The Encyclopedia Complex: Contemporary Narratives of Information

One of the staples of postmodern philosophy after Lyotard has been the idea that the “grand narratives” that unified past intellectual enterprises no longer hold–that the contemporary episteme is characterized by a plurality of language games and expert communities that yield few, if any, final standards of knowledge. Since the situation was diagnosed in The Postmodern Condition, however, efforts to unify research programs in the sciences have put this standard of plurality to the test. The various enterprises in biology, economics, computer science, and other disciplines often grouped together under the rubric of “complexity theory” suggest that the objects of disciplinary study can be categorized together as “emergent complex systems,” and redirect the project of the unification of science. The rhetoric of strict reductionism–the translation of a system’s disciplinary discourse into that of its more fundamental substrates, so that psychology reduces to biology, which reduces to chemistry, which reduces to physics–is avoided at places like the Santa Fe Institute. Rather, the favored approach is explained in terms of a transdisciplinary formalism: instead of breaking down an organism into chemical processes, and these into molecular events, complexity theorists ask whether there are definable rules governing the various strata of systems emerging from interactions at a “lower” level of complexity: autocatalytic chemical sets, cells, ecosystems, and economies share the formal property of emergence, and a major research campaign (and a string of slickly marketed popular books) is now arguing that universal laws may explain them all as instances of the same phenomenon.