One word that appears consistently throughout Johnson's essay, "The Myth of the Ant Queen," are derivations of emerge. The word initially is used to describe the self-organizing system of ant colonies, which are "emergent" in the sense that the community does not form based on hierarchal leadership, but instead through instinctual behavior and genetics. Emerge is again used to describe the ants' behavior, where Johnson specifically notes their "intelligence and personality and learning that emerges from the bottom up" (194). This idea of "bottom up" learning is later used in reference to how technology recognizes and translates handwriting into digitized lettering, connecting the theme of "emergent" behavior, by which many small, seemingly insignificant parts of a system come together in an organic way to accomplish a task (205). While towards the beginning and end of the essay, emergent is often used to describe a type of intelligence, the middle of the piece uses the word to describe cities. For example, Johnson discusses urban life in Manchester, the city that boomed into a major metropolitan area with no central leadership, as "a mix of order and anarchy...what we now call emergent behavior" (198). In the subsequent passage, Johnson further details this definition through characterizing urban cities with this type of behavior as "hav[ing] lives of their own, with neighborhoods clustering into place without any...figure dictating the plan from above" (198). This concept ties the whole theme of the essay together, from the examples of the ant colony to the technology to the cities, because each of these entities was essentially able to exist by first coming together, and working with and innately understanding every individual part's skill set to create a sustaining environment.
The idea of emergence, additionally, relates back to Cathy Davidson's "Project Classroom Makeover." When she established the iPod project, her motive was to give the students a resource and see what they could make out of it, thus not leading them, but leaving room for innovative interpretations of the objective to form. This is its own type of emergent behavior because as the experiment continued, new technologies, like listening to class lectures and dissecting heart rhythms, came to fruition when they might not have otherwise. The shared horizon between Davidson and Johnson in terms of organic, community-based intelligence, as well as Johnson's interconnected web of examples, show the true meaning of emergence in an academic and natural context.
In the same way that you described the iPod experiment as potentially emergent behavior, you can make the connection that all art is a result of emergent behavior using Lethem's arguments. Lethem argues that all artists build off each other to make make their own product. Because every idea is shared and utilized by others, it is as if art emerges from the works of an artist's predecessors.
ReplyDelete