ABSTRACT
I will begin with what seems to be the central proposition at stake: namely, that the form of the social is always and everywhere the product of “structure,” “culture,” and “agency” in relation with one another.1 Without being fussy about definitions for a moment, leave out “structure” and the contexts people confront become kaleidoscopically contingent;2 omit culture and no one has a repertoire of ideas for construing the situations in which they find themselves;3 without agency we lose activity-dependence as the efficient cause of there being any social order. Then either contingency or determinism would have a clear field-one cleared of social theorizing. Morphogenesis intensifies throughout modernity but, to become dominant,
requires positive feedback to be untrammelled in order to generate ever-accelerating social change. This latter state does not yet characterize the global social order. Nevertheless, the giant steps towards the social being regulated by positive feedback in the last two decades can be used to reframe the issue. That issue is as old as social theorizing: namely, “Where are we going?” It was the main preoccupation of the founding fathers, with their different answers: revolution, rationalization, or reintegration. Nevertheless “change,” “novelty,” and “variety” remain imprecise terms. It was
mainly the protagonists of (social) cybernetics who first sought to give any precision to the notion of “variety,” an absence lacking in Luhmann and his followers. Nevertheless, the usefulness of this “precision” was limited because cybernetics continued to bear the marks of its origins in information theory. The reservations that follow are intended as signposts to where reconceptualization is needed. Difficulties are rooted in the fact that most of the influential pioneers concerned
themselves with “variety” alone without giving significant attention to sociological questions about its distribution and diffusion: that is, to “social integration” as distinct from “system integration.”4 Systems theory in general has shown a marked tendency to neglect the conditions necessary for new forms of “social integration” and given almost exclusive attention to “variety” as the main or sole driver and characteristic of social transformation. Taken to its conclusion, preoccupation with increasing differentiation between people ends with “transactional individualism,” meaning that “singletons” transact their uniquely specific requirements directly with the system. Fundamentally, this is because the key concepts (borrowed from information theory) to capture morphogenesis5 are ones that privilege innovation to the detriment of what binds a social order together. Thus, it seems useful to pinpoint why the increase in “variety” has entirely
different connotations and denotations in succeeding generations of cybernetic systems theory. The brief discussion that follows is intended to show that the social sciences cannot simply borrow concepts, propositions, and theories to produce an instant “social cybernetics” or “sociology of complexity.” Interdisciplinarity can, at best, stimulate ideas. What it cannot and should not result in is a shuffling and shuttling of concepts between them that is damaging for both.
