Wednesday, April 06, 2005
(1:00 PM) | Brad:
When 80's Theological Icons Attack, Part Two
Okay, it's been a while since Part One, and I suspect that nobody really cares, but neither of these reasons have stopped George Lucas from creating three shitty prequels to Star Wars so why should it me when talking about Mark C. Taylor? So, there you go.It took me long enough, but I finally finished reading Taylor's most recent book, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. I had to set it aside back in February, after reading half of it, because other projects beckoned and dealing with it wasn't nearly the most productive way to spend my time. Now that I have a deadline looming for a thesis chapter, though, I thought: 'Hey, what better time to set aside all this work and finish that Taylor book!'
First off, I should say that my cursory assessment in Part One might have been a wee bit hasty. (Though not by much.) Upon finishing the book, and then exchanging a few emails with Taylor, I can with some degree of safety say that if he did sell his soul, as I suggested there, it was only as a stock option that the devil may not actually wish to cash in. You see that, Mark, you're not the only one who can trade in marketing metaphors.
Second, I think it important to point out -- as I did in the comments of that post -- that Taylor can really no longer be associated with 'pure' postmodernism. Someone, maybe Old, associated him with John Caputo, which I think would probaby taken as an insult by both. No, with his previous book, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, Taylor makes a pretty decisive break with his postmodern heritage. Well, that is to say, insofar as he thinks -- accurately -- that it ultimately leads to an impasse, whereby nothing actually happens. To counter this, he has opted to replace various pomo-isms, like deconstruction and poststructuralism, with complex adaptive theory.
To quote myself, from a short presentation I gave on the subject back in Scotland:
Complex adaptivity is all about the dynamic emergence of order in complex, closed systems. So, while the second law of thermodynamics is right, and such systems are always moving toward an entropic inertia, theorists of complex adaptivity maintain that the constituent elements of those systems -- i.e., the relatonal networks in which they function -- are self-stabilising and evolving. Such networks, in essence, adapt to the 'external' changes wrought by similar changes /adaptations in other network (even those that may not appear to be directly related to it). The degree to which networks adapt to such changes, is the degree to which they self-stabilize, and successfully negotiate themselves in the critical point between absolute structural order and absolute structural chaos. (A couple of the more popular examples are those of birds flying in formation, and how the fluidity of their formation is determined by each bird reacting / adapting to those birds closest to it. Much the same thing happens in ant colonies.) [UPDATE: I re-phrased a couple of sentences here, for the sake of clarity.]
Taylor spends a book outlining all this in Moment of Complexity, and a couple of chapters rehashing it in Confidence Games. So far, so good.
What's interesting, though, is Taylor's disinclination toward the same thinkers who seemed to be concerned by the same impasse he espies in their work and began moving in similar directions, with various degrees of success -- I'm thinking primarily about Derrida and Deleuze. (Though, to be fair, Taylor more or less avoids Continental philosophy in its entirety now, preferring the philosophical discourse of the natural sciences and complexity theorists & novelists like Andrew Crumey -- btw, I'm a little surprised he hasn't yet incorporated the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, considering the latter spent time out at the hub of complexity studies, The Santa Fe Institute. Continental thinkers, from Latour to Deleuze to Agamben, are simply no longer deemed serious enough for him to even bother. Related to Adam's ubiquitous post below, it must be nice to have reached the point where you don't even have to pretend to be a part of the discipline that gave you your voice.)
Complex adaptive theory has been very readily taken up as a corporate model, as well as a profitable way to think about the free market, hence the upshot of Taylor's descriptive analysis of the past fifty years of economic markets in Confidence Games. I can accept that Taylor does not feel the need to deal with Deleuze or Derrida, that there are other more productive means to similar ends, and that he honestly thinks bringing them into his new direction will distract people from the fact that he's saying something different; but the consistent dismissal, or outright silence, is a little problematic, at least when he thinks he is making to make a rigorously argued philosophical point. As it stands now, though I'm not entirely sure who Taylor thinks he is actually addressing -- having, by and large (it would seem -- though, he is now teaching up at Columbia, too, so maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about!), lost much of his voice in the very philosophical and theological circles in which he used to sit high. Surely, complexity theorists don't really take him too seriously, since he is simply reciting what they've been saying since their inception. This is not to say his is not a good review of the content, because it is. But I kind of regarded Moment of Complexity as the descriptive review, and expected Confidence Games to be a prescriptive assessment. But, no. All we get, once again, is descriptive review, and suggestive calls for the possibility of something different.
What I think Continental philosophy, as represented, let's say, by Deleuze and Derrida, offers is the supplemental reminder that such systems need not only be about the emergence of self-adaptive order, and thus our analyses need not only be descriptions of this emergence. Rather, in their own ways they remind us of the 'life-like' qualities of instability that (depending on who you're reading) either comes from or somehow precedes and conditions the emergent order. The theoretical difference, of course, is important. What unites much of Continental philosophy, even when in its oft-times painful insistence on something coming out of nothing, is its perception of singularities and life in those self-organising structures that would seem to make both singularites and life coherent and sustainable, but ultimately inadequate to explain why.
[UPDATE: BTW, who knew Matthew Yglesias had a soft spot, sorta, for Marxism.]
