Autologue
Interdisciplinary Dialogue within the Global Network Environment by Heath Michael Rezabek University of Northern Iowa for the 15th Annual Conference of the Association for Integrative Studies Wayne State University, Detroit, MI October 7-10 1993 In their article, "Defining and Teaching Interdisciplinary Studies," William H. Newell and William J. Green define Interdisciplinary Studies as "inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines and which lead to an integration of disciplinary insights." When I brought this definition to bear on my experiences of the Internet and of virtual communities for an Independent Study project in spring of 1993, I began to see why the task of describing any such approach would be so formidable. Every person coming into a dialogue carries with them a variety of ideas and approaches to a common topic. The Net is no different; in some ways the problem is worse. There are so many students and professors from so many different backgrounds who weave their words into the Net that it's a wonder that dialogue is in any way organized. Yet it is. Dialogue within the Net is almost self-organizing, clustered around topics which are called THREADS. How does a THREAD self-organize the divergent thoughts put into it?
This is the main question of my presentation. To discuss it, we could start with a relatively well-known notion: that of the paradigm.
Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, approaches the dual nature of any model through reference to the notion of a paradigm. Members of a given group share a paradigm in that THEY SHARE EXPERIMENTS AND EXAMPLES of the work in question. They also share a paradigm, in a complementary sense, in that THEY SHARE A CONSTELLATION OF GROUP COMMITMENTS (184). People going into an interdisciplinary discussion have personal and group paradigms: they have a store of examples and previous models with which they approach the given topic. They also have commitments which guide what they search for and what they will and will not discover.
As I began to describe the Internet, I found that no single one of my prior paradigms could encompass the scope of what was going on among its virtual communities. Rather, I found that virtual culture could best be explained through the use of first one paradigm and then another. It was, by nature, interdisciplinary; it only made sense that to explain it would require the mobilization of an interdisciplinary approach. My model of the AUTOLOGUE grew out of this work.
AUTOLOGUE is a word which I use to denote a forum and structure for ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue. Where a dialogue forms a group of two, an autologue forms a group of many, and the emphasis is not so much on the conversants themselves as it is on the continual evolution of the conversation, even when the originators have left. Its format compels the interweaving of threads of discourse from related disciplines; an explication of it as a model perforce takes in several disciplinary approaches. It operates within what deconstructionists call an "open text," context bleeding into context; yet it contains elements of self-organization analogous to those of chaos theory and non-linear thermodynamics, revealing an inherent order in dialogue which deconstruction insists should not be possible. An AUTOLOGUE is a perpetually unfolding and self-organizing dialogue -- in this case within the global computer network environment.
This environment -- the Internet -- is an amalgamation of computers and individuals electronically linked together at the speed of light through existing telephone networks. It is available to student and faculty members at most universities in the nation -- and the world. As such, any one of these people can converse with the others, and response is made to one or many at the user's leisure. The boundaries between virtual communities are permeable and non-definite. It could be said that all of virtuality exists within a borderland, just as the field of Interdisciplinarity positions itself in the inter-text of all fields.
This being the case, the Internet is an embodiment of the Interdisciplinary process. I shall show how, in order to understand the Net and the virtual communities which lend it form, I was compelled to graft together several models from seemingly different fields: deconstruction from post-structural literary theory [Derrida], self-organizing non-linear dissipative structures [Prigogine], strange attractors from within the fractal geometry of chaos theory [Mandelbrot], and the model of the MEME as a fundamental unit of cultural transmission [Dawkins]. I hope these ideas are familiar to many here, and that only a brief summary of their main distinctions and similarities will be necessary. The appended glossary will help to clarify and define terms too elaborate to discuss individually.
The eventual model of the AUTOLOGUE identifies an integrative fusion of models and approaches with which I was familiar well before I even knew what the Net was. Once I had entered into dialogue in, on, and about the Net, I found that the virtual community provided a sort of context in which the ideas I had brought in with me could not help but come together.
In order to explain the inherently interdisciplinary nature of any virtual community, I must first overview the paradigms which informed my study. The foundations of the AUTOLOGUE as a model lie in a fusion of three approaches from radically different fields. The first two, while possessing similarities which became more and more apparent as I considered them in terms of the cultural process, remain distinct: fractal geometry as a model of self-similar strange attractors, and the self-organizing dissipative structures of non-linear thermodynamics. Where fractal geometry and chaos theory see the ordering principles of strange attractors as permanent traits of the complex number plane, non-linear thermodynamics perceives the evolution of self-organizing structures over time, never once using the terminology of the attractor to describe these dissipative structures. The AUTOLOGUE opts to model virtual culture or community as a strange attractor which evolves over time in a open textual system. I call such a dissipative structure a memetic attractor, as it is in the play of culture that these two similar fields finally find common ground.
Regardless of their differences, it seems initially that the two fields of fractal geometry and non-linear thermodynamics are more closely related to each other than the third is to either. Deconstruction as an approach to reading and writing, from post-structural literary theory, nevertheless lends a crucial element to the model of the AUTOLOGUE. Its surprising intersection with fractal chaos [and non-linear thermodynamic self-organization] will be explored first.
In her text Chaos Bound, N. Katherine Hayles suggests that deconstruction and fractal geometry are parallel movements which, though separated into different fields, are parts of the same historical transformation shaping the way the sciences and the humanities are beginning to view their respective endeavors. Both deal with the concept of chaos, both deal with the open system and its relationship with order. Yet Hayles insists that a comparison of the two approaches shows a crucial schism in the way they each view chaos. "For deconstructionists," she notes, "chaos repudiates order; for scientists, chaos makes order possible." (184)
Upon closer examination however, striking similarities become apparent. In deconstruction, context is infinitely important to the outcome of a given dialectic, just as in chaos all depends upon initial conditions. Deconstruction works itself out in the borderlands between all texts, just as the intricate attractors of chaos appear at the borders of its forms. The "reading" of a text -- the process by which meaning is negotiated into existence, dissected, and reconstituted over and over again -- seems very similar to the process of fractal iteration, the mathematical feedback loop through which fractal self-similarity is revealed.
Bearing all of this in mind, we can nevertheless see that Hayles' observation holds true throughout. Fractal geometry views chaos as the womb of order; deconstruction views chaos as the tomb of order. How can this be?
I propose that these two paradigms are crucial to the issues of interdisciplinary dialogue as it is emerging within the global community. As theories, they have had tremendous impacts upon their respective fields. Their interdisciplinary reconciliation could not occur without a dialogue which spans those disciplines, and we shall find that self-reflective dialogue between a community of individuals -- AUTOLOGUE -- is itself a phenomenon which their convergence models.
Because these fields are so potentially analogous and yet so divided in their interpretations of chaos, it appears that none one can co-exist without a resulting modification of aspects of the others. Before I can explore this fully, let's look at each field in and of itself, beginning with the fractal geometry of chaos theory.
The most commonly referenced model of fractal geometry in chaos theory is probably the famous figure of the MANDELBROT SET [FIGURE 1 BELOW].
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It is a set of plotted points on the complex number plane, as guided by a simple formula. Each point plotted through the formula is called one "iteration." With the aid of computer graphical display, we see that certain ranges fall within distinctly repetitive behaviors and areas. These areas of self-similarity are called STRANGE ATTRACTORS. The majority of the attractors within the mSet reside at the boundaries of its form. Fractal is a term used to denote the self-similar order which is seen when zooming in on the locality of a given attractor. Note, for instance, the shape of the initial Mandelbrot set. Note then the small dot near its bulb. If we were to zoom in on this attractor, we would find the initial shape echoed at smaller scales. [FIGUREs 2...3 BELOW]
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This model of chaos gave me a view of non-linearity as harboring a sort of self-similar order; a dizzying and infinite multiplicity to be sure, but an eerie order nonetheless.
Another interesting thing is that we could zoom in on a borderland attractor for an indefinite amount of time and never "touch bottom." There would always be more self-similarity into which we could zoom, and we would be forever uncovering little "baby" Mandelbrot sets within the whole. Our ability to understand the Mandelbrot set, and thus the order inherent in chaos, is limited not only by our computing power, but also by the time we have available to explore these realms.
The perpetual zooming and self-similarity of fractal geometry in chaos theory can be compared to Derrida's notorious "differance" in which signifier after signifier may point to, but never be able to wholly identify, the signified itself. Here the elusive "signified" is the strange attractor of any set of signifiers, and the dialectical feedback loop of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is the iterative function through which definitional debates show such stunning tendencies towards recurring arguments and "self-similarities." We can interpret "differance" as a dialectical approach to an unresolvable attractor. These ideas will be demonstrated later through a simulation of a networked conversation in which concepts are repeated and reorganized in a self-similar fashion.
The post-structural approach of deconstruction fascinated and attracted me through the way in which it portrayed the literary endeavor as bounded in context and the critical endeavor as irresolvable. "Differance" guaranteed that our approach to literature's themes or strange attractors would never resolve neatly. Many of these ideas had occurred to me while reading and writing. Deconstruction, as practiced by Derrida, was a web of quotations and references, with the critical reader writing in the margins of a text which had "always already" existed. It was suggested that there was a revolution in progress throughout the whole of literature [some would even say culture] where-in those who sought to find order in reality would have to come to terms with an all-encompassing "textual upheaval."
At the center of this "textual upheaval" is the notion of all literature as one single "open text." This is an environment in which:
The role of the reader/writer is no longer seen as separate. Texts refer to each other and themselves, interweaving their influences unto infinity. The text is recognized as "always already" in process, an apparatus in which the reader/writer is a participant, not a master. The traditional view of the autonomous order or truth of a text is overturned in favor of a view towards the context-dependency and malleability of a text by the critical reader. Thus all efforts to uncover inherent meaning and order through language are doomed to failure. Even here, however, analogies can be made, this time with non-linear thermodynamics. Arguably the most important similarity [because the arguments of each approach depend on this notion] is that both theories hypothesize an open system. Deconstruction speaks again and again of the "open text" which the whole of literature is said to be, in which text bleeds into sub-text and both meld into context. Similarly, one of the three criteria for the self-organizing system proposed by Nobel laureate Illya Prigogine is that the system be thermodynamically open to its environment. The other two criteria are that the system be far-from-equilibrium [heat-death] and that it partake in auto-catalysis: the production of the system's future energy and matter out of materials and processes from its past. (Jantsch, p. 19)
If the interpenetration of all texts, one way or another, is a given, then all texts are open systems which shall remain open to the whole textual process. If the text and its dizzying complexity is "always already" a process, then it can plainly be seen as a far-from-equilibrium system. If the reader is every bit as seminal as the writer -- if indeed they switch off roles as easily as they might costumes -- then the open text is auto-catalytic: the dross of its past provides for its future.
Here, however, is where their schism occurs. Deconstructive readings cunningly undermine the human process of order-creation by demonstrating that we are not uncovering order hidden within a text [or human thought], but rather creating an unnatural "cultural" order. Deconstruction denies self-organization insofar as it views the reader/writer dynamic as a human and cultural creation, rather than a natural one. Experience of AUTOLOGUES occurring within the Net, however, seem to indicate that this reader/writer dynamic is a two-phase complementarity -- much more like a "symmetry break" in non-linear thermodynamics. This dual role of a participant in the Net has been denoted by one fused name: that of the reader/writer as "rider" -- as if they were two natural phases of operation, much like the wave/particle nature of quantum energy, or the positive and negative feedback of a dissipative structure. Prigogine sees this complementarity as the fundamental basis of evolution for all of life's processes.
It is possible that cultural self-organization -- the strange attractors of human thought and behavior -- can not easily be perceived from within the slow-moving and static linear format of the individual book and the framework of print-related literary theory, however radical. Its manifestation may necessitate a sort of empirical laboratory in which the feedback loop of dialectical iteration could be allowed to play itself out. During my project it became apparent that the dialectical process needed an environment with an iterative speed and non-linearity akin to that made available to chaologists only after the advent of computer plotting. What deconstruction needed was an incubator and a "do not disturb" sign, an open-yet-self-contained text in which the results could be not simply seen or postulated but experienced, as neither reader nor writer but as a rider would experience the textual process: one part motion, one part direction.
This is when I fell into the Net, and realized that this was what had always already happened. Suddenly, theory was lent form; it was as if we were surfing, riding waves of signal.
One of the first things I realized about the Net was that it did in fact embody the environment proposed as the "open text" by deconstruction. Ideas worked themselves out with a speed and fluidity restrained only by the speed of data transfer and the response time of an other. The writer of one "POST" would immediately become the reader -- and again the rewriter -- of the next. Through my computer keyboard, I stumbled into regions of dialogue about the most common and obscure topics, dialogues which were already in progress, and it seemed to me, must always have been so. However, I also gradually discovered a primary element of net.dialogue which was central to the difference -- and the similarity -- between the Net-as-it-was and the open-text-as-theorized by deconstruction. The very thing which allowed the deconstructive process to interweave throughout discussions and topics, yet which paradoxically refuted a primary tenet of deconstruction [loss of order] was called the THREAD. Here is what Gary Shank, of Northern Illinois University, says of the THREAD in his essay called "ABDUCTIVE MULTILOGUING." [one which I had, curiously, not run into until well after I had set the topic and title of my paper]:
"In the multilogue, we have a number of players. We have the starter, or the initial sender, who starts the "thread" (a well-established Net term, by the way). Once a thread has been started though, it is no longer under sender control. This is because the mechanics of Net response do not require turn taking. From the oral side, it is as if everyone who is interested in talking can all jump in at once, but still their individual voices can be clearly heard. From the written side, it is as if someone had started writing a piece, but before he/she gets too far, people are there magically in print to add to, correct, challenge, or extend the piece. Therefore, what we have is a written quasi-discussion that has the potential to use the strengths of each form."
-- Essay on networked "multiloguing" by Gary Shank, Northern Illinois University.
It was this notion of the THREAD -- the strange attractor of TOPIC -- that made me realize where deconstruction had made a crucial discrepancy. In a truly open text -- which the PRINTED MATTER world is not -- it is not the writer who is exerting "mastery" over the text, nor is the reader being subjugated. In the fluidity of the Net, they are riders one and all. Deconstruction fell short in its prediction of the breakdown of order because it assumed that, even in a truly open text, we would be the ones exerting mastery over culture. Far from it: the THREAD itself exhibits -- not exerts -- self-organization. The THREAD, and the whole phenomenon of "topic," is a strange attractor within culture. Topicality defines the boundaries of an AUTOLOGUE. Within the Internet's virtuality, one can choose to either ride the tide of signal or run against it. The closest thing to mastery is the ability to surf those waves without a wipe-out. In virtuality, wipe-outs are far more likely than sea-partings.
For a demonstration of this, and of how it parallels deconstruction, let's look at a simulation of the THREADing process. In the first display we have an initial "POST," a message sent to a group of individuals to open up a THREAD or topic for discussion. This POST speaks of "memes," and I will read it aloud.
There follows a lag time in which members of Timothy's virtual community read the initial POST. They then compose what is called a "FOLLOWUP," and only after this can a topic truly become a THREAD. The FOLLOWUP is made by selectively interspersing responses to parts of the original POST which are then re-forwarded to the group as a whole. I will read the response.
Illustration 2: First followup.
Then, in the next overhead, a third FOLLOWUP is made by another person, inter-weaving and responding to ideas in the other two. I will read that now.
Clearly this process of iteration can go on indefinitely. In addition, a THREAD only "ends" when it is at last not followed up by anyone. Yet even then, THREADS do not die. Rather, the topic itself remains as a strange attractor for the ongoing dialectic, and eventually it will be reared again at the start of another related THREAD.
Note that there are some ideas which were braided into the THREAD and others which were discarded, for whatever reason. It is this selective weaving capacity which demonstrates most clearly the correspondence between the deconstructive approach to the open text and the common routine for dialogue within the Net. This capacity most blatantly demonstrated is the complementary nature of the reader/writer. Comments are focused on very specific thoughts; points are followed up selectively, and the post which forms the seed of the next FOLLOWUP has been shaped by the prior one. We are back again to the role of the reader and writer, fused in the AUTOLOGUE to that of the "rider." Derrida says of this non-polar capacity:
"One must then, in a single gesture ... read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who ... would feel himself authorized to ... add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam wouldn't hold. ... The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the 'not serious' as in the 'serious.' The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a *game,* by the logic of *play* ... " (64)
It was this insistence upon "play" which Derrida argued, when given free reign within the text, would reveal an absence of textual integrity. However, within the Net it becomes apparent that this casual free-play is precisely the dynamic which allows the open text and the virtual community the variation necessary to adapt, integrate, and ultimately self-organize. Note that each "rider" identifies a POST by the "Subject Line." This subject line refers back to all prior posts which it is following up, and this is how a THREAD is co-created. The THREAD identifies a context; the THREAD runs through what might be called a virtual collective unconscious.
It is this convention of net.dialogue which demonstrated to me the STRANGE ATTRACTOR embodied through every THREAD. In its open text, where deconstruction forewarned of inescapable breakdown, I saw only far-from-equilibrium systems in the process of self-organization through interdisciplinarity. The missing link, I am convinced, is Prigogine's element of auto-catalysis, or feed-back. In deconstruction, this is latent in the reader/writer dynamic, but its fusion is realized in the role of the "rider" in an AUTOLOGUE. The THREAD is not possible without the iteration, the feedback loop -- POST to FOLLOWUP to THREAD. What emerges is an integrative attractor within an open text.
How is this ATTRACTOR possible? What sort of ATTRACTOR can this be that it engenders self-organizing dialectic, and thus culture? I have used these posts and this thread for a reason: the interdisciplinary model in which I first recognized these processes was that of the MEME. Much of the conversation gravitated around the topic of the meme: what IS a meme? How can we DEFINE a meme? Can those definitions be ACCEPTED universally, throughout all contexts? The meme and its controversy serves as an archetype for all dialectical debate. We forever dance around the fire of definition, and its impossible resolution becomes an attractor. Memes, however, lend us a cohesive unit with which to consider this cultural chaos, without losing sight of the fact that it is a conceptual container rather than a quantitative measure. Within the Net and many interdependent AUTOLOGUES, the MEME has become -- or probably always was already -- an attractor. So much so, in fact, that it is useful to consider this very focalizing phenomenon of the THREAD, of community, as centered around a MEMETIC ATTRACTOR.
Just as JudyBat points out in reference to dialects of spoken accent, certain phenomena of culture tend to settle into niches and localities, regardless of the openness of their "textual operation" to others. Or is it, perhaps, BECAUSE of? A parallel has already been drawn between the open dynamical system in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the open text of deconstruction. But to what end? The model of the AUTOLOGUE allows us to at least consider that which is neglected in pre-Internet deconstruction: the strange attractor in interdisciplinarity; the THREAD; the MEMETIC ATTRACTOR.
In Fractals: Patterns of Chaos, John Briggs writes this on the subject of such strange attractors in nature:
"The seemingly endless niches in nature ... can now be perceived as an analog for the intricate complexity which fractal geometers have found in the nooks and crannies of the Mandelbrot set. ... Niche means a corner or space. Biologists have traditionally used the word to signify the little empty corner of an ecosystem that an organism evolves to fill; a niche presents an opportunity for evolution. ... An organism creates a niche it occupies as much as much as it is *created by* the existence of an unexploited region of the ecosystem. New spaces or niches constantly come into being, unfolded by the total activity of organisms. When a species dies out, the fold (or niche) smooths over or is further crumpled into other folds. The great biological diversity on the planet is a sign that nature is continually rippling with new and related niches. It is like the surface of the sea wrinkling in the wind." (41)
This analogy might make post-structuralists squirm. Yet the empirical evidence is present. Given an open textual system which truly and wholly operates as deconstruction postulates, the result is NOT disorder and dissolution, but instead a strange sort of self-organization of ideas -- memes -- into regions or niches of attraction. The THREAD above demonstrates this, however pre-meditatively. The process of intertextuality runs throughout; references, shifts, and cross-references are made; the "original" text ultimately subsides in a figure-ground reversal, text bleeding into subtext bleeding into context. The THREAD was "always already" in progress, because the memetic attractor was always already present. Every individual plays a potentially equal role as both reader and writer -- as a "rider" and a weaver of the threads within the Net.
We return once again to Kuhn's definition of PARADIGM: 1: Shared experiments and examples, and 2: A constellation of group commitments. I refer to this two-tiered definition as Kuhn's Principle, and submit that it allows us to view the community-building process as simultaneously reactive and pro-active. Clearly, the more interdisciplinary the participants' examples and commitments, the more integrative the resulting paradigm will be.
Kuhn's Principle arises from the role of any present state of a memetic attractor as intersection of its past with its future. It can be applied fully to the THREAD as the binding link of interdisciplinary virtual community. We are back to the rider -- acting now as writer, then as reader, and again as writer. All of this activity centers around the memetic attractor. This past-to-future feedback loop is crucial to the self-organizing AUTOLOGUE.
Thus we see, through Kuhn's Principle that a model/thread/memetic attractor -- a paradigm -- has two capacities: the capacity to aid in comprehension and maintenance of the system in which it is embedded and the capacity to effect the future evolution of that system.
How can deconstruction abide this? Perhaps it cannot. It is possible that any paradigm works best in its field of origin. Perhaps the AUTOLOGUE can form a starting point for the fledgling and interdisciplinary field of memetics. In any case, I have offered up the model of the AUTOLOGUE as an adaptive paradigm for the interdisciplinary space between all fields of discourse. This approach to the intertext of all fields is fore-shadowed by Derrida himself in Dissemination, where he notes:
"There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the 'object,' without risking -- which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught -- the addition of some new thread." (64)
We have learned, through the application of the new cultural model of the meme to the self-organizing nature of perpetual dialogue, that the process of AUTOLOGUE does not necessarily lead to a denaturing of community. In fact, the whole of the process signified by the term AUTOLOGUE heralds NOT a denaturing of culture, but simply an adapting of that culture to the creations of its natural history. Culture is natural; cities and writing and computers are all naturally occurring. If they were not, they would not be present upon this planet. The human endeavor is only alien to our planet if we choose to alienate the tides of its natural processes from our cultural evolution. The task of integrative and interdisciplinary studies is to attune the frenzied diversity of culture to the natural process of the dissipative structure. The first step in this direction must be the forging of interdisciplinary community; the second must be that community's unending commitment to the forging of new interdisciplinary models which are able to integrate even the most seemingly unnatural processes into the more fluid current of the whole. I propose that the Internet provides both a forum and a structure in which this is "always already" happening. Ours is to integrate this medium into our studies.
It is hoped that this exposition can help inform interdisciplinary approaches which arise throughout the world community. I offer the AUTOLOGUE as an adaptive meme capable of modeling the integration of the many THREADS of our disciplines into one tapestry, into the Net we cast to catch community. The beginning of understanding lies in the self-organizing community -- the memetic niche where culture and virtuality meet and engage in the ongoing process of AUTOLOGUE.
HTMLized by Marius Watz.