The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (review)

The Moment of Complexity is an interesting, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfying book. Or, rather, it is two books. In the first—the bulk of the text—Mark Taylor aims to unite two disparate academic discourses: one found in the textual web of humanities, literary analysis, Western philosophy, and cultural studies, and the other in the technological web of computer networking, computational theory, biological science, and complexity studies. His claim is that new "nontotalizing structures that function as a whole" embodied in society's complex, emerging, internet-based "network culture" provide the answer to the nihilistic (and self-contradictory) postmodernist assertion that all totalizing theories and projects are fatally counterproductive (pp. 12, 5).

In the second book—bracketing the first as both introduction and coda—Taylor describes his new Global Education Network, a Web-based, for-profit, virtual corporation for delivering postsecondary education. Here the philosophical ruminations of the main text hover as implicit justification for his efforts—and as irrefutable condemnation of those in traditional academia who harbor "suspicion of business and technology" in their "resistance to change" (p. 17). While Taylor's first book attempts to synthesize diverse theories and bring disparate conversations together, his second trivializes a whole range of important political-economic debates and forecloses further conversation entirely.

The common thread through both sides of Taylor's text is the idea that "development—personal as well as natural and historical— has a direction: things tend to move from lesser to greater complexity" (p. 4). This synthesizing idea (described as teleonomic, "non-purposeful" but "end-seeking," rather than simply teleologic [p. 169]) unites studies in thermodynamics, information theory, systems dynamics, complexity studies, and evolutionary theory, all domains in which interesting changes seem to happen at the "tipping point" between too much order and too much chaos, according to Taylor. His book explores this idea through both the sciences and the humanities, his essays all revolving around a few key themes: the movement from modernist "grid" to postmodernist "network" in social theory and practice; the dialectical relationships between parts and wholes; the effects of reflexivity and self-reference on identity; and the mystery of self-organizing and self-sustaining systems in a random, chaotic universe.

Taylor's prose proceeds at a breathless pace, and his citations reveal his own impressive thirty-year path through Western philosophical, artistic, scientific, and religious history. Taylor admits that his book is not intended to be "a primer for nonspecialists" (p. 14), though his reliance on so many areas of expertise serves to distance even those specialists whom Taylor is apparently trying to engage. However, the main difficulty with his book is the mode of argument, a technique of juxtaposition in order to create dissonance, interest, and inspiration. As he draws upon artists and architects like Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, René Magritte, and Chuck Close, not to mention Augustine, Kierkegaard, Foucault, and Derrida, he moves them too quickly out of their own historical and intellectual context and into a contemporary conversation with current complexity theorists, especially those working through the Santa Fe Institute. Authors "echo" each other across the generations and the disciplines, but, as in any history of ideas, the danger is that the analyst sees greater metaphorical connections between different projects than the historical actors could ever have seen themselves.

In the end, Taylor's essays connect to current material and social conditions only in his manifesto calling for profit-based academic and business partnerships in electronic distance education, where the rest of the book's speculations about coevolution and complexity are assumed to prove the inherent value of this project. Taylor believes that "the university of the twenty-first century will be an intricate network or network of networks which is structured like a complex adaptive system. Within this expanding web, individuals and organizations which have never worked together will have to learn to cooperate" (p. 17...