Our complex, changing world

In his magisterial work, Modern European Thought, Franklin Baumer alludes to the “three blows” that humanity (one could also say “the human ego”) has suffered since the end of the European Middle Ages. First, Copernicus delivered the blow that dethroned humanity as the “crown of creation”, with his mathematical-astronomical claim that we are not at the centre of the universe (an idea that has since that time assumed much more far-reaching proportions). Then Darwin struck an already diminished humanity with the news that it was not directly created, ex nihilo, by God, but had instead descended from a long line of primates.

Finally, Freud delivered what is perhaps the most damaging blow of them all — and one that many people, even academics, do not readily accept — that supposedly “rational” humans are not even “in charge” in their own home (the psyche), as it were, but are continually being tripped up by unconscious wishes, fears and desires. This has perhaps been the outcome of what Nietzsche perceived as the long-term consequences of Copernicus having set the world rolling from the centre on an incline; a process that has, according to the German thinker, not stopped yet.

A lot is left unsaid in what has been said so far, of course — the fact that, for example, in the heliocentric astronomical picture of the heavens proposed by Copernicus, there was still, as with the preceding geocentrism, some sense to talking about an “up” and a “down”, and that today such coordinates have no more than relative, “inertial frame” meaning; and that Copernicus came to his conclusions without the help of telescopes, which says something about the faith that scientists have in reason. Or that the reason why some individuals still don”t take Freud seriously is related to this very faith in reason (a kind of residual rationalism).

Then there is the fact that the Copernican view of creation was, like its predecessor, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view, essentially a “closed-world” conception. Not that it was a simple-minded understanding of things — on the contrary, even the medieval view of the world, with its belief in a series of concentric (transparent) crystalline spheres to which the planets, the stars and the moon were believed to be attached, with the earth at the centre of it all, was a detailed, mathematically comprehensible system that some would find quite mind-boggling.

Not to mention the belief in the chain of beings that extended from the highest to the lowest, with intricate relations of analogy among them, on which many of the medical beliefs of the era rested, such as, for instance, that a cure for a disease affecting one’s eye required a herb that resembled an eye. Or the physiological theory of the four humours — red blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm — that was used to explain personality differences, as well as illnesses and their cures (something that features hilariously in one of the Blackadder series), until at least as late as Shakespeare’s time. But it was a closed system.

All that has changed, partly because of the effects of the “three blows” referred to at the outset, which alerted intelligent people to the insight that, at a biological as well as a psychical level, human beings are susceptible to the transforming influence (if not over-determined effect) of their physical as well as their “mental” environment. And this in a manner that was not straightforwardly decodable, but required a specific theoretical horizon (itself the outcome of a high degree of informed “suspicion” or speculation concerning possible explanations of perceived anomalies) for interpreting relevant phenomena and to direct ongoing research.

In other words, humans (and not only humans, but all living beings) are “open” to the influences around them at various levels, and respond to these in ways that are, in their turn, not “innocent”, either, but bring about reciprocal changes (at various rates) in that environment — changes that are not always easy to explain.

Think of the fact that, in the area of evolutionary theory, as in any scientific field, there are many hypothetical explanations vying with one another about the specifics of the theory, contrary to what many people think. For example, the question of the evolutionary significance of the human female’s extraordinary orgasm — so eloquently discussed by Leonard Shlain in Sex, Time and Power — is answered in divergent ways by anthro-evolutionists under the quaint headings of the “pole-axe theory”, the “cuddles-theory” and the “upsuck-theory”, to which Shlain adds his own (to my mind persuasive) theoretical explanation in terms of the very survival of the human species. There is therefore hardly unanimity among scientists, and this, too, is related to the way that a phenomenon may be seen as “fitting into” different schemas of interpretation, even within the “same” theoretical field.

For some time now one has been witness to a new field where the “openness” of humans to their ever-changing, multi-dimensional environment has led to modifications of various kinds. Broadly, I am thinking of the field of communications technology, a domain that evidently impacts on the way humans perceive themselves.

In this sphere it is impossible, at this stage, to continue clinging to the idea that computers are mere calculating machines, fundamentally for purposes of quantification. As Rosanne Stone (in her book, The War of Desire and Technology) points out, the phenomenon of networking among users of computers shows that the latter, understood as prosthetic devices, comprise “arenas for social experience”. This means that, within the area of communications technology, they fulfil a qualitative function through modes of interaction that allow (previously unknown) constructions and reconstructions of what we call the human “self”.

What does this have to do with a “complex” world? It is impossible to elaborate on all the domains or levels where complexity manifests itself in the contemporary world, but even if I restrict myself to the domain of the social relevance of computer technology, the point can be made that it is not a matter of the sheer amount of detail or variation that makes it a complex terrain. Unlike the world of the Middle Ages, with its sometimes intricate detail, which was nevertheless governed by the logic of exclusion — “either this or that” — the present world is complex in the sense of being susceptible to what one might call “multiple quasi-simultaneous possibility”. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the virtual spaces made possible by communications technology.

From Stone’s discussion of these matters it is clear that the element of “play” on the part of what anthropologist Barbara Joans calls Creative Outlaw Visionaries (vs “work” on the part of Law and Order practitioners) has a lot to do with this. Through playing around with technology, these creative hackers have managed to complexify the corporate environment where they earn their living, and in the process they have opened up a virtual domain where users of this technology can complexify their own selves.

Hot on the heels of psychoanalysis’s insight into the decentred character of the human subject (Lacan inverting Descartes: “I am where I do not think”), the strange socio-epistemic phenomenon of what happens to the concept of a “self” in the virtual space unlocked by computer technology confronts researchers with difficult questions concerning identity. As Stone remarks (commenting on the work of Sherry Turkle in this regard), the very terms, “self”, and “body” operate differently in virtual space.

And while, in clinical psychology, what is known as MPD — multi personality disorder, or “post-traumatic dissociative syndrome” – is a pathological condition where patients “suffer the question” of what a self is when it “divides its labour among its constituent “alters” or “avatars””(Turkle), those among us who dwell in the virtual worlds of Muds on the internet don’t “suffer” it; as Turkle aptly points out, they ‘”lay” with it. Stone sums it up well when she says: “The technosocial space of virtual systems, with its irruptive ludic quality and its potential for experimentation and emergence, is a domain of nontraumatic multiplicity.”

It is also a realm of prosthetic experience where the ongoing complexification of human subjects can be observed, and evidently many denizens of these “technosocial” spaces are quite at ease with the notion of many (non-pathological) selves, even with the idea that one does not have to cling to the belief in a “root self” which orchestrates the others via avatars and the like. Stone, for instance, confesses that her “current I” is as much of a mask as any of her other I”s have been.

I would venture to guess that most other people would not go as far as Stone on this — for most of us, if your “root persona” is taken away, as Stone puts it, “there”s nobody home”. But the very fact that millions of inhabitants of virtual spaces are quite comfortable with the idea of the quasi-simultaneous presence of many “selves” within a kind of “society of selves” (which constitutes their “individual selves”) — and that somehow they manage to keep all of this together — is testimony to the unfolding complexity of our world.