Wednesday, March 08, 2006
(9:52 AM) | Brad:
Cells & Deception
About a year & a half of my life was spent studying the in's and the out's of conning people. Much of this has to do with the fact that my doctoral dissertation entailed an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of Herman Melville's final novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. In the course of studying the con man's (& Melville's) patterns of misdirection, fluidity of identity, and rhetorical adaptivity, I became very interested in the theory behind complex adaptive systems [CAS] & various models of cellular automata. I was reminded why after watching the documentary Death by Design -- as well as rehashing all the reasons I had grown increasingly disenchanted with CAS and cellular automata as means of describing human activity.In the documentary, for instance, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner Rita Levi-Montalcini describes the process of thought she used to determine the reality (and eventually the necessity) of cell death. While doing so, she draws a rough analogy with the death surrounding here in Italy at the time, during World War II. Now, this would be a benign metaphor in the context of the documentary, were it not for the repeated (and very artfully done) juxtapositions of scientists talking about cellular activity and images of intersection traffic, stock market transactions, crowd behavior, etc. By the end, a couple of the scientists go so far as to say there is more than a "metaphorical" analogy at play here, and bemoan the fact that their insights are not taken into account on the level of politics.
This is where I kind of recoil. The whole analogy they find between cellular activity and human activity is built around such activity being absolutely naturalized (and thus, de-politicized). Death, for instance, is necessary & constructive; and individual cells/agents only "receive" their agency from their active participation in the whole, the living organism. It's little surprise to me that the leading advocates for these theories outside cellular biology are deeply immersed in market research & organizational structures on a corporate level -- and their bastard children, contemporary church growth gurus. Now, there may be no "invisible hand" guiding things, but the overwhelming naturalism ("why do cells act this way? -- because that's the way they have") doesn't need divine intervention or providence. Rather, the ostensible chaos of vibrant human activity, if looked at closely enough, reveals a pattern of adaptivity. Ultimately, then, we can finally describe this adaptivity and the tenuousness of its ensuing order.
Which is where the con man returns. There is, after all, something duplicitous about the central dialectic of the theories that draw from CAS and cellular automata, namely that of order & chaos (and thus, in a sense, that of sovereignty and freedom). -- Duplicitous insofar as there really is no choice offered. Order is always already there, it can only be observed and described as such; indeed, entire discourses are built around explaining the order that simply is. For in explaining, we are liberated from the tyranny of ignorance by insight. -- Duplicitous insofar as spontaneity is repressed; the contingencies of life tagged and ordered in order to make way for Life. -- Duplicitous insofar as Life is what is, even when we know (and acknowledge) that appearances are most often deceiving.
Which makes me wonder whether we should tread very cautiously w/ regard to thinking the logic of cells as a means of political resistance.
