Complexity and Discourse Closure

Some of those attracted to ‘complexity-thinking’ appeared to understand

 it as a new ontology involving moral recognition of the falsehood of 

ambitions and pretences of prediction and control, thus perhaps as a non- 

hegemonist epistemology (de Sousa Santos, 2003; Haraway, 1997; Sarewitz 

et al., 2000). Yet despite these insights, in conventional discourse-practices 

control (with tacit externalization) remains a persistent expectation, as a 

moral and intellectual given. According to this latter ontology, complexity 

is simply a complex object per se, but one ultimately amenable to control. 

Even if lack of control (‘uncertainty’) has to be admitted, it is only as a 

temporary, strictly limited problem (which deletes ignorance or lack of 

control under the misleading label of acknowledged ‘uncertainty’). This of 

course suggests the question: what is being bracketed – and what is being 

affirmed – when the chronic postponement of ‘lack of control’ (‘complexity’) 

is performed in discursive practices? What imagined public context is being 

implicitly cultivated? 

By the time complexity comes into focus, it will always have been framed, 

translated and domesti- 

cated somehow, like everything else. So a question should be not simply 

how to expose and critique these simplifications and reductions, but, better, 

how to render them more poetic, modest and human? However, this should 

not licence any degree or form of reductionism as the common discourse 

that might be able to claim more informal human richness and representa- 

tive legitimacy. So how complex can such formal public discourses be, even 

while they accommodate practical moral recognition of the strictly unspeak- 

able, that is, contingencies and unknowns? The more that neoliberal 

commercial cultural pressures pervade science, the less room there seems 

likely to be for these more modest, complex sensibilities. 

Wynne, B. (2005) Theory Culture and Society