Over at Philosophy in a Time of Error Gratton has a post up about the recent Wall Street protests. Gratton writes:
And if no one covered it, does it exist?
It turns out I get better access to news about it (or we all do, via the Intertubes), four days in, with scores of arrests, in the media capital of the world (TM). I got alerted that Keith Olberman had a piece about the lack of coverage on his still-little-watched nightly news program on Current. In any case, given the number of unemployed (or “underemployed and overeducated”) just in the tri-state New York region, it will be interesting to see if these protests grow as the days go on.
This is a perfect example of the importance of Luhmannian sociological autopoietic systems theory for political practice. Luhmann is a grim and pessimistic thinker when it comes to questions of political change. I would not go to him seeking a theory of political change. He does, however, allow us to identify salient features of social systems that might allow us to develop better emancipatory political practice.
read on!
Social systems are operationally closed objects. Operational closure means that the operations that take place within a system only refer to and respond to other operations within the system and that, therefore, there are no direct relations to events that take place in the environment of the system. For example, neurological events in my brain only refer to other neurological events in my brain and never to the external world. For this reason, there is never direct communication or interaction between systems. Two brains cannot communicate or transfer information to one another. Two social systems cannot communicate or transfer information to one another. Events in the environment of a system can, in many instances, perturb or irritate a system, initiating events in that system, but they cannot specify or determine how the system will take up and work these perturbations. As such, information is never something that passes between systems, but is always something systems themselves produce. I address all of this in more detail in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects.
This point can be understood through the example of me and my cat. As I pet my cat Tasha and she responds purring and sticking her rear up in their air I interpret this as her showing her affection and gratitude for my attention. From her perspective, however, this is probably a sexual exchange and she is lifting her rear to prepare for mating. We are both perturbing each other setting off further operations within our respective systems, but these perturbations aren’t an exchange of a self-identical message or information, but rather are understood and interpreted in very different ways for each system. As Lacan would put it, our “communication” is a miscommunication.
The consequence of this is that systems maintain only selective relations to their environment. Every system draws the boundary between itself and its environment and operationally maintains this boundary. Moreover, every system is possesses codes that determine those perturbations that it’s open to and those that it’s not open to. The environment of a system is always more complex than the system itself and no system registers everything that takes place in its environments. Great white sharks sense their world through the electro-magnetic fields of other organisms, I do not. Due to my psychoanalytic training, I experience another person’s slip of the tongue differently than a person that does not have this training and experience. For the latter person, the slip of the tongue is just a bit of meaningless nonsense, a mistake, whereas for me it is a trace of desire.
In the case of the Wall Street protests and the media we see precisely these effects of operational closure. The media system is an operationally closed system that is only selectively open to its environment. For whatever reasons, these protests fall into the “blind spot” of the distinctions the media system uses to determine its codes or openness to its environment. As a result, the protests end up failing to resonate with the broader social system, but rather are invisible. The media system is governed by what Ranciere calls a “distribution of the sensible” that regulates what can and what cannot appear. As a consequence, the protests are unable to interact with that other social system and produce change within it.
All of this entails that one of the central questions of political practice is the question of how to create system resonance between operationally closed systems. If you are unable to interact with an object then you are unable to change or destroy that object. The question then becomes, “what strategies can be devised that would enhance the possibility of irritating or perturbing these systems? Under what conditions is it possible to interact with another system?” Any political practice that is not asking these questions or aware of these properties of systems simply isn’t serious. Clearly protests of this sort aren’t doing anything. Are there other forms of protest that could produce a difference? For example, what if the protestors did something like Mel has suggested and protested on highways? Protesting on highways would shut down commerce and travel, perhaps forcing other social systems such as the media system, the Wall Street trading system, and government to take notice of these voices. What other strategies of this sort are possible? Why have the Wisconsin protests been marginally successful whereas so many others have been all but invisible?
Larval Subjects . 
September 23, 2011 at 12:49 am
Here’s the Livefeed link, where there was a convergence about an hour ago of a Troy Davis march with the Wall Street Protesters that gave led to some confusion for the cops. Watching police reactions–they are sometimes aggressive, then back off–there doesn’t seem to be a ‘label’ for what this is for them–a very interesting level of uncertainty–and for the protesters too, as to where this is leading. An unusually prolonged state of creative semi-chaos for a demonstration. By this time, the Wisconsin demonstrations (at least from a distance–maybe because they were BEING defined by feedback from greater coverage–seemed much more focused). Is it possible that the very poverty of establishment media coverage is contributing to maintaining this sustained state of what you’d see in the first hours of a demonstration? http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
September 23, 2011 at 12:53 am
“Why have the Wisconsin protests been marginally successful whereas so many others have been all but invisible? ” But how successful were the Wisconsin demos–which seemed to have been quickly subordinated to the election recall campaign? Was that superficially greater focus rather the drain that prevented them from evolving into something broader and more significant?
September 23, 2011 at 1:35 am
Yes – altho we are in direct contact with our ‘brains’…at least according to some…there is no gap.
We could also say that rather than ‘miscommunication’ we do learn, and survive by ‘adequately’ (certainly not perfectly) mapping our environment, or we would not exist, nor would there have been biological evolution? This would be Piaget. Who we hear little of in the current academic environment – but perhaps I’m not in the loop there.
You probably know the quote below from Maturan. And I know, Luhmann is ‘far superior’.
Maturana was not an easy person to debate with, to put it mildy. He was worshipped in S. America (from my exp of a conf in Rio de Janeiro in 97). He is now retired and involved in (spansh):
http://matriztica.cl/
with currently a seminar on ‘how to generate new practices in organisations’.
And a chat with Fidel Castro.
Ah, the joys of the web.
Order-words may constrain and determine subjectivity; in particular as one is born into regimes of signs. However, there is always the possibility of unpredictable encounters and novel interactions leading to previously unimagined observations, statement-acts and networks of conversations.
(Maturana, 1978, p.62).
September 23, 2011 at 1:59 am
“Refer” in the following phrase needs to be reworded, “For example, neurological events in my brain only refer to other neurological events in my brain and never to the external world.” Unless you posit radical discontinuity, neurological events “refer.” You make it clear what you mean later, but I still think that the thesis that “there is never direct communication or interaction between systems.” is debatable depending on what you mean by “communication.” Clearly there is interaction. I figure you clarify this in the book, as I don’t expect you to edit-the-heck-out of a blog post.
September 23, 2011 at 5:32 am
Could you explain more what you mean in neurological terms? This seems confusing to me, because certain neurological events in my brain are directly wired into other bodily systems — so thirst, for example, or the desire to breath when submerged under water, in these cases the body, deprived of a particular resource, undergoes a somatic reaction which translates directly into brain chemistry, through lack of oxygen or the modulation of certain capillaries. It also is not clear with more traditional neurological examples, things like concept formation, where there seem to be either a given set of pre-representations or random fluctuations which serve the same purpose (the motor-system babble of infants before they learn language, for example), the abundance of which are then whittled down by the conditioning of external systems. So maybe this external condition isn’t a direct communication — but how do the initial sets of pre-representations or the random matrix of neurological/motor signals themselves only “refer” to other neurological signals? Aren’t these communications with external systems — unilateral and determining communications from the multudinous real outside of the closed system? I ask specifically because the way you phrased it made your argument sound similar to the traditional empiricist argument, but I do not think that is what you are actually saying.
September 23, 2011 at 8:22 am
Levi writes:
‘Social systems are operationally closed objects. Operational closure means that the operations that take place within a system only refer to and respond to other operations within the system and that, therefore, there are no direct relations to events that take place in the environment of the system. For example, neurological events in my brain only refer to other neurological events in my brain and never to the external world.’
The origin of this claim can be found in Maturana:
Click to access Maturana%201995b.pdf
It also has a useful diagram on the closure of the n. system.
Also published in ‘Consciousness: Distinction and Reflection.’ ed. Guiseppe Trautteur. (Naples: Bibliopolis) 1995
I asked him about this in Belo Horizonte in 97 at the the int symposium on autopoiesis.
He stated that ‘anyone who looks at at a nervous system with open eyes can see that it is a closed system.’ Obviously he was making this claim as a biologist about another brain (probably a frog or newt).
This claim has never been taken up by his peers and, to that extent, if we were to follow Stengers definition of a scientific claim, it has never become ‘inter-esting’, – it has never been accepted that Maturana has acted as a reliable witness for nature (in this case the nature of brains). No group of scientists has ever found it worthwhile to accept or deny his claim. It remains background noise for the contemp. scientific community.
Now, of course, that is, in itself, not a problem. The only issue is if we claim it as an accepted finding of natural science – which it currently is not. We can of course claim it as ‘speculative philosophy. Which I assume Levi is doing – altho this is not transparently clear.
What is more, Maturana appears to be claiming that he has perfect (not selective) knowledge of the structure of a brain’s n.system – which would, following the thesis of operational closure, be impossible…? Of course I may well be wrong on this. I can’t wait to be put out of my misery. (that was a joke – in case of miscommunication).
I do think we have to be careful about making a claim about the structure of the neuronal system of the brain without making it v. clear on what basis it is being made. Levi seems to be basing it on Maturana’s early work….perhaps not. And where did the germanically superior Luhmann get the idea from?
This might be worth thinking about?
And from dear wiki:
‘One seemingly peculiar, but within the overall framework strictly logical, axiom of Luhmann’s theory is the human being’s position outside any social system, initially developed by Parsons. Consisting of “pure communicative actions” (a reference to Jürgen Habermas) any social system requires human consciousnesses (personal or psychical systems) as an obviously necessary, but nevertheless environmental resource. In Luhmann’s terms, human beings are neither part of society nor of any specific systems, just as they are not part of a conversation. Luhmann himself once said concisely that he was “not interested in people”. That is not to say that people were not a matter for Luhmann, but rather, the communicative actions of people are constituted (but not defined) by society, and society is constituted (but not defined) by the communicative actions of people: society is people’s environment, and people are society’s environment. Thus, sociology can explain how persons can change society; the influence of the environment (the people) on the system (the society), the so-called “structural coupling”. In fact Luhmann himself replied to the relevant criticism by stating that “In fact the theory of autopoietic systems could bear the title Taking Individuals Seriously, certainly more seriously than our humanistic tradition” (Niklas Luhmann, Operational Closure and Structural Coupling: The Differentiation of the Legal System, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 13: 1422)
September 23, 2011 at 10:53 am
Stanley,
I idea is that it is the organization or structure of the system that is going to determine the response to a stimuli, not the stimuli itself. Take a case where you have two different systems that are both perturbed by one and the same stimuli. You will get two different responses to that stimuli or perturbation. The reason for this is that those systems have different organizations. The stimuli doesn’t determine or specify the response but only initiates it. So events elsewhere in the body can perturb the neurological systems, but it’s still going to be neurons responding to neurons in this case and the nature of the response is going to be a function of the organization of that neuronal system. There won’t be a case where there is a one-to-one transfer of information as self-identical between systems. With that said, it is nonetheless possible for structurally coupled systems to “co-evolve” such that they enter into mutually perturbing relations with one another and thereby become attuned to one another.
September 23, 2011 at 11:20 am
Thanks for the link to the Maturana article, Paul. Hopefully others will read it. It’s important, of course, to understand that when Luhmann says he’s not “interested” in people he’s not making the claim that he doesn’t care about people or that he doesn’t think people are important, but rather that people aren’t the object of sociology. For Luhmann social systems are constituted by communications not people. We can never get at the person within these systems, but only the communications. Jason’s remarks give a nice example of precisely this phenomenon. He remarks that “reference” needs to be rewarded. Now within the community of autopoietic theorists the expression “operations only refer to other operations within a system” is a perfectly ubiquitous and common expression that is immediately apparent: a neuronal event only refers to a neuronal event just as a signifier only refers to another signifier. Neither refer to anything outside the system. Within the communication system of autopoietic theorists, this is a perfectly intelligible remark. Jason’s confusion arises not from the term reference but from how this terms functions in another communication system (likely the philosophical communication system of Anglo-American philosophy that treats reference as a question of how a proposition refers to a state-of-affairs in the world). The codes governing the use of the term “reference” in this communicative system are very different than the codes governing the use of the term in autopoietic theory. Hence confusion arises when these two systems are coupled together. Jason’s confusion is a nice illustration of precisely the point autopoietic theory is getting at; that a stimuli– in this case the term “reference” –cannot specify or determine how a system responds to it, but can only trigger a response. The nature of the response will be a function of the organization of the system that responds (structural causation).
I think the literature of Franz Kafka– especially The Trial and The Castle –gives us a wonderful illustration of the operational closure of social systems and the way in which individual psychic systems (in this case Joseph K) belong to the environment of social systems and are unable to directly interact with these social systems. Joseph K., qua individual psycho-biological system is entangled in social systems that he is unable to directly communicate with. In The Trial, not only is whatever crime he might have committed opaque to him (he’s registered something to the legal system of which he is not aware), but throughout the novel, as he tries to communicate with the legal system, his speech-acts as triggers or perturbations for that system are perpetually taken up by the system in ways that he is unable to anticipate or comprehend. Likewise, in The Castle, all of the people of the village and the castle are elements of the Castle– i.e., they are not individuals so much as functionally defined roles in a communication system (“we all belong to the Castle” a villager says) –and Joseph K. is unable to either directly communicate with the Castle (he dies of exhaustion trying to get to the Castle) nor figure out what the Castle wants from him or why it has hired him (something about the stimuli that he produces is being used by the Castle but in ways that he cannot know). Each novel can be read as exploring the painful experience of an individual being entangled in an operationally closed social system without being able to directly communicate with that social system. This is an experience many of us have had with bureaucracies and entities like insurance companies.
September 23, 2011 at 1:32 pm
Levi,
We missed the boat. What is “reference?” I see no explanation in your response, and I am not confused about the issue.
All you’ve effectively said–in your first response– is that “there is no representation.” But that is not the same is “there is no transfer of information” or “no communication.” Neither of those require representation. As for co-evolve,” do not at least most things do that?
When you do mention me directly, you rightly respond to the analytic meaning of “refer.” I meant it that way because I figure that would be easy to respond to and that your response would address my other questions. However, I am not “confused.” I am “ignorant,” because it’s obvious to me that you mean it in a way that I am not getting. Moreover, I cannot imagine any obvious solution, and thus I wonder if there was an momentary poor choice of words or whether something truly untenable was said. Given the amount of pile-on, it deserves your lengthy response. So, considering:
“Jason’s confusion is a nice illustration of precisely the point autopoietic theory is getting at; that a stimuli– in this case the term “reference” –cannot specify or determine how a system responds to it, but can only trigger a response. The nature of the response will be a function of the organization of the system that responds (structural causation).”
Actually, something akin to “structural causation” is the basis of all my work (cf Dewey on the reflex arc concept), so I am not making that basic mistake. Rather, I’m looking for an answer to the question of what reference is, and not a response that says that it’s intelligible in another tradition. That signs only refer to other signs is intelligeable qua Peirce, but that route has a lot of substructure and consequences. What are those of yours?
Again, what is “reference” in an autopeotic system?
September 23, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Jason,
Within the framework of autopoietic theory all systems are self-referential in that they only refer to themselves and their own operations, not an outside. A neuron only refers to another neuron, in that it is only a response to another neuron and only perturbs another neuron. As for information, the traditional concept of information in both semiotics (Eco’s variant) and Shannon’s variant is that of a message that travels between systems as the *same*. We find this model of information in Saussure as well as a variety of different semiotic theories (cf Sebeok). Within the framework of autopoietic theory this is impossible as systems are operationally closed. Other entities can perturb a system, but they cannot transmit information as it’s the system that specifies meaning, not the perturbation.
There was no malice in my remarks about confusion (remember, I hold that all communication is miscommunication); rather I was merely pointing out that terms resonate differently depending on the system within which they occur and that your remarks were a nice example of this phenomenon. I will say, however, that I’m growing increasingly impatient with your polemical tone. I’m not particularly interested in passing the jury of pragmatism (which I see as a form of anthropocentrism) nor in being assimilated to the pragmatists (though it’s perfectly fine if others wish to take up this project). I find questions of the sort “doesn’t x do this?” to be tiresome and reactionary impediments to discussion. I’ve never claimed to be entirely original or to be proposing an unprecedented philosophy. Like anyone else I’m influenced by a tradition and other philosophers. What’s important, however, are the issues and questions, not the philosophical lineages. Generally remarks of the form “x does this” are ways of policing boundaries, regulating schools of thought and striving to continue dominance of those schools (i.e., reproducing students in the images of the school of thought). It’s also a nasty habit instilled in American continentalists in continental programs where everything is to be referred back to a history and master-figures, not questions and problems. I might just be misunderstanding the nature of your participation here, however. I’m also, after all, an operationally closed system that has no direct access to you or your intentions.
September 23, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Levi,
I still do not understand when you say things like “it’s still going to be neurons responding to neurons in this case.” It can’t be neurons all the way down, can it? Even physically speaking, neurons DO NOT just react to other neurons. If I hold my breath for too long my neurons will react to the lack of oxygen in the blood that’s pumped into my brain. If I take some stimulant like caffiene or cocaine, the chemical will again disperse into my blood, directly stimulating my body-cells to give me a body-high, which is communicated to my brain through the normal nervous channels, but also again dispersing a direct chemical reaction when this blood reaches the brain. My point is that the neuron-to-neuron chain has to start somewhere and it starts at wherever external impact (visual, auditory, olfactory, — for fish rheotactic, for sharks electromagnetic) is translated directly before becoming neuronal–and this depends on whether you are talking about neurons or the nervous system generally. Now of course the system is already predisposed toward certain non-neuronal inputs, in the case of your shark example, but I do not see how that means it’s just neurons responding to neurons? Isn’t color a distributed set of neurons responding to the optic nerve responding to an impaction of photons?
My other point is that YES it’s clear what you say about closed systems responding to stimuli — but I was asking less about the closed system responding to stimuli than about WHERE that closed system’s set of responses comes from in the first place. So for instance, the instinctual motor-babble of infants prior to learning language. This is something which, though a part of their own closed neuronal system, seems still to be at this stage more determined by the OTHER closed systems of, say, evolutionary lineage, which determined the set of motor-responses and instincts that the child is learning from. This is what I meant by unilateral determination. How does this closed-loop theory account for the limitations of the system, since these limitations are not always “selected” by the system itself and are often the result of external, intractable physical constraints?
Finally, if you admit that co-evolution is possible between systems — some social shared conditioning in things like language, which allows for the transfer of imperfect communications or miscommunications which appear as communications — what does it mean when neuronal patterns for one idea in one person’s brain follow a similar shape and pattern as the neuronal firings in another person’s brain when they hear the same word or perform the same task? Isn’t there a difference between direct miscommunications and simply approximate communications?
September 23, 2011 at 6:48 pm
Yikes, Stanley! No, I am not claiming that it’s neurons all the way down. I gave the brain as one example of an operationally closed system. Your remarks about children learning language are a bit too vague for me to get a purchase on in the context I’m talking so it’s very difficult to respond to them. For example, your remarks about evolutionary lineages seem to suggest that you’re thinking of them as belonging to a different system than the child’s brain. I am not, however, making the claim that brain is structureless— though it is very plastic –rather there are all sorts of ways in which genes contribute to the structure that human brains have. That’s not the issue.
First, to be clear, things from outside a system can enter a system and produce effects within a system. That’s not being disputed. Those stimuli can come either from other systems in the body (your example of lungs, for example) or from the external environment. The question is what happens to a stimulus once it enters a system. What’s important is that the stimuli “sent” by another entity is nothing like the stimuli “received” by the other system. It is the internal structure or organization of that receiving system that specifies it’s functional nature, not the external environment. Maturana and Varela give a nice example of this in The Tree of Knowledge that I’ll repeat here in full:
This experiment nicely illustrates the idea of operational closure. For us, the observer that witnesses a coupling between the frog and the fly, it looks as if the normal frog represents its external environment and coordinates the movement of its tongue with that external environment. However, the experiment that rotates the frogs eye 180 degrees reveals that the frog has no direct access to an external environment, but rather only has access to its external states and sensory organs. It is operationally closed. As a consequence, the frog that has been operated on perpetually ends up missing the fly. There is a stimuli here that enters the frog’s operationally closed system (the visual cues of the fly), but when that stimuli passes through the operationally closed system of the frog it is “interpreted” or “processed” according to the frog’s structure or organization. The frog does not directly represent its environment.
None of this contradicts the notion of natural selection and developmental processes. A frog that always misses the fly is likely to be selected against in natural selection because it will starve to death before it gets the opportunity to reproduce. Moreover, the fact that frogs operated in this way always miss flies seems to suggest that frogs have a very limited capacity to learn. Other systems do have the capacity to learn. When operationally closed systems enter into relations with one another this is called “structural coupling”. Structural coupling is a relation between two operationally closed systems that mutually perturb each other while each system nonetheless remains closed. This is where co-evolution between systems take place. For example, every cell in your body is an operationally closed system. Nonetheless, the cells of your body are structurally coupled with one another. One cell might produce a particular chemical that is received by another cell that initiates operations in that other cell according to the receiving cells organization. The receiving cell then releases chemicals of its own that the original sending cell receives, initiating further operations in the cell that originally sent. In this way the cells become tightly coupled and their identities can change. For example, where cells begin as “pluripotent” (they are capable of becoming bone cells, nerve cells, muscle cells, blood cells, skin cells, etc), the manner in which they’re structurally coupled determines the subsequent identity of the cell turning one cell into a liver cell another into a bone cell, etc..
Right now a process of structural coupling is going on between you and I. Both of us are operationally closed psychic-systems that have no direct contact with one another. I write something and that perturbs you in a particular way, passing through your mental systems of meanings and understanding. My writing is a stimuli but it doesn’t specify or determine how you interpret what I write. It only triggers an interpretation. What specifies and determines your interpretation will be the prior thoughts you’ve read, prior things you’ve read and heard, how signifiers are organized in your mind, etc. In response, you write something responding to what it is that I’ve said that now passes through my operationally closed system of meaning. I’m surprised by what you say, sensing that you’re drawing conclusions that I didn’t intend (“neurons all the way down”) and that my remarks about the neurological system being closed with no direct relation to the outside is not quite getting across (your remarks about absence of oxygen in the lungs affect the brain in certain ways; of course!). I now write something in response. You respond again, and so it goes.
In this process of response and counter-response in the structural coupling between us a co-evolution begins to take place between our respective psychic systems. It’s not that we ever manage to share a message as information as identical– whatever we say to one another will always resonate a bit differently as a result of previous thoughts we’ve thought, previous experiences, books we’ve read, systems of meaning we respectively possess, etc –but our action does gradually become coordinated in a variety of ways.
Returning to the original issue of the post (social systems, not neurological systems) the point is that we can never quite communicate with another system in a way that allows us to master the effects of that communication. On the one hand, we can be completely invisible to another system as in the case of the protestors with respect to the media system (they’ve barely even registered). On the other hand, social systems often co-opt the message of another entity according to its own organization and aims, not the aims of that entity expressing the message. For instance, environmental protestors might speak to corporations trying to persuade them to adopt green policies. The code that governs the corporation’s relationship to its environment is not welfare of the planet, the future of humanity, etc., but rather profit/loss. Anything that doesn’t fit within this schema will be invisible to that system and those things which are said by the environmental activists that do manage to resonate with the corporation will be taken up according to the code profit/loss, not welfare/destruction. This is one of the places where I see Ranciere as far superior to and more elaborate than Badiou. Ranciere is sensitive to the manner in which social systems regulate appearances determining what can appear and what can’t appear and devises strategies for shifting that. I don’t see this in Badiou.
September 23, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Unless we have an shared interest, why should we accept any structure at its word especially as we know its word is but the epiphenomenon of that structure? Indeed how can we under this model talk about anything other than our structure at all as we must be blind to all others? Doesn’t this model necessarily devolve not to democracy but ontic solipsism? Further, do we imagine that any locale — a term for me in preference to “thing” – has at any time only one structural impulse with its various rules meterics and changes? Do we imagine that these varous structures are neatly nested so as to be subject to mereology or operationally grouped in sets? Do we imagine they have temporal stability or are not subject to aleatory variation? Do we imagine that these structures do not have shifting modes of communication or hierarchy and even existence or commensuation? I have no doubt that societies and individuals tend toward the structural closure you and Luhmann et alia note, but is that not exactly the problem and not the ontological chacacter of becoming?
September 23, 2011 at 9:35 pm
Dan,
I’m not saying this is a happy or a pleasant thought, just that it’s an ontological reality. Indeed, I expressed horror at this thought in a recent post here:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/oooiii-and-weird-substances/
Part of the point is that the relations between these systems is messy (not neat as your question asks) and different systems have different interests. From an ethico-politico standpoint we have to have a good cartography of these different systems to begin posing questions of strategic action at all. These systems are not fixed in any way but are constantly evolving and changing as a result of the events that take place within them. What’s important is that they can’t be steered or guided from the outside.
Returning to my last (overly lengthy) comment addressed to Stanley, Maturana and Varela give a nice metaphor or allegory to help us understand the concept of operational closure. They ask us to imagine a person who has lived their entire life on a submarine without windows and without ever going outside. One day, we, the observers congratulate this submariner for having navigated a particularly difficult array of underwater obstacles such as underwater mountains and canyons, other ships, etc. with such great skill. The submarine pilot to whom we express our admiration expresses perplexity. “Underwater mountains? Underwater canyons? Water? Ships? What are these things? I turn this steering wheel this way when this dial says this, that way when this other dial says that. When I hear particular types of pings I know to pull back on my wheel or push forward on it.” For us, the observer, we see movements of the ship (left, right, up down, etc) coupled to features of an environment (canyons, reefs, ships, mountains, etc). For the submariner, by contrast, there’s only the dials and pings.
Now take the submariner out of our little allegory here (he’s an illicit homunculous) and you have the basic idea of operational closure. Within the system there are only the dials and pings and the operations that follow from them. These dials and pings are nothing like the canyons, reefs, mountains, etc., on the outside, in the environment of the system. This is how it is for any system. Certainly something is perturbing the instruments of the submarine, but what that perturbation produces within the submarine is nothing like the origin of the perturbation. The submarine only engages with its internal space of operations, not directly with the world.
This is not a solipsism because it is not the claim that the system is the only thing that it exists or that it somehow produces all other things. As in the case of the poor frog that’s had its eye operated on by mad scientists, operational closure can have truly devastating consequences (the frog ends up dying of starvation). Likewise, our social systems are in serious trouble right now because of their operational closure with respect to climate change. The changes involved in climate change are too diffuse and gradual for the system to register with respect to its dominant codes. As a consequence, the environment our social systems rely on in order to sustain their existence is gradually changing significantly in a way that these social systems do not notice. At a certain point that change becomes so significant that the branch upon which these systems sit has been sawed away and these systems will be destroyed. That’s the opposite of solipsism.
September 23, 2011 at 10:37 pm
[…] lot of people have been perplexed by the idea of operational closure I discussed in a previous post and why it entails that there is no direct transformations of information between systems or […]
September 23, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Just a small point for the sake of conceptual history…
I don’t actually think M. ever talks/writes about ‘brains’ as closed systems, but rather ‘nervous systems’ as closed neuronal networks.
This is all in the article linked to above which is a good summary but obviously not the first place the claim is made – that would be much earlier (maybe 69). They would have been studying much simpler structures than ‘brains’, which presumably are part of n. systems anyway..
Also I think M. talks about neuronal changes ‘leading’ to further changes in other components in the n. system but not ‘referring to’. If we choose to use the term ‘refer’ it would mean ’cause’ in this context.
Have a great weekind and enjoy the Rugby world cup (another bad joke) quel vie. France v NZ tonite – this is gladiators today.
September 23, 2011 at 10:46 pm
Paul,
Quite right, my mistake. I’m getting the language of “reference” from Luhmann… I’m not sure whether I’ve come across it in M&V or not. For other readers, the article Paul links to is great but I would also say that for those who have never encountered autopoietic theory it is a bit opaque and not for the faint of heart. Maturana has a nasty habit of not specifying the system references and couplings he’s referring to (throughout it’s often unclear as to whether he’s talking about coupling the physiology of the organism or to the environment in which the organism is). I personally think he makes these concepts a lot more difficult than they need to be.
September 24, 2011 at 6:03 am
This thread began with an image from the Occupy Wall Street Protests… yet, curiously, not one of the other comments so far have made reference to this… like the “Main Stream Media”… as though it didn’t exist… was not worth notice or comment.
Yet here is an action in progress, itself an emerging ‘assemblage” on the edge of our massive, massively repressive self-referential system—alive with individuals in process of defining their goals, defining what they are collectively—so far, mostly outside the mad scientist’s dissected frog’s eye—trying to SEE what they are—which makes them all the MORE interesting, especially given the example of the Wisconsin protests… which BEG for study and analysis on the power of media feedback to define and limit the goals of nascent revolutionary movements.
What can philosophical thought contribute to present, immediate-right-now events? I’m sure I could add—as an unapologetic non-philosopher—plenty of reservations to Zizek, but gods bless him, he risks projecting his thought into the chaos of our shared historical reality… no less aware than anyone else of the cautionary tale offered by Heidegger.
There are things happening here that deserve attention and thought—how when the cops confiscated sound amplification, they devised a method, on the spot—of shout and response, where one person shouted a phrase, the near crowd would repeat it, broadcasting the words to the more distant crowd. This kind of creative response … I can’t put into words how important I think this is.. and why I think the relative confusion of this prolonged form of demonstration matters so much… that in ACTION, people on the ground, not from directives above, find ways to solve problems—and in process, REdifine the goals and the very idea of WHAT is possible.
I’d like to turn this to a question of how—if there is no way to change a closed system from the outside—how ELSE such a system CAN be changed? But to confront that system from the outside in such a way that it is forced to respond—and seek within itself a means of responding that was perhaps only latent before?
September 24, 2011 at 4:06 pm
“It’s also a nasty habit instilled in American continentalists in continental programs where everything is to be referred back to a history and master-figures, not questions and problems.”
Some examples, Levi?
Do you mean Americanists (those who study American philosophy) who happen also to study in continental programs, or literally American citizens who study continental philosophy?
Leon / after nature
September 24, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Leon,
I think there’s a strong Oedipal streak in American Continental philosophy where we seldom speak in our own voice but where we instead invoke the thought of a master-figure through which we speak. Just look at SPEP. You will never see a presentation there that isn’t about a master-figure. This has to do with training in Continental departments. They tend to be directed more at intellectual history than philosophy. We all, of course, cite other thinkers and engage with the work of others. That’s not what I’m referring to. I’m referring rather to a culture that sees philosophy primarily as commentary. This is one area where I thing Anglo-American philosophy has a decisive advantage over Continental philosophy.
September 24, 2011 at 10:12 pm
Draft of Principles of Solidarity–a document created out of action. Worth reading. http://nycga.cc/2011/09/24/principles-of-solidarity-working-draft/
September 26, 2011 at 3:57 pm
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