Anthropology UCLA, volume 22, 1996-1997, pages 44-65 (1997).
We Have Always Been
Postmodern:
Five Books on Anthropology and Science
by Nicholas Gessler
What follows is a review of five books which touch upon issues of anthropology and science in the postmodern age, which I take to correspond with the final half-century of the millennium. Some do so explicitly, others only by implication:
- Post-Modernism and Anthropology: Theory and Practice. Edited by Karin Geuijen, Raven Diederick and Jan de Wolf. Van Gorcum, Assen, The Netherlands 1995. ISBN 90 232 2932 0. 224 pages.
- Assessing Cultural Anthropology. Edited by Robert Borofsky. McGraw-Hill, New York 1994. ISBN 0 07 006578 0. 566 pages.
- The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Oxford University Press, New York 1992. ISBN 0 19 506023 7. 666 pages.
- At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. By Stuart Kauffman. Oxford University Press, New York 1995. ISBN 0 19 509599 5. 321 pages, illustrated.
- The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. By Stuart A. Kauffman. Oxford University Press, New York 1993. ISBN 0 19 505811 9. 709 pages, illustrated.
What unites them are their attempts to understand the production of knowledge and to discuss metaphysics in its broad sense (as speculative philosophy) through its subdivisions of epistemology and ontology. What distinguishes them are the relative priorities they bestow upon each in the current raging battle for the high ground. These struggles between the material and the mental in turn configure the combatants positions on how knowledge should be constituted, and consequently on how its acquisition should be practiced. Focusing on each book, I open with a close-up on one school of postmodern anthropology, then pull back to bring the discipline of cultural anthropology into view. Continuing to track back from a tight to a distant shot, I widen the field to the social sciences, and then close on the widest panorama of all, the universe of self-organization and evolution. These books progressively extend the depth of field on increasing scales of observation. They are reminiscent of the conceptual and visual sequences in the film and book the Powers of Ten:
On the importance of always looking for the next larger thing - and the next smaller. The idea of scale - of what is appropriate at different scales, and the relationships of each to each - is very important to architects. [Morrison, Ray Eames tribute to Charles]
Likewise, it is very important to us. Taken together, the books suggest the development of an evolutionary epistemology and theories of complex adaptive systems, computation and emergence relevant to the broader aims of anthropology. These are relatively new ideas, postmodern in the sense of riding the crest of technology and confronting the legitimation of their own ideas. Ironically, these very same ideas necessarily generate a metanarrative which many postmodernists would consider distinctly modern. What then are these modernisms about?
One way to look at them is to recognize postmodernism as the elevation of culture shock, experienced by anthropologists in the field, to a globally elaborated cultural form. It is in this sense that postmodernism is as difficult (or some might say as useless) to characterize as is culture itself. Few attempt definitions, and many definitions defy the attempt. It could be done using cluster analysis by plotting each usage as a point located along multiple associational, behavioral and referential axes. The resulting clusters of points would appear as clouds or constellations in an n-dimensional hyperspace. It could also be done using the inverse of the archaeological technique of seriation, by plotting the historic gradual change of usage through time as the tides of fashion rise and fall. Although such analyses could go a long way towards grounding and visualizing the arguments we frequently encounter, it would not be worth the effort here to analyze what may simply be an epiphenomenon of language. Instead, I would prefer to engage more substantial issues. Rather than trying to characterize postmodernmism itself, another approach may prove more valuable: I will examine some of the component issues it raises, specifically the homologous partitions between the sciences and the humanities, between scientific and narrative knowledge, and more fundamentally between epistemology and ontology.
As a new label which could be attached to many poorly understood new things to provisionally convey the impression of coherence where none is evident, the postmodern is conveniently available for the fluid residual category of "other." Its use has spread to consolidate many dizzying and contradictory associations. Its vanguards range from the familiar to the bizarre, and this is particularly true in anthropology where the postmodern is often reified and rallied against its cocreators: science and technology. This fermentation yields a strange brew. Intoxicating? Surely so. But occasionally sparkling with insights resurrected from the past that come from a temporary abandonment of coherence and pressing material concerns. Afterwards, one may be unable or unwilling to reproduce the experience, but the glowing impression lingers that something may have been gained, and that old wine in new bottles may take on some subtle flavors.
Among the least confusing is the consideration of the postmodern age as the postindustrial age, evidenced by changes brought about by scientific and technological advances particularly in information. Linguistics, translation, mathematics, cybernetics, genetics, communications, data storage, computation, computer languages, and artificial intelligence are sculpting the nature of knowledge. It is this computerization of society which prompted Lyotard to assess the rules of engagement between science and society a decade and a half ago. As Lyotard construed it, modern science legitimizes itself with grand narratives such as the furtherance of knowledge, wealth, progress, justice, freedom or understanding. In contrast, postmodern science legitimizes itself with local optimizations of maximal performance, or performativity:
Science has always been in conflict with narratives. Judged by the yardstick of science, the majority of them prove to be fables. But top the extent that science does not restrict itself to stating useful regularities and seeks the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy. I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making explicit appeal to some grand narrative... I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. [Lyotard xxiii-xxiv] A scientist is before anything else a person who "tells stories." The only difference is that he is duty bound to verify them. [Lyotard 60]
Ironically to some, within postmodern science itself there exists a return to the grand narratives of science and culture whose passing Lyotard had previously decried. His nostalgic yearnings for its reappearance seem to have been fulfilled. And how, he asks, should society be represented before and after this transition? The modern models see society as either a unified organismic whole systemically self-regulated with homeostatic mechanisms, or oppositionally as a theater for continual struggle between classes:
It is a choice between the homogeneity and the intrinsic duality of the social, between functional and critical knowledge. But the decision seems difficult, or arbitrary. [Lyotard 13]
In contrast, the postmodern model-in-the-making overcomes this false polarization and is based upon distributed information and communication, organized without an organizer, save something akin to the blind watchmaker at work. Lyotard proposes building it from the foundation of an expanded cybernetics:
What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle. [Lyotard 16] Postmodern science - by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta," catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes - is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. [Lyotard 60]
While concentrating on information or language games as his methodological approach, Lyotard does not deny the influence of other components in the mix. Collapsing and uniting his methodological dualism between information and materiality by including goods and trade as well as the cognitive equipment of the individuals that comprise society, we should be able to arrive at a postmodern model of culture not unlike cultural materialism. It is towards initial steps in constructing such a model that I dedicate this review. But before moving on, it is necessary to examine a few other characteristics of postmodern science raised by Lyotard, two with which I have a quibble, and one with which he has a quibble with others who have taken a narrower view of the postmodern. It is bracing to note that he considers his own views to be in flux:
It remains to be said that the author of this report is a philosopher, not an expert. The latter knows what he knows and what he does not know: the former does not. One concludes, the other questions---two very different language games. I combine them here with the result that neither quite succeeds. [Lyotard xxv]
First, although Lyotard explicitly reserves judgment on whether language games constitute the entirety of social relations [Lyotard 15], his methodology rooted in them leads him to conjectures with which I would take issue. Lyotard among other is surprised that scientists dont question their own view of the cumulative nature of science. To non-scientists there is no middle-ground between the flat and spherical-earthers, the Copernicans and the Ptolomains, the relativists and the Newtonians, the non-linear and linear scientists. To them these are battles between irreconcilable paradigms in which one must win and the other must loose. Consequently they assert that science is oppositional and not cumulative. There is no question that revolutions on the order of those studied by Thomas Kuhn are constantly in the making and that consequently, scientific knowledge accumulates only after the previous stage of knowledge has been recast. But even this modification conflates scientific knowledge with the leverage produced by science over the external world. Knowledge may be more evolutionary, but it is less so with technology, and there can be even less doubt that the power realized through scientific inquiry is cumulative. Perhaps the notion could be better expressed by saying that science is subsumptive. The new paradigm subsumes the old, reconstituting it but rarely replacing it entirely, and in so doing accumulates new phenomena under its control. Rocket scientists dont need relativity calculations to travel to the moon. Planners, architects and builders find the flat-earth model quite adequate. Turbulence does not deny the existence of placid streams. And we are all satisfied with the geocentric conceptualizations of sunrise and sunset, rather than the lumbering heliocentric agglomerations of revolve-into-sunlight and revolve-into-earth-shadow. When these propositions are examined only through their language as printed text it is easy to mistake subsumption for opposition.
Second, Lyotards views on the vitality and power of science as a producer of knowledge do not coincide with the diversionary tactics of those with radical agendas who wish to subvert science and hasten the rupture and fragmentation of the society that nurtures it. For whatever reasons, many of these attacks are grossly misinformed and consequently disinform their readers with the assertion that science has no special claims to knowledge. Despite these flanking attacks, Lyotard confirms that science remains strong in the postmodern era.
What never fails to come and come again, with every new theory, new hypothesis, new statement, or new observation, is the question of legitimacy. For it is not philosophy that asks this question of science, but science that asks it of itself... The question, "What is your argument worth, what is your proof worth?" is so much a part of the pragmatics of scientific knowledge that it is what assures the transformation of the addressee of a given argument and proof into the sender of a new argument and proof---thereby assuring the renewal of scientific discourse and the replacement of each generation of scientists. Science develops---and no one will deny that it develops---by developing this question. And this question, as it develops, leads to the following question, that is to say, metaquestion, the question of legitimacy: "What is your what is it worth worth?".. The striking feature of postmodern scientific knowledge is that the discourse on the rules that validate it is (explicitly) immanent to it. [Lyotard 54]
Lyotards view of postmodern science and its indeterminancy, is in large measure one with which I concur, but I find no reason to expect that the new sciences will replace the old. Rather I would expect that the subsumption of old knowledge by new will parallel sciences dominion over new territories, though within these new domains we may have to abandon the hope of predicting details. Whether these details are at a fundamental level non-deterministic or wholly deterministic but non-predictable, we may have to be satisfied with predicting only the large behaviors of these complex phenomena:
The problem is not to learn what the opponent ("nature") is, but to identify the game it plays. [Lyotard 57]
There is a course to plot from modern science to postmodern science for anthropology. although it is marked rather indirectly by the five books which follow. Hopefully, having survived the first misdirected tacks we will still have an appetite for the proper recipe. The first attempts to articulate a drive-through for fast-food-for-thought for anthropology. The second samples the immiscibility of tastes in our disciplinary menu of Scienz 57 Varieties™ of cultural anthropology. The third through fifth propose new informational interdisciplinary scientific diets high in complex computational adaptates and low in saturated fads. We can hope that they will provide the sustenance to carry us into the next century.
Post-Modernism and Anthropology: Theory and Practice.
Here we encounter an aberration of the postmodern as previously described. We find a discursive style, occasionally concealing the privileging of ontology over epistemology, through a slight of hand which replaces the latter with a "communicative and dialogical epistemology" [xiii] thereby presenting the illusion of a balanced metaphysic in which the two should be interconnected and blurred. On the front cover a Flemish bag-pipe player looks on from under the arch of a stone aqueduct in astonishment as two men pass, carrying on a door an impossible wire-frame cube. Atop the stoneworks another red-brick aqueduct stands, parallel and perpendicular to the first. A hook-nosed Concorde hangs motionless in the sky above the anachronistic Medieval still-life. On the rear cover we read:
Post-modernism... is about what we think that reality and truth are... To explore the implications... for anthropology three themes are discussed... Textual Strategies... how to express in texts this different attitude... History of Anthropology... how postmodern anthropology can be perceived in a history of non-postmodern orientations... Alternative Ontologies... how we can understand and accept different worlds. [back cover]
Sandwiched between image and blurb are ten articles and commissioned papers following a workshop on Post-Modern Anthropology: Consequences for Empirical Research held at Ultrech in 1991. It offers discourses on an endlessly self-regenerating world of Escher-like images. Postmodern anthropology, an offshoot of the postmodern I previously described, I will refer to simply as pomoan to highlight its own distinctively indistinct characteristics:
Post-modernists do not try to represent reality in a correct way and no longer make a distinction between what is happening and its interpretation. There is no Real World with which different theories can be compared to find out if they are correct. In post-modernism knowledge is construction... Meanings are not fixed, they are made in the interactions between writer, text and reader... there is production, a creation of meaning rather than representations, a transfer of information. [x]
This lack of grounding, anchorage, foundation, and materiality apparently provides the ontological opportunity to speak more and more of less and less:
Although post-modernism is very influential, it is not a notion with a clear definition. [ix] Post-modernism in anthropology is much talked about but it is still not very clear what it really means, nor is it clear what modernist anthropology is and what the relation between the two might consist of. Apart from that, there is a lot of discussion about the implications of post-modernism for anthropology. [x] Not only is it very obscure what post-modern anthropology stands for, but also what its relation is to what it is supposed to be a reaction to. [xi]
As we read the wandering introduction, simultaneously ascending and descending stairs which only Escher could negotiate, we may reasonably doubt we have anywhere to go. So many dualisms are abandoned with nothing offered in their place that we seem to have arrived in a featureless space:
In post-modernism the distinction is given up between logic and rhetoric, fact and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, to prove and to convince, art and science, emic and etic, subject and object, method and data, and so on. Thinking in dichotomies... is deconstructed. Genres are blurred. Reality is seen as fragmented, inconsistent and undefined... [x-xi]
But much of this dichotomous ground is familiar. It has been walked before and the footprints are still visible after 300 years if one looks down from the commercial flash of neon, krypton, and xenon and the glow of phosphors emanating from color monitors:
I am not present in my body in the same way that a sailor is present in his ship. Rather, I am very tightly bound to my body and so "mixed up" with it that we form a single thing. [Descartes 46] I know that sensory indications of what is good for my body are more often true than false; I can almost always examine a given thing with several senses; and I can also use my memory (which connects the present to the past) and my understanding (which has now examined all the causes of error). Hence I need no longer fear that what the senses daily show me is unreal. [Descartes 52]
It is not an isolated configuration of the pomoan mind that considers fashion to be the evidence for the validity of ideas and to be the final arbiter of truth:
The easy assumptions of the old order of discourse - of wholeness, consensus, clarity, closure, telos and even order itself - seems awkward, unfamiliar, and almost embarrassing, rather in the way of someone speaking of last years fashion as if it were last year, speaking seriously, and not in parody of the unspeakable. [x quoting Tyler]
So it is not surprising that the term "yuppie anthropology" [xix quoting Silverman] comes almost automatically to mind. The detour is modestly immodest, declining the existence of the Zeitgeist while trying to capture and recreate it in its own image:
Post-modernism is not to be conceived as a new paradigm... a new meta-narrative, a new story that would again tell what is truer and better than something else. Post-modernism as we see it rather wants to revive already existing styles and paradigms and juxtapose them. Hence the preference for pastiche to achieve this end. [xi]
Pastiche and hyperlinguistification (credits to Haraway) to what end? Or is the preference symptomatic of a performative style of rehearsed improvisation which guarantees the writer-actor innumerable scenarios to be scripted and revised?
The pomoan agenda is a curious philosophical tautology. Violating its own caveats, it first imagines that there is a culture of the postmodern. Then having allocated neocortical real estate to this cognitive construction, it builds an edifice with instances that fit and ultimately reinforce its preconceptions. Visually, it sees the world through a window of its own construction, creating its own unique cinematic special effects. It reifies its view by executing on glass a matte painting of what the world ought to look like, hiding what does not want to show and allowing the desired action to reach the lens through the clear glass. Finally, after post-production, it has reproduced the world in its own image, having replaced the grand narratives which it rejects with the grand tautologies of self-reference.
Has the emergence of the information-postmodern age... firmly eroded the currency of many of the presumptions of modern anthropological theory? [xxvi]
That of course depends upon the theory. The information-postmodern age has certainly eroded the pomoan presumptions of relative truth and the lack of a real world. The computers upon which that age is constructed are products of both modern and postmodern science and of the very epistemology and materiality that the pomoan strategy denies. Once we allow epistemology to re-enter the equation, we must again speak with confidence about the external world. Ignoring the material and technological basis for the age in which it finds itself, the pomoan strategy is blind to the wealth of possibilities now emerging for a postmodern science in developing theory and practice for anthropology.
Fortunately, not all of the contributors follow the boilerplate outlined in the introduction. George Marcus, for example, extols Donna Haraways "commitment to faithful accounts of a real world." [19]:
As with Bourdieu, in Haraways essay, we have a committed return to objective knowledge, but what a difference in how Haraways notion of objectivity is constituted, and what a difference in the practice of reflexivity she defines in order to constitute it! [20]
Frank Ankersmit, writing on "Historism, Post-Modernism and Epistemology" summarizes Rortys account of the "edifying philosopher," the postmodern practitioner who has abandoned all pretense of forging a "vertical" link between language and reality:
The edifying philosopher knows that everything he says and writes is part of the conversation of mankind and that what most counts is how what he says relates horizontally to what was and will be said before and after him... (Those who agree with him will) present themselves as doing something different from, and more important than offering accurate representations of how things are. They will question the notion of accurate representation, but, in order to be consistent, the edifying philosopher must also avoid taking the position that a search for accurate representations... is an inaccurate representation of philosophy. Whereas less pretentious revolutionaries can afford to have views on lots of things which their predecessors had views on, edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views... (This) results in the post-modernist oxymoron of the point of view of the absence of points of view. [36 parentheses added]
If these papers succeed in provoking the question "What is wrong with this picture" as the cover literally does, then the book succeeds in its intent. But what exactly is the picture under scrutiny and how can we make that picture right? Is it science, or is it postmodernism itself that is under the macroscope? Is this volume a challenge to epistemology, raising new and insightful problems in hopes of provoking solutions? Or is it simply a manifesto for the epistemologically challenged, unearthing and restoring old issues which most scientists regularly confront off-paper in their work? There are many valid issues raised by pomoan texts, but most fall far short of the customary practice expected in the sciences, where criticism is seldom textualized until it can be offered alongside of alternative and more productive theory. If anyone is blind to the inadequacies and shortcomings of anthropological practices I would encourage them to look here for new challenges. What the information-postmodern age is most likely to introduce to anthropology are creative opportunities for the innovative use of computers in visualization, multimedia, hypertext, modeling and simulations, yet there is scant evidence of that here. Readers may find useful ideas worthy of development, but I hope they would do so towards generating yet more reliable speculative philosophies and grands récits rather than resign themselves to the mire of trivializing petits récits and the marginalia of localized truths.
Its been swell... but the swellings gone down. [Tank Girl, United Artists 1995]
Assessing Cultural Anthropology.
I now turn to the current debate among a broader spectrum of anthropologists. This "must read" edited work with 31 contributions, each followed by a personal biography and mission-statement, presents an open-ended assessment of cultural anthropology as a whole. Its state of the disunion message begins with the North American "cacophony" and grows outwardly drawing in European and Third World perspectives, continuing with discussion of theory, epistemology, the concept of culture and its dynamics and considerations of anthropologys role in the global community.
The "grabber" is the opening engagement on breaches between science and the humanities and between epistemology and ontology as I introduced them earlier, but forged in the language of "positivism/interpretivism" and "materialism/idealism" instead. Issues of the postmodern are cast, not in the broader sense as I have emphasized as being materially and technologically driven, but in the restricted sense as compounded language games of the pomoan. The opening salvos include Marvin Harris defiant "Cultural Materialism Is Alive and Well and Wont Go Away Until Something Better Comes Along" which is as stimulating for its clarity, breadth and advocacy of renewed "scientism," as it is in its hostility to pomoan.
My plans for the near future include a renewed effort to confront the elitist, obscurantist, and nihilist posturing of postprocessual and post-modernist anthropology, not as an end in itself, but as part of an attempt to gain for anthropology a more central intellectual and applied role vis-à-vis the great issues of our times. [76 emphasis added]
It is from the realization that the contributors to this volume, who are among the most prominent of cultural anthropologists, will attract a diverse readership, that I close this review having omitted many of the discussions raised in this eclectic mix. The book is likely to be stocked on both text and trade shelves and it should be easy for readers to evaluate its merits based upon their own interests rather than on mine. There are discussions of postmodern science, but as with the pomoan, they largely omit any discussion of postmodern technology. Rappaport speaks of the aims of postmodern science as reconciliation and ecology [163, 165], and if he means by these the reunification of epistemology with ontology and of theory with grand narrative in a distributed view of the world, then I would agree. But his view is vague and he offers no plan. Borofskys similarly joins that chorus:
Readers should realize that a wide chasm exists between the "science" of Harris and the "interpretation" of Geertz. Can some of anthropologys most distinguished scholars, in their overlapping assessments of and visions for the discipline, build a new order? At stake is the future of the discipline. [5-6]
The future of our discipline may well lay outside it, in a cross-disciplinary cut that unites those who build science, both modern and postmodern with those who develop and use computational technology, both in the sciences and the humanities. For me, the pages echo Harris refrain, "until something better comes along." What has come along are new tools with which to shape cultural materialism.
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
Twenty-five authors contribute to a vertical integration of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, and culture and society. The critique of anthropology offered in the lead article, "The Psychological Foundations of Culture" has a distinctively postmodern flavor: Postmodern both in the sense of embracing the technology of computation and its spin-offs in cognitive science, and in its selection of literary metaphors critical of the fragmented nature of some anthropological practice:
Mainstream sociocultural anthropology has arrived at a situation resembling some nightmarish short story Borges might have written, where scientists are condemned by their unexamined assumptions to study the nature of mirrors only by cataloging and investigating everything that mirrors can reflect. It is an endless process that never makes progress, that never reaches closure, that generates endless debate between those who have seen different reflected images, and whose enduring product is voluminous descriptions of particular phenomena. [42]
It is postmodern too in its exposition and critique of the fragmented Standard Social Science Model and of the growing anti-science pomoan movement:
After more than a century, the social sciences are still adrift, with an enormous mass of half-digested observations, a not inconsiderable body of empirical generalizations, and a contradictory stew of ungrounded, middle-level theories expressed in a babel of incommensurate technical lexicons. This is accompanied by a growing malaise, so that the single largest trend is toward rejecting the scientific enterprise as it applies to humans. [23]
But the no-mans-land gained by the pomoan assault is an unproductive and infertile ground occupied by phantoms, recognizable as the territory becomes familiar:
These positions have a growing following, but less, one suspects, because they have provided new illumination than because they offer new tools to extricate scholars from the unwelcome encroachments of more scientific approaches. They also free scholars from all of the arduous tasks inherent in the attempt to produce scientifically valid knowledge: to make it consistent with other knowledge and to subject it to critical rejection on the basis of empirical disproof, logical inconsistency, and incoherence. In any case, even advocates of such avenues of retreat do not appear to be fully serious about them because few are actually willing to accept what is necessarily entailed by such a stance: Those who jettison the epistemological standards of science are no longer in a position to use their intellectual product to make any claims about what is true of the world to dispute the others claims about what is true. [22]
Fortunately, there is a new model on the horizon, one that exemplifies the broad postmodern inertia towards grounding research in technology while at the same time repudiating the narrow pomoan agenda of subverting unifying theories:
The Standard Social Science Model breaks the social sciences into schools (materialist, structural-functionalist, symbolic, Marxist, postmodernist, etc.) that are largely distinguished by how each attempts to affirmatively characterize the artificer, which they generally agree is an emergent group-level process of some kind... what is in effect a generative computational system... Understanding this... rich computational architecture of the human mind... is an indispensable ingredient in modeling or understanding whatever super-individual processes exist. [46-47 emphasis added]
In its place a Post-Standard Social Science Model is emerging formed in part by the other authors works:
The alternative view is that the human psychological architecture contains many evolved mechanisms that are specialized for solving evolutionarily long-enduring adaptive problems and that these mechanisms have content-specialized representational formats, procedures, cues, and so on. These richly content-sensitive evolved mechanisms tend to impose certain types of content and conceptual organization on human mental life and, hence, strongly shape the nature of human social life and what is culturally transmitted across generations. Indeed, a post-Standard Model psychology is rapidly coalescing, giving a rapidly expanding empirical foundation to this new framework. [34 emphasis added]
The authors further introduce an "integrated scientific monism" which subsumes the premodern dualistic metaphysics of science. It is not clear whether they consider their approach to be modern or postmodern, but chances are they silently wish to avoid the contradictory associations of the term altogether. Still, it is noteworthy that The Adapted Mind offers a replacement for dualism whereas the pomoan text offers none. The authors continue by presenting an Integrated Causal Model which subsumes the traditional content-independent assumptions of culture by adding content-specific mechanisms to human cognition:
The rich complexity of each individual is produced by a cognitive architecture, embodied in a physiological system, which interacts with the social and nonsocial world that surrounds it. Thus humans, like every other natural system, are embedded in the contingencies of a larger principled history, and explaining any particular fact about them requires the joint analyses of all the principles and contingencies involved. To break this seamless matrix of causation - to attempt to dismember the individual into "biological" versus "nonbiological" aspects - is to embrace and perpetuate an ancient dualism endemic to the Western cultural tradition: material/spiritual, body/mind, physical/mental, natural/human, animal/human, biological/social, biological/cultural. This dualistic view expresses only a premodern version of biology, whose intellectual warrant has vanished. [21 emphasis added] Proponents of the Integrated Causal Model accept that, in addition to whatever content-independent mechanisms our psychological architecture may contain, it also contains content-specific devices, including those computationally responsible for the generation and regulation of human cultural and social phenomena. [49]
We are now poised to take in a new outlook of culture, to survey what would have been impossible to explore prior to the advent of computers. It allows the integration of social science with evolutionary epistemology and the computational philosophy of science as well as with the emergent parallel distributed processing worlds of artificial life and artificial culture.
Culture is the manufactured product of evolved psychological mechanisms situated in individuals living in groups. Culture and human social behavior is complexly variable, not because the human mind is a social product, a blank slate, or an externally programmed general-purpose computer, lacking a richly defined evolved structure. Instead, human culture and social behavior is richly variable because it is generated by an incredibly intricate, contingent set of functional programs that use and process information from the world, including information that is provided both intentionally and unintentionally by other human beings. [24]
Further grounding the distributed nature of culture in both the individuals that host it and in the cognitive architectures of those individuals, they look back on the Standard Social Science Model from this new vantage point. The clarified atmosphere offers a fresh look at the abandoned position:
The SSSM attempt to abstract social processes away from the matrix of interacting psychological architectures necessarily fails because the detailed structure of psychological mechanisms is inextricably bound up in how these social processes operate. One might say that what mostly remains, once you have removed from the human world everything internal to individuals, is the air between them. This vagueness of ontology and causal mechanism makes it difficult to situate these hypothetical generative processes with respect to the rest of the natural world... Of course, the social system is not like a person or an organism or a mind, self-ordering due to its own functionally integrated mechanisms. It is more like an ecosystem or an economy whose relationships are structured by feedback processes driven by the dynamic properties of its component parts. In this case, the component parts of the population are individual humans, so any social dynamics must be anchored in models of the human psychological architecture. [47 emphasis added]
To "the air between them," they would surely agree, we must also add the "real" architecture of buildings and ships. These metaphors offer a transition to the evolutionary processes of complex adaptive systems, which we will see more fully developed using the terrestrial metaphors of fitness landscapes in the following review.
Evolving lineages are more like the proverbial ship that is always at sea. The ship can never go into dry dock for a major overhaul; whatever improvements are made must be implemented plank by plank, so that the ship does not sink during its modification. In evolution, successive designs are always constructed out of modifications of whatever preexisting structures are there---structures linked (at least in the short run) through complex developmental couplings. Yet these short-run limitations do not prevent the emergence of superlatively organized psychological and physiological adaptations that exhibit functionality of the highest known order---higher in fact, than human engineers have been able to contrive in most cases. [60]
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.
Might general laws govern all this activity? Might general laws govern phenomena ranging from the Cambrian explosion to our postmodern technological era, in which the exploding rate of innovation brings the time horizon of future shock ever closer? That is the possibility I will be exploring in this book. [16 emphasis added]
This book is Kauffmans grand narrative, his personal quest for a comprehensive theory of emergence. It is balanced by a blend of epistemology and ontology, a complete metaphysics. Deeply rooted in postmodern technology it reunites science with a totality not foreseen by Lyotard:
What is new is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we have supposed. Profound order is being discovered in large, complex, and apparently random systems. I believe that this emergent order underlies not only the origin of life itself, but much of the order seen in organisms today. [8]
Similarly he recognizes an essential role for simulation, not just for building knowledge, but in its algorithmic incarnation as the irreducible foundation for all phenomena. The theory of computation states that for many phenomena there may be no shorter way to predict behavior than to simulate the interaction of all the processes at work:
The theory of computation is replete with deep theorems. Among the most beautiful are those showing that, in most cases by far, there exists no shorter means to predict what an algorithm will do than to simply execute it, observing the succession of actions and states as they unfold. The algorithm itself is its own shortest description. It is, in the jargon of the field, incompressible. [22 emphasis added]
And considering that process begets process all the way up from the level of sub-atomic physics through the origin of life and culture to the evolution of the universe, the search for these second order processes is the search for a theory of emergence.
If the origin and evolution of life is like an incompressible computer algorithm, then, in principle, we can have no compact theory that predicts all the details of the unfolding. We must instead simply stand back and watch the pageant... And yet, even if it is true that evolution is such an incompressible process, it does not follow that we may not find deep and beautiful laws governing that unpredictable flow... For want of a better general phrase, I call these efforts a search for a theory of emergence. [23 emphasis added]
Thus culture is imbedded somewhere in this chain of first and second-order process and must be seen as both an emergent and distributed phenomenon catapulted forward from the edge of chaos:
General laws about the edge of chaos may govern coevolving communities of species, of technologies, and even of ideologies. [28] Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford, popularized the word meme... Are there collectively autocatalytic sets... of memes? Can cultural patterns be thought of as self-sustaining and mutually defining sets of beliefs, behaviors, roles? [300 emphasis added]
Finally, in a welcome departure from the petits écrits expected by Lyotard from postmodern science, Kauffmans narrative is at once grand, convivial and reassuring:
I am heartened by a view of evolution as a marriage of spontaneous order and natural selection. I am heartened by the possibility that organisms are not contraptions piled on contraptions all the way down, but expressions of a deeper order inherent in all life. [304 emphasis added] If we are, in ways we do not yet see, natural expressions of matter and energy coupled together in nonequilibrium systems, if life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbably accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. [20 emphasis added]
The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.
At Home in the Universe is a popularization of his earlier book, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Anyone intrigued by his current argument should also have a look at this earlier work which is over twice as long and printed with a smaller font on acid free paper. In short it is packed with information. The flavor is more technical but it is no less compelling in its implications:
Consider an ecosystem. Each kind of organism has, as parts of its environment, other organisms of the same kind and of different kinds. As is now clear, adaptation by one kind of organism alters both the fitness and the fitness landscape of the other organisms. Two alternative pictures have emerged. In the first, coevolution is viewed as resulting in an unceasing evolutionary process in which all species continue to change... This model has... been called the Red Queen Hypothesis... The alternative class of models has led to the idea of evolutionary stable strategies... in which the phenotypes of the coevolving species stop changing at a balance which is stable in the sense that any other mixture of phenotypes attempted by any species in the system would be less fit. [242 emphasis added]
Thus fitness landscapes may be ever changing, more like fitness seascapes undulating and peaking like the oceans surface. In biology as well as in anthropology, those aspiring to the improvement of their science are accused of physics-envy. Unabashedly unashamed of the accusation he invites us to join him in looking for applications for these new insights sparked by complex adaptive systems for our own research:
Thompson applied classical physics to biology. It has been said that a weakness of some biologists is persistent physics-envy: the seeking of a deep structure to biology. Rest content, is the sensible refrain, with middle-level theories capturing parts of how organisms work. Understand how a genetic cascade works, how sodium transport across a membrane is mediated. Surely we should, have, and will. Yet there is a new physics aborning, and it is again time to fall open victim to physics-envy. For want of a better name, the area which is emerging is something like a theory of complex systems... In short, physics is beginning to discover ways in which very complex systems nevertheless exhibit remarkable order. No reflective biologist can view these developments without wondering whether the origins of order in nonliving systems augurs new insights for the origins of order in living ones as well. [643-644 emphasis added] We must seek to understand the construction laws that allow complex systems to adapt on properly correlated landscapes and to understand how the couplings between landscapes evolve. In short, the capacity to evolve is itself subject to evolution and may have its own lawful properties. [645]
Neither orderly nor randomly, but on the borders of chaos are where the impetus for life and all emergent systems evolve. This is Kauffmans "new hypothesis."
The results discussed above lead to a new and perhaps startling hypothesis: In coevolution, organisms adapt under natural selection via a metadynamics where each organism myopically alters the structure of its fitness landscape and the extent to which that landscape is deformed by the adaptive moves of other organisms, such that, as if by an invisible hand, the entire ecosystem coevolves to a poised state at the edge of chaos. [261]
If he is correct, then this theory of emergence should apply to theories of culture including technology, economics and ideas. We may not be able to predict or retrodict cultural evolution in detail, but we ought to be able to discern its general properties well enough to discover laws of process and behavior. Among these might be the recognition of the limits to self-organization and variation of differently constituted cultures:
Dynamical attractors "box" the behavior of a system into small parts of its state space, or space of possibilities. Hence attractors literally are most of what a system does. It is the boxing of behavior into small parts of state space which constitutes much of the self-organization we shall encounter. [174]
Of the books reviewed, Kauffmans work might be the most emblematic of a postmodern science. It is clearly the most encompassing theory relying exclusively on the computational power of our information processing infrastructure and thus meeting the criterion of being on the cutting edge, (or should I say the chaotic edge?) of advancing technology. His metanarrative continues the modern spirit, standing alongside both cosmologists and physicists in espousing a grand unified theory and a theory of everything lightened only slightly by their self-effacing acronyms of GUT and TOE. And TOE is coincidentally also the acronym for Kauffmans theory of emergence. Like most scientists, Kauffman is probably much less concerned about his location in the postmodern universe, than he is in exploring and canonizing the natural world itself.
Epilogue.
In the current practice of anthropology, I am reminded of the genre of heads/bodies/feet flip-books. One can imagine the creatures created by different configurations of pages as forming a corpus of anthropology. Whether the cuts correspond to material-economic-ideational culture, or to the subdisciplines of biological-archaeological-cultural anthropology with the pages corresponding to the different paradigms in the academy is immaterial. What is evident is that even the slimmest edition would provide innumerable combinatorial configurations. To keep the book open, how should we turn the pages? Which arrangement should we display? Or should we as a discipline put down this source of endless novelty and work towards the writing and publication of a hypertext linked in ways which might help us to unify ourselves in purpose with the other sciences?
We are witnessing the birth of new computational sciences whose impact on our lives and thoughts will be greater than that possibly imagined by Lyotard in 1979. For economy we may wish to call them postmodern sciences. Where they will lead us is still an open question to be tackled by expert and philosopher alike:
Roger N. Shepard, a psychologist at Stanford University, worried that even if we can capture natures intricacies on computers, those models might themselves be so intricate that they elude human understanding. Francisco Antonio Doria, a Brazilian mathematician, smiled ruefully and murmured, "We go from complexity to perplexity." Everyone nodded. [Horgan 1995a, 109]
Captured behavior of the external world which eludes human understanding is nothing new. Heuristic accommodations and representational models have served us as biological cognitive adaptations to our social and physical environments since our hominid beginnings. Our understanding has always been augmented by materiality. The earliest technologies of formal languages are intimately cojoined with objects and written languages are preserved on media, both call into question the necessity of simultaneously understanding and capturing behavior. One can derive and understand the beauty of the Pythagorean theorem, but once derived this understanding is overshadowed by the elegant simplicity of its usefulness. It is beautiful precisely because one does not need to understand it in order to use it to capture the intricacies of nature. The same holds true for counting and doing arithmetic on ones fingers. From the technologies of distributed cognition to those of microscopy, telescopy, word-processing and computation the argument against continual understanding is the same: The adaptive advantage of such heuristics and representational models lies specifically in the ergonomic leverage they afford us in capturing nature by freeing us from the simultaneous necessity of understanding it.
Modern science, for all its power, is still pitifully inadequate when confronted with the problems that really matter, such as poverty, racism or conflict between states... Complexity enthusiasts think they can find the answers that have eluded their "reductionist" predecessors. Maybe they will. But their own work, and the record of their predecessors, raises another possibility: maybe these answers are beyond the reach of science. [Horgan 1995b, 31]
The response from science, like Mark Twains cable from Europe to the Associated Press should read: "The report of my death was an exaggeration." Far from a harbinger of The End of Science (which incidentally is the title of John Horgans soon to be released new book), complexity theory as Kauffman suggests may provide us with an inevitable rather than an accidental home in the universe. Perhaps the bankruptcy so often attributed to postmodern science is misplaced. Perhaps the bankruptcy lies with a traditional philosophy of science and a stagnant way of thinking that has not kept up with the times.
Flirtation with an adaptive evolutionary epistemology and computational philosophy of science may not only lead to a fulfilling relationship, it may also help to reconceive a science with the goal of reproducing increasingly reliable heuristics and representations of the external world. Many of us in anthropology have tried to maintain close interdisciplinary ties with the sciences, the humanities, and with contemporary technological innovations. Latours suggestions for a postmodern science dealing with society are already on the horizon. We are beginning to see work in artificial intelligence, artificial life, distributed cognition, and virtual/constructive/live distributed interactive simulations which begin to address culture. In applying for our passport to the future, many of us can say (with apologies to Latour):
We have always been postmodern.
Note.
Nicholas Gessler is currently working on a book entitled Artificial Culture - Experiments in Synthetic Anthropology to be published by the MIT Press.
Supplementary references.
- Descartes, René 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Ronald Rubin. Areté Press, Claremont.
- Horgan, John 1995a. "From Complexity to Perplexity: Can Science Achieve a Unified Theory of Complex Systems? Even at the Santa Fe Institute, Some Researchers Have Their Doubts." Scientific American, June. pages. 104-109.
- Horgan, John 1995b. "A Theory of Almost Everything: The Scientists Who Study Complexity Remain Exuberantly Optimistic: Hidden Order, At Home in the Universe, Are We Alone, and Frontiers of Complexity." Book Review, New York Times, 1 October, pages. 30-31.
- Latour, Bruno 1979, republished 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
- Lyotard, Jean-Francois 1979, reprinted 1991. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 10. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
- Morrison, Philip and Phylis Morrison 1982, republished 1994. Powers of Ten - About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Scientific American Library, New York.