Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PLANT, S. - The Virtual Complexity of Culture
PLANT, S. - The Virtual Complexity of Culture
As theories of chaos and complexity leak out from the sciences, an emergent
connectionist thinking is beginning to blur the distinction between the arts,
sciences and humanities.
The implications of this innovation are both extensive and profound. But long
before inevitable conclusions about planetary intelligence, it suggests new ways
of thinking and writing about the social, the human and the cultural, and
threatens the disciplinary mechanisms which have policed both the organization
of knowledge and modern conceptions of reality itself. It engineers a
convergence of nature and artifice, the present and the future, and the actual and
the virtual, and also collapses orthodox distinctions between teaching and
learning, knowledge and intelligence, and the production and consumption of
discourse.
This essay takes its cue from the self-organizing processes at work in human
brains, artificial intelligences, and the new lateral configurations of text made
possible by digitization. The dynamics of complex systems can also, however, be
perceived in economies, ecologies, social formations, evolutionary processes,
and cultures of all kinds.
*
While connectionism is emerging in a number of once separated disciplines
and areas of research, it is from computer science in general and artificial
intelligence (AI) in particular that some of the leading lines of connectionist
enquiry have come.
AI was once a top-down question of developing intelligence by means of
teaching machines to think. This approach was perfect for the production of
expert systems, able to store and process specialized information on some
particular area. But it does little for the intelligence of a machine. Intelligence
cannot be taught: it is instead something that has to be learned. More properly, it
is something that learns, a bottom-up process which is not merely a question of
learning something in particular, but instead a matter of what Gregory Bateson
204 SADIE PLANT
and effectively learns as it grows. Either way the distinction between nature and
artifice is collapsed.
*
Hebb began to explore these conceptions of learning, growth, and intelligence
in the late 1940s, at a time when wartime imperatives had given an
unprecedented boost to both neurochemical and mathematical research. A year
before the publication of his book, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: Control and
Communication in Animal and Machine had broken the news that there is no
essential difference between functioning systems of any scale, material, or
complexity. All working systems, regardless of whether they are organic or
machinic, at least share the fact that they work at all. But it was the work of Alan
Turing which really paved the way for contemporary connectionist conceptions
of both human and machine activity. Turing’s machine is the abstract and
exemplary case of a system which can run any program, an assemblage on which
once separated routines converge. This abstract machine formed the basis of the
computer, the general-purpose system developed by von Neumann in the 1930s.
It had a memory, an arithmetic unit, input-output devices and, most importantly,
a central processing unit.
This early computer was a serial processor, performing one step at a time. In
contrast with such serial systems, neural nets function as parallel processors in
which multiple interconnected units operate simultaneously. One attribute of
these systems is that they have no central processing unit. Information is not
stored in a single place, but is instead distributed throughout the system. It is also
difficult, if not impossible, to define the state of such systems at any given time.
They are literally in process, and short of “freezing” all the separate units or
processors, so that they all stop operating together and are then restarted after
read-outs have been attained, we simply cannot take in all that is happening
while it is happening.’6 The extent of the interconnectedness of such systems also
means that subtle shifts in activity in one area can have great implications for
others, again without reference to some central site. In effect, such systems are
continually engineering themselves, growing, emerging and taking shape as a
consequence of their own distributed activities. They are self-organizing.
Turing and Wiener were both exploring the abstract workings immanent and
necessary to the functioning of all machines. Although their systems were
equally centralized, their quest for such abstraction was a crucial and
unprecedented convergence of mathematics and engineering. If all individual
computer systems are technical actualizations of such abstract machines, it is this
abstraction which guarantees their interconnectedness.
In the 1980s, this connectivity began to be engineered from ‘the front end’ of
computing, with the emergence of the global webs of computer systems known
together as the Net. This can also be described as a parallel, distributed system
which not only functions without centralized control but has also developed as a
consequence of localised, piecemeal activities which build the system from the
bottom up. Neither its growth nor its present functioning depend on the presence
206 SADIE PLANT
of some central processing unit: the Net effectively pulls itself up by its own
bootstraps. What emerges as a consequence is the connection and convergence
of particular and individualized systems on a new abstract zone known as
cyberspace, the matrix or virtual reality.
This is not simply the virtual reality of the arcade game, although it is
precisely with systems such as these that virtuality starts to creep through the
screens of representation which have previously filtered it out. The virtuality
emergent with the computer is not a fake reality, or another reality, but the
immanent processing and imminent future of every system, the matrix of
potentialities which is the abstract functioning of any actual configuration of
what we take as reality. It is this virtual reality of actual systems which provides
the key to a connectionist or synergetic thinking and gives once separated things
and zones the abstract equivalence which allows them to link up.
*
It is precisely this connectionist model which now emerges in the new
arrangements and conceptions of knowledge necessitated by hypermedia. As
everything that was once stored in frames, galleries, books and records
converges on cyberspace, an on-line global library of the kind promised by Ted
Nelson’s Xanadu system is being implemented. Not that there is some
centralized strategy to download all the information in the world: the process,
not surprisingly, is bottom-up, piecemeal and dispersed. And it raises a wealth of
urgent questions which themselves expose the inadequacy of the old paradigms
which divided media, disciplined knowledges, restricted access, and closed
exploration down. How does text work when it becomes a component of multi-
media? What happens when the reader and the writer lose their distinctiveness
among texts which can be endlessly rewritten as they are traversed? How can the
more fragmentary texts which would seem to lend themselves to hypertext be
navigated and arranged by those who both read and write them? How do narrative
and argument translate into the non-linearities of hypertext? What happens to
education when it comes on line?
Nelson’s users alter the arrangements and content of the material they access,
so that any particular or momentary configuration of the virtual library is a
consequence of the activity of all those who have used it. His hypertext is
reminiscent of Vannevar Bush’s 1930s memex, whose user makes ‘a trail of his
interest through the maze of materials available to him’, adding his own links
and connections, inserting passages, and making routes. When ‘numerous items
have been thus joined together to form a trail’, wrote Bush, ‘it is exactly as
though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated
sources and bound together’7, forming not merely a new book, but also the
possibility of their ultimate connection beyond the confines of some particular
book.
These possibilities do not have to be pursued very far before it becomes clear
that particular volumes or articles fade into the background of a system of textual
organization composed only of links, links to links, and more links again. The
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 207
from elsewhere, nor can they be taught as if from above. They are
implementations of what Deleuze and Guattari call the machinic phylum, the
abstract process by which all material life pulls itself up by its own bootstraps
and continually engineers itself. This is the ‘Cosmos as an abstract machine, and
each world as an assemblage effectuating it’.16
*
Of all the areas with which connectionism connects, cultural studies has the
greatest potential for dealing with both the specificities and broad implications of
such vast interconnectivity. Drawing its themes and methodologies from the arts,
literature, film, history, philosophy and the social sciences, cultural studies is
already interdisciplinary. Its longstanding interest in the media finds it poised to
engage with the Net and hypertext, and its concern to integrate its theoretisations
with its subjects and objects of study makes it receptive to connectionist modes of
research. In its modern form, however, cultural studies has also developed a
number of tendencies which pit it against a connectionist approach. It draws
elements from only a few neighbouring disciplines, and regroups them around a
project of its own. It concerns itself only with representations of the economic,
technological and even natural factors with which it interacts, and confines itself
to conceptualisations of culture as a specifically human affair. Some notion of
individual or collective agency is assumed to play a governing role in all cultural
formations and productions, so much so, that as Wallerstein points out, the
cultural arena is one in which,
Hence the last thirty years of active readings, negotiated media, and a basic
position which suggests that the ‘people are oppressed (by the states, that is), but
the people (and/or the intelligentsia) have the power (and exercise the power) of
forging their own destiny’. But if this is indeed the way cultures work, how ‘it is
then, using this analysis, that we are still living in the oppressive system that
seems to persist is something of a mystery’.17
The emphasis on a ubiquitous agency underlies cultural studies’ break with
both the elitism of the arts and the perceived determinism of the sciences. After
this, culture no longer has to be high; nor does it have to become the object of
social science. But cultural studies remains invested in the educational and
ethical project of that most modern of faculties: the humanities. It is this which
gives both culture and its students a sense of purpose, autonomy and unified
direction, and places the whole area at odds with a connectionist approach which
begins to ‘consider culture as its own self-organizing system—a system with its
own agenda and pressure to survive’ and then finds, as Kevin Kelly points out,
that ‘the history of humans gets even more interesting’.18 Beyond spectacular
212 SADIE PLANT
vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in
disorder.’21
One of Pat Cadigan’s characters makes the same find. ‘He’d had no idea there
was so much infection floating around in the system, coming in, going out,
drifting like ocean-going mines or sitting camouflaged in various pockets and
hidey-holes.’ It’s never as clean and simple a story as it appears from its own
inside:
The collapse of the modern disciplines not only opens onto a new
interdisciplinary space, but also takes the ground from under the feet of
the modern integrated, unified individual. Complex biochemical processes
function within, across and in-between what were once conceived as autonomous
agents, corroding the boundaries between man, nature and the tools with which
he has mediated this relationship. The histories written as the histories of
humanity can no longer maintain their independence from emergent processes in
the economies and complex systems with which they interact, and attempts to
define culture in the ideological, humanist and sociopolitical terms which have
provided its post-war framework merely perpetuate a distinction between the
human, the machinic and the so-called natural which underwrites modernity’s
techniques of policing knowledge and reality.
Cultural studies absorbed Foucault, but had no interest in his reports from the
dark side of its disciplines, preferring instead to see his work as a variant on its
own anthropomorphic discourse and remaining untouched by the inhuman and
undisciplined zones his writing traversed. If cultural studies was ever subversive,
it did not intend things to go this far: its political project was never to destroy the
social order, but merely to humanize it. The end of authorship became another
framework, Foucault’s complex genealogies were confined to matters of textual
interest, and the subject of cultural studies was safe. But the technical
implementation of a postdisciplinary space is not so easy to resist. If intelligence
can neither be taught nor confined to a few humans, it cannot even be
monopolized by all of them: machines learn, and learning is a machinic process,
a matter of communication, connection and material self-organization.
Connectionist conceptions of the cultural do not merely operate within the
parameters of a humanist discourse of individuals and societies, but collapse
distinctions between human life, natural life and the artificial lives of economies,
on-line libraries and complex systems of every kind. Cultures are parallel
distributed processes, functioning without some transcendent guide or the
governing role of their agencies. There is no privileged scale: global and
214 SADIE PLANT
molecular cultures cut through the middle grounds of states, societies, members
and things. There is nothing exclusively human about it: culture emerges from
the complex interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems,
thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance
nights and bacterial exchanges. There are eco-systems under your fingernails.
You live in cultures, and cultures live in you. They are everything and the
kitchen sink.
*
Without the centrality of agency, culture is neither high, nor ordinary, but
complex. It becomes possible to look at cities, cultures and subcultures of every
scale and variety as self-organizing systems with their own circuits, exchanges,
contagions, flows, discontinuities, lines of communication and bottom-up
processes of development. It also becomes impossible simply to ‘look’ at
anything at all. If hypertext erodes the distinction between reading and writing,
connectionism challenges the old borderline between theorizing something and
doing it, and induces an unprecedented convergence and interconnection of
theory and methodology with what were once their discrete objects of study.
Theoretical developments leak across the disciplines, and also become newly
integrated with the complex processes they describe.
Indeed, connectionist theory does not merely describe anything: whatever
happens ‘in theory’ is more than a representation of the developments and
activities being theorized. If it works, it adds to the processes it studies: it too
makes connections, engineers links and fabricates self-organizing systems. It
replicates the processes it once represented; it simulates the activities on which
theory was once content to comment, and becomes part of the self-organizing
processes on which it once imposed itself. Reading and writing become less like
text than a peculiarly fluid cityscape more akin to a festival site which organizes
itself and develops its own roads, junctions and landmarks as a consequence of
the activity which takes place within it. Cultural theory then becomes a matter of
making cultures as well as, or rather than, interpreting them.
This is not a question of applying theory, nor even of integrating theory and
practice in some new dialectical relation, but something more akin to what
Deleuze refers to as a ‘system of relays within a larger sphere, within a
multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical.’ What was once the
theorist is no longer alone: ‘Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity,
even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are ‘groupuscules’.
Representation no longer exists; there’s only action —theoretical action and
practical action which serve as relays and form networks.’23 Trance dancers don’t
need Deleuze and Guattari to teach them about bodies without organs and
rhizomatic connections: they have learned all this for themselves. Writing
becomes a process of software engineering, making connections, and connecting
with the other connectionist systems and their connections too; it ‘does not
totalize’, but ‘is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.’24
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 215
NOTES
1 Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, London: Fourth
Estate, 1994:297.
2 Ibid.: 296.
3 Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Towards a Unified Science of the
Mind/Brain, MIT, 1989:40.
4 Ibid.
5 Donald Hebb, quoted in Klaus Mainzer, Thinking in Complexity: The Complex
Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994:126.
6 J.Richard Eiser, Attitudes, Chaos, and the Connectionist Mind, Oxford: Blackwell,
1994.
7 Vannevar Bush, ‘As we may think’, quoted in George Landow, Hypertext,
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992:16.
8 Michel Foucault, in Donald F.Bouchard, (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977:225.
9 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, London: Penguin, 1969:125.
10 Mitchell H.Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and
Chaos, London: Penguin, 1992:293.
11 Thinking in Complexity, op. cit.: 11.
12 Ibid.: 268.
13 Ibid.: 13.
216 SADIE PLANT