there is no neutral outside ever available. One is always within a system, or rather, always within a hierarchy of systems, almost all of them complex and polycentric. Just as when one is within a room one can never see all four walls simultaneously, a position of observing from within a system means substantive parts of the system will never be clearly visible to one’s cognition.
This should be the starting point for any analysis. One has to work from the inside out rather than the outside in, and begin with the following questions:
- What are the boundary conditions that define the limits to which one's cognition can clearly perceive the system?
- How porous (or how impermeable) are these boundary conditions?
Prem, your thinking in this thread has an ethical focus, something like care of the autopoietic self. I find your intention very searching and illuminating. However, upon consideration I doubt whether the dichotomy between closed and open systems, which you build up toward the end of your post, really offers any guide to action. As far as I can see, all human systems strive for a degree of openness as a precondition of learning and change, and for a degree of closure as a precondition of agency. Your posts are crucial in helping us all refine the systems vocabularies that we use. Here's what your reflections provoke in me.
Observing systems not only observe other observing systems, they also internalize them, constantly. This is because the boundary conditions that make us who we are, are exceptionally porous. Indeed, if we are lucky enough to have any sort of boundary at all, any sort of psychic and somatic autonomy, it is because a larger society gave us resources for indviduation. By resources, I mean mental images and schemas, corporeal practices, material and technical affordances - all coming from outside the individual, and usually from outside the family, the neighborhood, the province and even the language or country. It is in relation to such outside resources - by internalizing some and at least partially rejecting others - that one becomes an individual, or a community, or a society (Simondon, and later Stiegler, have a lot to say about this). Because of this permeability, highly invasive techniques are continually designed and applied in order to get people to behave, not as their own system with its own autopoietic compass, but instead, as a subordinate or even determinate part of another, more malleable system. These techniques are turned upon individuals, communities, societies.
Now, if I understand you right, your aim is to escape such capture and reformulate the conditions under which individuation occurs. That would also be my goal, not because I desperately want to become an autonomous individual, but because I'd like to participate in certain kinds of relatively autonomous communities which barely even exist today. But the problem is, other people and other systems are continually trying to stop us from achieving these kinds of goals. Not only do they create barriers to any deep restructuring of the material and technical affordances with which we shape ourselves and our communities, but they also make great efforts to induce different corporeal practices at the level of our own bodies, and to install different imaginaries and logical schemas in our own minds. A very relevant case in point is the way libertarian and neoclassical economists, acting in concert with capital interests and their representatives in government, convinced a large proportion of the world's educated classes that they are really entrepreneurs, looking to maximize personal profit through innovation. That's an impressive production of subjectivity. The neoliberal movement was able to do that because they have highly advanced techniques for observing, analyzing, and intervening on other systems.
The list of such techniques is long. Take an opinion poll: a quaint thing that used to allow a politician to get a rough view, every few weeks or so, of the demos as a differentiated political body. Now compare it to the real-time analysis of Facebook likes at country level, which allows not only for a continuous granular apprehension of what the demos cares about, individual by individual, but also for a differentiated intrusion into our thinking processes, via targeted advertising and symbolic stimulation of all sorts. This occurs simultaneously on the level of the person and the population, and it is hardly the only example of such observation/intervention.
Governments, corporations, militaries, police forces and some civil-society organizations develop technical systems for the observation of other systems. Their aim is to assess what's happening, whether in the financial markets, among criminal gangs, in a certain sector of professional endeavor such as scientific research, in a certain ecosystem, etc. When a pattern becomes clear, then the observing agency can chose the right point to intervene, with a speculative investment or a gun or a bit of research funding - or if we are really lucky, by restoring a stream or blocking the outflow of a toxic chemical. There's nothing new about the process: science-based propaganda efforts were first carried out in the US during WWI, and that led on to systematic advertising by giant corporations anxious to shape the desiring system they call "the consumer." Today, by applying analytics to large unstructured data sets, observing entities continually try to stretch the boundary of the system they are analyzing, just in case some relevant resource for perception or intervention might lie outside it. I would love to ignore all this and tend my own garden, but when I look around me at the people who do ignore it, I see vast psycho-social pathologies that strike fear into my heart. The kind of modeling that I am doing is at least partially a defensive reaction, it's part of a collective attempt to set limits on the degree to which we can be manipulated. It would obviously be important to try to asses the effectiveness of that kind of attempt.
Of course, no one is able to grasp the total system, nor is anyone's apprehension of the system true in an absolute sense - and both of those are important points. However, those points were made in the scientific community in the wake of Godel's incompleteness theorems in the mid-twentieth century. The drive for an overarching truth was then largely abandoned, and the race to create effective instruments was on. Today, entire populations have become the site of open-air experiments. Can we do something about it?
I basically agree with your starting points, Prem, and especially with the notion that one must always begin from inside. The version of complexity theory that I'm offering is political, which means it is situated, perspectival, necessarily incomplete and in strong need of dialogue and cooperation to get anywhere at all. As part of the demos I can ally myself with others to observe a wide range of observing techniques that are brought to bear on us by other entities. Similarly we can observe how every profession defines the boundaries of its field and organizes its analytical strategies to shape the world around us. Finally, we can try to asses what they do, how they intervene, how they react to each other's interventions, how other parts of the demos react, how new strategies are formed through reflection on previous strategies, whether our own or those of other entities. Most crucially we can asses what *we* do, what our collective actions produce in the world. This is a vital assessment currently lacking to that part of the global demos with which both of us seem to actively identify, namely "the left."
To perform this kind of analysis which is crucial to action, we have to make structural models that are sufficiently detailed (not too much not too little), and then see whether the application of the model yields any valuable resources. A decade ago, some of us including the much-regretted Armin Medosch made a model of political-economic change in the world-economy, which we called Technopolitics. Right now I am trying to make an interaction model for democratic capitalism within the overlapping boundaries of the world-economy and the earth-system, which is daunting but hardly unprecedented.
I mentioned that the elaboration of such models is a defensive activity, ie an attempt at achieving some degree of closure. By becoming aware of intersecting strategies one is less likely to unconsciously internalize their procedures and goals. However this awareness is not achieved in solitude, but through debate and exchange which create new collective resources for individuation. Such openness is urgently necessary right now, because most societies in the world lie under the threat of new kinds of authoritarianism, while all lie under the threat of global ecological degradation. Why are these threats arising and worsening? The point is to answer that question.
warmly, Brian