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Composition Forum
Composition Forum and this article are on the Web at http://compositionforum.com/
Composition Forum is a peer-reviewed journal for scholars and teachers interested in the investigation of composition theory and its relation to the teaching of writing at the post-secondary level. The journal features articles that explore the intersections of composition theory and pedagogy, including essays that examine specific pedagogical theories or that examine how theory could or should inform classroom practices, methodology, and research into multiple literacies. Composition Forum also publishes articles that describe specific and innovative writing program practices and writing courses, reviews of relevant books in composition studies, and interviews with notable scholars and teachers who can address issues germane to our theoretical approach.
Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition
Noah Roderick’s “Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition” article addresses the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. The author concludes that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences, but that composition scholars must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. This article demonstrates Composition Forum’s unique focus on the intersections of composition theory and practice, as well as the journal’s commitment to interdisciplinary research and scholarship.
2 Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition
Noah R. Roderick
Abstract: In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.
Any scan of the major rhetoric, composition, or literacy journals over the past ten years or so will show that complexity and ecology are rapidly becoming dominant metaphors in those fields. Given its position as a nexus between technology, communication studies, and the humanities, it is no surprise that many in composition studies, in particular, have eagerly taken up the banners of complexity science and ecocomposition. The epistemic and pedagogical possibilities of opening up scholarship and teaching in composition to complexity science and ecology studies are the subjects of countless dissertations, articles and books. Early overtures include Marilyn Cooper’s article, “The Ecology of Writing” and Margaret A. Syverson’s book, The Wealth of Reality: an Ecology of Composition, which took the crucial step of aligning the epistemology of complexity with the ethics of ecology. More recent works, such as Byron Hawk’s A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity and Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition, continue to more fully develop the radical philosophical implications of appropriating the discourse of complexity science. Combining recent insights from the physical sciences with the post-humanist philosophies of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, Mark C. Taylor, and Gregory Ulmer, these more recent arguments for complexity are examining the deep relationship between information technology, rhetoric, and the emergent properties of subjectivity, calling even for a post-subjective rhetoric.
In this essay, I revisit the relationship between science and composition studies, claiming that the question of whether or not it belongs to the sciences or to the humanities was not settled with the decline of the internalist- cognitivist movement associated with 1970s process pedagogy, as Robert Connors argued. I claim that compositionists need to take seriously the potential of complexity science to describe the writing act, not because the past decade has yielded any positive knowledge about, for instance, the writer’s mind, but because the interface between the natural and social sciences has been radically altered. In other words, the interesting questions
