Author: ContingencyStreet

Play: A Sociological Approach

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In their recent essay ‘Heterophony and Hyper-Responsibility’, Åkerstrøm Anderson and Knudsen present a sociological approach to play that is worth recording: A Gregory Bateson suggests that play is a special form of communication in which the message is that ‘these actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote’ (2000: 180). When children play-fight, they continually draw up a distinction between play-fighting and fighting. Thereby, they establish that a marked strike signifies the strike but does not signify that which a strike would signify. Bateson’s final and more precise formulation is, ‘These actions in which we now engage do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote’ (2000: 180). Thus, play represents a distinct communicative doubling machine. Play doubles the world so that we have a world of play and a real world, and the doubling takes place on the side of the play. Dirk Baecker (1999: 103) formulates it in this way: ‘In play, socialness is constituted by ways of …

Contingency and Double Contingency

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Here is a useful and brief description by Luhmann of the core concepts of ‘contingency’ and ‘double contingency’, taken from an essay entitled ‘Generalized Media and the Problem of Contingency’. A Contingency:  If I understand correctly the English term contingency in its present use, it has its core meaning in dependency and draws the attention primarily to the fact that the cause on which something depends performs itself a selection from other possibilities so that the contingent fact comes about in a somewhat chancy, accidental way. If we look into the theological and philosophical tradition of the term, our findings confirm this interpretation.[1] In scholastic philosophy the term contingens belonged to the theory of modal forms. Used to translate the Aristotelian ευδεχοϕυου (=possible) and mixed up with the classical Latin sense of accidens or eveniens, it was narrowed down to signify a special type of possibility i.e. ‘possibility not to be’.[2] This ‘possibility not to be’ was attributed to a world created by the unlimited will of God. Only a contingent world, as the nominalistic …

How Not to Criticise Social Theory

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There is no universal agreement about what the proper objectives of theory should be. Perhaps for that reason commentators can often be seen to criticise theories or theorists in ways that seem unfair. To assess a theory adequately it is necessary to consider what it is actually trying to achieve. With that in mind, Baert and Carreira da Silva have identified four common mistakes critics make when registering their dissatisfaction with a theory: 1. Explanatory Reductionism: the explanatory reductionist assumes that all theories are about explaining, or predicting social phenomena. That may be a common goal but it is not ubiquitous. Some theories aim to provide understanding rather than explanation. The authors talk about some theories designed to develop self-understanding: ‘they allow us to consider some of our presuppositions and to re-describe and assess our present societal constellation’. 2. Perspectivism: here the critic focuses on the perspective of the theory, that slice of social life it aims to describe (power, agency, values). The critic often implicitly suggests that there is no independent measure by which …

To Cybersemiotics through Bateson, Peirce and Luhmann

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This post introduces a very interesting presentation from Søren Brier, Professor for Semiotics of Information, Cognitive and Communication Science at Copenhagen Business School. It is entitled ‘Cyber(bio)semiotics: Transdisciplinary Through Bateson, Luhmann, and Peirce’. As you might expect from the title, Brier discusses the intellectual currents and developments that led to cybersemiotics. It is a little slow-moving, particularly at the start, but it is rich in content taking in the impact of Norbert Weiner, Gregory Bateson and Heinz von Foerster on cybernetics, information theory and general systems theory; the important concepts of autopoiesis and structural coupling from Maturana and Varela, Luhmann’s social systems theory which allows new approaches to communication, and Pierce’s biosemiotics. Apart from achieving its own aims, the presentation usefully (if partially) contextualises Luhmann’s work. Here is the bio Brier provides: I am an interdisciplinary researcher that has moved from an MA in biology (ecology and behavioral sciences) over a gold medal thesis in psychology (philosophy of ethology) both Copenhagen. U. through a PhD in philosophy of information sciences (Roskilde U.) after 10 year teaching …

Science, Objectivity and the Passion for Explaining

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In this essay Maturana negotiates several complex philosophical questions in a surprisingly accessible way. In it he answers three questions: What characterises cognitive constructivism? Why, under this view, is it not possible for science to achieve true objectivity? If this is so, why does science not slip into relativism? As ever, the term ‘science’ encompasses the social sciences as well. Maturana sees no justification for a cleavage between the two – certainly not the old distinction between quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Throughout, he considers these issues not as a philosopher but as a biologist reflecting on science as ‘a cognitive domain generated as a human biological activity’.   First, what kind of person is the scientist? What is the motivating force not only of the scientist, but the domain of science itself? For Maturana, the fundamental emotion that enlivens science, that determines it as a domain in which science takes place as a human activity, is curiosity; curiosity which emerges as a desire or passion for explaining. In this domain explanations are adequate – they …

Paradox of the Word

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Literature devoted to the medieval paradox is a fount of creativity and wit. This short piece considers two paradoxes of religious orthodoxy that have inspired writers through the ages, from medieval theologians, to seventeenth century Englishmen, to modern poets like Eliot interested in the metaphysical tradition. Both examples show the enjoyment their authors derived from the paradoxical nature of much religious dogma. Both dramatise the Incarnation, the teaching that ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’. St Thomas Acquinas presents this core doctrine of Christianity as a couplet in the vesper humn Pange Lingua: ‘Verbum caro panem verum Verbo carnem effict’ [Word became flesh and bread, Word made flesh] With this conceit we are presented with the self-referential autopoiesis at the heart of Christian teaching: the paradox of the Incarnation of the Word of God. Here we do not speak of God the Father or God the Holy Spirit, but the ‘second person’ God the Word. The Catholic mass still employs the words of God the Word (the reported speech of Christ from St …

Constructivism

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Cognitive constructivism of operationally closed systems is explained succinctly by Knorr Cetina: ‘Closed systems are systems which operate entirely within their own medium and machineries of world construction. An example is the brain, which the biology of cognition sees as informationally closed towards its environment. Perception, for example, is accomplished by the brain, not the eye, and the brain can only construe what it sees from signals of light intensity which arrive at the retina. In order to form a picutre of the nature of the source of these signals, the brain makes reference to its own previous knowledge and uses its own electro-chemical reactions. Phrased differently, in perception the brain only interacts with itself and not with an external environment. The brain reconstructs the external world in terms of internal states, and in order to accomplish this the brain ‘observes’ itself (Maturana and Varela, 1980). … Closed systems cannot build, with the environment of interest to them, a shared life-world. They lack the possibility of co-presence postulated by Schütz (1970) as an important feature …

Knowledge and Power

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In their book The Power of Scientific Knowledge Grundmann and Stehr ask two important questions: How does scientific knowledge become powerful in practice? What counts as knowledge for this purpose? This post presents some of the key points they highlight. The authors are not aiming to produce a general theory of knowledge application, but rather to provide ‘some historical-analytical tools and data for such an endeavour’. [It should be noted that they employ the more inclusive German understanding of the word ‘science’ which encompasses knowledge produced by the social sciences] What Counts as Scientific Knowledge? Harold Kroto, a British chemist and Nobel laureate, presents a simple answer to the question ‘what counts as knowledge’. Kroto argued that there are many theories but only a few that are true. True theories are facts that have been found to work in practice through experimental work. This explanation is not sufficient to explain how some knowledge becomes powerful while other knowledge is largely ignored. It presents only an ex post facto response to the question, taking no account …

Why do Theory?

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“Why do theory? You have to put so much into it and you get so little out of it.” Given the increasing drift towards empiricism and clinical studies, and the associated de-emphasising of theoretical research across the disciplines, this becomes an important question to consider (and what follows constitutes only a first attempt to provide some explanation) . Doubtless the first half of the equation is true. ‘Doing’ theory has always placed considerable burdens on the researcher. What is less often acknowledged, however, is the many additional burdens placed on the contemporary scholar – and not by the complexities inherent in a particular theory, but by the academy. What do I mean by this? Firstly, of course, any theory capable of describing all or some aspects of the very complex dynamics of modern society demands a great deal of our time and attention. This is perhaps particularly true of the kind of theory I am drawn to; theory that abandons the a priori. It always seems to me that the a priori maps out, prematurely, …

Autopoiesis

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Autopoiesis – from the Greek ‘poiesis’ meaning reproduction – means simply self-reproduction. The concept was developed by the evolutionary biologist Humberto Maturana to describe a system capable of reproducing itself using only its own elements; elements produced by the system itself. Luhmann redefines the concept so that it is capable of describing self referential systems. In the following short passage he states that autopoietic systems can be identified by: ‘… their ability to reproduce the elements of which they consist by using the elements of which they consist. Autopoietic systems are not only self-organising systems, able to form and change their own structure; they also produce their own elementary units, which the system treats as undecomposable, as consisting of an ultimate “substance”. Hence autopoietic systems are closed systems dependent on themselves for continuing their own operations. They define and specify their own boundaries. The environment, of course, remains a necessary condition for self-organisation and for autopoiesis as well, but it does not specify system states. It interpenetrates as “noise”, as irritation, as perturbation, and may or …