Emergence? Not again

Excerpts from an emerging project. Comments and criticisms are welcome.(Notes deleted)

Even as critical thinkers in sociology, psychoanalysis, and even economics were considering the extremes produced in the circuits of reflexivity, tech-enthusiasts were writing as if reflexivity were the solution to a wide range of social and political problems.  Much of this writing relied on the migration of concepts from cybernetic and complexity theory into commentary on contemporary society, a migration enabled by the rapid growth of networked communications. As computers became tools for everyday life, so did the language of computer networks suggest ways to analyze everyday life.

Among the many popular books documenting, celebrating, and ushering in ubiquitous computing is Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.  As the title suggests, Johnson’s underlying assumption is that fundamental patterns not only govern but connect seemingly disparate areas of experience: the habits of insects, the neural networks of the human brain, physical interactions among large groups of people, and software code.  In all of these, Johnson locates “emergent behavior,” patterns and systems that arise and achieve equilibrium through local rules and simple feedback processes.

For Johnson, the most striking aspect of emergent behavior is that it results from “self-organization.”  No one commanded its patterns to arise or dictated the structures that emerge. Accordingly, Johnson understands self-organization in terms of sets of opposed concepts: centralized v. decentralized, unified v. distributed, top-down v. bottom-up, and planned v. random.  For him, the second term in each pair is both the ideal and the future that we are just beginning to understand.  He can valorize these second terms because he presumes equilibrium, that is, he prioritizes homeostasis as the baseline, expected, and default position. Johnson acknowledges that extreme conditions—chaos, clusters, hubs, frenzies—are effects of self-organization, but he thinks that self-organization provides the solution to the instability it creates. The mechanism for this solution is feedback.

Johnson’s account of feedback relies on two stories, one about the 1992 media feeding frenzy around President Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with Gennifer Flowers and one about the proliferation of “cranks” (trolls) in online discussions. The media brouhaha, he argues, was the result of insufficient negative feedback:  “The Flowers episode was an instance of pure positive feedback, unchecked by its opposing force. Each agent’s behavior encouraged more like-minded behavior from other agents. There was nothing homeostatic about the process . . .” The tendency of online discussion threads to disintegrate into snark results from the opposite problem. The imbalance between participants and lurkers (those who make points and those who just read them) in threaded discussions enables contrarians to derail conversations. The lack of feedback encourages them to keep up their attacks. With more feedback, though, even online conversations would approach equilibrium.  

Johnson writes:

When you factor in the lurkers, a threaded discussion turns out to be less interactive than a traditional face-to-face lecture, and significantly less so than a conversation around a dinner table, where even the most reticent participants contribute with gestures and facial expressions. Group conversations in the real world have an uncanny aptitude for reaching a certain kind of homeostasis: the conversation moves toward a zone that pleases as much of the group as possible and drowns out voices that offend.  A group conversation is a kind of circuit board, with primary inputs coming from the official speakers, and secondary inputs coming from the responses of the audience and other speakers. The primary inputs adjust their signal based on the secondary inputs of group feedback. Human beings…are exceptionally talented at assessing the mental states of other people, both through the direct exchanges of spoken language and the more oblique feedback mchanisms of gesture and intonation.

Johnson employs two analogies here. The first obvious one is between human conversations and circuit boards. The second rather less obvious one is between computer mediated communication in large, complex, environments and face-to-face interaction, either in lecture or around a dinner table. The blurring between lecture and dinner table enables the analogy with the circuit board and the assumption of homeostasis.  Johnson connects primary inputs to official speakers and secondary inputs to an audience. Do dinner table conversations typically involve official speakers and an audience? My kids would say yes, but they would do so with a roll of their eyes so as to signal that this isn’t ideal and that they would prefer dinner unencumbered by lectures in political theory and psychoanalysis. The more typical contrast between lecture and dinner table conversation is that a lecture is centralized and hierarchical, relying on the difference between speaker and audience.  Conversation over dinner should flow among the participants so as to prevent a distinction between speaker and audience from ever solidifying. A group conversation, then, is nothing like a circuit board that relies on primary and secondary inputs. A lecture might be like a circuit board, but not because of feedback but because the institutional structure of a lecture installs hierarchy. To make conversation look like a circuit board, then, Johnson has to turn it into a lecture. This inserts hierarchy, centralization, and top-down organization into a setting that Johnson wants to render in terms of self-organizing equilibrium.

The analogy with the lecture that enables conversation to be understood in terms of primary and secondary inputs enables Johnson to omit the complexities of actual human interaction and thus present human beings as “exceptionally talented at assessing the mental states of other people.”  For him, there is no projection, transference, fantasy, paranoia, or repression; there is no tension or mismatch between what one says and what another hears, between what one says and what one means, or between what one says and why one says it at all.

At the same time, by treating computer mediated communication in large, complex environments as if it were no different from face-to-face interaction, Johnson can downplay the ways reflexivity leads to disequilibrium. For him, learning in networked environments means that the extremes fall by the wayside rather than becoming amplified as their effects extend throughout the network.  In effect, these extremes become the unknown unknowns already undermining Johnson’s reassuring story of homeostasis.

Johnson’s omission of complexity and unknowningness points to a short circuit in his account of reflexivity. He writes, “the new software will use the tools of self-organization to build models of our own mental states . . . They will be mind readers.” Reflexivity doesn’t go all the way down. Assuming (in an outrageous flight of fancy) that software can read minds (as if minds were made up, as if they were not conflicted, as if there were no unconscious) doesn’t tell us how we would react once we knew it could read our minds or how the knowledge we have of the contents of others’ minds would affect us. Thus it ignores the ways this knowledge has material affects as people bring futures into being on the basis of this knowledge. What blocks reflexivity in Johnson’s account (in addition to a fantasy based techno-utopianism that obscures the possibilities of surveillance and control—with mind-reading software, companies could deduct pay from workers’ day-dreaming on the job) are the oppositional sets structuring his analysis. Johnson wants to juxtapose “self-organized” to “planned” or “controlled.”  Thus, he has to avoid considering self-organization as itself a form of control, an inquiry which would require him to take up the unit that “self” is supposed to designate as well as the ways planning, institutions, and norms are vehicles and conditions for self-organization once one moves from ants to people.

In her discussion of nineties controversies over the self-organizing structure of the internet, Tiziana Terranova suggests that a cybernetic definition of control is “the antithesis of centralized government, because the latter presupposes a complete knowledge of each individual component of the overall system, which is impossible to achieve in these types of structure.” One should add that not only is such knowledge impossible to achieve in any political structural, but also that the invocation of such control as a critique of centralized planning aims at a straw man: theories and practices of centralized government have never been based on complete knowledge of each individual component—political power as such is exercised as potential, that is, as a promise, expectation, or threat. Terranova notes that governmentality is rejected as unsuited to the turbulent terrain of dynamic networks and deregulated markets. But this rejection is too quick, ignoring the very changes in governmentality that subjected the state to the market.  As Foucault explores in his lectures on neoliberalism, insofar as neoliberalism emphasizes the market as a site of competition rather than exchange, it demands that the state combat anti-competitive mechanisms and work to spread opportunities for competition. Consequently, the state must be ever vigilant in these efforts as well as vigilant about its own efficiency in so doing. Such vigilance, moreover, is exercised not just with regard to government, as its operations and resources are privatized. Rather, neoliberalism entails a governmentality of “active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent” intervention in society.

At any rate, what’s important for my argument here is that Johnson’s account of emergence presupposes the cybernetic definition of control Terranova invokes.  With such a presupposition, Johnson cannot acknowledge reflexivity’s own emerge as a dynamic of control, that is, the ways that the extremes produced by the circulation of information themselves have effects on those of us captured in communicative capitalism.

Comments

[Anna]

Jodi!
How great that you're tackling this paradigm. Have you read Mark Taylor's Confidence Games?

[Jodi]

I have the book; I only skimmed it when I got it a few years ago. I'll look at it again. thanks!

[chad]

If you think Johnson ignores the dangers of surveillance in this new book, check out the epilogue to his last offering, The Ghost Map, where he all but declares that perfect visibility of everybody everywhere will keep us all safe.

[chad]

Ok, I just realized that Emergence isn't a new book at all. Nevertheless!