Inventing the Future in an Age of Contingency [1 ed.] 9781443892599, 9781443851879

Citation preview

Inventing the Future in an Age of Contingency

Inventing the Future in an Age of Contingency Edited by

Amber Narro, André Folloni, Andrea Pitasi and Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

Inventing the Future in an Age of Contingency Series: World Complexity Science Academy Book Series Edited by Amber Narro, André Folloni, Andrea Pitasi and Massimiliano Ruzzeddu This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Amber Narro, André Folloni, Andrea Pitasi, Massimiliano Ruzzeddu and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5187-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5187-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence ............................................. 1 Andrea Pitasi In Search of the Lost Model ...................................................................... 11 Alfredo L. Spilzinger Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology and its Implications for a Complex Approach to Law ............................... 26 André Folloni WCSA in the Emergent Supranational World Order ................................. 46 Andrea Pitasi and Giulia Mancini The Shaping and Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception ..................................................................................... 52 Edit Fabó A New Systems Tool for Predicting the Future in an Age of Contingency .......................................................................................... 66 Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication toward Cultural Agency......................................................................................... 74 Graziele Lautenschlaeger Basic Notions of the Systemic View ......................................................... 88 Janos Korn The Problem of Time and Evolution from the Perspective of Systemic Sociology ............................................................................. 124 JiĜí Šubrt The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity for the Understanding of Social Contingency ............................................................................. 141 Laura Appignanesi

vi

Table of Contents

Innovation between Economy and Culture.............................................. 163 Massimiliano Ruzzeddu The Sociology of Risk as Criminal Political Support of Negligent Crimes and their Impact on Economic Criminal Law ............................. 180 Michelle Gironda Cabrera Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law................ 187 Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero The Place of Our Earth in the Universe and Turning-Points in its Life ................................................................................................. 203 Ralovich Béla Applied Systemic Approach and Vision for Strategic Business Consulting ............................................................................................... 210 Rok Bukovsek Contributors ............................................................................................. 221

PRESENTATION: TIME AS SYSTEMIC CONVERGENCE ANDREA PITASI

1. Prologue While discussing some papers at the 2012 WCSA conference in Vienna, I noticed a strange phenomenon: systemic scholars were quoting Heidegger more and more, downsizing at a very simplistic and misleading level his thought which brilliantly describes the limits of the systemic vision as it took shape between 1950 and about 1980. The systemic vision of the 1980s, which is rather obsolete among scholars, is currently a dynamic trend in public opinion which is increasingly using terms such as selfreferential, system, and complex but in decontextualized and often misleading ways. This terminological misuse and the misleading interpretation of Heidegger’s thought leads to a self-defeating presentation of the systemic approach. This self-defeating attitude clearly emerges when systems theory copes with time in general and the concept of future in particular. That is why, two years later in Budapest, the 2014 WCSA conference was titled INVENTING THE FUTURE IN AN AGE OF CONTINGENCY.

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence

2

THE SYSTEMIC APPROACH PARADIGM SHIFTS PARADIGM (P) PARADIGM (P) P1) Whole/Part

KEY AUTHORS Ross Ashby Nobert Wiener Talcott Parsons Ludwig von Bertalanffy Anthony Stafford Beer Ervin Laszlo

P2) System/ Environment

Heinz von Forester Niklas Luhmann

P3) Autopoiesis

Humberto Maturana Francisco Varela Niklas Luhmann

P4) Enormous Constellation System

Richard Normann Daniel Dennett (2004) Niklas Luhmann

KEY CONCEPTS Culture, control, personality, integration, homeostasis stability, wholeness, structures, parts Functional differentiation system, communication, order from noise Self-production of inner components, rhizome, complexity, functional equivalent fluctuation, horizon Flucting constellation, autopoietic reconfiguration, memetic complexity, catalog, global platform, enormity

Table 1 – The systemic paradigm shifts (Pitasi in Pitasi-Mancini, 2012)

Andrea Pitasi

3

The past systemic paradigms which I call P1, P2, and P3 and summarize above, had severe problems in coping with time, especially with the idea of future. P1 simply meant future as traditional reproduction of the past through the present: cultural and strongly controlled reproduction; no relevant change. This vision was very rigid and, in epistemological terms, ontologically rooted. P2 and P3 converge from this point of view, linking Luhmann’s communication coding with Foucualt’s order of discourse which describes time and future unspecific as a rigidly controlled deontological discourse which must be reproduced coherently and consistently but with no ontological or empirical implications. History can be rewritten, so to speak, and the future mirrors the rewritten version of history. In P4, time becomes a systemic, convergent spiral. It implies radically different paradigm shifts, toolkits, and working styles for the systemic sciences applied to social, legal, and economical studies. For example, in terms of working styles, sociological works can be divided into relatively few categories. 1. Qualitative locally based works. They are rather focused on small-scale ethnographical information and participant observation. Probably the most famous and exemplary sociological research of this kind is Whyte’s “Street Corner Society,” (1993) 2. Quantitative middle-range works attempting to balance theory and empirical research. Robert K. Merton’s Theory and Social Structure is the masterpiece which embodies this working style at its peak. These working styles did not have great generalization standards. Merton’s key work implicitly framed the problem of generalization when he considered the systematization of the most relevant theoretical-empirical findings to expand their range. The matter of comparison also emerged dramatically through the growing internationalization of what Elias called the civilization process. 3. Comparative Sociology, both diachronically and synchronically, emerged as a vision key to expanding the sociological horizons beyond the specific territorial and time limitations which are features of the two other working styles. Comparative Sociology generated high quality contributions to compare “entities” (social and institutional ones). This working style implied very broad but neat and simple scenarios in which the entities were compared and produced very wide but simple scenarios

4

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence

in which complex interconnections were rather weak. Variety increases by hybridization and then comparisons become very unlikely. The convergence concept in the age of complexity scenarios is not a mere socio-cultural convergence. What is convergence then? Before answering this question, one further step in mapping sociological working styles is required. 4. General sociological theory, a great stream focused on the epistemological construction of conceptual and semantic systematization of scientific knowledge by converging the key foundations and findings of interdisciplinary studies. No convergence would ever be possible without this kind of working style. This fourth working style was also the incubator of systemic shifts from P1 to P4. What sociological working styles are effective? Observing the history of sociology in terms of working styles, sociological works can be divided into relatively few categories which I described briefly above. We can expand on them as follows. 1. Qualitative locally based works. These works are not characterized by wide theoretical frameworks, historical depth or huge amounts of data; they are rather focused on small-scale ethnographical information and participant observation. Probably the most famous and exemplary sociological research of this kind is Whyte’s “Street Corner Society” but Middletown (Lynd & Lynd, 1929) was probably the very first champion. These are craft-ship works, certainly fascinating and intriguing even if at a very low generalization level and scientifically not very reliable or reproducible. Visual ethnography methods introduced since the end of the 1970s were an attempt to develop more valid and reliable procedures (Grady, 2001 and 2008). 2. Quantitative, middle-range works attempting to balance theory and empirical research in a kind of circular and mutual double check between theory and fieldwork. Robert King Merton’s Theory and Social Structure (1949) is the masterpiece, embodying the best of this working style. Neither of these working styles had great generalization standards, especially the former. They were both focused on the territorial and time limitation of the research subject. Merton’s key work (1949) implicitly framed the problem of generalization when he considered the systematization of the most relevant theoretical-empirical findings to expand range. The

Andrea Pitasi

5

matter of comparison also emerged dramatically through the growing internationalization of what Elias called the civilization process (Elias, 1969 and 1982). 3. Comparative Sociology, both diachronically and synchronically, emerged as a vison key to expanding the sociological horizons beyond the specific territorial and time limitations which are features of the two other working styles. Comparative Sociology generated high quality contributions to compare “entities” (social and institutional), for example Goudsblom’s writings (Goudsblom, 1994). Nevertheless, this working style implied very neat and simple scenarios in which the entities were compared and thus very wide but simple scenarios in which complex interconnections were rather weak. That is why the editors of the superb Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology wrote pointedly: “If, as globalization seems to have implied, there were to be eventual social and cultural convergence in the world, comparative sociological research would wane as there would be fewer distinct entities to compare” (Asaki et al., 2014: XII). Be aware that globalization does not imply fewer entities: globalization implies fewer distinct and neatly separated entities which in the past shaped the stereotypes of the taken-for-granted world (Berger & Luckmann, 1995). Globalization implies an increasing density and variety of entities but these are recombinational hybridizations (genetically and mimetically) which express, on one side an increased variety and density of entities, and, on the other, the vanishing of “pure,” specific local entities. Variety increases by hybridization and then comparisons become very unlikely; the convergence concept in the age of complexity scenarios is not a mere socio-cultural convergence. 4. A fourth working style is general sociological theory which is a significant stream of work focused on the epistemological construction of conceptual and semantic systematization of scientific knowledge by letting the key foundations and findings of interdisciplinary studies converge. No convergence would ever be possible without this kind of working style, the masterpieces of which are Luhmann’s “Social Systems” (1995) and “Theory of Society” (2012 and 2013). What is convergence then? In the theoretical paragraph, I will introduce the metaconvergence spiral to answer this. However, before

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence

6

entering the next theoretical stage, one further step in mapping sociological working styles is required.

2. The theoretical challenge: Rethinking systems convergently

Figure 1. The Metaconvergence Spiral

In the metaconvergence spiral shown in Figure 1, there are six platforms (coded in the blue/dark areas of the spiral and listed top down in the figure): o o o o o o

Convergent world organization Ring singularity Language Triffin’s world currency Memetics Mediatech & ICT (can also be described as digitalization)

Andrea Pitasi

7

and five types of convergent catalogs coded in the white areas listed top down as follows: A. B. C. D. E.

Ethological Copies (EC) Symbolic Multipliers (SM) Functional Equivalents (FE) Innovations (IN) Reconfigurations (RE)

The metaconvergence of platforms and catalogs is not a mere dialectical synthesis between a thesis (platform) and an antithesis (catalog); the metaconvergence spiral is rather an increasing dematerialization and differentiation process redesigning and reconfiguring the dynamic and unstable flows among EC/SM/FE/IN/RE, in which the increasing EC density implies inflation of copies and deflation of value, and the RE variety describes the opposite side of the bifurcation shaping four key scenarios of high/low density linked with high/low variety as follows: HD/ HV HD/LV HV/ LD LV/LD Moreover, the variety-density link mirrors the internal differentiation coding of the platform expansion. For example, currency platforming is binary coded with institutional sovereignty and language platforming is coded with vernacularization. The vernacularization process is currently decreasing (Cavalli Sforza, 2001) just like the amount of currencies representing sovereign entities; the Euro is a simple example of how many currencies disappeared in recent decades (the German Mark, the Dutch Guilder, the Spanish Peseta, the Italian Lira and so on). Other currencies continue to exist (mostly in Africa and South America) but they are rather irrelevant, and further currencies are satellites of just one, stronger currency (the Australian, Canadian and Hong Kong currencies are named dollars). The convergence of currencies and its turbulence can be explained though some methodology fractal principles (Mandelbrot, 2006).

3. Research design and methodology The hardest challenge for non-systemic scholars, and for public-opinion scholars trying to understand complex systems, is the ambivalence between complexity ontology and its implicit nihilism (Montuori, 1998). This ambivalence can be solved with a little help from epistemological creativity (Montuori, 2013). Our methodological key question is what are we conceptualizing, classifying, assessing, and measuring when we

8

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence

conceptualize, classify, assess, and measure complex systemic trends? First of all, we are talking about unstable, nonlinear, turbulent flows, not about clearly shaped entities: moods in public opinion, winds, earthquakes, stock exchange trends, and viral pandemics share the same epistemology, methodology, and divergence at the theoretical and technical levels, although functional equivalents are pretty evident (Wilczek, 2008). The evolutions of sociological thinking and of social global change have always been interconnected since sociological research was essentially qualitative and “local” meant communitarian, while “macro” meant “national.” Then the internationalization trend elicited by the key role of comparative sociology turned “national” into “local,” “communitarian” into “meaningless environmental noise,” and “macro” into “global.” But global implied a key paradigm shift: from thinking sociologically as thinking comparatively into thinking sociologically as thinking convergently. The metaconvergence spiral I present in this paper is the added value of this writing toward a convergent systemic thought.

4. Time as systemic convergence Time is no longer to be considered a line, nor a circle, nor the trajectory of an arrow. The social construction of collapsed space and time in a single point, as hypothesized by Kandinsky’s painting, is also largely obsolete, depending on Moore’s Effect. The point is a self-expanding globe. How does it expand through spiral-like trends as described above? The spiral requires going beyond the myth of rational prediction, as expressed in some naive macroeconomics or sociological research. Construction and the invention of time in general, and of the future in particular, play a much bigger role than “forecasts.” Spiral is an invention, a construction no more no less than Schumpeter’s, Kuznets’ or Kondratiev’s cycles. Thus the spiral is shaped through macrofacts and macrotrends but with no illusion to be an objectivity or the independent observer model.

5. Epilogue: Rethinking systemically In the world where everyday life is taken for granted, many operations evolve sequentially. For example, the TV news lists breaking stories but is seldom able to present the links among them. Many people write down their daily checklist but they rarely set this list in a wider and more strategic and systemic vision. These TV producers realized Heidegger’s key lesson in life: We live in a limitless evolutionary horizon.

Andrea Pitasi

9

Humans usually need operational limits for practical reasons. For example, they switch the mobile off to rest or have a nap. The misleading phenomenon is, metaphorically speaking, that these people expect the world to stop when they sleep and that if they become sleepwalkers, the world will go slower and will be more easily controlled. A wide systemic vision (P2, P3, and P4) is aware that systemic macrotrends and shifts do not have much to do with human-based micro action. The micro search for limits (often camouflaged by security, safety, and stability) as a kind of naive attempt to stop time and be in an eternal present is a very common human attitude. Nevertheless, our planet evolved through the ages, destroying and creating new species in a non-stop dynamic. The same thing in politics: If we compare the world map in 1948 and 2015, we can easily understand evolution in macrotrends. Heidegger’s pop lesson (the one public opinion usually takes for granted) is that life is aimed at fulfillment (Vollendung), and when a life or an age is fulfilled, then there is a new turning point (Kehre). In this way, evolution and time look like cycles or circles. This is not what Heidegger meant. Vollendung and Kehre are steps on a path (Unterweg) which is limitless and endless: Limitless evolution is open to the possible, defined as “Gegnet” by Heidegger. Gegnet implies a wider opening and a more turbulent scenario which powerfully attracts toward/rejects from the convergent spiral of time.

References Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. (1995). Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning. Gueterloh: Verlag Bertelsmann Stiftung. Bielsa E., Casellas, A. and Verger, A. (2014). Homecoming as Displacement. Current Sociology. 62 (1), 63–80. Cavalli Sforza, L.L. (2001). Genes, Peoples and Languages. New York: North Point Press. Eibl-Eibelssfeldt, I. (1987). Grundriss der vergleichenden Verhaltensforschung. Muenchen: Piper GmbH & Co. —. (1984). Biologie des menschlichen Verhaltens. Muenchen: Piper GmbH & Co. Elias, N. (1969). The Civilizing Process, Vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1982). The Civilizing Process, Vol. II. Oxford: Blackwell. Emirbayer, M. (1997). Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. The American Journal of Sociology. 103 (2), 281–317. Goudsblom, J. (1994). Fire and Civilization. London: Penguin.

10

Presentation: Time as Systemic Convergence

Grady J. (2011). Numbers into Pictures: Visualization in Social Analysis. In Margolis E. & Pauwels, L. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods (pp. 494–529). London: Sage. Grady, J. (1998). Visual Sociology at the Cross roads. FQS. 3 (9). —. (2001). Becoming a Visual Sociologist. Sociological Imagination. 38 (2–3), 83–119. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. (2012–2013). Theory of Society, Vol. II. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mandelbrot, B. (2006). The Misbehaviour of Markets. New York: Basics Books. Merton R K. (1949). Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press. Montuori, A. (2013). Complexity and transdisciplinarity: reflections in theory and practice. In World Futures 69, 200–230. —. (1998). Complexity, Epistemology and the Challenge of the Future. Academy of Management Proceedings, K1–K8. Lynd R.S. Lynd, H.M. (1929). Middletown. A Study in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Horcourt, Brace & Company. Melucci, A. (1995). Passaggio d’epoca. Milano: Feltrinelli. Merton, R.K. (1949). Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Pitasi, A. & Mancini G. (Eds.) Systemic Shifts in Sociology , LAP, Saarbruecken 2012. Sasaki, M. Goldstone, J. Zimmermann, E. (2014). Concise Encyclopaedia of Comparative Sociology. Boston-Leyden: Brill. Wilczek, F. (2008). The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces. London-New York: Basics Books. Whyte, W.F. (1993). Street Corner Society (fourth edition). Chicago: University Press.

IN SEARCH OF THE LOST MODEL ALFREDO L. SPILZINGER

It all started a few years ago while I was sharing a “pastis” with my wife in Café de Flore, at number 172 Boulevard St. Germain in Paris. I was sitting at the same table at which, back in the 1930s, Jean-Paul Sartre had gathered his intellectual friends to discuss man, his reality, and despair. Having gone through colleges in various countries studying accounting, economics, finance, sociology, epistemology, and quantum dynamics, the discovery of complex science had shone a light into my intellectual life. I understood what I was looking for. That was to understand man in his permanent mutation and in his being an instrument of change that would allow him to survive in a highly competitive world. And to understand that at that same table used by Sartre, it was as if I could share discussions with people that had left a very special mark on mankind. And just as in that labyrinth of speeches by famous people, I started to be a spectator and transcriber of discussions between those minds that have brightened us in recent centuries. Those discussions were trying to undress the man living in his active solitude and fighting for his survival in an organization that we came to call democracy, an imperfect system that, until now, we have not been able to replace with anything better. Democracy gave birth to capitalism, its beloved son, to manage the resources of mother earth and distribute them, not equally, between the nearly seven billion people who now populate this strange satellite spinning wildly around the sun. I did not look for complexity. On the contrary, complex science met me in Santa Fe Associates, where I was able to interact with very special people who had been working in that area since 1940.

12

In Search of the Lost Model

And finally, I learned that every complex matter must be analyzed in four essential stages of implementation.

To understand a complex system of any organization requires establishing its theory or philosophy (be it a country or a simple home), a philosophy summarizing why we were interacting and what we want to achieve with that organization, setting values and objectives. That is defining its culture, consistent in the long term. From that defining step, an array of actions and objectives that must be implemented to meet the defined culture develops. A model that, while it may be amended, usually mutates following the beat and rhythm of the life of the organization. In this model, we can write the rules that will be the dimensions within which we will move to implement the model and this can change as the need arises. And finally, the behavior of their agents will give feedback or options for modifying the model or the rules to allow those actors to live comfortably within the model. But we cannot write rules directly from the philosophy without going through the model What happens in the complex world of the twenty-first century, is that in everyday life, we are suffering a reality that is not consistent with those principles.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

13

Modern man was born some 150,000 years ago when he started to emerge from the Boblos caverns in Africa to begin a journey toward Europe bordering the Mediterranean at a rate of one kilometer per year. He was fighting for his life, first against animals – for defense, food and shelter. Then he had to fight against other men to prevent the theft of what he had attained. Fighting was, thus, his measure of life. He was born and developed in a forest that, as Maturana says, is autopoietic. It was self-organized and self-reproduced where no general manager, human resources director, or finance manager existed. Large trees share the land with fungi, with roses and with shrubbery. Elephants, tigers, and birds share their surroundings with butterflies and insects. And everything seems to continue living without special rules, just taking care to avoid becoming food for others. And so was man’s life, from its earliest steps, on a course to finally reach the longed-for “demos – kratos.” That is the original Greek definition for democracy, the government for “the many,” for the benefit of “the many,” and to make life easier. Democracy started in the eighteenth century to bring peace to man’s permanent fight. And that “demos kratos,” once installed, created a special “oikos – nomos” (Greek for the organization of the house). Democracy was intended to be the best form of government, creative in its organization, able to implement an economic system that gave birth to that beloved son: capitalism. The system appeared to be very clear. But it was necessary to build up teams of leaders (“the few”) to manage and organize cities, countries, and regions so as to fulfill the mandate of their constituents, “the many.” But a different reality was uncovered. It was necessary to define how to choose “the few” that were to govern “the many.” And there, the Greek polis was enthroned in the system as an applicative form of politics. The organization of the city (polis), the nation, or the region demanded a team of “the few” to receive the mandate of “the many” to govern. The group of the few understood that they could govern “the many,” requiring simply an exchange of powers. That exchange consisted of promising “the many” not to continue fighting and to assure their safety from the otherness and from the risks of

14

In Search of the Lost Model

nature, such was their role in democracy. In exchange, “the few” asked “the many” to give them their votes. Then they would not fight anymore. In the end, it was just a problem of set economies and it was necessary to evaluate this process under the set theory. But “the many” were born and evolved, based on their epigenetic principles, to continue fighting. And they could not be defeated by defending something. So in this interchange of powers, “the few” agreed to leave to “the many” a stage in which they could continue fighting: the market. They would have said: Fight for survival in that space and download in that scenario all your existential adrenaline.

And this was adjusted to the existing reality. “The few” began to rule “the many,” and the latter started to fight in the economic field. But those “few” also needed additional resources to continue governing and also to survive. They needed financial resources, structured at the beginning in the form of taxes, but they needed more support. “Few sets” found benefit in the alliances with the power sets of the many with whom they also interchanged power for money.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

15

Thus, coalitions were formed among “the few” and selected sets of “the many” to conduct the whole structure while in the meantime, the many struggled to survive. The detailed terms of association between “the few” and associated sets is in the most remote corner of the lost secrets. Some of “the many” survived, others did not. But for “the few” and their new associates, that did not matter. They survived permanently, transferring power among themselves. That power is what the few had to direct toward “the many.” And this system does not work, anywhere in the world. In the early twentieth century, some intellectuals tried to implement a new direction for this kind of government. The theories of Karl Marx gained some support in a number of countries. Communism. The aim was to substitute individual decisions taken by “the many” for centralized decisions taken by the government, “the few,” to convince the people that state capitalism was more ethical than capitalism in the hands of “the few” and their associated sets. But that experiment ended in resounding failure with the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989. No capitalism so conceived can succeed either in private hands or in those of the state. In all cases, “the many” remain outsiders in every distribution of income. And, even worse, they have the least freedom. If one day a plane crashed into the Himalayas with 500 passengers on board, certainly the security forces would alert the world. If, instead of one aircraft, there were ten in the same day, which would mean 5,000 people dead, the alarm would be even more desperate. And if that tragic fact should occur every day for a month, the United Nations, NATO, and the world would assign security forces to find a solution. However, in Africa, 5,000 children a day (approximately one every 17 seconds) die from diseases like malaria. Because the few have other reasons to be concerned, the problem lies in defining how re-election could be achieved at the end of their mandates and how the few will transmit their power to partners or in some cases to apparent enemies. Among “the few,” “enemy” is just a political word without a precise sense because, at the end, they need each other.

16

In Search of the Lost Model

The absence of complex thinking has reduced communities to deterministic and mechanistic procedures. We push a button at one end, and a product is automatically produced at the other end. In other words, you give me votes, and I will pay you with services to protect your life.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

17

Meanwhile, economists in the world have tried to make us understand, through complicated equations, what will be the reactions of “the many” in a special place they call “the market.” They believe their speculation could help “the many” to act in their daily fight. Their way of thinking is: The market already exists, so start fighting accordingly, with our assumptions on marginal propensity, to demand and supply curve declination, or statistics on what happened in the recent past.

Big mistake! In the first place, the market did not pre-exist as an independent entity. It is just a space in which transactions take place, one by one. The market is a way to transliterate transaction. It starts to appear and to be active with each transaction and disappears at the end of each transaction. It is not plane space but a curve like the Einsteinian cosmological space and, therefore, suffers from the attraction forces of those who move each transaction in a certain orientation, different from that of any other transactions. When someone says something works on the financial markets, he is tremendously confused. There is no such market. There exist operations and interactions. Once a deal is closed, the market disappears. The second issue is that people are living, original, unique and unrepeatable entities and cannot be considered as variables of equations. Those experts did not consider people to be complex entities whose reactions do not fit into an equation in the style used by Ludwig Boltzmann, for example. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, when Boltzmann wrote of his discoveries in the physical area, he explained every event within the physical mechanic area through mathematical equations. And he wrote hundreds of those equations. The intellectual community in different specialties entered into a vortex that we call “bolzmannmania.” No thesis or conclusion could be effective in the field of science or economics if it did not have equations to support them. People became, for them, fixed numbers of integrals and derivatives that would mark the

18

In Search of the Lost Model

economic sense of any interaction with the rest of “the many” and in some cases with “the few.” Beyond those equations, 5,000 children continue dying every day in Africa, and thousands of Latin American and Southeast Asian people remain below the poverty line. They were not taken into account by those equations. They could not precisely measure an end to the poverty of “the many,” for instance. How many is many? If 23% of Bolivia's population is living on less than $2 a day, the IMF says they survive below the poverty line. And it is a large percentage. But in Mexico, that figure is 10.3% of the population. That small? Because in Tanzania, it is 89.9% of the population, and, in Italy, 8.7%. The overall average of 2.7 billion people worldwide who survive below the poverty line represents 38.6% of the world population living on less than $2 a day, while more than 850,000 people (1.25 % of the earth's population) cannot be fed. Each year, more people are dying due to hunger than malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV combined. For analysts, it is just a percentage of the total population, another figure. But for those who die, the ratio is 100%. We are obviously speaking of fuzzy boundaries again because human beings are not numbers but complex living entities, original, unique, and unrepeatable Meanwhile, who analyzes these figures and prescribes austerity measures? The general manager of the IMF earns an annual income of $565,000 (plus other side benefits like air fares, cars, drivers, secretaries, and the like) free of any tax. That is something like $2,150 per working day. Meanwhile, “the many” are exposed to the solitude of his daily struggle just because countries have not designed economic policies capable of defining a model that would end these inequalities. Has there ever been such a model? The philosophy of democratic countries has been clear, but the model for defining their application does not exist, at least for the consequences we warn against.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

19

Instead, rules were written, but without a supporting model behind them, “the few” have decided upon perhaps the worst option—writing rules generated directly from philosophy, but without a model that could be generally agreed upon with the many. It is time for “the many” to defend their existence. Because, quoting Grossberg, we might ask ourselves: “What if we dared to play God?”

I have been discussing with the scientist Eshel Ben Jacob, an influential figure in establishing the now rapidly evolving Physics of Living Systems (Biological Physics and Physical Biology) disciplines, how bacteria are evolving in such a way that they can communicate among themselves when danger is approaching. In summary, if those bacteria, as Ben Jacob assures, can self-organize into hierarchically structured colonies of 109 to 1,012 bacteria, each utilizing a great variety of biochemical communication agents such as simple molecules, polymers, peptides, complex proteins, genetic material, and also “cassettes of genetic information” such as plasmids and viruses, are we prevented from doing the same? Inside our organism, 100 billion bacteria are currently living. It is a number several times bigger than the number of cells in our body. So if we do not want or we are not allowed to behave like a prokaryotic, is it because we are not duly prepared to win the life battle? We need to understand that this symphony that we run together is unfinished. There is an absent model, like Schubert’s Symphony, which lacks a final movement. The sets of living beings must necessarily understand that they operate within complex scenarios, and our research gives us three new spaces to consider:

In Search of the Lost Model

20

1. Interaction protocols. The way to understand received interactions is to understand properly what to do and to achieve maximum effort in doing so. If, instead of considering ourselves just as actors working alone within a set of many, we understand that we are a set of nodes in that network, the value of the whole effort working together is much greater. It is like a fisherman’s net. Once a node is broken, many of the fish will escape through the hole, and the effort will be the same with the result lower than if the node of that net had been safe. Those who still appreciate equations could say that the value of a set of nodes on a network is based on Einstein's relativity: Interaction=mc2 But in this case, the mass which is the network of nodes is m=2n, where n equals the number of nodes in the set. Therefore: Value of the net N=2n (299 752 458 m/s)2 (if we discard the moment c2 as a constant k)

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

21

Value of Interaction=2 n . k If we compare, as an example, a network of 120 nodes with a value of one point each, by the time they interact alone, the total value of the said network would be 120. But the value, if acting as a set of 120 nodes, would be=1.329 x 1036 (i.e. 1329 followed by 33 zeros). Therefore, the difference between acting individually (which would give an output of 120 units) would become 1.107 x 1034 (i.e. 1107 followed by 31 zeros) that is 11,070,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than 120 points.

Why then do “the many” act as small individual groups, instead of firing our synapses, intertwined and at the same time? To paraphrase Frank Rosenblatt, we are losing the big opportunity to fire two shots of synapses and, by doing so, produce more than double the value proportional to war which produces only a single shot. We have applied the perceptron concept created by Rosenblatt just for brain connections, to human interaction and the way to gain more value from them. The most important matter to be taken into consideration is that the space in which we interact with it is not just plane space. It is a round space. Therefore, when we interact in certain mode, the power of that interaction arrives larger at its destination. That is the reason why a network action is so different to individual actions.

22

In Search of the Lost Model

In the above graphic, we can demonstrate that the X0 – X1 line of action arrives with double effect and that 2X1 arrives at its destination as 4X0. The Einstein space definition has changed all our concepts of how cases may affect third parties. And this failure to achieve more profit with the same effort occurs simply because there is no model that allows us to produce interaction as a network. Nobody cares if “the many” have that possibility. 2. Moreover, every living being generates for itself a metaprogram filtering interconnections received from abroad, decoding them according to their own epigenesist. And considering that metaprogram with fuzzy logic intelligence, we could say that, by the time a person receives instructions to do or to understand something, that filter is negative. It is because interaction protocols have predetermined a different interpretation of that synapse. When Iran states that the country only needs to enrich uranium for medical and energy production purposes, the community concludes instead that Iran wants to produce nuclear weapons. When Hamas preaches peace, the international community interprets this as them needing time to launch more missiles against Israel. When Russia states that it recognizes the application of peoples’ self-determination, the community understands that indeed Russia wishes to take over the territory of Crimea. When the USA provides $3 billion in compensation to emerging countries for effects of climate change, the community understands that the USA will itself continue to emit carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. When an Argentine economy minister says that the peso will not be devalued against the US currency, every Argentine understands that it is time to go to buy dollars because a devaluation will occur in the near future.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

23

3. To try to design the model, we must apply systemic breakdown, a deconstruction (in the terms used by Jacques Derrida) of what exists but without breaking either the whole or the parts. It refers to unbundling the parts to analyze how components interact with other parties. This detailed analysis will certainly reveal the changes necessary in the model architecture to get the quality we require. It is definitely an evolution rather than a revolution. We must be sure that the model will defend the people philosophy and make the necessary architectural decisions. Once discovered, those qualities could rebuild the model and make it work properly. The task is not easy. But nothing is easy when it comes to complex systems. Trying to summarize in a few pages, twenty years of research is a complicated task, especially when it comes to complexity. What I can say is that we live at an incomplete stage. The Greek “demos kratos” has enabled a revaluation of rights. But these rights are violated in the economic area. “The few” still defend their perennial rights, while “the many” are waiting for a new holistic approach enabling them to ascertain the missing model, the one that could count with the consensus of “the many.”

24

In Search of the Lost Model

The journey through the unfinished symphony that is developed in the book defending my thesis has allowed me to introduce myself through musical instruments in the space of interaction.

And in this journey, I want to emphasize the need to reconcile ourselves with otherness, those beings who go unnoticed because nobody looks at them, avoiding the fact that we are all “the other.” And we must remember that we exist because someone recognizes us as parts. If we accept the Biblical stories as a record of human knowledge, then God finished the earth in seven days. But we wonder what happened to Him on the eighth day? Has He disappeared? Has He died, as Nietzsche said? I personally think that He is sitting in the front row of a theater where we, the characters, enter the scene stage left, where we start to recite parts that nobody has written. Therefore, we improvise speech all the time. In that sense, we have to interact with other similar characters who do not know either how the play started but, even worse, how it will end. All of us know that our time on stage is limited and we will be definitively leaving stage right. But God is still seated on the first row, admiring how we design the parliamentary model, because that it is our own responsibility.

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

25

It is, therefore, necessary to consider that if we had a model to make our time on stage easier, we would be creating a better way. For all of us, that is the real purpose of the Greek oikos nomos, the economy, as we call it today. If we fail to design that model, we shall not be fulfilling the object of our lives on the earth. And as Professor Andrea Pitasi expressed in his preface to my book, always very pleasant, my words could generate a Renaissance, because, having worked twenty years on this matter, I have tried to cover our complex world and its implications for the economic life. But it was necessary to support my thesis. No more equations. But instead a more complex adaptive systems-based approach to resolve our daily lives. And with such an object, I have tried to show the need to reduce inequality between “the few” and “the many,” using complex instruments to play a complex musical score just to leave a better world to those who come after us.

PIERRE DELATTRE’S CONTRIBUTION TO CONTEMPORARY SYSTEMIC EPISTEMOLOGY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR A COMPLEX APPROACH TO LAW ANDRÉ FOLLONI

It is quite common to find references to the “system of law” or the “legal system” in specialized literature. Similarly, it is common to find authors who refer to the “complexity” of the legal system and who note that law is a complex system. When this occurs, however, the terms “system” and “complexity” are not commonly used in any sense other than that of everyday language. “System” is used in the sense of a set of elements with a certain structural unity and harmony. “Complex” is employed in the sense of complicated, intricate, and difficult. Because of the terms’ carefree usage, there are doctrinal texts that, considering the complexity of the legal phenomena, recommend a reductive procedure: law should be isolated through the exclusive study of legal norms. This reductionist isolation would be a necessary condition for understanding a complex system such as the legal one. It should be noted that reduction would be a condition of its comprehension and, therefore, a condition of the possibility of the science of law. However, in recent decades, something called complexity science has developed from the study of complex systems and the qualities these systems often present. There is already a relatively solid theoretical body of work on complexity in systems theory in fields such as physics, biology, computer science, sociology, and others. In law, however, a body of work is still in its infancy. Complexity science emerged from a scientific revolution that shook some of the foundations of normal science, when the latter proved to be partially incapable of dealing with complex systems, notably complex adaptive systems (CAS). Curiously, one of the crucial points that demonstrate the failure of the reductionist paradigm is that the reductive

André Folloni

27

method proves to be inadequate for understanding complex systems. Today, we know that trying to isolate a complex system from its environment for study purposes can be a serious error. There are various reasons for the misconception of reductionist analysis. One is the finding, now trivial, that this isolation breaks the chain of interactions and retroactions responsible for the system’s emerging qualities, i.e. those properties that only emerge when the whole is taken together. To separate is to eliminate the emergence and, thus, to lose the emergent quality that should be understood. What remains is incomprehension, non-science. Note the opposition: reduction, in many cases, prevents understanding and therefore prevents the science of complex systems, including law. While many lawyers continue to argue that the scientific method should be reductionism, given the complexity of the legal system, most scientists in other fields claim the opposite: given the complexity of a system, the scientific method often cannot be reductionism. Complex systems theory is, so to speak, an ontology, since it studies what these systems are like and how they behave. Studying these systems, however, is problematic and raises questions of foundation, evoking properly epistemological inquiries on how these systems should be studied. There are thus complex systems theories and, side by side, an epistemology of complexity, with all the variations and uncertainties typical of a (perhaps) still pre-paradigmatic science. I believe that, in law, there are three interconnected paths of study. There is a theoretical path. Complexity is an explanation of how complex systems function, particularly adaptive ones: how they are formed, how the complexities emerge from relatively simple interactions, how the agents of a system interact with their environment, how patterns emerge, and so on. In particular, the peculiarities of law as a CAS, its analogies with other systems, can contribute to a better understanding of legal complexity and its relationship to the socioeconomic environment. There is an epistemological path. When science began to deal with complex systems, it perceived the limitations of linear, reductionist, and disciplinary thinking. This led to the development of studies that suggested ways of thinking and understanding that were suitable for confronting complex systems, including adaptive ones and, more broadly, the complexity of the reality that surrounds us. Scientific thinking became committed to falsifiability, interdisciplinarity, the examination of general laws and particular situations, randomness, nonlinearities, and emergences.

28

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

There is, finally, a regulatory path. Theories of complexity may help achieve a more secure degree of scientific legitimacy to aid in drafting legal norms that operate in the socioeconomic environment and that possess sufficient effectiveness to contribute to the objectives usually determined in the Constitutions. One of authors who best understood the epistemological problems raised by the study of complex systems was Pierre Delattre. This article examines the reflections that Delattre recorded, a few years before he died, in his book Théorie des systèmes et épistémologie.

1. Pierre Delattre Pierre Delattre was born in 1926 and died in 1985. He was a French biologist and physicist. He founded the Society of Mathematical Biology and was a member of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he organized the School of Theoretical Biology (2cole de Biologie Théorique). He also worked in the Department of Biology at the Bureau of Atomic Energy (Département de Biologie du Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique). As a biologist and physicist, Delattre was interested in the systemic approach. He wrote, for example, on the systemic approach to theoretical models in radiotherapy and radiobiology (1974). It is not surprising that he postulates emergence, a property of complex systems, as that which distinguishes biology from physics or, maybe more properly, that which prevents biology from being reduced to physics (Kauffman, 2010, p. 34). Delattre established a theoretical dialog with the most important systems theory authors of his time: Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Henri Atlan, Heinz von Foerster, Jean-Louis Le Moigne, Jacques Monod, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Norbert Wiener, and others. He confronted the problem of transferring the language and systemic concepts of physics to chemistry and chemistry to biology. Delattre understood this task to be a special case of a general epistemological problem, since he also engaged in important studies in philosophy of science and epistemology, in which he referred to authors like Rudolf Carnap, Mario Bunge, Karl Popper, Castoriadis, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Gaston Bachelard, Werner Heisenberg, and others. Delattre’s premature death prevented him from following later developments in complex systems theory. His works thus do not mention,

André Folloni

29

for example, the specific problems of complex adaptive systems, still in formation at that time. His writings anticipated many epistemological discussions of other famous authors, while he remained in a relative state of obscurity. In many places, these writings are completely current, as I will try to demonstrate in this article. The topics that follow develop Pierre Delattre’s preoccupations in the aforementioned book, which, as its author explains, is “dedicated to the concrete theoretical problems raised by the study of complex systems” (1981, p. 85). This work will also consider other epistemological contributions and their implications for a complex science of law, always taking into account Delattre’s warning that “the transfer of concepts between different disciplines is a subject that requires greater attention” (1981, p. 52). It does require attention, but is also possible and fruitful, for a general theory of complex systems to function as a meta-model in relation to the theories (models) of specifically considered systems – a meta-theory, therefore (Delattre, 1975, p. 87). The preoccupations they generate, in turn, can be taken to the realm of epistemology of complexity, potentially useful for the study of any complex system, as is the case of law.

2. The initial epistemological interest of systems theory In Pierre Delattre’s view, the initial interest of systems theory is connected to two related, but distinct, difficulties. First, systems theory functions as a reaction to the compartmentalization of knowledge: its division into disciplines with specific thematic fields and the departmentalization of university knowledge in sectors that do not communicate. If this division is inevitable and a result of deepening scientific knowledge, which Delattre, along with his contemporary Thomas Kuhn (1975, p. 253) recognizes, it also generates problems, as these different types of knowledge are not connected, and thus compromise the possibility of producing a more comprehensive knowledge (Delattre, 1981, p. 9). Second, systems theory sheds light on a methodological problem: traditional scientific methodology is analytical, in the sense that it proceeds by separating reality into smaller, well defined portions, seeking to understand them separately, only to then try to reconnect the knowledge produced in isolation. Descartes (1979, p. 167), for example, describes his method in this way. However, this manner of proceeding has proved

30

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

difficult and often impossible when looking at more complex systems. When these systems are divided into smaller parts, they often lose some of their most important characteristics, which are only manifested in the whole (Delattre, 1981, p. 9). Complex systems, after all, constantly interact and evolve (Delattre, 1985, p. 23). Two problems have been identified: the compartmentalization of knowledge and the classic scientific method of analytical dissection and synthetic reconstruction. In addition to the search for a more comprehensive knowledge, another use for systemic knowledge is allowing one science to understand the advances of another, eliminating, or reducing, the problem of one discipline using methods and ways of thinking that have already been refuted by another (Delattre, 1981, p. 11). As we shall see below, both messages are relevant to scholars of law.

3. Formalized scientific language and its concepts Science should obtain results that reflect reality, confront the chosen problem and, simultaneously, conform to the requirements of coherency that our intellect imposes (Delattre, 1981, pp. 9–10; 15), Hence, the necessity to construct a coherent and formalized language that is also not self-sustaining and that maintains a reference to reality as a condition of scientificity. The concern with common language is pronounced: any possible connections between disciplines can only be understood if studies are expressed in a language that permits this dialog. As can be noted, the three semiotic planes for examining language are present in the author’s preoccupations: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Constructing this language, however, is a work in progress; Delattre wrote, there was no one systems theory, but a set of fairly uniform attempts, more a program than a result, without clear boundaries between what belongs to the theory and what is excluded (ibid., pp. 12–16). Despite notable current advancements, there are still uncertainties in these fields. Delattre acknowledges that a complete synthesis of knowledge is impossible for various reasons. One is that reality and science are dynamic, and a synthesis, if obtained, would soon become outdated. The search should be for partial and provisional syntheses that encompass large questions and apply to domains of knowledge that were formerly treated by separate disciplines (ibid., pp. 23–24). In this work, the language used may vary: “There may be very different degrees of formalization between everyday language and the complete mathematization of discourse, depending on the respective roles exercised by syntax and

André Folloni

31

semantics” (ibid., p. 25). This passage recalls Aristotle’s classic warning in The Nicomachean Ethics: “[. . .] it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits” (1984, p. 50). In a similar sense, Karl Popper, reflecting on linguistic precision, states: “It makes no sense for us to seek a greater degree of precision than the problem confronting us demands” (1982, p. 56). Thus, different sciences will work with varying degrees of precision, and the language that unifies them should take this into consideration. Delattre (1981, p. 26) refers to “formalisms.” If I understand his terminology properly, formalism is nothing more than a technical language appropriate for a particular discipline, which becomes a certain reality and is viewed under a certain aspect. Thus, “crime” may have one semantic general use and another in Law. The more formalized a language is, the more precise the meanings of its terms will be. In the formalism of Law, “crime” has a fairly precise meaning, but in general use, the expression may denote different types of behavior that, from a legal standpoint, would not be a crime. This holds true for the limits of disciplines such as Logic, Geometry, and Math, in which semantics is reduced to syntax. From the standpoint of systems theory, one of the problems of formalisms is the capacity for exchange: all interdisciplinarity depends on common language (Delattre, 2006). Thinking about law as a complex system inserted in constant inter-relationships with its environment implies the problem of the interchangeability of formalisms. Proposals about the relationships between law and its social environment, which combining legal and sociological knowledge implies, for example, that “crime” is used by law and sociology in a shared sense. Producing a scientific discourse on the economic effects of a particular legal discipline demands that the concepts used in this discourse be shared or, at least, be sharable, based on a compatible semantic stipulation in law and economics, and so on. Since a concept often expresses the qualities of objects, a fundamental problem raised by systems theory is the ability to adapt the concept when the object it denotes is inserted in another environment and, thus, acquires new functional properties (Delattre, 1981, p. 28). A norm within a system, seen in abstract, has certain functions, but when it is examined as part of the social whole, or of a system in interaction with its environment, it may have different functions. Further, in a different socioeconomic context, the meaning and scope of that norm may also change. The concept of “norm”

32

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

used in systemic understanding should be compatible with the range that its use awakens. This does not mean, however, that one should always seek a better word to describe any reality, losing precious time and energy in discussion, when the utility of the word, when present, is limited. A definition is not always univocal. In Law, moreover, it rarely will be. An expression will always have some imprecision, and this imprecision will only be circumvented through definitions – somewhat arbitrary ones – that will need to be accepted and shared by the scientific community (Delattre, 1981, p. 30). Having made this stipulation, the scientific community is aware of what each expression means, continuing to seek better substitute words may imply losing precious time and energy, defining the legal boundaries of the properties referred to by the expression. There can always be a more precise expression; precision is desirable, but also unattainable, recalls José Souto Maior Borges (1999). Insisting on this stylistic refinement will not necessarily imply a scientific gain if the new expression only comes to refer more faithfully to a meaning that is already accepted, even if by arbitrary stipulation, by the scientific community. A complex discourse, intended to determine, for example, the socioeconomic effects of a certain ancillary tax liability or the set of obligations of a particular company or economic branch must necessarily use ancillary obligation with the same semantics as that of tax law. Further, it must also endow efficiency with the same meaning as that of economics. Besides being necessary, it will be sufficient that it is so. It is not necessary and may even be harmful, generating unnecessary confusion and linguistic complexity, for new expressions to be developed within systemic discourse. Whenever possible, an expression and meaning already established in a discipline should be retained by interdisciplinary discourse; this requires, however, that there be expressions and meanings already customary in each discipline, rather than endless disputes about words and their meanings. This is always a relevant problem. Any science is a language that spills over into something other than itself (Delattre, 1981, p. 39). The formalization of language should serve the aim of reducing imprecision without compromising the correspondence between what Delattre calls a “meaning system” (language-object) and a “signifying system” (meta-language). The philosopher explains (id.) that “the first aim of science is, ultimately, to ensure that there is a correspondence between the characteristics of the meaning system and those of the signifying system; or, more precisely,

André Folloni

33

that the study of the properties of the latter allows the properties of the former to be discussed” (sic). The relationships between a meaning system and a signifying system are defined by Delattre as analogous; thus, it is a relationship of analogy between the two systems. Between the extremes of purely semantic analogy and complete, isomorphic structural (or syntactic) analogy, various degrees of the analogies’ strength can be verified (ibid., p. 40). This conception, however, can be problematic because it depends upon accepting that language, a human creation, is able to reflect, with greater or lesser fidelity, the characteristics of the reality around which it turns. Moreover, it becomes even more problematic when one recalls that there are different linguistic systems that reciprocally translate with difficulty. In Chinese, for example, the commonplace absence of a subject in sentence construction is linked to a worldview in which the postulation of agents is not always necessary, something that does not occur in languages on the Indo-European branch (Vulibrun, 2006, p. 40). When the reality in question is law, a human creation based heavily on written language, this correspondence problem may be less important because of the absence of a real referent in certain meanings (“justice,” for example). However, the absence of a referent ends up determining more severe linguistic problems in disciplines like Law. Ultimately, the meaning of justice is something that emerges from human, social, power, political, economic, religious, and moral relationships, which can acquire new configurations in each space-time position. Here, meaning is taken as an emergence (Gregersen, 2003).

4. Reductionism and holism as methods One of the great challenges of complex systems theory is working with the problem of “emergences.” Emergences can be understood as the qualities of complex systems that are nonexistent at the level of their component parts. Many authors, in fact, use the notion of emergence to qualify a self-organized system as “complex,” such that there would be complexity when there are emergences. According to Jeffrey Goldstein (1999, p. 49), “emergence” refers to the appearance of new and coherent structures, patterns, or properties in the process of complex systems’ self-organization, which are not present at the level of the parts that form these systems and thus cannot be reduced to them. Therefore, faced with a complex system, the analytical method of dissecting the object’s parts as a

34

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

condition of understanding comes into question: an examination of the parts does not allow emergences to be understood. When Delattre was writing at the end of the 1970s, he was fully aware of this difficulty. However, he complained (1981, p. 43) of the poverty of studies on emergences. As one example, among others, he recalled water, whose complex properties are not explainable, based on what is known about oxygen and hydrogen. Unfortunately, the epistemologist did not survive to see the remarkable progress in the study of emergences that has been observed in recent decades. The epistemological issue, however, stays the same. The problem of emergences in complex systems raises another issue: reductionism and “globalism” (the expression used in the Portuguese translation consulted, which here I shall refer to as “holism”). Delattre differentiates explanation from “description” (ibid., p. 44). While explaining is the exposition of phenomena through realities different than their own and, therefore, the turning to elementary processes or entities that would be at the phenomena’s origins, describing is the exposition of phenomena just as they are observed, without appealing to unobserved elements or processes. Karl Popper made the same distinction (1982, pp. 131–132): explaining implies exposing the hidden, while describing is exposing the ordinary empirical world. José Souto Maior Borges (1994, pp. 123–128) follows a similar line: the science of law not only describes, but explains, from the Latin ex plicare or removing folds (“plicas”), making clear what was obscure, making manifest what was in a state of concealment. Traditionally, the utility and possibility of reductionism as a methodological resource for scientific explanation are quite accepted, but this consensus has suffered tremors under the influence of systems theory. These tremors have occurred because reductionism is only possible when it is assumed that the elements forming a system are completely definable by its intrinsic and stable characteristics, susceptible to understanding through analytical procedure. These characteristics should be sufficient to determine an element’s behavior in any connection with other elements or with another environment. A study like this depends on elements being quite isolated (Delattre, 1981, p. 44). However, in complex systems, the behavior of elements may vary, as they are not isolated, but rather in constant interaction with the other elements and the environment. Some characteristics of certain elements, apparently constant, may prove to be variable when the environment is altered. In these cases, the assumptions

André Folloni

35

of isolation and stability, necessary for reductionist analysis, are not manifested, making analysis impossible. The existence of many diverse elements in complex systems also impedes the reductionist analytical procedure (ibid., p. 45). An atomistic worldview, like that of Wittgenstein (1968, p. 58) – “2.061, The states of things are independent from one another” – does not seem to be compatible with more complex systems in which atomic quality depends on the whole (or the environment) and on the other atomics. Strictly speaking, in systems of this type, there are no atomics. Once law is a system in a social environment, and the legal system itself an environment in which norms and normative subsystems are inserted, it may be impossible to treat both the norms in isolation from the system, and the system – and other legal manifestations – in isolation from the social environment in which they are inserted. The impossibility of understanding the norm in isolation from the legal system that contains it implies what is traditionally called a “systematic interpretation of law,” in the sense, for example, of Claus Wilhelm Canaris (1983), in which a norm is understood in terms of the other norms and the totality of the system. The possible hopelessness of understanding norms – and a system – in isolation from the socioeconomic environment in which they are inserted posits a systemic interpretation or a complex interpretation of law. This will occur when a change in the environment might imply change to the system. It is possible to give an example: the concept of “family” in contemporary law differs from the concept adopted in the last century, and this change has been made through social environment injunctions that are reflected in the legal system. It will also be impossible to understand norms isolated from the environment, whenever a change in the latter is sought through the legal system. In cases such as this, it will be necessary to evaluate whether and how the change occurred to understand whether or to what extent the objectives of law were reached in order to suggest the maintenance or modification of legal rules. For example, taxation designed to induce economic behavior and development should also be legally evaluated according to the effects it has on the environment, particularly when these effects are legally regulated. These considerations imply that reductionism in law has limited legitimacy. Moreover, its legitimacy, necessity, or possibility can never be admitted a priori. Experience with reality is necessary to corroborate or refute the feasibility of reductive analytical epistemological procedures. Thus, in some situations, it may be possible to interpret a rule with a view

36

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

to its practical application and, depending on the researcher’s intentions, independence from the socioeconomic environment in which it is inserted. In many other situations, however, this isolated understanding is impossible. To a large extent, Delattre’s complaint holds true for law (1981, p.45): “From the moment when the attempt at analytical decomposition and synthetic reconstruction no longer allows you to find the properties of the whole, it loses its explanatory power and becomes practically useless [. . .].” However, it is impossible and epistemologically illegitimate to prescribe, a priori, the reductive method or to prohibit it. It is not uncommon for lawyers to acknowledge the complexity of legal reality, because of this same complexity and, consequently, its supposed unknowability to recommend reductionism as a method. The argument is as follows: Law is incomprehensible, given its complexity; the only possibility is to artificially reduce its complexity through a methodological cut. We thus cut the relationship between law and the environment to turn our attention only to positive legal rules. However, with this move, the legal theory admits at the outset that it is studying an impossible object: rules understood in isolation from their environment. As generally discussed, the interpretation of law is not systemic and is epistemologically impossible as a definitive method for understanding legal phenomena, including the normative. The systematic is not systemic. The reaction against reductionism often leads to what Delattre calls “globalism” or “holism.” This movement, in fact, has some justifications. If it is possible to have a broad overview that explains a phenomenon, it is not necessary to descend to greater levels of complexity. There are situations in which properties are manifested at the level of the whole but not its parts and are partially independent from them, such that an examination of the parts is insignificant (Delattre, 1981, pp. 145–146). For Delattre, this means that reductionism and holism are complementary, rather than exclusive ways of understanding. Each emphasizes a different but important aspect of scientific activity (i) explaining with (ii) economy. From the opposition between reductionism and holism emerge questions that need to be explained, such as, for example, what happens when a new element is inserted into a system and to what extent this insertion alters the characteristics of the element and the system itself (ibid., p. 146).

André Folloni

37

5. System-environment distinctions Andrea Pitasi (2014, p. 206) explains how the transition, in systems theory from the part-whole paradigm to the system-environment paradigm is a gain in complexity, a gain that increases in the paradigm of autopoiesis and the enormous constellation system. As Delattre himself explains in another study (1992-a, p. 299), an element of a system may itself be a system, and in this case, it becomes especially interesting to examine how a system functions in the presence of other systems that form its surroundings. The richness of the relationships between law and the systems that form its context, political, environmental, economic, and religious, would be a specific application of this general study. Epistemological interest in the relationships and interactions between an object and its surroundings is old. What systems theory provides is, precisely, a closer examination of these relationships when the object inserted in the system is, in turn, a system comprising interacting elements (Delattre, 1981, p. 48). Studies of this kind in law, i.e. considering it as a system in a complex environment, were conducted decades ago by Niklas Luhmann (1981; 1984; 1987) and Gunther Teubner (1989) in seminal works on law as a complex system in constant interaction with its surroundings. One of the themes for examining system-environment relationships is the issue of borders. What separates or distinguishes the system from its environment? There are different kinds of borders, and new systems, which may arise, will eventually have unprecedented borders. Thus, if a border can generally be defined as what distinguishes a system from its environment or what regulates exchanges between the system and the environment, the study of each border in each system can prove to be quite challenging, even in law. A positivist conception of law usually elects legal texts published by legally competent subjects or legal norms as the boundary between the legal system and the non-legal (environment). Every definition of law that reduces it to a system of legal norms establishes its border there. Those borders are less defined when one understands law, more broadly, as a set of social practices that include, in addition to norms, citizens’ compliance with it, judgments in courts, doctrinal debates, legislative discussions, etc. Since the border is the space where the relationships between the system and the environment are defined (Delattre, 1981, p. 48) and its identification is what authorizes one to distinguish what is internal and external to the system (ibid., p. 49), this study is relevant. One should not give in to the reductionist

38

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

methodological temptation to devise an artificial boundary in order to facilitate study: if the object is complex, the study should be complex; a reductionism that artificially moves the system’s border implies renouncing its understanding. According to Delattre (ibid., pp. 49–50), it is relatively simple to study the relationships between system and environment when the object has intrinsic characteristics that define its state; it varies in time depending on these characteristics and under the influence of internal or external factors; and the object’s action on the environment does not modify the factors of the environment to which the object is sensitive. I believe that kind of simplicity does not exist in the study of law. First, the characteristics of law are not themselves intrinsic, since it is subject to interpretation by an “open society of interpreters” (Häberle, 2002, p. 18). Second, the action of law on society can always modify the social factors to which the law is sensitive; moreover, law is, in a certain sense, precisely this: an instrument of social change, of the transformation of reality, with greater or lesser effectiveness. Hence, the “good cut” (Delattre, 1981, p. 50) that simplifies examination appears to be impossible in the science of law. The distinctions between law and its social environment and, more broadly, the environment in which they are both involved, imply not only the definition of borders, what actually enters and exits (Sein), but what should enter and exit (Sollen). In this sense, different problems should be clearly distinguished. One problem, for example, is the entry, evaluated as negative, of political and economic elements into legal discourse; this is the case with complaints about political judgments made by courts or decisions based on economic data that disregard legal decisions. It is a problem that concerns the system being obliged (or not) to be closed, to some extent, to its environment, but being unable to, thus establishing an exchange that could be problematic and must therefore be understood and controlled. It is the need for a lock on an input that does not seem to be totally in place. A different problem is the entry of elements from the environment in legal discourse that is evaluated as positive, which should, then, be encouraged, although also controlled. This is the case of judgments based on historic or socioeconomic data or those offered by the natural sciences. In this case, we discuss whether the system should (or not) be open to its environment. Yet another problem is the exit of legal information to the environment and how this takes place, involuntarily (a societal rule made for a purpose but which ends up preventing free enterprise, for example) or voluntarily (a tax rule is made to encourage some behavior and this behavior is effectively adopted). Here, we

André Folloni

39

examine, in the system-environment relationship, the opening in the output. In law, not only the existence of entries and exits is relevant as fact, but the evaluation of the lawfulness or unlawfulness – or convenience or inconvenience – of this transit remain as relevant objects of study.

6. Causality, finality, intentionality Delattre takes up the distinction between causality and finality, understood as the comprehension of movement, or the temporal sequence of events, based either on an effective cause or on a final cause (both in the Aristotelian sense). In tax law, for example, the cause of the obligation to pay taxes can be understood as the “triggering event” (a causal explanation) or the use of financial resources for the state and society (a final explanation). In criminal law, the imposition of a sentence may result from crime as a cause or from punishment as an end (or correction, or deterrence, etc.). They are different ways of understanding. Metaphorically speaking, one might say that the cause pushes, while finality pulls; one is before, the other after. Causality, notes Delattre, had historically greater importance in the scientific explanation of facts, although finality would remain, here and there, in the discourse of science (1981, p. 53). In the epistemologist opinion, explanations of causality or finality should not be eliminated in the scientific discourse in the study of complex systems, particularly in those where irreversible processes occur (ibid., p. 55). Delattre’s opinion on finality in the human sciences is particularly interesting. In this case, he says (id.), “[. . .] finality, under the name of intentionality, ceases to be a problem when expressing the idea of a project, and therefore of the influence of what is to come over what precedes it in time. This possibility has been easily recognized ever since beings endowed with consciousness and the power of anticipation have intervened” [sic]. For him (idem, p. 57), situations that depend on finality occur when the following factors are combined: The system tends toward a state, and the path to follow is reasonably determined, such that this future state conditions the set of changes; if the conditions of each point on this path vary (within certain limits), the system preserves its characteristics; we cannot reconstruct the system’s behaviors by appealing only to causal explanations and deterministic threads.

The first two are known characteristics of nonlinear systems. The third refers to our cognoscibility and should be clarified because a poor

40

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

understanding may stem from several factors: ignorance about the processes of integrating parts in complex systems according to our reductive analytical method; difficulty in making description-level changes; poor knowledge of the relationships between the properties of the whole and the details of the parts’ dynamics; an inappropriate cut between system and environment, hindering an understanding of the relevance of the internal and external factors that intervene in the evolution, when the properties of the system are not observable outside the environment or when the properties of the parts are not observable outside the whole ( ibid., p. 58). All these difficulties, strictly epistemological problems, manifest themselves in the science of law that cuts out the norms and separates them from the system (one level) and its historic, social, economic, political, cultural environment (another level). When we drastically reduce the complexity of a legal phenomenon, we lose the processes of integration between law and its surroundings, unknown because they are situated on the borders – little explored – between isolated disciplines (law, sociology, economics, political science, etc.). In general, lawyers have difficulty with level changes because a clear way to work in this sense has not been established: We do not have – at least, not yet – a “normal science” (in the Kuhnian sense) to work with law in its complexity. Thus, we isolate law from its environment, and we thereby suppress properties that only manifest themselves in the system-environment integration, and these properties, essential for understanding the legal reality, are excluded from the science of law. What results is an epistemic paradox: In order to know we must reduce, but reducing makes knowing impossible. Hence, complexity is understood as a challenge (Hofkirchner, 2007).

7. Chaos and order That order emerges from chaos is, today, something that no longer appears to be in dispute (Prigogine; Stengers, 1984). However, how does this happen? How does order spontaneously emerge from chaos? This question is a special case of a more general question: how can more emerge from less? In Pierre Delattre’s view, this is a difficult problem because the Western metaphysical tradition has always accepted as valid a contrary principle: less cannot engender more. That less actually can engender more was a much less accepted principle, except in the esoteric tradition

André Folloni

41

(1981, pp. 60–62). In fact, it is quite common to encounter experiences of degradation, for example, transition from order to chaos, while the emergence of order from chaos is less frequent (ibid., p. 62). Further, even when the emergence of order from chaos is verified in experience, its theoretical explanation is problematic, both because of its inherent difficulty and because of its apparent contradiction with the second law of thermodynamics, which associates entropy and disorder (ibid., p. 63). Moreover, the difficulty stems from an epistemological problem: the concepts of “order” and “disorder” are not always well established, and can vary from one discipline to another. The difficulty lies in understanding “spontaneous” morphogenesis, i.e. that which is not produced by the interaction between systems nor the interactions between a system and the environment. One must have, above all, clarity and precision in order to assess whether the examination is done on one or another level. When Delattre wrote, he complained about the lack of this kind of conceptual clarity (1981, p. 67). Understanding the problem of morphogenesis in its current form depends on examining what was produced after Delattre (in the field of social sciences, there is a recent study by Pitasi, 2010). This is another important field of research for law.

8. The construction of hypotheses Delattre follows the view that scientific activity consists of constructing hypotheses from problems, stating their properties through deduction and confronting them with experience, similar to Karl Popper’s approach, although putting the question in slightly different terms (Delattre, 1981, p. 68; Delattre, 1992-b, p. 278; Popper, 2005, p. 9). Popper, however, does not examine the process of hypothesis formation; on the contrary, he vehemently rejects this examination: it is a psychological problem, not one of the logic of scientific research (2005, p. 7). Delattre, in contrast, devotes attention to this problem. According to him, a kind of “common sense” operates in the formulation of hypotheses, influenced by past experience. In complex situations, however, this “common sense” has difficulties operating, given the multiple possibilities of conjectures that present themselves to the scientist (Delattre, 1981, p. 69). It is indeed often the case that hypotheses are the opposite of what common sense would recommend (ibid., p. 70). Delattre provides examples, and those in the sphere of social sciences are particularly interesting for law.

42

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

The development of medicine should have produced improvements in health and, thus, a decrease in the consumption of medicine. However it has

produced an increase. The invention of the automobile should have reduced transportation times, but its proliferation has generated the reverse effect. A specific pedagogy, when one might expect it to promote curiosity and the desire to learn autonomously, put an end to them. Increasing the number of years of education, rather than generating equality, as intended, has generated inequality. Delattre here refers to the work of Dupuy, who suggests, as a hypothesis, that this is a problem of societies with heteronomous production, or prosthesis societies, where the needs of one are met by the labor of others: “An essentially heteronomous system would tend to self-regulate almost independently of those who are supposed to be the beneficiaries” (Delattre, 1981, p. 70) [sic]. Phenomena such as this are studied as antagonistic imbalances, counterintuitive behaviors, inverse regulations, nonsense, paradoxical effects, and perverse effects. They are unintended effects and, very often, unanticipated, even unpredictable. But they often manifest themselves, in the case of intentional behaviors, against the agent’s intentions (ibid., p. 71). In the case of environmental tax law, for example, the doctrine records a situation in which a tax is designed to make a polluting industrial process more expensive, hoping to dissuade the producer from continuing with that process. But the cost is internalized and the industrial company feels that it is paying for the right to pollute and thus monetizes environmental law (Schoueri, 2005, p. 239). Deterministic models based on linear causality are clearly insufficient, if not inadequate, for understanding phenomena of this kind. There is a curious interaction between theory and observation in these cases (Delattre, 1981, p. 73). This is another case in which Delattre perceives similar phenomena occurring in various objects from many disciplines in the exact sciences and the social and human sciences and for which he demands a less isolated treatment, something that complex systems theory should be able to offer (ibid., pp. 73–74).

9. Logic In the last item of his book, Pierre Delattre demonstrates his antagonism to inaccurate uses of logical concepts such as “contradiction.” This occurs, according to Delattre, in works that intend to be “dialectical,” mainly based on Hegel and the dialectical shift from the logical plane to the real plane (Delattre, 1981, p. 74). In logic, contradiction, opposition, complementarity,

André Folloni

43

and duality are different phenomena (Copi, 1978, p. 161), but are often treated as a group under the name contradictions (Delattre, 1981, p. 77). “Contradictions” are also often detected in reality, which would invalidate the classical principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle, without considering that the “contradictory” properties appear at different times or under the influence of different interactions, from uncertainties in system-environment relationships (ibid., pp. 77–78). The confusion between them should generate inaccuracies (ibid., p. 76). Thus, the search for a systemic and complex treatment of phenomena does not authorize, in Pierre Delattre’s view, “[. . .] hidden texts in which ‘everything is in everything and vice versa,’” without taking great care in the analysis that allows and explains what this means (ibid., p. 79).

Final considerations Everything that has been presented allows us to observe how the work of Pierre Delattre, published more than 30 years ago, remains relevant in raising questions that are not part of the concerns of non-systemic science, as the science of law still largely is. Many lawyers still believe in isolation, in reductionism, in an analytical scientific method, in the descriptive work of science, and so on. These lawyers thereby lose much of the richness of the legal phenomenon, which is without adequate scientific explanation. The construction of a complex science of law is still a challenge. Progress was made in some fields of legal knowledge, such as the sociology of law. However, a science of law capable of taking complexity as a challenge and abandoning reductionism as a method has yet to develop and reach a paradigmatic condition that permits deeper study, although it ‘may’ still do so. One path to this construction is to take the epistemological debate beyond the reflections of Pierre Delattre, examining what was produced in the last three decades of studying complex systems and the underlying epistemology. The author himself laments, at the end of the book, not having had the opportunity to devote himself to the problem of information. There is much quality production in this field still to be explored by the legal community and, certainly, much knowledge regarding law as a complex adaptive system still to be produced.

44

Pierre Delattre’s Contribution to Contemporary Systemic Epistemology

References Aristóteles. Ética a Nicômaco. Trad. Leonel Vallandro e Gerd Bornheim. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1984 (Col. Os Pensadores). Borges, José Souto Maior. Ciência feliz: sobre o mundo jurídico e outros mundos. Recife: Fundação de Cultura da Cidade de Recife, 1994. —. Obrigação tributária: uma introdução metodológica. 2. ed. São Paulo: Malheiros, 1999, p. 14. Canaris, Claus-Wilhelm. Systemdenken und Systembegriff in der Jurisprudenz: entwickelt am Beispiel des deutschen Privatrechts. 2. ed. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1983. Copi, Irvin. Introdução à lógica. Trad. Álvaro Cabral. 2. ed. São Paulo: Mestre Jou, 1978. Delattre, Pierre. Função. In: ROMANO, Ruggiero (org.). Enciclopédia Einaudi. v. 21. Brasília: Imprensa Nacional, 1992, pp. 288–304. —. Investigações interdisciplinares: objetivos e dificuldades. In: POMBO, Olga; GUIMARAES, Henrique Manuel; LEVY, Teresa (coord.). Interdisciplinaridade: antologia. Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006. —. On methodology for the elaboration of a theoretical model. International Journal of General Systems. London, v. 2, n. 2, 1975, pp. 87–97. —. Système, structure, fonction, évolution: essai d’analyse épistémologique. Paris: Maloine, 1985 (Col. Recherches Interdisciplinaires). —. Systems approach of theoretical models in radiobiology and radiotherapy. International Journal of General Systems. London, v. 1, i. 2, 1974, pp. 105–117. —. Teoria dos sistemas e epistemologia. Trad. José Afonso Furtado. Lisoba: A Regra do Jogo, 1981. —. Teoria/modelo. In: ROMANO, Ruggiero (org.). Enciclopédia Einaudi. v. 21. Brasília: Imprensa Nacional, 1992, pp. 223–287. Descartes, René. Objeções e respostas. In: Discurso do método; meditações; objeções e respostas; as paixões da alma; cartas. Tradução de J. Guinsburg e Bento Prado Júnior. 2. ed. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979 (Col. Os Pensadores). Häberle, Peter. Hermenêutica constitucional: a sociedade aberta dos intérpretes da Constituição. Porto Alegre: Sergio Fabris, 2002. Hofkirchner, Wolfgang. The challenge of complexity: social and human sciences in the information age. In: Institute for Philosophical Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (ed.). Proceeding papers of XXIV Varna International Philosophical School. Sofia: IPhR, 2007, pp. 449–455.

André Folloni

45

Goldstein, Jeffrey. Emergence as a construct: history and issues. Emergence. v. 1, n. 1, pp. 49–77, 1999. Gregersen, Niels Henrik (coord.). From complexity to life: on the emergence of life and meaning. Oxford: University press, 2003. Kauffman, Stephen A. Reinventing the sacred: a new view of science, reason, and religion. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Kuhn, Thomas. A estrutura das revoluções científicas. Trad. Beatriz Vianna Boeira e Nelson Boeira. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1975. Luhmann, Niklas. Ausdifferenzierung des Rechts: Beiträge zur Rechtssoziologie und Rechtstheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. —. Rechtssoziologie. 3. ed. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987. —. Soziale Systeme: Grundriss enier allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Pitasi, Andrea. Teoria sistemica e complessità morfogenetica del capitalismo. Roma: Aracne, 2010. —. The sociological semantics of complex systems. Journal of Sociological Research. v. 5, n. 1, pp. 203–213, 2014. Popper, Karl. Conjecturas e refutações. Trad. Sérgio Bath. 2. ed. Brasília: UNB, 1982. —. The logic of scientific discovery. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005. Prigogine, Ilya; Stengers, Isabelle. Order out of chaos: man’s new dialogue with nature. Toronto: Bantam, 1984. Schoueri, Luís Eduardo. Normas tributárias indutoras em matéria ambiental. In: TÔRRES, Heleno (coord.). Direito tributário ambiental. São Paulo: Malheiros, 2005, pp. 235–256. Teubner, Gunther. Recht als autopoietisches System. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Vulibrun, Jorge. Uma leitura filosófica dos termos chineses utilizados no I Ching. Revista de Ciências Humanas. Florianópolis, n. 39, pp. 37–66, abr./2006. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trad. José Arthur Giannotti. São Paulo: Cia Editora Nacional, 1968.

WCSA IN THE EMERGENT SUPRANATIONAL WORLD ORDER ANDREA PITASI AND GIULIA MANCINI

The World Complexity Science Academy (WCSA), is the intellectual venue where systemic visions, approaches, and toolkits are constantly developed to evolve and design an ever more sophisticated policy model for coping with the key challenges of our times and with the emerging supranational and transnational world orders. The WCSA’s vision is extremely interdisciplinary and, at the same time, the systemic tools provided by social, political, economic, and legal sciences are privileged. A key challenge in these scenarios is the emerging shape of the European

Union. The WCSA DECLARATION OF BOLOGNA, made on December 4, 2010,1 provides the broadest and deepest explanation of the WCSA. WCSA has a global vision and the quality and quantity of members, projects, and alliances mirror the evolution of this vision inspired by a networking model. For example, the WCSA signed bilateral agreements with: the European Sociological Association, the International Federation for Systems Research, the Croatian Communication Association, the Russian Sociological Associations, and the International Sociological Association. The main policy goal of the WCSA, which is strongly focused on a systemic vision applied to strategic planning and policy-modeling, is about how to shape a different kind of “systemic and global” citizen. The evolution of a new systemic and global citizen emerges from some important hints from the European Union that it is becoming “a conditional agenda setter.” For example, Tsebelis used this definition to express the power of the European Union to increase the future and accelerate integration.2 These days, the WCSA would also play a role involving people and organizations which share features:

Andrea Pitasi and Giulia Mancini

-

47

A systemic vision of science: With more awareness of the many challenges of our age.

We cannot focus on a local level or on a political way simply in one place; rather we need a global vision. Helga Nowotny wrote that it is important to show that science has become much more like other institutions in modern society.3 This means that science will transform knowledge. Knowledge makes differentiation; knowledge makes value. In this way it could be very interesting to read the document about the European Research Council (2012), in which Nowotny described the three preconditions for enabling European Research to get off to such a good start. a) The political—it is important to push frontier research, because industry and business would turn to knowledge and new skills. b) The scientific—it is important to set up a genuine international competition with an exclusive focus on the brightest and most talented individual researchers. c) The culture—it is important to build a genuine European scientific culture of excellence.4 -

Cosmopolitanism: Cosmopolitanism as opposed to nationalism. Identity is essential, we need to have rules. But, nevertheless, we should be aware that in a globalized world, with different missing and integrating symbols, the needs and the cultural aspects are speeding up, and so, metaphorically speaking, you can find a different kind of integration.

Cosmopolitanism does not, therefore, mean the end of the nation, but its transformation. It is the real change we face now, how to bring sociology back to a cosmopolitan view. In this way, the WCSA is trying to facilitate a new foundation in which strategic tools are created to cooperate with the European Union.5

48

-

WCSA in the Emergent Supranational World Order

Entrepreneurship: This is about mentality, a mentality which provides new energy, new emphasis, and new enthusiasm to let the emergent shapes become stronger and stronger.

This aspect is very important because, as Audretsch wrote, entrepreneurship can serve as a guiding light to direct policymakers in understanding the issues, the debates, the most important questions, and in distinguishing what is known and has been established from areas which are at the frontier of research or need to be researched in the future. Entrepreneurship involves the individual, the industries and, at a spatial level, cities, regions, and countries. It means that the different contexts and organizational forms are going in a new direction because the rule of European standardization will be to organize a system that will help to create a favorable business environment.6 -

Lobbying and donating: The border between profit and non-profit is fading in some ways. For example, multinational companies like Microsoft are involved in organizations that care for children in Africa.

In fact, in many European countries, distinguishing between for-profit and not-for-profit organizations is often difficult. Lobbying means being able to create a network to expand the connection and to be able to expand knowledge and capital resources. Lobbying represents a visible and important strategy for many interest groups trying to reduce the deductible contributions under income and to influence opinion leaders.

Andrea Pitasi and Giulia Mancini

49

The focus of the WCSA policy model is to transform, to shape from traditional academic association, to create a multidimensional level, and to create a system of systems integrating cosmopolitanism, entrepreneurship, scientific lobbying, and donating. A good way of doing this is to create a synergy among didactics, researching fundraising, trendsetting and influencing public opinion, policy-modeling and, at the end, policymaking. Policy-makers in Europe are becoming increasingly aware that we are in a moment where convergent challenges, and the circulation of information, spread very fast. Tangible and intangible assets are increasing, and they are becoming global.

50

WCSA in the Emergent Supranational World Order

Digitalization was probably the first step which opened the spiral. The process then moved through mimetics and the Triffin dilemma, again from language to a convergent world. The links between the different parts are that the more globalization is researched, the more global the results, the more policy-modeling and policymaking are shared then the more we achieve a convergent world organization. In this area, the WCSA is trying to re-shape and re-construct itself into a strategic organization, evolving from an academic network into a hypercitizen system of systems. The goal is to transform the WCSA into a kind of laboratory in which to evolve a system of systems within the perspective of an emerging supranational world order. This kind of vision serves to link the teaching of research with thirdmission policy-modeling in this day and age, especially in the European Union where the links between power, business, investments, and social policies (most importantly in relation to health and aging) are getting stronger and stronger.

Andrea Pitasi and Giulia Mancini

51

References Audretsch, David B. Entrepreneurship, A survey of the literature, Enterprise Papers No 14, 2003. Beck, Ulrich and Natan Sznaider, Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda, The British Journal of Sociology 2006 Volume 57 Issue 1. Opening Address of President of the European Research Council European Research Council fifth anniversary, Brussels, February 29, 2012. Helga Nowotny, Individual Autonomy and Autonomy of Science: The Place of the Individual in the Research System, The Research System in Transition NATO ASI Series Volume 57, 1990, pp. 331–343. Tsebelis, George, (1994). The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter. American Political Science Review, 88, pp. 128–142. doi:10.2307/2944886. Pitasi A., The Metaconvergence Spiral Rethinking Sociological Working Styles Systemically, «International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences» (September 2014), Vol. 4, No. 9. —. Hypercitizenship and the Management of Genetic Diversity: Sociology of Law and the Key Systemic Bifurcation Between the Ring Singularity and the Neofeudal Age, «World Futures», (2012) 68: pp. 314–331, 201.

Notes 1

Nuova Atlantide, Anno 2010, XXV° - n° 2 – MAG/AGO. George Tsebelis (1994). The Power of the European Parliament as a Conditional Agenda Setter. American Political Science Review, 88, pp. 128–142. doi:10.2307/2944886. 3 Individual Autonomy and Autonomy of Science: The Place of the Individual in the Research System. The Research System in Transition NATO ASI Series Volume 57, 1990, pp. 331–343. 4 Helga Nowotny, Opening Address of President of the European Research Council, European Research Council fifth anniversary, Brussels, February 29, 2012. 5 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda, The British Journal of Sociology 2006 Volume 57 Issue 1. 6 David B. Audretsch, Entrepreneurship A survey of the literature, Enterprise Papers No. 14, 2003. 2

THE SHAPING AND DEVELOPMENT OF A LIBRARY-BASED SCIENTIFIC WORLD-CONCEPTION EDIT FABÓ

Theoretical base Oswald Spengler belonged to the group of prominent philosophers who were able to understand man in his fullest cultural complexity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Subsequently it seemed that the age of the great epoch-making scientific, artistic achievements was over. Prosperity only analyzes, systematizes, gathers, and synthesizes the results of the great ancestors and of boundaries blurred between the sciences. Knowledge became belief. Evidence-based critical thinking vanished definitively when man turned away from the most important achievements of the scientist generation because he did not consider the outcome, but rather only a factor of cultural history. That is creation, but it can live on only in the highly qualified scientist’s thinking and working (Spengler, 1994, pp. 667–668). Research libraries have the task not only to preserve the treasures of science, but also

to keep them alive with organization and to make them available to the actors in the field of science. Therefore, further study will focus on research (or scientific) libraries. Since its destruction, the ancient library of Alexandria has haunted men of knowledge. In the Middle Ages, the Renaissance launched increasingly rapid development – development that, in our age, has become so revved up (or multiplied) that it is a natural daily necessity. So, since Gutenberg’s invention, more and more people have been able to write, print, and fill more libraries. Some of the larger collections, even if limited, were public. Higher education institutions had libraries. The birth of modern science has been dated from Galileo, when it was divorced from religion. The technical achievements of science in the nineteenth century gave further impetus to more comprehensive economic, social, and cultural changes,

Edit Fabó

53

and at the turn of the century, for example, Spengler thought the human race came to the end of an era as, on the one hand, cultural circles changed, and, on the other, European culture predominated. Some of Spengler’s theses are debatable, but his statements pointing to general contexts are true. More recent works dealing with the nature of globality confirmed and refined his ideas irrespective of their motivations (Huntington, Beck, Rodrick, Luhmann). In the twenty-first century, the phenomenon of globality is generated mostly in two areas: one is the economy, and the other, a branch of the previous sphere of interest, is the flood of information in the virtual world powered by information technology. And since both are based on the pattern of European foundations, their impact adjusts itself accordingly.

The problem in general At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Internet gave global access to both content providers and users. The authenticity, accuracy, and reliability of the supply of data and of other uploads are very important factors. The difficulty of information control, the faith in the authenticity of some acts, as well the generally shaken confidence, stand in the background of the acceptability of globality and of the biggest crisis phenomenon of our time. However, nowadays, according to assessments of economic crisis management, it is necessary to understand that the market does not have the ability to self-regulate in a way that would mitigate social consequences with ethical self-correction. Because contested steps are not only unethical, but also unjustified as they are supported by opinion only. So the representatives of economic science have not complied with the spirit of scientific criticism (see Spengler). At the same time, it is recognized also that the effective functioning of the growing global economy is possible with regional (national) government regulations (Rodrik, 2014, pp. 296–306). But countries are transferred into the global (virtual) space, and they reinterpret themselves in the new medium, formulating their scale of value and cultural entity to others too. Scientific judgments are agreed according to principles and the institutional system of the state. The big question is from the aspect of scientism – how it can be integrated into other cultural societies (Berényi, 2010, p. 706). And in terms of its methods, including the science of economics, it must return to the critical spirit if it wants to preserve its scientism.

54

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

Credibility is the basis of the recognition and of the prestige of science and of scientific results. Archives and libraries are the oldest sources and the guardians of scientific knowledge. Written communication has played a key role in the cultural history of mankind, as written facts have legitimating force, because the content of documents bridged the spatial and temporal limits of the human. Therefore, these facilities are considered the authentic locations of common culture and history. Thus, the evolved stereotype of trust is so strong that the librarian’s information is considered valid in the virtual world of the Internet today (Rankes, 2009, pp. 732–733).

Research libraries in the twenty-first century The significant achievements and results of the history of library science in the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries created the complex system of rules which allows users to see the cultural and scientific works systematized with their connections. The identifiable description of each document, the highlighting of setters, and the exploring of content are strictly regulated. In the integration of various levels of library databases, the mass of incomplete data presentation does not help scientific sophistication. The integration of several-hundred-year-old paper-based catalogs into a system of computer registration requires enormous effort. The retrospective adaptation of the appropriate level of processing catalogs into today’s rules is accepted, standard practice. However, the full fitting of large quantities covering hundreds-of-years-old catalogs is very difficult; there are missing units. Therefore, the old card catalogs are uploaded as a form of visual material to the Internet, in which the possibility of retrieval and of grouping is

more limited than would be advisable. And while there are parts of holdings, those have only the registration of inventory levels, or maybe not even that. The processing of these units is usually circumstantial because these arise as outstanding work, so the majority of these materials are old and require specialized knowledge. But the exploration of these items cannot be postponed. We cannot avoid the work that demands more attention and more time even if its difficulty seems to make it impossible. The integration of processing holdings is done by various conventional constructed data. Typically, the online catalogs of those (research or scientific) large libraries struggling with disadvantages face an “information-deficit” that has to supplement data recording.

Edit Fabó

55

In the meantime, service companies operating in the field of economics take advantage of information technology to increase the scope of their market to collect, buy, and exchange data. Information units are members’ names, addresses, contacts, consumer habits etc., or other parameters related to the operation of firms. Desired data can be collected, but their listing does not require more serious skill; their reality can be checked, their screening and creation can be facilitated and speeded up with the use of information technology. The important phase of the work of information product making is data recording. But the source levels of the data construction of economic and scientific factors – in our case, namely, libraries – functioning in the maintenance of state are not the same. The library’s regular data creation (especially in the case of old and rare documents) is multifaceted and requires special learning, erudition of source, factual knowledge, and database management experience according to discipline. The speed of data creation cannot be measured with the typing of the elements of economic life indicated in information products. Libraries turn to information agencies in the economic world, whose work, carried out in accordance with the requirements of applied data recording, lacks the knowledge and time for search and research. The integration of registrations without autopsy, competence, or skill is misleading. It reveals this by the control of incomplete, misleading, or inaccurate data that do not meet the standards. There are often cases in which the catalogs of the market sector evaluating financial value present more detailed and more precise descriptions. The respect for rules supports the situation of the taxonomy of sciences that the actual document puts into the field of knowledge which is relevant for creators’ reality also. Because of their motivation, research libraries should

invest in enforcing these rules emphatically since one of the formal criteria of scientific rigor is bibliographic accuracy. Published on the Web, cataloged data serves science in its entirety as well as the connections between different sciences. After all, the guided researcher, searching through the complex system, inevitably makes discoveries that would otherwise remain hidden. There are further trends in the profession of librarian that support the above requirement in principle. The code of the ethics of the profession has been formulated and adapted. Libraries aim to increase the quality of processing and of content services (Virágos, 2013, pp. 323–330). The integrated catalogs of the research and – among them – of the higher

56

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

educational (or academic) libraries, appear together with other various quality databases, which are both complete and incomplete explorations, so the incomplete data communications of these libraries are not so conspicuous. Although qualifications are based on self-assessment of performance, they should encourage quality. But this does not happen. Scientific policy has noticed inconsistency in the measurement of excellence (Quante and Rózsa, 2010, pp. 695–697). In discourse, attention turns to quality indicators and not to appropriate work. In fact, everyone is happy to be able to prove the existence among the “particular circumstances” with self-examination of their capacity. But actually, conditions do not conform to state expectations, determining regulations, or scientific requirements. Self-justification shall be self-acquital, and irregularities remain. Any qualitative evaluation is only meaningful if it happens in an institution which operates in accordance with standards. So, factual obligations such as “advisable tasks” have been delayed and, finally, dissolved and forgotten.

The appearance of libraries in higher education Universities that teach librarianship despise and fear the market at the same time. Because they are sure that the majority of their students will be able to find a job in the economic sphere, they prefer to give “competitive knowledge.” Students are delegated to information firms in order to gain useful experience. There, the main aspects are short-term effectiveness, correct administration, prompt situation awareness, and problem-solving rapidity. But they do not gain the experience, skill, or knowledge of the standards of processing work. Scientific claims satisfy reality because such activity does not go on in the background institutions (namely libraries) that have to provide this work. However, this would be extra knowledge enabling students to compete in the jobs market. Recruiters would recognize it as an added value on which it is worth spending time and money. (On the one hand, for example, the second-hand dealers indicate that it would be the demand of the market. On the other hand, the more thorough the knowledge, the better the problem-solving skill.) The employees of organizational units serving education do not really understand why further training is needed in the doctoral schools. So much is clear to them that the theoretical and practical training is for the research work, but they cannot see why it is beneficial to the community, and they only realize that scientific degrees valorize doctoral students’ careers. And because scientific investigations are based on the individual interests and

Edit Fabó

57

the efficiency of independent work, investigators believe their colleagues dealing with science only do their own business and have more time for research and a higher salary. The leadership of universities is crippled by emerging jealousy, so it becomes the practice of the overeducated to deny the success of their own educational work. This means that higher education cannot show the added value of scientific qualifications to its own students or employees if it is not limited to educational activities – after all, it does not establish a model for a scholar’s career, and it denies the adequate utilization of its own guaranteed level of knowledge in education. Necessary information support for university teaching and research work happens with skilled labor for a despised and dreaded market, which lacks authenticated scientific proficiency in the university. In other words, scientific support is not used in the background of institutions. Although there are some promising initiatives in university library services which specifically provide information for education and research, the certified academic skills are lacking. Leadership practice in research libraries is similarly controversial, since leaders regard their institution as “only” a specialized collection and not a scientific establishment. They even turn away from this aspect because it is “expensive and time-consuming,” despite the central provision of funding. Budgets allow this, and its implementation is only a question of organization and of the appropriate targeting of the scientific institution’s profile. So, their services do not come with a scholarly guarantee. If the leaders of institutions recognized a more general scientific purpose, they would adjust to the main expectation to serve science which can be found in their deed of foundation. The specialized literature of knowledge management in principle defines the requirements desirable for the construction of knowledge sharing – this remains merely theoretical with a few commendable initiatives. The institutional segregation of higher education in library and information science further complicates the issue. It happens that information ethics, administration processes, and business models are taught at centuries-old universities, but the creation of scientific criteria, their disciplinary specifics and complexity, is no longer transmitted, although the interdisciplinary principles are proclaimed if not always publicly followed. Departing students are professional in giving, buying, fishing for, or mining information, but they are not aware of its content, credibility, or shortcomings.

58

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

Nowadays, the impact of the value and volume of the fashionable usage of phrases like “knowledge assets” is unevaluated. Publishers and bookshops accurately determine the price of publications according to the particular subject area and different levels of quality. As soon as the publication loses its topicality, it becomes less expensive. Eventually, trendy works can command incredible prices because of the scarcity of copies remaining. But, unfortunately, the antiquarian cannot assess in each case what was the impact of actual (scientific) publication in its own age and how well it fared in the market. However, due to now established scientific methodologies, the science historian, who is forced to browse and investigate in libraries, can tell how much the worth of the researched book is. It is impossible to research every publication, but through regular processing, librarians will be able to demonstrate the value of their holdings without laborious detective work. So if every document in the library’s holdings gets fully processed in the system, the library will be able to demonstrate its scope. Thus, the value of a large library or of a smaller reference collection can be estimated with the mapping of the discipline or sub-area of science. This complexity (or completeness) of integration of intellectual creations shows former and contemporary works in a historically correlated system, and it also means that the institution, community, or state is capable of organizing knowledge. The checking and accounting of scientific work is the source of further conflict. The sabbatical (or research time) of employees with scientific degrees is granted in recognition of their qualification; it is a human right as provided generally by constitutional law and, therefore, cannot be taken away or restricted. The sabbatical extends to the subject and method of research which must or can be included in a broader topic. This is usually the case. Sometimes, the scientific life is weak, divided, and susceptible to blackmail. There is no honor in science. The surplus due to these works in not calculated (at least, not often enough): the sensitivity of the problem associating with problem-solving skills. Thus, scientific knowledge is not simply a prestige project, but (in chaos, in life, in practice) it is the existence of difficulties resolving a progressive, future-building ability. And this is the moment that is not (quite) clear to the decision-makers of the so-called market sector. If someone achieves a doctoral degree, this will be a natural (obvious) skill for them. So one really succeeds with better capabilities and work skills. However, if the decision-maker has no scientific qualification, he will only see the employee’s better performance. And he is generally right, but his

Edit Fabó

59

opinion covers the importance of scientific education in individual development. After the early failures of the forced immediacy of informatization and digitization, it is necessary to realize and recognize that the keeping of rules, in addition to scientific work, allows knowledge and practice to be expected, desired and to have a quality of data for presentation in research libraries (Clement et al., 2013, pp. 127–128). There is very much a need for several information specialists. However, there is also a great need for dedicated commitment to the sciences in science libraries that finds a balance between the market demand detected and the scientific information service. In fact, only a credible striving scientific database is able to establish a valid scientific world-conception. Unfortunately, or fortunately, the great dilemma for researchers is in the virtual flood of information from the Internet that may render the system of reference misleading. The search systems of the library catalogs serve to overcome this challenge. These are thoughtful, marked with a contributing function and publication, strengthened with subject concepts, the science operating taxonomically. These are “appreciated” search systems (Drótos, 2013, p. 39). However, if the system operators have no knowledge or the skill of discipline, the reliability of the database will be questionable. It cannot be emphasized enough, by way of example, that no legal or historical relevance attaches to whichever king or pope attached his seal to a law or decree or took part in its drafting. Their level of responsibility is reflected in their classified location in the catalog, and it also creates a clear situation for the researcher and reader according to age, as required by the rules. The sad reality is that, on the one hand, the catalogs do not reflect this consistently, even these distinctions seem to get lost in the schematized “user-friendly” versions, namely those that do not seek to display orderly solutions. On the other hand, researchers, perhaps in the absence of the former, do not themselves use the full depth of the library search system, and they do not know its full possibilities. In immeasurable quantities, catalog items uploaded to the Internet are impossible to check. However, it is unclear, initially at least, who the researchers are that are able to see the document as complete with references to other sources. Only librarians can help in the orientation as they are involved in the construction of databases and as researchers familiar with the treatment of the sources of holdings (Nagy, 2012, pp. 186–191). Publishing colleagues demonstrate the researchability of the holdings through their online professional biographies with the

60

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

presentation of personal references and, as researchers, draw attention to the way of revelation of new relationships. The scientific staff of a library is not only able to serve research needs but also conduct their own research (Nitecki, 2011, pp. 55–56). The critical approach realizes the readers,’ researchers,’ and librarians’ discourse, which is the cornerstone of scientific thinking. (And at this point, the attention of prosperity is turned to the importance of Niklas Luhmann’s theoretical works.) The most important strategic task of the institutions of higher education, building fundamentally on the library, is to incorporate these excess, hidden, or rarely explored documents into the curriculum, or insert them into the system. For no other reason, it is important to see and distinguish the essential source from the unimportant. And the processing lost can be replaced in the framework of demonstration. While the students can study the discipline and gain experience in research work, at the same time, they complement the missing factual knowledge hampering the librarian’s work. The exploration of holdings is the most elementary proof and qualification of teaching and research activities in higher education institutions. Without this, the library does not operate as was intended by its founders, or those who could access holdings unique to a discipline. Indeed, this is the evidence beyond reasonable doubt that the level of activity at university or college is consistent with the reason for which it was established. It is truly able to demonstrate the knowledge of people, organization, and infrastructure, which is able to represent, preserve, and pass on its own academic performance, and a solid foundation which is expected of institutional digital library documents in the twenty-first century.

Strong state and community in a global world The experience of societies in central and eastern European countries during the twentieth century, combined with the reality of the shortage economy, produced an immeasurable hunger for abundance. Information was one commodity in short supply. After the regimes changed, trade and services promising freedom and affluence quickly appeared, which corresponded with the formalities of the western models, and the methods and technologies picked up the western pace. The sources of the creation of scientific information are: the person (who may be a lecturer, researcher, student, or librarian), the process of learning, the research, and the progress of creative work which has not changed. Nobody questioned the content, completeness/complexity, or reliability of information because

Edit Fabó

61

a conventional “gentlemen’s agreement” emerged as a result of the forced informatization, since all online catalogs have similar weaknesses. In the case of science, the countries’ leaders constituting a community of scientific politicians (institutional leaders, the organizers of research) must bring order to the diversity of freedom and the needs of democracy. Science is democratic, but it involves more sophisticated practice than is usual in public life or in politics. Scientific results are available, comprehensible to everyone, and the participation of actors is postulated to the required level of knowledge, that is, hierarchical. Scientific bodies and academic institutions fix the elements of their decision-making systems to match each other largely because they are aligned to national and international rules and conventions. Thus, since the aforementioned elected and delegated leaders have the largest responsibility due to their position of oversight of how to take the development forward, they need to define the concrete cultural and scientific goals which give content to the framework of legal and economic systems. (In Luhmann’s words, these different, cognitively open systems are determined culturally and scientifically.) In the short term, a well-functioning economy brings noticeable changes to the living conditions of the people. However, in the long term, economic performance is capitalized by those with the value systems and value trends of the community (state) which include cultural and scientific ideas as well. (The process works the same in the lives of individuals.) It will not develop for itself, but it still represents a forward direction. In the unpredictable contingency of the future, journeys without aim are unnecessary detours, the wasted expenditures of human, institution, infrastructure, and resources. The determination of goals is indispensable and is adapted to the country’s borders, regions, and the global world. The goal for the future is not the same as maintaining process and institutional legitimacy, but it is the station which can set up the next aim. The smaller institutional and profileable expectations and requirements can be broken down, deduced from the real “big” vision (so far aim, goal etc.). If the given rules and criteria are on the level of each station or generality, which may be the field of science, library science for example, the regulations are only partly met because all kinds of quality management will, at best, be a parody of science and quality or, at worst, the two will annihilate each other. Quality can only be assessed in a research library where data supply is standard and authoritative, otherwise “quality” as such will overwrite and eclipse real centuries-old expectations, prolong their implementation for centuries, and will remove and eliminate the safe foundations of the future’s knowledge.

62

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

By sustaining and procuring these institutions, the state can keep its strength and viability. On the one hand, it is able to form its own expectations and it has science-trained, experienced professionals at the government level with whom the monitoring is possible, and, on the other hand, it is capable of more intensive presence with its scientists and researchers in the international scientific life. The appearance of marked scientific goals in the local value system connecting to the global ambitions with the ability to execute them effectively allows for more confident (local) self-representation in the virtual space.

Conclusion The documents kept in libraries in online catalogs constitute the systematized complex knowledge fusion of the scholarly generations in many countries and regions. Their best chance of survival is to be placed in a virtual environment, helping to shape the theories of context instead of the doubtful theories of conspiracy (even though the latter, it turns out, can sometimes be true).

References Ayris, Paul. “A könyvtári szolgáltatások fejlesztése Európában – változások idején.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 3 (2012): 101–115. Barátné Hajdu Ágnes. “A könyvtáros továbbképzések rendszere.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 9 (2012): 364–378. Barnes, Barry, David Bloor and John Henry. A tudományos tudás szociológiai elemzése. Translated by Faragó Péter, Tanács János. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2002. Beck, Ulrich. A kockázat-társadalom. Út egy másik modernitásba. Translated by Berényi Gábor, Kerékgyártó Béla. Budapest: Andorka Rudolf Társadalomtudományi Társaság, Századvég Kiadó, 2003. Berényi Dénes. “A tudomány és a világ különbözĘ kultúrái.” Magyar Tudomány 171, no. 6 (2010): 698–707. Bertalanffy, Ludvig. …ám az emberrĘl semmit nem tudunk. (Robots, Men and Minds). Translated by Füzeséri András. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1991. Bertot, John Carlo. “Concluding Comments: 2010 Library Assessement Conference.” Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2011): 127–128.

Edit Fabó

63

Bognárné Lovász Katalin. “A felsĘoktatási könyvtárak szerepe a tudásmegosztásban.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 58, no. 9 (2011): 387–397. Braun Tibor. “Egyetemek a világrangsorok bĦvöletében.” Magyar Tudomány 171, no. 7 (2010): 816–824. Clement, Tanya, Wendy Hagenmaier and Jennie Levine Knies. “Toward a notion of the archive of the future: Impressions of practice by librarians, archivists, and digital humanities Scholars.” Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 112–130. Cséka György. “ÉlhetĘ kompromisszum (?!), avagy az Egyetemi Könyvtár alapkatalógusának digitalizálásáról.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 11–12 (2012): 489–496. Drabinski, Emily. “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction.” Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 94–111. Drótos László. “Hofmann, Melissa A. – Yang, Sharon Q.: Változáskutatás: 260 felsĘoktatási könyvtár OPAC-jának újralátogatása.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 60, no. 1 (2013): 36–39. Enyedi György. “Városi világ.” Magyar Tudomány 170, no. 3 (2009): 295–302. Health, Fred. “Library assessment: The way we have grown.” Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2011): 7–25. Huntington, Samuel P. A civilizációk összecsapása és a világrend átalakulása. Edited by Ara-Kovács Attila. Translated by Puszta Dóra et al. Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 2008. Jaeger, Paul T., Ursula Gorham, Lindsay C.Sarin, John Carlo Bertot. “Libraries, policy and politics in a democracy: four historical epochs.” Library Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2013): 166–181. Kálóczi Katalin. “Szervezet az önismeret útján.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 11–12 (2012): 451–458. Kiszl Péter. “Zavarosban halászók: villanások az üzleti információs piac kétes zónájából.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 58, no. 8 (2011): 348–358. Kornai János. A hiány. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1982. Kóródy Judit. “Könyvtáros hallgatók szakmai gyakorlatainak tapasztalatai vállalati információs környezetben – felkészítés a munkaerĘpiacra.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás, 59, no. 9 (2012): 387–398. Kristóf Tamás, ed. Tudományfilozófia és kultúra jövĘkutatói szemmel. Budapest: Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem JövĘkutató Tanszék, 2004. Lankes, R. David. “Hitelesség az interneten: mértékadótól a megbízhatóig.” Shortened by Dévai Péter. Könyvtári FigyelĘ 55, no. 4

64

Development of a Library-based Scientific World-Conception

(2009): 731–733. [“Creditibility on the internet: shifting from authority to reliability.” Journal of Documentation 64, no. 5 (2008): 667–685.] László Ervin. Káoszpont: Válaszút elĘtt a világ, Translated by Rédai Gábor. Budapest. Budapest Klub Alapítvány, Kossuth Kiadó, 2006. Luhmann, Niklas: Látom azt, amit te nem látsz. Edited by Karácsony András. Translated by Bittera Dóra et al. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1999. —. A modernség megfigyelései. Translated by Böröczki Tamás et al. Budapest: Alkalmazott Kommunikációtudományi Intézet, Gondolat Kiadó, 2010. Magda Sándor. “A tudomány és az oktatás felelĘssége a globális válságban.” Magyar Tudomány, 171, no. 3 (2010): 331–343. Merton, Robert K. Társadalomelmélet és társadalmi struktúra. Translated by Berényi Gábor, Balogh Zoltán. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2002 (Osiris Tankönyvek) Móczár József. “A közgazdaságtan válsága. (Neoklasszikus versus keynesi közgazdaságtan).” Magyar Tudomány, 171, no. 3 (2010): 318–330. Nagy Zsuzsanna. “Könyvtáros határok nélkül? A tudományos könyvtárak elmosódó határai.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 5 (2012): 186–191. Neumann, John: Válogatott elĘadások és tanulmányok. Edited by Lukács ErnĘné. Translated by Augusztinovics Mária. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1965. Nitecki, Danuta A. “Space assessment as a venue for defining the academic library.” Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2011): 27–59. Oakleaf, Megan. “Are they learning? Are we? Learning outcomes and the academic library.” Library Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2011): 61–82. Palánkai Tibor. “Nemzet és globalizáció.” Magyar Tudomány 170, no. 4 (2009): 441–459. Quante, Michael and Rózsa Erzsébet. “A kutatás- és tudománypolitika aktuális kérdései Németországban.” Magyar Tudomány 171, no. 6 (2010): 694–697. Rodrik, Dani. A globalizáció paradoxona: Demokrácia és a világgazdaság jövĘje. Translated by Felcsuti Péter. Budapest: Corvina, 2014. Sárpátki Ádám. “Könyvtáros szakmai sztereotípiák és azok PR-vonatkozásai.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 60, no. 8 (2013): 331–345. Schwendtner Tibor and Margitay Tihamér, ed. Tudomány megértĘ módban: Hermeneutika és tudományfilozófia. Budapest: L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2003. Sebestyén György. “Az információmenedzsment térnyerése a 21. században, avagy a modern felsĘoktatás egyik legnagyobb kihívása.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no. 9 (2012): 355–363.

Edit Fabó

65

Sinka Róbert. “A könyvtár szerepe a felsĘoktatási tudásközvetítés megújításában.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 59, no.7 (2012): 267–277. Spengler, Oswald: A Nyugat alkonya. Translated by Juhász Anikó, Csejtei DezsĘ, Simon Ferenc. Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 1994. Szívós Mihály and Kovács Bernadett. “Az egyetemi kutatási tevékenység palettájának átalakulása: tudomány és internet kapcsolata a nyugat- és közép-dunántúli régió felsĘoktatási intézményeinek internethasználata alapján.” Magyar Tudomány 171, no. 1 (2010): 81–94. Virágos Márta. “A magyar felsĘoktatási könyvtárak helyzete és jövĘje.” Tudományos és MĦszaki Tájékoztatás 60, no. 8 (2013): 323–330.

A NEW SYSTEMS TOOL FOR PREDICTING THE FUTURE IN AN AGE OF CONTINGENCY GERARD JAGERS OP AKKERHUIS

Is our future unpredictable because of contingency? Or is it possible to observe the activities of individual agents and extract large and predictable patterns? As was concluded in a study about general laws (Jagers op Akkerhuis, 2014), answers to these questions can be sought in two major fields: processes and structures.

Strong focus on laws for dynamic systems In current research, there is a strong focus on processes as a basis for predictions. This focus has resulted in the discovery of a range of important theories for organization in dynamic systems, e.g. self-organizing criticality (Bak, 1996), tipping points (Holling, 1973; Scheffer, 2010), deterministic chaos and fractals (Mandelbrot, 1967; Lorenz, 1963; Feigenbaum 1979), general relativity and expansion of the universe (Einstein, 1915; Hubble, 1929), Moore’s law (Moore, 1965), power laws and network laws (Pareto, 1896; Zipf, 1949) and, last but not least, the theory of evolution (Darwin, 1859; Wallace, 1855). Meanwhile, processes involve flows of material or energy. Basically, all processes take place in accordance with Noether’s theorem (Noether, 1918), stating that autonomous processes happen in the least time along the shortest path. A corollary of this law is the so-called ‘constructal law’ (Bejan, 1997). The constructal law is a thermodynamic approach which offers a unifying perspective for many different flow patterns, and the structures emerging from them. It states: “For a finite-sized system to persist in time, it must change in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it.” This statement offers a very general, unifying perspective on many of the processes described by the above laws for dynamic systems.

Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis

67

Although we have no exact figures, we estimate that more than ninety percent of the efforts in current complexity research focus on the identification of laws for dynamic systems. Meanwhile, a small group of researchers focuses on the identification and ranking of the structural complexity of the basic objects. We think this is relevant, because if one wants to understand dynamic systems, it may be a good start to understand the construction of objects and how this construction allows for certain interactions. The practical value of knowledge about the construction of an object, if one wants to learn about its potential functioning, is supported for example by the gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were placed on board the Pioneer spacecraft. One of these plaques carries pictures of male and female human figures. These pictures indicate that the organisms that sent the spacecraft have hands and feet, a large head, and bodily differences that may suggest the existence of sexual behavior. If ever intelligent beings observe this plaque, these pictures will allow them to reason about the kind of behavior these organisms may show, and the society they are capable of constructing. Their technical status can be derived from the construction of the spacecraft itself. This example shows that information about the construction of ‘agents’ forms a valuable basis for deductions of their interactive capacities. For this reason, it is our conviction that the toolkit of system science would be incomplete without tools for defining objects.

Laws for ‘objects’ Generally, an object is viewed as showing some form of ‘internal’ unifying interactions. Various approaches have been brought forward for the identification of what an object is. Well known concepts in this field are those of the ‘fundamental particles’ in the standard model in physics, the ‘monad’ (Leibnitz, around 1898), the ‘holon’ (Koestler, 1967), ‘autopoiesis’ (Maturana & Varela, 1980), ‘metasystem transitions’ and ‘major transitions’ (Turchin, 1977; Szathmáry & Maynard Smith, 1995), and ‘relational closure’ (Heylighen, 1990). In general, these approaches aim at generality, not at creating a sharp differentiation between ‘unitary objects’ and objects that consist of groups of (attached) objects. As we see it, this aim of generality on this point is a continuing source of ambiguity. So far, no generally accepted theory has emerged which allows a stringent definition of what a ‘unitary object’ is. In our view, the cause of

68

A New Systems Tool for Predicting the Future in an Age of Contingency

this problem is that definitions are frequently based on an a posteriori classification instead of using an a priori construction of ‘objects’ as a basis for classification. The naming of objects frequently goes as follows: It is observed that within a certain object, smaller objects reside. These look as if they share a similar kind of structure, for example, the objects in the leaves of plants that have been named chlorophyll. By using such an a posteriori naming, it is not clear how this chlorophyll came about, nor is it possible to know what kind of entity chlorophyll is. To fill in this gap, one can start looking at the processes by which the chlorophyll did become a part of the cell. But this way of analysis implies an a priori approach. A novel methodology, which is based strictly on an a priori approach, has recently emerged. It has been named the Operator Hierarchy (e.g. Jagers op Akkerhuis & van Straalen, 1999; Jagers op Akkerhuis, 2008). This approach focuses on the emergence of self-reference. For example, when people sit on each other’s lap, and in this way form a self-sustaining ‘circle’ in which every person sits on the lap of another person, this is an example of emergent self-reference. In close relationship with the work of Heylighen (1990) about using closure for distinction making, the operator hierarchy refers to self-reference in terms of closure. More specifically, the operator theory uses the combination of structural and functional ‘closed topologies’ for defining types of organization from the ground up. Every successive type of organization in this hierarchy is represented by physical units, called ‘operators.’ For example, the (topologically defined) operator type ‘atom’ is represented by many different kinds of physical objects, called atoms.

Can one use the Operator Hierarchy for inventing the future in an age of contingency? Interestingly, and unexpectedly, the Operator Hierarchy shows an internal logic. And it may be possible that this logic can be extrapolated. The internal logic of the operator hierarchy seems to be the result of limitations in the possibilities by which processes can form the next closure. For example, if one starts with molecules as the highest level operator in a system, then the construction of a bacterium minimally requires the closed topology of the membrane, and the closed topology of

Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis

69

the autocatalytic set, while both these closed topologies must, in cooperation, sustain the bacterium as a unitary system. And if one starts with bacteria as the highest level operators, a next step can lead to two new structures. One new structure emerges if one or more bacteria start living obligatorily in the interior of another bacterium. The result is a host cell which harbors one or more bacteria as endosymbionts. A recent ‘inside out’ explanation for the engulfment of endosymbiont bacteria has been proposed (Baum & Baum, 2014). The other option is that two cells join their structures to produce a multicellular combination. As the hallmark for multicellularity, the operator hierarchy uses the presence of plasma strands that connect the plasma of neighboring cells. When cells are attached, but plasma strands are not present, the cells are viewed as ‘just’ being attached, not as a multicellular operator. The reason for this viewpoint is the lack of a common outer membrane (representing the structural closure which is required to comply with the construction rules of the operator theory) in cells that lack plasma strands. The joining of two cells and the formation of a multicellular operator can be observed in nature in two example situations. The first is that of complex bacteria, e.g. the connections between nitrogen fixing cells and normal cells in blue-green algae. The second is that of endosymbiont cells, the latter forming the hallmark of almost all multicellular life on earth. If one now analyses the above examples of closure (bacterium, endosymbiont cell, bacterial multicellular and endosymbiont multicellular), one can recognize closures of similar kinds (Figure 1), for example, the multicellular closure of the bacteria and the multicellular closure of endosymbiont cells. Similarly, one can distinguish between structural organization without endosymbionts (bacteria, blue-green algae) and structural organization with endosymbionts (protozoa and plants and animals). This way of analyzing the organization of Figure 1 indicates the existence of certain ‘dimensions’ for organization, e.g. unicellular versus multicellular, and plain cell versus endosymbiont cell.

70

A New Systems Tool for Predicting the Future in an Age of Contingency

Figure 1. An overview of how a single cell can form the basis for the construction of more complicated structures. From bottom to top, the more complicated structures are defined by the presence of endosymbiotic relationships. From left to right, the more complicated structures are defined by the presence of interactions between cells that lead to a new unitary product. In each direction, the step from basic to complicated organization is viewed as adding a ‘closure dimension.’

Figure 2. Left: A (limited) version of the operator hierarchy, showing how processes in nature have allowed for the emergence of increasingly complex operators. Open squares are extrapolations. Right: An abstract representation of the left figure, now with emphasis on closure dimensions. Each closure dimension is shown as a box. The upward pointing arrow indicates that the closure dimensions seem to follow a numerical law which can be extrapolated.

Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis

71

As is shown in Figure 2, the analysis of closure dimensions does not have to be limited to organisms. In fact, it can be applied from the ground up, from the protons and neutrons (which are both ‘hadrons’), to the atom and the molecule, and to the four different kinds of organismal structure. In Figure 2, the real systems on the left are accompanied by the abstract number of closure dimensions. What we see emerging is an overall logic of closure types defined by closure dimensions.

Viewing the operator hierarchy as a meta-periodical system Internal logic is typical for so-called ‘periodical systems,’ such as the standard model, the eightfold way (for hadrons) (Gell-Man & Neeman, 1964), and the periodical system of the elements (Mendeleev, 1869). As far as we know, the internal logic of the operator hierarchy may well represent an undiscovered, novel kind of ‘meta-periodical system.’ If this idea of a meta-periodical system can be shown to be logically correct, the extrapolation of this logic can be used for the prediction of future types of operators. A special aspect of such predictions would be that they are based on topological laws for organization. For this reason, they would not be affected by contingency. It is hypothesized that more research into the internal logic of the operator theory will add to the toolkit of system science new tools that allow for far reaching predictions about the structure of future operators.

References Bak, P. (1996). How nature works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. Copernicus, Springer-Verlag, New York. Baum D.A., Baum B. (2014). An inside-out origin for the eukaryotic cell. BCM Biology 12: 67. Bejan, A. (1997). Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics. Third Edition. Wiley, New York. Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Reprinted. London: Penguin. Einstein, A. (1915). Die grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie. Annalen der Physic 49: 769–822 Feigenbaum, M. J. (1979). “The Universal Metric Properties of Nonlinear Transformations.” J. Stat. Phys. 21: 669–706.

72

A New Systems Tool for Predicting the Future in an Age of Contingency

Gell-Man, M. & Neeman, Y. (1964). The eightfold way. W A. Benjamin, Inc., NY, Amsterdam. Heylighen, F. (1990). Relational Closure: a mathematical concept for distinction-making and complexity analysis. In: Cybernetics and Systems '90 (ed. R. Trappl). World Science, Singapore, pp. 335–342. Holling C.S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual review of Ecological Systems 4: 1–23. Hubble, E. (1929). “A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae”. PNAS 15: 168–173. Jagers op Akkerhuis, G.A.J.M. and van Straalen, N.M. (1999). Operators, the Lego-bricks of nature: evolutionary transitions from fermions to neural networks. World Futures, The journal of general evolution 53, 329–345. Jagers op Akkerhuis, G.A.J.M. (2008). Analysing hierarchy in the organization of biological and physical systems. Biological Reviews 83, 1–12. Jagers op Akkerhuis G.A.J.M. (2014). General laws and centripetal science. European Review 22: 113–144. Koestler A. (1967). The ghost in the machine. London, Hutchinson & Co. Leibniz G.W. (1991). La Monadologie, edition établie par E. Boutroux, Paris LGF Lorenz E.N. (1963). “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20: 130–141. Mandelbrot B. (1967). “How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension”, Science, New Series 156: 636–638. Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realisation of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, (also in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 42). Mendeleev D. (1869). “The Relation between the Properties and Atomic Weights of the Elements”, Journal of the Russian Chemical Society, 1: 60–77 [Engl. transl.] Moore, G.E. (1965). “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”, Electronics 114–117. Noether, E (1918). “Invariante Variationsprobleme”. Nachr. D. König. Gesellsch. D. Wiss. Zu Göttingen, Math-phys. Klasse 1918: 235–257. Pareto, V. (1896 Vol I, 1997 Vol II). Cours d’Économie Politique Professé a l’Université de Lausanne. Scheffer,M S.R. Carpenter, T.M. Lenton, J. Bascompte, W. Brock, V. Dakos, J. van de Koppel, I.A. van de Leemput, S. Levin, E.H. van Nes,

Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis

73

M. Pascual en J. Vandermeer. (2010). Anticipating Critical Transitions. Science 338: 344–348. Szathmáry E. and J. Maynard Smith. (1995). The major evolutionary transitions. Nature 374: 227-231. Turchin, V.E. (1977). The phenomenon of science, a cybernetic approach to human evolution. Colombia University Press Wallace, A.R. (1855). On the law which has regulated the introduction of new species. Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 2, 16: 184–196. Zipf, G.K. (1949). Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. p. 1.

INTERACTIVE MEDIA ART AND THE MATERIALITY OF COMMUNICATION TOWARD CULTURAL AGENCY GRAZIELE LAUTENSCHLAEGER

Introduction The first artistic experiments with electronic and digital technology were developed in restricted research and technological centers (Naimark, 2003). Nowadays we count on a completely different context, in which a huge amount of information about electronics, programming, sensors, and other electronic devices and procedures is available and shared in the internet, papers, and books, contributing largely to the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. This is an important aspect that allows any enthusiast to experiment aesthetically with those materials. However, it is naive to look only at the positive side of the issue, ignoring that it is very rare to see aesthetically powerful experiments with electronic and digital technologies. Especially in some realities, the current “makers” are far from an expressive use of them. The engagement in a creative process of interactive media art can be an exercise of a transdisciplinary (or radical non-disciplinary) educative approach. To better explain the main argument of this paper, it is necessary first to define my understanding of “interactive” when I mention “interactive media art.” Interaction does not depend on technological devices, and in a second-order cybernetics perspective, in agreement with Ranulph Glanville’s viewpoint, interaction can be defined as: “Mutual responsiveness that may lead to novelty, in which no participant has formal control over the proceedings. Interaction occurs between participants, not because of any of them” (Ranulph Glanville, 2001, p. 3). In addition, interaction is based on two or more systems in communication, whose structures can be transformed and updated in real time, according to both (or more) sides’ feedback.

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

75

As the object of study to guide the research development, I have chosen the concept and device of “sensor.” The arguments and relationships with the interactive media art field are explained in the next section of this paper. In the sequence, exploring the idea of materiality of communication, the paper addresses how sensors can be understood as an instrument to communicate, using the example of a simultaneous technical and aesthetical experiment with them in an educative perspective. The analysis of such an experiment is an attempt to approach the media art education field as a transdisciplinary thinking-acting attitude, involving hands-on practices and collective learning processes. From that experience, the researcher understands the parameter(s) of creative processes in interactive media art that are fundamental to engage participants in learning processes and how such engagement in a second moment contributes to the establishment of a cultural agency. For this paper, the parameter “enjoyment” will be discussed.

1 Sensors 1.1 Sensors and cybernetic models A sensor can be understood as part of a working system that detects and responds to some type of input from the surrounding environment. The inputs can be, for example, light, heat, motion, moisture, pressure, and/or other numerous physical/chemical phenomena. Probably every reader has already heard of some of them: temperature sensor, rotary sensor, infrared sensor, ultrasonic sensor, light sensor, moisture sensor, pressure sensor, accelerometers, capacitive sensor... there are uncountable types of them, and they are spread everywhere in our everyday lives. They are projected to collect and measure data in order to regulate different kinds of systems on a range of scales, from use in small devices to their use in mass and social control. A cybernetic approach to their use is a clarifying tool to understand and take advantage of their potentialities in the cultural and artistic contexts. Like media art, cybernetics is a transdisciplinary way of understanding and interacting with the world. Since the Macy Conferences, the topics discussed by cyberneticians have ranged from minimal/abstract/ mathematical structures to huge and complex human relationships (Cybernetics – Kybernetic I: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953, 2003). Cybernetics “is a word invented to define a new field in science. It combines under one heading the study of what in a human context is

76

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in living organisms” (Wiener, 1995). This definition points out why Cybernetics (and especially second-order cybernetics1) plays an important role in understanding interactive media art as a transdisciplinary expression of knowledge and why it is the epistemological basis of the research presented here. Moreover, from Gumbrecht’s perspective: “The second-order observer rediscovered the human body and, more specifically, the human senses as an integral part of any world-observation (…) it brought up the question of a possible compatibility between a world-appropriation by concepts (which I call ‘experience’) and a world-observation through the senses (which I shall call ‘perception’)” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 39). From a technical and material perspective, Gumbrecht's statement is the basis for observing the role of a sensor in an interactive media artwork (installation or performance) as one of the fundamental parts of such a system, allowing the world-appropriation simultaneously by senses and concepts, as well as the communication between two systems with different natures: humans and machines.

1.2 Sensors in the Art context At the Exposition International du Surréalisme (Paris, 1938), “Duchamp had thought of installing ‘magic eyes’ so that the lights would have gone on automatically as soon as the spectator had broken an invisible ray when passing in front of the painting.” Duchamp’s wish proved unfeasible, but Man Ray adapted the idea for the opening night, turning out the lights and handing out flashlights at the entrance so that visitors could use them to view the artworks “on display” (Filipovic, 2009). The solution retained much of Duchamp’s original intention: the viewers got closer physically to the artwork, helping the artist bring it to fruition. In 1968, the British cybernetician Gordon Pask presented at the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity in London the “Colloquy of mobiles” (Gordon Pask, 1968). This artwork was a computer-based social system, in which “male” and “female” machines could establish a communication basically through light, sound rotating elements. According to the German art critic and curator, Margit Rosen, “the form of communication that he

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

77

conceived referred unmistakably to a sexual analogy” and in detail, she says: “After a phase of inactivity, the females (made of fiberglass) began to glow more intensely, and the three males emitted a ray of light. When the ray of light struck the mirror inside the female mobile’s structure, by way of rotating the mirror, she tried deflecting the ray back at the free-hanging light sensors above and below the male’s aluminum body” (Rosen 2014). The system was programmed in a way that “the goal of communicating was to achieve a moment of satisfaction, and the mobiles learned to optimize their behavior to the point where this state could be reached with the least possible use of energy” (Rosen, 2014). Furthermore, the exhibition visitors could also take part in the conversation and learning process, assuming the role of another machine by the use of flashlights and mirrors. These are only two examples of relevant known artworks to illustrate trends in contemporary art that contribute to shifting the way we look at art: as a processual and/or dynamic system, rather than merely an object to be appreciated. In this sense, body engagement and machine mediation are precious topics for understanding the nature of what it became possible to create with electronic and digital technology. Such possibilities are the main aspects that guide the practical propositions of this ongoing research into sensors and aesthetic experience. The material appeal of sensors leads to the question: How can aesthetic experiments with sensors contribute to rescue a handicraft approach to media art production, and therefore contribute to their implementation in an educative approach? Through a cybernetic viewpoint, I work on the hypothesis that the materiality of sensors also frames human-machine interaction and the media art fields.

1.3 Sensors: between nature and machines The origin of a sensor as a device in the history of culture is also rooted in observations and experiments with nature and living organisms. That is why the history and genealogy of sensing is a field to look at in order to understand the role played by the concept, materiality and functions of sensors in a dynamic system. A brief overview of those possible connections/similarities, and the differences between organic and machinic principles is a recurrent topic. Valentino Braitenberg for instance, asserts in “Vehicles – Experiments in synthetic Psychology”: “When the cooperation of various input nerves in the activation of spinal motoneurons was analyzed, three facts emerged.”

78

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

They turned out to be fundamental discoveries about the computational properties of synapses, even before the techniques of electrical recording of single neurons were developed” (Braitenberg, 1984, p. 109). Those three facts explained the functional relations between the macroscopical input-output experiments and the microscopical universe of the electrical properties of neural cell membranes, constituting, as the fundamental operations of the calculus of propositions: conjunction (AND), disjunction (OR), and negation (NOT). These are coincidentally the logic elements also used by Greek philosophers of antiquity and by programmers. This relationship definitely brings a broader perspective on the sensing phenomena. On the one hand, it can be seen through the lens of its very materiality, exploring the manipulation of electricity and electric impulses through conductive and non-conductive materials and/or their inherent behaviors. In this sense, the recent experiments with sensors made with conductive fabrics are promising tools to experiment intermodal interfaces with sensors, embedded in body and/or space, with posterior analysis of their relationships. On the other hand, it can be seen through its operational functionality as an interface responsible for the translation of materialities and the regulation of systems. In this case, a successful example is the work of Achim Menges. In his creations he implements the principle of sensors through an organic material (wood) to build structures whose behavior and appearance clearly presents the mutual influence of nature and machines. In the project “HygroScope: Meteorosensitive Morphology” (2012 Centre George Pompidou, Paris), Menges explores a “mode of responsive architecture based on the combination of material inherent behavior and computational morphogenesis. The dimensional instability of wood in relation to moisture content is employed to construct a climate-responsive architectural morphology. Suspended within a humidity controlled glass case, the model opens and closes in response to climate changes with no need for any technical equipment or energy. (…) The material structure itself is the machine” (Menges, 2014). This example illustrates perfectly the influence and important role that materials (and materialities) still play in creative propositions, and in the interactive media art field as well, although it has been recognized by many theoreticians in the history of art as belonging to the universe of processual art, therefore emphasizing its “immateriality.”

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

79

2. Materiality of communication There is a proliferation of sensors on the market, and they are quite accessible for people in general, which, in combination with the phenomena of DIY culture, enhances our ability and access to technology development. However, only a few people know their specificities and how to use them adequately in a certain context, being able to use them expressively, as part of a language with its specific grammatical structure. Thus, how can we use them to communicate? Regarding Klaus Krippendorff’s conversation with Heinz von Foerster's ideas of language as social practice, it is worth thinking of a “Second-order Cybernetic of Otherness” (Krippendorff, 1996): “When language switches to the track of function it is dialogic. (...) In its function, language is constructive. (...) In its function, my language reaches out for the other: this is the root of conscience” (Foerster, 1995). Such a philosophical statement about the functionality of language must, however, find expression in our material and concrete world. In a critical perspective of occidental development of knowledge construction, based on the abstract instance of meaning attribution, Gumbrecht defines “materialities of communication” as “all those phenomena and conditions that contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. 8). Also developing the concept of “presence” as a spatial rather than temporal notion, Gumbrecht connects media history and body culture, considering that “we no longer believed that a meaning complex could be kept separated from its mediality” (Gumbrecht, 2004, p. II). Both these perspectives have special significance for the interactive media art field, which can be understood as a mediated aesthetic experience which arises from the tension and oscillation between “presence effects” and “meaning effects.” The notion of materiality of communication also leads us to review neglected aspects of digital culture (usually associated by our common sense with abstract and virtual worlds) and can contribute to rescuing handicraft activities, environmental and human values. From a more radical but necessary political perspective, we can also not ignore the origin of materials used in the fabrication of electronic components and devices, their unreasonable and unsustainable exploitative modus

80

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

operandi, endangering human rights, life forms, and the limited natural resources of the planet (Sean Cubitt, 2014).

3. Between sensors and senses: performing the materiality of communication Considering that the idea of the materiality of communication cannot be discussed except from the point of view of practical experiments, the workshop, “Between Sensor and Sense: performing the materiality of communication,” was proposed as a pilot to be held at the conference “Besides the Screen,” in Vitória (Brazil). At this event, participants were stimulated to exercise the creation of an aesthetic experiment with sensors having a functional system as the same starting point.

3.1 The functional system A group of five sensors that are responsive to bending, pressure and/or squeezing manipulation can trigger simultaneously five audio tracks. The sensors were handmade sticktape bend sensors, a tutorial which can be found on the Youtube Channel by Hannah Perner-Wilson (Plusea). (Wilson, 2009). They are basically made with sticktape (not conductive), conductive thread and fabric, and Velostat (a semi-conductive plastic).

Image 1: frame extracted from the video-tutorial “Sticktape bend sensor in less than 4 minutes” (Wilson, 2009)

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

81

The five sensors were connected to a microcontroller through a voltage divider circuit, in which the sensors worked as a variable resistance. The manipulation of the sensors changes the resistance of the material, making the sensors send more or less voltage to the pins of the microcontroller. Through wi-fi communication, the signal read on the microcontroller is sent to software running on a computer, which is programmed to change the volume of pre-recorded audio files. Each sensor is attributed to a soundtrack. The whole system is a potential sound composition to be executed in real time.

3.2 Methodology Participants were introduced to the functional system available as a platform to work on. The idea was that the working system itself had no meaning, and only through the direct experience with the materiality of the available elements could the participants start having ideas of how to explore its potentialities aesthetically. Stimulating through a hands-on, collective learning process, one of the main points of the methodology was based on the trial of whitening all the “black boxes” that composed the technical structure. During this process, the researcher explored the chance of triggering conversation processes. Since electronics and programming are fields of knowledge dealing with the materiality at a non-tangible scale for human senses, this exercise offered the participants the chance of playing with the seductive universe of the “technological magic” from an investigative perspective. Although it was planned to work on a pre-conceived working system, the methodology aimed to offer open space for creation, exercising the connection of meaning attribution with body engagement mediated by technological devices. This was beyond the semiotic constraints, meaning here is understood as the formalization of something that wished to be expressed in order to engage people in a circular movement of an interactive experience. The proposal was not about reinforcing the dichotomy between concrete and abstract, but rather exploring the diversity that exists in balancing such aspects in creative activities. In this open space for creativity the participants had the chance to face a creative process as a place of contingencies. They were supposed to make their aesthetic and technical choices about the evolving problems in a collaborative way.

82

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

Image 2: Participants in the Workshop “Between sensors and senses” held at Besides the Screen Conference in Vitória/ES, Brazil. Aug, 2014. (Photo: Luis Astorquiza)

3.3 Results Most of the participants had no idea of how such things could be placed together to generate a reactive or a potentially interactive system – regarding the concept of interactivity pointed out by the cyberneticians. One of groups came up with a performance experiment based on the contribution of all participants, as a living organism. The sensors would be attached to the chest of each of them and together the group, through thorax movements, would compose a breathing collective organism. The other group came up with the idea of an extended body, whose audio contents referred to previous and daily body experiences in the space of the university. A sensor placed in the belly would trigger noises of the university restaurant, for example.

3.4 Analysis Although we had a short time to embrace all the tasks planned, the experience seemed to be very powerful as a joyful learning process, especially regarding it as an introduction to potentialities of interactive media art and the understanding of its specificities. It confirmed that technical devices themselves, if not inserted in a concrete and social context, are meaningless.

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

83

It was also interesting to perceive how strong the propositions were, based on two main conceptual bodies: the fragmented body and the body-container, reflecting part of the background understanding and the relationships the participants had with their own bodies. The collective creative dynamic was enriched by an enjoyable atmosphere of collaboration and the participants were encouraged to focus on their creative process with the available materials and questions arising, instead of getting obsessed with a final product. From such an approach emerged maybe the most significant discovery of the experience: in creative processes, shifting the perspective to discovering problems instead of solving them, can be a very important tool for a learning and empowering experience. Further experiments should consider long-term work development, in order to stress to the groups other and more complex relationships between conceptual and technical aspects of creativity in the interactive media art field.

4. Enjoyment For Gordon Pask “aesthetically powerful environments” are those which people are liable to enjoy and which serve to shape the enjoyment (Gordon Pask, 1968). Moreover, Pask adds that such an environment “encourages the hearer or viewer to explore it, to learn about it, to form a hierarchy of concepts that refer to it; further it guides his exploration: in a sense, it makes him participate in or, at any rate, see himself reflected in the environment” (Gordon Pask, 1968, p. 34). “Enjoyment” at the fruition, and learning processes at the same time, has been considered in several other circumstances as the key factor for engagement and has been explored inclusively in studies on human-computer interaction. Regarding connections with psychology and cognitive sciences, some researchers also refer to the concept of “flow,” developed by the psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihály (Finneran and Zhang, 2002). He states that the flow experience is defined as the feeling of complete engagement and enjoyment in a creative and playful activity and it is related to “lacking the sense of worry about losing control” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 59). This feeling, mostly achieved by people through games, sports, and other leisure activities, can also be extended to daily life and creative processes. According to him, rather than being in control, “the sense of exercising the control in difficult situations” can be

84

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

very enjoyable, which cannot happen under the “safety protective routines” (p. 61). This idea can be brought into the perspective of creative processes with electronic and digital devices, in which creators are usually challenged by apparently unsolvable technical problems. Flow experiences also embrace the sense of discovery and augmentation of the self’s complexity. That is why Csíkszentmihalyi suggests the balance between challenges and skills. Moreover: “Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement, by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment.” (...) “After an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990, p. 46). Like in the definition of interaction by Ranulph Glanville, the emergence of novelty plays a significant role. The awareness about what Csíkszentmihalyi, Pask, and Glanville proposed are hints to artists, art educators, and creative and cultural agents to know how to analyze and act in their contexts as makers. Playing around with sensors in an aesthetic proposition and enjoying its collective learning processes is certainly a creative experience placed in the realm of contingencies. The permanence or transformation of the various aspects of the media art scene (and, by extension, of society) are all based on those makers’ decisions. And while putting into practice the “Second-order Cybernetics of otherness” mentioned by Krippendorff, “enjoyment” is one of the parameters to be considered in those decisions.

5. Cultural agency through creative processes in digital culture Krippendorff’s explanations of social organizations from the position of their active participants (rather than passive observers) are essential for discussing human agency in any cultural field. To be a cultural agent, working in the media art context, is a complex task and requires a multi-skilled profile to be constantly cultivated, especially in a collective and collaborative way. The use of “enjoyment” in the entertainment industry in connection with technology could be considered immediately successful in the sense that it attracts a huge audience that always express themselves very excitedly about what they have experienced in exhibitions and performances. Part of its success is based on a behaviorist approach in playful activities through the use of stimulating (or not) reactions with

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

85

rewards. However, it does not mean that such initiatives contribute to creating what Gordon Pask called the “aesthetically powerful environment,” once they are not able to break the barriers between consumers and technological black boxes. Strategies are needed to trigger curiosity in people, stimulating them to desire whitening black boxes and to become autonomous for making things that can query and transform their own reality. The kind of “magic” behind technology (non-tangible processes) can be a lure for enjoyment and the achievement of “flow” in the field of human-machine interaction, as others have already studied. However, it is rare, and not easy, to implement second-order organizations, where subjects are considered playing their role in such a system. This is a paradigm shift already understood in science and art theories, however we still did not put it into practice in the concrete and daily world. For those who are in the position of “makers” in the network of DIY culture, there still remains the question of the next level: If you can do, does it mean that you must do? And if yes: why and what are the social and environmental implications? These further steps rely on issues of techno-ethic and sustainability, which I consider urgent topics to constitute an ecology of a thinking-acting attitude in the current material and contingency culture. These are topics to consider in media art education initiatives as well.

Final considerations The creative activity conducted at the event “Besides the Screen” contributed to seeing the sensor device as an element that makes possible the transit of materialities, mediated by human intervention. This aspect reinforces our responsibility over our choices once it relies on our human ability to take concrete actions in the world. Whatever kind of material culture we produce, it is necessary to address our freedom of action, but also to regard our responsibility facing “in principle undecidable questions” (Foerster, 1995). In the contingent creative field those undecidable questions are always present and are welcome to become a substantial part of the artwork, letting critical topics evolve to be addressed. Heinz von Foerster says: “Only those questions that are in principle undecidable, we can decide. There is no external necessity that forces us to answer such questions one way or another. We are free! The complement to necessity it is not chance, it is choice! We can choose who we wish to

86

Interactive Media Art and the Materiality of Communication

become when we have decided on in principle undecidable questions” (Foerster, 1995). In addition to the second-order perspective, Humberto Maturana also sees self-reflection as crucial to acting responsibly: “People are aware of the circumstances and reflect the consequences of their activities. They can ask themselves whether they want to be what they are as they are doing what they are doing. In the moment of self-observation, all the certainties and securities of the state without reflection disappear” (Poerksen and Maturana, 2004, p. 74). Unstable conditions are a key factor to check our sense of responsibility; at the same time, it is a parameter of the sense of risk. To risk is to play with contingencies. And maybe this is the most exciting and enjoyable aspect in interactive media art’s creative processes. In such a context, learning to play with the materiality of communication can be a powerful tool to grasp what can be extended to our daily cultural action, and therefore finding parameters to decide what becomes permanent and what should be changed. Far from giving precise answers, this paper is a speculation on possible models for creating the necessary conditions for an effective participation by subjects, and therefore (in the media arts scene or in a general social context) to allow the emergence of second-order organizations.

References Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: MIT Press. Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Cubitt, Sean. (2014). “Ecologies of Fabrication.” In. Vitória, Brazil. http://besidesthescreen.com/. Cybernetics – Kybernetic I: The Macy-Conferences 1946-1953. 2003. Vol. 1. Zürich, Berlin: Diaphanes. Filipovic, E. (2009). “A Museum That Is Not.” Art-Flux. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-museum-that-is-not/. Finneran, Christina M. and Ping Zhang. (2002). “The Challenges of Studying Flow within a Computer-Mediated Environment.” In Human-Computer Interaction Studies in MIS. Foerster, H. (1995). “Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics.” Sehr 4 (2: Constructions of the mind).

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

87

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html. Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004). Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Krippendorff, K. (1996). A Second-Order Cybernetics of Otherness. http://repository.upenn.edu/asc-papers/80. Menges, A. (2014). HygroScope: Meteorosensitive Morphology. Accessed October 5. http://www.achimmenges.net/?p=5083. Naimark, M. (2003). “Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Money: Technology-Based Art and the Dynamics of Sustainability.” Leonardo Journal. www. artslab.net. Pask, Gordon. (1968). “The Colloquy of Mobiles.” In Cibernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts. London: Studio International. Poerksen, B. and Humberto M. (2004). “The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism.” In The Knowledge of Knowledge Entails Responsibility. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint academic. Ranulph, G. (2001). “Second Order Cybernetics (6.46.3.3).” Vancouver. http://homepage.mac.com/WebObjects/FileSharing.woa/65/wo/7wsdM pT goWel2KJb.1/2.2.1.2.26.31.97.1.35.0.1.1.1?user=ranulph&fpath=p ape%2 0etc:cybernetics&templatefn=FileSharing1.html. Rosen, M. (2014). “Pask Bibliography.” Accessed September 25. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/colloquy-of-mobiles/?desc=full. Wiener, N. (1995). “Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener.” In Cybernetics of Cybernetics: The Control of Control and the Communication of Communication, edited by Heinz von Foerster. Minneapolis: Future Systems, Inc. Wilson, H.P. (2009). Stickytape Bend Sensor in Less than 4 Minutes. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEPgLbPv6N

Notes 1

In “Cybernetics of Cybernetics: The control of control and the communication of communication” Heinz von Foerster opens the publication distinguishing firstorder cybernetics as the “cybernetics of observed systems” and second order cybernetics as the “cybernetics of observing systems” (Foerster, 1995, p. 1). “Second order Cybernetics (...) was developed between 1968 and 1975 in recognition of the power and consequences of cybernetic examination of circularity. It is cybernetics, when cybernetics is subjected to the critique and the understandings of cybernetics. It is the cybernetics in which the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised as had become traditional in Western science: and is thus the cybernetics that considers observing, rather than observed systems” (Glanville, 2001, p. 3) [9].

BASIC NOTIONS OF THE SYSTEMIC VIEW JANOS KORN

Introduction A brief history of the ‘systems view’ of parts of the world is outlined leading to the formulation of problematic issues. By and large the development of the ‘systems or structural view’ of things over time has not followed the path of empirical research. With the exception of control theory developed during and after the Second World War (Brown, Campbell 1948; Nise, 2008; Korn, 2012), there has not been a series of inventions of more or less far reaching laws and theories describing and explaining how parts of the world appear to work and tested against experience as has been the practice of the ‘conventional science’ of physics. It has taken the path of generating a vast variety of ideas without much thought being given to the investigation of their relationship to experience, the tendency started by the pioneers of the ‘systems view’ such as von Bertalanffy and continuing to the present day. This path has been supplemented by the appearance of numerous modeling techniques such as the ‘viable system model’ and ‘universal modeling language’ and ‘systems tools’ like ‘multiple cause diagrams’ without appropriate theoretical foundations (Jackson, 2000). The idea of seeing parts of the world consisting of fundamental elements possibly in some relation forming a structure was originated by the ancient Greeks. Democritus introduced the notion of ‘atoms,’ Thales saw ‘water’ as the fundamental element which was later modified to ‘earth, water, air and fire.’ Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ may be interpreted as the notion of ‘purposive system or cybernetics’ (Wiener, 1948; Korn, 2013a) which is widely recognized in ‘control theory’ (Nise, 2008). We can also view ‘religious systems’ as ‘gods or similar entities with their own particular characteristics in relationships’ which is a particular statement expressing the basic idea of the ‘systems view’ to be generalized later. Although contributing to knowledge, ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Roman, Christian, and other civilizations, perhaps

Janos Korn

89

using ‘common sense knowledge’ made immense use of the activities of ‘systems’ when constructing their hanging gardens, pyramids, walls, icons of gods, and huge cathedrals. Most of these edifices or products have survived, but the ‘systems’ which had constructed them perished. The term ‘system’ has been used sporadically in the past like the ‘Ptolemaic or Copernican view of the solar system,’ ‘systems of rigid bodies,’ or a ‘system of differential equations’ by men of science and by people in the course of their lives like ‘road system,’ ‘communication system’ etc. or ‘he/she has a system (for doing something),’ ‘the system does not work’ and so on. This usage usually occurs when an entity or activity is perceived as complex and needs to be referred to in some usually vague manner. The term came into wider technical use with the development of servomechanisms, or control systems during the Second World War for directing antiaircraft guns, for example, followed by the huge expansion of control theory (Brown, Campbell, 1948; Nise, 2008). Concurrent and later topics like ‘operational research,’ ‘cybernetics,’ ‘systems dynamics,’ ‘viable systems,’ ‘living systems theory’ etc. emerged. Strands of thinking like ‘interpretive, emancipatory, critical approaches,’ ‘chaos theory,’ ’complexity science,’ ‘reflexivity’ and so on have opened up (Jackson, 2000; Umpleby, 1999; Scott, 2004; McMillan, 2008). And the trend continues unabated (Bosch, 2013; Hieronymi, 2013). Thinkers like von Bertalanffy and Boulding realized the general applicability of the term ‘system’ or the ‘systems view’ for describing states and events which appeared complex, resulting in ideas like ‘general systems theory’ as some kind of a super theory (von Bertalanffy, 1950; Boulding, 1956). Developments aimed at a general systems theory were advanced (Klir, 1969; Troncale, 1985; Rapoport, 1986; Yi Lin, 1999) and were based on the idea of the existence of homologies between disciplines that have traditionally been considered as being separated due to their different subject matters. Mathematics was the favored symbolism by which this idea was expressed. General systems theory is considered to be some kind of meta theory. Lately, attempts along this line were abandoned. As an alternative, evolution of what is claimed to be ‘systemic thinking or systemic view’ has been going on along highly speculative lines of diverse topics interspaced by methods of modeling and attempts at systems design most with ill-defined, vague concepts which were difficult to apply to particular, problematic scenarios (Checkland, 1982). A vast number of publications has appeared, conferences and courses at university, but not

90

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

school level, have been held. Control theory has been widely recognized as a separate discipline; this had always been a problematic issue in engineering education which was recognized much later (Towill, 1975; Finniston, 1980; Korn, 2009, 2012). The essentially universally applicable systems view has become fragmented into information systems, social systems, soft/hard systems, service systems, control and computer systems and so on. In addition, there is a variety of ‘systems tools (such as influence diagrams),’ ‘techniques (black box technique, Petri nets, and so on),’ and ‘methodologies (soft system methodology)’ without an appropriate theoretical basis. Their appearance and development may be due to a ‘feeling’ that there are vaguely defined ‘related objects’ acting as the subject matter of the ‘systemic or systems view’ in technology, society, in animate and inanimate nature (Checkland, 1982; Jackson, 2000; Fowler, 2004). Thus, the recent development of the ‘systems view’ may be seen to have taken place along the lines of descriptive, speculative approaches, methods of modeling, approaches with a design flavor and philosophical trends (Jackson, 2000). In the 1950s, the ‘systemic view’ had been introduced as a kind of replacement for conventional science which von Bertalanffy rejected in its entirety, an act which, with hindsight, was a mistake (von Bertalanffy, 1950). The content of conventional science was unsuitable for handling problems associated with related, multiple objects with quantitative or qualitative properties like an ‘electrical capacitance’ or a ‘train driver’ but its methodology of problem solving should have been retained together with domain knowledge of entities which enter the ‘systemic view’ at specific points (Korn, 2013a). The ‘systems view’ has not succeeded as a replacement for conventional science or in providing an alternative either. Perhaps this is due to the ‘systemic view’s’ extensive use of speculative language with sporadic attempts such as ‘systems dynamics’ to bring itself down to a more concrete empirical level (Jackson, 2000). The fundamental tenet of a ‘science’ is the use of ‘law-like’ hypothetical statements referring to ‘theoretical objects’ with class characteristics carrying a symbolism which leads to elaborate ‘invariants’ to be used for formulating models or ‘related symbolic’ expressions as in mathematics, for example. These latter statements usually operate in sufficiently concrete terms which enable them to be exposed to the tests of experiment

Janos Korn

91

or observation risking refutation (Magee, 1985; Korn, 2013a). Speculative language in abstract terms is essential for generating ideas, beliefs, views, describing trends, innovative ideas, making general suggestions, and formulating objectives to be achieved. Such language has been invented for economy in expressing thoughts. In the majority of verbal exchanges between people, ‘speculative language’ is acceptable and sufficient. However, when it comes to testing ideas, when a prototype model has to be produced in design and in constructing predictive, reasoning schemes, more organized thinking is desirable, expressed in terms of concrete ‘means with meaning or models’ (Korn, 2010) such as processed natural language and/or mathematics. On the basis of the outline above, we can suggest a number of specific problematic issues seen as inherent in current practices of the ‘systems or systemic or structural view’: 1. There is a lack of a fundamental theory leading to a ‘discipline’ of systems which would cover the general applicability of the ‘systems view’ and possibly be acceptable as such to those interested in the development, teaching, and application of this view. 2. Methods of modeling do not follow from a theory regarded as fundamental. With a few exceptions, like ‘systems dynamics’ and ‘computer modeling,’ they are free-standing constructs of representation similar to a ‘scale model of a ship’ with vague and ambiguous symbolism incapable of reasoning, leading to predictive statements. 3. The current ‘systems view’ is not rooted in branches of existing knowledge and is not related to the historical background of human intellectual endeavor (Korn, 2013a). 4. Strong educational issues (such as the anomaly between conventional science and engineering, difficulties in teaching ‘systems’) still prevail in addition to the absence of a branch of learning to be considered as a discipline of systems. 5. Lack of integration of the ‘systems view’ into problem solving and design in engineering, the professions and everyday life (Finniston, 1980). 6. Lack of effect of the ‘systemic view’ on thinking in society, community, and the individual.

92

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Practice of the ‘systems or structural view’ of parts of the world is an empirical exercise along with the ‘view of qualitative/quantitative properties of things’ which engendered the development of conventional science. This science has had an immense effect on society due to the invention of effective explanatory and predictive theories and useful devices. Perhaps this has come about as a result of the application of the methodology of conventional science leading to the use of precise mathematical models. This is the direction of activity of the current work (except using linguistic models with the ability to carry mathematics) intended to lead to a systems science through a paradigm change (Korn, 2013a). The intention of this paper is to suggest general principles which are seen to underlie this work and which may lead to the alleviation of the problematic issues suggested above, to show their application in producing the basic ideas of the constituents of human intellectual endeavor and to demonstrate the effect each has had on society including that of ‘systems science.’

‘Systems View’ in the context of Human Intellectual endeavor The ‘systems or structural view’ of parts of the world is an empirical view unlike thinking about aspects of a symbolism like pure mathematics, linguistics, or trying to solve a crossword puzzle. Therefore, its problematic issues need to be resolved by empirical research. Approaches to this kind of research are depicted in Fig.1. which places this view in the context of human intellectual endeavor (Korn, 2013a.) Religions, philosophy, and law are also human intellectual endeavors but they are not concerned with empirical research as, for example, forms of art which may be seen in this light. Blob 1 in Figure 1 stands for the most fundamental intellectual endeavor of perceiving a part of the world as a ‘whole’ and making, or not, an appropriate response like a ‘monkey [preceptor] seeing a tiger [whole] and emitting a shrieking noise presumably meaning: danger is approaching [response].’ Natural language has enabled people to take a ‘structural view’ of entities leading to Blob 2, the ‘subject/predicate construction.’ Further, there are two ways of describing entities: through their ‘qualitative or quantitative properties’ (the basis of mathematical modeling but loss of their identity) OR their ‘structure’ (the basis of linguistic modeling but retaining their identity). These two ways are indicated by Blobs 3 and 4 (Korn 2009, 2012, 2013a).

Janos Korn

93

Perhaps the development of natural language with its immense generality, expressive power and wide applicability to incorporate both ways, has prompted the development of the means for intellectual problem solving indicated by the other blobs. These means have enabled living things, in particular people and others with some means of expression (higher order animals), to solve physical, mental, and emotional problems. For example, conventional science (Blob 8, an intellectual problem solver has resolved an immense number of physical, problematic issues raised by intellectuals, mostly scientists) (Pledge, p. 196).

94

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Unified into a scientific, engineering, and artistic endeavor (the three cultures, [Lewin, 1981]) Figure 1. Diagram of constituents of human intellectual endeavor

Janos Korn

95

Here we are concerned with proposing an improvement in the problem solving ability of the ‘systems view’ through a paradigm change which perhaps can be achieved by ‘systems science’ (Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2013a). Subject to debate and acceptance, ‘systems science’ as proposed here claims to be a general, coherent and in-depth study of the ‘systems or structural view’ leading into design as part of problem solving as indicated by Blobs 10 and 11. Thus, the ‘three cultures’ as referred to in Figure 1 become meaningful (Lewin, 1981). The picture, as shown in Figure 1, shows the diversity and variety of human intellectual endeavor. We intend to develop the ‘structural view’ as indicated by Blob 9 through a paradigm change to show the generality of this view by providing the underlying, general principles of viewing parts of the world which yield the detailed symbolic models capable of being exposed to at least thought experiments. This is an empirical exercise.

General principles of systems Further to the diagram in Figure 1 our interest lies in the ‘systems or structural view’ of parts of the world. To a large extent based on previous publications, we now intend to suggest a succinct summary of the ideas which may be seen as basic to this topic and to suggest their consequences in the subsequent parts of the paper.

1. Principle of identity This principle suggests that there is a general description of parts of the world in terms of their structures which can be viewed either in terms of their appearance (static state) or of their behavior (dynamic state) in terms of ‘natural language’ in the first instance for the expression of a belief, a view and so on. This pair of concepts includes all aspects of parts of the world i.e. concrete, abstract, symbolic, and imaginary. Accordingly, we assert a: Belief about the nature of parts of the world: ‘The identity of concrete, abstract, symbolic, or imaginary entities is defined by structure. Therefore, the ‘systems or systemic view’ of parts of the world as referred to in Figure 1 is pervasive, indivisible, and empirical.’

96

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

2. Principle of analysis This principle suggests a hypothetical statement leading to the analytical means or a symbolism for the structural description of any part of human intellectual endeavor, in particular that of the ‘systems view.’ Accordingly, we assert a: View of existence of parts of the world: ‘There is an agreed number and a kind of parts or theoretical objects each with its own qualifiers AND these parts are connected into = X. A static structure (recognized by qualified relations as stative verbs) to represent parts of the world or states, OR Y. A dynamic structure (recognized by qualified interactions as dynamic verbs) to represent activities or changes of state. Followed by: a symbolism based on ‘processed natural language’ derived from a ‘story of a scenario’ which is the most general means of representation and communication or a model. Meaning-preserving linguistic transformations convert a story into ‘basic constituents’ of oneand two-place sentences of which complex static or dynamic structures can be constructed in terms of ‘ordered pairs’ [linguistic networks] or ‘predicate logic statements’ [semantic diagrams]. This procedure is called static [X] and dynamic [Y] linguistic modeling of scenarios (Korn, 2009, 2013a). Reductionism is restored to the ‘systems view.’ In detail: Four invariants are used for the organized description of a scenario: I. Class of theoretical objects or related pertinent properties [or functional elements at the primitive level] which can be concrete, abstract, symbolic or imaginary; II. Relations producing a static state recognized by stative verbs which describe spatial, kinship, logical etc. relations; III. Interactions producing a dynamic state recognized by dynamic verbs signifying physical power (carrying energy) or influence (carrying information or impression of use [requirements and fitness] or meaning [of symbols, signs, gesture, works of art or carriers of messages…]); IV. Qualifiers (adjectives [properties], adverbs) for focusing on individuals from a class so that the statements containing them can be exposed to test for an assessment of their truth value [in science]

Janos Korn

97

or simply to make them more concrete and/or colorful [in conversation], which altogether form the description of an entity or whole so as to be capable of producing, or not as the case may be, an ‘outcome’ [emergent novelty] or change of physical, mental, or emotional state affected by topology, properties/qualifiers of objects (simulation). Such a description (for representation of a part of the world or as a subject for communication) is referred to as a model which can be ‘static’ [scale model of a ship, gesture, viable systems model etc.] or ‘dynamic’ which can be manipulated [mathematical, linguistic] (Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013a). We recognize: Context-free sentence=Unqualified objects in unqualified relation OR in unqualified interaction and Context dependent sentence= ‘Qualified’ objects in ‘qualified’ relation OR in ‘qualified’ interaction. The relationship between elements of natural language and the empirical concepts of ‘systems science’ is shown in Figure 2. Elements Nouns

Function in a sentence Subject, Direct and Indirect objects

Relationship to a part of the World Topic or chosen Initiating or Affected objects

Verbs

Stative verb – being Dynamic verb – action

Relations Interactions, impression

Adjectives

Qualifiers of nouns

Properties

Adverbs

Qualifiers of verbs

Adverbials of manner, time etc. of action

Conjunctions Joining words, clauses to create arguments, symbolic logic

Relations, complex scenarios AND, OR

Figure 2. Isomorphism between natural language and invariants of systems science

98

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Here we have a comparison between ‘conventional and systems sciences’: A. Conventional science deals with a single object and seeks referably mathematical relationships between its quantifiable and/or other properties or qualifiers. The identity of the object is lost. Conventional science can make far reaching, hypothetical, empirical statements based on the repeatability of parts of the world which can be translated into precise, static as well as reasoning models to be exposed to experience to assess their truth value. B. Systems science deals with multiple objects and seeks mathematical and/or linguistic relationships between its structural elements (objects + relations [statics] or objects + interactions [dynamics]). The identity of the qualified objects is preserved. Systems science intends to follow the methodology of conventional science but, in order to cope with living in particular human activity scenarios with much reduced repeatability of parts of the world, introduces qualitative aspects and uncertainty into the construction of static as well as reasoning models.

3. Principle of change of state In general, following Newton’s First Law: No change of state expressed as a property can take place by itself. A means for action for execution of a cause is required for the accomplishment of a change arising either by ‘chance’ or in accordance with a ‘purpose’ and is subject to WILL in case of living beings (Korn, 2009, 2013a). Thus we can say Change of existence of parts of the world: ‘Any part of the world can be seen to change as a result of activity by sets of objects in informatic and/or energetic interactions operating in an algorithm [the producers] intended to create or to destroy an intellectual, physical, mental, or emotive product the function of which is to induce changes in individuals (natural, artificial, living, social) (the consumers) for their benefit or otherwise.’ Figure 3 is a diagrammatic representation of this statement which represents the dynamics of a purposive system which reduces to ‘action by chance’ if the feedback links are taken out. This obviates the presence of ‘Agents 1 and 2.’

Janos Korn

99

We can make the following remarks regarding the scheme in Figure 3 (Nise, 2008; Korn 2012, 2013a): Remark 1. The ‘initial state’ of a changing object expressed as a property must be consistent with that of the ‘final state.’ For example, ‘the transformation of a fence painted yellow into the same fence painted red is possible but not into the same fence being warm by the same scheme. Remark 2. Any purposive system [technical, biological or social or that used in everyday life such as ‘to cut a slice of bread’] consists of two regions: that in which ‘information’ or signals as ‘influence’ and the other in which ‘energy’ as ‘physical or skilled power,’ circulate. The two regions are interfaced by an ‘amplifier (technical [electronic], living [muscle], social [demonstration]) (Korn, 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013a). Remark 3. Only one property of a changing object used to specify a change of state can be altered at a time since only two properties can be compared at the same time: that included in the objective with that indicating the current state through a feedback path. Remark 4. The task of ‘inner feedback loop’ is to produce the product which consists of a number of ‘related objects’ expressed as ‘ordered pairs.’ Each ordered pair describes a change. In order to produce a required product, inner feedback loops operate in an algorithm. Each ordered pair requires an inner feedback loop for its construction. Thus, the number of ordered pairs of products in a scenario may be used as a measure of complexity of a scenario=number of ordered pairs of products The diagram in Figure 3 is constructed from one- and two-place sentences following the convention of linguistic modeling (Korn, 2009, 2013a). The diagram has three feedback loops concerned with changes of state of: 1. A selected changing object; 2. The product; 3. A particular ‘system’ contributing to the production of the product in accordance with an algorithm.

100

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Figure 3. Diagram of production and consumption combined into a purposive system

The function of Agent 2 is to carry the objective which describes an envisaged property of the changing object to be accomplished by the whole of the purposive system, to compare the objective with the current state or property and to transmit the difference to Agent 1A. The function of Agent 1A is to accept this difference, to compare it with the current state of the product and transmit the difference to Agent 1B. The function of Agent 1B is to accept this difference, to compare it with current state of

Janos Korn

101

activity of the ‘systems’ acting within the algorithm so as to produce the product and to activate these ‘systems’ as required toward production. In order to show the operation of the scheme in Figure 3 in producing products consisting of multiples of properties we expand it without showing the feedback links as depicted in the scheme in Figure 4. This figure also illustrates the use of equation 1: A measure of complexity is given by the number of purposive systems required for the production of ordered pairs. In Figure 4, ‘systems 1, 2, etc. and d’ are equivalent to the ‘inner feedback loop’ in Figure 3 which operates until all required properties of the product are in place or the product is complete. ‘System d’ then delivers to and ‘switches on’ the product to the ‘changing object.’ Subsequently the product can exert interaction to achieve the required effect on the changing object. The term ‘delivery’ does not mean only physical delivery. It can mean, for example, that once the ‘geometric and material properties of an electric motor [Product] have been produced by [Inner feedback loop], it can then be ‘switched on’ [Delivered] to produce mechanical power to effect the rotation of a propeller [Changing object]. Or once the ‘training course for a plumber has been completed by [Inner feedback loop] the plumber [Product] can practice installing heating [Delivery] that can affect the well-being of a family [Changing object].’ The ‘production’ part of the scheme in Figure 4 is concerned with manufacture or assembly whereas the ‘delivery’ part deals with application, all operating in an algorithm to ensure coordinated activity of the whole scheme. For instance, ‘making a knife’ is the province of the former but its use for ‘cutting bread’ is carried out by the ‘delivery’ part to be passed on to the ‘person to eat it’ [Changing object]. Studies in engineering systems are usually concerned with the ‘manufacture part’ (Nise, 2008; Korn, 2012). For example, a story of a scenario might be: Due to its aging population, a town council is considering making the inner part of the town ‘age friendly.’ The problem is to fit this story into the formalism of linguistic modeling which should help the council to make a decision. The term ‘aging population’ is abstract and designates a class or number of people sharing similar and, as far as possible, ‘concrete,’ observable characteristics for features or properties which need to be identified and connected by logical functions i.e. they appear together in

102

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

the same time period. This procedure forms a set of ordered pairs as indicated under X in ‘Principle of analysis’ and can be carried out in a methodical manner (Korn, 2013a). For example, ‘getting tired,’ ‘difficulty in walking,’ ‘being uncertain,’ ‘having graying hair,’ and so on are properties shared by and can be used for identification of members of the class of ‘aging population.’ This set then generates a number of ‘needs’ by implication such as ‘supplying chairs,’ ‘slowing traffic lights,’ etc. provided by inner feedback loops in Figures 3 and 4, leading to their totality which constitutes the product and which may enable the town to be called ‘age friendly.’ Subsequently this product affects the mental and physical states of the ‘aging population’ [Changing object]. The methodical, detailed, and precise application of static and dynamic linguistic modeling of this scenario along the lines of the scheme in Figure 4 enable the council to evaluate cost, impact on physical, mental and emotional environments of the town including the rest of its population etc., and to reach a decision. This is shown by the semantic diagram in Figure 5 which is a loose application of dynamic linguistic modeling without the rigorous notation intended for demonstration. The implication, as generated by the Semantic Functional Relation (SFR) (Korn, 2009, 2013a) is the ‘aging population’ has properties: 1. getting tired, 2. difficulty in walking, 3. being uncertain, AND in order to improve life, requires the town to become ‘age friendly’ by the fulfillment of: I. supply of benches, II. reduction of obstacles, III. clear signposting, where 1, 2, and 3 are identifying and I, II, and III are contingent properties which act as objectives to ‘delivery systems’ in Figure 5.

Janos Korn

Figure 4. Expanded version of Figure 3

103

104

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Figure 5. Approximate semantic diagram of ‘aging population’

4. Principle of hierarchy We distinguish two kinds of hierarchy: 1. Evolutionary hierarchy which arises as a result of successive aggregation of two or more assemblies of related objects or properties in the direction of increasing complexity for the production of new, emergent properties, and 2. Organizational hierarchy which is an arrangement of dependency when a body or organization [natural, living, man-made] is viewed as classified in successively subordinate levels (Anon, 1994; Korn 2013a). The existence of a hierarchy depends on the complexity of the product as indicated by equation 1. Fashioning a ‘walking stick from a tree branch by a walker when he cuts its length’ involves one ‘ordered pair’ giving ‘measure of complexity=1.’ Also, however much knowledge is involved, basically the operation of a ‘single doctor, lawyer, or architect etc.’ engaged in nothing but prescribing a medication, giving advice or preparing a drawing, is similar. A postman sorting, delivering and pushing letters through letter boxes in sequence as indicated by ‘dynamic verbs’ does not require a manager [measure of complexity=1], no hierarchy exists. The 3 activity is self-organized (McMillan 2008). However, when the same job of sequences is carried out by three postmen, so as to coordinate their activities according to an algorithm to bring about a product of three ordered pairs (measure of complexity=3). All these activities, as shown by the dynamic verbs, are carried out in accordance

Janos Korn

105

with skilled power which is one or more purposive systems operating in accordance with the scheme in Figure 3 (Korn, 2009, 2013a). Further to the scheme in Figure 4, representation or modeling of ‘evolutionary hierarchy’ can be accomplished by: First – Using the mathematics of ordered pairs of an emerging object so as to leave one or more relations unattached in one or more manufactured products (Korn, 2009, 2013a). By picking up unattached relations the products are then assembled. This is the production part of Figure 4, resulting in a new, emergent property of the aggregate. Second – The completed product is subsequently delivered, or not, to be used directly or through a ‘user.’ This is the delivery part of Figure 4. Each part: manufacture, assembly, delivery, or service can exist on its own since each is carried out by purposive systems according to the self-contained scheme as depicted in Figures 3 and 4. The ‘first part’ continues until a specific product in production is deemed to be completed and becomes suitable for use by a consumer to be delivered to cause a change of state in the consumer. For example, ‘bullets’ regarded as a product are manufactured and assembled in a factory then given to ‘soldiers’ who shoot them at the ‘enemy,’ the ‘changing object.’ ‘Organizational hierarchy’ is the consequence of ‘evolutionary hierarchy’: 1. Low level of hierarchy: manufacture, assembly, or delivery of a number of same or different kinds of basic product at the basic level of hierarchy such as functional elements and their direct assembly. For example, ‘a mechanical spring or gunpowder’ is thought of as ‘functional element’ (Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013a). A machine-tool workshop [to cut lengths of steel rods], assembly lines [to assemble cardboard boxes], a squad of soldiers [to fire bullets], chamber maids [to service rooms in a hotel], or a number of priests in different parishes [to prepare a sermon of sentences (a sentence is a unit of thought)], or a salesman in a drapery or hardware shop [to deliver a ‘piece of cloth’ or a ‘nail’] serve as examples. Products at this level of hierarchy can be delivered directly to changing objects to affect their physical, mental, or emotional state.

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

106

Products manufactured at this level of hierarchy are further assembled in the direction of increasing complexity with subsequently emerging new properties until they are deemed to be complete or suitable for consumption or for changing the state of a selected object as shown in Figure 3. This is what is meant by basic or horizontal levels of hierarchy. The activities of manufacture, assembly, delivery, or service are divided into ‘groups’ of products defined by an emergent property. For example, a ‘motor car engine’ having been assembled has become ‘capable of delivering varying mechanical power’ subject to being supplied with ‘fuel’ and means of ‘control.’ Also, a ‘person’ undergoing a training course acquires the ‘skill of a practicing plumber.’ Each group usually requires a manager to coordinate activities and to organize inputs of raw material, physical power, information, and facilities. We note that the presence of a ‘manager’ effects an increase of ‘measures complexity’ with all the attendant uncertainty, increased possibility of errors occurring, disputes due to human factors such as emotions, ambitions, envy and so on. 2.

Increasing levels of hierarchy: This is caused by:

First, in the case of ‘different kinds of basic product’=Increasing complexity of product and/or increased size of the ‘consumer.’ Second, in the case of the ‘same kind of basic product’=Increased size of the ‘consumer.’ Third, increasing variety and complexity of products generate ‘aspects.’ They are, for example, products that need to be invented, designed, discovered such as natural gas or coal, marketed, sold, bought, involving finances and accounting, packaged, the needs of people taking part in production to be taken care of, delivery and management have to be catered for and so on. These activities in an organization are run by ‘departments’ such as ‘Accounts.’

Janos Korn

107

Although expressed with an army connotation, a general representation of the hierarchical structure of an organization is the ‘inverted tree’ as demonstrated by Figure 6.

Figure 6. Diagrammatic representation of hierarchy

Figure 6 is a ‘static’ model or representation of hierarchical structure which cannot be manipulated. However, it shows that in the direction of the arrow of increasing complexity due to the operation of ‘evolutionary hierarchy’ the ‘containment principle’ is maintained for manufactured artifacts (Saeed 1997). The increased level of hierarchy in the vertical direction is due to the ‘third case.’ For example, in the case of a ‘motor car’ production, a ‘piston’ is ‘physically’ contained in the ‘piston, pin’ assembly which is part of the ‘engine’ assembly and so on from left to right in Figure 6. Each assembly has its own manager at level 2. In a ‘service’ such as the ‘army’ or a ‘hotel’ informatic containment takes place in the vertical direction. For example, in Figure 6 the ‘sergeant’ at level 3 contains level 1 and 2. The organization as in Figure 6 operates in terms of ‘information’ which is handled by purposive systems as in Figure 3 at each junction designated by a ‘name’ (Korn, 2010). For example, a diagram of a simplified scenario of a ‘kitchen staff of three cooks and a head cook preparing a meal’ is shown in Figure 7.

108

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Figure 7. Simplified illustration of hierarchy

5. Principle of synthesis as part of problem solving Figure 1 points toward the generality of problem solving in the intellectual sphere based on recognition of an unsatisfactory state of affairs prevailing in a particular area. For example, the widespread acceptance of ‘heat [flow]’ as understood in thermodynamics as a ‘flow of caloric’ an invisible fluid-like substance (Pledge, 1966). The basic structure of problem solving is shown in Figure 8 as a transformation of a problematic initial state into an acceptable previous or final state. The transformation is carried out by ‘purposive systems’ as show in diagrams in Figures 3 and 4. Once agreement has been reached about what constitutes the ‘problematic IS’ and the ‘acceptable PS and FS’ which can be subject to debate, these systems need to be synthesized or designed together with the ‘product,’ constituting the prototype model (Korn, 2009, 2013a). A design methodology for engineering the product and organizing the systems in an algorithm is described together with the ‘mathematics of ordered pairs’ which calculates the detailed mechanism of aggregation of components into more complex ones [Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013a]. Remark 5. The world may be seen as a conglomeration of related OR interacting things and ideas in static or dynamic states respectively any chosen part of which may be regarded by a living, in particular human, being as a candidate for change. Thus, an object to be changed (concrete

Janos Korn

109

[chair] or abstract [transparency (of the window)]) can be selected with features any of which is perceived to fail to fit an expectation and as such is regarded to be in a problematic initial state. Remark 5 summarizes the idea that problem solving in the living sphere is as common as gravity is in the material sphere, since without this activity living things cannot import substances necessary for their survival and export waste.

Figure 8. Basic structure of problem solving

The possibility of unlimited change is the basis of innovation, the source of novelty and the exercise of human ingenuity. Spotting a ‘problematic issue’ and how to put it right needs a ‘leap of imagination’ which is subsequently realized by ‘purposive systems’ or by natural evolution in the living sphere.

6. Principle of ideas The objective of a purposive system as shown in Figure 3, as a representation of the Aristotle’s ‘final cause,’ is set in a living organism from microscopic to plants and in most animals by the hereditary mechanism. For this reason, when a plant or animal meets an unexpected circumstance like ‘lack of water’ it usually dies, it is unable to seek alternatives. Human beings think and come up with ideas to debate so as to avoid and prevent circumstances and advance their own situations by having ambitions. As depicted in Figure 8, they can perceive problematic, initial scenarios and look for remedies by identifying final states which

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

110

they can turn into objectives of purposive systems for transforming the initial and final states. Such systems are to be designed using a design methodology (Korn 2009, 2012, 2013a). Therefore, we need to add another cause, the cause of ‘thought,’ to Aristotle’s four: ‘Thinking [to generate thought for survival, advancement and to set objectives]. The five causes complete the necessary constituents of ‘problem solving’ as indicated in Figure 8, and comprise an engineering philosophy, the discipline which is no longer confined to a narrow technical context but is regarded as a universal activity of beings in the living sphere (Lewin 1981). The proposed ‘systems science’ is suggested as a major constituent of this philosophy.

An example An example is included to demonstrate the use of ‘static and dynamic linguistic modeling in analysis of scenarios.’ A simple example of the ‘aging population’ with a design flavor but without the details of the ‘design methodology is given in 3. Principle of change of state.’

Static linguistic modeling The story is ‘The top of the table is supported by legs which stand on the carpet.’ Here we have: ‘Class of selected topic’ or affected object=‘Table’ ‘Common selected features of its structure or ‘invariants’’=‘Top is supported by legs,’ ‘Legs stand on carpet’ ‘An organization of these features into a structural model’ =i=1=‘top (is supported by),’ i=2=‘legs (stand on)’ and i=3=‘carpet (is)’ which refers to the identity of an object without an active part. However, there are three topics or objects comprising the structure of the scenario. The common noun ‘top’ is the subject of the sentence, the others complete the predicate. The relations are arranged into the array in equation 2 shown without the background theory (Korn 2009, 2013a).

Janos Korn

111

Equation 2

In equation 2, one selected term or ordered pair in each row is part of the complete sentence. In the first row ‘top is supported by legs, (n12)’, in the second row ‘legs stand on carpet, (n23)’ and in the third row ‘carpet is carpet, (n33).’ The three relations together form an aggregate which may be described as: ‘table top supporting arrangement,’ the emergent property of the whole bounded by the conjunction, or ‘simultaneous presence,’ of the three ordered pairs which is called the conceptual boundary of the whole. The emergent property labels or designates the noun phrase, ‘table.’ However, the array offers a choice of groups of ordered pairs or aggregates. For example, we have in the first row ‘top is supported by the Carpet, (n13),’ in the second row ‘legs stand on top, (n21),’ and in the third row ‘carpet is carpet, (n33).’ This aggregate also makes sense, we can name it ‘upside down table,’ as its emergent property. But we cannot assign a label to it since natural language does not recognize this object as one that occurs regularly and merits assignment of a ‘noun phrase.’ In this example the total number of choices is three, but if the number of topics is increased to four, the number of choices becomes 220 and the same for five is 4,845 (Korn 2009). Thus, we note that with an increasing number of objects taking part in a scenario, the increase of the possibility of their combinations into choices is vast. The next step is: ‘For a particular topic, specific features of the model can be: Stated; investigated for the occurrence or not of an emergent property in steady state; AND the truth of the investigation or simulation can be confirmed provided the conditions in ‘Common selected features of its structure’ can be reproduced for experiment or observation’=‘Any one of the groups of

112

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

ordered pairs or choices in equation 2 can be selected and examined for existence of an emergent property.’ Equation 2 can be represented as a linguistic network as shown in Figure 9 which can then be used for exercising methods of network analysis. Thus, extending the application of this discipline into linguistics (Korn 2009).

Figure 9. Directed graph representation of equation 2

Dynamic linguistic modeling The story is: ‘There is a farm with land for grazing. But in the winter, for the cows to be able to give milk, they must eat hay which is delivered to them, from the store to the shed, by the farmer who uses a tractor. The cows are milked every morning by machine. Having accomplished these jobs, the farmer is content.’ Following the pattern set by the previous example, we have: ‘A class of selected topic’=‘Initiating and affected objects: ‘farmer – hay,’ ‘machines – cows’ ‘Common selected features of its structure’=‘Context-free sentences: ‘farmer delivered hay,’ ‘machines milked cows’ Adjectival, adverbial qualifiers– Farmer, for the cows to be able to give milk, uses a tractor, Hay – nutritious,

Janos Korn

113

Machines – working, Cows – hungry’ ‘An organization of these features into a structural model’=‘The semantic diagram is shown in Figure 10 with qualifiers inserted (Korn, 2009, 2013a). Additional sentences are introduced (farmer placed [hay] in front of cows), (farmer connected machines [to cows]) and (farmer created [impression]) which appears to be needed for achievement of a more complete meaning of the story.’ This is stipulated in the course of constructing the semantic diagram. The semantic diagram in Figure 10 introduces the use of ‘feedback’ as part of the progression in time of changes of states of objects from an object carrying an input function such as object 1 [dp(1,1)] toward another object with an acquired property considered to be an outcome such as object 12. Figure 10 says that ‘farmer at 1’ cannot proceed to further action at ‘farmer at 4’ until ‘he/she knows that the current action of ‘delivering’ is completed’ and so on in any sequence of events accomplished by a ‘living object’ with a central nervous system capable of decision-making as part of the cybernetic structure (Wiener 1948). In general, at any junction or object with ‘feedback’ interaction there is a decision to be made. For example, at ‘farmer at 4’ the ‘farmer is aware that hay has been delivered at ‘3’ to the shed but he is also aware through feedback that there is no hay initially at ‘‘6’ for the cows.’ This is comparison which calls for action ‘to place, in (4,5)’ if there is a difference between what is required and what actually exists. In Figure 10 decision-making is implicit, it is shown explicitly in Figure 3. In order to see how ‘feedback’ and ‘prompting links’ affect the progression of state in a semantic diagram, we need to derive the sequence of predicate logic statements following the method developed in (Korn, 2009). The semantic diagram in Figure 10 shows the acquired properties of the ‘product’ or topics which, as ordered pairs, are: Ap (3,3) – [nutritious] hay (is delivered, twice a day, from store to) shed (n34) 3. ap(9,9) – [working] machines (are connected to) cows (n51) ap(10,10) – [hungry] cows (have no more) milk (n12) Since there are five objects we need one out of three ordered pairs with feasible, arbitrary acquired properties as follows.

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

114

[nutritious] hay (is eaten by) cows (n31) milk (is also stored in) shed (n24) 4. [working] machines (increase production of) milk (n52) The ordered pairs are represented in the linguistic network in Figure 11 from which we note that the tree ‘n12, n34, n24, n51’ represents the acquired properties of the product in Figure 11 in addition to ‘n24’ which is demanded by the formalism of linguistic networks (Korn, 2009). This means that the ‘interacting object’ for the production of this ordered pair is missing from the semantic diagram in Figure 3 and, as such, missing from the story of the scenario. The number of groups of ordered pairs in a digraph for ‘n=5’ is (20 x 19 x 18 x 17)/(1 x 2 x 3 x 4)=4,845. These are the candidates for ‘trees’ or ‘bounded objects,’ of which one just mentioned functions as the product in this problem. Now that the product is available we can ask questions pertinent to particular domains of ‘conventional science.’ That example is directly related to this problem. The next step is: ‘For a particular topic, specific features of the model can be: Simulated in search of an expected or unexpected outcome or change of state of a selected object or topic in dynamic state; AND the truth of the investigation or simulation can be confirmed provided the conditions in ‘Common selected features of its structure’ can be reproduced for experiment or observation’=‘When software becomes available including times for achieving changes of state or having an integration procedure as required by the dotted and chain dotted, directed lines, the semantic diagram can be simulated to study the dynamics of the scenario. Also, ‘Common selected features of its structure’ can be set up to perform experiments for comparison with the result of the simulation.’

Janos Korn

Figure 10. Semantic diagram of the ‘farmer, hay, milk scenario’

115

116

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Figure 11. Linguistic network of ‘hay/cows scenario’

Discussion of the examples: 1. The full treatment of these examples is given in (Korn, 2013a). Here we have included the minimum for appreciating the method of static and dynamic linguistic modeling. 2. The relations and interactions in the scenario are represented by stative and dynamic verbs such as ‘is supported’ in equation 2, and ‘to deliver’ in Figure 10. 3. The explicit pattern of the purposive operation is summarized in Figure 3 which in an abbreviated form continues to be exhibited here in the activities indicated in Figure 10, and showing the ‘producer’ part, the ‘product,’ and how the ‘product’ affects the mental state of a living object, the ‘farmer’ in the ‘consumer’ part. Each part of the sequence of such operations produces a part of the ‘product’ with the complete product appearing at object 11 to cause the change of state of the ‘farmer’ or the outcome. 4. The abstract term expressing the ‘impression of satisfaction’ has been gained by perception of the ‘farmer’ collecting concrete terms as given by the acquired properties at object 11. 5. The scenario, the subject matter of this example, contains ‘hardware, bioware and humanware’ as described in (Korn, 2013a). We can consider further ‘problematic issues’ once the product is available. Here we are concerned with business science (finance, accounting, law, marketing, and so on) with a story as a continuation of the narrative of the scenario:

Janos Korn

117

The herd of cattle consists of 56 cows each eating 15kg of hay a day during winter time, assuming there is no grass, and producing 18 liters of milk a day. The price of hay is £250 a ton. The question for the farmer is: ‘If the winter lasts 90 days, what is the minimum selling price of milk needed to break even?’ Mathematical model: Total cost of hay is 56 x 0.015 x 250 x 90=£18,900 from which the minimum selling price of milk 18,900=56 x 18 x 90 x price which is about £0.2 per liter.

Contribution of constituents of human intellectual endeavor to society Figure 1 says: ‘All further efforts are motivated by the need to solve PROBLEMS,’ which means that humanity has been thriving in order to find the means for solving intellectual problems intended for the solution of ‘mental, physical, and emotional problems.’ The intention now is to consider the influence of the ‘constituents of human intellectual endeavor’ on a society, community, or an individual. Parameters for description of activities of a society, community, or individual A society, community, or individual consists of individuals who are living objects and are engaged in activities that aim to change their ‘mental and physical states’ in the interest of survival. Any identifiable group of such individuals is called a social system. Activities to that effect are described as: Education (a), Entertainment/culture (b), Empirical/theoretical knowledge (c), Design/manufacture, assembly of materials/devices/artifacts including medicines (d), Defense/law, order (e), Health or maintenance of physical and mental well-being (f), Manufacture of food and energy or conversion of raw materials into consumables (g), Commerce of materials and energy including information gathering and exchange (h), Transport or distribution and delivery of goods [foods], people, information (i),

118

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Environment or source of energy, raw material, information or sink of waste (j) Characteristic features of human intellectual endeavors as a ‘means of problem solving’ 1. Superstitions, mysticism, common sense knowledge, experience – source of prediction of events of human interest (outcome of a battle, finding a lover, good fortune or success), untenable due to use of models separate from the objects of inquiry [sup, myst], vague, abstract language, no attempt at falsification of hypotheses, based on conventions, traditions [comsen], match of current problem to one in past [exp], restricted application… 2. Fine arts, paintings, literary works – intends to represent images, to send messages by authors, to provide pleasure, to generate emotions. Fertile ground for human invention, creativity … 3. Performing arts, music and dance – as ‘Fine art…’ except the means of doing it is different… 4. Conventional science – intends to invent credible, reliable representations of the quantitative aspects of parts of the world for explanations and predictions of events involving individual objects, to discover new materials/devices irrespective of their value to humanity, fertile ground for human invention, creativity. Immense success in influencing the lives of people, animals, plants, and on the environment and education, 5. Architecture, medicine, conventional engineering – intends to provide dwellings, offices, bridges; to heal; to design and implement physical or material artifacts through construction and manufacture. Fertile ground for human invention, creativity – tries to handle related multi-object problems, strongly value based … 6. Systemic view – generates mostly speculative views, ideas; little if any reference to systematic exposure to experience; creates models difficult to use without proper foundations; restricted interest and application…. 7. Systems science – follows the methodology of conventional science in generating credible, reliable representations of qualitative, including quantitative, aspects of parts of the world for description and simulation of their static and dynamic structures so as to predict events which involve related, interacting objects with living, human components; acts as part of problem solving and

Janos Korn

119

design; not necessarily value based; potentially unrestricted application. In particular, ‘systems science’ involves changes in EDUCATION: I. II.

III. IV.

Introduction of teaching the symbolism of ‘linguistics’ in addition to ‘mathematics.’ Acting as a means of mapping a scenario, possibly problematic, into a theoretical construct for organized speculation before, and if, introducing quantitative methods [measures of uncertainty, differential equations…] In-depth understanding of HOW things work. Design of ‘products’ and ‘systems’ and so on.

8. Systems engineering – intends to design and implement purposive, related multi-object systems; applications are theoretically unrestricted. It may be concerned with development of the third culture as indicated in Figure 1. All means of problem solving are engaged in producing products with the function of changing the mental and physical states of societies, communities or individuals in accordance with the scheme in Figure 3. Relationship between parameters and features In order to gain an insight into the ‘contribution of constituents of human intellectual activity to society’ we relate features to parameters through subjectively estimated influence measured on the scale as follows: Ɣ

very significant=3, significant=2, superficial=1, nil=0.

This is summarized in Figure 12 and is based on intuitive judgment. Accordingly, ‘5. Architecture, medicine, conventional engineering’ and ‘8. Systems engineering’ have the greatest influence followed by ‘4. Conventional’ and ‘7. Systems sciences,’ which may be expected since these disciplines directly contribute to handling the physical and mental needs of human beings.

120

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

Figure 12. Comparative appreciation of constituents

Conclusions From an historical outline of the ‘systems view’ we have formulated a number of problematic issues one of which states the lack of fundamental, underlying empirical concepts of this view and the lack of a theoretically supported symbolism with rigorously defined rules and notation. The role of symbolism is for the translation of these concepts into the possibility of exposing them to, at least, thought experiments. The fulfillment of this condition which is a characteristic of a ‘science’ requires the symbolism to generate models which can reason and can be manipulated. The suggested ‘systems science’ is intended to provide such models whereby providing a framework which is modeled on that of the highly effective ‘conventional science of physics.’ An important application of the proposed ‘systems science’ is in problem solving as part of a design or engineering methodology for developing the ‘prototype system model’ including that of ‘product.’ However, to be applied further, this method needs debate and the development of software. For example, a mathematical model such as described here ‘IF there is a topic or class named ‘table tops’ which are ‘flat’ with length [a] and width [b] at right angles forming an ‘area’ described by ‘A=a times b,’ THEN given a specific table top with structure as specified in the antecedent having A=1.5 m2 and b=0.5 m, it follows that a=3 m.’ This is a ‘static’ mathematical model which can be manipulated by altering its structure.

Janos Korn

121

The ‘6 principles’ is a summary of the empirical concepts underlying ‘systems science’: The first asserts that any theoretical object can be identified by its structure including chemical and nuclear. The second provides the means of analysis or converting selected parts of the world including human activity scenarios into ‘static’ or ‘dynamic’ models. The third introduces the structure of change, both purposive and by chance. The fourth outlines how hierarchy can be understood and modeled showing how complexity is related to new, emergent properties of aggregates. The fifth introduces the idea of the universality of problem-solving activity in the living sphere and the role of ‘systems science’ in design [Korn, 2009, 2012, 2013a]. The sixth refers to the importance of the generation of ideas in the lives of human beings and possibly higher order animals to facilitate survival and to satisfy ambitions and so on. The ‘systems view’ is located on the spectrum of ‘human intellectual endeavor’ which, based on intuitive notions, is used for estimating its influence on elements of human society. Essentially the construction of ‘static’ [mathematics of ordered pairs] and ‘dynamic’ [sequences of predicate logic conditionals] models uses stories or ‘narratives’ in natural language to describe scenarios in the first step in preparing a linguistic model of a scenario. A story is then converted by ‘meaning preserving transformations’ into a homogeneous language of one- and two-place sentences (Korn, 2009, 2011, 2013a). More work is needed in this field of linguistics. Also, the introduction of ‘integration’ into changes of state requires attention. Linguistic modeling is highly teachable, rooted in existing branches of knowledge like linguistics (Burton, 1984), logic (Copi, 1978), mathematics, and network theory and it is computable.

122

Basic Notions of the Systemic View

References Anon. (1994) Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh Bertalanffy, L. von. (1950) An outline of general systems theory. The British J for the Philosophy of Science, 1(2). Bosch, O. (2013) Evolutionary learning laboratories: platform for dealing with complex issues, 4–6 January, Sonoma State University, USA. Boulding, K. (1956) General systems theory: the skeleton of science, Management Science, v2, n3. Brown, G. S., Campbell D. P. (1948) Principles of servomechanisms, J.Wiley & Sons, NY. Burton, S. H. (1984) Mastering English grammar, Macmillan, London. Checkland, P. (1982) Systems thinking, systems practice, Wiley, Chichester. Copi, I. M. (1978) Introduction to logic. NY: Macmillan. Finniston, Lord (1980) Engineering our future (report). HMSO, London. Fowler, M. (2004) UML distilled, USA, Addison-Wesley. Hieronymi, A. (2013) Understanding systems science: A visual and integrative approach, Systems Research and Behaviour Science, v30, n5. Jackson, M. C. (2000) Systems approaches to management, Kluwer Academic, NY. Klir, G. J. (1969) An approach to general systems theory, Van Nostrand, NY. Korn, J. (2009) Science and design of systems, Troubador Publishing, Leicester. —. (2010) Concept and design of information and IS, UKAIS Conf., 24/25 March, Oxford. —. (2011) From the systems view to systems science, Kybernetes, v40, n1/2. —. (2012) Network modelling of engineering systems, Troubador Publishing, Leicester. —. (2013) Paradigm change in the systemic view, International Symposium, 24/25 January, Universidad de Valencia, Faculty of Economics, Spain. —. (2013a) Linguistic modelling of scenarios, Troubador Publishing, UK. Lewin, D. (1981) Engineering philosophy–The third culture, J of the Royal Society of Arts, September. Magee, B. (1985) Popper, London, Fontana Press. McMillan, E. (2008) Complexity, management and the dynamics of change, Routledge.

Janos Korn

123

Nise, N. S. (2008) Control systems engineering, Wiley, Chichester. Pledge, H. T. (1966) Science since 1500, HMSO, London. Rapoport, A. (1986) General system theory. Essential concepts and applications, Abacus, Tunbridge Wells. Saeed, J. I. (1997) Semantics, Blackwell Publishers, USA. Scott, B. (2004) 2nd order cybernetics: an historical introduction, Kybernetes, v23, n9/10. Towill, D. R. (1975) Present day control engineering–Is it Latin to the undergraduate? The Radio and Electronic Engineer, v45, n10. Troncale, L. R. (1985) Future of general systems research, Systems Research, v2, n1. Umpleby, S. A. (1999) The origins and purposes of several traditions in systems theory and cybernetics, Cybernetics and systems: An international journal, v30, n2. Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics. Chichester, UK, Wiley. Yi Lin, (1999) General systems theory. NY, Plenum.

THE PROBLEM OF TIME AND EVOLUTION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SYSTEMIC SOCIOLOGY JIěÍ ŠUBRT

Modern man, under the influence of the upbringing and education which he has received, tends to understand time as something that is purely quantitative, without properties, even, regular and invariable – second by second – a kind of empty form or one of the abstract coordinates through which we measure our life and phenomena associated with it. Looking at history shows that for a man from another epoch such an understanding could be very distant. Equally strange to him might be our idea of the linear flow of historical time from the past through the present to the future. The archaic view of the historic flow of time saw history as a sort of eternal cycle, an eternal repetition or eternal return of the same. Eliade speaks of traditional agrarian societies as well as the large ancient civilizations of Asia, Europe and America, and he finds one common feature: even though these societies knew some form of history, they preferred not to take it into account. According to Eliade, there was a resistance to particular historical time linked to the desire for periodic returns to the mythical time of beginnings (Eliade, 1993). In archaic societies, tradition plays an important role. The life of individual actors consists of the repetition of activities that occurred in the distant past. Living members of society act as if in constant communication with their ancestors. Thus it is metaphorically said about archaic man that he did not see the future because he moved backward with his head facing the past (Hejdánek, 1990). While the cyclical obsession with the conception of historical time was typical of ancient times, by the Middle Ages it was already common to find a teleological conception of movement from creation to the end of the world. This reconstruction of the structure of time is related in medieval Europe to the transition from paganism to Christianity. The Christian understanding of time is based on the three determining moments

Jiri Subrt

125

represented by the beginning (creation), the peak (the coming of Christ and the crucifixion), and the end (Great Assize). It was only thanks to the existence of these “points of reference” that historical time straightened, becoming a vector time, linear and irretrievable (Gureviþ, 1978). So-called Western civilization has developed, over centuries, a considerable sense of the passing of historical time and devotes significant attention to it. There are, however, civilizations and societies for which historical time does not possess such a value. Examples include, for instance, preliterate societies, about which Eric Wolf speaks of “people without history” (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 31). Claude Lévi-Strauss used this to establish his typology of “cold” (preliterate) societies, in which time does not play a significant role, and “hot” (modern) societies, in which the time factor dominates. A certain indifference to historical time, however, is perhaps most characteristic for Indian culture. J. L. Fischer (1968) observes that the need for historical time in India is almost completely lacking. “If the European mind is directly affected by the obsession with catching (unstoppable) time, the Indian simply ignores it (and thereby it abolishes it). Therefore, it is almost impossible to write Indian history with even approximate accuracy” (Fischer, 1968, p. 116). However, the issue is not just one concerning the past. The future too, as a dimension of historical time, had to be “discovered.” Returning to the image of the archaic human being facing the past, we can observe that this person did not see the future because it was hidden behind him or her. As presented by M. Machovec, even Greek and Roman Antiquity did not understand the concept of the “future” in the sense attributed to it by the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The Latin word futurum (in Greek esomenon) was an empty concept, something of a blank sheet. “The future as something obliging, the future as ‘a better world,’” works for the future as something that gives meaning to our efforts – that all moved to Europe from Jewish traditions through Christianity, which means by some kind of ‘Christianization’ of ancient traditions. However, the antique man from the heyday of Greece and Rome would not understand ‘living for the future,’ and therefore any meaningful mission of man to mold the future, was correspondingly seen either as a kind of madness or superstitiousness (Machovec, 1990, p. 68). The variation in the historical understandings of time led contemporary German scholar, O. Rammstedt to attempt to formulate a development conception, in which he distinguished four historical types of understanding of time:

126

The Problem of Time and Evolution

1. occasional consciousness of time (based on a distinction made between now/not-now, etc.); 2. cyclical consciousness of time (containing distinction before/after); 3. linear awareness of time (past/present/future) with the closed future; 4. linear awareness of time with an open future (Rammstedt, 1975, pp. 47–63). Orientation toward the future (present already in the religious consciousness) gained substantial social importance at the beginning of the modern period; the future was understood as a problem to be solved. As a result of this reorientation, the future was grasped as a socially dependent quantity, to be created and planned through current decision-making. The image of the future is also associated with the idea of progress. Even this, though, is not a natural part of human consciousness, but only a relatively late product of it. Karl Manheim, in his book Ideology and Utopia (1929), relates this idea to the epoch that immediately preceded his own, which began after the French Revolution. This period brought in the idea that a linear progression of historical time was related to the implementation of a social development that tended to be positive and which can therefore be marked as progress. The conception of the linearity of progress came to Mannheim from two sources. The first consisted of the fact that in the development of Western society toward capitalism, the bourgeois ideal of reason as the target idea was confronted with the existing state of society. The tension between the idea of reason (rational, perfect organization of human life) and the imperfect state of society was overcome by the idea that “being is infinitely closer to what is reasonable.” The second source of ideas about progress, according to Mannheim, could be found in German thinking, in which the idea of ascending human development – as, for example, at Lessing – was placed in connection with the “education of the human race” (Mannheim, 1991, pp. 260–261). The idea of progress dominated in social science thinking for virtually the entire nineteenth century. The twentieth century, which followed with its cataclysms, made the idea of the development of mankind – as a constantly upward trend – significantly more problematic. With the postmodern thinking of the late twentieth century, the theory of progress as a “big story” was finally put into the waste bin of discarded concepts.

Jiri Subrt

127

Temporalized sociology For a long time, sociological theory did not consider the question of time as a serious theoretical and methodological problem. If the task of science is – as scientifically oriented scholars believe, in particular – to come to a formulation of scientific rules, then these principles should have universal, lasting validity; they have to work always and everywhere, regardless of location and time. One of those who in the late 1990s helped define the requirement for a fundamental reconsideration of the problem of time in sociological theory, is Patrick Baert, who advocated the term ‘temporalized sociology.’ Baert, building in many respects on Giddens’ theory of structuration, uses this term to envisage a research program focused on diachronic analysis and process. Such a program is at loggerheads with the notion of structural synchronicity (Baert, 1992, p. 4). To clarify his intentions, the author presents a classification of the four approaches to the issues of time encountered in social theory. The first approach assumes that the basic principles of order are, or are to be considered, unchangeable. These principles are then shown in time and space as invariant. The historical roots of this approach go back to the Greek atemporal tradition established by Parmenides and Plato. Baert indicates this approach as the conception of the “eternal permutations of time.” According to this tradition, changes that can be observed in time are in fact just imperfect “permutations” or “combinations” of unchanging eternal principles. This Greek idea of an unchanging atemporal world influenced European thinking for a very long time. In the seventeenth century, it was reflected in the Cartesian view of the world; in the twentieth century it influenced linguistics and social sciences in the orthodox conception of structuralism. The basic idea of structuralism in the social sciences is based on the assumption of an involuntary atemporal logic that is to be revealed as common to all cultures of the present, past and future. The second approach which Baert (1992) speaks about is similar to the previous in that he also considers the existence of unchanging principles. However, these differ by prerequisite that they show up in time, which means a conception that emphasizes the passage of time in identifying the main principles of order, but at the same time postulates a future that is closed. Although compared with the previous conception of “eternal permutation,” the gains of time implied in this second conception are substantial, they are relativized by the fact that, over time, they do not create any new principles so that the appearance of something new and

128

The Problem of Time and Evolution

unexpected may be discounted. Baert therefore speaks of a “closed historical” conception, where the term “closed” refers to the postulated invariability of the main principles. The historical predecessor of this approach can be found in the teleological aspects and finalistic principle of Old Testament and New Testament teaching (which stood in contrast to the predominantly atemporal world view of the Greek civilization). A similar view of the world later appears in the philosophy of history, whose pioneers were such big names as Turgot, Condorcet or Herder. In the nineteenth century we find it in the concept of unilinear evolution, whose influence emerges, for example, in Tylor. As Baert observes, the science and philosophy of the nineteenth century had a closed historical view of the dominant position. It can be found both in the then causally mechanistic model of physics (supporting among other things the second law of thermodynamics) and in extremely finalistic conceptions of social philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The third approach Baert (1992) terms “cognitive-rational control” (ibid, p. 10). This type could be considered de facto as a special level of the second (“closed historic”) conception. Despite its teleological nature, it sees a necessary condition for achieving future goals in human (scientifically based) intervention. This idea became the basis of Comte’s formula savoir pour prévoir, et prévoir pour saisir and then took précised form in Mannheim’s planning for freedom. In contrast to the fourth approach, which, like (the second), is a “closed historical conception,” and is based on the idea that the fundamental principles of order can be detected only through time, he considers the main arranging principles not as invariable, but as open to change. This last approach, therefore, significantly differs in that it postulates an “open future” (Baert, 1992, p. 8). It is a conception that has become an integral part of Western thinking during the nineteenth century. Significant credit for its formation may be ascribed to Darwin’s theory. Its second pioneer is considered to be H. Bergson with his ideas about cosmic vitalism and time as invention. Representatives of this stream in sociology include G. H. Mead and later Niklas Luhmann and his system theory. In contrast to the closed historical conception that does not allow the possibility of creation, and in which the future, even if it is yet unknown, is as if ready and waiting to be discovered, the future is here understood as completely open. The “open” approach, which is, apart from exceptions, absent in sociology, for Baert, represents the basis of what he describes as temporalized sociology. Baert’s project of temporalized sociology is based on an assumption summarized by the term “relatively open historical view,”

Jiri Subrt

129

highlighting the volatile nature of the principles of order and contingency. The first and most important concept of temporalized sociology is for Baert this “relatively open future” and with it the associated idea of discontinuity. Other important concepts include Mead’s concepts of emergence and novelty (new events), and also Bergson’s term durée, duration. In his own conception, the author emphasizes permanence, and, together with it, the correlation between emergence and permanence. He claims allegiance to those calling for new paradigms or research programs able to correct the previous neglect of the temporalized aspects of social life (Baert, 1992). Let us add that one specific type of temporalized sociology is represented by the civilization theory of Norbert Elias (1976), whose distinguishing feature is processuality, a focus on research trends in the development of social and personality structures. Elias’s interests are attracted to the processes of continuous, long-term changes. These are processes that take place unintentionally and unexpectedly, and that moreover do not have either an absolute beginning (zero-point), from which they would unwind, or an end at which they would inevitably aim. Elias considers constant conflicts between civilizing processes and decivilizing processes (entzivilisierende Gegenprozesse) characteristic of current development (from the Stone Age to the present day). Even if the civilizing process is currently the prevailing tendency, there is no reason to believe that this must be so in the future (Elias–Dunning, 1983, p. 33).

Time’s arrow Even though common sense tells us that time is “running” in one direction from the past through the present to the future, this opinion is not supported in many scientific theories. The great constructions of modern science – Newtonian mechanics, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg and Schrödinger – all would function equally well, even if time ran backward (Coveney-Highfield, 1995, p.19). Basic physical laws and equations do not contain in themselves anything that could be interpreted as determining the direction (and irreversibility) of time. On the contrary, they are symmetrical in respect of time. To physicists, one-way time can appear as an illusion created by the human mind. This is why they sometimes speak of this as “psychological” or “subjective time.” However, the problem remains that even though the laws of nature are indifferent to the direction of time, nature undoubtedly has a liking for spinning histories of a one-directional type, while reverse

130

The Problem of Time and Evolution

histories are never admitted (Barrow, 1997, p. 195). Or as Sir Arthur Eddington proclaimed in his time, the most remarkable thing about time is that it goes on. However, many physicists tend to neglect this side of time (Eddington, 1928, p. 68). A simple example of an irreversible process is a glass that falls from the table to the floor and breaks. It never happens that the broken glass jumps up from the floor to the desk and is again in one piece. The scientific theory of irreversible processes, in which the direction of time applies, is represented by thermodynamics. According to its two laws, energy during physical processes is preserved, although it can change from one form to another. There is only one change: a certain part of the energy that entered into the process is transformed into (waste) heat. Any form of energy can ultimately be converted into heat, but due to the dissipation, and conversely, it never does so completely, because when converting heat into work, part of it always escapes. The loss which occurs due to dissipation, Rudolf Clausius described with the expression ‘entropy.’ This is a quantity that gradually increases until it reaches its maximum. In 1865, Clausius modified both laws of thermodynamics to cosmological form: The first law lays down that the total energy of the universe is constant; the second law states that the total entropy of the Universe is growing inexorably. German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz drew from this second law the idea of the evolution of the universe as a gradual degeneration. This stops at the moment when the entropy (as an increasing rate of system disorder) reaches a maximum, and the universe comes to a state of thermodynamic “equilibrium” (which means simply its “heat death”). If we know that the universe is now expanding, it means that it cannot be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. A simple example through which it is possible to conceive the nature of entropic processes is what happens if we pour milk into tea: molecules of milk will gradually mix with the molecules of tea, until finally molecules of both components in a cup are evenly distributed (it comes to a state of equilibrium where the randomness in the distribution of both types of molecules in the mixture reaches the maximum value) and mixing will cease. Mixing has been exhausted, and it is impossible to imagine the opposite process of the mutual separation of tea and milk. The second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy (disorder) increases over time, inspired the idea of the existence of time’s arrow, which was formulated for the first time by Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927. According to this, the movement of time forward correlates exactly with increasing entropy.

Jiri Subrt

131

However, if the thermodynamic arrow points to equilibrium and disintegration, then the other, the Darwinian evolutionary arrow, points on the contrary from simple biological organisms to more complex and more complicated organisms. And so the question arises whether the second law of thermodynamics is consistent with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It seems that Darwin’s theory, showing how the complexity of life increases over time, is the opposite of thermodynamics, which assumes that the universe is moving toward exhaustion and complete decomposition. The loss of order expressed in the second law of thermodynamics is at first sight contrary to many complex processes taking place around us. How it is possible to go over from a state of disorder to a state of order, was ironically revealed by further research in the area of thermodynamics, which concluded that the aforementioned second law need not be only synonymous with clear and inevitable decline. This, however, arose from the study of irreversible processes that occur far from the state of equilibrium, which is credited to Ilya Prigogine and his Brussels school whose work was entitled the theory of “self-organization.” What we see in the universe as disordered objects may be organized objects and structured opportunities that nevertheless give rise to disordered processes as well as highly organized ones. The basic tendency, despite heading toward disorder according to the second law of thermodynamics, may simultaneously give rise to the existence of systems, forming far from the equilibrium state through their connection to flows of substances and energies. These systems can sustain themselves “out of balance” if their openness allows them to pass on to their surroundings the entropy which arises in them (the second law is not violated, because entropy in the total system and its surroundings increases, in spite of the fact in the localized system “negentropy” can predominate). In total, the universe appears to be the result of two opposing tendencies, the tendency to disorder and the tendency to orderliness. Thermodynamics “does not prohibit” the spontaneous emergence of orderliness. The heading toward a “final balance of a monotonous bath of maximum entropy” is associated with the formation of remarkable structures (Gleick, 2002, p. 312). For structures that come into existence this way, Prigogine coins the term “dissipative structures” (Prigogine-Stengersová, 2001, p. 35), because they arise as a result of the mutual exchange of substance and energy between the system and its surroundings. Complex processes that lead to the formation of dissipative structures are called “self-organizing.” The idea of dissipative structures became inspirational for a series of

132

The Problem of Time and Evolution

disciplines including system sociology. Prigogine’s thermodynamics speaks here not only to the question of linearity, but also to cyclic behavior: although time’s arrow tends toward the equilibrium, a process that leads to this target, may give rise to cyclical behavior. The relationship between irreversibility and repeatability can be simply demonstrated through the example of a mechanical clock, whose operation consists of a series of swings or oscillations; the flow of time is shown here by losses in the form of dropping clock-weights, the loosening of a spring or battery exhaustion that result in the clock engine stopping. Coveney and Highfield illustrate the relationship between entropy and organized behavior with an example of people and their handling of money that is close in nature to sociology. The condition when an individual has no money corresponds to a state of equilibrium. In the real world, however, there usually occur individuals who have some, even if it is only a small amount of money – they are then far from the state of equilibrium. Since people must usually spend part of their money on their food, those who have little of it have basically no choice but to reduce their spending to a level that ensures that they do not die of hunger. On the contrary, the condition that is far from the state of equilibrium is significantly different. In the mentioned case, it means that the number of options for how to deal with money grows. It is possible to squander it, to buy gold or land for it, to save it in the bank, to invest into a risky venture or speculation. There are no general instructions on how to deal with the money because the options on offer are numerous. This example brings us closer to Prigogine’s assertion that it is possible to linearize near the state of equilibrium, while far from the state of equilibrium (which offers many different solutions) equations become nonlinear (Prigogine, 1997, p. 29). Self-organization, according to Prigogine, means that the system in the course of its history goes in various respects through various conditions. The fact that the system is in a particular state means that a preceding event brought it to such a condition. If some complicated systems can be characterized by simple behavior, by the same token some simple systems can behave complicatedly (Gleick, 2002, p. 308). Being far from the state of equilibrium significantly increases the number of possible conditions that the system can take. The possibilities on offer can be expressed through a so-called bifurcation graph (bifurcation meaning “branching”), in the form of a gradually branching tree where each new branch means a new

Jiri Subrt

133

opportunity. Each point at which branching occurs is referred to as a critical point. At each critical point, the system has the opportunity to take up a new possible condition. Close to the notional tree trunk of tree bifurcation, the system can take few configurations. With an increasing number of branches, possibilities multiply, growing up to a “blurred zone of chaos high in the leaves of the tree” (Coveney-Highfield, 1995, p. 258). This situation in which the system has the choice of a plethora of options leads to the formation of unpredictable behavior called deterministic chaos. According to contemporary chaos theory (Gleick, 2002), this chaotic development is viewed, not as a complete crippling of order, but as a special form of it: as an order with infinite complexity (captured for instance in the form of Mandelbrot’s fractals or Ruelle’s strange attractors), or as an order lacking in periodicity. Contemporary science has discovered that many natural and even artificial systems behave chaotically. Chaos is found in the changing weather, the flow of rivers, population growth, and road traffic, or in prices on the stock exchange. And because all these phenomena are irreversible processes, it can be stated that irreversibility is characteristic both of self-organization and chaos.

Past, present, and future British theoretical physicist, Stephen W. Hawking talks about three arrows of time that have in common their singular direction. These are: a. the thermodynamic arrow, in whose direction disorderliness increases, b. the psychological one, whose direction is drawn from the fact that we remember the past and not the future, and c. the cosmological arrow, which is defined by the direction in which the universe expands (Hawking, 1991, p. 141). The consequences of such oriented time were demonstrated in the 1950s by the philosopher Hans Reichenbach’s six theses: a. Time runs from the past to the future. b. The present which separates the past from the future is now. c. The past will never return. d. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future. e. We record the past but not the future. f. The past is fixed, the future is open (Reichenbach, 1991, p. 20).

134

The Problem of Time and Evolution

Jürgen Grün (1993) thinks of these six theses as the starting point for further exploration of the matter of the direction of time, whose content can be expressed as follows: * The essential feature of time is its irreversibility. The direction of time always points from the past to the future, and never counterclockwise. * The past and the future, lying on a one-dimensional line, can be distinguished from each other through the bisecting line of the present. The particular importance of the present stems from the fact that acting and intervention in the course of the world can only occur in the present. * If an event is over, it remains forever in the past. In order to reach the past, the direction of time would have to reverse. * The acting man no longer has any effect on the past. He can try his hardest, informed by the consequences of his actions, somehow to put right the mistakes of the past. However, his action is always carried out in the present with an open future, whose form he can only anticipate. It is possible to influence only present events or events that are expected in the future. * The asymmetry between the past and the future lies also in the fact that documents and information may come only from the past, never from the future. * Because the past cannot be changed into the present, it is impossible to intervene in it. On the contrary, the future is in principle open; if not, there would be no freedom in human action (Grün, 1993). It may be added that these six claims can also be viewed as a starting point for what, together with Baert, we refer to as temporalized sociology. For Baert, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is the founding scholar of temporalized sociology. The starting point for understanding his considerations of time is provided by the title of the book The Philosophy of the Present (Mead 1959). According to Baert, we can find in Mead four understandings of the present (Baert, 1992, pp. 77–79), and he considered the third and the fourth meanings particularly important. The first understanding is simply that people are constrained to live in the present, which determines their experience. They can, of course, imagine something of the past or the future, but this experience is based on recollection or imagination that takes place in the present. Their reality is

Jiri Subrt

135

always in the present. The passage of reality lies in the merging of one present into another. This leads to a second understanding. Because people live in the present, they can receive the past or the future only through the present (something similar is stated by Collingwood, according to whom the paradox of historical science is that all the evidence of the past is obtained only in the present) (Collingwood, 1946 in: Baert, 1992). The third understanding is represented by the typically human trait that lives not according to the mere present, but has the ability to exceed this present. Mead believes that people are different from animals that live in a completely undifferentiated now. The human ability to exceed the present is based on the fact that the past (symbolized by memory) and the future (associated with anticipation and expectations) have their representations in the present. This gives people the ability to solve current problems on the basis of past experiences and in the light of possible future consequences. The fourth understanding is connected with the conception of the reconstructive function of thinking in the sense in which this problem occurs in a pragmatic philosophy. The point is that in the present, people, their ideas, and associations with the past and future are continuously changing. This, according to Mead, arises from the fact that new circumstances cast fresh light on what has happened or is likely to happen. Mead connects the constitutive nature of time with the concepts of emergence and event, and respective novelty (a new event); his emphasis is placed on the “emerging” (emergent) and the new. In the spirit of Darwinism and pragmatism, for Mead, novelty or emergence are not phenomena based purely on the past, though they may be dependent on it; they are something more than the processes that led to them. In line with this view, Mead regarded the future as “incurably random” (Baert, 1992, p. 80). In his view, a new emerging event is impossible to predict, even if we had a perfect view of what immediately preceded it. If, for Mead, the locus of reality is represented by the present, then the past and the future are only objects of thinking, and their locus is therefore in the mind. The true past, much like the real future, is unattainable, but through the mind they unfold in the present; thus we may exceed the present. The past is represented in the present through the memory along with the practical knowledge of the importance of realized actions. The future occurs in the present in the sense of the anticipation of the reactions

136

The Problem of Time and Evolution

of others to different lines of action. The acting subject, after being exposed to new experiences, returns to the past, looking at it from another viewpoint, and adjusts his future conduct and expectations accordingly. New experience may falsify old hypotheses, and in this respect, may draw up a new past and a new future as cause and consequence. How far these horizons unfold depends on the extent of the reorganization of the past and of the future that experience compels. The systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, the contemporary representative of temporalized sociology, comes very near to Mead’s ideas about time in many respects. Luhmann defines time as the “interpretation of reality with regard to the difference between the past and the future” (Luhmann, 1976, p. 135). From The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, by Humberto R. Maturana and Francesco J. Varela, Luhmann took the term autopoiesis (from the Greek autos=himself, poien=to create, to do). Maturana understands the biological system as a network of the production of its own components. Living systems – like, for example, body cells – are autopoietic systems because they are characterized by strong internal dynamics (in contrast to living systems, machines, for example, are not autopoietic systems even though, like cells, they have input and output from the environment (because they are oriented not to the building and maintaining of their own structures, but to producing products). The autopoietic system conception simply expresses that the system has the ability to self-generate, or – a little more precisely – individual systems evolve independently, so that they realize the possibilities contained in the network of elements from which they are composed (Mucha, 1989, p. 154). Luhmann understands the system as a structured composition of relations, which allows certain options and excludes others. The concept of autopoiesis is tied to the concept of emergence, which refers to those characteristics of the system that are not explainable from the properties of its elements, which therefore are new and characteristic of the given system. These properties cannot be attributed to the elements themselves, but to their specific selective connections in the context of the system (Willke, 1991, p. 100). For these selections – as evidenced by the diversity of systems composed of nearly identical elements – there is never just one option. Luhmann understands social systems as temporalized systems, which may consist only of elements temporalized (Luhmann, 1980, p. 241). In the process of autopoiesis, these systems constitute themselves in the

Jiri Subrt

137

temporal dimension, both in structure and process. Systems structure their own systems through time (a resource in short supply, leading to the reduction of time demands) and through processes that take place within them, a subject evaluated on the basis on their own system’s rationality. The existence of various system times raises the question of their tuning according to time, which culminates in synchronization to world time. The concept of structure in systems theory involves a dynamic aspect referred to as “dynamic stability” (Luhmann, 1998, p. 52), concerning the fact that the dynamic is implicit in each form of stability. While structures retain to a certain degree their reversibility, processes working to the contrary result in irreversibility (they cannot work backward) (Luhmann, 1993, p. 73). Due to affiliation with the system and to what is happening in it, a structure is permanently exposed to stimuli that structure it anew, but also change it. Irreversible processes dictate the reversibility of structures, but also alter them. For Luhmann evolution constitutes a specific mechanism of structural change (Kiss, 1986, p. 41). In earlier conceptions of evolutionary theory, the majority view prevailed that evolution is an inevitable process of change, often associated with the concept of civilization growth, social progress, growing humanity etc. This notion is abandoned in the modern variant of evolutionary theory. Luhmann believes that evolution is blind in terms of its orientation to the future, so modern evolutionary theory focuses only on the description of real changes. Evolution depends on the joint action of three mechanisms – variation, selection, and stabilization (Luhmann, 1991, p. 151). Variety means the overproduction of possibilities of experiencing (Erleben) and conduct (Handeln). Selection stands for the choice of viable alternatives. Stabilization represents maintaining the resulting solution to the respective evolutionary problem. Stabilized structural formulas stand for a certain historical product selection, i.e. choosing from the many varied options. Luhmann understands social evolution as a process of differentiation of the socio-cultural, that is to say the “diversification” of the social system into many specialized subsystems. From the premise of increasing functional differentiation and complexity, Luhmann draws a conclusion pointing to the growing temporalization of complexity, and the increasing importance of time (Schlote, 1996, p. 99). This increase in complexity raises orientation uncertainty, against which pre-modern societies sought support in the past and tradition; at that time history could still be considered a true magistra vitae (a teacher of life). Luhmann adds his finding that in modern society it is impossible to

138

The Problem of Time and Evolution

draw from history the full variety of the feasible. After all, before Luhmann, R. Kosseleck had already pointed out that history can serve as a model for the future only if the past and also the future are ultimately the same (Bergmann, 1983). Contemporary society, which is very dynamic and rapidly changing, is continually moving away from its past and differentiating itself from it. In such a situation, the simple application of the idea that we should learn from the past is becoming somewhat problematic. Conduct that is uncontrolled by tradition is permitted by technology, money, and activist law, which causes some kind of “neutralization of history.” As a result of evolutionary changes history has lost its model character, its orientation to its own systemic history has become insufficient, and the focus of attention has shifted to the future, to social planning, which is, according to Luhmann, the manifestation of efforts toward the so-called “defuturizing of the future.” The fact that it is ever harder to guess the future, arises not from some fundamental unpredictability, but from the complexity of the world following no plan and constantly accelerating.

Conclusion One of the functions of sociological theory is frequently considered to be the prediction function – the ability to predict future conditions and situations. In the early nineteenth century, Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace declared that if he knew how the universe had looked at its beginning, and all the laws governing it, he could predict everything in the future. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the situation looks somewhat different. The long-shared belief in deterministic and irreversible laws was shaken by new discoveries; Newton’s crystal ball of determinism is considerably cracked (Coveney, 1995). Naive determinism, assuming that the more we know, the more precisely we can predict, has already been abandoned by contemporary science, and thus the possibility of prediction has shrunk. The efforts of some social scientists – as in the systemic theory of Niklas Luhmann – are therefore turning to the theoretical description of complex social systems, in which the open future is not uniquely determined by the present or the past. Another example of such an orientation is the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, under the name Open the Social Sciences (published in the 1990s by Immanuel Wallerstein et al.). This report, among other things, talks of the importance of the time dimension,

Jiri Subrt

139

of systems far from the equilibrium characterized by an uncertain future, and of laws formulated merely to list possibilities, but not certainties (Wallerstein, 1998, p. 70). Social movement produces emergent and unpredictable changes that are, according to the judgment of Karl R. Popper (1997), influenced by the growth of our knowledge, whose future growth cannot be predicted. Popper (1982), a program indeterminist, also convincingly demonstrates that the Laplacian deterministic dream is based on the postulate of a closed future and on the assumption of symmetry between the past and the future. The social world is, as Miloslav Petrusek stated, “nomothetic, causal and predictable, that is relatively strictly deterministic, only in its reproductive dimension” (Petrusek, 1991, p. 699). In addition to reproductive and repetitive activities there exist innovatively creative activities that cause the emergence of unpredictable change.

References Baert, P. (1992). Time, Self and Social Being: Temporality within a social context. Avebury: Aldershot. Barrow, J. D. (1997). Teorie všeho: Hledání nejhlubšího vysvČtlení. Praha: Mladá fronta. Bergmann, W. (1983). Das Problem der Zeit in der Soziologie: Ein Literaturüberblick zum Stand der “zeitsoziologischen” Theorie und Forschung. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 35, pp. 462–504. Coveney, P. and Highfield, R. (1995). Šíp þasu. Praha: Oldag. Eddington, A. (1928). The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eliade, M. (1993). Mýtus o vČþném návratu. Praha: OIKOYMENH. Elias, N. (1976). Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, Bd. 1, 2. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Elias, N. (1988). Über die Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Elias, N. Dunning, E. (1983). „Sport im Zivilisationsprozeß: Studien zur Figurationssoziologie.” Münster: Lit-Verlag. Fischer, J. L. (1968). Filosofické studie. Praha: Výzkumný ústav odborného školství. Gleick, J. (2002). Chaos: Vznik nové vČdy. Brno: Ando Publishing. Grün, J. (1993). Zeitrichtung: Ein philosophischer Grenzgang. Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen.

140

The Problem of Time and Evolution

Gureviþ, A. J. (1978). Kategorie stĜedovČké kultury. Praha: Mladá fronta. Hawking, S. W. (1991). Struþná historie þasu. Praha: Mladá fronta. Hejdánek, L. (1990). Filosofie a víra. Praha: OIKOYMENH. Luhmann, N. (1976). “The Future Cannot Begin.” In: Social Research, Vol. 43., No. 1, pp. 130–152. Luhmann, N. (1980). Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der moderne Gesellschaft. Bd. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. (1991). Soziologische Aufklärung, Bd. 2, Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft. (4. Auflage), Köln und Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. —. (1993). Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. (4. Auflage), Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —. (1998) Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Erster Teilband). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Machovec, M. (1990). Místo Egona Bondyho v dČjinách metafyziky. In: Sborník Egonu Bondymu k šedesátinám. Praha: Pražská imaginace. Mannheim, K. (1991). Ideologie a utopie: PĜednášky a eseje. Bratislava: Archa. Mead, G. H., (1959). The Philosophy of the Present. Ed. by: A. E. Murphy, La Salle – Ill: The Open Court. Mucha, I. (1989). NČkterá východiska Luhmannovy kritiky souþasné sociologické teorie. In: Soudobá teoretická sociologie na západČ: PĜíspČvky ke kritické analýze. Kolektiv autorĤ. Praha: Ústav pro filozofii a sociologii ýSAV, pp. 147–167. Petrusek, M. (1991) Ignoramus et ignorabimus: Od OtevĜené spoleþnosti k OtevĜenému vesmíru (k 90. Narozeninám Sira Karla Raimunda Poppera).“ Sociologický þasopis, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 689–701. Popper, K. R. (1982). The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism. London: Hutchinson. —. (1994). Bída historicismu. Praha: OIKOYMENH. Prigogine, I. (1997). ýas k stávání: K historii þasu. Praha: KLP. Prigogine, I., Stengersová, I. (2001). ěád z chaosu: Nový diaolog þlovČka s pĜírodou. Praha: Mladá fronta. Rammstedt, O. (1975). Alltagsbewußtsein von Zeit.“ In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 27, pp. 47–63. Reichenbach, H. (1991). The Direction of Time. Berkeley, Oxford: University of California Press. Schlote, A. (1996). Widersprüche sozialer Zeit: Zeitorganisation im Alltag zwischen Herrschaft und Freiheit. Opladen: Leske – Budrich. Willke H. (1991). Systemtheorie. (3. Auflage), Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag.

THE SYSTEMIC APPROACH TO URBAN IDENTITY FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF SOCIAL CONTINGENCY LAURA APPIGNANESI

Abstract The concept of “system” as an epistemological criterion can become reality if we apply the systemic perspective to urban space. Nowadays, some drivers of change have a global impact, and the related urban development seems to be a concrete model of contemporary social evolution. Addressing this premise, this chapter aims to argue the loss of identity in metropolises as a paradigm of the increasing complexity of global society through a challenging interdisciplinary dialog between system theory and urban planning. The thesis is that philosophical orientation and Urban Planning are linked by the same long-term historical evolution, and this parallel development will likely continue in the future. After a historical overview, we propose a rethinking of “structural-functionalism” reflected in the rigid functionalization of urban areas. Cities and megalopolises are expanding quickly and in a disorderly way; digitalization and globalization are changing physical and sociological aspects of the urban dimension. In this context, some technical tools for urban analysis, such as “zoning” or “layers,” that divide the whole into parts, are no longer able to interpret this dynamic reality. Complexity needs a new interpretive analysis, consistent with social contingency. This paper does not presume to provide pre-packaged solutions, but rather a hermeneutic instrument for the understanding of contemporary urban evolution. “Understanding” is a prerequisite for management, governance and project strategies. Therefore, with the aim of identifying innovative paths of analysis, it seems useful to adopt a systemic approach by applying some conceptual tools theorized by Niklas Luhmann. In this

142

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

way, system theory might be a strategic key to tackle that form of urban expansion called “sprawl metropolis.” Thanks to this approach, a city can be seen as a social system with structural couplings between subsystems and between the system itself and its environment. Communication becomes the actual urban structure. It emerges from an unidentified environment through the circulation of material and virtual flows (men, goods, money, data, information) that draw the true identity of the city. Thus we try a methodological translation “from seeing through a lens to seeing the lens” (Thomas Khun, 1999). Instead of building a model and verifying it on a map partitioned into sections, we find a connection between behavioral data. If the city seems best interpreted as a complex system that reproduces itself thanks to communication, then flows and relations make visible the structure of the sprawl metropolis just like a medical exam based on the flowing of the contrast liquid does. The different links represent the “structural couplings” that connect the subsystems to each other (economic, political, cultural …) and the system with its environment. In sum, structural couplings identify the transition from “functionalism of differences” to “functionalism of links.” They underpin the dynamic relationships that bring out an “order from noise,” identifying the new contingent urban life in the new enormous constellation that the urban system has become. One settlement among many comes to be preferred where the advantages of centralization are mutually reinforcing, so that finally a new distinction develops between town and country N. Luhmann, Theory of society Stanford University Press, California 2012, p.4

Introduction Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (“The Metropolis and Mental Life”) is the work published in 1903 by Georg Simmel: the first sociologist interested in urban expansion from a sociological point of view. Later, on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean, in 1962 Lewis Mumford wrote “The City in History.” In this book, the sociologist explored the development of urban civilizations, delivering a harsh criticism of urban sprawl. His idea was that the structure of modern cities

Laura Appignanesi

143

is partially responsible for many social problems in Western society. While pessimistic in tone, Mumford affirmed that urban planning should emphasize an organic relationship between people and their living spaces. At the present time, the trend of the world’s population to concentrate in megacities acts as a trigger for reflections about our future. The changes we can observe are the result of different domains interacting: sociology, economy, policy, demography, environment. Of course, the increasing number of enormous urban concentrations causes a series of processes and poses environmental questions: drastic changes in landscape, increasing consumption of land, socio-economic imbalances, and also loss of identity and alienation. Nowadays, some “drivers of change” [1] have a global impact and transformations occur at uncontrollable speed. This situation stimulates the research of new paradigms of socio-urban development to investigate this complex intersystemic galaxy, so as to plan appropriate strategies. In fact, urban growth seems to be a concrete model of contemporary social evolution. Thus, in this paper we propose an epistemological issue: does it still make sense to interpret these increasingly vast, formless and chaotic cities in the light of the functional differentiation of their parts? In our attempt to answer this question, we establish a constructive dialog between sociological theory and urban planning principles, through a parallelism that seems to continue the historical evolution of both disciplines, which, notwithstanding their different foundations, aims, and methodologies, are linked by a common denominator: the item of social aggregation. In this context, the concept of “system” as an epistemological criterion can become reality if we apply it to the urban space.

Contemporary and future scenarios We are facing changes and challenges related to a new form of global urbanization.

144

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

Source data: United Nations web site http://thebusinessaim.com.ng, last accessed on September 25, 2014

Source data: United Nations web site http://thebusinessaim.com.ng, last accessed on September 25, 2014

Laura Appignanesi

145

Source data: United Nations web site http://thebusinessaim.com.ng, last accessed on September 25, 2014

At the present time, all over the world there are megalopolises, such as Beijing, 21,150,000 people in 16,801 sqm (data from 2013); Istanbul, 13,800,000 people in 5,343 sqm (2012); São Paulo, 11,200,000 in 1,523 sqm (2011); New York City, 8,400,000 people in 1,213 sqm (2013); Mexico City, 8,900,000 people in 1,485 sqm (2010); London, 8,300,000 in 1,572 sqm (2013) [2]. It is estimated that 200,000 people move into cities every day. We can imagine that it is as if every week a new city as big as Kyoto or Barcelona arises [3]. According to the trend of urban population, statistical projections assert that by 2050, about 70% of the world’s population will live in cities, a considerable increase on the current 50%. In particular,

146

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

data and figures elaborated by the United Nations forecast, in the next 30–50 years, a world characterized by a larger number of cities and megalopolises with a population of over one million and a higher number of inhabitants in these urban spaces. These perspectives highlight the need to address the problems associated with environmental and social risks, such as the unequal distribution of resources and consequent instability. We are already dealing with these issues, but they are potentially destined to explode in the future. Generally speaking, many and different causes interact in this evolution process, but we can simplify it by identifying some external “drivers of change” (Arup, 2006) and some “genetic mutations” in the social context. Regarding the main drivers of change, Arup, in a research-based publication, identify and explore leading factors that will affect our world in the future. They investigate themes including: energy, waste, climate change, water, demographics, urbanization, and poverty. Concerning the “genetic mutations” of the social system, the most important are globalization and digitalization. The former is the process of international integration of every aspect of life, especially thanks to the advances in transportation and telecommunications, including the rise of the internet. The latter is a business and life model that includes the extension and support of electronic devices. The urban evolution toward megacities and sprawl metropolises seems to be a concrete paradigm of contemporary social evolution. Addressing this premise, this chapter aims to understand the increasing complexity of contemporary urban space, not by providing pre-packaged solutions, but by proposing a hermeneutical instrument, because “understanding” is a prerequisite for management, governance, and the definition of project strategies. To read these dynamics, it is useful to apply conceptual models to identify the path for the analysis of social changes. It is a methodological translation “from seeing through a lens to seeing the lens” (Khun, 1999).

Laura Appignanesi

147

The dialog between social and urban models from a historical perspective The thesis is that both sociology and urban planning are linked by the same long-term historical evolution, so that it is likely that this parallel development will continue in the future. In ancient Eastern civilization, feng shui was a philosophy at the service of architecture and territory planning. In the Western world, there is no corresponding discipline, but it may be interesting to look for a parallel between the philosophical views or socio-historical contexts and the corresponding predominant urban models theorized by architects. We can consider the city as a sort of sociological laboratory, based on the compared analysis of the models from a historical perspective. In fact, if we focus on a synthetic exemplification of historical evolution, we can find that in different ages, the ideal projects theorized by planners can be considered as a paradigm of the prevalent role of human beings in the world, as if urban plans were a phenomenological representation of abstract social ideas. According to the legend, when Romulus and Remus founded Rome, they drew the furrows that constituted the frame of the whole society of the Roman Empire. From the reticular structure of the Roman city developed on the orthogonal axes “cardo” and “decumanus,” we arrive at the Middle Ages, when the Italian fortress city was a sort of metaphor for the closure of the society and the cathedral was the center of the town in the way that God was the center of Medieval philosophical speculation. In the Renaissance, the humanistic vision inspired the “ideal town,” painted by artists as a model of the rational equilibrium of existence. According to the philosophical view of Marsilio Ficino, the human being was the center of an ordered universal system, and the urban plan of Palmanova, for example, was its map.

148

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

Palmanova map: Source: http://www.forumlive.net/

In the seventeenth century, the scientific revolution and the birth of the bureaucratic state changed the mind-set between the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Bacon. At the same time, some architects designed the stellar city, and the plan is characterized by a well-identified center with radiating streets, as in a new rigorous cosmic order. During the Enlightenment, it was the idea of progress that guided the hand of architects. For example, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux produced an innovative residential model. The French architect drew up plans for the expansion of the Salinas de Chaux, near the village of Arc-et-Senans. Ledoux designed an entire city set on an elliptical ring and the perimeter was formed by two concentric series of buildings: the inside one was reserved for administrative offices, the external one for equipment buildings and various residences: it was a modern “ideal city.” During the Industrial Revolution, the English concept of “garden city” can be seen as an answer to the growth of industrial society, through the contraposition between an ideal green town and the gray conurbations built near the new factories.

Laura Appignanesi

149

On July 11, 1914, Antonio Sant’Elia published his tables of the “new city.” He proposed a new model of architecture that enhanced functionality and beauty: the reworking, in an architectural key, of Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism. More recently, in 1951, the plan of Chandigarh designed by Le Corbusier involved different spaces according to the different functions of a building (political, economical, residential and so on). The spaces were connected to each other as the parts of a body so that the map of Chandigarh looks like the mirror of the sociological theory of “structural functionalism.” Actually, during the twentieth century, many planners and architects proposed urban models based on the differentiation of areas according to their destination of use. To stress this parallelism between Sociology and Urban Planning, we can recall the classical authors of the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to whom the concept of “specialization” became increasingly important in defining a social system. Simmel ascribed the cause of fragmentation and individualism in social life to labor division, while, according to Durkheim, “specialization” replaced religion as the main foundation of a social system, defined as a complex organism in a holistic sense. With Weber, the attention moved from the whole society to the individual; in this way labor division was motivated by the analysis of individual rational behavior. Such behavior, according to the arguments contained in “The Protestant ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” is subject to a process of rationalization whose roots lay in religious convictions. Referring both to Weber and Durkheim, in the middle of the last century, Parsons proposed a general theory of “structural-functionalism” to integrate the two approaches, describing the social system as a set of interacting parts, each of which performs a function necessary for the reproduction of the whole system. In essence, the structure of society is identified through the functions performed by its parts. In the eighties and nineties, Niklas Luhmann offered the logical structure of the system theory that outdoes the tradition of wholes and parts. “Functional differentiation” of systems is the concept at the center of the construction of the general theory of systems. The German sociologist offered a conceptual framework based on the definition of “operationally

150

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

closed systems,” whose autopoietic self-reproduction is made possible through communication while the human subject is, so to speak, thrown out of the social system, since it constitutes a (psychic) autonomous system. Starting from these premises, Luhmann came to define the concept of “differentiation” from a dual perspective: between system and environment and between the different sub-systems included in the environment of a certain system. Its boundaries are traced by operations as determined by self-operating closure, without external inputs. In a few words, we can say that the “differentiation” proposed by Luhmann decomposes the complex polynomial of social reality into prime factors to enable a conceptual scanning to show its inner structure and mechanisms. Although the concept of the relationship between autopoietic systems is not present in the general theory, the systems are not unrelated and autistic units, but they relate to environmental assumptions, which, in turn, are some operatively closed systems. These sorts of links are defined by Luhmann as “strukturelle Kopplung” (structural coupling), a sociological concept that identifies the connection fostering and filtering mutual influences between autonomous systems, connecting them in a stable way, but without causing them to lose autonomy.

Contemporary urban evolution: the systemic approach Cities and megalopolises are expanding quickly and in a disorderly way; digitalization and globalization are changing physical and sociological aspects of the urban dimension. In this context, some technical tools for urban analysis, such as “zoning” or “layers,” that divide the whole into parts, are no longer able to interpret this dynamic reality. Complexity needs a new interpretive analysis, consistent with social contingency. Thus we propose a rethinking of “structural-functionalism” reflected on the rigid functionalization of urban areas. In this scenario, urban complexity could be analyzed by the system theory and the abstract tools provided by Niklas Luhmann. The system theory stands as a powerful conceptual instrument for the socio-economic evolution of society, but the concept of “system” could be applied to the concrete urban space. In fact, in metropolitan areas, there seems to be an orthogonal relationship between social and material dimensions (they are autonomous, but they presuppose each other for their existence).

Laura Appignanesi

151

From the historical-comparative reflection on the long-term evolution of urban models, we come to the current situation, which sees the inconsistency between real urban development and the structured layers according to which cities were planned, for instance, work spaces, living spaces, commercial areas, and places for cultural or political activities. This planning is founded on homeostasis stability and structural functionalism that seem no longer applicable to the contemporary expansion of globalized and digitalized megacities.

Mexico City, Source: http://www.theboredninja.com/

In sprawl metropolises, the landscape units are mixed, and the cities acquire immense anonymous indeterminate boundaries. If we consider the relationship between the urban system and the rural environment, the feature that stands out is the collapse of the boundary between city and countryside, suburban areas seem, on the one hand, to expand and, on the other, to disappear: the sprawl city is identified in scattered settlements where urban and agricultural functions overlap, and this disintegrates the municipal boundary. This happens both in tangible, visually perceptible, and intangible ways, for instance, with the cancellation of administrative boundaries by local place-based policies. Even the internal boundaries between subsystems seem to lose their spatial determination. In megalopolises the boundaries become blurred; their internal components are mixed and overlapping. Urban spaces expand both horizontally and vertically,

152

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

including the layers of subway tunnels and air routes, the extension on the water of rivers and seas, the spreading of virtual ICT infrastructures. In this context, “communication” becomes the actual urban structure. It emerges from an unidentified environment through the circulation of material and virtual flows (men, goods, money, data, information), that draw the true identity of the city. Then, tackling the management of urban spaces with two- or even three-dimensional representations could prove to be insufficient to understand the complexity of such an intersystemic reality. A fourth dimension should be added: the abstract but essential size of communications. This should be possible by conceptual scanning thanks to the toolkit of system theory. According to Luhmann and his “differentiation” between “system and environment,” we can consider the need of the urban form to emerge in a readable way from a complex environment, like the constitution of a sort of “order from noise” in a dynamic constellation [4]. But in the general theory, the system has “boundaries” that are exactly identified by the self-referential operations of the system, while the environment, in its relativistic sense, is bordered by a “horizon” that moves back as you move toward it. In the contemporary reality of the sprawl metropolis, this differentiation between urban system and global environment seems to fade: the boundaries of the city move closer to the horizon of the environment. Thus, the frame of “structural couplings” seems to be the actual bearer, thanks to its function as a multiple connecting element between the various subsystems. The different areas of the city are no longer identified by the delimitation of bodies, but by “circulatory and lymphatic systems,” which define them like a medical diagnostic image based on contrast liquid. On the basis of these considerations, integrated communication becomes a precondition for the stability and the autopoiesis of the system. But we must stress that the concept of “stability” includes openness to change and availability to respond to external stimuli through effective and efficient bridges. Then, the Luhmann concept of strukturelle Kopplung seems to gain more and more importance in this sort of globalized and interconnected system. The sprawl city is not composed of parts of a whole, but of dynamical systems interconnected to each other. The maintenance and changing of the urban aspect is determined by connections and interpenetrations. The sub-systems self-reproduce but not in isolation; they connect to each other in a structural way.

Laura Appignanesi

153

Here, we try to propose an innovative method for the analysis of the contemporary development of metropolitan areas via the above sociological concepts which could replace the traditional urban tools of “zoning” or “layers,” no longer able to interpret a dynamic and, therefore, complex reality, just as the sociological tradition of wholes and parts is no longer able to describe society. The further important tool is the analysis of “links” and “hubs,” both in a material and virtual sense. The map of multimodal communication infrastructures such as fiber-optic links, for instance, and their sorting nodes, can be considered the concrete equivalent of the theoretical abstract concepts of “structural couplings” and “interpenetrations.” In general, we focus on relations from a dual perspective (between different subsystems and between system and environment), and we use the axiom of Luhmann’s theory according to which communication constitutes the social structure and the existence of a system. While the “Renaissance man” was the last element of society, not further decomposable, system theory reverses the paradigm by the transition to the driving difference between system and environment: Luhmann excludes man from the social system and places it in its environment, while communication becomes the last element. In this sense, it is possible to read urban complexity by changing the methodological toolkit in this conceptually radical way. The attention is no longer focused on the decomposition in anatomical areas, well identified by a stable and determined assigned function. The “autopoietic” operations for the maintenance and development of the city-system move to physical and virtual communications. A multitasking society transfers its interests and functional relationships to the connection axis. They become themselves multifunctional places of business and meeting, for example, because the urban society lives traveling across the city. Places and spaces become alive just because they are interconnected. The single “sub-systems,” despite their autonomous “operational closure,” build “structural couplings” that allow us to receive and filter flows of information, people and objects. From the sociology of law, we can borrow the idea of the transition from “functionalism of differences” to “functionalism of links” [5]. In general, in the whole contemporary city, the single organs appear delimited by permeable membranes through which an osmotic relationship

154

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

with the environment is established. Links and ties increasingly innervate the macrosystem, constituting the connective tissue capable of transmitting impulses of life: there are one-to-one relationships and connections between the various systems that allow reproduction and development. Consequently, the interpretive reading is based on the principle that the evolution of urban systems does not depend on the functional hierarchy of structures and infrastructures, but on many overlapping intersystems (people interact and live in a multi-level and multi-tasking reality, thanks to the mass spread of devices and social networks). These networks of connections can be recorded using the model of “structural coupling.” The single systems interact and affect each other, producing new combinations of rationality that determine the evolution of the single urban areas/sub-systems and their multiplicity of organic characteristics of a sprawling city.

A barometer of the loss of urban identity The rethinking of “structural-functionalism” is founded on the shifting toward a new un-differentiated global society, where transnationalism has caused the boundaries to fade, where digitalization has replaced the idea that virtual, and concrete items are separate entities, and where dematerialization has turned everything into communication flows. In this context, the links between the sub-systems and between system and environment become increasingly important. In fact, in complex areas like megacities, contingency increases and produces social diseases and disadvantages. The rapid and uncontrolled growth of urban aggregations poses many problems of unsustainability, such as: consumption of land, energy requirements, and even unequal distribution of income and consequent social instability. So, in order to plan a livable and socially sustainable city, we have to keep in mind that the translation from synoachia to the polis argued by Plato twenty-five centuries ago is still amazingly topical. In his interpretation of the myth of Promethium, in the Dialog Protagoras, Plato says that technical skills are not enough to build a city because these skills only allow us to construct houses and infrastructures, and this amount of artifacts is an unorganized cluster. To have a polis, according to Plato, we need oídos (mutual respect) and dike (justice). Today we might say that we need good governance.

Laura Appignanesi

155

It would be like saying: for a sustainable urban development, strategies must take into consideration not only environmental sustainability, but also social sustainability. The effects of good or bad governance can model reality, as represented in Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Public Palace of Siena, where we can see the allegory of good government, the frescoes about the effects of good government or the impact of bad government in the city and in the countryside. In spite of the same landscape and urban design, the kind of governance changes the aspect of reality. The visible landscape of the contemporary city is generated by the interaction between society and material infrastructures. There’s a sort of “structural coupling” that enables this kind of intersystemic communication so that it would be interesting to carry forward a hermeneutic reading of this mutual influence. There have been many attempts to measure well-being and the quality of life. Quantitative indices have been constructed on the basis of different parameters. For example, we can cite BES, the Equal Sustainable Wellness index, created in Italy by CNEL and ISTAT [6]; or the Better Life Index of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), working on different States by comparing the levels of service and well-being based on eleven topics identified as critical for the quality of life [7]. But to interpret the feeling of people regarding metropolitan life, we suggest an original “measuring tool” related to a literary interpretation, that we can see as a particular kind of “self-observation.” In this case, measurements are not numbers, and the demonstration is not a scientific reasoning. Citing once again Plato, the methodological choice, as stated by his Protagoras, is not logos but mitos, which is like saying that we do not need a logical articulation to demonstrate a thesis, but a story. In agreement with Plato’s Protagoras, even today, there are some literary works that are useful tools for understanding, on one hand, the influence of socio-cultural aspects as generative factors of the anthropized environment and, on the other hand, the perception of urban identity on the psycho-emotional sphere. Imagery expresses the feelings of human beings, so it is possible to use a real “sociology of imagination” (Wright Mills, 1959). A narrative description of urban reality can be considered an example of “storytelling”

156

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

instead of a “descriptive map”: a non-conventional reading of the city and its identity via the writer’s sensibility, or an innovative heuristic evaluation of the two-way communication between man and city – a meta-dialogue in constant evolution. “To ask for a map is to say ‘Tell me a story,’” says Peter Turchi in Maps of the Imagination: the Writer as Cartographer [8]. For example, here, we can consider Auster (1987) and his description of New York, seen from different means of travel, with the names of places that are just numbers: “They traveled to the West Side on the shuttle, walked through the dank corridors of the 42nd Street station, and went down another set of stairs to the IRT trains. Seven or eight minutes later they boarded the Broadway express, careened uptown for two long stops, and got off at 96th Street” [9]. We can easily find the narrative “demonstration” of the loss of urban identity: “Stillman never seemed to be going anywhere in particular, nor did he seem to know where he was” [10]. “The old man had become part of the city. He was a speck, a punctuation mark, a brick in an endless wall of bricks. Quinn could walk through the streets every day for the rest of his life, and still he would not find him” [11]. But a story can even be a “literary barometer” of social contingency: “Quinn was nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing. (…) This is New York, and tomorrow will be June the third. If all goes well, the following day will be the fourth. But nothing is certain” [12]. Quinn, the main character of the novel, changes his identity with that of an unknown detective. The identity is lost in the urban labyrinth where everything is identical and interchangeable, and the only law that regulates the paths is the law of chance. He is lost in the streets of New York, and to orient himself, he records the movements of the man he is following and tries to interpret the map that he obtains: “This picture made Quinn think of a bird, a bird of prey perhaps, with his wings spread, hovering aloft in the air. A moment later, this reading seemed far-fetched to him. The bird vanished, and in its stead there were only two abstract shapes, linked by the tiny bridge Stillman had formed by walking west on 8th Street” [13]. This seems the graphic representation of metropolitan anonymity. The shape of this sort of city seems to change its meaning according to the different moods of the protagonist. In our opinion, this is the best representation of urban uncertainty.

Laura Appignanesi

157

After “Sociology of Imagination” as a heuristic instrument for “social survey,” we propose a sort of “Sociometry” as a tool for the quantification of the fourth dimension of the city. Sociometry is a quantitative method for measuring social relationships. It was developed by the psychotherapist Jacob L. Moreno in his studies of the relationship between social structures and psychological well-being. One of Moreno’s innovations in sociometry was the development of the “sociogram,” a systematic method to graphically represent individuals as points/nodes and the relationships between them as lines/arcs. So it would be possible to create an indicator of the intensity of relations, a sort of “interconnecting-gram” of the sprawl city, as well as a circulation map that shows links and hubs, like a magnetic resonance of the reproductive system of urban life, with its interpenetrations and intersystemic structural couplings, to obtain “order from noise.” Rather than developing a model and adapting it to reality, through a sociometric survey, it would be possible to deduce social behaviors from the Big Data available thanks to Digitization. This would allow the diagnosis necessary for the identification of adequate corrections. What we propose is to implement survey activities with these kinds of innovative methods, because the map by zoning and layers deals with the city surface, but we need to know the inner structure that gives it the form.

Oslo, photo by Elisa Paladini

158

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

Conclusions Lewis Mumford claimed that the modern city is too close to the Roman city which ended in collapse; if the modern city carries on in the same vein, Mumford argued, it will meet the same fate as the Roman city. Mumford recognized the crises facing urban culture, distrustful of the growing finance and political structures, fearful that a local community culture was not being fostered by these institutions. He wrote: “The physical design of cities and their economic functions are secondary to their relationship to the natural environment and to the spiritual values of human community.” Now this historical-evolutionary and cyclic approach concerning urban development could be overcome by identifying paths of interpretation that are more consistent with the complexity of the matter. In particular, it seems useful to adopt a systemic perspective based on some conceptual tools theorized by Luhmann, such as differentiation between system and environment, self-reproduction, self-observation, interpenetration, but first of all, the concept of “structural coupling” might be strategic for the understanding of the intersystemic communication. Thanks to the conceptual tools of system theory, the city can be seen as a social system with structural couplings between subsystems or between the system and its environment. Consistently, we propose the creation of new analytical tools alongside the traditional urban ones of “zoning” and “layers,” which identify the sub-urban functional spaces drawing borders and dividing the whole into parts. The morphology and possible pathologies “emerge” using new reading tools, able to identify the urban functional sub-systems in megacities where the whole is less and less distinct from the environment, its internal components are mixed, and overlapping spaces dilate horizontally and vertically. Then, the identity of the city, both in a material and social sense, seems best interpreted through circulatory flows. They represent the “structural coupling” that innervate the complex constellation. So, we need a logical process that does not propose a model to be applied to reality, but interprets reality to provide a model. In other words, instead of building a model and verifying it on a map divided into sections, we search for a connection between behavioral data. In this sense, literature can help us understand the state of the art of social awareness. Besides, sociometric tools can be thought of as a new diagnostic method

Laura Appignanesi

159

for the identification of the disease to find its cure. It is a prerequisite for building a real city, socially sustainable – not an ideal city or a metaphysical one, detached from actual reality: just lifeless artifacts and places. In conclusion, if contemporary cities seem best interpreted as complex systems that reproduce themselves thanks to communication, then flows and relations make visible the sociological structure of sprawl metropolises in the same way that a medical exam based on the flowing of the contrast liquid does. Moreover, the different links represent the “structural couplings” that connect the subsystems to each other (economic, political, cultural …) and the system with its environment. The structural couplings stress the dynamic relationships that bring out an “order from noise,” identifying the new, complex, cross-system, urban life. In sum, structural couplings identify the transition from “functionalism of differences” to “functionalism of links” [14]. In conclusion, we can say that a series of global dynamics are driving a massive territorial redistribution of population. The gradual concentration of the world’s population in large, congested, hypertrophic and increasingly uncontrollable nodes, causes an exponential increase in the level of complexity. This complexity requires an interpretive reading to highlight, under the skin of the urban area, the invisible structure of the model, to be able to intervene in it. The system theory of Niklas Luhmann can provide a strategic approach to the issue of urban expansion. Because the first assumption for management is the understanding of the contemporary society always on the move, and of the synapses that innervate the complex inter-galaxy evolution. To be able to manage such complexity, it is necessary to use an adequate theoretical model, able to explain the functional laws of reality.

160

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

Øresund Bridge, photo by Elisa Paladini

Acknowledgments I wish to express my great gratitude to Prof. Fausto Pugnaloni of Università Politecnica delle Marche, for the advice and support provided. With him, I’d like to thank the research group on urban issues, for sharing stimulating projects and activities.

References Arup, Drivers of change, Arup book, 2006. Auster, Paul, The New York trilogy, London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Baraldi, Claudio, and Corsi, Giancarlo, and Esposito, Elena, Luhmann in glossario, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2002. Biagini, Emilio, Cartografia e teoria dello sviluppo: un incontro tra strumenti di comunicazione e ricerca scientifica, in Gabassi, P.G., Tessarolo, M., Disegno e comunicazione, Milano: Franco Angeli, 1995. Breitenberg Valentino, L’immagine del mondo nella testa, Milano: Adelphi, 2008.

Laura Appignanesi

161

Cipriani, Roberto, Per una sociologia dell’immaginario, in Sociologia della Comunicazione, Fascicolo 44, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2012. Curi, Umberto, Pensare la guerra. L’Europa e il destino della politica, Bari: Dedalo, 1999. —. Il farmaco della democrazia. Alle radici della politica, Milano: Christian Marinotti Editore, 2003. Durand, Gilbert, L’immaginazione simbolica, Milano: Red, 1999. Durand, Gilbert, Le strutture antropologiche dell’immaginario, Bari: Dedalo, 1972. Febbrajo, Alberto, Funzionalismo strutturale e sociologia del diritto nell’opera di Niklas Luhmann, Milano: Giuffrè, 1975. Elias, Norbert, Tappe di una ricerca, Bologna: Il mulino, 1998. Febbrajo, Alberto, and Harste, Gorm, Law and Intersystemic Communication. Understanding ‘Structural Coupling,’ Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Fornasari, Fabio, Nulla è senza un segno. La mappa e la rappresentazione del mondo: due casi di studio, in Sociologia della Comunicazione, Fascicolo 44, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2012. Khun, Thomas, La struttura delle rivoluzioni scientifiche, Torino: Einaudi, 1979. Luhmann, Niklas, Theory of society, Translated by Rhodes Barrett, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. Luhmann, Niklas, and De Giorgi, Raffaele, Teoria della società, Milano: Franco Angeli, 2003. Luhmann, Niklas, Sistemi sociali. Fondamenti di una teoria generale, traduzione e cura di Alberto Febbrajo, Reinhard Schmidt, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Moreno, Jacob, Sociometry, Experimental Method and the Science of Society. An Approach to a New Political Orientation, New York: Beacon House, 1951. Moretti, Franco, La letteratura vista da lontano, Torino: Einaudi, 2005. Mumford, Lewis, City Development, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1945. —. The City in History, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961. Platone, Protagora, a cura di G. Reale, Milano: Bompiani, 2006. Simmel, Georg, The Metropolis and Mental Life, New York: Free Press, 1976. Turchi, Peter, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004. Wright Mills, C., L’immaginazione sociologica, Milano: il Saggiatore, 1962.

The Systemic Approach to Urban Identity

162

Notes 1

Vd. Arup, Drivers of change, London: Arup book, 2006. Data Source: The World Bank, UN data, Statistical Office of the Beijing Municipality. 3 Data Source: Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore, 2014. 4 Cfr. Elias, Norbert, Il processo di civilizzazione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988. 5 Febbrajo, Alberto, Law and Intersystemic Communication. Understanding ‘Structural Coupling,’ Farnham, Ashgate, 2013. p. 1. 6 Source: www.misuredelbenessere.it, last accessed on September 20, 2014. 7 Source: http://www.oecd.org/, last accessed on September 20, 2014. 8 Vd. Turchi, Peter, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, San Antonio-Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004. 9 Auster, Paul, City of Glass, in Trilogy of New York, London: Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 57. 10 ivi, p. 58. 11 ivi, p. 91. 12 ivi, p. 104. 13 ivi, p. 68. 14 Febbrajo, Alberto, op.cit., p.1. .

2

INNOVATION BETWEEN ECONOMY AND CULTURE MASSIMILIANO RUZZEDDU

Innovation: the notion Science affects society in two different ways. The first is the production of knowledge; in more detail this consists of providing the largest possible section of society with objective knowledge of the world, or at least more reliable knowledge than the religious statements that revealed their limits at the end of the Middle Ages. In the last four centuries, thanks to science, everybody has learned that the earth and the human beings are not the center of the universe; the universe is not steady, but has been expanding for billions of years. Furthermore, life is a matter of chemical reactions and needs no explanation based upon any vital metaphysical force; an evolutionary trend started with a simple cell and led to human beings etc. Although all those statements are subjected to the rule of the falsifiability and might be disproved at any moment, they are now generally held to be true and define how the world is represented in all Western societies (Bloor, 1991; p. 50). In other words, these beliefs form the deepest level of cultural understanding and common sense in all societies and inform judgments for every empirical phenomenon (Watzlawick et al., 1967). The sum of those statements forms the scientist’s attitude. This attitude implies: – A non-finalistic representation of the Universe. The Universe is not the result of intelligent design and it has no goal. Consequently, both in everyday life and in scientific milieu, the correct attitude

164

Innovation between Economy and Culture

when observing any phenomenon is a desire to find its causes rather than the purpose for which the phenomenon has taken place. – A rationalistic attitude. The information about each phenomenon should consist of objective data, with no regard to the observer’s personal opinions and feelings; no matter if the observers are scientists, scientific communicators or other categories of social actors. Rationality provides the instruments for understanding empirical

data, especially syllogistic judgments. – A new vision of time. In spite of the non-finalistic character of the world, the rational treatment of collected information permits us to assess that regularities through time exist; in many domains of reality, from initial conditions of disorder and simplicity, arise ordered and complex phenomena. In the naturalistic domain this trend is called “evolution”; in the human-social domain it is called “progress.”

The second, in which the science-society link is evident, is technology. This second character emerged in nineteenth century, during the second Industrial Revolution, when a number of technological inventions started the mass production of various commodities. This led to a rapid improvement in living conditions, even at the lowest social strata. However, the phenomenon of technological change had always existed throughout human history, even long before the nineteenth century. All the students of the classics know that the references to metals in The Iliad and The Odyssey describe the passage from the bronze age to iron age: in both poems numerous are the references to objects made of both bronze and iron, like weapons, knives, or chariot axles (Russo, 2005; p. 23). This characteristic shows that in the period between the two poems, the Bronze age was finishing and the Iron Age was slowly rising. The use of iron caused deep changes in social life, but it is not possible to find any explicit mention of this extraordinary innovation either in The Odyssey or in the other written descriptions of the time. This is just an example which shows that for millennia new inventions appeared with no – or very little – awareness among social actors who probably considered new technologies or new customs to have always been part of their lives. This condition of unawareness did not end until the nineteenth century when unprecedented increases in amounts of food, clothes, and free time due to new technologies, made citizens aware that an actual break with the past was happening. Consequently, this huge availability of commodities

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

165

increased social demand for other innovations and pushed a number of social actors (scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians etc.) to strengthen efforts to increase the amount of new discoveries and inventions. It is also necessary to mention that the general cultural environment of that epoch fostered an attitude of openness: historians portray Positivism as an era in which not only intellectual and political élites, but also the masses showed an almost religious faith in science and in the progress that science would grant in the next future. The progress meme achieved its greatest diffusion in the Positivist era, enhanced both by the technological changes in society as well as the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution. This has doubtless been an unprecedented cognitive revolution: never in human history had individuals been more aware of the fact that change existed and that it could consist of an improvement in the general conditions of their lives. It would not be unrealistic to assess that the exponential pace at which scientific, technological, and social changes have taken place since that time, depends on the interaction between the elements of those two categories, structural and cultural. According to this pattern, in the nineteenth century, a positive feedback process arose in which successful technological inventions as well as cultural changes provoked significant changes in general conditions of life; these changes made public opinion aware that innovation processes were in progress, and more generally, that social changes existed. This favorable public attitude toward social change implied increasing pressure over scientific communities in order to yield more scientific discoveries and technological developments within a circular cause-effect relationship that affected both science and societies. This brief historical excursus is intended to provide the appropriate notion of innovation; this is not a category that can include any case of scientific and technological change, on the contrary, we will use this term only to refer to those cases that take place with the full awareness of all the social actors involved: scientists, engineers, political authorities, entrepreneurs, and public opinion. As we will see below, considering in addition the cognitive-cultural dimension (besides the technical) of innovations will provide a reliable technical framework for the observation of specific cases of new technology being introduced (see Bijker, 1997).

166

Innovation between Economy and Culture

Innovation, science and society Nevertheless, in order to do that, it is necessary to remember that innovation is a phenomenon that takes place in social contexts (Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., and Pinch T. J., 1987), and affects environments in ways that can be either favorable or hostile to new technologies. The characters of this environment mainly depend on the nature of the interaction between science and society at a given moment (see Merton, 1973; pp. 173 and ff.). In recent history, we can recognize three main phases of this relationship, each offering a different scenario for innovation. We can set the first phase – isolation – between the epochs of Positivism and the end of the Second World War. During this period, science achieved extraordinary prestige. In fact, in a context where religion was losing more and more consent, science appeared to be an institution able to provide humankind with the ultimate truth about reality. Furthermore, through applied knowledge – i.e. technology – this institution was supposed to be able to relieve all the sources of human suffering, like famine, illness, and poverty. The scientific approach to reality was, nevertheless, perceived to be so powerful that it was supposed to be the criterion of action not only for the control of nature, but also for the control of human lives. Positivist sociology itself is an example of this attitude. Spencer used biological and naturalistic categories to describe worldwide societies: just like organisms, societies follow strict evolutionary rules and move irresistibly toward the highest degrees of complexity (Spencer, 1897, p. 7). Even more radical were the positions of Comte (1842, pp. 33 and ff.), that depicted the ultimate destiny of every society to be ruled according to naturalistic principles, the only one able to organize the other social actors in order to obtain the largest amount possible of output (merchandise, services, order etc.). Briefly, the science-society relationship appeared quite simple: the scientists were depicted as working alone in their laboratories with no contact with the external world; it was in fact necessary to prevent other social actors, with their opinions and value judgments, from endangering the absolute objectivity that the scientific methodology ensured. After

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

167

centuries of religious restraint, in the name of pure knowledge, scientists could not accept any social limitation on their activity. It is necessary to highlight how, in this phase, the science-society relationship was one-way: while scientists were free to choose the object and the methodology of their research, no matter what ethical or social costs that might imply, any innovation they delivered to society could only be positive; if some social groups reject the innovation, this was attributed to old-fashioned obscurantism. The second phase could be called the “integration” phase, because the gap that existed between science and society narrowed significantly and society began to affect scientific practice. After the end of the Second World War it appeared clear that the social consequences of scientific progress were too overwhelming to allow scientists to be unaware of them. Paradigmatic was the history of nuclear power: in the 40s only Einstein’s political consciousness convinced President Roosevelt to build an atomic bomb before Hitler did, and give financial support to the Manhattan project. However, after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and humankind officially entered the Atomic Era, nobody could ever support the statement that scientists had no responsibility for the risk of the total destruction of the planet. The physics community was expected to share the same commitments as politicians, soldiers, intellectuals etc. to maintain peace; scientists were not supposed any longer to exclusively care about their own research with no thought for the possible impact their findings could have on society in terms of either wealth and knowledge or death and destruction. In the decades that followed, public opinion assumed that similar commitments for issues like environment or public health should be imposed on scientific communities other than physicists – biologists, physicians, engineers – so that nowadays it is virtually impossible for scientists to plan their careers without taking into account ethical and social issues. Nevertheless, during that phase, society started to have a different impact on science – the attitude of political authorities toward science also changed markedly.

168

Innovation between Economy and Culture

In the 30s, Fermi and the other “Via Panisperna boys” discovered the bases of nuclear physics in an anonymous room in downtown Rome; just a few years later the experiments to build the first atomic bomb took place in a purpose-built town at Los Alamos, with a billion dollars of governmental funding. After the atomic era began, science became so deeply interwoven with political, military, and economic worldwide interests, that the research activities could count on significant public support; nevertheless, this unprecedented availability of financial and technical resources implied, for science, the need to focus on those fields of investigation that best met the interests of the funding institutions. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that while in the early stages of this phase geo-political and military interests essentially prevailed, afterwards other issues emerged from civil society and public opinion. In order to draw a model of this phase, it is possible to assess that, from the 40s onwards, science has partially lost the independence that it had enjoyed in the Positivistic era. Scientists were no longer seen as warlocks, lost in their fantasy world of weird facts; they became instead fully fledged social actors with a contribution to make to the common good. They were supposed to share the general goals of each society in terms of knowledge to be acquired and aspects of life to be improved. Any progress perceived to have been delayed or missed became the responsibility of science, together with politics and the economy. The situation has changed significantly in recent decades. Since the 70s, the globalization of markets and the emergence of local realities, supranational powers etc. have reduced the possibility of each nation to change society. As a result, the state’s leading role in boosting scientific research and technological progress has lost out in the face of market forces. As a result, nowadays, private companies do research about illnesses, space, etc., while at the same undertaking economic activity and making a contribution to scientific knowledge (See Latour, 1987; Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny et al., 2001; pos. 476). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that the market is now the prevailing model for scientific activity. In fact, in recent decades, state and politics are not the only institutions to have lost their credibility: along with religion, science itself has faced a big loss of trust among social actors (Lyotard, 1979). Furthermore, while

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

169

the market seemed to be the best agency of social regulation in terms of efficiency and decision-making, the 2008 crisis saw even the market lose a major part of its credibility among stakeholders and the public. In spite of this, none of these institutions have completely disappeared. National states still keep performing important functions, both in domestic and the international domains; religion is a more and more powerful criterion of action orientation. As a consequence, the main difference between the current situation and the past is greater complexity, i.e. a higher degree of indeterminacy. This means that, while in the past it was quite easy to assess a social institution or practice prevalent at a given moment, nowadays it is very hard to assess what trend is prevailing. The science-society relationship has become so complex that there is no general law or character with which it is possible to describe the current epoch. As Nowotny et al. have stated, science, economy and culture have “become so internally heterogeneous and externally interdependent, even transgressive” (pos. 90). Those domains are now so interdependent that it is impossible to assess what is currently prevailing in each. In other words: “The growth of the knowledge industries has not only led to an increase in knowledge workers and a proliferation of sites of knowledge production, but has also tended to erode the demarcation between traditional knowledge institutions such as universities and research institutes and other kinds of organization” (pos. 364). This recalls the enormous amount of knowledge that private research institutes carry out and the problem of the availability of this knowledge for the public. Is this private information part of the body of social knowledge, or is it just the output of a firm? But generally speaking, borders have disappeared and left a number of unsolved issues. For example, faced with the need to know how a technological input will generate profits, private research has to match the so-called “hard sciences” as well as the social sciences, especially economics; thus market studies and technological research appear more and more to be parts of the same general category of “knowledge production.” This condition also matters in the case of communication (Ziman, 1987; pp. 109 and ff.) since the relationship with [the civil society] has become so important, part of a scientist’s skills must be the ability to

170

Innovation between Economy and Culture

communicate to the largest audience possible the results of their research as well as the social importance of their findings.1 In conclusion, nowadays knowledge production activity, similar to other domains of social reality, shows high levels of incertitude. This is the name that we can give to the current phase. No institution has disappeared, and no institution seems to be holding a leading role. Science, politics, religion, and the market now coexist together and produce all sorts of social inputs: knowledge, supplies, services etc. While this condition does not necessarily imply a worsening of social actors’ life-styles, it is, for sure, problematic for the observers, whose theoretical instruments seem more and more inadequate for seizing general social trends through processes of abstraction from a number of single, specific cases.

Culture vs Incertitude This incertitude inevitably emerged in the field of innovation. While in the other historical phases it was clear from where processes of innovation started (science, politics, market etc.), nowadays defining a pattern that includes all scientific domains and social contexts is much harder. For example, if we compare the data on cell-phone diffusion worldwide with those on green-fuel diffusion, we will probably not be able to find a trend common between the two cases; we will have to adopt a complex approach and focus on the singularities of both phenomena (see Gell-Mann, 1994, p. 50) Nevertheless, even if we decide to start such an operation and adopt a case-oriented approach, we would find one more obstacle: the lack of adequate theoretical tools. Although contemporary studies take into consideration obstacles and limits to innovation, the general framework is frequently rationalistic; all the observed actors are thus supposed to be rationally oriented to the maximization of their profits, and no other kind of approach to reality is allowed for. Although, the author mentioned above acknowledges that the market has merged with universities and politics, value creation seems to be the only reference used to comprehend innovation. In other words, the only

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

171

question about innovation is whether it might create value and, if so, how much, and what are the conditions are for increasing that value. These words by Ellul are the best framework for depicting this condition: Technical progress is an indispensable factor in the economy. The economic world cannot remain stationary. It is unceasingly called on to evolve. In particular, the importance of technical progress is central to the theory of investment. All the possibilities of labor must be utilized at any price. It is necessary constantly to uncover new possibilities of investment. (Ellul, 1964, p. 151)

Consequently, every delay in the introduction of innovation is just an organizational matter, which it is possible to overcome with the proper organizational approach. Technical progress could remedy this but (…) technique shares in the decrease, not absolutely, but relatively. Technical progress no longer occurs rapidly enough to compensate for the other factors. Not even the opponents of this theory repudiate the importance of the technical factor, and that is what interests us here. (ibid.)

Of course, cases can happen where economic externalities are obstacles to the innovation process, but more frequently mere theoretical economic instruments are not enough to comprehend such failures. Now, we have seen above that one of the main ways in which society and science affect each other is culture. Now, culture does not consist only of visible habits and artifacts, but also of a deeper level, made up of unconscious assumptions about the “nature of truth, time, space, human nature, and human relationships” (Schein, 2004, p. 85). In other words, if in a given social context, the idea of time consists of evolution and progress representations, or if the idea of human relationships does not imply conservation and respect for authority, then a favorable environment for any new product will emerge and the innovation process will likely be successful. Consequently, a reliable methodology for studying innovation cases implies observing, for a given social context, the cultural productions that contain those assumptions – religious mythologies, political ideologies, historical narrations, etc. – and trying to comprehend the effects of those assumptions on all phases – start, implementation, conclusion – of the innovation process.

172

Innovation between Economy and Culture

Measurement of innovation Due to the limited space for this work, it is not possible to give a detailed description of the interaction pattern among culture, economy, and innovation in the innovation domain. Nevertheless, in order to demonstrate the epistemic potentialities of this approach, I will show here a very simple example: the annual Innovation Performance report of the 28 member states of the European Union.2 The performance measurements depend on a range of indicators that the authors have used since 2010. The indicators are divided into three groups: the Enablers, the Firm Activities, and the Outputs. Each of these groups contains a number of specific indicators, as shown in Table 1. According to this table, the measurement of the innovation performance is primarily economic in nature: while the indicators 1 to 6 have a merely statistical value, the others imply a financial dimension.3 The result of that measurement is in Table 2, which contains a rank of 28 countries according to their innovation performance. The translation of the indicators into the graphic is a complex operation that cannot be the object of an exhaustive description here; any reader interested can find it in the methodological descriptions in the quoted URL. The relevant information that emerges is that the top-ranked countries in the table are Protestant or mainly Protestant. Furthermore, in the countries above the EU average, only two are Catholic. The situation is the opposite in the sector below the European average, where almost all the countries are either Catholic or Orthodox, with only one Protestant country. Now, many are the possible explanations for this empirical regularity, although they would all need specific data for each country involved, especially if we remember the extreme diversity that characterizes the contemporary production of knowledge. For sure, a good point of view can be the theoretical framework that Weber created about one century ago. According to this point of view, the rational approach to life that characterizes the Protestant confessions offers

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

173

a better environment for innovation than a context in which the counter-reformation heritage has imposed a more traditional vision of life. In other words, it is possible to conclude that among the categories of variables shown above, the cultural differences among confessions emerge in the domain of the representations of social actions (that we consider a part of the assumptions on human relationships) and are doctrinally the most diverse. In more detail, the set of cultural variables more likely to identify the information needed for seizing a possible pattern “innovation vs. religious tradition,” should be the category of the representation of social actions. In fact, while there is no reason to conclude that the vision of time and other categories of assumptions are different among Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, the category of “human relationships” shows the highest level of diversity. Put another way, behind that measurement of innovation performance there might exist a scenario in which the Protestant legacy consists of a set of values that make social actors eager to use the social wealth – including also the general intellect, the educational system and scientific infrastructure – to produce more wealth. Although the general social advancement of society is not an effect foreseen in a religious context that mainly focuses on reducing laziness and irrationality, this deeper layer of the culture in Protestant countries fits the generic statements about the immeasurable benefits of the advancement of science and the benefits of progress. Although those sentiments are also commonly shared in countries where the religious tradition is different, their accomplishment meets obstacles at a deeper level, for example, where Catholics tend to stress the importance of emotionally positive links with one’s neighbors rather than the individual engagement in material activities.

Conclusions This essay deals with a crucial but still unresolved issue of sociological thought: the relationship between the cultural and structural dimensions of society. This issue is so complex that, of course, it was impossible to be exhaustively descriptive. Nevertheless, the aim was to use this issue as a

174

Innovation between Economy and Culture

base to highlight some aspects of contemporary sociological investigation that show a few contradictions. The field of innovation is where those contradictions emerge more frequently. While throughout the world (at least the Western world) technological progress is openly regarded as being of value and is viewed positively in all social contexts, the implementation of social innovations shows deep differences in terms of acceptance and advancement. The costs that those delays imply are so heavy that the rationalist paradigm is not an adequate instrument of interpretation, no matter that it is based on the value-oriented action rather than the individualistic search for profit. Taking into consideration also cultural conditionings – that are more ancient than the rationalistic influences – might contribute to finding regularities in phenomena that are still affected by high-level technologies.

References Bijker, W. E. (1997). Of Bicycles, Bakelite and Bulbs. Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., and Pinch, T. J. (eds.), (1987). The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. Cambridge: MIT press. Bloor, D. (1991). Knowledge and social imagery. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago press. Comte, A. (1842). Discours sur l’esprit positif. http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/Comte_auguste/discours_esprit_po sitif/Discours_esprit_positif.pdf. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Vintage books. Etzkowitz, H. (1997). The Triple Helix: academy-industry-government relations and the growth of neo-corporatist industrial policy in the U.S., in Campo dall’Orto S. (ed.), Managing Technological Knowledge Transfer, Bruxelles: EC Social Sciences COST A3, vol. 4, EC Directorate General, Science, Research and Development. Etzkowitz, H. (1998). The norms of entrepreneurial science: cognitive effects of the new university-industry linkages, in Research policy, 27, pp. 823–834. Etzkowitz, H. (2004). The evolution of the entrepreneurial university, in International Journal of Technology and Globalisation, vol. 1, 1, pp. 64–77.

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

175

Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (1995). The Triple Helix University-Industry-Government Relations: A Laboratory for Knowledge Based Economic Development, in EASST Review, 14, 1, pp. 14–19 Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (2001). The transformation of University-Industry-Government relations, in Electronic Journal of Sociology, 5, 4. Etzkowitz, H. and Viale, R. (2005). Third academic revolution: polyvalent knowledge; the DNA of the triple helix, Relazione presentata al Convegno Triple Helix 5. The capitalization of knowledge: cognitive, economic, social & cultural aspect, Torino, 10–21 maggio. Gell-Mann, M. (1994). The quark and the Jaguar: adventures in the simplex and the complex. New York Freeman. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman S., Scott, P., and Trow, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Knorr-Cetina, K. (1982). Scientific communities or Transepistemic Arenas of Research? A Critique of Quasi-Economic Models of Science, in Social Studies of Science, 12, pp. 101–103. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Lyotard, J. (1979). La Condition postmoderne – Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: éditions de Minuit. Merton, R. K. (1973). The sociology of science. Chicago: Chicago University press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2001). Re-thinking science: knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. E-book. Pinch, T. and Bijker, W. (1984). The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other, in Social Studies of Science, 14, pp. 399–441. Russo, R. (2005). The Heart Of Steel: A Metallurgical Interpretation Of Iron In Homer. 24 Bull. Hist. Chem., 30(1). Schein, E. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass. Spencer, H. (1897). The principles of sociology. New York: Aplleton & C. Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J.H., and Jackson, D.D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication. New York: Norton Weber, M. (1992). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Rotuledge.

176

Innovation between Economy and Culture

Ziman, J. (1987). An introduction to science studies: the philosophical and social aspects of science and technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes 1

This implies also deep reflection about the role of schools and universities in contemporary society. Due to heavy cuts in public spending, even in the richest countries, they need to obtain their financial resources in different ways. The easiest seems to be the economic exploitation of the knowledge that they produce themselves. This means achieving the largest number of patents as possible, to be economically exploited; this can happen through a strong orientation of the research activities, which might not be as free as in the past, as well as a strong connection with civil society. The literature on the Triple Helix Model (Etzkowitz, 1997, 1998, 2004; Etzkowitz, Leydesdorff 2001; Etzkowitz, Viale 2005) fully reflects this trend. 2 http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/policy/innovation-scoreboard/in dex_en.htm 3 Also the indicators (14–17) in Intellectual Assets group are rationals whose denominator is the Gross Domestic Product.

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

TABLE 1 – (Source: IUS2014 database) Download: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/policy/innovationscoreboard/index_en.htm (last accessed February 5 2015) ENABLERS Human resources 1. New doctorate graduates 2 Population completed tertiary education 3 Youth with upper secondary level education Open, excellent and attractive research systems 4 International scientific co-publications 5 Scientific publications among top 10% most cited 6 Non-EU doctorate students Finance and support 7 Public R&D expenditure 8 Venture capital FIRM ACTIVITIES Firm investments 9 Business R&D expenditure 10 Non-R&D innovation expenditure Linkages & entrepreneurship 11 SMEs innovating in-house 12 Innovative SMEs collaborating with others 13 Public-private co-publications Intellectual Assets 14 PCT patent applications 15 PCT patent applications in societal challenges 16 Community trademarks 17 Community designs

177

178

Innovation between Economy and Culture

OUTPUTS Innovators 18 SMEs introducing product or process innovations 19 SMEs introducing marketing/organisational innovations 20 Employment fast-growing firms of innovative sectors Economic effects 21 Employment in knowledge-intensive activities 22 Contribution of MHT product exports to trade balance 23 Knowledge-intensive services exports 24 Sales of new to market and new to firm innovations 25 Licence and patent revenues from abroad

0.000

0.100

0.200

0.300

0.400

0.500

0.600

0.700

0.800

MODEST INNOVATORS

MODERATE INNOVATORS

INNOVATION FOLLOWERS

INNOVATION LEADERS

BG LV RO PL LT HR MT SK HU EL PT ES CZ IT CY EE SI EU FR AT IE UK BE NL LU FI DE DK SE

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu 179

TABLE 2 – EU Member States’ innovation performance

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/policy/innovationscoreboard/index_en.htm (last accessed February 5 2015)

THE SOCIOLOGY OF RISK AS CRIMINAL POLITICAL SUPPORT OF NEGLIGENT CRIMES AND THEIR IMPACT ON ECONOMIC CRIMINAL LAW MICHELLE GIRONDA CABRERA

Research objectives: Discuss the axiological-normative adjustment of the current criminal dogma, regarding the founding idea of the analytical system of crime. The criminal legal doctrine, since the French Revolution and the gains of the Enlightenment, has developed a normative structure, a product of the enlightened thought of the Enlightenment. And the system’s general theory of crime tried to produce a study of crime from its subdivision on objective analytical substrata. Until the seventeenth century, the whole explanation of worldly phenomena came from the Church, causing a dangerous unification of morality and science, moral and political, and certainly between morality and law. A new epistemological content, active in several areas, emerged just as religious belief ceased to serve as the basis for the explanation of worldly phenomena. At this time, man gained prominence in the Western political scene after the rise of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century (“the century of lights”). That was when Cartesian rationalism reached its status as the greatest scientific source. With the replacement of the divine will by rational will, man began to experience a new role in society. Through reason, he sought to explain and understand the nature and the truth of things. The method used by Cartesian rationalism is to observe and describe things, creating truths to be taken as absolute and permanent.

Michelle Gironda Cabrera

181

In Cartesian science, the foundation of knowledge must be logical. Even skeptics who doubt everything could never doubt reasoning developed using a mechanical rationality, given its obvious correctness. This need was based on the formulation of modern science; Descartes had already observed that “chaining reasons” was typically the way to argue logically and rationally. His argument, moreover, in “Discourse on Method” had the pretension of logicality: to talk about God, the philosopher dispenses with faith. It was this environment that influenced legal knowledge during the first decades of the nineteenth century. In other words, in the context of law (and criminal law), trials held on the basis of Cartesian rationalism, sought to explain the crime as much as the events of nature, through an empirical method. Thus the criminal law, attempting to incorporate a scientific approach, “adapted to the rules of the game,” away from abstract philosophical speculation. Judgments were not worthy of attention. As a result of this knowledge model, the criminal law of the second half of the nineteenth century created concepts of crime described by Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. For Lombroso, who was a doctor, the cause of the crime was the effect of genetic determinism, and he thus advocated a concept of the “born criminal.” For Ferri, sociologist and student of Lombroso, the cause of the crime was previously determined rather by socio-psychological criteria. Thus was built a model of criminal law that assumed that every event had a predetermined, unchangeable and pre-diagnosable cause. The problem is that this model was no longer aware of the concerns and problems faced by the criminal law late last century. New forms of crime reached around the world and had few tangible consequences, encouraging the emergence of a distinct criminal law, leaving behind the epistemological simplifications that work only with the logical coherence of the concepts brought. Modern sociology collaborated with the criminal law in that it gave it new tasks. This is called sociology of risk as it involves the risk-taking feature of current modernity and human management technologies. This new model of society is the field of study of many sociologists, attributing the name “risk society”1 to the German sociologist Ulrich Beck.

182

The Sociology of Risk as Criminal Political Support

Modern society shows signs of increased concern around certain risks, e.g. man-made and natural disasters, both of which can have severe consequences. It is important to differentiate between the concepts of risk and danger – the difference is not ontological. While the risks are representative of human decisions, in that they reflect the anticipation of tragedy caused by human decision-making, the dangers are the possibility of injury. Alternatively, risks can originate from nature and are thus independent of human decision. This was well differentiated by Luhmann: We “should speak of risk only when the decision itself is an essential reason for the possible occurrence of an injury, when, therefore, another decision that damage would not occur,”2 at least not in that form. The example given by Luhmann is the smoker who, accepting the risk of developing cancer, continues to smoke. The non-smoker, does not feel risk, but danger. The German sociologist, moreover, explaining the complexity of the world that is beyond the understanding of human consciousness, states that parts and systems should be treated, not in isolation, but by considering one’s surroundings. Luhmann defines complexity: “Complexity means obligation to selection, obligation to selection means contingency and contingency means risk.”3 Beck defines risk as a result of a human decision rationally taken in the management of technology, and the decision is directed to an advantage or technical and economic opportunity. To Dean, however, risk in modernity is steadily approaching the concept of danger, to the extent that, in certain circumstances, risk can be seen as a continuum, and in this sense, never disappears completely.4 Despite the conceptual plurality that revolves around the notion of risk, there is a transversal element in all its definitions, namely, the distinction between possibility and reality. Thus, an event or risky behavior may or may not happen, elevation which is the risk to the scope of uncertainty. Periodic bursts of fear, risk, and dissatisfaction are part of the recurring history of civilizations. But there is a fundamental characteristic present in civilizations of all ages, namely the need, arising from time to time, for the modernization of the people, breaking with the previous paradigmatic model.

Michelle Gironda Cabrera

183

The lesson of Thomas Kuhn, for whom scientific revolutions “are those episodes of non-cumulative development in which an older paradigm is fully or partially replaced by a new, incompatible with the first,”5 is right. It is notable that the bourgeois revolution, known as the French Revolution and marked in the annals of history as the Age of Enlightenment, led to the abandonment of the feudal serfdom paradigm, ending the monarchical absolutism of the eighteenth century. And just like any abandonment of paradigms, it proliferates in every age (Zeitgeist) seeking to overcome a model already incompatible with the desires of the people. A subsequent episode started with the Industrial Revolution, which would transform the relationship between capital and work and replace much human craft with machinery. If, from an objective point of view, the post-industrial society is characterized by the handling of new risks, from a subjective point of view, this new setting is reflected in the widespread increase in a sense of insecurity. It is notable that the phenomena already described as post-industrialization have economic consequences for the criminal law, which is a political and timeless product. If the phenomena inherent in modern society were responsible for intensifying the sense of fear and widespread insecurity, this feeling, in turn, resulted in the intensification of social demands for security. In this case, public opinion sees the criminal law as the main risk control tool. This new discourse then enters the criminal legal discourse, allowing for the so-called criminal law risk. In fact, the current criminal law has been facing serious difficulty from the intensified clamor of public opinion which appeals to criminal law to address its feelings of insecurity. The direct consequence of this phenomenon is felt in an expansion of the field of activity of criminal law, especially in the socioeconomic sector: environment, public health, consumer rights, business, etc. The efforts of the criminal law seek to address the social problems emerging from new threats and opportunities embedded in a context of the globalization of markets and to break social boundaries. It creates a society that, as well as globalized and at risk, is, according to the definition of the Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, networking: “A new economy has emerged on a global scale in the last quarter of the twentieth

184

The Sociology of Risk as Criminal Political Support

century. I call it informational, global and networked (...) network because, in the new historical conditions, productivity is generated, and competition is based on a global network of interaction between corporate networks.”6 In this scenario, by contrast, emerges the need to increase the well-being of citizens on the one hand, and their security on the other. Moreover, in their daily lives, citizens cannot avoid risky activities. This is the context of expansion of culpable crimes, imposing on citizens a duty of care, or better, it is appropriate for citizens carrying out their activities, accepting a tolerable level of risk. To understand the science of criminal law, we need to understand the criminal law itself as complex by nature. Scientists should not stop using axiological criteria for the approximate practical reasoning of knowledge. It is in this context, on this precise issue, that criminal law should embrace the science of complexity. Because, while many jurists argue that, because of the complexity of the legal system, the scientific method must be reductionism, most scientists in other areas say the opposite: because of the complexity of a system, the scientific method cannot be reductionism. At the same time, however, it cannot be holistic: holism blurs the understanding of the specifics, individuality, and diversity of legal expressions that multiply in time and space. It is easy to see the existence of a favorable ambiance for wrongful classification. The self-understanding of criminal law involves the understanding of the expansion of the risks arising from a scenario of technological advances, imposing the persecution by conduct that, although risky, does not exceed the level of risk allowed or tolerated by society. The negligent crime, more than any other, has a fundamental role in modern criminal law, which is geared to new social demands arising from the manufacturing process that has existed since the nineteenth century. Perhaps negligent crimes become protagonists in society. In this context, it is concluded that, in inflation, negligent crimes reflect favorably on the adoption of dogmatic axiological models, which will be better understood through the approximation of criminal law science with complexity science. The task assigned to negligent crimes and the cause of their expansion, which, in the political-criminal context, is not aiming to reduce risk from

Michelle Gironda Cabrera

185

human activity to “zero,” but to minimize it. Still, in relation to this task in the twenty-first century, it is certain that criminal law, through negligent crimes, aims to reduce the feeling of insecurity caused by the awareness of the risks. Finally, a Ruhl’s lesson: “There is a legal system, and it is complex and adaptive. We can leave it at that and intuit propositions that seem likely to follow, or we can dive headfirst into law’s complexity to swim amidst its chaos, its feedback networks, its self-organization, its scales, its emergence, and its sheer dynamism. For those who have already taken that dive, this work aims to serve as a useful status check and blueprint for further work. For those who have not taken the dive, this may persuade you to join that school of thought, or begin to understand law’s complexity. There would be no point to exploring a model of law as a complex adaptive system if doing so would not open up windows to a new understanding of law as a system. When we talk of using complex adaptive systems theory to inform legal theory, we can think of it as applying on one or more of several levels of contextual depth. At the surface, one might recognize that there are complex adaptive system properties in the economy, poverty, war, terrorism, crime, the environment, and other realms we attempt to manage and regulate through law, and ask simply what that means for law. How should law be configured so as to best approach these complex social and physical systems? At a deeper level, one might ask whether law itself is a complex adaptive system.”

If the current penal legislation is examined (relating to the environment, economic crime and negligent crimes) researchers understand that the criminal law is, obviously, a complex system.

References Alflen da Silva, Pablo. Aspectos críticos do direito penal na sociedade de risco. In: Revista Brasileira de Ciências Criminais. v. 12, n. 46, já./fev 2004, São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 2004. Beck, Ulrich. La sociedad del riesgo global. Tradução de Jesús Alborés Rey. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores. Castells, Manuel. A sociedade em rede.Volume I.Prefácio de Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Tradução de Roneide Venancio Majer. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2011. Dean, Mitchell. Risk, calculable and incalculable. In: Risk and Sociocultural Theory: new directions and perspectives. Deborah Lupton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

186

The Sociology of Risk as Criminal Political Support

Kuhn, Thomas. A estrutura das revoluções científicas. Tradução de Beatriz Boeira e Nelson Boeira. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2000. Luhmann, Niklas. Sistema y función. In: Sociedad y sistema: la ambición de la teoría. Organização Ignacio Izuzquiza. Barcelona: Ediciones Piados, 1990. Roxin, Claus. Derecho Penal. Part I. Fundamentals. Tomo general. La structure de la Crime Theory. Translation of Luzon Diego-Manuel Peña, Miguel Díaz y García and Javier Vicente Conlledo Remesa. Madrid: Civitas, 1997. —. Criminal Policy and Legal and Penal System. Translation Luis Greco. Rio de Janeiro: Refresh, 2002 Teubner, Gunther. The law as an autopoietic system. Lisbon: Gulbenkian Caloste, 1999. Ruhl, J.B. Law’s complexity: a primer. Georgia State University Law Review: Vol. 24: Iss. 4, Article 9.

Notes 1

Beck, Ulrich. La sociedad del riesgo global. Tradução de Jesús Alborés Rey. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores, 2002. 2 Apud Alflen da Silva, Pablo. Aspectos críticos do direito penal na sociedade de risco. In: Revista Brasileira de Ciências Criminais. v. 12, n. 46, já./fev 2004, São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 2004, p. 77. 3 Luhmann, Niklas. Sistema y función. In: Sociedad y sistema:la ambición de la teoría. Organização Ignacio Izuzquiza. Barcelona: Ediciones Piados, 1990, p. 69. 4 DEAN, Mitchell. Risk, calculable and incalculable. In: Risk and Sociocultural Theory: new directions and perspectives. Deborah Lupton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 147. 5 Kuhn, Thomas. A estrutura das revoluções científicas.Tradução de Beatriz Boeira e Nelson Boeira. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2000, p. 125. 6 Castells, Manuel. A sociedade em rede. Volume I. Prefácio de Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Tradução de Roneide Venancio Majer. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2011, p. 119.

GROUNDING COMPLAWXITY: TOWARD A DYNAMIC THEORY OF LAW PEDRO MIGUEL MANCHA ROMERO

I. Introduction One of the most salient peculiarities faced by legal research in complexity theory is that, contrary to some other knowledge fields like economics, complex theoreticians do not usually refer to the legal realm as a suitable area for complex systems thinking. Undoubtedly, this is especially surprising, for the major pillars of any legal system are order and justice, while “order” – namely, the elucidation of patterns normally hidden to ordinary perception – is a subject of complexity theory. However, we would be seriously mistaken in considering such a lack to be due to any underlying reluctance by law or legal scholars to use science within their field. Contemporary law departs from the import of the epistemological model raised by the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Carpintero Benítez, 2010; Rodríguez Puerto, 2004). Contrary to pre-modern legal practice and training, which was based on the ontological and methodological plurality coming from the Aristotelian principle of subjecta materia (Carpintero Benítez 2010, 32), new legal thinking mixed the reductionist approach of nouva scienza with the Cartesian rationalist matrix, giving rise to legal constructs. Such constructs were meant to be complete provided that they were kept contained within self-referentiality (Carpintero Benítez, 2009). From then on, law would be mainly considered as individuals’ law (Rodríguez, Puerto, 2004) – with individuals being the monads par excellence as well as a logical concatenation of precedents and consequences. As a matter of example, we could think of the modern Natural Law School, the codification movement triggered by Napoleonic legal codes or Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law.

188

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

In sum, both law and legal systems, as ordinarily understood nowadays, are epistemologically ingrained in modern science. Indeed, you might easily encounter references to “legal sciences” as a way to participate in and partially appropriate the slightly superstitious prestige which science has in contemporary popular culture. The problem is that the vast majority of jurists are anchored in a science concept which science itself invalidated threefold throughout the twentieth century, namely, a science of laws that are absolute or indifferent to any relativity; laws that are definite or indifferent to probability; and laws that are simple or indifferent to complexity. In view of this, is there any meaningful way to apply complexity sciences to law? Certainly, the answer to this question is the general aim of this conference as well as the underpinning of the pun this research has coined as CompLawxity. It will refer briefly to the current state of complex legal thinking and conclude by discussing utility and the foundations of complexity theory legal use.

II. State of the art Were researchers to avoid the natural bias imposed by any research which leads them to overrate the object of the study, they ought to admit that chaos and complexity theories have been barely considered in legal literature to date. At the outset, it will not be necessary to justify a common reference to complexity and deterministic chaos nor to non-linear systems dynamics. This common reference assumes that the study of chaotic systems is part of complex studies and the most powerful precedent to complexity theory. Within a legal framework, the said theories have not been studied much apart from in the American academy, where it has caught the attention of a tiny group of scholars. Bearing in mind the huge number of legal papers published in United States journals every year, we can get an accurate idea of the paucity referred to when considering the fact that between 1980 and 2012, only 131 papers referred to the aforementioned theories directly or indirectly. On top of this, we could identify barely ten authors whose proposals are really worthy of consideration, either for their groundbreaking character or for the research tools used – Glen H. Reynolds, Thomas Lee Hazen, Lawrence E. Cunningham, Vincent Di Lorenzo, Thomas Earl Geu, Royce R. De Barondes, John B. Ruhl, Thomas Bak, Daniel Katz, and Gregory Todd Jones.

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

189

Taken as a whole, a common trait of most papers is a lack of systematic study of the subject. Truly jurisprudential reflections are relatively short as well as incomplete. Most authors make use of chaos theory, complexity theory, or both, within their own area of expertise. Given this, we might find references in constitutional law, planning law, environmental law, intellectual property law, telecommunications, procedural law, alternative dispute resolution, company law, and international law. In the same way, quantitative studies are even shorter, although much more important in content, using mainly network thinking and power laws. Needless to say, this is not just a personal opinion. It is backed by the findings coming from the analysis of categories used by authors and the rank attached to each of them. In doing so, the research has considered a number of complex or chaotic categories taken into account within the different papers, such as complex adaptive systems or sensitive dependence on initial conditions. As a token of philosophical interest, the research has also looked for references to five philosophers, i.e. Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Descartes, and Popper. Finally, in order to refine each category rank, the researcher discounted from the totals those authors using the respective category incidentally. The resulting rank is the following:

190

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

Not surprisingly, the resulting diagram resembles the shape of a power law representation. A brief analysis of these results makes clear that most authors have borrowed terms from the scientific parlance in a loose way. Paradoxically, however, they have not thought much about the potential jurisprudential or simply philosophical implications of their proposals. As an example, notice that sensitive dependence on initial conditions – or butterfly effect, the most famous category within non-linear dynamics – is ranked first. However, both Lyapunov’s exponents and Feigenbaum’s universality rank at the bottom. This clearly demonstrates that these categories are just mentioned by the authors, who do not take care to empirically prove them.

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

191

Similarly, and secondly, it is remarkable that the philosopher most cited – i.e. Popper – is mentioned less than the said butterfly effect. Considering that Popper was a philosopher of science, this can be taken as a sign of poor interest in this subject on the part of the authors, although trans- or inter-disciplinarity – a common subject in philosophy of science – is a long way from being a settled question. On top of this, nobody really mentions either Heraclitus or Parmenides with respect to paradigmatic issues, which helps frame the theoretical extent of most of the papers considered. In sum, we could consider, certainly in a provisional and even rash way, that chaos and complexity theory have no interest from a legal standpoint – for there is such paucity of interesting proposals. We could even add, as Grün does (1999/2000), that these theories have no interest outside the American academy. Should research stop now?

III. Complexity theory and its legal usefulness Obviously, the previous section’s final question is a rhetorical one. Although not much considered to date, the usefulness of complexity theory and non-linear dynamics for legal purposes is out of the question. Researchers could advance three potential uses for them: the first regards philosophical foundations; the second, legal systems’ dynamic traits; and the last regards the assessment of political systems rising from legal systems or intertwined with them.

A. Philosophical reconfiguration The western Contemporary or Late Modern Age is, no doubt, the age of revolutions. In old Europe, and without prejudice to the British case, first and foundational was the French Revolution, which spawned a large revolutionary and contra-revolutionary period. But politics was not the only area of contention involved. The Industrial Revolution, for example, involved a qualitative change in the use of natural resources and a rate of technological change whose echoes still reverberate two centuries later. On the other hand, the twentieth century was really generous in scientific paradigm shifting which, in turn, excited modern man’s revolutionary fantasies. Altogether, this has resulted in a trivialization of the word, which researchers can easily check by noticing the abusive use of the term “revolution” in cultural parlance and advertising, for instance.

192

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

In this way, the variegated discussions about the revolutionary extent of complexity theory and its different subcategories is not relevant, for this could only be settled once enough time has elapsed, which is not yet the case (Arana, 2012). There is a potential usefulness for complex thinking in reconfiguring the way we acquire knowledge and think about reality. Meta-reflection – this is to say, reflection about reflection – imposes upon us a preliminary caution: we should not forget that an actual knowledge of reality as a whole would never be possible. This epistemic incompleteness has already been established sufficiently both within physics and mathematics, although we still long to know “everything.” Fortunately, this yearning pushes us forward and progressively extends the realm of our knowledge. However, it does not suffice to overwhelm the limits posed by our dimensional condition, for we can only know what is dimensionally shared, that which we share dimension with. Let us imagine, as in a well-known example, how a bi-dimensional being could explain a tri-dimensional sphere intersecting her plane. Nevertheless, this caution has not to be considered as a misoneist sentence taking us down the nihilist path. Any epistemic doom is discredited by constant findings of new objects, beings or structures by scientists and researchers, as well as the unending attempt to explain reality by means of these, or even in contradiction to them. Bearing all of this in mind, we can easily glimpse the potential of complex thinking, the invitation it makes to re-think reality by making use of ascertained facts instead of, as usual, forcing to be real what has been previously thought. On the other hand, our civilization’s cultural and technological success might result in collapse if we do not re-think reality in a proper way. Claims against reductionism are frequently encountered, no less than warnings about the diminishing rate of findings to be put in the reductionist basket. Indeed, reductionism has become one of the worst – and most common – academic insults one can receive (Feldman, 2012, 148). This notwithstanding, researchers can only conduct themselves in a reductionist way – not to mention the impressive success of reductionist thinking – because we are tied to our environment and to dimensional shape. Does this mean that reductionism is a kind of Western culture fatum heading to some kind of individualistic dissolution? Surely this could be true, especially if researchers culturally transpose the consequences of Thermodynamics Second Law and pay attention to

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

193

history, where every cultural aggregation comes to end, no matter whether it takes a couple of generations or 6,000 years. As luck would have it, not everybody is prone to doomsdays, and Stuart Kauffman, for instance, dares to assert that we should consider the existence of a Thermodynamics Fourth Law (Kauffman, 2000), describing any natural system’s innate inclination to preserve itself, as Peter Corning emphasizes in his essay on emergence (Corning, 2002). In sum, in order to determine whether there is an existing fatum or not, researchers should go back to our civilization’s infancy, given that destiny is not only a final state, but an initial condition too for any being subject to it. This return necessitates making our way back to the founding momentum of thought, or, as Heidegger suggests (Heidegger, 2005), to a time when original or initial questions were put forward. Although there is some risk of arbitrariness when producing birth certificates, it could be easily assumed that the West saw the light of thought thanks to two titans who shared an age and culture: Parmenides and Heraclitus. But what could be gained from going back to philosophers so distant in time, and how could they be linked to modern scientific theories? Intuitively, researchers might gain some insight from this archeo-philosophical trip by considering the property of hysteresis so properly used by Benoît Mandelbrot in his different studies on price formation (Mandelbrot, 2006). Given that effects keep some memory of former causes even after such causes demise, why could the same not happen with philosophical ideas? Add the so-called lock-in model (Roithmayr, 2000; Hathaway, 2001; Hathaway, 2001), by which any path-dependent system faces extraordinary difficulties to move away from the path followed to date, and the importance of revisiting these two authors’ original thought should be apparent. The Western world rests on Parmenides but makes itself uneasy with Heraclitus. Were researchers to ignore philosophical mannerisms resulting from the ultra-specialization that has reached this field too, the thought, and almost the only one, is inheritor of the Parmenidean proposal. Consider, for instance, Popper’s account of historical paradigms, where researchers can easily find traces of common Parmenidean genealogy and, above all, the absence or insignificance of Heraclitus influence (Popper, 2011). In the researcher’s opinion, Parmenides’ proposal, duly purified – even as counterfeited, in Kingsley’s judgment (Kingsley, 2006), by Plato – became the idealistic matrix which has informed Western thought,

194

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

making our thinking take the idealistic path and hindering both our relationship with and ultimate knowledge of reality. The knowledge model resulting from Parmenides’ poem is essentially dualistic, reductionist, and quietist. Dualism results from opposition between two conflicting realities: the corrupt and compound reality of phenomena, and the ideal one, pristine and purified (Parmenides, 2007, frag. 1, 28–30). Obviously, on top of the ontological reduction which implies excluding from reality a big part of it, a further epistemic reduction is added regarding the way to proceed in order to know reality, a basically intellectual and essentialist knowledge. Remember that, in Parmenides’ own words, to be is the same as to think (Parmenides, 2007), so the being is that which remains in the being, self-contained and everlasting (Parmenides, 2007). This introduces us into the third feature of his epistemic model, quietism: that which cannot cease being (Parmenides, 2007). In turn, this leads back to reductionism – for that which is not has been removed from that which is; as well as dualism – because that which is cannot be everything which is not. According to Kingsley’s mystical reading of Parmenides, it is apparent that Parmenidean conclusions are not only a product of thinking, but also of personal experience of hêsychia or stillness, typical of his practice of incubation as pholarcos or priest of the Doors of Hades. However, in the same way that colors were removed from Greek statues over many centuries, bequeathing us a false impression concerning the smoothness and whiteness of classical marble, the assumption of Parmenides’ logical reasoning, properly purified of mystical pretension, became the preconception of the Western way to apprehend reality. From then on, the real could only be the thought, what has been previously decomposed and classified, the separate. Altogether, this makes the first and ultimate foundation of alienation in the world. But, as previously stated, we make ourselves uneasy with Heraclitus because reality is disturbing. Where Parmenides established dualism, reduction and stillness, Heraclitus was able to see unity, holism and movement. His sentences can be opportunistically misinterpreted due to their fragmentary and aphoristic character. However, an epistemological trend radically different to that of Parmenides is embedded within Heraclitus’s work. In fact, had it been followed, the cultural story would have been totally different. Heraclitus did not name himself as the Obscure. His obscurity results from a flawed attempt to understand his proposal from idealistic Parmenidean quarters, which necessarily implied

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

195

misunderstanding it. When he states, for instance, that Nature likes to hide itself (Colli, 2010, 22B123 DK) or that hidden harmony is more beautiful than apparent harmony (Colli, 2010, 22B54 DK), Heraclitus is not setting apart two opposing worlds, as idealism would do. What he is distinguishing is two grades of knowledge regarding the same reality. Both reality and real knowledge are available to those who desire to conduct themselves through it awake, and not sleepwalking, as suggested in 22B1 DK. In short, the physis – or reality – showed by Heraclitus is single. Given this, how could we know physis in a true way if we considered ontological reductionism as one of its traits? Heraclitus says, time and again, that reality is contiguity, contact, whole, or entirety (Colli, 2010, 22B10 DK, 22B103 DK et al.). And he does so in spite of the plurality of beings concerned, whose dialectic relationship does not result in a synthesis, but in eternal cohabitation and confrontation (Colli, 2010, 22B8 DK). In Heraclitus’s opinion, the being is the coexistence of opposing entities that do not exist and cannot exist on their own, because they involve themselves reciprocally. There is a whole, and there are parts, but neither the whole nor the parts exist on their own but in continuous interrelationship. Expressing such characteristics in a rational way is extremely difficult due to the sequential nature of our intellectual abilities. For us, the natural and intuitive way is to consider that the relationship between whole and its parts results in a new entity, a kind of meta-whole. This way of proceeding leads us to a never-ending search for beings and categories, each a little hazier than the last, for the alternative seems to be a magmatic Tohubohu threatening our mental sanity. You can easily understand why this could be viewed as a threat to our existence if taking into account the utilitarian side of human knowledge. Going more deeply – or ascending, as preferred – into this reasoning, we arrive at another Heraclitean topic, the dynamical nature of reality. The fire of reality, which lights itself in a measured way and in a measured way is put out, as in fragment 22B30 DK, represents the necessary amalgam of unity and holism referred to above. There is almost insurmountable conceptual difficulty confronting this issue, because how could reality reveal its being or essence in a process? Is not the essence what remains, what does not change? Considering reality as changing leads us into two aporias: time is an illusion, as Prigogine suggests was Einstein’s understanding (Prigogine, 1997, 14); or, rather, reality is an illusion, as resulting from Spengler’s interpretation of Heraclitean thought (Spengler, 1948). No doubt, both aporias give some comfort but no real

196

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

knowledge. Considering the pain of our life to be illusory lays in the foundational program of every comprehensive and eschatological reading of reality, like religious ones – time and suffering are equally illusory – both will get dissolved in joy when communion, enlightenment, or scientific elucidation are reached. But, symmetrically, there is some kind of inverse comfort in Spenglerian nihilism, which was embedded in German Agonismus whose consequences are well known. How much solace do people find in the face of destruction, in the Cleansing of the Temple? But the Heraclitean proposal moves away from both aporias. Process is not an illusion, but the essence of reality, which is autopoietic. The real is not as much imbalance as continuous re-balancing, coming from its components’ interaction. Process is not nihilist or insubstantialist either because its consequences become apparent in the course of time. Reality, then, is the process itself, and we can only get and refine our knowledge of it through our inescapable involvement. Any attempt to take a step back and observe is legitimate and, surely, unavoidable. It will only render an approximate understanding of reality. At this point, the Borgian character of Funes el Memorioso could help us. In a way, Funes abolished the past by remembering – by making present – “all” the past, but this, in turn, made him an unlikely and implausible character to a rational reader. Back to ordinary limits of reality, researchers could wonder now which of the two models fits best in a world splintered into self-repeating fractal dimensions, where emergent properties cannot be explained by individual characteristics but by the interrelationship of individuals. This is a world where such interrelations are subject to apparently never-ending feedback loops which modify both the whole and its constituents’ behavior, the same world where, as bravely unveiled, subtle non-linear patterns live together with more comfortable linear ones. Which philosophical reading is more suitable for the self-criticality processes taking place on the edge of chaos? Which model can be more useful for explaining the surrounding reality as a whole? All of these questions uncover another virtue of Heraclitean thought, also considered by Edgar Morin: its counterintuitive intuition (Morin, 1999). As suggested, the Heraclitean proposal is paradoxical in the light of ordinary or common logic. This, together with the state of scientific knowledge in Heraclitus’s time, explains why his thought was immediately forgotten or simply knocked off, as Plato did. However, non-linear and complexity science findings have empirically confirmed Heraclitus’s

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

197

philosophical intuition. As Feldman states (Feldman, 2012), it might be absurd discarding reductionism in bulk, given its evident achievements and the certainty that there are further Higgs Bosons to find. But this is compatible when considering that, maybe, it is time now to enrich our perspective in order to avoid the symmetric absurdity of the reductionist funnel (Anderson, 1972).

B. Dynamical traits of legal systems Complexity theory is useful for both knowing and assessing legal and political systems. Exchanging philosophical premises would have an immediate impact on legal understanding. Both jurists and laymen are used to believing in a legal ideal to which every fair society must tend. Such ideality can be located outside the Platonic cave, at the Adamic natural state of classical contractualism, inside declarations of rights, or at Rawlsian original positions, for instance. In any case, it is a crystallized, out-of-time ideality. And a false one, too. As Heraclitus suggested, and as is commonly accepted, justice is a function of injustice (Colli, 2010, 22B80 DK), so we should consider legal systems as a function of confluence and conflict, getting rid of the unattainable desire to defeat them. This way, justice could be deemed to be one more of the agents forming and interacting within the legal system, instead of a meta-legal goal. Robert Axelrod’s prisoner dilemma model as implemented by Gregory Todd Jones may be of assistance. Jones concluded that societies more inclined to cooperation and to immediate punishment of cheaters could reach higher global and individual wealth than their opposites (Jones, 2008). In a similar vein of generality, complexity theory can help us to re-shape legal systems as order models. As William H. Rodgers properly remarks, written legal tradition, as initiated by Hammurabi’s Code in 1775 BC, barely represents 0.0008333 percent of human tradition (Rodgers, 1993). Bearing in mind the different effect of past causes arising from hysteresis or path dependence, researchers will come to the conclusion that laws are written in stone by hands shaped by custom, which, in turn, is the result of the interrelationship of individuals mutually known and unknown. Law and legality are not only a matter of politics but also – and mostly – of citizens and civic groups. This last point makes clear another issue that political steersmen usually put aside, or at least want to. Lawmaking is not only determined by what was previously enacted or customarily accepted, but also by

198

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

chance and even hidden influences. Vincent Di Lorenzo, for instance, refers to the case of an US Senator whose opinion about safety warnings in liquor commercials changed after her daughter was run down by a drunken driver; this shift resulted in decisive warnings being enacted (Di Lorenzo, 1994). On other occasions, legislative shift can be difficult to trace, if we consider, for instance, Christakis and Fowler’s three-degrees hypothesis (Christakis and Fowler, 2010). According to this, one individual’s decisions can influence others linked to the first one up to three grades. This is to say that strangers can influence lawmakers without noticing it. In a more particular way, we can also cite different American authors who have revealed usually hidden characteristics of legal systems using complexity sciences or tools. For instance, Daria Roithmayr made use of path dependence to explain how racial discrimination is ingrained in the United States legal education system, despite recurrent efforts to amend this trend (Roithmayr, 2000). Similarly, Vincent Di Lorenzo found evidence of systemic racial discrimination in lending due to path dependence some years before, although lenders were unaware of it (Di Lorenzo, 1996). Indeed, path dependence is one of the dynamical properties more frequently invoked by authors. Some of them, like John B. Ruhl (Ruhl and Ruhl, 1997), connect it with irreversibility of process, so often explained by Ilya Prigogine in terms of how negative effects of legislation cannot be undone. It is also advisable to remark that several authors have linked catastrophe and unexpected effects resulting from sensitive dependence on initial conditions to draw attention to the need to reevaluate the risk assessment criteria usually used by lawmakers. In this sense, it is particularly interesting to consider Douglas Kysar’s analysis on the precautionary principle and cost/benefit analysis when passing new legislation on potentially catastrophic issues like nanotechnology and the environment (Kysar, 2006). Notwithstanding the interest of these and some other similar reflections, the small number of studies showing patterns of legal behavior common to non-legal phenomena are much more interesting. Daniel Farber (Farber, 2003; Farber, 2005), for instance, has studied different legal issues empirically, like judicial doctrine spreading, and concluded that they are subject to power laws. On a different, although related issue, researchers (Katz, Stafford and Provins, 2008) have studied the judiciary as a network structure, concluding that it does not differ much from any other network. There is a small number of such studies, and it has also to be mentioned that some of these authors, like Farber (Farber 2003, 155),

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

199

are skeptical about the potential legal use of complexity theory. These works lay down a promising line of research. The researcher presents a normative proposal. There is a risk posed by invoking natural philosophy as a political argument. Different authors, like Prigogine and Stengers (1997), Escohotado (1999) or Kauffman (1995), have expressly warned of this, all of them citing various examples of attempts to ground monarchy using mechanics. Also frequently mentioned in this context, is the risk of naturalistic fallacy, which normally infers biased axiological consequences from scientific facts. Social Darwinism, for instance, usually misleads by referring to survival of the fittest as though the fittest were the socially stronger, missing the point – for example – that the cockroach is one of the fittest and more adaptive species. Would SS officers see cockroaches when getting their uniforms ready before the mirror? Would they not see elegant panthers instead? Maybe this is the reason why, among American scholars, there are those who think, like Jeffrey Rudd (2005), that chaos and complexity theories pose a threat to the United States democracy and its practice, for they could replace deliberative principle by technical, non-democratic analysis and decisions. Bearing this caveat in mind, however, I consider that complexity sciences are of use from a political, philosophical standpoint. If social processes, like juridical ones, share complex adaptive systems characteristics, then totalitarian or reactionary programs will be doomed from the outset. Totalitarianisms of any kind try to impose a constructionist program which, by its very nature, is global and finalist. It does not matter much whether the hoped-for paradise is a socialist or a racial Eden, for both pretend a predetermined paradise in which individuals do not play a big role. Regrettably – or fortunately – the impossible knowledge of every initial condition at a given time, together with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, refute such predictions sooner or later (Juarrero-Roque, 1991), thus making the system collapse in a painful manner with many lives lost. Likewise, reactionary yearning for a political past is destined to fail, although in this case due to non-linear systems irreversibility. Causes that lead to a certain political state can be counteracted, but rarely – if ever – undone. As an example, we can repeal the Volstead or Prohibition Act, but this will not take away all its pernicious effects (Ruhl and Ruhl, 1997), as American society painfully experienced with the spreading and consolidation of the Mafia phenomenon.

200

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

Is there anything more? For sure. Common traits of complex adaptive systems are: self-regulation aimed at adapting to and surviving external and internal changes and happenstances; concurrence of high numbers of agents; and the recursive impact of systemic effects on individuals’ behavior which, in turn, becomes the recursive cause of system evolution. Given this, political systems will be more adaptive, the stronger these traits are. As a result, if we consider that the political system’s primary goal is its own survival and that of its members, would it not be consistent to think that there is some kind of scientific and historical evidence that democracy is the more adaptive system? Perhaps it is too soon to convert this suggestion into affirmation, for a great deal of empirical work is yet to be done, but it is a good starting point to fight those who believe that people are like perishable, interchangeable goods.

References Anderson, P.W. “More Is Different.” Science 177 (August 1972): 393– 396. Arana, Juan. Los sótanos del universo. La determinación natural y sus mecanismos ocultos. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2012. Carpintero Benítez, Francisco. “Los constructos racionales en la reflexión sobre la justicia.” Dikaiosyne Revista semestral de filosofía práctica, nº 23 (julio–diciembre 2009): 25–87. —. “Métodos científicos y métodos del derecho: una historia superada.” Persona y Derecho, nº 62 (2010): 29–58. Christakis, Nicholas A. and James H. Fowler. Conectados. Madrid: Santillana Ediciones Generales, 2010. Colli, Giorgio. La sabiduría griega. Heráclito. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2010. Corning, Peter A. “The Re-emergence of ‘Emergence’: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory.” Complexity 7, nº 6 (2002): 18–30. Di Lorenzo, Vincent. “Complexity and Legislative Signatures: Lending Discrimination Laws As a Test Case.” Journal of Politics and Law XII (Fall 1996): 637–664. —. “Legislative Chaos: An Exploratory Study.” Yale Law & Policy Review 12 (1994): 425–485. Escohotado, Antonio. Caos y orden. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1999. Farber, Daniel A. “Earthquakes and Tremors in Statutory

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

201

Interpretation: An Empirical Study of the Dynamics of Interpretation.” Minnesota Law Review 89 (February 2005): 848–889. Farber, Daniel A. “Probabilities Behaving Badly: Complexity Theory and Environmental Uncertainty.” Environs Environmental Law & Policy Journal 27 (Fall 2003): 145–173. Feldman, David P. Chaos and Fractals. An Elementary Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Grün, Ernesto. “Derecho y caos. Sobre la actual y futura evolución del derecho.” Revista Telemática de Filosofía del Derecho, nº 3 (1999/2000): 31–36. Hathaway, Oona A. “Path Dependence in the Law: The Course and Pattern of Legal Change in a Common Law System.” Iowa Law Review 86 (January 2001): 601–665. Heidegger, Martin. Parmenides. Tres Cantos: Ediciones Akal, 2005. Jones, Gregory Todd. “Homogeneity of Degree in Complex Social Networks as Collective Good.” Georgia State University Law Review 24, nº 4 (summer 2008): 931–945. Juarrero-Roque, Alicia. “Fail-Safe Versus Safe-Fail: Suggestions Toward an Evolutionary Model of Justice.” Texas Law Review, nº 69 (June 1991): 1745–1777. Katz, Daniel M., Derek K. Stafford, and Eric Provins. “Social Architecture, Judicial Peer Effects and the “Evolution” of the Law: Toward a Positive Theory of Judicial Social Structure.” Georgia State University Law Review 24 (Summer 2008): 977–1,001. Kauffman, Stuart. Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. —. At Home in the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kingsley, Peter. En los oscuros lugares del saber. Gerona: Ediciones Atalanta, 2006. Kysar, Douglas A. “It Might Have Been: Risk, Precaution and Opportunity Costs.” Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law 22 (Fall 2006): 1–57. Mandelbrot, Benoît. Fractales y finanzas. Una aproximación matemática a los mercados: arriesgar, perder y ganar. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2006. Morin, Edgar. El Método I. La naturaleza de la naturaleza. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1999. Parmenides. Poema. Editado por Joaquín Llansó. Tres Cantos: Ediciones Akal, 2007. Popper, Karl R. Teoría cuántica y el cisma en física. Madrid: Tecnos, 2011.

202

Grounding Complawxity: Toward a Dynamic Theory of Law

Prigogine, Ilya. ¿Tan sólo una ilusión? Una exploración del caos al orden. 4ª edición. Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 1997. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. La nueva alianza. Metamorfosis de la ciencia. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 1997. Rodgers, William H. “Where Environmental Law and Biology Meet: Of Pandas’ Thumbs, Statutory Sleepers, and Effective Law.” University of Colorado Law Review 65 (Winter 1993): 25–75. Rodríguez Puerto, Manuel Jesús. “El inicio de los sistemas jurídicos. Entre el método y el individualismo.” Anuario de Filosofía del Derecho XXI (2004): 385–410. Roithmayr, Daria. “Barriers to Entry: A Market Lock-in Model of Discrimination.” Vanderbilt Law Review 86 (May 2000): 727–799. Rudd, Jeffrey. “J.B. Ruhl’s “Law-and-Society System”: Burying Norms and Democracy Under Complexity Theory’s Foundation.” William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review 29 (Spring 2005): 551– 632. Ruhl, John B. and Harold J. Ruhl. “The Arrow of the Law In Modern Administrative States: Using Complexity Theory to Reveal the Diminishing Returns and Increasing Risks the Burgeoning of Law Poses to Society.” University of California Davis Law Review 30 (1997): 405–482. Spengler, Osvaldo. Heráclito. Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe Argentina, 1948.

THE PLACE OF OUR EARTH IN THE UNIVERSE AND TURNING-POINTS IN ITS LIFE RALOVICH BÉLA

The beginning The hot earth of dust appeared at a given moment from the sun in the timeless and endless universe, the principles of which will never be totally known by mankind. After some time, biological life, which is an exceptional phenomenon and is connected to a structure of a biological living entity/unit, was formed (or created) on the cooling, inert earth. At present, it seems that biological life is only present in the bio-sphere of the earth in the discovered Universe.

What is the living entity? It is a structure, bordered with a “wall” (cell membrane, cell wall, cutis and so on) from its environment (in the present case the structure means the total material construction of a living biological unit) and which gives the possibility that in itself and through its border, energy as well as substance flow has existed. It is suited to its given environmental circumstances (among certain conditions – life conditions) and arranged in the way required, which is characteristic and positive for the unit until its death. During that period of time, there has been a dynamic balance between the entity and its environment. The living unit reacts to the outside effects, and at the same time, has influenced its environment, it multiply and bequeath its characteristics to its offspring, and all its processes are directed by the general laws of the universe. The first living entity was probably a microorganism, the formation of which is unknown.

What is the aim of the Biological Life? As was published in a small booklet entitled “The old man and the thoughts,” the aim of the Biological Life is only the further Biological Life: no more, no less!

204

The Place of Our Earth in the Universe and Turning-Points in its Life

Features of the living entity and its effect on life One of the characteristic features of living biological entities is that they have not only been influenced by their environment but at the same time, they also affect their surroundings. Therefore, since the first living biological entity appeared, the fate of the Bio-sphere has not only been determined by the laws of the Universe but by the effects of the entity too. That was the first turning point in the life of the Earth. The importance of these effects may be verified by that supposition on the basis of which the early reductive conditions on earth were converted into oxidative ones by microorganisms. In consequence of their metabolism, the free oxygen appeared, and this new situation enabled the formation of breathing organisms (plants and animals). Since the appearance of microorganisms on the earth, they have represented the greatest part of the living population. Their number is infinitely large and unknown. Without microorganisms, there would be no biological life.

Some words about the Bio-sphere and continuous biological life The Bio-sphere is not only a complex system which consists of the earth and one part of its atmosphere, but at the same time, it is a closed system for biological life because neither biological nor human life, nor the factors which can detrimentally influence biological life, are able to spontaneously leave it, and furthermore, those factors which are necessary for that life cannot freely arrive from space. For a continuous biological life in a closed system – for example, in the case of a microbial mass-cultivation – it is obligatory to ensure the permanence of the specific life conditions (optimum and standard composition, pH, temperature, aerobic or anaerobic condition of the medium, elimination of unnecessary substances and the mass of bacteria and so on). Erwin Schrödinger and later Atsushi Katsuki supposed that biological life needed an environment of low entropy as the compounds of small entropy necessary for that life could be consumed by the living entity only in such circumstances. Convenient entropy conditions on earth have been ensured by water-circulation which has regulated the temperature of our globe. During the last decade, the temperature of the earth has increased and, at the same time, the climate, the character of the seasons and that of the weather have changed. Measurements have verified that there has been

Ralovich Béla

205

no increase in the amount of energy arriving at the earth from the sun. This means that the causes of the increase of temperature must be in the bio-sphere. On the basis of the facts already mentioned, all questions connected with biological life should be investigated with the help of biological laws because individual rules of physics, chemistry, economics, and politics are insufficient.

The effects of mankind The appearance of human beings has resulted in the second decisive change in the bio-sphere. Until that point in time, only natural microorganisms, plants and unconscious animals, which were controlled in a natural way, lived in and influenced their environment together with the effects of the natural inanimate processes (volcanoes, meteors and so on). Since the appearance of “conscious” humans, they have acted to improve their conditions and create a better and more conformable life; nowadays their actions are mainly motivated by profit. As the number of people has increased, their harmful processes have also become more impactful for the bio-sphere. Until the Industrial Revolution the impact of human action was moderate and only very local. But after it, the impact has become more intense, affecting ever greater areas of the earth. The size of forests has decreased continuously. After the Second World War – in an atmosphere of euphoria and unfettered imagination – the speed of these processes has risen. First, it was observed that the snow disappeared from the Kilimanjaro, and the size of deserts started to increase; the typical characteristics of the seasons also altered. The unpleasant phenomena became global, and we arrived at the present serious situation which is illustrated by the data in Tables 1 and 2.

Discussion On the basis of the data presented in the Tables, it can be stated that all parameters have changed in an unfavorable direction, and these alterations have influenced the entire bio-sphere. They have caused a deterioration in human health, with cases of unexpected deaths in France, Hungary, and the United States. They have interfered with agricultural production, animal husbandry, and forests. As a consequence of these changes, tropical and subtropical insects and diseases have emigrated to the countries of the temperate zone.

206

The Place of Our Earth in the Universe and Turning-Points in its Life

Prospects As to the present situation, in the best case we correctly know the causes of the alterations as well as the effects of those causes and our efforts to stop the unpleasant processes are based on that exact knowledge. The present situation has meant that the “dose” has been insufficient. Therefore, it is necessary to drastically enlarge the “quantity of the medicine” at once! In the worst case, neither “diagnosis” nor “therapy” is correct, or only partly so. If this is the case, we need to reevaluate everything, to come up with a more exact “diagnosis” and the “new adequate medical treatment” must be started immediately, otherwise, the “patient” will soon be lost.

Summary In the bio-sphere, a great number of ecosystems are present which are closely connected with each other and which can only exist within the confines of the living conditions. Outside these confines, there is no biological life! The laws of biological life and the universe are absolute categories, and there is no place among them for liberal imaginations.

References Ralovich Béla: (2004): The Old Man and the Thoughts. (in Hungarian) Püski Kiadó, Budapest, 2004. ISBN: 963 9906 53 0 —. Data to the History of Teaching and Research of Microbiology. Vol. I. and Vol. II. (in Hungarian) Balatonberény, 2011 and 2014. ISBN: 978 963 08 1874 2 and 978 963 08 9753 2 —. E-mails to the EU Commissioner Mrs.Connie Hedegaard in 2013. —. Our Thoughts about the Life. (in Hungarian) Búvópatak XII, (Number 6-7.) 24–25, 2013. —. The God, the Universe and the Infinity. (in Hungarian) Búvópatak XII, (Number 9.) 12–14, 2013. —. Letter to the Head of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. (in Hungarian) 2013. —. The Place of our Earth in the Universe and Turning-points in its Life (Thoughts Induced by the Climate Change). (in Hungarian) Orvosi Hetilap 155, (Number 34.) 1367–1368, (2014).

Ralovich Béla

207

Table 1 – Life needs of a theoretical human being and his/her impact on the environment Needs Oxygen: 360 ml. or more/minutes (basic metabolism) Energy by food (depending on gender): 6,27-7,95 megajoules/day Basic metabolism: 88w. (in case of a heavy work more than 600 w.) Drinking water: 2–2.5 liters/day General water use: 20–500 liters/day (The world average is 50 liters/day) Energy (estimated world average in 2000): 70,000 megajoules/day with favorable sunshine, weather, temperature and rain: as during earlier centuries Products CO2: 270 liters/day (basic metabolism) Heat: Less than 50% of the total daily energy produced in a body may depart into the environment Steam and water by expiration and sweat unknown Urine: 1.5 liters/day Feces: 100–500 gr./day Sewage water: Its quantity is proportional with that of the water used Solid communal waste in Hungary: 0.4 t./yr. or 0.6-1.2 m3/yr. Notes to Table 1 As the number of human beings is more than 7.5 billion, the data in this Table must be multiplied by that figure to get the current values. The overall effect of microorganisms of an infinite number is unknown, however it is certain that, without their metabolisms, there would be no biological life in the bio-sphere. It is known that some of them can metabolize CO2. The aerobic microbes need oxygen and liberate CO2. Some anaerobic species can produce, for example, methane. Or during the process of composting, the production of measurable quantity of heat can be observed. As to the members of plant-world, it is well known that they consume CO2 and produce oxygen during their vegetation period in accordance with light conditions. Also, they have an important role in the water circulation.

The Place of Our Earth in the Universe and Turning-Points in its Life

208

In the case of animals, exact comprehensive data are not known. It is evident that their species and demands determine their effects. For example, warm-blooded animals emit heat; in the gut of ruminant animals methane is produced. We do not deal here with the effects of industry, agriculture, transportation, other services, and households. Table 2 – Characteristic data Number of population in billions: 1850, 1.17; 1937, 2.1; 1950, 2.5; 1980, 4.4; 2014, ›7.5 CO2 in the atmosphere in ppm.: 1750, 250; 1957, 315; 1987, 350; 2015, ›400. The rise is global but faster in the northern hemisphere. Other gases (methane, CFC, N- and S-oxides, etc.) in the atmosphere: changing concentrations Average temperature of the earth: less than 2 centigrade higher than it was during 1910s. Melting of ice: It is global but more significant in the northern hemisphere. Size of forests in billion ha.: 1882, 5.5; 2005, 4.0 (the decrease is now 13 million ha./yr.) Raw materials and their quantities: -

coal in million t.: 1937, 1,280; 1958, 1,762; 1980, ›2,805; 2005, 5,878; 2014, 7,823 oil in million t.: 1937, 279.5; 1958, 809.8; 1980, 3,059; 2000, 3,590; 2014, 4117 gas in billion m3: 1935, 71; 1958, § 400; 1980, 1531; 2005, 2,778; 2014, 3479

The origin of total primary energy in 2010 according to the International Energy Agency: oil, 33%; coal, 27%; gas, 21%; water, 10%; atomic, 6%; wood, 2%; others except water and atomic, 1% Energy users in Hungary in 2010: households, 34.8%; transport, 25.9%; other services, 19%; industry, 17.3%; agriculture, 3% Notes to Table 2 It is necessary to mention that the values presented here are not the same in all publications! The present burning of oil, coal, and gas liberates

Ralovich Béla

209

the energy of the sun which had been accumulated by the living world millions of years earlier in its organic substances which were transformed into the raw materials inside the earth. Wood burning also releases the energy of the sun but that was fixed by the current plants. The burning of organic substances yields CO2. All (produced, liberated, and collected) energies except those which are used for work, burden the environment. In 2014, mankind used up the total yearly renewed resources by August 19th.

APPLIED SYSTEMIC APPROACH AND VISION FOR STRATEGIC BUSINESS CONSULTING ROK BUKOVSEK

Introduction In human nature, there seems to be a tendency to search for the answers to the questions we pose ourselves. It is also in one’s nature to find questions to the problems one sees or understands. With this toolkit, humankind can overcome its nature in an organized and systemic way. Humans are, however, practical beings, who make decisions that influence their future every day, especially in everyday business and work. There are several other fields where this is prominent, such as religion, culture, or sports. In this article, however, I would only like to show the connection between systemic science and business theory, between the ideas of complex adaptive systems and business systems. The method used can be described as an applied systemic approach for strategic business consulting. It is applied as it represents a concrete toolkit that can be used to analyze business factors, it is strategic as it can be used to give us a bigger picture of an analyzed subject, and it is intended for business as it can be used as a decision-making tool. With the advance in the development of the idea of complex systems, some scientists, such as S. A. Kauffman, started to anticipate the change in laws that govern our nature. The system of this kind of law was different from the basic laws of nature, i.e. the laws of physics. When trying to overcome the future by understanding its path, we must nevertheless first try to understand the world we live in. The idea of complex systems is present in contemporary scientific research. Its factors are, however, not entirely new to scientific research. When the reductionist approach of the seventeenth century had started to show its great impact, other ideas began to fade. And by the time the ESA sent the Rosetta orbiter into space, it was already 2004. The rockets overcame gravity and sent the orbiter into the soundless space. Ten years later, Rosetta intercepted the Churyumov– Gerasimenko comet some millions of kilometers from the Earth using only

Rok Bukovsek

211

Newton’s laws of physics. However, when our clocks synchronize with the GPS satellite in the Earth’s orbit, our position could not be clearly defined if we did not use specific laws of physics, i.e. Einstein’s laws of relativity and general relativity.

Complexity Our understanding of nature is ever-changing. What we know of nature and its factors changes every time we get the right answer to the question, every time we pose the right question arising from the problem that concerns us. The reductionist approach has been at the heart of mainstream science since the beginnings of the modern era. Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, and others found great solutions to the problems that were troubling them at that time. The laws of physics could describe nature in deterministic and probable ways. Every time an apple fell from the tree, and if you were to stand under it at that time, your head would hurt. The holistic approach made its way into contemporary science only in the twentieth century, when certain problems became particularly troublesome. Jules Henri Poincaré encountered some of these when trying to solve the equation of the three body problem. Finally, he discovered that it could not be solved. He determined this by approaching the problem with a holistic view, as in chaos theory. Similar methods were also used by Jacques Hadamard, John von Neumann, George David Birkhoff, and others. This field of research quickly spread to other branches especially because of the widespread use of computers. Interconnected fields started to arise, connecting hitherto unrelated scientific areas. The theory of complexity is now widely used in different scientific disciplines, such as biology, physics, artificial intelligence, computer sciences, and military development. Many previously separate parts of scientific research are being united into the so-called RING Singularity, i.e. robotics, informatics, nano-technologies, and genetics. The questions are now quite different from those asked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The world that Kant felt so apprised of is nowadays deeply connected with problems in the outer space, where different types of orbiters research planets and comets, and where a small probe from the Earth was able to catch a small satellite after it had been cruising in vast empty space for ten years. They are, however, also deeply linked to the problems of inner space, the quantum space, and the undefined space of micro particles. Complex systems can be identified with some basic and minor rules. These are as follows: simple behavioral rules generate complex behavior, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (the system has emergent properties

212

Applied Systemic Approach for Strategic Business Consulting

irreducible to separate components), and there is a circular cause and effect connection between the parts and the whole. With this set of rules, we can make a world of connections among the part, the system, and the whole. These rules then trigger causality, which can be described as upward and downward causality. Based on these steps, we can create or understand the complex world around us, i.e. the world of the twenty-first century.

Complex systems and economics The studies of dynamic systems composed of many interacting elements are a great advantage when entering the fields of economics and business, the fields of practical decisions – decisions that influence one’s past, present, future, and most of all, eternity. These studies are very handy due to several connecting points within them that have been identified through the idea of complex adaptive systems and can be applied to the practical world, i.e. the world of business. These connection are as follows: dynamism (both systems are thermodynamically open, non-linear, have a non-equilibrium state); work agents in both systems (they do not have optimal information on the communication with the outer world, their heuristic system for problems can fail); existence of networks (crucial for surpassing the lack of information, agents participate in overlapping networks); the presence of emergence (absence of higher-level modeling constructs, which simplifies the systems); and evolution works (process of differentiation, selection and amplification). The advantages of the applied complex approach can be viewed in two ways: with an organizational or an operational approach. By studying complex adaptive systems, it is possible to map them and use them in day-to-day business decisions. An organizational approach can help the management of a company to rethink its organization, to understand non-linear behavior and sensitivity to initial conditions, to understand that success is to improve under changing conditions rather to optimize under stable conditions, to see that group properties emerge from diverse individual interactions and continuous feedback from the global environment, and to have a buffer zone of excess resources to recover from shocks to the system. With an operational approach, the company can mathematically, by computer, simulate some of its deepest interconnected problems, such as logistics. Several types of approach exist: the agent-based model (ABM) that is efficient with natural systems; the multi-agent system (MAS) that has upper causal effects, such as autonomy, local view and decentralization,

Rok Bukovsek

213

and is needed for solving specific practice or engineering problems; the complex adaptive system (CAS) which is a self-similar collectivity of interacting adaptive agents, where agents and systems interact, and is best used for solving problems at the top level. The properties of complex adaptive systems are the following: their structure is complex, it is made of dynamic networks of interactions, with their relationship not being just a mere aggregation of individual static entities; strategies are adaptive, as individual and collective behavior can mutate and self-organize according to a change-initiating micro-event or a collection of events. Communication and cooperation/competition takes place at all levels, from agent to systemic level. Connecting complex adaptive systems with practical business systems has some advantages, such as: 1. aiming for improvement (for both, there is no optimal configuration); 2. the use of adaptation and evolution to produce new and innovative responses, to have non-linear responses, within which the same event triggers different responses regarding the agent; 3. non-equilibrium phases, within which innovations come along with routine work since there is always a possibility to explore; 4. changing strategies; 5. two-way connection (agents’ actions alter the system, and vice versa); 6. exploration of different approaches and exploitation of niches; 7. exponential growth occurs only after some time, since the initial impacts of a new species on the system are unknown at the beginning; 8. unpredictability (changes occur through internal and external interactions and selection, through properties that are not pre-specified in the system); and 9. the problem of choice or fitness landscape (there are many peaks or places, but when an agent chooses one peak, they cannot change their mind). Human complex adaptive systems are even more complicated since these are systems with a distinct identity, whose purposeful cognitive acts are guided by that identity. There are some factors of human complex adaptive systems, such as: 1. experimentation and recombination (reliance on experience: old ideas are not ‘dead,’ just waiting); 2. trade-off of productivity for resilience;

214

Applied Systemic Approach for Strategic Business Consulting

3. competition for niches and resources; 4. introduction of ‘heat’ into the environment (the Hawthorne effect); 5. sense of the environment (information gathering, processing, and exchange); 6. interactions with abutting and distant complex adaptive systems, where it is important to be aware when thinking outside familiar areas; and 7. productive use of feedback.

Complexity and business strategy The classical business strategy is a result of several decades of running business in the world. It started with the industrial revolution and the creation of mechanized procedures that required a different operational approach than before. The construction of factories, however, resulted in many new problems. In addition to the huge buildings, the overall maintenance, and the oversupply of workers, there are also the problems of logistics and brands. These need to be examined and run efficiently. Business strategy deals with this type of problem and introduces a brand new level – the level of management. As factories increased in number, managers continued to search for ways to improve productivity, lower costs, increase the quality of their products, improve employee/manager relationships, and increase efficiency. The focus shifted from using machines to increase productivity to finding new ways to increase employee productivity and efficiency. With this, they began to notice some new problems inside factory systems. Employees were dissatisfied with their current working conditions, and many lacked the necessary training for doing their work efficiently. Managers then began to formulate and test possible solutions, one of which was to find the best possible way for workers to perform and manage their tasks. The research resulted in the development of classical management theory, i.e. the so-called Taylorism. F.W. Taylor was an American mechanical engineer and one of the first management consultants. On the basis of his ideas, several different approaches have evolved over time. They all share some similar characteristics: mechanical approach, economies of scale, bottom-up flow of information, top-down flow of decisions, problem of distortion through different levels of the company and its derivation from the mechanical view of the world based on physics (predictability and mathematical precision, cause-effect). Taylor had a similar role to the role of Newton in physics. With the use of

Rok Bukovsek

215

a systemic approach based on complex theories we can, nonetheless, overcome some of the problems of the classical business strategy which has become somewhat obsolete in the twenty-first century. Adaptive business strategies are based on the complex view of the system. Interactions among agents in the local environment impact the global environment through the emergent properties. This is a collective, coherent and synchronized action. However, the opposite can also hold true: the global environment can change the local environment. Adaptive business strategy has its source in background practice, from which the company’s axioms emerge. These axioms are intuitive, culturally based practices that are available in the world we share. They are specific for each culture and are not universal. We have to use our reference framework to understand the effect of mixing different practices. The benefits of using a systemic approach in adaptive business strategy are as follows: coherence, flexibility, robustness (resistance to perturbations), increased flow of energy, and the transfer and processing of information. With a systemic approach, we can overcome the limits of the classical approach by finding the background practices and patterns, and understanding the limits of the analyzed branch, which can be done by using the following toolkit: edge of chaos, ceaseless creativity, pre-adaptations, and creative destruction. With a systemic approach, it is possible to identify and create new values, which creates a whole new line of businesses. A systemic approach, through its advantages, easily detects and integrates market potential, and connects it to new possibilities and new technologies. Furthermore, it identifies new values by connecting the vision with the existing markets. Understanding how organizations and firms adapt to their environment allows us to understand how they cope with the conditions of uncertainty. However, this will remain just a theory if the systemic approach is not used in firms and organizations as a decision-making tool. Just as Newton’s logic still rules over almost all the cosmos, so Taylorism has positive advantages in the world of organizations and business strategies. By using a systemic approach as a decision-making tool or a decision-making policy, we can overcome some of the problems of classical business strategy. When using a systemic approach such as this one, we need a vision and understanding of the business someone is working in and a deeper understanding of the system the business is in. Then we can use the applied systemic approach, but only as an aid to understanding, presentation, and decision-making. It should never get in the way of clear communication, the standard which must always be set by the reader and the user of the information, not its

216

Applied Systemic Approach for Strategic Business Consulting

producer. While the systems approach can provide many of the inputs needed in the forming of the right judgment, it offers no substitute for the capacity to make that judgment.

Applied systemic approach How can we use a systemic approach in strategic business consulting? When using a systemic approach, we need to apply it to different kinds of real problems and versions of reality. In addition, we have to distinguish between the terms systemic and systematic. Systematic can be identified as: 1. carrying out by using step-by-step procedures; 2. of or constituting a system (typically described as carefully planned processes that unfold gradually). The goal of a systematic approach is to identify the most efficient means to generate consistent, optimum results. On the other hand, the term systemic means system-wide or deeply engrained in the system. It usually describes habits or processes that are difficult to reverse because they are built into the system. And identifying those habits and procedures is critical for understanding the applied systemic approach. Furthermore, systemic thinking can be thought of as the opposite of analytic thinking. While systemic thinking concentrates on the interaction between elements, analytic thinking isolates the elements and concentrates on them. Some other oppositions are: studies of the effects of interactions vs. studies of the nature of interaction; global perception vs. detail and precision; modification of groups of variables simultaneously vs. modification of one variable at time; integration of duration of time and irreversibility vs. reversibility and independence from the duration of time; validation of facts through comparison of behavior with reality vs. validation of facts by experiments within theory; use of loose models vs. use of precise and detailed models; an efficient approach when interactions are nonlinear and strong vs. weak interactions; possession of the knowledge of goals with fuzzy details vs. possession of details with poorly defined goals; and a multidisciplinary approach vs. a discipline-oriented approach. So how can we tackle the applied systemic approach and what are some of the studies of this kind of approach? Studies of a systemic approach to business strategies have shown the following advantages: 1. breakthrough performance: rethinking and broadening the concept of what the company was capable of doing;

Rok Bukovsek

217

2. how a cognitive shift can alter background practices by recombining the existing building blocks into a new system, a new cognitive infrastructure; 3. project implementation: changing the models by which an organization’s acts create misunderstanding, inability to see the clear picture and alienation from the organization; 4. problem solving: focusing not on a single point of improvement in the system, but on a bigger picture; not competition, but cooperation among different companies aiming toward the same goal; 5. planning: the process itself will create greater awareness of the relationship between ideas and operations – instrumental (or strategic for the classical business strategy) vs. strategic (they emerge from and are embedded in a deeper understanding of the fundamentals); 6. acquisitions, mergers, and alliances: the common aim of drawing on the strengths and advantages of each party to create general success.

Possible strategies of the applied systemic approach When using the applied systemic approach, the following steps need to be taken: 1. identifying companies, organizations, branches, or industries as parts or a whole; questions: what are the agents and what is the system?; 2. realizing background practices in the market; questions: what are the corner stones of the existing practices, what are the pillars of the system?; 3. applying the systems-approach toolkit onto the target (company, branch, industry, etc.); questions: how are the agents and the system connected?; how does a new opinion on the agents/system emerge and how do the new properties of the agents/system emerge?; what are the consequences of this approach?; 4. revaluation of the problem; questions: how was the system transformed through the applied systemic approach?; what is the future of the target?; how was our opinion (the observer’s) changed by the process?

218

Applied Systemic Approach for Strategic Business Consulting

When applying the systemic approach to different subjects, it is possible to use case studies for the application of the toolkit. These will be in the form of different global systems for which this method works best. The automobile industry is one of the biggest industries in the world, and it was also one of the classical industries to have emerged from the industrial revolution. A man-made miracle in the shape of a car that realized the idea of traveling to places through the personalization of travel, as it enabled people to travel anywhere they wanted (not just the idea of faster travel, but also the idea of the possibility of traveling). The pillars of the automobile industry are as follows: driving system, road system, and backup service systems (car mechanics, gas stations, shops, hotels, etc.). The automobile society had to create new kinds of paths for the cars. More and more roads started to emerge throughout the landscape, some on the sites of older roads, others brand new. This caused the decline of old towns on old routes, and new towns, new local societies flourished. Mechanics and engineers created new ways to improve the way cars reacted, and to enhance their range and safety. But what awaits the system in the future? Lately, the pillars of the system have seen some very significant changes. The reform of the driving system will subsequently change the other two pillars. When trying to find new possible fuels, the industry has also started to change the road system by implementing new charging systems, and also service systems, as new types of mechanics and engineers will be necessary for car maintenance. These consequences are deeply connected with the future of the automobile industry. Until now it has been almost like the old days at Ford – no creative imagination, just a systematic and analytical approach to evolving the stated facts. However, with new types of energies to fuel the cars, by shifting from gasoline to electricity and from internal combustion to electric engines, a new creative and imaginative period will begin. I will now try to present a concise version of the case studies in the areas of communications and postal services. The pillars of the communication industry are the following: communication devices, personal device system (PDA), and entertainment device. The future of the industry can be identified as follows: changes in communication with the creation of social networks (dissolvement of time?), creation of new values and ideas, impact on the models of future development. The consequences that could follow are: 1. creation of the CPE (communication, PDA, entertainment) giants, since they make standards where there were none before (e.g. Windows, word processors, smart phones, etc.);

Rok Bukovsek

219

2. creating different business models (start-up companies etc.); 3. imitation as an evolutionary process (using start-up companies as pre-adaptations, the process of want-and-see-then-buy). The pillars of postal services are the following: information hub (letters, postcards, and commercial documents), transportation of goods to B2B and B2C; 4. communication channels for official and business needs (invoices, state reports, etc.). The future can be identified with the following: changes in the channels for transportation of information (World Wide Web), obsolete need for the transportation of goods with new technologies (3D or 4D printing), changes of communication channels for official and business needs (business operations over the Internet in the form of electronic invoices and state reports). The following consequences can occur: 1. shift from physical infrastructure to IT infrastructure; 2. mergers between IT infrastructure and communication giants; 3. creation of new values creates a new kind of business.

Conclusion In the ever-changing contemporary world, there is a big need for identifying and holding onto the perhaps unchangeable details of our world. The details which we can lean on, however, cannot be seen in the ‘old’ world. What then are the pillars of the new economic and business systems and what is its vision? Finding the answer to these two questions would be like winning the lottery. The following proposal slightly differs from the applied systemic approach and is useful only on some levels of thinking. There are a few key points that enable us to use the practical approach to systemic thinking. These are variety, density and interdependence. It is safe to say that these have become an important factor in our society. The increasing number of people living in this world creates more and more connections, but also enhances the number of possible connections. While living in the ‘old’ world, the information flow was restricted by space and time factors. With the new inventions considering space (cars) and ‘time’ (e-mails), the flow of information acts as a catalyzer to the system, to society. The old ideas are starting to merge, thus creating new kinds of ideas and branches. One of them is also the RING Singularity. The convergence of many previously separated parts of scientific research, which are now being united in the so-called RING Singularity – robotics, informatics, nanotechnologies, and genetics. The future is not characterized

220

Applied Systemic Approach for Strategic Business Consulting

by clinging to the ‘old’ traditions, but by finding traditions in the new world, traditions that will someday also be defined as ‘old.’

References Abell, B. 2002. Re-imagine your business for breakthrough results. Sunstone Press. Pitasi, A. Jan./Jun. 2013. A systemic sociological theorem of global evolution. Rev. Direito Econ. Socioambiental, Curitiba, v. 4, n. 1, p. 92-103. Kauffman, S.A. 2008. Reinventing the sacred. Basic Book

CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Appignanesi

University of Macerata, Italy

Ralovich Béla

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Rok Bukovsek

General Manager at Ota-S d.o.o. Slovenia

Edit Fabó

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

André Folloni

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil

Michelle Gironda Cabrera

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil

Gerard Jagers Op Akkerhuis

Wageningen University, Netherlands

Janos Korn

Business Systems Laboratory (BS-Lab)

Graziele Lautenschlaeger

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Pedro Miguel Mancha Romero

University of Cadiz, Spain

Giulia Mancini

G. d’Annunzio University, Italy

Andrea Pitasi

G. d’Annunzio University, Italy

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

University Niccolò Cusano, Italy

Alfredo L. Spilzinger

Lord of Brownsel, SFAI President

JiĜi Šubrt

Charles University, Czech Republic