Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Chapter 3. Ambient Work: Networks and Complexity in an Ambient Age

99 who or what writes when something is written? In the opening to chapter 7 of The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, Mark C. Taylor writes, “I, Mark C. Taylor, am not writing this book” (196). This seems counterintuitive. I have the book; his name is listed as the author’s; some agent with the designation “Mark C. Taylor” at some time put words to page or screen. Is this not an author? Yes and no, we might say. Certainly the author is not who she or he once was. Michel Foucault (“What”) and Roland Barthes have both suggested that the author is a discursive fiction, a mere function of discourse if not actually “dead.”1 Samuel Ijsseling points out that, in answering the question of who speaks when something is said, philosophical modernism has “considered it selfevident that man is the subject of his own speech” (127). However, much contemporary thought claims that the source for speech is “different from consciousness,” meaning that “man is not lord and master in his own house” (Ijsseling 127). Mark Taylor extends this line of thinking. Words, thoughts, and ideas are never really his, he tells us; more accurately, he is c h A P T e R 3 Ambient work networks and complexity in an Ambient Age Modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because humans are smarter . . . but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work. —N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman The writer writing is not at home. —Barrett J. Mandel The world is its own best model. —Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines 100 chapter three theirs. He becomes the vehicle for their circulation (196). The boundaries between brain and body, self and world, language and thought, beginning and end, are permeable. The stable self who articulates him- or herself through writing becomes osmotic, blurring into the surroundings, with the environs and particularly other people taking an active role in production. When Taylor states that “thought thinks through” him in ways that are unfathomable, he traces this flow and identifies it as the spectral quality of writing (197). In this sense all writing is ghostwriting; all writing is haunted by innumerable specters, the thoughts, writings, images, events, and feelings of others of which I may or may not be aware (M. Taylor 196). The writer writing is not alone, being always linked to or haunted by others, some familiar, some strange. Taylor’s book, for which this digression on authoring is a performative microcosm, usefully introduces complexity theory, or, more specifically, theories concerning the behavior and impact of complex adaptive systems , and considers the implications of these theories for the humanities. Of special interest is the emphasis on complexity’s relation to network culture. Network culture is complex in an emergent and ecological sense. It is important to underscore that a complex system is distinguished from a complicated one by the process of emergence: in the usage I deploy here, something complicated can be disassembled into its component parts, no matter how intricate, while something complex cannot be adequately analyzed through or predicted from the component elements but rather enters a new state of order or equilibrium that transcends the initial state (Cilliers viii–ix). An airplane is complicated; a pond ecosystem or the brain is complex . While Cilliers’s example is overly simple, since an airplane must be involved in complex processes, too (aspects of wear and tear, metal fatigue, and so on may well be better understood as complex), the main point remains . Complexity evolves; it is dynamic, and hence, while equilibrium can result, such stability is an achievement with the conditions for its transformation already built in. Such equilibrium, in other words, is temporary, or a perspectival view that masks how the system is already far from equilibrium , just in ways not perhaps apparent. Hence the importance, for Taylor, of bringing contemporary network culture into conversation with theories of complexity. By increasing the number of variables in circulation, including the spectral/virtual, network culture pushes us toward acknowledging complexity in ways that modernist theory and modernist culture simultaneously prepared us to see and found ways and reasons to resist. Network culture cannot be so forestalled, as Taylor sees it; we are confronted with ambient work 101MMM and haunted not only by increasing points of connection but also by their interactive emergence into new forms. Digitality provides new...