational space to another.</p><p>And this brings me to another point about Herman's approach that I like: he references the existence of multiple narratives and the interactions among them. He says:</p><blockquote>Narratives do not merely evoke worlds but also intervene in a field of discourses, a range of representational strategies, a constellation of ways of seeing—and sometimes a set of competing narratives, as in a courtroom trial, a political campaign, or a family dispute. (p. 17)</blockquote><p>This addresses an important issue for me: the ecosystem of any narrative, which always emerges and finds its place within a rich ecosystem of interacting knowledge systems. Thus, I can't understand Trump's narratives without also understanding the fertile ground in which they could take root and grow. As with any complex system, I need to be able to critique both the internal DNA of the system and the ecosystem within which that DNA can unpack and express itself. Focusing merely on the narrative itself can be illuminating, but eventually it obscures more than it clarifies, I think.</p><p>I like the introduction to Herman's thinking about narrative and mind, and I think I agree with his assumption that understanding the mind can help us understand narrative, and vice versa. As he says in conclusion: "the study of narrative worldmaking can inform, and not just be informed by, understandings of the mind" (p. 18). However, there is something teasing me about extending narrative beyond mind, but I haven't worked that out yet.</p><p>Next, I'll look at the antimimetic narratology of Brian Richardson.</p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-88554497303695572972021-10-26T13:26:00.001-04:002021-10-26T13:32:17.121-04:00The Trump Stories: A Feminist Narratology<p>Feminism forms the basis for Robyn Warhol's presentation of the second approach to narratology in <i>Narrative Theory</i> (2012) by Herman, et al. Warhol begins with a simple enough definition of feminism: "the conviction that dominant culture and society are organized to the disadvantage of everyone who does not fit a white, masculine, middle- or upper-class, Euro-American, not-yet-disabled, heterosexual norm" (<i>Narrative Theory</i> 9). She elaborates feminism with <i>intersectionality</i> "because white privilege, class privilege, heteronormativity, and other positions of relative power complicate hierarchies of gender" (9). </p><p>Feminist narrative theory, then, is a corrective to traditional critical approaches which "developed in a pointedly masculinist academic culture, based on theories developed by men who grounded their models in the study of male-written texts" (9). From its inception then and at its core, feminist narrative theory (Warhol objects to the term <i>narratology</i> which is too "cut off from questions of history and context") has been particularly sensitive to the position of the critic towards the work and to the relations between the author and reader — in other words, to social, political, economic, and intellectual contexts of the narrative. Warhol sees feminist narrative theory playing well with the rhetorical narratology of Phelan and Rabinowitz and with the antimimetic theory of those such as Brian Richardson. I, too, like the insistence of feminist narrative theory to place the narrative within a rich context of information, organization, material, and energy flows and at the nexus of social, political, economic, and intellectual relationships. I also like that feminist narrative theory places the critic within the narrative, always conscious of and accountable for her critical position. Warhol finds the least overlap with the mind-oriented theory of David Herman, which she considers too <i>essentialist</i> in its orientation.</p><p>As Warhol defines feminist narrative theory, then, it is primarily distinguished from other narrative theories by placing "at the center of the inquiry … gender, sexuality, class, or other politically significant and historically grounded differences" (11). In contrast, I place complexity theory at the center of my critique of narratives. Complexity theory, of course, includes the resources and insights of feminist theory, but does not limit itself to those issues.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-80955271818504586852021-10-25T07:50:00.000-04:002021-10-25T07:50:17.743-04:00The Trump Stories: A Rhetorical Narratology<p>I've become frustrated with my study of Trump stories, and I realize that I need a working narrative theory, a narratology. Fortunately, I've been reading <i>Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates</i> (2012) by David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol, all of Ohio State University. So I intend to work through their book and work through my own narratology that will help me analyze Trump's stories more systematically.</p><p>However, I've also been reading and writing about complexity over the last 10 years, so I aim to develop a complex narratology, or a rhizo-narratology. Much of the writing in this blog provides me with a rather rich field of ideas that can be worked into a coherent approach to narrative based on complexity theory. We'll see.</p><p>Herman, et al. explore four main approaches to narrative: rhetorical, feminist, mind-oriented, and antimimetic — their labels. All of them afford useful ways into a narrative and reliable grounds for critique. However, I think I have something to add to this conversation, primarily because of all the complexity theory that I've been reading. I'll position my own thinking about narratives against the positions outlined in this book, and I'll start with the rhetorical approach of Phelan and Rabinowitz.</p><p>Phelan and Rabinowitz define narrative as: "somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something" (3). They note that each of these propositions about narrative merits significant development, which they provide in due course, but this definition gives us the skeleton of their approach to narrative. Using a Donald Trump tweet, I can rephrase their definition this way: Donald Trump tweeted his followers on January 6, 2021, in hopes of stalling or even undermining the certification of the 2020 Presidential election by Congress, the narrative that Vice-President Mike Pence could stop the steal of the election by Democrats and give the election to Trump. The full tweet is below:</p><blockquote>January 6, 2021
06:00:50 If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency. Many States want to decertify the mistake they made in certifying incorrect & even fraudulent numbers in a process NOT approved by their State Legislatures (which it must be). Mike can send it back!
Retweets: 66961
Favorites: 289835 ("<a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-january-6-2021" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tweets of January 6, 2021</a>")</blockquote><p>Of course, this is not the only tweet from Trump on this day. According to UC Santa Barbara's site <i>The American Presidency Project</i>, Trump tweeted 25 times that day starting at 2:45 am and ending at 11:01 pm. All of the tweets were about the stolen election and, thus, could be joined into a single narrative arc, but this one tweet is concise and to the point, making it convenient for this post.</p><p>Phelan and Rabinowitz' definition of narrative is barebones, and they immediately try to flesh it out by listing 6 principles that support their definition:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Narrative is a <b>purposive event</b>, "a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience" (p. 3). <i>Purposive</i> means that they are interested in how larger purposes shape a narrative and its various elements. <i>Multidimensional</i> means that they are interested in not just the meaning of a narrative but the experience of it, its affective, ethical, and aesthetic effects and the interactions among those effects. I see here a pathway to my own thinking about rhizo-narrative: an ecological approach that involves any critique of narrative in first situating the narrative in its ecosystem and tracing the flows of energy and information from the system into the narrative and back out and tracing the perturbations between and within the narrative and its ecosystem.</li><li>Rhetorical narratology assumes an <b><i>a posteriori</i> </b>rather than an <i>a priori</i> stance, not preselecting "for analysis particular issues such as gender or cognition or particular kinds of narratives such as those deploying antimimetic elements of story" (p. 5). I appreciate the openness of Phelan and Rabinowitz to all forms of narrative, but I wonder if they, too, by their very definition are preselecting what they consider as narrative. I think I can make a case for a soccer match underway <i>in situ</i> as a narrative, but I have the feeling that Phelan and Rabinowitz would limit narrative to the story I tell my friends later, after the game itself is played out, about the amazing victory or crushing defeat. In terms of my Trump discussion, I can consider the unfolding events of January 6, 2021, as a narrative as they are happening; whereas Phelan and Rabinowitz may consider as narrative only the retelling of those events by a news reporter to her television audience at a later time, or even at the same time. Of course, I am running the risk of defining everything as a narrative, but at the moment, I'm quite comfortable with that risk. It's story, all the way down.</li><li>Rhetorical narratology assumes a <b>feedback loop</b> "among authorial agency, textual phenomena (including intertextual relations), and reader response" (p. 5). This feedback loop works very well for rhizo-narratology, though I think Phelan and Rabinowitz limit it too much, tracing only those feedback loops among the author, the text, and the reader. I want to expand to include the entire ecosystem within which the narrative unfolds and all the flows that inform and sustain the narrative.</li><li>Rhetorical narratology is keenly interested in the <b>progression</b> of a narrative from some beginning point, through various other points, to some ending point. Understanding the progression of a narrative is key to understanding its design and its purpose. This morphological approach also works well for rhizo-narratology as it introduces time into the understanding of form. The form of a narrative is not a static structure — fixed and done by an author or a printing press, but an unpacking of DNA over time in different environments leading to different expressions and meanings, to different stories. As the events of January 6, 2021, unfolded in Washington and on television, different participants and different viewers were seeing different stories with different meanings. Of course, the narrative form of the events that day are still not fixed but continue to unfold as its DNA unpacks in different contexts for different purposes. The DNA of <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> (the work that Phelan and Rabinowitz use in their discussion) also continues to unfold, as the juxtaposition of the Black Lives Matter narrative highlights. Again, to my mind, Phelan and Rabinowitz limit the dynamics in this progression to the author, the audience, and the text. I think this is too narrow for my critique of the Trump narrative.</li><li>Rhetorical narratology assumes three different ways for a critic to think of audiences: the <b>actual audience</b> of a given narrative in a given event, the <b>authorial audience</b> that the author imagines addressing, and the <b>narrative audience</b> that the narrator addresses in the narrative. These different audiences can overlap, but often do not, and they are useful for rhizo-narratology, I think. To my mind, this fragmenting into various audiences highlights the complex nature of every element within a complex system. It's complexity, all the way down.</li><li>Finally, audiences engage narratives in three broad ways:</li><ol><li><b>mimetic</b>: "interests in the characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own" (p. 7),</li><li><b>thematic</b>: "readers’ interests in the ideational function of the characters and in the cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by the narrative" (p. 7), and</li><li><b>synthetic</b>: "interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger narrative as artificial constructs, interests that link up with our aesthetic judgments" (p. 7).<br />Audiences tend to judge narratives by how well they ring true to the audience, deal with relevant issues or make the issues relevant to the audience, and how well they present to the audience. In short, most audiences want stories that are true, relevant, and well told.</li></ol></ol><p style="text-align: left;">Phelan and Rabinowitz's definition of narrative is useful as far as it goes, but I can already see points at which it constrains me uncomfortably. My first objection is that it appears to define narrative from the outside-in from the traditional objective position. It is as if they are standing outside the narrative situation looking in on it from some meta position that I don't think exists. Once we engage a narrative, then we have no way of removing ourselves from the narrative — no more than does the somebody telling or the somebody listening or the somebody or something being narrated. We become as much a part of the narrative as are those other agents that Phelan and Rabinowitz mention. We don't have a privileged position apart from and above the narrative from which to analyze and assess the narrative. I need a definition of narrative that involves me from the beginning so that I analyze the narrative from the inside. This is a particularly crucial point when studying the Trump stories as I am not an objective, impartial analyst with a clipboard and white coat, and even if I were, I still would have to account for the limitations and peculiarities — the biases — of that positioning within the narrative's unpacking. It's positions, all the way down.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Next, I'll look at feminist narratology.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-74127868837980614342021-04-29T10:21:00.002-04:002021-04-30T08:46:25.055-04:00Trumpism and Me<p>I have more to say about how to situate myself within Trumpism. My first tendency is to explain how I am not a part of that ecosystem, to deny it, but I have to remember that I am engaged with Trumpism whether I like it or not. My sense of identity may matter, but it does not remove me from Trumpism. My beloved friends and family are Trumpers, and much of my country is Trumpist. If I look wider, then I see that much of the world is Trumpist. I'm engaged. So how do I situate myself within this place?</p><p>I can start with Bill.</p><p>Bill and I were childhood friends. We went to the same school and the same church in Buford, Georgia — some thirty-five miles northeast of and, in the mid-60s, distinct from Atlanta, with a rural, small town feel. Buford was conservative and voted Dixie Democrat, a political allegiance seriously challenged by the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Anyway, Bill and I played together. We had sleepovers. Life was safe and comfortable where kids could stay outside and play past dark and no one worried much. Buford coddled its young — to the point that we were allowed at 14 and 15 years of age to illegally own and operate scooters and motorcycles on Buford streets, at least until several accidents drove some common sense into the city elders' heads.</p><p>Then in January, 1967, during my tenth grade of school, my family relocated from Buford to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I lost contact with most of my Buford friends, including Bill. My new high school was all sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and the University of New Mexico downtown was a hotbed of anti-war enthusiasm that proselytized the lower schools heavily. I was entranced. I wore my hair as long as my parents would let me. My new best friend Kerry introduced me to poetry and philosophy, and I met Anna at my school and Julie from the next school over. I still remember standing in our backyard in the Summer of 1967, a transistor radio to my ear, hearing the Beatles' "A Day In the Life" for the first time. Church could not compete.</p><p>At the end of high school, I left for a short stint in a commune near Taos, while over in Buford, Bill left for a long stint in Viet Nam. Our life trajectories had split.</p><p>I didn't see Bill again until Fall, 2019, at the fiftieth reunion of the Buford High School Class of 1969. I was living in Georgia again, and the organizers kindly included me even though I had graduated from a school 1,400 miles and a universe away. The gathering was not at all political, but it was clear to me that politically I was out of sync with my old classmates. Still, I enthusiastically swapped emails and befriended people on Facebook, and I learned that Bill had fought in Viet Nam, had a career with the US Postal Service, had married and had sons, then a few years ago had lost his wife to cancer, and now had a new girlfriend. He had also abandoned our pentecostal heritage and worshipped now as a Catholic.</p><p>Bill and I especially promised to get together soon, but the pandemic intervened, so we communicated over Facebook, but it didn't go so well. I quickly learned that most of the people in Bill's Facebook circle were enthusiastic Trumpists, and I made some injudicious comments during one exchange that inflamed everyone's tempers, including Bill's. I shouldn't have said what I did on Facebook — I've never seen a political challenge go well on social platforms — and I had to scramble to repair relationships and forestall a series of unfriendings.</p><p>Still, the incident highlighted the core issue for me. Bill and I had started life in very similar situations and we were ending in similar places, yet our paths had been very different, and now despite our shared interest in being friends, we found our different views confusing and challenging to each of us. I could say, of course, that we had different DNA and different life experiences so that both nature and nurture led us to different political views, but that explanation seems way too glib and dismissive to me. I think something more interesting and human is at work, and I want to explore that deeper movement.</p><p>I've come to believe that humans create or adopt stories by which they try to explain and live their lives. As I've said in a <a href="https://blog.keithwhamon.net/2020/09/the-narrative-paradigm-of-walter-fisher.html" target="_blank">previous post</a>, I accept Walter Fisher's claim that <i>homo narrans</i> is one of the root metaphors for humanity. We create, share, and live by stories, and our narratives are at the core of what we are and describe us just as our muscular, circulatory, and neuronal systems do. I think that these narrative structures are embedded in us and, thus, are only partially explicit. Mostly they are implicit, but they form the frames through which we see life and the channels by which we try to live our lives. Forming stories is what maturation and enculturation are all about. We learn stories and live those stories. Most stories are shared within some group that we identify with, but most of us have a few stories peculiar mostly to ourselves.</p><p>To believe on one hand that Donald Trump is the last, best hope for saving the United States, you have to believe certain stories about the world. To believe on the other hand that Trump is a threat to the United States, you have to believe different stories. I want to understand these stories. I want to know what they are, where they come from, and how they inform, frame, and sustain our world views. I do not aim to reconcile these stories through some dialectic. Rather, I hope to turn them into a dialogic that allows for conversation enlivened by curiosity and compassion.</p><p>I also hope to test my own stories, to measure them against other stories to see how well they hold up and where they are weak. As a liberal, I like to believe that I have no inviolable stories, stories that I will defend at all costs, but I suspect that isn't the case. My conversations with obvious liberals have demonstrated to my satisfaction that most people have a story that they will not change or even challenge because doing so threatens such trauma and loss of identity that they cannot face it. I'm wondering what story I cannot do without.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-66872653301560691382021-04-28T08:42:00.000-04:002021-04-28T08:42:52.509-04:00Critical Complexity and Four Cs<p>What I have in mind is applying Preiser's program of critical complexity to my issue with Trumpism among my friends and family. I'm comfortable enough with Preiser's critical complexity to try to use it — comfortable in the dual senses of finding it congenial to my own thinking and of believing that I understand it well enough not to butcher it too badly. I do it in the hopes that I will come to understand the issues with my heritage better and will be better positioned to cope with them. Trump has crystallized a number of issues that have for years distressed me about my religious heritage. I have tried rejecting it, ignoring it, or educating my way out of it, and while those approaches have changed the way I think, believe, and act, they haven't satisfied me. I still have this large force of energy that pushes and pulls on me, perturbs me usually at the most sensitive moments, and I don't understand it well enough. I want to turn and face the elephant and, if possible, make friends with him. Yes — I see a bull elephant with enormous tusks that can gore me, but I'm hoping to learn that it's really a cow, a mama elephant, fiercely protective of her calves and herd, no doubt, but willing to tolerate a prodigal.</p><p>I'm taking a two-path approach: I'm analyzing complexity and narrative in this blog, and I'm writing a novel in another space. The analysis here helps me define the skin of the people I'm studying, and the novel there helps me get under their skin. I hope ideas from both paths can illuminate each other, can provide soundings that keep me from straying too far from either path. My suspicion is that writing here will help ground my other writing, has already wandered all over the place. Those lateral wanderings in fiction are important, I think, but just as they can lead to new insights, they can also lead astray, and I'm not always sure which way I've wandered. We'll see.</p><p>It seems to me that my first task is to recognize the issue and to begin to define it. Critical complexity has several implications here. First, I am included in the issue. I am not apart from that which I study. I'm in the middle of it. I was born and raised in the pentecostal faith that I want to understand better, and while I no longer worship in that faith and disagree with it on numerous issues, I am still perturbed by it, and I still perturb it. Moreover, the act of questioning this faith community entangles me with it and exposes the entanglements that have been there all along. I cannot ignore my own role in any analysis of this complex system. I read sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild's 2016 study of the Tea Party community in Louisiana (<i><a href="Strangers in Their Own Land" target="_blank">Strangers in Their Own Land</a></i>) and noted how she — even as a liberal academic from California — was drawn into this foreign community as she tried to understand it. Hochschild did not convert to the Tea Party, but she did come to like and respect these people and to understand better why they believed and behaved as they did. Understanding a complex system of beliefs and behavior rearranges boundaries, sometimes boundaries that we thought were inviolable. But as critical complexity insists: no boundaries are inviolable. They are all provisional, but that means that any researcher is responsible for making those boundaries explicit, demarcating the limits of what is known or even knowable.</p><p>Critical complexity also says that I must position myself in relation to the limits of my knowledge. I was raised a pentecostal and attended a pentecostal church (Church of God) until I went to college. Most of my family and many of my friends are still active within the pentecostal community or within the wider evangelical community. I might presume that I am quite knowledgeable about these conservative communities, having been raised in them, but of course, that isn't the case. My knowledge is quite intensely focused on three families: my mother's and father's and the single family they created. My knowledge is as much emotional as it is intellectual. I have a bit of reading to do. Fortunately, the Church of God is not so old — about 130 years — so I can cover most of its history. I even met as a child some of the folk from its earliest history.</p><p>Then, I must keep in mind that any definition of a complex system necessarily reduces the complexity of the system in the very act of generating a manageable, understandable model of that system. Saying it works two ways, as Cilliers caution us: it enables what we know and at the same time obscures what we know. To use terms from physics, as soon as we focus on and define the position of a particle, we lose focus on and definition of its velocity. I have no privileged position outside and independent of the system from which to observe all the system at once. I only have positions within the system that afford me certain angles of insight but that also obscure other angles that may be just as insightful if not more so. I prefer some angles over others and will choose them over the others to form my knowledge of Trumpism. These choices carry ethical implications, and I must remain aware that I am making them. Those choices carry responsibilities and obligations that I must address.</p><p>In short, any study of a complex system such as Twenty-first century Trumpism among southern American pentecostals is likely to generate far more questions than answers. I will know more, but I will also know how much more I don't know. This causes me no dismay. I'm with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in her 1997 introduction to her translation of Derrida's <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grammatology-Jacques-Derrida-dp-1421419955/dp/1421419955/" target="_blank">Of Grammatology</a></i> says:</p><blockquote>And if the assumption of responsibility for one's discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom.</blockquote><p></p><p>Actually, I find it cause for celebration. I am truly dismayed by those who believe that "we'll understand it all by and by" (the religious reductionists) or that we are about to discover the "theory of everything" (the scientific reductionists). Both present me with the dismal hope of having nothing left to learn, and I can think of no eternal punishment more hellish than this.</p><p>Fortunately, any one person's life is worthy of and will amply sustain a novel-length study. The study of a whole group of people over several lifetimes is more than ample for any study and for any work that I am likely to write with my remaining time. I especially like the promise inherent in Spivak's snarky comment that responsibility must cohabit, must couple with frivolity. What a nice way to live.</p><p>So this is not a problem that I will solve and put away. Though I may abandon study of the issue, I will not resolve it to anyone's satisfaction or cease to engage it. These are my people, my country, my world, and I must learn to live, and perhaps even thrive, within the ecosystem we all create together. At best, I can hope to understand our ecosystem better and better position myself within it so that we all may thrive. I think this, then, may be an appropriate way to position myself within the complex system that I wish to study: responsible, frivolous, heterogenous cohabitation and coupling spurred by curiosity and some compassion.</p><p>That's a lot of Cs: cohabitation, coupling, curiosity, compassion all woven together by critical complexity. I wonder if my thinking here has been guided more by delight in language than by rigorous reason. Probably. I suspect it often is. I often devise a clever arrangement of words long before I figure out what it means — if I ever figure it out. I like when I write something that I can then read and learn.</p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-78745049839479218082021-04-23T10:32:00.001-04:002021-04-23T10:32:17.589-04:00The Problem of Complexity: Summary<p>In the final chapter of her dissertation, Preiser summarizes her argument by looking at how her interpretation of the problem of complexity develops over three parts. In Part I, she presents complexity as a problem for traditional science that relies on the Newtonian/Cartesian reductionist paradigm. Complexity calls into question our traditional knowledge claims that our theories mirror the world. Rather, our models of the world are always a reduction of complex reality and expose the limits of knowledge. In short, complexity presents any rigorous study of complexity with more questions than answers.</p><p>In Part II, Preiser examines the philosophical implications of complexity, situating the study of complexity within poststructural and postmetaphysical positions that challenge any grounding norms from which to launch a critique, questions inherited theories and models for explaining the world, re-examines our meaning-making strategies, and thus, undermines its own ability to be critical. She claims that we can reinvent the notion of critique as originally conceptualized by Kant and revive critique. Her re-reading of Kant's notion of judiciary critique connects critique with Derrida's concepts of <i>stricture</i> and <i>différance</i> to change critique's role as a measurement grounded in some normative framework to a generative, reflexive movement that informs a certain kind of thinking. For Preiser, critique becomes a dynamic process of cutting and joining opposing paradigms, working within both without being grounded in some fixed ideology and without reconciling them or reducing one to the other. Through its liminal, provisional position, critique legitimizes itself and operates by exposing the limits of both paradigms. This revision of critique fits best within Derrida's concept of <i>general economy</i>, which overcomes the restrictions and reductions of thinking about oppositions in a binary juxtaposition. Critique becomes at once a <i>mode of questioning</i> the limitations of inherited thought structures and a <i>strategy of thinking</i> about complex reality. In short, complex critique grounds itself in reference to its limitations, its horizons.</p><p>Finally in Part III, Preiser claims that critical complexity is a radically critical and normative turn in the the study of complexity as it reframes complexity as a human condition that needs to be negotiated afresh every day and not as a problem that can be resolved and put away. Her three self-undermining but non-arbitrary normative imperatives mandate a perpetual and radical self-critique that calls us to proceed differently in the world by remaining sensitive to how the self, the other, and society as a whole is co-constituted relationally.</p><p>Preiser believes that critical complexity implies that any intervention into complex systems is always provisional and temporary in nature as it cannot promise any unambiguous solutions to wicked problems. Moreover, interventions cannot be based on an <i>a priori</i> set of rules or programs but must remain based on the dynamic interactions of the components of complex system as a whole. Critical complexity is not a foolproof method for solving problems but a flexible engagement with the intractable human condition that can lead us to the edge of what analysis can accomplish and then point beyond to what the human spirit can attempt.</p><p>Then, Preiser claims that critical complexity as she has developed it makes a number of contributions to the study and critique of complex systems:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>To counter the absence of any general theory of complexity, her study presents a list of ten common characteristics of complex systems to form an economy of concepts that can help orient newcomers to the field and guide complexity studies.</li><li>Critical complexity follows a middle way through the dilemma of critiquing reductionism on the one hand while using reductionist strategies on the other in order to say something meaningful about complex systems. Critical complexity thus avoids the loss of reference by maintaining a dialogical point of reference to a complex reality.</li><li>Critical complexity challenges the strict distinction between epistemological and ontological complexity — between knowing complexity and living complexity — through the issue of wicked problems, ultimately claiming that such complex issues remain insolvable because of our incomplete, contradictory understandings of changing parameters. Thus, complexity issues are better approached as conditions to be engaged — accepted, understood, and wisely managed — rather than problems to be resolved and dismissed.</li><li>Preiser insists that her study of critical complexity responds to the call to think differently by redefining key concepts in terms of the double bind that can be teased out from their conceptual structures so that complexity becomes <i>general complexity</i>, knowledge becomes difficult or <i>hybrid knowledge</i>, critique becomes <i>critique as stricture</i>, and thinking becomes <i>complex thinking</i> — all of which leads to <i>critical complexity</i>.</li><li>The three critical imperatives form non-foundational (or self-undermining) groundings for provisional, open-ended strategies by which to respond to complexity.</li><li>Critical complexity is distinct from other understandings of complexity in two ways. First, it converges critique and complexity in the general economy of the double bind which builds a path for complexity to engage the humanities in addition to the natural sciences. Second, it makes no claim to be better than other approaches to complexity. It calls us to think differently but acknowledges no prescriptive devices by which to measure how critical complexity is better than any other approach.</li><li>Critical complexity can serve as a transversal meeting place between the natural sciences and the humanities, allowing both sides to illuminate shared issues through the common lens of critical complexity.</li><li>Finally, Preiser's study serves as an example of how such a transversal process that weaves together ideas and methodologies from various fields of study can be implemented.</li></ol><p style="text-align: left;">After listing her study's unique contributions, Preiser lists several limitations:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Preiser first notes her focus on Kant's interpretation of critique, with too little engagement with the larger field of critical philosophy.</li><li>Then, her study does not engage the ethical aspects of complexity thoroughly enough as she has already done that in previous studies.</li><li>Her study does not clarify the epistemological status of the three imperatives, presenting them mostly as ethical formalisms. She recognizes that more analytical and conceptual work is needed.</li><li>The study weaves together the ideas of a number of philosophers, all of whom could have been explored more deeply.</li><li>Finally, the study fails to provide a concise <i>Theory of Complexity</i>, with solid answers for how to apply its concepts.</li></ol>Preiser concludes her study with several suggestions for future research:<p></p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>She insists that while such complex phenomena as non-linear causality, emergence, and self-organization have been studied in-depth by the analytic sciences, this phenomena has received too little attention from other philosophical traditions.</li><li>She is intrigued with Niklas Kompridis' elaboration of Heidegger's concept of <i>world-disclosure</i> and thinks his work is a new generation of Critical Theory scholarship.</li><li>Critical complexity could inform other fields of study such as neo-institutional theories of global culture, global legal pluralism, and global civil society as all these theories acknowledge the importance of difference and moral pluralism.</li><li>Because the notion of the general economy of thought depends on the presence of an excess of thought that refuses to be incorporated into the calculating structures of the restricted economy, then an in-depth study of a <i>theory of excess</i> could be valuable for understanding the general economy of thought.</li></ol><div>So Trumpism is a wicked problem, and just maybe Preiser offers me a pathway toward understanding this problem better than I do now and situating myself in relation to this problem. I think the question becomes for me: do I have faith that Preiser's critical complexity can help me generate some actionable knowledge that will, first of all, match reality well and, secondly, benefit my community? I have enough faith to try it, and I'm certain that critical complexity as Preiser outlines it has enough rigor to enable my journey. So try it.</div><p></p><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-73617009106389304062021-04-18T11:21:00.001-04:002021-04-23T10:14:22.605-04:00The Problem of Complexity: Situating Complex Thinking<p>In her fifth chapter, Preiser shifts from framing the problem of observing complexity to the problem of thinking about what we observe in a complex world. Complex phenomena require complex modes of thinking, which she bases on the notion of the general economy to overcome the either/or, binary mode of thinking and a redefinition of critique in light of Cilliers' concept of <i>critical complexity</i>, which because of its inclusion of reflexive ethics in the very act of observing reality situates complexity in the light of our lived, complex experiences. Complexity should not be thought of as a problem to be solved on our way to Utopia but as an unsolvable condition we must engage and cope with as part of the human condition.</p><p>Cilliers (who was Preiser's mentor in university before his untimely death) argues that because our knowledge of complexity is based on models which of necessity reduce the system under investigation, then the choices about what to include and exclude in our models always requires ethical considerations. For Preiser, this ethical aspect distinguishes Cilliers' critical complexity from other postmetaphysical systems of critique as it shifts critique from a <i>mode of thinking</i> to a <i>mode of being</i>, transforming the way we act and exist in the world, not just the way that we know the world.</p><p>Preiser recognizes the problem of expressing a system of ethics after having renounced all objective, transcendental positions on which to ground those ethics. As a ground, she suggests <i>ethics in the name of the limit</i>, arguing that ethics enters the picture at the moment we confront the limits of our knowledge and must make decisions. Ethics is not located in the moment of organized politics or morals where decisions are prescribed. When we know which decisions or strategies lead to what results, then we don't need ethics but morals and best practices. When we cannot predict outcomes, then we need ethics. As Derrida says, "If you knew what to do, there would be no decision, you would have already done it." </p><p>Echoing Kant and Cilliers, Preiser proposes three imperatives to frame and inform critical complexity:</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Provisional Imperative:</h4><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Justify actions without precluding revision of those justifications.</li><li>Make choices which keep other choices available.</li><li>Make choices which respect diversity even as those choices reduce diversity.</li><li>Act in ways that allow the constraining and enabling interactions within the system.</li></ol><p></p><p>These provisions require a perpetual self-critical attitude and recognize the open, fluid nature of complex systems and the limitations of our knowledge of those systems. The provisional imperative works with the both/and logic that undermines closing off of options.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The Critical Reflexive Imperative:</h4><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Distrust most strongly that which you believe most deeply.</li><li>Expose the limits and overturn the boundaries of theoretical assumptions.</li><li>Eschew solutions in favor of continual learning.</li></ol><p></p><p>These provisions question the normativity at work in any practice of critique and makes critique aware of its own limitations.</p><h4 style="text-align: left;">The World-disclosing Imperative:</h4><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Choose actions that break open new understandings of what it means to be human.</li><li>Resist thought that can lead to dehumanising strategies.</li><li>Choose actions that allow for new ways of understanding our situatedness in the world.</li></ol><p style="text-align: left;">The world-disclosing imperative represents practices through which we can imagine meaningful alternatives to existing structures which are broken and no longer serving us well. For Preiser, critique discloses our embeddedness in a complex world. Because we see through the world, the meaning of objects and systems as a network of interrelationships is most often revealed in breakdowns in functionality when, for a brief moment, the meaning of objects is lighted up, mostly by their missing functionality. This disclosure works on two levels: disclosure of an already interpreted and structured world within which we always already find ourselves and disclosure of new horizons of meaning that challenge existing structures as the shifting, permeable boundaries of our understanding reorganize our world.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Preiser concludes with the claim that critical complexity provides us with the conceptual tools to proceed differently in the world, to tackle wicked problems in different ways by giving us a reasoning art that does not conform to some substantive recipe but employs a relentless multiple way of thinking that looks inward and outward, ever vigilant of how the self, the other and society are constituted relationally in the process of co-constructing the world. She insists, then, that critical complexity gives us ways of knowing and being that are different, that allow us to think together of diverging paradigms without reducing them to one another, that allow us to overcome institutions and regulations that are too eager to reduce our complex condition to some solvable or computable obstacle, that finally restores the possibilities of new, alternatives ways of engaging the radical, antagonistic space of complexity.</p><p>So where does this critical complexity take me in my efforts to understand how my conservative friends and family buy into Trumpism?</p><p>First, I find Preiser's thinking quite congenial with my own. The main benefit in reading her has been for her clarifications of some philosophical terms and concepts, especially from Derrida. I say this not to diminish but to appreciate. I am not a philosophy scholar as Preiser is, and she has combed out some tangles in my own thinking but without changing my hairstyle much. I still see the world in light of complexity theory, especially in light of Morin and Cilliers, two theorists who seemingly have had much influence on Preiser.</p><p>I was already familiar with Cilliers critical complexity and its incorporation of ethics, and in fact, it's through following Cilliers' work that I learned of Rika Preiser and Minka Woermann, two students of his at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, both of whom have written convincingly about complex ethics and have done a more thorough job than Cilliers, I think, of applying complex ethics to practical situations.</p><p>Which leads me to the second benefit of reading Preiser: she organizes in her three imperatives tendencies that had been mostly intuitive and haphazard in my own thinking. She has provided me with some rigor and structure. I can use her imperatives to better organize my approach to understanding Trumpism among my fellows, starting with her first claim: that like any complex problem, my issue with Trumpism is not a problem to be solved on my way to the United Utopia of America but an unsolvable condition I must engage and cope with as part of the human condition. I must recognize that, at least on the issue of Trump, many loved ones and I do not think the same or even see the same reality. This isn't a fight that I can win. It isn't even a fight. It is not a dialectic that can result in some synthesis between two antagonistic views. Rather, it is an intractable dialogic that can lead either to estrangement or to conversation, and which depends mostly on the inclinations and choices of the interlocutors. For myself, I must replace my combativeness with curiosity.</p><p>I am offended that my friends and family don't share my view of Trumpism. I want them to be like me, and I fight (argue, no fisticuffs) to win them over. But of course, as soon as the relationship becomes adversarial, I lose all hope of understanding them and of learning anything about Trumpism. They become alien to me, and I've lost a friend, a cousin. In my sober moments, this is not where I want to go. I need an emotional base for my thinking, but anger isn't it. I need to cultivate curiosity. That starts with giving up on the idea of winning, or even winning them over — a more subtle but just as combative a position. Rather, I need to be more rigorously curious about why they think as they do, and perhaps more importantly, why I don't. </p><p>Curiosity, then.</p><div class="page" title="Page 208"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 210"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 213"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 220"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 213"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 192"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 195"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 201"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 199"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 195"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 171"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 175"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 177"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 181"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 187"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 181"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 177"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 163"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 170"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-4767096008099047122021-04-06T11:12:00.003-04:002021-04-06T11:12:59.554-04:00The Problem of Complexity: General Complexity<p>In the third and fourth chapters of her dissertation, Preiser considers the implications of the limits of knowledge of complex systems for any critique of those systems. She situates her understanding within two main philosophical traditions: first, Kant's critical project and then Derrida's deconstruction and différance.</p><p></p><p>Preiser asserts that Kant's understanding of critique as the continuous self-critique of the limits and possibilities of reason itself co-insides (a nice neologism by Preiser) with her complexity approach. Her close reading of Kant reveals critique to be a judiciary process with a double movement that both cuts, or analyzes, and brings together, or decides, simultaneously. She then associates this double movement in Kant's understanding of critique with Derrida's notion of <i>différance</i> and his metaphors of <i>stricture</i> and <i>hymen</i> to redefine critique as dynamic rather than a static linear judicial process. She finally associates stricture with <i>force field</i> and hymen with <i>constellation</i> to create metaphors by which to express the liminality of critique.</p><p>Critique as a dynamic process of constant cutting and joining of seemingly opposing paradigms provides Preiser with an approach to the legitimization problem in poststructural critique, as it unsettles the distinctions assumed by each paradigm, establishing the limits of each and resisting both the reduction and reconciliation of one to the other. Thus, complex critique is grounded in neither paradigm, belonging to neither wholly yet partaking in both at once and finding its legitimacy in exposing the limits within each paradigm. By maintaining its position within a force field of opposing and attracting entities and forces, complex critique can work in the space between rupture and reconciliation, maintaining the gap for the enlightenment to come. In this space, Preiser insists, critique becomes the method, tool, and force that compels us toward a reform of reason and thought, which she intends to explore in her fourth chapter.</p><p>In her fourth chapter, Preiser explores the concept of general as opposed to restricted complexity after the fashion of Derrida and Morin, as general complexity allows one to both accept and reject in a double movement the strategies and positions of Newtonian/Cartesian reductionism. Her concept of general complexity follows from Derrida's concept of general as opposed to restricted <i>economy</i> — economy being that dynamic, complex system that enables and structures the movement, circulation, and exchange of thought (or anything else, I suppose) within a given system.</p><p>Preiser begins her exploration of general complexity through a discussion of Derrida's deconstruction of <i>restricted economy</i>, with its underlying rationale of a structured, universal, and closed system of production and exchange that promises absolute knowledge and formal mastery of everything in the system. This economy configures the interactions of components and other systems as <i>always meaningful</i> and claims that multiplicity and indeterminacy are always accounted for, creating a closed system guided by linear causality, unaffected by external influences of un-knowable, incalculable components not already taken up in their processes of production and consumption of knowledge, widgets, or whatever. Restricted economy assumes a strict distinction between inside and outside its system and always looks for ways to incorporate anything that can undermine its economizing strategies. Restricted economy sees the world as ultimately a knowable and manageable system and believes that appropriate work or thought within that system will be rewarded with appropriate wages, or returns, by that system. Preiser says that it is this restricted economy of thought that spurs both Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics to expose the gaps in Kant's closed system as well as Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the all-encompassing economic apparatus.</p><p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-NwnyFxSaMDeBHJZujHX4eNdFm0=/0x0:2394x1422/1200x800/filters:focal(1006x520:1388x902)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66145941/Screen_Shot_2020_01_22_at_3.51.22_PM.0.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="266" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-NwnyFxSaMDeBHJZujHX4eNdFm0=/0x0:2394x1422/1200x800/filters:focal(1006x520:1388x902)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66145941/Screen_Shot_2020_01_22_at_3.51.22_PM.0.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meaning Is in the Connections & Not in the Thing</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Preiser cautions in her discussion that a general economy is not a contradiction or rejection of a restricted economy but a recognition of the limits of the restricted paradigm. General complexity is not a call to holism or the chaos of relativism; rather, it is a middle way between the restricted (simple or complicated) and the chaotic — in other words, the complex. Finally, Preiser defines general economy in terms of Derrida's concept of différance. Just as the meaning of a sign is not constituted simply by qualities inherent in the sign itself but by the network of relations between the sign and all other signs in a particular text in both a particular place and time and in all other places and times, then the meaning of an economy is not constituted simply by entities and processes inside the economy but by the network of relations between that restricted economy and all other economies (the general economy) in all other places and times. Thus, no sign and no economy has some absolute, present meaning and identity within itself. Its meaning and identity is to be worked out and expressed within the complexus of traces and relationships between it and everything else. Its meaning and identity are neither simple nor chaotic, but complex: a result of the irreconcilable tensions within itself and between itself and its surround.</p><p>Preiser equates Derrida's différance with Morin's <i>complex thought</i> and its concept of <i>dialogic</i>, which maintains the tension between antagonistic systems, accepting the middle third without attempt to reconcile either rupture or reconciliation of systems in a dialectic. Working and thinking within this gap allows new possibilities of critique that are neither absolute nor eternal but open to excess, innovation, and creativity.</p><p>I am not proficient enough in philosophy to evaluate Preiser's readings of Kant, Derrida, and others in between, but her argument makes sense to me, and I think I can follow it well enough. Her reading of both Kant and Derrida clarified some confusions I had with both of those fellows, so I'm happy that I took time to read Preiser carefully. At any rate, I feel positioned to read her conclusion about the practical applications of complex thought. I suspect that I will learn something that will help with my exploration of the different ways we Americans understand Donald Trump. We'll see.</p><div class="page" title="Page 121"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 124"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 134"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 137"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 139"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 143"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 147"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 148"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 153"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 150"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 148"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 141"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 139"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div><div class="page" title="Page 136"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div><div class="page" title="Page 134"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p></p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-63934679155810379142021-03-21T11:24:00.000-04:002021-03-21T11:24:45.306-04:00The Problem of Complexity: Knowing Complexity<p>In the second chapter of her dissertation, Preiser tackles the difficulties of knowing complex systems. She starts with four quotes from four modern philosophers of science who all capture the issue nicely, but Bruno Latour is the most succinct: "We have taken science for realist painting, imagining that it made an exact copy of the world" (<i>Pandora's Hope</i> 78). Latour's implication, of course, is that science is not an exact copy of the world. What his statement overlooks is that realist painting isn't an exact copy either.</p><p>The very term <i>copy</i> implies not exact, not the same, but something that affords some utility: more portable and handy and reproducible. We make copies because the original is too unwieldy — too complex — to deal with handily. The models of the world — the knowledge — that we carry around in our heads, books, and computers to use for our various purposes are all inexact copies that greatly reduce the complexity of reality to make the models easy to use. A realist landscape will hang on our walls — the landscape itself will not. We reduce the landscape to a two by four foot stretch of canvas in order to make it fit and to make it easy to transport when we move or sell it, but that reduction always leaves things out that are quite likely important to the actual landscape itself. For instance, the painting may not capture the increasingly dry weather conditions that make the forest susceptible to fire and blight. The painter can overlook those details to satisfy his own purposes, the forest cannot.</p><p>Likewise, a scientist's model of the forest will omit some details and dynamics to make the forest intelligible — to paint an intelligent picture — and usually for some purpose — perhaps to convince Congress to act on global warming, but the reductions in her model always leave out details that may very well prove to be critical later on. Only the forest is exactly itself. Copies are not. As George Box has told us so very well: "All models are wrong, but some are useful." If complete correspondence between reality and your model (poem, painting, or formula) is your objective, sorry. Everything we know is wrong, but some of it is useful.</p><p>Of course, I overstate my case. Day to day, we find it useful to say that we know things, and we can usually rely on this knowledge in our proximate zones of influence, but we must always be aware that our knowledge like our influence extends only so far. We can always reach a limit where our knowledge breaks down and becomes error. I reach that limit every time I write. That's where all the insight waits.</p><p>I find it rather humorous that in its reaction against reductionist thinking, complexity reveals that knowledge always reduces reality. Yet, in a strange way and quite unexpectedly, this tension between a desire for holism and the necessity of reductionism is the zone of best complexity thinking. Complexity must operate in that hot, volatile zone between the certainty that our knowledge models reveal something reliable and testable about reality while at the same time leaving out something that is important about reality. In other words, we can be confident that we know something wrong. We can have reasonable hopes that it may be useful to us in certain situations, and we can be certain that it will prove incorrect in other situations. Strangely enough, we are both enabled by what we know and limited by what we know, equally. This is the hot zone within which human knowledge must work.</p><p>So what does Preiser say about the problem of knowledge?</p><p>Preiser addresses two core problems with modern knowledge:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>the failure of Newtonian/Cartesian reductionism to cope with the complex issues raised by the discovery of the quantum particle, evolution, and relativity, and</li><li>the restructuring of knowledge itself in the face of these complex issues.</li></ol><p></p><p>Preiser notes that our current dominant scientific epistemology follows from classical Cartesian/Newtonian, which in short, asserts that the descriptions of reality produced through isolation, observation, and the establishment of regularities describes reality as it is. Preiser claims that this reductionist epistemology works well enough for mechanical, closed systems, but is inadequate for dealing with complex systems with emergent properties, which leads to problems for our knowledge generating practices. She intends to correct this issue with a post-reductionist epistemology that incorporates a more holistic complexity view while coping with the necessary reductionism inherent in any epistemology.</p><p>She then gives an overview of Cartesian/Newtonian reductionism, which posits five key features of Newtonian natural systems: they are deterministic, closed, reversible, atomistic, and universal. This model became the basis of the modern scientific method and epistemology, and it was so successful that its assumptions of unchangeable, timeless properties and laws that govern the universe soon spread throughout Western thought. This view has a number of implications. First, natural systems can be known by analyzing and isolating their parts into elementary matter and interactions that follow universal and uniform laws. Science, and by extension true knowledge, is thus the process of classification, measurement, and rational organization. Newtonian reductionism was expressed in the universal languages of mathematics and logic, which precisely represented the real world as it is. </p><p>But, Preiser cautions, the fault lines within the Newtonian scientific model finally cracked with the discovery of the quantum particle, that Gordian knot of interactions and exchanges rather than a single, unified thing. The Newtonian model could not formalize the behavior and fundamental nature of quantum particles. Moreover, relativity and evolution revealed that the concepts of space and time, absolutes in Newton's model, must be changed to account for new experience and insights. These ruptures in the Newtonian model allowed complexity theory to emerge as a new view of reality.</p><p>Many complexity theorists have recognized what Preiser calls the first problem of knowledge: that a gap has emerged between our knowledge of the world and the world itself because of the empirical difficulties of describing the physical and phenomenal characteristics of complex phenomena. The logic of classical science cannot keep up with the generative, flexible, and pluralist nature of knowledge needed to describe complex systems. Complex phenomena challenge the five Newtonian postulates mentioned above: they are non-linear rather than linearly deterministic, open rather than closed, contingent in time rather than reversible, neither compressible nor universal, but always unfolding in a local, complex ecosystem. Preiser insists that we need new methods and vocabularies to usefully describe complexity.</p><p>Preiser insists that developing these new conceptual frameworks for knowledge requires recognizing four different kinds of reductionism inherent in any knowledge system:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Ontological</b> reductionism claims that all physical and non-physical phenomena can be explained in terms of matter, particles in motion.</li><li><b>Epistemological</b> reductionism claims knowledge in one discipline can be reduced to another discipline, ultimately to physics.</li><li><b>Methodological</b> reductionism claims that all systems are best investigated at the lowest, simplest possible level.</li><li><b>Causal</b> reductionism claims that all emergent properties of a system can be explained by their causal relations to the basic elements of the system, thus denying any downward causation in emergent phenomena.</li></ol><p></p><p>Reductionism creates a kind of blindness when knowledge seekers ignore the complex systems at hand to investigate the simpler elements and then to explain the complex system only in terms of the simpler elements or systems. This reductionism ignores its own blind spots in order to claim universal truth. Many with a more holistic sense of reality have argued against this reductionism, but holism itself cannot escape reductionism. Indeed, Preiser argues that it is impossible to avoid the four kinds of reductionism, which are all implicated with one another, and that most complexity theorists fall into one of two traps: those who see no distinction between the system and its environment in some holistic approach and those who insist that all complexity can indeed be measured and simulated by computational models to reveal universal laws.</p><p>Following Cilliers, Preiser insists that a rigorous understanding of complexity must be aware that any description of complexity involves some reduction of reality. This understanding leads to a performative tension that destabilizes the dichotomy between either holism or reductionism. It's always both. Thus, any engagement with complex systems is always a dynamic interaction among the nature of phenomena (ontology), our knowledge of it (epistemology), and our methods for studying it (methodology) in a dialectical (Cilliers) or a dialogical (Morin) process that Preiser calls <b>general complexity</b>, after Morin.</p><p>General complexity is at once coherent and open with the result that our understanding is never absolute but always contingent and skeptical of itself, allowing the researcher to reflect critically on her knowledge generating practices. She is no longer certain that her models fit reality like its mirror image as she shifts her focus from the properties of entities in classical science to the relations among entities and the echoing relations among relations in complexity science, which of necessity leads her to an entirely new epistemology as new knowledge requires new ways of modelling reality, new ways of framing reality to gather knowledge from it through observation and interpretation. But, as Preiser warns repeatedly, no model can capture the full complexity of any complex system as such systems are radically contextual and radically open. In some ways, a system's degree of complexity can be measured by the degree of difficulty in modelling the system. Any modelling system (a particular science or novel, I think) must decide what observables of a given real system to include and which to exclude in order to function as a model and to generate knowledge about that system. Knowledge, then, always limits a contextual and open system in order to understand it and use it, but it never knows when the parts of the system excluded by our models — which in the real system are still interacting non-linearly with the parts included in our models — will become relevant. Given that we cannot avoid the reductionism of any model, of any knowledge, then we must embrace up front and constantly the limitations of our models. An irreducible gap exists between complex reality and our knowledge of that reality; thus, to create knowledge, we must use reductionist strategies to be able to say anything meaningful about complex systems at all, but our models too seldom acknowledge what's left out, and thus they all have blind spots. This is the nature of knowledge as revealed by complexity: that knowledge is limited, but as Preiser argues, this limitation is not a disaster but a condition for knowledge. Limits enable knowledge. As Dutch philosopher Cornelis Anthonie van Peursen explains, we need a horizon that limits our field of vision for the act of seeing to take place. This horizon is formed by the interaction of the observer and the environment, and is situated in both at once. It is both inside (subjective) and outside (objective) the observer.</p><p>Having explored the first problem of knowledge, or the epistemological rupture that occurs when moving from the reductionist Newtonian paradigm to the complexity paradigm, Preiser frames the second problem of knowledge, arguing that knowledge generating practices and the notion of knowledge itself changes in the face of complexity.</p><p>Preiser complains that most current complexity science is still reductionist: concerning itself with measurement and uncovering regular laws — an approach that, according to Morin, recognizes complexity by decomplexifying it. The heart of the error of decomplexifying lies in the assertion that what is left out of the measurements and calculations are not of importance, but as Cilliers insists, they are of utmost importance as they are still a vital, perturbing part of the real system being measure and calculated in the model, and in complex systems, even small parts can have large effects (the butterfly effect of chaos theory). Preiser proposes Morin's concept of general complexity that replaces the concept of <b>disjunction</b> between emergent features of a system and its underlying structures with the concept of <b>distinction</b> between emergent and underlying structures that recognizes both their independence and dependence in the system. This is a post-reductionism that is self-aware of the blind spots of its own practices and disarms the animosities of opposing paradigms without uniting them into a grand monist truth. Post-reductionist denies neither reductionism nor holism, but holds them in dialectical tension and assumes that the most useful knowledge lies in the interplay of both. This new approach to generating knowledge requires a new language and vocabulary.</p><p>Preiser claims that complex knowledge is <b>hybrid</b> and <b>difficult</b>: because complex knowledge acknowledges dynamic relationships as well as entities, it is not static or fixed, but dynamical and provisional, not limited to a stable entity, a fact, but branching out to other knowledge regimes so that there is always a surplus of signification in which meaning is open, infinitely disseminated, and ultimately uncontainable (rhizomatic, in Deleuzional terms). The process of generating, storing, and using knowledge becomes a dynamic complex system itself. While, complex knowledge rejects both the absolute totality of knowledge and the possibility of representing something fully, it does not reject knowledge, truth, and representation in some anything-goes relativism. Rather, it challenges us to know and engage the limits of our knowledge, and to re-invent if necessary. In short, complex knowledge is the ghost of reality, and haunts those liminal spaces where knowing meets non-knowing.</p><p>So does Preiser clarify (reduce to a working model) this complex knowledge? I hope so. That's why I'll read the rest of her dissertation. But in this chapter she reinforces for me issues in writing fiction that almost all fiction writers and readers struggle with: where to put the frame of beginning and ending? what to put in the middle and what to leave out? and to understand the implications of all those forces that are perturbing the narrative but could find no space or time for expression. No one can tell the whole story, so how do you tell an engaging story?</p><p>I think the best writers have always understood intuitively the complexity of the world. Of course, formula fiction is a closed little system with neat actors interacting in highly regular and predictable ways (stock characters with fixed plots), but the best fiction is open to the world, mapping new terrains to see what happens, following ghosts in that liminal space between knowing and unknowing. That's the good stuff.</p><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 84"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 85"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 86"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 86"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 87"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 88"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 89"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 89"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 90"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 91"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 96"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div><div class="page" title="Page 77"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 82"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div><div class="page" title="Page 83"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column">
</div>
</div>
</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-69226153265876998212020-12-13T11:50:00.002-05:002020-12-13T11:50:55.580-05:00The Problem of Complexity: Self-Organization<p>The fifth and last of Preiser's characteristics of complexity is self-organization, which I previously summarized as the ability of complex systems to modify and reproduce themselves in order to cope with their environments. In other words, they are able to learn and to adjust to ensure their survival. At last, I thought, I had come to a characteristic that seems to divide living, animate systems from inanimate systems.</p><p>I can learn about my environment and modify my behavior and beliefs to cope. I can reproduce to continue something of myself. I don't think my house can do these things.</p><p>But I may be misunderstanding both my abilities to self-organize and the abilities of my house.</p><p>I, of course, am able to exchange energy, matter, information, and organization with my environment in complex loops that restructure me internally and my environment externally. In other words, my environment perturbs me, and I perturb my environment, and we can both modify ourselves to maintain our own integrity and to better fit with the other. These perturbations are reciprocal but not commensurate. Because of its immense size, the environment perturbs me much more than I perturb it. It's a bit like comparing the gravitational pull I exert on the Earth to the pull the Earth exerts on me. The tail does not wag the dog, though neither are passive.As an aside observation, however, note that if I combine with 7 billion other humans to create a modern consumer society, then that society can begin to wag the Earth, and this helps me understand our current ecological crisis. I must keep in mind that the environment, the Earth, will respond to the perturbations of seven billion ticks to maintain its own integrity as a functioning complex system. And I think the Earth is still the more powerful partner here. If it starts scratching its back because we are making it itch, then we humans may not benefit.</p><p>But this is not a post about ecology as such, but about self-organization. I perturb and am perturbed in return, but I notice that I have looked in only one direction: outward. What about inward? As it turns out, the environment inside me is just as big and as complex as the environment outside me. In other words, the distance from me to infinitesimal strings is about the same as the distance from me to the infinite stars. You can find some wonderful interactive animations that help visualize this seeming paradox <a href="https://htwins.net/scale2/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.nikon.com/about/sp/universcale/scale.htm" target="_blank">here</a>, but my point is that likely there is as much perturbation coming from inside me as from outside me, and I emerge as Keith Hamon in the whirlpool at a particular intersection of these forces. I do influence those flows of forces, but they influence me so much more. They create me. For a time, the forces coming from the stars and the strings weave a pattern that is me. And everything else, of course. I mean, it isn't all about me -- though in a way it is -- just as it is all about you. And your dog. And your iPad. And your planet. We are each rather nicely positioned at the center of the Universe, and the whole freaking thing works together to create each and every one of us.</p><p>These fanciful flights quickly land me in a mystical realm of mystery and awe which resonates well with me, but it isn't what I want to discuss in this post. I'm intellectually aware of these vast scales within and without me, but of course, day-to-day I'm aware mostly of the proximate scales just within and just without me: does my stomach hurt? is my family excited about Christmas? These scales form my day-to-day reality, and while I'm always aware that my feet stay on the ground because of the gravitational pull of the Earth, I often forget that I can go crazy because of the pull of the Moon, only one scale removed farther out. Or while I'm aware that my muscles one scale inward ache after exercising, I'm blissfully unaware when one cell in my lungs -- just one scale farther in -- mutates, becoming cancerous in reaction to the perturbations of working with asbestos fifty years ago (I don't know that this has happened, but it could -- I do know about the Moon).</p><p>In short, I can learn and self-organize. I can somewhat sense the forces moving around and through me, and I am somewhat resourceful enough to adjust myself to find a better fit with those forces: deflecting some, modifying others, washing in a few. I've been doing this since my embryonic phase in the womb when my cells started unpacking themselves using the energy, matter, information, and organization supplied by DNA and the womb. Can my house learn and adjust itself?</p><p>I suspect that most of us think of learning as an intellectual task, and much of formal learning is, but complexity tells me that learning is any ability to sense and to respond at any scale to the forces flowing within and without us. I'm thinking now that most learning is not intellectual or conscious at all. I coached soccer for years, and I became aware that most of my players who became adept at some skill had no conscious idea of how they were able to capture a ball out of the air while simultaneously turning to move toward the opponent's goal. They just did it, or didn't. Those who did didn't know why they could do it anymore than those who didn't knew why they couldn't. My attempts at explanation were mostly vapid and useless, because I didn't know either. Somehow, that one's body could learn that trick, and the other body could not.</p><p>I say body to distinguish it from intellectual mind. Our feet learn quite aside from our conscious control. With no immediately conscious help from my mind, my immune system learns about new invaders and then fights epic wars throughout the galaxy within me. <i>Star Wars</i> is not just in my mind, but literally in my body, and thus far, the good guys are winning, though there have been some close skirmishes.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/ae/03/24ae036fbf4261c87495cc00d74832d6.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="368" data-original-width="550" height="214" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/24/ae/03/24ae036fbf4261c87495cc00d74832d6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>So if learning is not an exclusive privilege of human intellect -- however much I may value it -- then how far does learning extend through the Universe. My immune cells, obviously, can learn. Dogs and trees learn. I recall how the dwarfish oak trees on the south Texas coastline bend inward from the prevailing Gulf winds. This is not an innate growth pattern of oak trees; rather, these trees have learned to cope with their environment, using what range of responses they have available. Slime mold and viruses can learn. If viruses can learn, are we very far removed from carbon and oxygen learning?<p></p><p>I tend to think of hydrogen coupling with oxygen as a rather mechanical process, but perhaps all coupling from atoms to humans to galaxies are to some degree complex behaviors that lead to new forms. They do, of course. The coupling of hydrogen and oxygen leads to water. My own coupling with a woman led to a life-long relationship and to two sons. My coupling with other Georgians this past November led to a victory for Joe Biden and the overturn of the Trump Administration. The coupling of the stars led to the Milky Way and Earth. The Ancients may have been right: it's all coupling, all the way in, all the way out. And while there are mechanics to the coupling in its myriad forms, it is never merely mechanical. Coupling can not be reduced simply to its parts and mechanics. It is always purposeful and meaningful.</p><p>Well, I seem to have landed myself into some kind of Gaia theory. I didn't expect that, and it's clear that I have much thinking to do before I sort this out in my head, but I'm not likely to do it in this post.</p><p>Let me summarize what I mean by self-organization in complex systems. First, I'm convinced that to some degree, all entities are complex: from rocks and water to human brains and galaxies. Then, all these systems, including my house, can sense their internal and external environments and can respond -- however slowly and in however limited or expansive a range -- to those perturbations. They can all self-organize.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-85480215083896050172020-12-08T09:45:00.001-05:002020-12-08T09:45:48.846-05:00The Problem of Complexity: Emergence & Complex Causality<p>Emergence is the fourth of five characteristics of complexity that Preiser says are commonly mentioned in the literature. In a previous post, I summarized what I understood of Preiser's points about emergence and complex causality this way:</p>
<blockquote>Complex systems manifest emergent properties that can be understood only in terms of the organizational structure of the system and not in the properties of the components. Emergent phenomena depend on and yet are independent of constituent parts and display certain properties:<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li>radical novelty: emergent phenomena are neither predictable nor deducible from micro level components, which are necessary but insufficient for understanding emergent phenomena. </li>
<li>coherence: emergent phenomena are integrated wholes likely to maintain some identity over time.</li>
<li>macro level: emergent phenomena occur at a macro level compared to their micro level components.</li>
<li>dynamical: emergent phenomena are not a priori wholes but gradually appear as a complex system dynamically develops over time.</li>
<li>ostensive: emergent phenomena show themselves and are ostensively recognized in terms of their purpose and meaningful behaviour.</li></ol>
Complex systems operate through both upward and downward causation, such that emergent properties are the result of the organization and interactions of constituent parts at the micro-level but also in turn cause changes in the constituent parts.</blockquote>
<p>I find this explanation of emergence and causation in need of some unpacking. I like to use proximate examples, so first, I think I should point to this post I'm writing as an ostensive example of an emergent property of the complex system Keith Hamon. My blogging, of course, depends on the various parts of my body -- heart, lungs, musculoskeletal system, brain, and more -- however, a thorough study of each of those parts could not prepare you for such an emergent characteristic as blogging. Nothing in the behaviors and interactions of my organs says, "This guy writes a blog."</p><p>Despite its dependence on the interactions of all my various parts, blog writing itself as a recognizable characteristic of Keith Hamon emerges at a scale above the parts that constitute me. The efficient working and interaction of those parts are, of course, necessary to explain my blogging, but they are not sufficient. Blogging emerges and works at a social scale above the scale of my individual organs, and blogging is recognizable and makes sense only at that scale. If we were to look at the scale of my fingers -- carefully and exhaustively mapping the interactions of tissue, bone, and blood -- we would find nothing labeled blogging or that points to blogging. Only when we examine all the parts working together do we start to see some patterns that we can begin to label <i>blogging</i>. Really, we can hardly label my finger twitching as blogging until we look at the even higher social scale that encloses me and the blogosphere.</p><p>So blogging is a radically novel emergent characteristic of mine that is neither predictable nor deducible from meticulous study of my constituent parts. If you want to understand why and how I blog, you must, of course, understand how my parts work together, but you must also understand human language and communication, the Internet in general and the blogosphere in particular, computer technology, and more.</p><p>And you must be able to see that all of these micro and macro parts cohere over time, that they persist within a recognizable organizational structure to perform consistent functions. The pattern of blogging must cohere and persist long enough to be informed by energy and information, to digest that energy and information, and to feedback energy and information into the environment. In other words, the system must cohere long enough to perturb and to be perturbed. Blogging has been around since 1994, and I have been blogging in some form or other since 1996 -- first as a personal journal and then in 2009 as a professional space to support my teaching and study in the first MOOCs I was taking. Blogging has connected millions of people into coherent and meaningful groups. It has connected me to students and MOOC colleagues from around the world.</p><p>And this leads me to the next point about emergent phenomena: they are dynamical, emerging gradually as they search for and eventually find a space for themselves in the current ecology. <a href="https://online.ndm.edu/news/communication/history-of-blogging/" target="_blank">In 1994, Justin Hall</a> did not call his review of various Internet sites on Links.net a blog. That term and identity came later. My first blog was basically a journal of family events. This blog <i>Learning Complexity</i> grew out of an earlier blog <i>Communications and Society</i> named for a class I was teaching in the Interdisciplinary Studies department at Georgia College and State University. Each of these emergent systems could have been stillborn, and indeed, I have started other blogs that went nowhere, read by no one. Thus, a complex system must be robust enough to force its way into an ecosystem and resilient enough to persist.</p><p>Justin Hall's first blog could have died, but the idea and technology of blogging was robust and resilient enough to cohere and persist, which brings us to Preiser's last characteristics of emergence: they are purposeful and meaningful. Blogging is purposeful and meaningful to millions of humans, the technology is robust enough to sustain the flows of energy and information, and so blogging has persisted. All emergent phenomena exist in this tense and tenuous space. We can certainly imagine that blogging might not have made it, for we have examples of many Internet ideas that did not. (Remember AltaVista and Yahoo, the early, too rigid search engines?) To persist, an emergent characteristic of any complex system must express some meaningful purpose, usually with some elegance.</p><p>Blogging, then, is a radically novel, coherent, macro-level, dynamical, and meaningful characteristic of the complex system Keith Hamon that cannot be understood or explained by my body parts. Blogging is emergent, and to borrow an old adage: I am greater than the sum of my body parts.</p><p>But as Preiser notes, borrowing from Edgar Morin, the whole is also less than the sum of its parts, and this gets us into the issue of complex causation. Upon the emergence of my body as a functioning system, I as a whole begin to exert forces on the various parts of my body, causing changes within the parts and shaping how they function -- which, of course, changes how the parts affect my body and back around again. Blogging, for instance, exerts forces on my heart, lungs, musculoskeletal system, brain, and more, which in turn, exerts forces on and literally shapes my body and my blogging. I have a different mind because of my blogging. I likely have a different heart. I know my hands are different.</p><p>The same sort of causation happens between the body scale and the social scale. My blogging has some modest effects on a small slice of society, and in turn, society has large effects on my blogging and even on my various body parts. I can become depressed, overweight, and sluggish from blogging about this pandemic and the Trump administration or I can become excited and energetic at the emergence of a vaccine and the promise of a Biden administration, and these changes in my body parts can affect my blogging and my interactions within society and back around again. Complex causation, then, is circular and continuous, non-linear. A + B = C is replaced by A<sup>1</sup> + B<sup>1</sup> > C<sup>1</sup> > A<sup>2</sup> + B<sup>2</sup> > C<sup>2</sup> and round and round.</p><p>So yes, my organs make up me, but I in turn make up my organs, just as I help make up my society, which in turn makes up (in multiple senses) me. Filtered through me, society also makes up my organs, as the last four years of the Trump administration have churned my stomach, and I suppose my organs filtered through me help make up society. Forces move across scales to perturb in unpredictable ways the complex systems functioning at different scales, and those systems in turn feed forward and feedback forces that perturb complex systems working at other scales.</p><p>Causation, then, is complex. What causes what? Does my stomach hurt just because of some silly antic by Trump? Or must I factor in my religious upbringing, my education, my diet, my professional life, Facebook, and more? Odds are that I will never be able to say just what makes my tummy ache. Even with something as apparently simple as a virus, we can quickly see that a pandemic is not simply caused by a mutated virus. That virus must express itself in various ecosystems to survive and thrive. Of course, it needs a physical system, but it also must find its way through various social, political, economic, scientific, and religious systems and different body types if it is to persist. And if humans are to manage the virus, then they must manage all of those systems -- a task beyond the abilities of the current U. S. administration and population.</p><p>Wow. I have much to learn yet and way too little time.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-18712247807467854232020-12-01T08:38:00.000-05:002020-12-01T08:38:19.079-05:00The Problem of Complexity: Humans, Houses, and Heterogeneity<p>The third consistent and persistent characteristic of complexity that Preiser finds in the literature is non-homogeneity, or as I prefer to say it, heterogeneity. I did not notice if she explains why she prefers the negative expression rather than the positive, but I prefer the positive, probably because of my reading of Deleuze and Guattari's characteristics of rhizomatic structures which have informed my thinking for years now and which resonate well in Preiser's writing.</p><p>In <a href="http://blog.keithwhamon.net/2020/11/the-problem-of-complexity-definition.html" target="_blank">an earlier post</a>, I summarized Preiser's non-homogeneity this way:</p><blockquote>Complex systems are comprised of a number of heterogeneous components with multiple, dynamic pathways among them that create rich and diverse interactions which become too complex to calculate. The elements and interrelationships change over time and scale.</blockquote><p>Like Deleuze and Guattari, Preiser joins the concepts of multiplicity and heterogeneity to say that complex systems are made up of a number of distinguishable entities that interact with each other in countless ways to form a functioning entity that itself helps make up an enclosing, functioning entity. So to understand Keith Hamon through the lens of complexity, I must think of myself as comprised of a number of different organs that interconnect with each other along multiple, dynamic pathways that create rich, diverse interactions that are too complex to fully calculate. Moreover, I must think of different scales, so that I see each of my organs -- my lungs, for instance -- as a complex system itself comprised of tissues and cells, which are themselves complex entities comprised of multiple, heterogeneous molecules, which are themselves ... well, you know the drill by now. And I must be able to scale up to see that I, Keith Hamon, am one of the multiple, heterogeneous entities that comprise larger complex systems: my university or my family, for instance. And all of these different entities at the different scales are all interconnected by countless pathways to manage various flows of energy, matter, information, and organization to all the other entities at all scales. For example, consider an image of just one complex system, the Internet:</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Internet_map_1024.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A Map of the Internet in 2017</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="text-align: right;"><br /></div>Of course proximity has its privilege so that entities closer to each other typically exert more influence on each other, but all entities exert some influence on all others, and this complex weave of forces becomes impossible to map. Note that the map of the Internet above does not include the people who connect to all those wires and routers. It doesn't map the software or the content. As complex as it already is, that map is woefully inadequate to explain the Internet. We simply can't reliably trace a single cause to a single effect. This uncertainty helps me understand Covid-19, for instance. We know that the disease starts with a particular virus, but the same virus has such a wide range of interactions with different human and animal hosts. Many don't notice this virus any more than the other viruses inhabiting their bodies. Some become mildly or violently ill. A few die. The explanation for any of these different states depends on more than simply tracking the path of the virus through a specific body.<p></p><div>So what causes someone's death? The virus, of course, is a necessary component of a Covid-19 death, but it is not sufficient to explain that death. A body is a complex system, and its interaction with any external agent such as a virus can be explained only by considering all the various heterogeneous elements and the interconnections among them. It's becoming obvious to me that understanding why one person dies from Covid and another does not demands knowing not only the disposition and interactions of all the person's internal systems (organs, tissues, cells, and the like), but also their external social, economic, political, and religious systems. All of these systems interact to render some people vulnerable and some not, and we are only dimly becoming aware of this complex interaction. We may never understand it fully -- at least, not before the virus moves on to be replaced by another pathogen with a different complex of interactions. And because it's such a complex matrix of interactions from so many different systems, we may never be able to bring sufficient forces in the form of medical and social therapies to bear on everyone's illness. We are not that resourceful or wise.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I haven't really dealt with heterogeneity. Why should entities in a complex system be different from each other? The short answer is to enhance the resilience and responsiveness of the system to its environment. Because my body has an array of organs and tissues that perform a range of functions, I can better "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." (Sorry for that unfortunate comparison. "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.") For instance, compare my body to that of slime mold, a relatively simple creature that has very few ways to perceive and to respond to its environment. It can sense its world only in a very narrow range, and it can process and respond to those sensations in even more limited fashion. More complex creatures, including myself, can sense more of the world, process those sensations in more ways, and respond in more ways. This variety makes my complex system more resilient, more likely to survive and thrive.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, my complexity is only relative to the simplicity of the slime mold. Compared to a rock, the slime mold is a quite complex creature. And as I've already noted in a previous post, the simplicity of a rock may be a trick of different time scales. Because rocks perceive, process, and respond to their environment over millenia rather than minutes as I do, then they seem dumb to me. For all I know, rocks might be the geniuses of Earth, and I regret that I will not likely be here when they reveal their plan.</div><div><br /></div><div>My house has its own complexity: a range of different rooms serving different functions. It has heating and electrical systems that perceive, process, and respond to the environment in different ways to preserve its own integrity and to please its microbiome: me. Moreover, my house is in a neighborhood of heterogeneous homes. My house does not look like my neighbors' houses, as all the houses here were built by different people of different economic status at different times in whatever style and with whatever materials were popular with the owners at the time. Tastes changed and so did the houses.</div><div><br /></div><div>The variety of houses gives my neighborhood an organic character that contrasts remarkably with the mechanical, cookie-cutter character of the newer subdivisions where all the houses and yards have a homogeneous look and feel. That is an aesthetic judgement on my part, but it explains why I prefer a garden of many plants and flowers rather than a garden of one flower, however beautiful the flower. If a blight attacks my garden of many flowers, then some will survive. If a blight attacks a garden of one flower, the garden dies. Complexity is not only more resilient, but to my eye, it is more beautiful. I celebrate complexity and appreciate its proximity to chaos. That's where all the excitement is.</div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-22453117285296204952020-11-28T12:04:00.002-05:002021-04-24T09:15:17.486-04:00The Problem of Complexity: Relational Bodies and Houses<p>Preiser says that complex systems must be understood as a nexus of nonlinear, dynamic relationships. In a previous post, I explained this second of Preiser's five characteristics of complexity this way: </p>
<blockquote>Complex systems are constituted relationally both inside and out, and the relations between internal components and the environment are dynamic, manifold, and nonlinear, which means that output is not directly proportional to input. The behavior of interactions is to some degree unpredictable and uncertain and functions in a state of asymmetrical non-equilibrium. The survival of complex systems depends on this nonlinear relationality.</blockquote><p>So what does this mean for thinking about myself or my home?</p><p>It means first that the typical definitions of myself are limited — not necessarily wrong, but not exhaustive, either. The usual way of knowing a thing such as myself is to look for defining characteristics — features that I have that distinguish me from you, for instance, or from them. We have numerous labels for those characteristics such as weight, height, race, voting preferences, gender, occupation, family, location, age, and so on. We can assign values to each of those labels: pounds or kilograms (the particular scale employed matters little here), inches, colors, political parties, years, and various types. If we aggregate those characteristics, then we identify and define Keith Hamon.</p><p>This is the classical scientific approach to knowing Keith Hamon: break him down into whatever characteristics are relevant to the current discussion (health, commerce, politics), assign appropriate values to these characteristics, look for the patterns of cause and effect in those characteristics, and then, if you are clever and focused, manage Keith Hamon better: correct his illnesses and insure he buys certain things and votes for certain candidates.</p><p>This is an extremely powerful approach to knowledge about the world in order to control the world. We record the tokens of an individual. For instance, I got the brown hair color token -- at least until a few years ago, when I had to exchange it for the gray hair color token. Either way, I had a specific token, a thing, a chunk of knowledge that in the correct conversation could be used to manage me better. If something was wrong with my health or economic status, I or some employed expert could examine my tokens, determine what is amiss, and recommend a course of corrective action.</p><p>This stuff works. The problem, Preiser says, is that because of its efficacy, people assume that this is the only approach to knowledge. They become blind to other knowledge and to the limits of their own knowledge, especially when confronting complex systems such as Keith Hamon, or even his house.</p><p>First, my characteristics are not discrete chunks of something, tokens, that I possess and can exchange; rather, they are the results of dynamic relationships among multiple entities. Even something as apparently simple as my hair color is the result of dynamic relationships. I don't have a brown hair token — not really. Rather, I have the interplay of a range of hair follicles of different shades and colors, the ambient light (my hair is black at night and has auburn highlights when I've been in the Bahamas for a month — I have the photos to prove it), the age of the rest of my body, the quality of the measuring devices (your eyes, a camera, mirrors), and the distance from me at the time of recording or viewing. My hair color, then, is a result of the interplay of all these entities and relationships which are constantly changing. Thus, the color of my hair is constantly changing. Perhaps not by much day to day, but it is changing.</p><p>Fortunately, my hair color is trivial to most discussions, and I can glibly answer brown when asked about it, as I did at my last driver's license examination. The license clerk accepted the brown token just as glibly, even though I could have legitimately answered gray, or better yet, salt and pepper. Still, salt and pepper was not one of her available designations, and since brown was still about as appropriate as gray, she recorded brown. I'm confident that when I use my license in the future, most people will accept the brown token, even if they notice that it's no longer quite accurate. It fits well enough.</p><p>And that is the problem for Preiser: understanding anything as a collection of characteristic tokens works well enough in the common light of day. Heck, it even works well enough to send astronauts to the Moon and back. Still, as we peer farther into the Universe and deeper into the atom, we find that this reductionist token approach works less and less well. There are no tokens. There are only dynamic relationships. What's worse, our ability to manage — to predict and to determine — those relationships becomes more and more uncertain. For instance, the color of my hair is a property — in however small a part — of the relationship between my hair follicles and the beating of my heart and flow of my blood and my current exposure to Sun flares. I don't know how it is related, but complexity thinking tells me it is. If I had powerful enough monitoring devices and the correct mathematics, I could perhaps trace those relationships and win a Nobel prize, but ... I don't.</p><p>We humans intuitively know this. We know that the reduction of knowledge to a handful of tokens is limited and limiting, but we've also learned that it is useful and powerful. It works. Mostly. It's the "mostly" that bothers Preiser and other complexity thinkers.</p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Electromagnetic-Spectrum.svg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="!Original: PenubagVector: Victor Blacus, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons"><img alt="Electromagnetic-Spectrum" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Electromagnetic-Spectrum.svg/256px-Electromagnetic-Spectrum.svg.png" width="256" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">PenubagVector: Victor Blacus, CC BY-SA 3.0 <br />via Wikimedia Commons</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p>
It bothers me, too, especially when I encounter people who insist that reductionist science is the only way to knowledge. It's a bit like insisting that only the electromagnetic radiation that we can see, visible light, really counts, when it has become clear to us that visible light is a really small slice of what's available and that reducing reality to visible light is nonsensical — even though focusing on the common light of day works very well for me most of the time. I must keep in mind that reductionist science is in great part responsible for my awareness of the wider spectrum of light.</p><p>But I'm also excited to think about how open complexity thinking is. Understanding something so specific as Keith Hamon or a chrysanthemum means exploring all the dynamic relationships and interactions between all the infinite parts starting with the human scale and moving inward toward the quantum scale and outward to the cosmic scale and mapping all those pathways and flows of energy, matter, information, and organization. It's an endless task, which means learning has no end. Well, that should occupy my time. And if I throw in trying to understand you as well, then it should keep me busy until I'm gone.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-54358835294230447062020-11-24T10:29:00.000-05:002020-11-24T10:29:23.240-05:00The Problem of Complexity: Open House and Open Human<h3 style="text-align: left;">House and Human</h3><div>I want to explore these five characteristics of complex systems that Preiser lists in her dissertation by comparing and contrasting the human body to a human house. This is mostly a matter of convenient proximity, as I have one of each.
I start with the assumption that a house is more of a closed system and a human is more of an open system. In other words, on the sliding scale from simple system to complex system, a house skews to the simple and a human skews to the complex.</div><h4 style="text-align: left;">Openness</h4><div>The first characteristic that Preiser mentions -- openness -- suggests that the contrast between house and human may not be as distinct as I imagined.
As Preiser describes in her dissertation, the openness of a complex system both internally and externally involves us in the issue of boundaries both internal and external. I can, of course, see and model the boundaries of my own house, both inside and outside. I can also see the boundaries of my own body, mostly on the outside, but I know that the inside can be seen under special, medical conditions. I can in the common light of day point to both my house and my body and say, "That's my house. That's me." Most everyone will know what I mean and agree with me. I can walk through my house in the dark, and mostly the walls do not shift and the floors don't rock. My own body stays mostly inside my skin, a convenient and customary area of demarcation -- a boundary.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, as soon as I begin shifting my gaze to see through a complexity lens, then both house and body begin to open, though I think the body opens more. As it happens, both my house and my body emerged in 1951, so we are the same age. The boundaries of my house were fixed at birth/building and have changed very little since then. The original owners had about 2,400 square feet under roof in 1951, and we -- the second owners -- still have the same. The room layout is about the same, though the surface features have changed with new paint, carpets, and furnishings. </div><div><br /></div><div>The boundaries of my body, on the other hand, have changed much, certainly more than my house. I have more cubic footage under roof than I did 69 years ago, and the contours are different -- though thankfully my head is still atop my shoulders, my heart in my chest, and my legs underneath me. Still, even the most casual observer will note that I am not what I was 69 years ago. I don't occupy the same space. My boundaries have shifted mostly due to the growth and rearrangement of my internal components, but also because of complex interactions both internally and externally. For 69 years -- or rather for 70 years, as my body was growing and interacting with its environment in the womb -- I have been open to energy, matter, information, and organization from outside. My entire body is a porous sponge that soaks up my environment. I process those inputs internally more or less well and feed back outputs into my environment. </div><div><br /></div><div>One scale down, my organs are doing the same. My heart is jostling with its neighboring lungs and stomach to get along (it mostly does) and to be a productive member of the society that I am. It takes in blood and oxygen for energy to do its work and feeds back the blood and energy to its community. Round and round, a constant, essential cycle. I can scale down through tissues, cells, molecules, and atoms as deeply as my science and technology will allow me to go, and it's the same openness all the way down or in.</div><div><br /></div><div>One scale up, my family is doing the same. We jostle with each other to get along (we mostly do) and to be productive members of the society that we identify with (we mostly are). We take in and feedback in a constant, essential and necessary cycle. We gather often, exchanging information and energy that coordinates us and maintains our identity as a family. Again, I can scale up through clan, community, town, state, nation, world, and cosmos as far as my science and technology will allow me to go, and it's the same openness and flows all the way up or out.</div><div><br /></div><div>However far I go inward or outward, I see the same flows of energy, matter, information, and organizational patterns back and forth through whatever boundaries I define. My skin is a convenient and handy boundary with physical and informational implications ( social, economic, and political). It's also the boundary that most people see and that photographs capture. It shapes my perception of myself and my world, and it shapes my environment's perception of and interactions with me, but it is by no means absolute. I leak inward and outward. Each scale in or out stains the next scale, and understanding my skin requires understanding those proximate scales. Complete understanding of my body requires understanding all the scales inward and outward -- an impossible task. I am infinite, and I could study me forever and still not get to the bottom of me.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, I did not expect to follow that line of sentences to that period, but I'll let them stand to see if they have legs.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's easy for me to see that my body is a more open system than is my house. I tend to think of a house as protection from the outside -- a fixed, inviolable, somewhat sacred boundary, or barrier, between my family and the environment, but complexity thinking questions those assumptions. Similar to my body, my house is made up of different systems that manage the flows of energy, matter, information, and organization into and out of my home. My house has electrical, gas, and plumbing systems that bring energy and water in and take heat and waste out. My house has television, telephone, and network systems that exchange information between the inside and outside. During this pandemic I've been more conscious of ventilation in my home, and so I've opened my house's windows more often to allow a better exchange of air from outside to inside, but really, my house is old and was built back when insulation was not a priority, so it has long exchanged air with the outside.</div><div><br /></div><div>If I look for them, then I can find lots of exchanges and flows between my house and the environment, and the interactions between my house and environment become even more open and complex when I think of my family and me as my house's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome" target="_blank">microbiome</a>. We live inside the guts of my house similarly to the way all those bacteria live in my guts, and the interactions between the microbiome and host are complex and critical. The interactions become even more complex if I extend the microbiome metaphor to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holobiont" target="_blank">holobiont</a>, which includes the host, the microbiome, and all the other species living in or around the host and that contribute in some way to the functioning, whether for good or ill, of the host. I can see my house as the host and me, my family, my friends, workers, insects, pets, furnishings, devices, cars, lawn mowers, and other things as the holobiont. I've now included my yard as a second, more porous skin of my house. Clearly, my house is not a closed, simple system, but open and complex.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, there are differences between my body and my house, as the other characteristics of complexity are likely to reveal, but the lesson for me here is that if I start looking from the framework of complexity, then I find that there really are no absolutely closed systems. Even rocks and black holes exchange some energy, matter, information, and organization with the rest of us, though on very different time scales and perhaps in coarser chunks. Still, everything is part of the weave, the <i>complexus</i> ("what is woven together") as Morin calls it.</div><div><br /></div><div>I have a couple of reservations about openness as I have described it. First, the proximate scales are more important to us and to our identity. The farther I focus my attention away from my human scale, then the more obscure I become and the more difficult it becomes to trace the influences of my human scale on the behaviors of the other scales. I'm fairly confident if I move one scale inward toward my internal organs or one scale outward toward my immediate social groups, but if I move much further, I start losing Keith Hamon. At the molecular level, I'm just a nebulous cloud. At the national level, I'm just a bland dot. Either way, I Keith Hamon recede into the background as just part of the general noise, and it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what impact, if any, my behaviors at the human scale are having on either the molecular scales I enclose or the national scales that enclose me. Whatever influences that might be attributed solely or even mostly to Keith Hamon at the human scale seem to diffuse and become muddy as they delta out or in to other scales. At some scale, I seem to lose myself. Once I move beyond a certain horizon, I dissolve into something else. My house does the same. If I focus too far in or too far out, I can no longer recognize my house. (You can illustrate this graphically with Google Earth). Later in her dissertation, Preiser talks about the critical importance of horizons and boundaries for knowledge.</div><div><br /></div><div>Second, the term openness suggests superficially that complex systems are all open and not closed. This is not the case. Openness in the sense of allowing the flow of energy, matter, information, and organization across some boundary of a complex entity must be counterpoised by closure in the sense of restricting, modifying, or at least monitoring the flows across some boundary. Both opening and closing boundaries are absolutely necessary functions for the maintenance of the complex entity, for its internal interactions, and for its external interactions with its environment. Openness and closure work hand-in-hand in constant, irreconcilable dialog, and the life of my body and my house plays out in the dynamic tension between them. Both my house and my body have boundaries that keep the rain water out of the inside while allowing some water in. Failures of either function leads to catastrophes. A leaky roof or a burst pipe can allow water in where I don't want it and stop water where I do want it. When the plumbing breaks, the party is over. Most activity ceases until the boundaries are repaired. My body works the same. Drowning and extreme thirst both lead to catastrophes. I just googled <i>oxygen poisoning</i> and learned of <i><a href="https://myhealth.ucsd.edu/RelatedItems/3,90904" target="_blank">oxygen toxicity</a></i>. Apparently, this is a condition, though I've never heard of it. Too much oxygen, just like too little, is bad for my body. All life on Earth depends just as much on the flow of light from the Sun AND on the layers of atmosphere, seas, and vegetation that filter that light. The dialog between sunlight and sunshade is a constant interplay in our lives, and we absolutely need both.</div><div><br /></div><div>Openness, then, must be managed -- either by the boundary itself (my skin or my roof) or by the complex entity that depends on the boundary (me, when I decide not to have that next beer). Both my house and my body need both more liberal impulses of openness and more conservative impulses of closure, and the mix of both depends on the internal interactions of the complex entity and the external interactions with the environment. The mix is never static; rather, it needs constant attention and care. That's the responsibility of life as a complex entity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, I have issues with the implications that some entities can be almost completely closed while some entities are almost completely open. I don't think any system in reality is ever completely open or closed. I don't think Reality itself is completely open or closed. We must always account for the interplay to some degree of interaction of the forces and components within a complex system and the forces and components without that system. Even a rock has something going inside, though it takes a very long time to emerge, and what happens inside the rock is dependent on what is happening outside the rock, between it and the environment. Over centuries, even a rock must learn to adjust to its new environment or cease to exist. A black hole may be the most nearly closed entity in all the Universe, and yet we are learning to tease information and energy from it -- if not matter or organization. And who knows what matter and organization may lie on the other side of that hole? So dialog and interplay it is all the way down, all the way out.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, I intended to write about all five characteristics of complex systems that Preiser lists in her dissertation, but I'm up against the boundary of post length. It appears that I will devote one post to each characteristic. So more next post about relationality, non-linearity and non-equilibrium.</div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-24421475883521413832020-11-20T09:07:00.001-05:002020-11-29T09:53:43.792-05:00The Problem of Complexity: Definition and Knowledge<p>I will write more about narrative theory, but I won't stop reading about complexity. I'm reading a dissertation by Rika Preiser entitled <i><a href="https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/71629" target="_blank">The Problem of Complexity: Re-Thinking the Role of Critique</a></i> (Dec. 2012, Stellenbosch University). I find it most engaging, and I want to write about it before I forget what she says. I came across Preiser's work through her association with Paul Cilliers, who was her dissertation director until his untimely death 2011 July 31. I have read much of Cilliers, and quickly realized that he was helped greatly by two of his students Rika Preiser and Minka Woermann, both of whom I started reading. Their own work has helped me understand Cilliers. I suspect Preiser's dissertation will do the same.</p><p>In her dissertation, Preiser frames the problem of complexity in two ways:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>the problems with the definition of complexity, and</li><li>the problems with observing, knowing, and describing complexity.</li></ol><div>In other words, she poses an ontological question: what is complexity? and an epistemological question: how can we understand complexity?</div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Idea(l)s of Complexity</h3>Preiser insists that there is no unifying Theory of Complexity (24). At best, we can recognise a certain "economy of concepts" that arranges itself around the characteristics of complex systems to form a "commonplace structure of intelligibility" (38) that Edgar Morin calls a paradigm of complexity and Paul Cilliers calls an attitude of complexity. Preiser lists 10 common denominators that inform the various theories of complexity:<div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The history and origins of theories of complexity are directly linked to General Systems Theory, cybernetics and artificial intelligence. </li><li>Theories of complexity follow two distinct tracks: </li><ol><li>a track that claims complexity has the duty to measure and formalise complex systems by means of mathematical computation, called <b>restricted</b> complexity by Morin and Cilliers, and </li><li>a paradigm that argues that complex systems ultimately cannot be measured and calculated but remain in principle too complex to model in theoretical equations. Called <b>general</b> complexity by Morin and <b>critical</b> complexity by Cilliers. </li></ol><li>Theories of complexity are all concerned with the study of complex phenomena in states of non-equilibrium that display characteristics of non-linearity, self organisation, and emergence and behave in a manner in which time and energy expenditure is irreversible. </li><li>Theories of complexity use technical and metaphorical vocabulary to describe complex phenomena and provide scientists with a language for dealing with complex phenomena. </li><li>Theories of complexity shift from a paradigm of classical Newtonian/Cartesian science to a non-reductionist paradigm, in direct opposition to linear, atomist, determinist and reductionist explanations of the world. </li><li>Complexity studies prefer organisation over static structures, ‘relationships over entities’, stochastic above determinist mechanism, and phenomenon in its context over isolated objects. </li><li>Complexity theories express the limits of human understanding in relation to complex natural and social phenomena and problematizes instruments and strategies used to model the relation between natural and formal systems. </li><li>Theories of complexity devise few problem-solving tools and clear-cut solution kits, but rather expose, challenge, and problematise the assumptions of conventional theories and practices. </li><li>Theories of complexity influence the way in which we do science and how we practically implement scientific findings and demand methods of inquiry and knowledge generating practices that draw from a plurality of epistemologies or positions. </li><li>Complexity discourses affect and cross-pollinate a variety of fields of study.</li></ol><h3 style="text-align: left;">Describing Complexity</h3><div>The general, interdisciplinary approach to complexity of Morin and Cilliers leads to Preiser's second problem: knowing and describing complexity. Study of complex systems requires a complex, interdisciplinary, integrative theoretical approach that remains critical of each approach used, challenging its own knowledge generating practices. Complex study cannot ignore its own complicity in and influences on the complex systems it studies. Once inside a system to observe it, the observer must account for being there. This is always a problem inside the problem one is trying to observe, understand, and describe. Complexity, in other words.</div><div><br /></div><div>Preiser lists five descriptions of complex empirical phenomena that seem not to fit the traditional "Cartesian/Newtonian prescriptions of analysis" (74):</div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li><b>Openness</b> - Complex systems are open to their environments -- exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization -- so that according to Cilliers clearly defining the boundary of the system is
problematic and is often "a function of the activity of the system itself, and a product of the
strategy of description involved".</li><li><b> Relationality, non-linearity and non-equilibrium</b> - Complex systems are constituted relationally both inside and out, and the relations between internal components and the environment are dynamic, manifold, and nonlinear, which means that output is not directly proportional to input. The behavior of interactions is to some degree unpredictable and uncertain and functions in a state of asymmetrical non-equilibrium. The survival of complex systems depends on this nonlinear relationality.<br /></li><li><b>Non-homogeneity</b> - Complex systems are comprised of a number of heterogeneous components with multiple, dynamic pathways among them that create rich and diverse interactions which become too complex to calculate. The elements and interrelationships change over time and scale.<br /></li><li><b>Emergence & complex causality</b> - Because of the dynamic nature of internal and external interrelationships, complex systems manifest emergent properties that can be understood only in terms of the organizational structure of the system and not in the properties of the components. Emergent phenomena depend on and yet are independent of constituent parts and display certain properties:
<br /></li><ol><li><i>radical novelty</i>: emergent phenomena are neither predictable nor deducible from micro level components, which are necessary but insufficient for understanding emergent phenomena.</li><li><i>coherence</i>: emergent phenomena are integrated wholes likely to maintain some identity over time.</li><li><i>macro level</i>: emergent phenomena occur at a macro level compared to their micro level components.</li><li><i>dynamical</i>: emergent phenomena are not a priori wholes but gradually appear as a complex system dynamically develops over time.</li><li><i>ostensive</i>: emergent phenomena show themselves and are ostensively recognized in terms of their purpose and meaningful behaviour.</li></ol>Complex systems operate through both upward and downward causation, such that emergent properties are the result of the organization and interactions of constituent parts at the micro-level but also in turn cause changes in the constituent parts.<li><b>Self-organisation</b> - Complex systems are able to evolve within themselves their internal structures in order to cope with their environments. They are able to learn and to adjust to ensure their survival.</li></ol></div>Complexity, then, is first a problem of observing and studying complex phenomena that themselves have incalculable interrelationships and interactions and unpredictable properties and then second being able to observe only from the inside as part of the system. The observer has no objective, outside point of view, but only a subjective, inside point of view that affects -- often non-trivially -- the complex system under observation and study. The presence of a thermometer changes -- however slightly -- the temperature of the body being measured.</div><div><br /></div><div>Following Morin's lead, Preiser concludes by positing complexity not as a theory but as a pilot notion "that allows for an
integrative theoretical approach that remains critical of the scientific assumptions that emerge
from studying complex phenomena ... exposes the limits of each
discipline and ... [problematizes] the status of knowledge and knowledge generating practices (75).</div><div><br /></div><div>In my next post, I will use my own house and body to explore these five characteristics of complexity.</div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-64514067627141496442020-11-08T09:30:00.001-05:002020-11-08T09:30:49.296-05:00The Narrative Paradigm: Good Reasons<p>As I think about Fisher's argument, I am more and more persuaded that the narrative paradigm helps me explain the disconnect between my arguments about Trump and the arguments of my Evangelical friends. First, we usually argue at different scales: I'm arguing from the rationalist paradigm which focuses on a narrow, prescribed perspective and they from a narrative paradigm which has a much wider reach. Let me explain.</p><p>Fisher claims that the narrative paradigm includes the rational paradigm, superseding it without negating it. He says: </p><blockquote>I want to stress, however, that narrative rationality does not negate traditional rationality. It holds that traditional rationality is only relevant in specialized fields and even in those arenas narrative rationality is meaningful and useful. (10)</blockquote>
In a sense, then, narrative is the frame within which a technical reason can function. When Newton used a new technical reason (calculus) to formulate the universal laws of motion, he did so within a narrative — a frame — that relegated God to the role of watchmaker who created the mechanical world, set it running, and then was largely absent as the wheels and engines whirred reliably throughout the Universe, managing both the arc of the moon and the fall of an apple. His story didn't quite rid the Universe of God (Laplace did that a bit later), but his narrative distanced God far enough that the Universe could follow the universal laws of motion without divine interference or help. The story provides a suitable frame for Newton's technical rationality, his mathematics and calculus. All technical rationality has a similar relationship with some enfolding story, just as all systems have a similar relationship with their ecosystems.<div><br /></div><div>An immediate problem with technical rationality noted by Fisher is that not all people can use any given technical rationality. I, for instance, cannot use Newton's calculus, which he devised for rationalizing the laws of motion. I assume I'm bright enough to do so, but I have not studied it. I've even forgotten most of the geometry and trigonometry that I last studied as an underclassman some 50 years ago. However, as Fisher claims, all people have access to narrative rationality with its tests of probability and fidelity. All of us can recognize good reasons for believing or not believing some story.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what are these "good reasons" that Fisher says all human beings can recognize and use? As I understand him, Fisher examines good reasons through three lenses:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>narrative coherence: Does the story make sense in itself, or as Caldiero says in his article <i><a href="http://ac-journal.org/journal/2007/Spring/articles/storytelling.html" target="_blank">Crisis Storytelling</a></i>: "Is the story free of contradictions? Does it 'hang together?' Is it consistent (Fisher, 1985, pp. 349, 364)?"</li><li>narrative fidelity: Does the story fit well with other stories that I already know and believe? Caldiero says: "Does the story exist on the same plane as other stories the reader has experienced? What are the “truth qualities" of the story? Is the reasoning sound? How good is the reproduction of the story? What is its value (Fisher, 1985, p. 349ff; 1987)?"</li><li>narrative context: Both coherence and fidelity are tempered by a person's own "history, culture, and perceptions about the status and character of the other people involved (all of which may be subjective and incompletely understood)" (<i><a href="https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Narrative_paradigm" target="_blank">Narrative paradigm</a></i>). Both coherence and fidelity — or what we might call the <i>fit</i> or <i>feel</i> of a story — is determined not solely by the characteristics inherent within a story but also by the life history of the people hearing the story. Stories that fit well with what people already know and value are more readily accepted. Those that don't fit require much more persuasion, if not coercion. Thus, we cannot think merely of an argument itself with its internal logic and probabilities as we can with a syllogism; rather, we must account for the ecosystem within which the argument is expressed.</li></ul></div><div>Any argument about Trump that I might offer my Evangelical friends will always be tested not simply for how well it arrays and presents the facts, but also for how well it fits with stories that my friends already know and believe. Even if my argument, which itself assumes a larger story, is internally consistent and logical, my friends will reject it if it does not hang together with stories that they already know, believe, and trust to give meaning to their lives.</div><div><br /></div><div>An easy example is my argument to Evangelicals that Trump's personal life does not meet the usual Evangelical standards for righteous living, a failing that they hated and castigated Bill Clinton for. I was raised under those standards, and I know them well. Other than his avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, Trump meets none of them. He lies, cheats, and philanders. He is vulgar in speech and habit. He is self-centered, petty, petulant, and profligate. I can produce ample evidence to support all of these claims, and my Evangelical friends simply nod, smile, and say along with <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-rick-perry-trump-god-1473773" target="_blank">Rick Perry</a>, "Yes, isn't it miraculous how God has used Trump — the worst among us — to lead America back to the path of righteousness?" Or they might say, echoing influential Evangelical leader <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9vMEKKJJE" target="_blank">Jerry Falwell, Jr</a>, "Well, we are not supporting a pastor-in-chief, but a president." Or they might join with <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/18/melania-presents-donald-trump-the-family-man.html" target="_blank">Melania</a> or <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Case-Trump-Phyllis-Schlafly/dp/1621576280" target="_blank">Phyllis Schafley</a> and say, "That's just fake news. Donald Trump's a devout family man."</div><div><br /></div><div>I should not be surprised, though I often am. I'm certainly too often confused. In the face of all this evidence to the contrary, how can they continue to support someone who is so clearly not an Evangelical supporting their life goals?</div><div><br /></div><div>They, of course, have a larger story that makes the facts I present irrelevant or incorrect. They first have stories from the Bible — or at least, their interpretations of those stories, which have often been reworked into a narrative more to their liking. The favorite one, of course, is King David, to whom Trump is often compared. Like Trump, David was a womanizer. He was also a murderer (as far as we know, Trump is not). Yet, David stands in the eyes of most Evangelicals as Israel's greatest king — not despite his flaws, but because of them. His flaws highlight the glory of God, who can use even a flawed human to work His Will. And God is still doing that today with Trump. This not only gives a pass to Trump's flaws but actually praises them as supports to God's glory. This view strikes me as most perverse, as it does <a href="https://theconversation.com/for-a-growing-number-of-evangelical-christians-trump-is-no-longer-the-lesser-of-two-evils-148714" target="_blank">some other Evangelicals</a>, but most Evangelicals that I know accept some version of this story, at least well enough to swallow Trump's outrageous behavior.</div><div><br /></div><div>But one story may not be enough, even if it's from the Bible and regularly retold in Sunday School. Fortunately, the Bible has more stories of sinners turned saints, as in the story of Saul the persecutor of Christians blinded on the road to Damascus and converted to St. Paul. But there's more.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many Evangelicals are also familiar with the sinner-turned-preacher story of today. My own family's denomination had countless stories — often told in lurid detail by flashy evangelists in a holy ghost revival meeting — of a flagrantly outrageous sinner suddenly blinded by God's light in a road-to-Damascus experience who gloriously turns from attacking God's kingdom to defending and expanding God's kingdom. My Evangelical friends and family see in the flesh a King David or St. Paul character in their pulpits and witness first-hand the amazing power of God to transform a miserable sinner into a glorious servant of God.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps you detect some sarcasm in this observation. I can see it myself, and I'm sorry, for I intend none.</div><div><br /></div><div>I firmly believe in the power of religious stories to inform and transform a believer's life, and most religions teach and practice this power. For every spectacular failure of a Jerry Falwell, Jr, or Jimmy Swaggart, I see millions of people whose lives are enriched by their religious faith, and I deeply respect it. To me, this quiet, quotidian work of faith is the real story, but it lacks narrative coherence and impact. A good story needs a well-defined protagonist in conflict with exceptional forces. It's this heightened tension between good and evil that drives the story and makes it memorable (I'm in agreement with Flannery O'Connor here). Fortunately, some of these real-life heroic figures are more like St. Theresa or Billy Graham, and some are not. One character supports our faith, one does not. I think we need both for a rich, complex understanding of life.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the question remains if and how the Trump as King David story is supported by good reasons as Fisher defines them. I think it is for those who accept the King David story as historical fact. The story is coherent, and it fits the pattern of a well-known and accepted story. Of course, the coherence and fidelity are not perfect. Trump, for instance, was not born a poor shepherd, but he has garnered a reputation for taking on and slaying giants such as China — to my mind, a reputation largely of his own fabrication, but a reputation nonetheless. And this points to a critical feature of the power of stories: once Trump becomes identified with King David, then he takes on all of the characteristics of David, including his ability to kill giants and drain the swamp.</div><div><br /></div><div>Then, the Evangelical view of Trump as King David is well-tempered by their "history, culture, and perceptions about the status and character" of Donald Trump and the people retelling the story. My Evangelical friends know who they trust on Facebook and Twitter, and when those trusted sources retell this King David/Trump story again and again, then they believe it. Once the story begins to wear well in their hearts and minds, then evidence to support that story appears everywhere. For instance, they consider the 2016 election campaign itself: No one expected Trump to be the Republican candidate, much less the winner over Clinton. Perhaps even Trump himself didn't expect it, but he won anyway. And he won through the miracle of the Electoral College, which could only have happened through God's direct intervention. Once you accept the story, it's easy to see the Hand of God in this improbable event. Forget your statistics and the arcane machinations of the Electoral College. This was God at work to bring America back to Him. And He used Donald Trump to do it. How wonderful and glorious is that?</div><div><br /></div><div>This brings me to thoughts about the ecosystem within which a story emerges and sustains itself. More about that later.</div><div><p></p></div>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4717220359532645973.post-85916426040342020872020-10-25T13:26:00.000-04:002020-10-25T13:26:45.188-04:00The Narrative Paradigm: Epistemology vs. Ontology<p>If Walter Fisher is correct, then the rational paradigm is a matter of epistemology, of knowing the facts of a situation and the operations for manipulating both those facts and the situation. The narrative paradigm, on the other hand, is a matter of ontology, of becoming and living out a chosen story with some consistency and truth — though oddly enough, even violating one's own story can affirm the consistency and truth of that story. Rationality is something we can acquire, but narrative is something we are born with. Rationality is something we can learn to do, narrative is something we are.</p><p>For Fisher, <i>homo narrans</i> is the master metaphor for the essential character of humans, relegating other metaphors — <i>homo faber</i>, <i>homo economous</i>, <i>politicus</i>, <i>sociologicus</i>, <i>sapiens</i>, and so on — to various specialized ways of recounting and accounting for human thinking and doing. For Fisher, we become our stories through emerging and living within a particular family, clan, and community, and we retell and even reshape those stories to recount and account for who we are. We learn and preserve our shared reality through the stories we live and tell. Fisher quotes Kenneth Burke's <i>Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent</i>: "Not only do human beings successfully infer other beings' states of mind from symbolic clues; we know that they characteristically, in all societies, build each other's minds" (9). Our stories build our minds within an ecosystem of shared stories. Our minds seemingly come wired for story, and our engagement with our communities helps us create and live our stories.</p><p>If Fisher is correct, then we build mind through story first and through reason later; thus, narrative as a function of mind subsumes rationality (9). Our reasoning is always framed by, tempered by, informed by our narratives, which is one easy way to explain the differences in argument employed by physicists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, and theologians. Their narrative frames present them with a particular subset of facts and with an often peculiar subset of terms and operations for manipulating those facts. Agents in each of these different fields can observe facts within their fields and more or less skillfully manipulate those facts, but each agent will identify themselves as a physicist, engineer, or lawyer based on the stories about themselves and their worlds that they believe, tell, and live. Story precedes and frames reason.</p><p>Moreover, most academicians are painfully aware of the difficulties of translating the facts and reasoning methods from one field to another — say, from physics to English. The acceptable facts and the operations for manipulating those facts in one field are not intuitively obvious to people in another field, and conversation between the two fields can be awkward. Physicists can talk to deconstructionists, for instance, but it takes some special effort, and thus, most academicians are content to stay in their fields only dim aware of the conversations and arguments in other fields. But thinkers such as Michel Serres, N. Katherine Hayles, and Basarab Nicolescu believe that the crosstalk between fields, between differing stories, can be especially enriching for any fields that engage it. I believe this as well.</p><p>What are the implications of grounding story in ontology and grounding reason in epistemology, especially for understanding the tension I feel between my own perceptions of the Trump administration and the Evangelical perceptions of Trump? Several, I think.</p><p>First, story is more resistant to change than is reason. Presented with new facts and interpretations, I can change my rational mind (though even that can be difficult, given the influence of story). Reason is a more nimble and manipulable tool than is story. Indeed, reason can be described as a tool, but I'm not sure that story can. Reason, it seems to me, is designed and is used for arranging and rearranging facts into rational formations and for using those resulting understandings for manipulating and managing reality. Reason is a tool designed and used for specific purposes.</p><p>Story works deeper than that. Story provides the framework that helps us foreground facts in the first place: to be able to even see a fact and to identify it as salient. There are more facts in the world than we can recognize and comprehend, and story helps us highlight those facts that have potential for our lives — that fit the narrative of our lives — and it makes these choices before we are even conscious of making a choice and long before we apply the scopes and razors of reason to our observations. Thus, reason is a function of the clear, conscious mind; whereas, narrative is a function of the subconscious mind. Reason works like clockwork; narrative works rhizomatically, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari suggest. Most of us are likely conscious of and in control of our reasonable minds, but I suspect most of us are not conscious of and in control of our narrative minds — unless we have turned our reasonable minds onto and examined our narrative minds.</p><p>The reasonable mind, then, is more liberal in the classical sense than is the narrative mind. When presented with new facts, the reasonable mind will readily dismiss old beliefs and systems to make room for new beliefs that better account for the new facts. Story, on the other hand, clings to the old beliefs, the old gods, and resists change. As Walker Percy has noted, changing our stories usually requires trauma of some kind (think of a near death experience or a divorce) or a close encounter with a great mind (think of a graduate seminar with Isaac Bashevis Singer). Story is more conservative; reason is more progressive.</p><p>I do not use the terms <i>conservative</i> or <i>progressive</i> in a political sense, though the implications for politics should be obvious. Rather, I use them in the sense of how we construct reality, a process that requires both conservative and progressive functions. On one hand, we must be able to conserve life constructs. We cannot afford to relearn the same things over and over; hence, both muscle and mental memory are obvious conservative system functions. A known and reliable route from home to work and back is a conservative and very useful construct. On the other hand, we must also be able to learn new things as the demands of our environment and internal systems change. We can benefit from trying new routes between home and work. Often at one and the same time, we must be able to rely on what we already know (the past) and rely on our ability to learn new things (the future). This leads me to define the conservative mode as past truth and the progressive mode as future truth. A well-functioning mind makes use of both modes, as both modes reinforce and support each other.</p><p>I am not suggesting a golden mean here between the left hand and the right hand, progressivism and conservatism. I am not arguing for moderation. Rather, this is placement of ourselves within the complexity zone, damn near chaos, which has proven to be the most dynamic, robust, and interesting zone in all of life. The constant interplay and tension between what I have already learned from experience and inherited wisdom — my story — and what I have yet to learn from new experiences and stories is what drives my life on its trajectory. It is what makes my life interesting. Complexity is a sweet spot between the cold, dead certainty of the past and the hot potential of the future. But as with a soccer ball, I don't always hit the sweet spot. Sometimes I cling too much to what I know (conservatism), and sometimes I revel too much in what I have yet to learn (progressivism). I suppose we all have these tendencies to one extreme or the other. We all know someone who, for instance, is trapped in a life-draining relationship with a lover or employee because they are too afraid to abandon a given, familiar, sanctioned structure and someone else who cannot maintain even a life-affirming relationship with a lover or an employer because they are too attracted by new relationships.</p><p>Well, my thoughts are meandering away from ontology and epistemology — not in a bad way, but in a way, away. My point is that I tend to favor rational arguments, and I am often confused by the arguments of my Evangelical friends. I'm also amazed at how intractable they can be. I can provide voluminous data that, to my mind, proves that Donald Trump is a narcissistic liar and cheat with no morals and they will insist that he is nonetheless God's chosen man for the hour. I walk away confused and dispirited.</p><p>But I'm coming to see that we are arguing on two different levels that do intersect and certainly do not translate without some serious effort. I'm talking about reason and they are talking about narrative. I'll give an example to end this post.</p><p>One of my favorite websites, <i><a href="theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a></i>, recently posted an article by Baylor University professor Samuel Perry entitled <a href="https://theconversation.com/evangelical-leaders-like-billy-graham-and-jerry-falwell-sr-have-long-talked-of-conspiracies-against-gods-chosen-those-ideas-are-finding-resonance-today-132241?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2016%202020%20-%201761317069&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20October%2016%202020%20-%201761317069+Version+B+CID_37bdf94153b45c2e8f3a2f0fec989171&utm_source=campaign_monitor_us&utm_term=Evangelical%20leaders%20like%20Billy%20Graham%20and%20Jerry%20Falwell%20Sr%20have%20long%20talked%20of%20conspiracies%20against%20Gods%20chosen%20%20those%20ideas%20are%20finding%20resonance%20today" target="_blank">"Evangelical Leaders like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell Sr. have long talked of conspiracies against God’s chosen – those ideas are finding resonance today."</a> Perry explores one of the most long-held and common stories among Evangelicals: that they are denigrated and dismissed by mainstream society — the World. This is a subplot to a larger story about how this world is not our home; rather, Heaven is our promised home. The old red back hymnal used in the Churches of God of my youth contained countless songs that claimed alienation from and indifference to this World and allegiance to the World to come. The old hymn "I'm Getting Ready to Leave this World" says it pointedly:</p><blockquote> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://g.christianbook.com/dg/slideshow/f400/1109m_1_ftc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="266" height="200" src="https://g.christianbook.com/dg/slideshow/f400/1109m_1_ftc.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><br />To prepare a mansion, Jesus said “I’ll go.”<br />
If it were not true I would have told you so.<br />
Just a little while to linger here below.<br />
I’m getting ready to leave this world.<br /><br />Chorus:<br />
I’m getting ready to leave this world (of sorrow).<br />
I’m getting ready for the gates of pearl.<br />
Keeping (my record bright).<br />
Watching (both day and night).<br />
I’m getting ready to leave this world.</blockquote><p>I can recall countless sermons railing against worldly pleasures, amusements, and adornment. I grew up believing that the World is hopelessly, noxiously sinful and that the sinners of the World hate the redeemed who follow Jesus. We chosen remnant should avoid sinners whenever possible, distinguish ourselves from them in dress and manner, and wait vigilantly for the call to Heaven, our true home. No one should not be confused that many Evangelicals have little regard for environmentalist concerns: why worry? This world is doomed anyway, and God's people will be on the side that destroys it and replaces it with the shining New Jerusalem.</p><p>It's easy for me to see, then, how Evangelicals who believe this story can fall for the idea that mainstream media — the voice of the World — hates them and mocks them for their religious beliefs. And who is the only one who will stand up for them and call out the mainstream media, the fake news? Well, Donald Trump, of course. He's clearly God's appointed man to defend the faithful from the attacks of Satan and the demonic Democrats (the alliteration really helps the story, don't you think?). I might counter that Donald Trump is the sort of man who can brag about grabbing women by the pussy, which seems to run counter to the stated beliefs of most Evangelicals, and my Evangelical friends will respond: "Praise be! Isn't it miraculous how God can once again use a broken man as He used King David to defend His people?" I find quickly that there's no way I can state my reasons that they cannot neatly rearrange the facts to fit their narrative. If you believe the story, the facts work.</p><p>And my Evangelical friends can find lots of facts to support their opinions. I watch Bill Maher, and though most Evangelicals don't, they are aware that he makes great sport of them. See? The World hates them.</p><p>If I'm to engage my Evangelical friends, I must start at the level of story, of a generalized frame — I can't start at the level of rational argument as it is too restricted, too specific. Moreover, the story that frames my rational argument is inconsistent with their story. Pussy-grabbing Donald Trump is a hero in their story and a villain in mine. The details or facts don't change, the story does. The meaning and value of the facts depend on the story. The facts are what I know, the story is who I am.</p>keith.hamonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08404376705918243534noreply@blogger.com0