Dear Kafkaz:
Thank you for one of the wittiest and certainly the most direct
confrontations with what I am trying to propose. A breath of fresh air,
i might add! :-)
OK here goes. I'm sorry if I respond in earnest to your challenges one
by one, but you deserve a serious response.
First of all, Kafkaz is responding to precisely the kinds of new age
crap that has infiltrated the discourse of business management,
corporate productivity, Kaos Wall Street investment strategy circles, as
well as what I call Santa Fe groupies attributing the dawn of [put
platitude here]...that needs to be countered with the kind of general
literacy about systems that I'm proposing.
Cybernetics, autopoiesis, self-organizing systems--these are complicated
yet incredibly rich fields of study, which overlap, for sure, with what
others say is something closer to home with the field of rhetoric and
composition and computers and composition represented by participants in
this discussion. We say we train students in, offer seminars in, even
allow area exams and even doctoral dissertations in "rhetoric and
technology," as well as "[rhetoric of] new media [theory], but what do
we really mean by rhetoric and technology and new media? How can we
talk about rhetoric and technology or new media without mentioning
exactly those very rich concepts like first, second and third order
cybernetics; first, second [and third] theory of thermodynamics,
autopoiesis and cognition [and computers and {autopoietic} cognition],
emergent and distributed cognition and so forth. What does it say to
those outside of rhetoric and composition and English studies so-called,
that those credentialed within these rubrics as expert in "rhetoric and
technology" and "new media studies" don't understand these things?
This also raises a point that Charlie pointed out in his last missive:
it seems from his experience that academic institutions use WAC
programs and their proponents for propaganda purposes, but have no real
commitment nor any real respect for what the programs or proponents
might be able to do with the resources that universities have but tend
to allocate elsewhere.
Now I'm all for critical thinking, and I still believe that we threw out
the baby with the bathwater when we substituted "social" whatever for
"cognitive" whatever in the history of rhetorical invention. The
Critical Thinking movement I believe resulted from the serious work by
Richard Young and others on tagmemics, and produced some wonderful
stuff. I remember using a book almost twenty years ago with that title
by a philosophy professor at UMich that was really terrific.
Furthermore, contemporary directions in cognitive science have begun to
subsume computational and emergent (and enactive or distributed)
approaches from a unified perspective--although I'm not entirely sure
that those within rhetoric and composition who talk about "social
cognition" are entirely cognizant of this development.
But a bandwagon is a bandwagon, and there's always a loss of rigor and
integrity when concrete and instrumental knowledge becomes a source of
in-the-know terminological swirls (which is true of any theory de
jure). God knows how derisive people were when critical theory
terminology and names like Deleuze started to appear on Megabyte
University way back when.
But despite the excesses of unself-conscious adherents to Grossman,
Deleuze, Bourdieu, and Turner, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Ulmer and Zizek
(and next it will be Bruno Latour, let me assure you), all of these
thinkers have offered extremely useful concepts that have worked their
way into the vocabulary of even the most practicioner-focused rhetoric
and composition and computers and composition person.
But as I have been writing, and as my dissertation advisor William R.
Paulson has been writing for some time, all of these thinkers have been
enormously influenced by the cybernetic revolution, and their disparate
terminologies have all rooted in cybernetic theory for master tropes
that anchor their discourse. Knowledge of cybernetic theory and
complexity theory in physics and cognitive science would actually make
all of these weird theories far more accessible to beginning English and
r&c and c&c grad students, by the way.
And given the prevalence of serious systems analysis throughout the
academy, anyone claiming knowledge of rhetoric and technology, and
looking for a way to communicate with innovative faculty in other
disciplines in order to foster critical thinking and writing across the
academic disciplines, would do well to educate themselves in the various
hybrid knowledges that constitute the term "systems" if they want to
gain respect and trust rather than quickly fading smiles, lip service
and a short honeymoon.
Thanks Kafkaz, for your serious and witty response.....mer
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