Systems Sociology and Embodied Lifelines
Paul S. Chung. Dr. Habil.
Paradigm Shift and Sociology of Science
Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift implies a structure of scientific revolution from our current understanding of standard science to a new model in solving anomalies, challenging the existing scientific model. Epistemological rupture takes place in the entire constellation of beliefs, values, and techniques, as shared by the members of a given community.[1]
Such epistemological rupture heads toward a creative new synthesis, which can be seen as a flourishing project in dealing with sociology of science or scientific knowledge. A genealogy of paradigm allows us to bring social inquiry into the scientific field because its paradigm is conditioned within a social cultural milieu and driven by power relations. Scientific research programs are intertwined with the material reality, political governance, and legitimacy of scientific meta-discourse.
Therefore, the sociology of science or scientific knowledge is an endeavor to scrutinize a variety of scientific and social matters at the broad spectrum: the effects of scientific episteme and technology on social cultural life. In turn, sociological inquiry concerns the ways in which scientific ideas or its research programs are embedded within its political and economic contexts. An epistemic stance in sociological frame of reference dissects a particular type of social conditions of scientific discourse (privilege, authority, prestige), when it comes to analyzing the structure and functioning of scientific research programs.[2]
It is Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who initiates a paradigm turn to the systems sociology in terms of a biological notion of autopoiesis. The term autopoiesis is made up of Greek components: autos (self) and poiesis (poetry means making)—ultimately meaning the autonomy of self-organizing systems. A Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana and his pupil Francisco Valera coined the concept to explain how biological systems such as cells are a product of their own circular structures, taking on the concept of a circular reproduction of the cell.[3]
Luhmann appropriates the living system of self-organizing (autopoiesis) to conceptualize his systemic approach to sociology. The systems sociology remarks a paradigm shift from an anthropocentric model to a systems model of communication.
Systems Sociology and Autopoiesis
Luhmann utilizes the general framework as borrowed from the biological concept of self-organization in process and network. He appropriates Husserl’s phenomenology of sense, meaning, and horizon in the cybernetic framework. “The form in which consciousness executes its operations is called by Husserl (in connection to Brentano) intentionality.” “Intentionality is nothing but the positing of a difference.”[4] Intentionality is now the primal operation, and in its first step, a sense occurs, differentiating itself out of the horizon of an environment.
For instance, a ship is located within its horizon—but by moving, it realizes its function. The ship is not merely bound to its actual location, because its horizon is a horizon of possibilities. Sense making is the interplay between the actual and the possible within a horizon of the sea. Sense a la Husserl implies a unity of the difference between the actual and the possible.
Luhmann defines sense in terms of the distinction between self-reference and other-reference. Systems operate within the medium of sense and are distinguished between self-reference and other-reference. The actualization of self-reference (one subsystem) correlates with other-reference (other subsystem). Luhmann synthesizes a biological idea of autopoiesis with social systems, as coming to terms with the neuron phenomenology of self-organization according to autonomy and self-creation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela
Autopoiesis and Embodied Cognition
In fact, Varela addresses his neuron phenomenology of autopoiesis as an exemplar of the autonomy and creation of living systems to expand the unitary organization of life in the systemic way. The autopoietic theory provides a new approach to the biology of cognition, bringing it to phenomenology of perception (M. Merleau-Ponty).
If I express the autopoietic principle according to Ponty, the body is articulated as the site of cognition and experience as embodied within the life-world. Therefore, “all the living relationships of experience,” are brought back, “as a fisherman’s net drawn up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed.”[5] “To return to the things themselves is to return to the world which precedes knowledge, of which the knowledge always speaks… [a human being] is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”[6]
For Valera the organism and its space-time horizon occupy the center-stage of human cognition embodied within the life-world, in which right action or ethical praxis a la Aristotle comes to the fore. This refers to embodied cognitive science, which integrates life with cognition embodied in the entire situatedness of an organism, within its life-world. The significance of organisms or social agency is seen as integrated units and beings, which are grounded within a tremendous network of historical, social, environmental relationships.
This epistemic stance rediscovers the essential organism-centered view of life, which is consonant with Steven Rose's critical theory of lifelines. Valera’s cognitive science is expressed with an organism-centered view of life, which is opposed to the selfish gene or genetically determined understanding of life.[7]
The organismic approach facilitates a biological understanding of evolution, cognition and embodiment, focusing on the implication of autopoiesis for the operation of the nervous system in cognition in reference to human praxis. It deconstructs a traditional notion that the nervous system encodes the external environment in an internal mode of representation. The mode of representation is inclined to bring the organism into an optimal adaptation to the environment out there.
By contrast, Valera considers the nervous system to be a unitary recursive network, as situated within an autonomous (self-governing or “homeodynamic”) organism; it is engaged in a constant flow of action, which is embedded in its surrounding.
Systemic cognition is to bring forth meaning in ontogenetic and phylogenetic lifelines. For example, colors do not exist out there, waiting for it to be represented internally. Instead, they are brought forth and embodied in a situated ecological life-world, which is perceptually guided by body and action. Valera’s cognitive science has little to with the adaptationist and representationist stance on life and cognition.
Valera’s position is known as an enactive approach in bringing together the mind/body, or body/ environment; it accentuates a dynamic relationship between the purposeful actions of agency and the environment for creating a common social world.[8] Life-world is brought forth in terms of an agency’s dynamic interaction with the environment. Husserl’s notion of life-world comes to terms with the web of life in an ecological theatre.
Indeed, a systems thinking comes to terms with ecology as the study of household (oikos) interlinked to all members of the Earth. It is the science of dealing with relations between the organism and the surrounding world, featuring the ecosystem in network. In an ecological theatre there are communities of animals and plants interacting with their physical environment, bringing forth a new oikos as an ecological unit. A science of ecology enriches a systems thinking in terms of community, pattern of network, and complexity of functioning.[9]
In the philosophy of Aristotle, oikos implies everybody living in a given house, which is regulated by economic systems of oikonomia in contradiction to accumulating economy (chrematistike; the rules of money-making),[10] in which exchange and circulation of money is central as the source of riches.
In Aristotle’s idea of ethical praxis there is synthesis of oikos with oikonomia, which reinvigorates an ecological way of thinking in terms of justice for the common good. Human praxis is an action that includes its purpose in the process of self-realization (entelechy) in the life of the polis. Poiesis implies something that produces something as its product (oikos construction).
Thus, Maturana and Valera seek the bridge between the two concepts through the combination of autopoiesis, which means autonomy and creativity in construction of oikos. Moreover, Francisco Varela gives account of the concept of autopoiesis, not merely at the biological level. The broader concept of organization finds its defining role in comprehending diverse realities of social systems.[11] He accentuates the aspect of praxis with prudence (phronesis), so that right action is embodied, coming to terms with Buddhist meditation.
[1] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 175.
[2] Bourdieu, “The specificity of the scientific field and the social conditions of the progress of reason,” Social Science Information 14 (6), 19-47.
[3] Maturana, “Autopoiesis.” In Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organizations, 21-32.
[4] Ibid., 31.
[5] Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, XV.
[6] Ibid., ix. xi.
[7] “An Interview with Francisco Varela,” Wild Duck Review, 2000.
[8] Thompson and Varela, “Autopoiesis and Lifelines,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1999) 22, 909.
[9] Patten, “Network Ecology”, in Higashi and Burns, Theoretical Studies of Ecosystems.
[10] Aristotle, Politics, I, 11, 1258b, 33–34.
[11] Varela, “Describing the Logic of the Living,” in Autopoiesis, 36-48.