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Taylor, Mark C., and Esa Saarinen. Imagologies: Media Philosophy. New York:Routledge, 1994.

Van Slyck, Abigail A. "Women in Architecture and the Problem ofBiography."Design Book Review 25.2 (1992): 19-22.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York:MOMA, 1966,

Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning From LasVegas. Cambridge: MIT P, 1988.

Willis, Julie. "Invisible Contributions: The Problem of History and WomenArchitects." Architectural Theory Review 3.2 (1998): 57-68.

The Teleology of Complexity:A Response to Mark C. Taylor

Michael Arner

By the time Al Gore invented the Internet, the history ofthat network'sprivatization had already become complex, an interplay of ordering aswell as ofdisordering principles. The dot-com era's struggle to stake out"mindshare"-toprofitably wrap, label and own territories ofcyberspace,ofcyber experience-s-can be understood, for example, as largely success­ful efforts to linearize what we have come to thinkofas the quintessentiallynonlinear field. After its origins in the academy and its widespreadadoption by the military, the Internet was transformed in its embrace bythe corporation in ways seemingly antithetical to the principles of itsconception, at least insofar as those principles valorized a "network" overa "grid" topology. The websiteportal (Yahoo!, MSN), gave the "centerless"network a center, a point oforigin, a frame, a direction, and a hierarchicalarrangement of content. The website application gave state (history,narrative, ordered sequence) to the user's supposedly "stateless" sam­pling of information. Everywhere the "free" network's contents were

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privatized, marketing and legal battles fought to own the most encom­passing framework for accessing via the new medium, from the browser(Netscape), to the Internet Service Provider (AOL, CompuServe), to theentire desktop (Internet Explorer/Windows Explorer) .New technologieswere-to use Microsoft's insidious catchphrase-embraced and ex­tended. They were adopted as "open" standards, languages, and methodsaccessible and sensible to everyone. But these technologies quicklyindividuated as they were "enhanced." In practice, to use the newtechnology at all, one was coerced to use the conqueror's particular andwidespread dialect, the new, de facto standard.

These orderings are examples of intellectuallandrush that have lessglamorous precursors and analogues in the careerist academy, longacquainted with the theory ofcarving out profitable virtual niches in the"free" intellectual marketplace. The successful academic, even ofthe oldschool, recognizes something of the inevitability with which order isimposed upon a chaos so that it might be learned and so that it might beowned. The particular and eclectic vicissitudes ofindividualpersonalityinflect such orderings.

The point is that the social use of adaptive systems in their variousincarnations will not be a revolutionary disengagement from linear,hierarchical, and grid systems, but will be defined instead by theirnecessary, necessarily productive, historical engagement with moreconservative paradigms. Emergence, and what we call progress, relies asmuch upon erecting boundaries as upon dissolving them.

As the interdisciplinary discipline par exellence, and with its tradi­tional love both for totalizing narratives inassimilable by the hardsciences and for those narratives' beautiful interplay with the psycholo­gies oftheir particular authors, literary studies is particularly well-poisedfor reception of the new technologies offered by complexity theory. Thelatter's assimilation as a tool for literary analysis, alongside the various-isms, will necessarily entail both a diminution ofits theoretical applica­bility, strength, purity, and self-evident truth-and an increase in itspractical application, reach, rhetorical .sophistication, and sex-appeal. Itwill simultaneously advance and obscure our understanding ofphysical,literary, and cognitive structures.

With N. Katherine Hayles's work, Mark C. Taylor's is among themost visible, learned, and lucid in this work's important advance wave.His fine The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture is apopularist account ofresonances between recent information theory andrecent critical theory, an account that concludes somewhat perplexingly

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by equating "Complexity in the University" with "e-Ed," learning andteaching mediated by the Internet. In Taylor's analysis, the traditionalclassroom's infiltration and transfiguration bye-Ed represents a changeinevitable, qualitative, and therefore also good. I am uncertain aboutwhether or not the transformations he envisions concomitant an allianceamong the practitioners of his e-Ed project (GEN or Global EducationNetwork)-teachers and students, the corporation, and the university­are inevitable ones. The assessment of their desirability seems to me tobe based on four tacit assumptions, which it is the purpose of this paperto refute. The emergent is not the good. The university is not itselfa workof art. Knowledge is not capital. The dynamical field is not democratic.

Taylor's portrait ofthe GEN project's detractors is ofaging, tenuredtechnophobes fearful for the loss of accumulated power that changes tothe university's fundamental structures will entail. As a nontenured PhDin English whose undergraduate training was in Mathematics and Com­puter Science and who has spent the last six years as the chief softwarearchitect for various wireless software companies (as well as for oneeducational publishing corporation), I hope at least to provide a voicesomewhat unique among the naysayers.

Intrinsic FinalityTaylor is quite correct to oppose the positive knowledge offered bycomplexity theory to the entrenched, negative knowledge offered bycritical theory and preeminently by deconstruction. Complexity theorytakes as its fundamental object of study a motion, latent in and intrinsicto the order of things, toward higher and higher levels of self-organiza­tion. Deconstruction can only regard the idea ofthis motion as "theologi­cal," an agency or presence supposedly both free from and determiningofthe physical signifiers which provide its trace.

The interconnectedness of agents (natural or synthetic) within dy­namical network systems, in which minute local fluctuations may leadquickly to vast global changes, makes these systems resistant to descrip­tion in the terms 0 f classical methodo1ogies. Theyresist analysis, descrip­tion ofthe whole in terms ofits componentparts, because their significantproperties are rather those of the relationships between parts than prop­erties of the parts themselves. Reifications of these relations will definenew kinds of entities describable in new schemas of "higher order." Nodeterminate relation exists between the two levels ofdescription; that is,the new descriptors are increasingly formal, increasingly abstract. Thenew descriptors increasingly efface any determinate connection to their

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more material substrates. Weather systems and economies are twoexamples among many of such systems comprised of components sovarious and so interrelated that the equations predicting their behavior areeasier to model and observe than to solve.

The mathematics ofthe difference between classical and dynamicalsystems is given in the transition from relatively simple systems that canbe modeled by isolable linear equations-systems obeying principles ofsuperposition such that their component movements may be meaning­fully separated and understood separately in order to provide a completeunderstanding of the whole precisely equal to the sum of these separateparts-to complex, generally unpredictable, nonlinear systems, in whichcomponentmovements are so interrelatedthat independentdescription ofthem is impossible or meaningless with respect to the system as a whole.The system as a whole exhibits surprising, "emergent" behavior, appar­ently self-organized epiphenomena.

In the eighteenth century, Kant gave this theology, which he calledthe doctrine ofan "intrinsic finality," to Nature, some ofits consummateexpression in the three critiques. For Kant, the products of naturalsystems, like the emergent entities in dynamical systems, are character­ized by their parts' simultaneous, reciprocal function as both ends andmeans-to which the imposition of no exterior design or designer isevident. In this, his system's conception of Nature contrasts with more"mechanistic" conceptions of the world understood as clockwork, ascomprising functional components evincing a design from which theexistence of an external Creator-god or external purpose might bededuced.

There are two relevantmappings ofthis distinction between extrinsicand intrinsic finality that are crucial, both to Taylor's idealization ofnetwork over grid culture, ofthe new over the old, of the post-industrialover the industrial-and to a larger debate between the institution of"Technoscience" and its critics. These are both mappings already per­formed by Kant himself: first, from the natural system and the naturalorganism. to the work of art; second, from the natural system and thenatural organismto the human institution, preeminently to the university.

Although, according to The Critique ofJudgement, the artwork cannever be for human contemplation what the natural product is-in otherwords, can never be an object ofperfect beauty, since the former willalways retain the trace ofsome connection to its author's hand-intrinsicfinality does become the ideal to which aesthetic production aspires.Ideally, the aesthetic image will be "life purified in and reprojected from

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the human imagination" (219-20). It will achieve dynamic relationsamong parts dislodged from their original contexts to be set into themotion ofnew constellations that are conceived in withdrawal from theauthor's subjectivity into autonomous, wholly internal relation. Anunderstanding of the artwork in these terms prepares for a modernistaesthetic: the work is no longer about anything: it is the thing. It does notpoint to meanings about a world outside itselfbut creates an autonomousmeaning of its own. Here the two modes, intrinsic and extrinsic, oraesthetical and teleological, comprise Kant's reflective judgment. Re­flective judgment attempts to construct a universal that would subsumea particular presentation's finality in order to construct a unity of thephenomenal manifold. This unity may only be known by the reflectivejudgment analogically. If, in accordance with a metaphor to the determi­native (the non-reflective) judgment, the manifold is considered in termsofits subsumption by a determinate concept which would be its imaginedpurpose, considered as ifits purposiveness were directed toward somesupersensible end, its accord with that concept may be consideredobjectively, and the judgment so produced is called teleological. If theunity so produced is instead subsumed by no determinate concept, butcorresponds instead only to an indeterminate Idea-when the manifoldis considered as Zweckmiissigkeit ohne Zweck, or purposiveness withoutpurpose, when its finality is considered to be without end-then accordis judged subjectively, in terms of its harmony or the harmonic play itoccasions with the mental faculties of the observer, and the reflectivejudgment so produced is called aesthetic. The right exercise of theaesthetic judgment is characterizedby disinterest. It occasions, solely viaits form, a play of the faculties that is pleasing apart from any interest inthe actual existence of what the work represents or is.

In Kant's The Conflict ofthe Faculties, conceived at about the sametime as The Critique ofJudgment, the same division separates the idealpraxis ofthose disciplines in the Academy that must be held accountableby the government to external ends dictated by the law of the land­Theology, Medicine, and Law-from the ideal praxis of the philosophi­cal disciplines, which must be allowed to simply speak the truth as aninternal exploration ofthe disinterested, autonomous exercise ofReason.Here, the profit motive, like any other interest or end external to adiscipline's search for objective truth, obscures its ideal practice. Thisinsistence on academic objectivity stands in opposition to Taylor's planfor the network culture in which effacement of the nonprofit/for-profitdistinction is one of the most important tasks.

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Now Taylor becomes quite puzzling when he effects his own versionofthe two mappings. In his contemporary schema, the concept ofthe gridplays the outdated role of Nature falsely imagined as exhibiting anexternal finality (as in the clockwork or mechanistic universe rejected byKant). The grid imposes a false, external ideal oforderedness upon, notthe chaos, but the complexity of experience. Taylor in this context hasearlier quoted Mandelbrot, "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are notcones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth nor does lighttravel in a straight line" (40). Withoutwhollyrejecting the idea ofthe gridas something that might still lend a determinate character to experienceanalogically, the network provides a model much more faithful to theworld's true intrinsic finality-to the organic, near ubiquitous, complex­ity of self-organizing structures (which we now perceive everywhere innatural and artificial systems). Good. But Kant's laudable transition froman extrinsic to an intrinsic paradigm as it is described in Taylor's thirdchapter becomes, in Taylor's final chapter, an insidious dichotomyprivileging uselessness over usefulness, privileging high art over popularculture when it is translated into the terms of art appreciation-and anelitistpreference for peer review overjudgmentby the marketplace whenit is translated into the terms of architecting an academic institution.AlthoughTaylornow considers these translations in Kant suspicious andunjustifi ed appIication 0 f the architectonic 0 f mental facul ties, first to artcriticism and second to the university, how are we to account for Taylor'sown precise repetition ofthe gesture in expansivelymapping the adaptivesystems paradigm first onto a postmodem aesthetic criticism and nextonto his own plan for transforming education into something more likethese postmodem aesthetic productions? He condemns both the idea ofdisinterested production-self-interestala Mandeville or Adam Smith ismore to his taste, self-interest being the local interaction from which thenovelty of global behavior emerges-and condemns the interest offaculty who wish to preserve a tenure system. (Academics are too well-paid, profit-seeking, and protective of their consolidated power theydon't adapt readily enough to new technology or to new ideas theyshould take their example from the ascetic, self-sacrificing, and quicklyadapting businessman!) How do we explain these seeming inconsisten­cies? What precisely is the difference here between Kant's project andTaylor's?

First, Taylor differentiates in practice between binarisms-whichare bad and should be mediated or obliterated-and transitions from onemode in an epistemological duality to its other, which are good and which

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take place in history and which shouldbe embraced. The latermoment hasthe character ofHegelian aufhebung or of the postmodernist revision ofany modernist epiphany: it simultaneously preserves, negates, and tran­scends the earlier moment just as the network preserves, negates, andtranscends the grid (41, 257). The later moment, being later, is thereforemore advanced, and being more advanced, better. For Kant, there areeternal verities, but for Taylor, it is fundamental that ideas obsolesce: "Innetwork culture, professors who continue to lecture from tattered notesthey have used for years are as obsolete as most ofthe ideas they continueto promote" (262). This is in fact an assumption tacit but widespread inthe practical sciences, one concisely articulated in Marvin Minski'sdisparagement ofthe history ofscience, "A dynamic science has no needof its past, it forges ahead" (qtd. in Duput 43).

An academic course is a technology, already obsolete by the time ofits dissemination. The problem with faculty members who resist the ideaofsubserving their thought and their teaching to the pressures ofa "time­to-market" based economy is that they "do not realize that they remaincommitted to a model ofthe university that is over two hundred years old"(258). This unqualified bias toward the new, the possibility for which isthe "most important legacy" we can leave to our children, crossesdiscipline and application. Kant himselfis not as bad as, say, Shakespeare,but he is a far sight worse than Duchamps or Schoenberg, who have onlycomparatively recently become obsolete.

Here, my own tone belies a sympathy with the modernist critical andaesthetical projects of"making it new," which Taylor claims are identicalto the planning ofobsolescence, unwillingly having supported the bour­geois industrial proj ect it was meantby the early Modernists to undermine(31). That each generation create and interpret its experience and itsinherited experience anew is necessary, not in order to progress butmerely in order to remain in the same place, to achieve some indepen­dence from the tyranny ofreceived and ossifying structures. The misap­plication ofthis revolutionary ideal to the university relies on an equationofthe artwork (specifically ofthe avant garde artwork) with the academy,an equation for which there is no justification. The injunction for theeducator to always be revolutionary is an impediment to education, inwhich received and even ossifying structures qua structure may have avalue they do not have for the artist.

This is a second point ofdistinction between Kant and Taylor. Kanthimself, in paralleling the work of the university with the work of thesubjective judgment, does not, even analogically, juxtapose the univer-

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sity with the artwork. The analogy is rather between the faculties of theuniversity and those ofthe subject, comprised ofand mediating betweenboth interested and disinterested agencies. That the university, like thework of art, is enmeshed in a complex market economy is, as Kant wellknew, as true of each as it is of the subject. What differentiates theuniversity from the artwork, what makes aesthetical judgment of theuniversity impossible, is precisely what Taylor both complains about inits faculty and offers as the realpolitiknecessitating increased allegiancewith the corporate world: the university is characterized by our interest,our practical investment in-apart from its mere form occasioning apleasing play of the faculties-its actual existence. This is a practicalinterest in the actual existence ofa disinterestedfaculty.

Although Reason does not dictate the whole ofa subject' s actions, thesubject acknowledges the redemptive possibilities that the actualexistence ofthat faculty offers, loves them, desires their continuance.At a time when the U.S. government, to fortify its economic interestsin the oil industry, is able to buy the dissent of a handful of scientistsfrom the near-universal assent of their peers in order to justify thenonratification of the Kyoto treaty, it seems sinful to quote, as Taylordoes, these beautiful lines from the Conflict of the Faculties withdisparagement:

It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university alsocontain a faculty that is independent of government's command withregard to its teachings; one that, having no commands to give, is free toevaluate everything and concerns itselfwith the interests ofthe sciences,that is, with truth: one in which reason is authorized to speak out publicly.For without a faculty of this kind, truth would not come to light (and thiswould be to the government's own detriment); but reason is by its ownnature free and admits ofno command to hold something as true. (qtd. inTaylor 242)

To my ears, the axioms with which Taylor begins his final chapter,"Theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind" aredisturbing ones. It is not, of course, that theory and practice cannot findconstructive mediation: Kant's entire ethical theory, like his aestheticsand his metaphysics, rely on the assumption that they can. The greatpractical scientific advances ofthe twentieth century-eomplexity theoryeminently among them-lay in the realization ofunexpected applicationfor study long thought useless or purely theoretical. Concomitant withthese realizations, revolutionary new formulations of the good, the

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profitabIe, are 0 ften found. But the ability to conflate a theoretical facultywith a practical one, or the theoretical faculty's receptivity to anyimposed good, whether religious, economic, or political-eannot be thesole raison d'etre for the former's existence. One aesthetic privileges thatartwork which presents a cohesive epistemology, but the idea of theuniversity is to resist thought's hegemony-the necessary consequenceofany universally accorded, single good, single notion ofprofit-not byannihilating received structures but by preserving and presenting them inall of their history and multiplicity.

The Mathematical SublimeKant, Taylor's strawman for the constrictiveness of grid paradigms,remains the great psychologist of the moment of complexity, which hecalls the Mathematical Sublime. The sublime Kant divides into "dynami­cal" and "mathematical" components, depending upon whether theimagination, overwhelmed by its inability to satisfy the injunction ofunifying a sensuous manifold into one intuition, appeals to Reason in itspractical or its pure capacity. Ordinarily, it is the dynamical mode,appealing to practical or moral reason that is considered to establish thesublimejudgment's relation to teleology: the mind discovers, in its recoilfrom the feelings of awe and fearfulness associated with the contempla­tion of one's physical subjection to the might of Nature, something notbeyond but outside of this indifferent physical realm, somethingsupersensible in the self that is superior to what threatens mere indi­vidual, physical life and in this discovery, the excited intuition of asupersensible vocation, the aesthetic experience of moral feeling thatovercomes the fear ofNature's might and teaches us to "regard as smallthe things about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life), and [toregard] its might (to which we are no doubt subjected in respect of thesethings) as nevertheless without any dominion over us and our personalityto which we must bow where our highest fundamental propositions, andtheir assertion or abandonment, are concerned" (101).

As we shall see, the mathematical sublime also admits ofa teleology,one that its association with emergent structures in a dynamical field­with the insights of complexity theory-makes more evident to us thanit was to Kant.

In Kant, the mathematical mode similarly refers a difficulty ofaesthetic comprehension to rescue by pure reason's cognitive faculties.The difficulty is again resolved with a transition from physical tosupersensible reflection, from reflection on the perceived physical sub-

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strate to intuition ofthe supersensible force that determines and compre­hends that substrate. This transition is a change ofmode effected by thedifficulty's reification, just as the transition from linear to nonlineardescription of a dynamical system progresses from consideration ofphysical particulars that cannot be held at once in human comprehensionto consideration of emergent global behaviors.

More explicitly concerned with measure than might, there is in themathematical sublime a synchronic aspect to the experience: discreteintuitions are successively apprehendedby the subject' s imagination andthese apprehensions are then synthesized into a unified comprehension,an idea, ofthe object. Now, although apprehension may continue indefi­nitely, there are bounds to what can be so comprehended. As this limit isapproached, the original unit taken by the imagination as the standard ofthe object's measure vanishes and the imagination finds itself overex­tended, in a kind ofabyss in which it fears to lose itselfaltogether. To itsown aggrandizement, the pure cognitive faculty intervenes with the ideaof a totality to which these apprehensions may be subrepted. Thedifficulty is thus itself reified and the reification taken as a triumph,former anxiety transformed into a pleasure.

According to Kant, the Egyptian pyramids considered too closely failto give the full emotional effect of the sublime because the spectator'seye, moving upwards from one tier to another, only ever relates to oneanother a linear progression of images, the pyramid's lower tiers to itsupper ones, with the former already half-forgotten by the time the upperones are perceived. The stones are apprehended appropriately, withprecision-their texture, their interrelation one atop another-but thewhole is only inadequately seen. On the other hand, from too great adistance, the physical stones are only obscurely represented so that theirparticularity is not seen at all. For sublimity to be felt, Kant insists, onemust be at the precise distance to perceive the transition from one orderofapprehension to another. The whole annihilates with its magnitude nota measure abstractly understood (mere unit and number), but one whichmust first be apprehended in its physicality-that is, as sensuous intu­ition, in its immediacy and detail (90-91). ,

Vince Darley defines the moment ofcomplexity as the point along acontinuum ofmore and more stochastic data and calculation to predict thebehavior ofa system by solving its equation set for a variable than it doesto actually model the whole system and determine that value at that timeby observation. This humbling of reason, at the point when it is over­whelmed by a magnitude of interrelated data, intuits in that humbling a

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supersensible force that unifies and determines it. It describes both themoment of emergent structure in complex systems and the Kantianmathematical sublime.

Cognitive scientists increasingly understand our assimilation, ourordering, ofthe outside world also in terms of such chunking. The chaosofwhatare at first ununifiedphysicial particulars are reified as higher andhigher-ordered constellations that themselves become the primorialcomponents of jumps to the yet next higher levels of abstraction andorganization. In this way, the entirety of experience is organized intoindividual epistemology. We may speculate (as they themselves do inother contexts) that the elation with which students ofcomplexity beholdthe surprising appearances ofnew types and levels oforganization in theirmodels ofdynamic systems corresponds to a felt resonance with their ownfundamental cognitive processes-and that it is the same elation we feelwhen, in aesthetic contemplation, the disparate elements ofan artwork'smanifold can be subrepted into an "aesthetic idea" that then becomestreasured qua knowledge. Though it remains unarticulated, the motionfeels like progress toward the realization of an enlightenment goal: todescribe and so to circumscribe and thus to own the entirety of experi­ence. In this way, the motion, not itself the good, nevertheless becomesthe symbolofthe good and oftenmistaken for the thing itself. For it allowsto be felt a correspondence between "progression" that is strictly formal,strictly internal to a system, and the notion ofan external, abstract end thatprogression is supposed to serve.

I have earlier suggested that among the hard sciences complexitystudies, being in a real sense "the sciences of surprise," is particularlysusceptible to ideologies privileging novelty in and of itself-althoughthere is nothing in the science itself to justify the treatment of its subjectemergence in any way other than as a natural force, like gravity or thereserves ofenergy latent in an atom, that might serve ends both desirableand undesirable.

This force, like othernatural forces, exhibits a real, intrinsic indiffer­ence to human teleologies. Respect for it has prompted the most philo­sophically engaged practitioners of artificial life to suggest readingFrankenstein as a necessary ethical preliminary to one's research. Thecontrary view, the pathetic fallacy that this force for the generation ofnovelty is good in and of itself, becomes increasingly prevalent as wemove from the academic hard sciences to the corporation-and perhapsoddly even more so as we move from the corporation to the academicliberal sciences. Under such a rubric, whatever facillitates emergence,

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specifically, the formal increase of connectedness among the agents insome dynamical system and the formal increase of the number of localinteractions among those agents-apartfrom any notion ofthe content ofthose interactions-simply becomes desiderata.

As under capitalism, connectedness itselfthus becomes a virtue. Theexecutive's value increases proportionately with the size of his or herrolodex and with the ease and swiftness with which deals are effected.The consumer's value similarly increases with the volume ofcompletedtransactions, which become credit, the fortification offuture flow. One'svalue is in one's node-ness, more for what one connects than what oneis-which rather impedes the flow of capital.

Indeed, this equation which I have just repudiated-the emergentequals the good-holds splendidly under capitalism, in which the sameword is used to mean both "that which conforms to the moral order oftheuniverse" and "that which becomes property in exchange for capital."Where all flow is encoded as the flow ofcapital, complexification oftheflow with an increase in the connectedness of agents and the frequencyoftransactions,will exponentially increase the stochasticityofthe systemand any organized siphoning of the flow within it will prove to befantastically lucrative for the siphoners.

If you believe in this conflation of knowledge and capital, whatTaylor calls "the currency of education," then mechanical accelera­tions of the flow of information, coded as a flow of capital viatechnologies of reproduction and dissemination, will indeed helpalleviate the current educational crisis-which is principally a prob­lem of distribution.

You will also appreciate the rights of the student qua customerpurchasing his or her degree. Improvements in the technology ofeduca­tion will mean enhancements of the convenience and speed with whichthis flow might be consumed and tailorings ofit to better fit the consumer'sparticular consumption preferences. Such enhancements will entail radi­cal changes in the calling-of-shots from producer/teacher to the con­sumer/student in ways Taylor has already outlined: degree requirementswill increasingly be designed by the consumer; course lengths will beshorter, hours more variable. Ultimately, the student's consumption ofknowledge must be understood as completed once the exchange ofcapitalis completed, for they are otherwise not equal-the former's actualdelectation will be amatter ofrecord, like the tourist site one has "checked

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off' with one's camera. Taylor is quite right to see peer-review as an earlycasualty of such a system. With it, the university's function of guiding

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education in any holistic sense as well as its function of certifyingcompetency must also be diminished. As the Nielson corporation tells itsconstituent households, you needn't watch any more public televisionthan usual; we are interested not at all in your ideal viewing habits, onlyin what you actually consume.

Choosing "Yes"Perhaps it is a shortcoming to be phased out with my generation, but, evenin the development of network technologies, with which I have beeninvolved since even before Al Gore's great reign, Ihave found purchasingbooks (those O'Reilly Publications with the animals on the fronts arenice) to be far more expedient in learning new technologies than theperusing of their hyperlinked versions online. I think the imposition oflinearityupon their structures indeed has something to do with it-human(or at least my) understanding, relying to some extent on this limitedspatiality. Once I have indeed learned something, I find the Internet to bea fantastic research tool for updating, correcting, expanding, and testingthat knowledge-although before it can reach the smooth conduit ofmyhigh-speed DSL connection, it must compete for clock cycles across thenetwork with the terrabytes of pornography which, by volume, stillcomprise the greatest, most consistently profitable traffic on the web.Both for my physical subsistence in a market economy and for theintellectual edification offered especially by information that would nototherwise be available to me in this country and in this age where the othernews outlets are monopolized by corporate interests, I am sublimelygrateful for the Internet. And it may well be that e-Ed obsolescesclassroom and office-hours interaction in the same way that the film hasobsolesced the novel; television, the film; and the video game, television.But I think it would be a mistake to overestimate the democratic proper­ties ofthe dynamical field perse. From what we currently know, it seemsfar more routinely to offer possibilities for swift consolidation andleverage of powers gleaned by initial, accidental advantages, after arather Darwinian fashion. I also think it misguided to overvalorize thequalitative radicalness of the Internet, especially as an educationalmedium, for reasons that I should like to suggest in conclusion.

Students ofcomplexity theory are at this moment made particularlysensitive to the question of eliminating peer review by the self-publica­tion of Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science, which hasbecome a runaway best-seller, accompanied by a story particularlyattractive to the mainstream media about the renegade scientist-author

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who used the wealth of his software company's success to finance aCopernican intellectual revolution that could only be effected outside ofthe academy and its traditional apparatuses for publishing (and editing)research. The book, proclaiming itself the herald of a host of recentinterdisciplinary revelations, very effectively packages discoveries of aparadigm shift the bulk of which have been well known to complexitystudents for twenty years or more. It is a textbook example in print of aphenomenon legion in electronic media: that proliferation does not equaltruth; that free-thought is often indistinguishable from fantasy in itsescape from the censure of an editorial agency; that what's in yourmailbox may not be good for you.

Part of the hype of the Web's early popularity was that it offered alevel playing field wherein a small corporation might have the samepresence that a multinational once had, an individual as much as aninstitution. This remains in some small sense true: a pauper may publish.But, from the consumer's end, in a field characterized by so much noise,it becomes far less a question of accessing information than ofhow thatinformation will be organized.

Taylor envisions the disadvantaged and dispossessed out there,craving knowledge that the elitist academy currently withholds. In fact,most of the raw information an undergraduate consumes during thecourse of his or her career is already available-and more or lessgathering dust-at the public library, ifnot already in some form on theWorld Wide Web. The equally undemocratic advantage the university infact currently offers its students over the library is in its purport, howeverarbitrary, to organize, value, and certify the acquisition ofsome subset ofthat growing archive. This is a crucial function we consider sacrificing tothe play of market forces, which has given us no indication thus far offavoring anything other than expedient fictions (expedient both to extrin­sic and to intrinsic ends) on the epiphenomenal layer.

Besides representing the end ofa certain kind ofchic, geek greed, the"shakeout" of the dot-com era also buried what many in my generationhad come to suppose their permanent improvements to the way Americancompanies do business. While it cannot be claimed that the radicalcorporation is a thing ofthe past, by and large there is little in the mediumitself that has liberated the existing Internet company from adherence tomodels that can be considered revolutionary only in that they provide anew media and new niches for well-established methods. Taylor is fondof quoting Warhol's teleological dictum to the effect that "businessart is the step after art," but the unfortunate reality is that the rules of

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corporate America are still almost all being written by those who haveskipped a step.

Decrying binarisms throughout his smart and stimulating book,Taylornevertheless concludes by asking us to choose, somewhatprimor­dially, between saying "Yes" and saying "No" to an immersion innetwork culture, not simply as an object of study, but of emulation­indeed, to the historical inevitability ofwhich we should surrender. Wemust choose "Yes." "If 'No' does not harbor 'Yes, '" he says, "it shouldremain unspoken" (270). I have tried to express my reluctance even toharbor such a "Yes." These structures, these complex adaptive systems,and the logics that create them I have found and do find to be beautiful,meaningful, fundamental. They provide extremely powerful means ofunderstanding natural, cognitive, and synthetic systems. The boundariesTaylor questions have no doubt always already been illusory-profit!nonprofit, education/entertainment, University/Marketplace, even IvoryTower/Real World-but their ideal positings are fundamental to aschema of the academy that I am loathe to let go. In my perhaps alreadynostalgic belief, liberal education is above all a series of difficulties, ofsublime interruptions in the flow of, the easy assimilation of, information.It is as such fundamentally opposed to principles ofexpediency that mustbe first in adaptive systems.

Works Cited

Darley, Vince. "Emergent Phenomena and Complexity." Artificial Life IV:Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis andSimulation ofLiving Systems. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. 411-16.

Duput, Jean-Pierre. TheMechanization oftheMind: On the Origins a/CognitiveScience. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict ofthe Faculties. Trans. Mary J. Gregor. Lincoln:U ofNebraska P, 1992.

--. Critique ofJudgement. Trans. J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner, 1951.

Taylor, Mark C. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.