ABSTRACT
As theories of chaos and complexity leak out from the sciences, an emergent connectionist thinking is beginning to blur the distinction between the arts, sciences and humanities. The implications of this innovation are both extensive and profound. But long before inevitable conclusions about planetary intelligence, it suggests new ways of thinking and writing about the social, the human and the cultural, and threatens the disciplinary mechanisms which have policed both the organization of knowledge and modern conceptions of reality itself. It engineers a convergence of nature and artifice, the present and the future, and the actual and the virtual, and also collapses orthodox distinctions between teaching and learning, knowledge and intelligence, and the production and consumption of discourse.
