Jung argues for a systems rhetoric, which is
a whole composed of parts. Systems rhetoric translates systems science theory into the register of rhetoric by
conceptualizing explanations as systems constituted by the descriptions that sustain them…[I]t is a methodology that
attempts to make apparent how a theoretical explanation accrues persuasive force through its articulation with its
constitutive parts—the descriptions that sustain it. Systems rhetoric juxtaposes different descriptions of a phenomenon
(here, that phenomenon is rhetorical agency) that are coupled with particular versions of an explanation (here, it’s systems
science) for purposes of foregrounding the relational contingency of theory-power itself… [S]ystems rhetoric seeks to
describe the persuasive appeal of an ascendant theory in terms of the rhetorical debts it owes to that which it excludes. In
this way, systems rhetoric attributes a given theory’s explanatory power not only to the descriptions that sustain it and with
which it is directly coupled, but also to those descriptions a given theory refuses to admit. (1-2)
This approach helps us “consider how a given scholar becomes a part of one system and not another and, further, how ideological and social constraints, actualized both symbolically and materially, have a hand in shaping such processes of becoming” (1).
Agency in a System
“[E]lements become elements only through their participation in a relation that constitutes them. Systems are therefore always contingent, since relations could have been selected otherwise… What compels selection, then, is the impetus to reduce complexity such that a particular version of the system-environment difference can be observed…. Revising this system would require a different cut; it would mean observing a different distinction between what pedagogy is and what it isn’t, which would require a re-conceptualizing of the relations between and meanings of elements like teachers, students, learning, and writing. In terms of agency, in a second-order pedagogy system teachers and students don’t influence each other through feedback loops as mutually affectable but distinct elements (as in first-order agency); rather, in a second-order pedagogy system teachers and students constitute each other through a boundary that makes observable distinctions between what pedagogy is and what it is not… our history of repeated interactions with objects that occupy the spaces we inhabit orients us to similar kinds of spaces, and our habituated contact with certain objects in said spaces makes those objects matter to us…. Furthermore, our histories of orientation—once sedimented as embodied habits—affect the spaces toward which our bodies tend and the things we notice in them…Perception is thus both anticipatory and normalizing (Connolly 187): we anticipate moving toward certain kinds of spaces and engaging in predictable ways with particular objects in those spaces, and when we do perceive them and interact with them in ways we anticipate, both these objects’ presence and our ways of interacting with them are normalized: those objects belong there in that space interacting with me in this way” (7-8).
In Jung’s article, system doesn’t seem much different than ecology. In fact, both Cooper and Syverson use system while describing ecologies. Cooper described different systems within the ecology of writing. Syverson describe ecologies as made up of complex systems (though it is unclear at the end whether ecology is a complex system or whether it is made up of complex systems). Jung discusses self-organization, emergence, ordered chaos, and embodiment is ways very similar to Syverson; this is likely because they are both working from complex systems theory.