Apropos my last post and this post by Tom over at Plastic Bodies, I happened to run into my colleague Carl Clark (a rhetorician) who is applying the principles of autopoietic theory that I develop in chapter 4 of The Democracy of Objects. His aim is to develop an autopoietic theory of rhetoric. This leads to some pretty startling and disturbing conclusions (not to mention brilliant ones). It will be recalled that I argue that objects are 1) dynamic, processual systems, 2) that they come in two flavors: allopoietic objects and autopoietic objects, and 3) that “size does not matter” with respect to objects. Just as an atom is composed mostly of space and is an assemblage of particles like electrons and neutrons, the fact that something like say my college is composed mostly of air, that it is spread out in space, and that it is assembled out of ever changing components (students, faculty, administrators, facilities management, books, buildings, computers, etc) does not undermine the college as being an entity or substance in its own right.
Here I’m focused on autopoietic objects. One major difference between allopoietic and autopoietic objects is that the latter reproduces its parts and maintains its structure, while the former does not. If an autopoietic object like a salamander loses its tail, that tail grows back. If I get cut, my wound heals. The college perpetually replenishes its students, and when faculty move on their positions are often filled. When a professor or a student steps out of line, administration steps in to push them back in order (discipline them). Autopoietic systems actively produce their elements and relations between their elements. A college does not have students, it makes students. This isn’t the case with allopoietic objects. If an allopoietic object such as a rock is chipped, this wound doesn’t heal. Moreover, rocks do not produce the elements of which they are composed, but draws elements together from elsewhere in the world through forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, electro-magnetism, and a variety of chemical processes). To be sure, there are gradations between autopoietic and allopoietic objects, but it’s sufficient for our purposes to keep these two flavors of object in mind.
read on!
Insofar as autopoietic objects produce their own elements and relations between these elements, they are negentropic (“negation of entropy”). Negentropic objects attempt to maintain their order/organization across time. This entails that many of the operations of autopoietic objects consist in combating entropy. Entropy can come from two sources: within the object and without. While there is no object that does not contain a degree of entropy (zero entropy), nonetheless autopoietic objects attempt to combat this entropy and maintain some unity and organization. Here it’s worth noting that these objects do evolve or change, primarily as a result of the entropy they encounter. Organization is not fixed but is dynamic and evolving. In this regard, zero entropy would be undesirable.
Now there are two key points to get about autopoietic objects. First, autopoietic objects are radically a-teleological. They have no further purpose than maintaining or continuing their existence. Fungi, for example, are not for breaking down dead organic matter. Fungi are only “for” producing the elements of which they are composed and relations between those elements. Their “aim” is just to keep the process going. Second, autopoietic objects are “operationally closed” while “structurally open”. Operational closure is an allusive concept that is difficult to articulate. The basic idea is that: Operations that take place within an autopoietic system only ever “refer” to or directly interact with each other. My thoughts are only responses to other thoughts in my mind. Language is only ever a response to language. Processes taking place within a cell only ever refer to other processes taking place within a cell. Economic transactions only ever respond to economic transactions. Political acts only ever refer to other political acts. Imagine a bubble. An autopoietic system is a bubble in which there is only ever interaction, reference, or communication with other elements in the bubble, never directly with other things outside the bubble.
However, autopoietic objects are also structurally open. They can be perturbed, “irritated”, or stimulated, by entities outside of them, yet in being perturbed these stimuli will be transformed within the object according to the structural organization of the object. They will never be received exactly as they were given. Referring to my metaphor of the bubble, events passing from the outside world into the inside world of this object must pass through the membrane or film of the bubble. That membrane will “distort” or transform these stimuli in a variety of ways, such that what passes through is not exactly what it was. In other words, operational closure and structural openness mean that autopoietic objects filter their world. Luhmann says that it is the distinctions operative in a system that filter the world, transforming these stimuli. Economic systems can be perturbed by political systems, but will be perturbed in an economic way (behind an economic filter or “membrane”). Legal systems can perturb political systems but the political system will be perturbed in a legal way. A salamander can be perturbed by a snake but only in a “salamandery” way. And, above all, each system will be entirely blind to some things that exist in their environment, being unable to register them at all.
Operational closure and structural openness are my formulations of the concepts of “withdrawal” and “vicarious causation” respectively. I’m never sure whether Harman and I are saying the same thing, so while we share some affinities I tend to think our ontologies might be quite different.
When these principles are applied to rhetoric as Carl is now doing, you get some startling results. Traditionally rhetoric is understood to be that science which investigates the art of persuasion. The aim of rhetoric here is to persuade. However, if it is true that autopoietic systems are a-teleological and operationally closed, then this thesis must be abandoned (in its traditional form). Rather, as Carl puts it, the aim of rhetoric is not to persuade, but rather to stave off entropy. That is, the aim of entropy is to reproduce the elements composing the object and the relations between these elements. Carl gives the example of providing reasons for a belief. Ordinarily we understand providing reasons for a belief as designed to persuade an audience. However, Carl argues– based on some of his forays into cognitive science accounts of rhetoric as well –that the reality is quite different. We provide reasons for beliefs not to persuade others but to reinforce beliefs for ourselves. In other words, the aim of providing reasons is to stave off entropy threatening our beliefs and further fix our beliefs. Another example would be a church. We might think that the aim of a church is to lead people to salvation, educate them about theological doctrine, etc. However, if the autopoietic theory is right, the aim of a church is simply to reproduce the church. As Foucault observes, its a system of subjectivization (i.e., element formation).
Yet lest readers think I’m picking on churches, the point would be the same with all systems. As Tom recounts in his post, the continental academic system is structured to reproduce itself. As a consequence, it is generally hostile to forms of intervention that depart from interpretive models of engagement and that challenge master-figures. Analytic philosophy has its own version of closure and openness. At a much broader level, the college system in general would not be concerned with educating, finding truth, developing knowledge, etc. Rather, the academic system would simply seek to reproduce academic discourse.
I am not saying any of this is good. However, I think it’s important to articulate problems as starkly as possible so as to develop effective strategies for dealing with these problems. While I think Carl (and Luhmann) go a little too far– we do manage to persuade others on occasion –they also shed light on just how rare persuasion is and why this is so. How often have we experienced frustrating disputes with a colleague where we know we’re right (and they know they’re right too!) and we nonetheless can’t get through? How often have you had an argument with a conservative where basic facts seem completely unable to get through? How often have there been debates between atheists and believers where nothing seems to budge an inch? Autopoietic closure and structural openness explain this.
A rhetorical theory sensitive to autopoietic closure and structural openness would have to develop a number of different things. First, it seems to me that rhetoric would break down into two sub-fields: intra-rhetoric and inter-rhetoric. Intra-rhetoric would investigate how rhetorical events function within a system or object in that object’s self-maintenance. It would bracket any reference to an outside and adopt a systems point of view. Inter-rhetoric, by contrast, would investigate interactions between operationally closed systems. Inter-rhetoric would examine how systems perturb one another, how systems respond to being perturbed, how they can become mutually reinforcing and dependent even when absolutely opposed to each other (schismogenesis), but above all how it might be possible to fundamentally to fundamentally transform another system (revolutionary theory and practice). In my view, this is what Lacan was after in his reflections on the position of the analyst and the structure of the analytic setting. He noticed that patients have a tendency to interpret every statement in terms of their own filters (operational closure) and tried to devise strategies that would redistribute those filters (the theory of interpretation, use of scansion, polysemy, equivocation, surprise, etc).
Further, an autopoietically inflected rhetorical theory would be sensitive to the defense mechanisms of rhetorical systems. Just as bodies have an autoimmune system to fight diseases, social systems have autoimmune systems with their own “antibodies”. For example, conservatives in the States have worked for years to delegitimate education, science, and media. This is an autoimmune system. It functions to axiomatically defuse perturbations from any of these sources, thereby allowing conservative collectives to avoid entropy. Likewise, the concept of “faith” in contemporary Christianity is an antibody for Christian belief. Insofar as it 1) is belief in the absence of evidence, and 2) treated as morally commendable (indeed, as the most important thing to God), it functions to defuse any critique or reason giving within this social system insuring that the elements (believers) won’t wander away or challenge doctrine.
When I brought up autoimmunity to Carl, he immediately jumped on a fascinating possibility: If social systems have autoimmune systems might they also be capable of suffering from autoimmune diseases? An autoimmune disease is a disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the body itself. Isn’t this exactly what we see going on with conservatives today? Conservative delivery systems of ideology (church’s, talk radio, etc) have been so effective in immunizing and radicalizing elements (self-identified republicans), that would-be republican leaders can no longer defend positions that would allow them to reasonably respond to the problems we face and appeal to moderates to get elected. This system is eating itself. And isn’t this what many Marxists hope with Capitalism? That it will suffer from an autoimmune system that would lead it to devour itself? There is a whole contagion model of autopoietic social systems to be developed. This would include not only a theory of autoimmune diseases, but also a theory of bacterial contamination, viral contamination, etc. Here we would find a wealth of strategic possibilities for both changing and demolishing certain systems.
Larval Subjects . 
March 21, 2012 at 10:08 pm
I think you’re overestimating the power of the system to perpetuate itself and underestimating the actors who disrupt it from within and prevent it from having the self-perpetuating effects you’re pointing out. Or rather, in terms of autopoetic social systems, how do you account actors that disrupt the self-perpetuating mechanisms from within? I’m talking about the student who was a student (say, of Buddhism) before he entered college; once there, he finds a sympathetic professor in Religious Studies who introduces him to Augustine and Nagarjuna, who agrees with him that the college system is flawed and somewhat invested in churning out degrees, but nevertheless leaves room for students like him to design a specialized course of study, etc. Obviously, the college system “filters” and “distorts” the incoming student insofar as he has to take certain courses, fulfill certain requirements, etc. But when the student reflects on his experience there, that is not what he thinks of. If anything, he thinks of how that system, in the end, had nothing to do with his experience. Or take the example of the non-dogmatic priest who, according to doctrine or not, spends his time with the downtrodden in his parish, or the dying, etc. Here, the church may be perpetuating itself through him, but that’s not the only thing it’s doing, or making possible.
I ask because while I can understand how objects (inanimate things) would operate qua closures, boundaries, atomic maintenance, etc., I’m skeptical that social systems ever really accomplish the closures they purport. Isn’t that a bit like ignoring the drunk people that walk out of the bar, saying that bar-owners don’t care about people having a good time, watching sports, and getting drunk, but only with keeping the bar open and profitable? I don’t think, at the very least, that persons (conscious things, free things, thinking things) are so easily absorbed by these social system.
More seriously misleading, I think, is the idea that “My thoughts are only responses to other thoughts in my mind.” What about the thoughts I’m sharing with you right now? Aren’t you responding to them? Certainly, you don’t think that you’re simply imagining out of nowhere everything I’m saying right now. Certainly, even in reading this, your thoughts are responding to something outside your own mind???
March 21, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Perhaps I’m bringing up extraneous points and that you only mean to make assertions about the self-perpetuating behavior inherent to the “systems themselves,” independent of the experiences of those who act within them. But I think we can be led to a pretty paranoid point if we don’t keep in mind the regions of activity and creation in persons that, one way or another, are “free” from the system they’re nevertheless enmeshed in.
March 21, 2012 at 10:17 pm
Tim,
As I remarked, systems always struggle with entropy. What you’re describing are instances of that entropy and how it can disrupt a system. Colleges try to produce elements (subjectivizations/students), but they’re never quite successful as the person herself is an operationally closed system. This mere logical issue pertaining to the relation between parts and wholes is a constant theme in my work on these issues: the parts (not to be confused with elements) introduce entropy into the system. At any rate, the whole issue you raise is why I talk about entropy and see it as a crucial concept. As for your point about thoughts, yes you’re perturbing me right now, but your intervention isn’t carried over as identical in my mind but filtered through my membrane or distinctions.
March 21, 2012 at 10:18 pm
We’re never completely dominated by any system because we are ourselves systems in the environment (outside of) these other systems. No system can dominate another.
March 21, 2012 at 10:44 pm
[…] response to my last post, Tim of Fragile Keys makes some interesting remarks. Tim writes: I think you’re overestimating […]
March 21, 2012 at 11:25 pm
I want to ask a question that will probably sound absurd to you, but I’ll ask it anyway.
You say that I myself am a system outside of all other systems. But is there room in your thought for this: that “I” am outside my own system? Outside the system that I supposedly “am”? For example, such that I am drawn toward my death, my non-being, and thus disrupt the autopoetic maintenance of my self-present, self-conscious, self-identified system (whether mental or bodily). Is there a relation that is possible between me as a system and the “absolutely outside” of that “me”? I mean to an outside that would not be just another system (or object) — a relation to the outside of the whole world, in that sense.
And if I told you that this was so, that I believed it, knew it, felt it to be so, would you deny me that possibility, or laugh at me for being absurd?
Hopefully such thoughts are not too perturbing. As always, you don’t have to answer if you deem it a waste of your time.
March 21, 2012 at 11:38 pm
Hi Tim,
As a naturalist, of course, I don’t think there’s any outside or beyond to nature (which is what I mean by immanence). However, I don’t doubt that you have this thought and experience and that it is an operation that takes place in your thought and that leads you to develop according to certain vectors. That said, I’m committed to the thesis that no entity can ever “get outside of itself”. I’ll always encounter you behind a veil. I do think there’s a sense in which systems are “outside” themselves that you probably wouldn’t accept. In my view, systems or objects are “withdrawn” even from themselves. By this I mean that they aren’t transparent to themselves. For example, we might think of the unconscious in this connection.
March 21, 2012 at 11:39 pm
The above is the question I’m circling around these days. To try and use some of your terms, is there an entropy-inducing element that, not coming a system outside of the system (in the sense of being ‘external’) but also not coming from any one of its parts (in the sense of being ‘internal’)? I am asking about an entropic element that exceeds any and everything (and I’d be tempted to associate this with the movement of thinking itself — thinking beyond any and all operational closures of the conscious self).
Since you write that, “There is no system so thorough and successful that it manages to achieve zero entropy or perfect order/structure,” I’m tempted to say that this applies even to the system that I am (whether as a body or as a mental apparatus). But then what does that make “me”? I know it has something to do with being drawn to “my” non-being, or to my inexistence. Drawing toward inexistent, or to the dead and gone, or to the suffering, as drawing toward that which escapes any elemental or systematic analysis, toward that which does not make up an operationally closed system, but rather IS a kind of “embodiment” of structural openness.
Risking some propositions there, so don’t hold me too tight to them. I think the basic question is this: how is entropic resistence introduced in to the very system that I am? Practically, how is it that I overcome my past prejudices, or my old ideas of myself, especially if this doesn’t happen in relation to anything else but “my own” thought? Where does this impetus for alteration come?
Hopefully this makes ‘some’ sense — or at least clarifies the absurdity of my question.
March 21, 2012 at 11:45 pm
I posted the last comment before I read your response, but hopefully it still can clarify. I’d just say that, in my eyes, your thesis of withdrawn objects has always been very close to the “outside the system but in the system” that I’m vectoring toward. For me, however, I’m tempted to say that the withdrawn in each object is, precisely, “nothing.” But the “nothing” in each thing is, in another sense, its relations to everything else — relations it can never totally access. Well, I’ve got countless drafts of blogposts trying to flesh this out a bit better, none of which are ready for speech, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
March 21, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Hi Tim,
You write:
Well one consequence that follows from the theory of autopoietic closure is that no system is ever a product of its environment or what it has learned. However, another point is that autopoietic systems do engage in their own operations or activities and that these can generate “transcendence” with respect to their experience. Think of this in terms of Kant’s categorical imperative. (I’m going to repeat stuff to be clear and for others, so hopefully you don’t take me as lecturing you about things you already know). Kant distinguishes between analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions don’t introduce anything new but just render explicit what was already there in the concept, e.g. “bachelors are unmarried males”, “triangles are three sided figures”. Synthetic propositions add create something new, a relation that wasn’t there before in thought. Kant’s provocative thesis is that there are synthetic a priori propositions. That is, there are propositions that 1) introduce something new into thought, and 2) that do so through thought alone and that aren’t simply a repetition of what is learned. He gives mathematics as an example, but more reasoning would be one as well. I think that every autopoietic system is more or less capable of doing such things. This is another form of creativity that results not from entropy, but through internal system operations in the object. This would be what allows us to depart from our past habits and behaviors (as well as our environmental conditioning) through thought. When I write I’m not simply regurgitating what was already there in my mind, I’m actually forging new links. Part of this would be through these kinds of system-specific operations, part from entropy in my thought process. In the case of creative entropy, for example, language is polysemous. As I write, the linearity of writing generates polysemous effects (entropy) that present suggestive connections that can lead me down entirely new paths of thought.
March 21, 2012 at 11:53 pm
Tim,
As I’ve argued before, I don’t see “the nothing” as primitive, but as an effect of structuration and memory in systems. A book can be missing on a shelf in a library because there is a symbolic system that assigns it a place. A symbolic system is a something or a positivity. That positivity is a condition for absence, lack, nothing, the thought of death, etc. That’s my view anyway. This is, of course, only possible in systems that have memory. The symbolic is for me one way the nothing is introduced into the world: i.e., the signifier introduces a gap between signifier and thing into the world such that the two are never able to coincide. Even if I get a strawberry I can never get “strawberry”; or as Hegel said, “you can’t buy ‘fruit'”.
March 22, 2012 at 1:10 am
[…] of the system. Rather it exists only in and for the system that draws the boundary (in a previous post I referred to this boundary as the “membrane” or “film” of a system. […]
March 22, 2012 at 4:20 am
I see we need to log into wordpress to comment now…
small point…
I think your term ‘structurally open’ is covered already by the concept of ‘structure determinism’ – it is the structure that determines what counts as a perturbation….
March 22, 2012 at 4:23 am
Levi,
Thanks for helping me explore these ideas–and for the encouragement! These kind acts help me stave off entropy! One comment: You write: “While I think Carl (and Luhmann) go a little too far– we do manage to persuade others on occasion . . .” I agree that we do manage to persuade others from time to time, but I suspect that the process is pretty aleatory. It’s a crapshoot. Maybe, on occasion, we do perturb another person and get the desired response, but that’s entirely dependent on the other person’s distinctions. The person will only be persuaded if it allows him to resist entropy a little longer. By analogy, I’ll accept the food you offer if, and only if, I’m hungry.
Or to look at it another way, maybe it does look like I’m persuaded by your rhetoric, but that persuasion might just be a by-product of my effort to resist entropy. Similarly, an ad for McDonald’s simply says “McDonald’s is still here” or “McDonald’s still exists.” It doesn’t persuade people to eat there. If I happen to eat at a McDonald’s, that’s just a by-product of the ad. An advertisement isn’t about persuasion; it’s about reproducing autopoietic objects such as fast-food chains, as well as the ads themselves.
The thoughts are obviously very tentative, and thanks again for helping me work this stuff out.
March 22, 2012 at 4:28 am
Sorry, I clicked post comment too soon. I meant to say that the McDonald’s ad is a performative utterance. By stating that “McDonald’s is still here,” the ad keeps McDonald’s in existence even if no one eats there as a result of the ad. It’s not about attracting customers.
March 28, 2012 at 11:58 am
Sorry for the delay in responding. I think this is an interesting proposition. The complementary approach would be to suggest that persuasion is an ongoing effect of object relations that is integrated with the autopoietic, negentropic operation of the object. I was thinking of a number of mundane examples: choosing a path to take when walking your dog in your neighborhood or grabbing a box of cereal in a supermarket. However, your example of writing is most apt as an actor-network. The tools you employ perturb your thinking. This is a kind of persuasion: part of what I would think of as a minimally rhetorical, ontological condition that creates the possibility for the kinds of rhetorical processes we conventionally term argument. As such, while we can think of each rhetorical act as autopoietic, it is simultaneously mutative.
It is analogous to the way that we must eat to sustain ourselves but each thing we eat changes us to some degree. Even when we preform ceremonial rhetoric, specifically designed to reinscribe identity, things change. Given that we are always other than what we imagine ourselves to be, our rhetorical efforts to maintain identity always miss the mark anyway. And, as I suggested above, they call upon us to enter into particular actor-networks that mediate our activity.
In the end, I think examples of liberal/conservative or evangelical/atheist debates are not especially useful to understanding rhetoric. Persuasion doesn’t occur that way. If anything, one might take up these identities as examples of exactly how allopoietic humans are: blindly, inescapably in the service of these ideologies with no apparent capacity to consider an alternative. However we are not those things. I don’t step out my door wondering how a liberal-atheist should walk his dog. Instead we enter into those rhetorical positions when called to serve as actors in particular networks.
As a rhetorician, if I want to convince someone of something, my first job is not to situate them in a position that demands that they disagree with me. The dysfunction with American politics is that we turn everything into ideology theater (this is true on both sides of the aisle). I’m not suggesting that there can be a non-ideological, rational rhetoric, but only that conversations that begin by staking territory are not intended to go anywhere. I’m confident that decisions that get made in Congress never begin or end with such positions. I suspect this because similar kinds of disciplinary entrenchments in the academic (science vs humanities, literature vs rhetoric, etc.) are always ultimately muted in rooms where decisions get made.
March 30, 2012 at 2:38 pm
This is good stuff, but one lasting problem with the definition of allopoietic and autopoietic you give is that with one of them you deal both with composition and dynamics, whereas with the former you just deal with composition.
Going by the oldschool M&V definition, allopoiesis says nothing about how the machine is structured, except that it acts with inputs and outputs to create changes outside of itself. It is other-creating, not other-created. They deal with exactly the opposite problem.
This is important because in that case a system can be treated both as autopoietic and allopoietic, shifting through different teleological regimes in it’s self-generative drift.
Autopoiesis per say is not telological, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility of the autopoietic object operating quite coherently as an input/output abstract machine.
March 30, 2012 at 2:50 pm
To put that slightly less pompously, autopoiesis doesn’t have to exclude teleology, it’s just not a part of that category of description, just as flavour is not a part of weight.
As far as I can tell the reason people made such a fuss about it was that they were dealing with circularity in a different way to a lot of the other people, rejecting concepts of self-organisation for dynamic tautologies, and wanted to stop their stuff getting confused.
April 4, 2012 at 6:48 pm
I wanted to keep this tread alive and respond to what Alex wrote above, particularly “As a rhetorician, if I want to convince someone of something, my first job is not to situate them in a position that demands that they disagree with me.” Great point. As Kenneth Burke said, rhetoric is about creating common ground, or a “common place” from which to begin an argument. I’m also beginning to think rhetoric is about creating cognitive dissonance in an autopoietic object, rather than persuading an “audience.” Perturbation can create this cognitive dissonance.