Reply to comment

Reading these three pieces (I know we were only assigned the two, but I forgot) was certainly an exercise in standpoint epistemology for me. Since I am currently taking my third class with Anne, have taken a course on Emergence with Paul and attended a few meetings of the emergency working group, it was pretty impossible for me to separate my prior experiences with these authors from their texts. While reading the second piece, seeing the names of who was speaking (I recognized all but one name) was especially distracting to me because it caused me to picture each person's face, hear their voice saying the words, imagine the vocal inflections and gestures that went with the words, remember pleasant or unpleasant interactions with them, wonder how their kids were doing, etc. and, all in all, took my mind off the task of examining the words at hand. It's a good thing Anne likes reader-response theory because my response experiences were pretty crucial to my understanding of the words.

Anne's theories on the emergence of stories elicited less of a response from me than Paul's article on a similar topic. There were two reasons for this. First, I strongly agreed with Anne's description of the creation of meaning and her work both reinforced and expanded my own understanding of emergence in language by specifically discussing literature while I objected to Paul's frequent generalizations. Second, Anne's literary style was more pleasurable than the style Paul had to adopt for a journal article. While thinking in this vein on implications of language choice, I also found the structure of Anne's piece to be more emergent or bottom-up versus Paul's top-down. She used a few specific intra-actions of agents (teacher-student, telling-puns) to build up to a broad concept while Paul began with the broad goal of integrating science into culture and used specific examples to develop this concept (a more conventional academic style). It was interesting to read two pieces with similar aims approached so differently.

But my goal is not to compare the three texts, but to relate them to our work thus far. In all the texts we've read thus far, much of the material is presented as revolutionary. And, due to my experiences and academic background, much of the critiques and solutions are not new to me, so I find myself increasingly focusing on specifics of style and construction of argument versus content alone. In that sense, these are part of a theme. The two articles also strongly resonate with many authors' rejection of dualism, acknowledgment of agency and insistence on social and cultural context. Much of emergent theory does emphasize the agency of the world, which sounds like a feminist endeavor. So, why isn't complexity theory female dominated like other agential and multi-standpoint disciplines? Is it because it's couched in scientific jargon?

Flora