Book Review Observing Complexity Systems Theory and Postmodernity

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Edwina TaborskyBook Review: Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity

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79Book Review: Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity

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William Rasch (ed.) et al, Observing Complexity: Sys-tems Theory and Postmodernity

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ISBN 0816632979 (hardcover).

This edited collection includes papers by Niklas Luhmann, Peter Hohendahl, Marjorie Levinson,

William Rasch, Drucilla Cornell, Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Jonathan Elmer, and Brian Massumi.

As a collection of papers it is well-written, it is a thoughtful and exploratory analysis, and could

well be used as a basis for further, broader and deeper investigations of both systems analysis and

postmodernism.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, with a fundamental interpretation by

Niklas Luhmann of his functionally differentiated systems theory provides a focus to the book. The

papers that follow in this section examine the implications of this complex systems analysis and

introduce an alternate systemic analysis by Maturana and Varela. Section two further explores

these two analytic frames and section three provides the reader with references to other thinkers in

postmodernism such as Lyotard, Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze.

The focus of the book is an examination of systems theory as a major option for examining

society and social behaviour that has developed in the postmodern era as a result of the breakdown

of the scientific method with its concomitant themes of controlled social and technological progress.

The positivist cognitive model of the world, with its ideology of a one-to-one representation of the

world within the mind, of an equality between an action and its record, and a global

decontextualization and universalization of this record, formed the basis, we are told, for an impe-

rial or hierarchical social architecture. Should the rejection of this model lead to the solipsism ofeither a utopian idealism or relativism? The authors reject these possibilities as untenable and

instead, present us in this set of papers with systems theory. How a systemic perspective and

organization, as differentiated from that of an individual, prevents isolationism and agential con-

trol is not, however, explained. Systems theory is examined within two models - one based on the

autopoietic frame of Maturana and Varela (1980, 1987) and the other based on the functionalist

differentiations of Luhmann (1989, 1995). The unfolding of these two models as quite different

and even incompatible forms of system dynamics is not set out as a clear articulation in the bookbut emerges as a discursive result of the different articles and critiques.

Many of us begin our own inquiries on the dynamics of cognitive processes with the eight-

eenth century, and the articles in this volume with their references to Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, and

Leibniz, are no exception. However, I argue that problems, which may range from inadequate

descriptions to circuitous difficulties with terminology, are almost inevitable when researchers are

ignorant of the analyses of the great adversaries, Plato and Aristotle, and the progressive debates

by the scholastics over these two models of cognition The reason is simple - the reflections on

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cognition, on the relation between the observer and the observed and the nature of the infrastruc-

ture of their interaction, have been ongoing for over two thousand years and our own interpreta-

tions will be deficient or at least weakened if we ignore previous analyses. Another deficiency inthe thematic infratructrure in these papers is semiotics - in particular the synchronic frame of prag-

maticism of Charles S. Peirce. Semiotics is referred to a few times but without comprehension and

it would, I feel, help organize and clarify the attempts at establishing an analytic frame undertaken

in this volume. Systems theory is defined, albeit somewhat tentatively, as operating within com-

plex dynamic networks of contextual relations with an analogy to first and particularly second

order cybernetics. However, second order cybernetics with its focus on semantic transformations,

does not, I feel, have the analytic robustness to deal with structure to semantic transformations. For

example, a critique made by Hayle (Chapter 7) argues against the differential or discrimination

processes of Luhmann in favour of a connectionism to that world. This conflict would be rapidly

clarified by an understanding of the Peircean categories: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.

There, differentiation within Secondness is accepted as a vital determinant along with the

connectionism of Firstness and both are understood to be embedded within a formal or habit-

forming mediation of Thirdness. Equally, the hesitation by a few of the authors against accepting

this evolving formal memory of Luhmann, with its process of exclusion and enforced selection,

would be readily clarified by an understanding of both the habit-forming processes of PeirceanThirdness and the metareferential workings of the Aristotelian final and formal causes.

The two models examined in this volume agree that there is a separation between the internal

and the external realities and agree also in their opposition to the one-to-one decontextualized

correlation of these two realities. However, apart from this basic architecture, any further similari-

ties of processing the relations between this internal and external realm rapidly disappear. The

autopoietic model of Maturana and Varela operates as a self-organized and operationally closed

system, where a system will, as completely self-referential, self-reproduce its systemic properties

in reaction to its contact with the external world. This privileging of self-governing properties can

be understood as a legitimate attempt to counter the implied imperialism of direct control by the

external observer. The systemic world is understood to operate as a plurality of different yet hori-

zontally interacting autopoietically functioning systems. However, this rejection of a systemic hi-

erarchical structure, of verticality, viewing such within a political rather than an organic architec-

ture, ignores the realities of biological and chemical dynamics which, as complex systems, operate

within both horizontal and vertical networks of relations. To then define the Maturana-Varela hori-zontal plurality as also complex exhibits a misunderstanding of complexity theory. Plural or mul-

tiple systems are merely a statistical collation of beans in a bag. Genuine complex systems

operate within differential scales of codes of measurement, ranging from those with few to those

with large degrees of freedom and from few to large degrees of codal constraint. Importantly, these

codal processes operate within a range of spatial extensions for their codal properties and within a

range of different temporal values (Matsuno 1998). These multiple variables are networked in both

vertical and hierarchical relations and establish a complex system as not a statistical plurality but as



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a non-reducible relational system of differential scales of multiple forms of measurement or codi-

fication.

The Maturana-Varela system, with its rejection of hierarchies, its limited degree of freedom in

space and time, and its closure, operates as a mechanical system (Rosen 1991) and therefore,

cannot be understood as a complex system. Because of the closed self-referential nature of the

autopoietic system, no larger systemic forces, whether it be codification (as a referential or formal

measurement), or matter ( as the input of material energy), or the attraction of future constraints

(final cause), can affect the autopoietic system. The only causal force from the external realm that

can breach this order is the Newtonian mechanical force of mass or efficient cause. This closed

character of the autopoietic realm is critiqued in a number of papers in this volume, where the

attempt to diminish this isolation is answered by setting up a textual or dialogical process of media-

tion. However, this insertion of textuality with its focus on a transformative interpretive action is,

I feel, an inadequate attempt to deal with the mechanical problems of the autopoietic closure. The

text is, for one, a symbolic and specifically human form of mediation. However, as other papers in

this volume declare, we cannot exclude the biological realm from interpretive actions. Again,

Peircean semiotics with its vital category of a flexible and future-oriented mediate Thirdness, the

Platonic Maxwells Demon action of the demiurge, the Aristotelian force of potentia, and thescholastic force of dunamis, would all be able to contructively respond to these terminological

and methodological problems.

The other model, indeed the favoured model examined in this volume, is the functionalist

differential model of Luhmann and it is examined in a number of papers as a system of relational

discourse that operates within two modes - an operational level of memory and learning, and a

semantic level of description. This clear understanding that a systems interactions with the world

and therefore its interpretations of this world are relational and not merely self-referential and that

these relations function within two different processes of codification, would seem to overcome

the two problems of the Maturana-Varela closure and its horizontal monologue. On the one hand,

as noted, there is the observational mode, equipped to establish a memory, a system of stable eigen

values. This mode operates as an on-going process of constructing redundancies, enforcing selec-

tion and exclusion, and thereby functioning as a method for establishing form as a codal process

whose stable referential measurements are connected to its past measurements. This model contra-

dicts Maturanas closed self-referential system which remains trapped in its circularity and in abold move, opens the system to developing a flexible and emergent discourse. On the other hand,

there is the semantic level, a method for describing the observed, for making distinctions, which

are then moved into the recursive process of remembering these developing distinctions. But how

do these two processes operate? The problems with this model rest in a hesitation by its author and

particularly by its interpreters to recognize that these two processes operate within an architecture

that is necessarily structured and stratified. That is, the insistence on seeing functional differentia-

tion as operative only within the experience of the individual locates the interpretive semantic



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forces strictly within local and current spatiotemporal contingencies. But, to ignore that the other

process of memory, operating as a reference system for these local interpretations, must operate in

a different space and time, and must therefore be kept, as a code, formal and decontextualized,limits the analytic power of this model.

The fact is, these two Luhmann processes of an operational and a semantic level, must neces-

sarily operate on two different levels of measurement or codification (Taborsky 1997, 1998). A

one-level model cannot both describe and analyze itself at the same time. The rejection of hierar-

chical stratification as an operational architecture means that causality is confined within the codal

scales of the individual, which is to say, within codes that remain contextual and locally interpre-

tive and therefore, unable to forge a metareferential measurement of stable eigen values. Thisvolume of papers acknowledges the disparate processes but shows a limited understanding of the

architectural frame of a bileveled structure, of the dissimilar spatiotemporal processes of potential-

ity and actuality, and of the unique properties of Motion and Form, which were well developed

within the Aristotelian and the scholastic analyses, and within the Peircean semiotic architecture.

As such it presents a confined understanding of genuine complexity. Therefore, the volume is

unable to develop a solid and constructive critique of the codal problems of Luhmanns two proc-

esses and a two-tiered context of different scales of measurement

Essentially, this volume is an ambitious attempt to provide an alternative to the problems gen-

erated by the relativist isolationism of postmodernism. Systems theory, with its recognition that

relational processes are not isolated but operate within networks of entangled relations, its recogni-

tion that interpretation is developmental, exploratory and flexible, would seem a strong and con-

structive response to both the problems of the collapse of the modernist framework and the prob-

lems of postmodernism. However, to operate as a genuine alternative, systems theory must not

discard, as does postmodernism, all the analytic developments of our cognitive heritage but must

explore that heritage within a modern framework.

Edwina Taborsky

Bishops University,

Quebec, Canada

References

Luhmann, N. 1989.Ecological Communication, trans. J. Bednarz Jr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Luhmann, N. 1995. Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz Jr., Stanford: Stanford University Press

Matsuno, K. 1998. Dynamics of time and information in dynamic time,BioSystems, 46: 57-71

Maturana, H. and Varela, F. 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston:

Shambhala

1980.Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel

Peirce, Ch. S. 1931-35. Collected Papers. Eds. Ch. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, A. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

PressRosen, R. 1991.Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life, New York:

Columbia University Press

Taborsky, E. 1997. The Textual Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

1998. Architectonics of Semiosis, New York: St. Martins Press


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