WICI Speaker Series - Ira Allen

WICI Speaker Series with Ira Allen

Witnessing Staggered Collapse: Epistemic Complexity and Systems Decomplexification

Tuesday, February 11th, 2025

1:30 - 3 p.m. | DC 1304

Ira Allen, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Digital Media Studies at Northern Arizona University, discusses how "witnessing" offers a democratic way to navigate societal collapse as the infrastructures of our lifeworld decomplexify while individual efforts to understand that world increase in complexity. ​

Please join us to attend this talk in person!

Abstract:

Witnessing Staggered Collapse: Epistemic Complexity and Systems Decomplexification

It is common to understand the breakdown of large systems in terms of decomplexification. Linkage density among network nodes in a system decreases, with ever more linkages routing through centralized “supernodes.” In the context of a staggered or seriated collapse of the “CaCaCo” (carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage) civilizational structure, i.e., breakdown of an ever-complexifying global modernity with all its ills and ambivalent blessings, this logic holds particularly well for epistemic experience, for individual efforts to parse reality. At a time when reality itself is increasingly dynamically complex in its structuration of individual lives, both harder and more important to parse well, our overall mediation networks have grown ever less complex, with ever more epistemic power concentrated among ever fewer entities. The paradox of collapse is that as the infrastructures (both material and epistemic) of our lifeworld decomplexify, individual efforts to understand that world necessarily increase in complexity. For just one minor example, the platform capitalism breakdown or destruction of peer-to-peer communication platforms as the core of the internet, which Cory Doctorow engagingly termed “enshittification” and others speak of as capitalism’s catabolic phase, relocates epistemic complexity from networks to individuals—but leaves most of us more in the dark than ever before. A Google search can, famously, no longer be relied upon for usable results (and that’s even before the dispositions associated with generative AI). In the rise of Substackers and Twitterstorians that accompanied a widespread loss of faith in traditional epistemic sources (print and online journalism, academia, etc.), we saw one response to such impossible conditions in the emergence of epistemic supernodes, loci of information aggregation that accompanied a loss in overall density of information exchange among ordinary people consuming and producing media. Another way of saying this is to observe that the democratic epistemic promise of the early internet, what Jodi Dean critiqued already in the aughts under the heading “communicative capitalism,” is today cashing out in the intrinsically fascizing development of epistemic supernodes. It is doing so precisely as we most desperately need not superordinate mediation of the world but peer-to-peer communication both locally and globally in the old “information utopia” sense. But we ourselves, in the face of a dynamic large-scale civilizational collapse, are understandably very motivated to outsource our own epistemic capacities to trusted figures of authority, supernodes who can “know for us.” This talk takes up Davide Panagia’s scholarship on “sentimental empiricism” in working out how a turn away from “truth” and toward “witnessing” as epistemic ground might help combat the anti-democratizing tendency to lash our epistemic hopes to supernodal “knowers” (as North American liberals have, for instance, to historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an  American”). By witnessing, I mean the knowably imperfect and yet relationally transcendent effort to dispose an audience to hear some otherwise inaudible, and keenly felt, experience of the world. Witnessing cannot save us from collapse, of course. Nothing can prevent CaCaCo’s collapsing (as I detail in the recent Panic Now?). But we may live into that together in better or worse ways. For the dimension of staggered collapse that is a painful transaction between epistemic complexity and systems decomplexification, I suggest, witnessing offers a rhetorical genre that disposes us to potentially more democratic forms of life than do available alternatives.

About the speaker:

Ira Allen is associate professor of rhetoric, writing, and digital media studies in the Departments of English and Politics & International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He teaches courses on digital argumentation, #datapolitics, rhetoric and democracy, and rhetoric and composition theory. Ira’s new book, Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing (U Tennessee P, 2024), details the value of and some strategies for judicious panic in an age of staggered collapse, following on the vision of chastened humanism developed in his first book, The Ethical Fantasy of Rhetorical Theory (U Pittsburgh P, 2018). His scholarship and translations appear in such outlets as Degrowth Journal, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetoric Review, SubStance, Modern Language Notes, College Composition and Communication, Theory & Event, and Political Research Quarterly. Past popular essays on how to respond meaningfully to climate collapse and other dimensions of polycrisis appear in venues such as Jewish Journal, CommonDreams, and Local Philosophy.