Chapter 13
The virtual complexity of culture
Sadie Plant
What alchemical transformation occurs when you connect everything
to everything?1
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
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referred to as deutero-learning, or learning to learn. It feels its way forward, and
makes its own way, rather than tracking some existing route.
What is now described as an ‘order-emerging-out-of-massive-connections’
approach defines intelligence as an exploratory process, which learns and learns
to learn for itself. Intelligence is no longer monopolized, imposed or given by
some external, transcendent, and implicitly superior source which hands down
what it knows—or rather what it is willing to share—but instead evolves as an
emergent process, engineering itself from the bottom up. While the resultant
neural nets have so far ‘achieved only limited success in generating partial
“intelligence”’, it is the very fact ‘that anything at all emerges from a field of
lowly connections’ that is, as Kelly says, ‘startling’.2
If artificial intelligence has fuelled this line of research, one of the earliest uses
of the term connectionism was in relation to what might once have been
unproblematically defined as the natural intelligence of human beings. It was
realized in the nineteenth century that the central nervous system is one of the
most complex naturally occurring systems, and although the fine details of how
it functions are lost even on the experts in the brain sciences, it is now accepted
that the brain is a neurochemical switching system of such enormity that it is
thought to be composed of some 1015 nerve cells or neurons, ‘give or take an
order or magnitude’3.
In his 1949 book The Organization of Behaviour, Donald Hebb introduced the
notion of ‘cell assemblies’, describing the brain as a complex system of multiple
and parallel associations bereft of any centralized control. The term
connectionist was used to problematize notions of the brain as a given organ
unchanged by what it thinks, and instead allow it to be defined it as an emergent
neurochemical system which is modified by every connection it makes.
Hebb’s key innovation was to develop the understanding of synapses, which
are ‘the points of communication between neurons, where processes make quasipermanent junctions with the soma or processes of another neuron’.4 Arguing
that connections between neurons are strengthened and developed as they are
made, he effectively suggested that learning is a process of neurochemical selforganization and modification. ‘When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite
a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process
or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as
one of the cells firing B, is increased.’5
In a sense, Hebb’s work already revealed the continuity between artificial and
natural intelligence which is now suggested by neural nets and mathematical
models of self-organizing systems. Regardless of whether they occur within a
software system or a human brain, material modification and learning become
continuous processes. After this, it can either be said that ‘natural’, human
intelligence is ‘artificial’ and constructed in the sense that its apparatus mutates
as it learns, grows and explores its own potentiality; or that ‘artificial’
intelligence is ‘natural’ insofar as it pursues the processes at work in the brain
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 205
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
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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 multimedia? 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
virtual library is a complex communications system in which contacts and
junctions function like Hebb’s synapses, reinforced and strengthened every time
they are made. Unused links may fade into the background, but nothing entirely
disappears. As Bush points out with the title of his article, the memex is quite
literally ‘As we may think’.
Text, of course, is only the beginning. It goes without saying that such on-line
information spaces deal with still and moving images, and audio as well.
Hypertext collapses distinctions between readers and writers, producers and
consumers, and this is merely the start of the devastating changes wrought by the
digitization of information. The emergence of the Net and hypertext is also
concurrent with a shift in attitudes to publishing, teaching, the role and status of
the academy and, by extension, of all aspects of education and the so-called
production of knowledge. Gibson’s cyberpunk scenarios, in which the complex
cultures of the imminent future have no middle class between the rich and the
poor, are indicative of the tendency for middlemen to be removed from every
zone. In the arts, publishing and music industries, the collapse of the user—
producer distinction finds editors and curators confronting the danger of their own
redundancy as images, text and music move wholesale into samizdat production.
The mediating functions of the tutor and the teacher are equally undermined by
these shifts.
As Foucault writes, the ‘university stands for the institutional apparatus
through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction, at the least cost to
itself.’8 Today’s academy still has its sources in Platonic conceptions of
knowledge, teaching and the teacher-student relationship, all of which are based
on a model in which learning barely figures at all. Indeed, by definition, there is
nothing to be learned, nothing new to be discovered or to be explored. Socrates
puts it perfectly, if a little bluntly: ‘when we speak of people learning, they are
simply recollecting what they knew before; in other words, learning is
recollection.’ Nothing is ever entirely unknown, ‘because what we call learning
will be the recovery of our own knowledge; and surely we should be right in
calling this recollection’.9 Like God, the truth and the knowledge that attains it is
simply just sitting there, waiting for man. Only its remembering remains to be
done.
The academy loses its control over intelligence once it is even possible to
imagine a situation in which information can be accessed from nets which care
for neither old boy status nor exam results. There is no selection on the Net.
Beyond the ability to buy, beg, borrow, or steal, there are no requirements to be
fulfilled before a CD-ROM can be used. But even these are the more superficial
effects of a deep rewiring of the processes by which knowledge is disciplined
and reproduced. As the role of the human teacher of machines is subsumed by
their ability to learn for themselves, the science of artificial intelligence mutates
into the engineering of artificial life. The top-down imposition of knowledge
becomes redundant, and anything which might be called growth, evolution or
development occurs in systems which function without such external governors
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or even centralized controls of their own. They have no pre-ordained designs or
goals in sight, but proceed bottom-up, making connections and reinforcing links,
in precisely the way that synapses function in the human brain with which they
converge as neural nets.
These connections between the parallel distributed processings of machines,
brains and an immense complexity of other dynamic communications systems
have enormous implications for all conceptions of teaching, learning and the
disciplining of knowledge. Released from its relation to teaching, learning is no
longer coded as study and confined to some particular zone, specialized
behaviour or compartmentalized period of time. A teacher no longer controls the
process, ensuring the development of well-rounded individuals one step at a time,
serial fashion: those once defined as students learn to learn for themselves.
While technical and economic imperatives have forced some moves from
teaching to learning in the universities, higher education remains premised on the
paternal function of the professorial figure, handing his knowledge down through
the generations, restricting access, and preserving a tradition still in debt to the
Greeks. Although the full effect of the Net and the technical implementation of
on-line libraries such as Xanadu are still to come, the implications of such
systems cannot be delayed until they arrive. Such libraries were always virtually
real, and even the beginnings of the actualization of these virtual systems of
information is now starting to take effect.
Just as texts and computers lose their individual identities, so do the
authorities, teachings, canons, bodies of knowledge and orthodox methodologies
which were once proper to particular disciplines. Bottom-up learning,
hypermedia, and the Net do not merely facilitate a new interdisciplinary
approach: they demand one.
*
Where once there were separate disciplines, connectionism opens up a zone
which is so interdisciplinary that only the links between them remain.
Biologists and economists have been among the first researchers to explore the
implications of this abstract processing and the connections it makes possible, not
least because the computer has become so integral to both disciplines. Neural
nets make it possible to model the behaviour of self-organizing systems on
computers, and parallel processing programs are used to simulate both organic
and economic activity. It is also the case that many aspects of their existing
research programmes lend themselves to an interest in the behaviour of nonlinear systems. In biology, organisms, ecosystems, and evolutionary
developments are being reassessed in the light of a new interest in selforganization, and macroeconomic systems can likewise be considered as
complex compositions of localised, microeconomic processes.
If these two disciplines find themselves using the same research
methodologies to deal with the same abstract processes, there are, however, few
areas which have not had some contact with connectionist approaches to their
own specialized subjects and objects of research. Biologists and economists are
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 209
not alone in their convergence with the connectionism of artificial intelligence
and the neurosciences.
There is a new interest in the interaction between chaos, complexity and
literature, and in philosophy, the posthumanist non-linearities explored by
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Irigaray are reconceptualizing bodies of
knowledge as systems of thought and re-awakening older interests in both
systems theory and the work of Kant, Marx, and Freud. Indeed many disciplines
have some existing theory of complex systems on which to draw: geographers
read Wallerstein, and historians can refer to Braudel.
As disciplines engage with a connectionist approach, they also begin to
discover the redundancy of their own disciplinary separation. If Bush’s memex
allows the trails and connections to emerge from the background of what was
once arranged as books and libraries, connectionism develops across and
between what were once demarcated knowledges and specialized zones, and
foregrounds whatever emerges from these links rather than the disciplines they
have traversed.
The emergence of machine intelligence coincides with the discovery that
machines are complex systems, and complex systems are everywhere, from the
microbiological to the macroeconomic, and across what were once distinct
natural, social, human and artificial zones. These are,
[assemblages] at the edge of order and chaos [whose components] never
quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. These
are the systems that are both stable enough to store information, and yet
evanescent enough to transmit it. These are the systems that can be
organized to perform complex computations, to react to the world, to be
spontaneous, adaptive, and alive.10
Klaus Mainzer defines connectionism, or what he calls synergetics, as ‘an
interdisciplinary methodology to explain the emergence of certain macroscopic
phenomena via the nonlinear interactions of microscopic elements in complex
systems’,11 regardless of the scales or materials of which such systems are
composed. Economies, organisms, and ecosystems can equally be studied,
defined and researched as self-organizing assemblages. Whether systems were
once considered to be natural—organisms, for example—or artificial—
economies or social formations—there are processes of growth, evolution and
learning which are common to them all. And one of the most important
implications of connectionism is that these processes are piecemeal,
discontinuous and bottom-up. Complex systems do not follow the straight lines
of historical narration or Darwinian evolution, but are composed of multiple
series of parallel processes, simultaneous emergences, discontinuities and
bifurcations, anticipations and mutations of every variety. Regardless of either
the materials or scales on which they operate, their macroscopic, molar
appearance belies a complexity of local interactions and molecular behaviours
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which proceed without any such transcendent guides. There is no governor, no
central processing unit, and no monolithic governing point, and ‘neither genetic
evolution nor the evolution of behaviour needs a global program like a
supervising divine will, a vital force, or a global strategy of evolutionary
optimization’.12
Does what we call ‘knowledge’ also operate this way? If all ‘physical, social,
and mental reality is nonlinear and complex’,13 is it possible that the ideas,
inventions, and discoveries which compose what has been thought of as human
culture are themselves composed of complex interactions, evolving connections
and self-organizing behaviour patterns?
It can certainly be said that research in biological systems, economic
complexity, neuroscience and machine intelligence effectively forms a complex,
dispersed, and open system, a uncoordinated and piecemeal process which none
of the disciplines can control. Elements from each feed into the other and crossfertilize; parallel processes and simultaneous developments proliferate; messages
and media converge. Not that the particular nexus which emerges is some closed
system, and self-contained: these new connnections do not regroup to compose
another disciplinary zone, and can only ever be contingently defined and
momentarily circumscribed. What were once separated lines and modes of
research interact with each other, and also with an entire culture of equally
complex, dynamic and mutually influencing systems: the Net and hypertext,
for example; the Net and hypertext as they interact with markets; the Net,
hypertext and markets as they interact with neural nets; the Net, hypertext,
markets and neural nets as they interact with similarly complex individuals.
If, as Kevin Kelly points out, complex systems have ‘rekindled earlier
intuitions that evolution and learning were deeply related’,14 there is no
distinction between learning and the exploratory processes which cut through all
intelligent behaviour, and no way of teaching or confining such intelligence to a
few humans, or even to all of them. The learning process is the life and the
activity of all complex systems, regardless of whether they were once conceived
as organisms, machines, cultures or economies, and the tendencies at work in
each do not proceed in isolation, but leak into and cross-infect each other as they
converge on their virtuality.
A Xanadu of this immensity changes everything. There are urgent questions
about the function of teaching and its centrality to a system of education based
on the top-down transmission of already existing knowledges. And if what would
once have been unproblematically defined as ‘scientific knowledge’ functions as
‘a parallel distributed system’ which ‘has no center, no one in control. A million
heads and dispersed books hold parts of it’.15 By an inexorable extension,
something which might once have been defined as ‘the sum of human
knowledge’ is no longer confined to bodies, volumes and disciplines, but
becomes an immense, self-organizing program of evolutionary, intellectual, and
technological processes which are neither simply human nor merely knowledge
based and never ‘simply’ or ‘merely’ anything at all. They are not organized as if
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 211
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,
the concept of ‘agency’ constantly recurs as a theme. Against the so-called
objective pressures that are said to come from the politico-economic
realm, the acolytes of culture assert the intrusion of human agency—as
intrinsic possibility, as source of collective hope.
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
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society and speculative humanism there is an emergent complexity, an evolving
intelligence in which all material life is involved: all thinking, writing, dancing,
engineering, creativity, social organization, biological processing, economic
interaction and communication of every kind. It is the matrix, the virtuality and
the future of every separated thing, individuated organism, disciplined idea and
social structure.
Cultural studies has condemned as ‘naturalization’ any attempt to introduce
what it understands as natural processes to the study of social, political or cultural
developments, and all efforts to connect technical, economic and scientific
activity to cultural, political and social life have been rejected for their
determinism. The humanities have often been right to be wary of such moves:
research projects such as sociobiology have often been woefully blind to their
own cultural functioning. But if connectionism has emerged from the sciences,
this is not because it is scientific: it is simply that the sciences are the first
disciplines to be undermined by it. Artificial intelligence succeeds as it escapes
from both the laboratory and the scientist, both of which become elements of the
learning process they may have thought they contained. Distinctions between the
human, the natural and the articifial are scrambled, and whatever was once said
to belong to each of them finds a new basis on which to connect in the dispersed
and connective processes which link them all. And unlike earlier attempts to
bridge the culture—nature divide by means of rigorous social science, the
complex systems approach leaks into what were once the subject matters of the
arts, humanities and social sciences without any of the dangers of reductionism
which marked modernist cybernetics and systems theory. If, for example, the
clear implication of such an approach is that ‘the traditional concept of
individual responsibility is questionable’, agency and intention are not removed,
but complicated and perplexed instead. While a phenomenon like ‘urban
development cannot be explained by the free will of single persons’ but is instead
‘the result of nonlinear interactions’19, this only emphasizes the irreducible
complexity of precisely the intentions, dreams and desires which feed into its
macroscopic result. If there is a new reductionism, it lies with the humanism
which wants to collapses the immense complexity and fine detail of the
interwoven lines and circuitries into the singular will of individual or collective
agency.
‘We are in a social formation’: of this there is no doubt. But is this where we
are going to stay? Why not ‘see how it is stratified for us and in us and at the
place where we are; then descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage within
which we are held; gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of
the plane of consistency.’20
It was Foucault’s antihumanism which discovered both the extent of
modernity’s disciplinary procedures and the immanent matters of its specular
reality; the virtual confusions and undisciplined connections which haunt the
Enlightened world: ‘Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the
haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, crimes,
THE VIRTUAL COMPLEXITY OF CULTURE 213
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:
What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins of an immense
circulatory system was closer to a sewer. Strange clumps of detritus and
trash, some inert and harmless, some toxic when in direct contact, and
some actively radiating poison, scrambled along with the useful and
necessary traffic.22
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
In an age when even philosophy ‘is no longer synthetic judgement’ but
becomes ‘a thought synthesizer’, anything else would be reactionary. They need
to move beyond specialization without swapping such status for the broad
strokes of generalization, and are effective only insofar as they ‘make thought
travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one
makes sound travel).’25 They are neither modern nor postmodern, but in
proximity to the future and continuous with the tendencies and directions in
which they write. They run ahead and in anticipation of themselves, and have to
do with ‘surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.’26
Connectionism is not interested in rehearsing what is already known, or
endorsing the disciplined bodies of knowledge and their canonized vaults. It is
less a matter of being taught the old than a process of learning the new. It has no
project, but emerges bottom-up from researches dispersed across the disciplines
and similarly distributed developments amongst its media and channels of
communication. It is not a new theory, but fatally disturbs the role of theory
itself. It is not an answer, but a question.
In a passage read by Deleuze at his funeral, Foucault posed it perfectly: ‘What
is the point in striving after knowledge [savoir] if it ensures only the acquisition
of knowledges [connaissances]…?’ Why bother with a thinking which concerns
itself only with ‘legitimizing what one already knows’, when it could ‘consist of
an attempt to know how and to what extent it is possible to think differently’?27
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
14 Out of Control, op. cit.: 296.
15 Ibid.: 452.
16 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, London: Athlone, 1988:280.
17 Immanuel Wallerstein, Geo-Politics and Geo-Culture, Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, 12.
18 Out of Control, op. cit.: 360.
19 Thinking in Complexity, op. cit.: 10.
20 A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit.: 161.
21 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin, 1977:198.
22 Pat Cadigan, Synners, London: Grafton, 324.
23 Gilles Deleuze, in Donald E Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, Cornell University Press, 1977:
206.
24 Ibid.: 208.
25 A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit.: 343.
26 Ibid: 5.
27 Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’ to The History of Sexuality 2 The Uses of Pleasure,
London: Penguin, 1986.