This was the eighth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my class Communication and Culture from 1997 to 2007. It was cut out for the 2009 version of the class.

Required Reading:

recommended:

Transition notes
Note the theoretical progression over the past few weeks from
  1. the observation (intuition) of a pattern (gestalt, system): Benedict

    TO

  2. the identification of the systematic (synchronic) features of the gestalt: Saussure

    TO

  3. the complexities of the factors and functions (Jakobson and Hymes) that can be made part of the pattern and influence how it is actualized or experienced

We are now moving to an investigation of the processes that might account for the systematization (structuration?) of elements (borrowed items out of diffusion and "new" items out of social evolution).

How to make things happen with, within, against,
a (poetic) (live) (unpredictable) polity ("community") :
a matter of ongoing structuring producing temporaty (synchronic) orderings:
in other words, (not homeostatic, diachronically, evolving) SYSTEMS

Starting in the 1940s, and from many disciplines, has emerged a concern with non-linear interactions, that is interactions that make new conditions for future interactions, that is interactions that cannot be reproduced by the application of the rules that appear to have led to the initial conditions. This concern led to what was first known as "systems theory" and may now be known as "chaos theory" or "complexity theory."

I approach these theories as a focused explorations of G.H. Mead intuitions about human communication being best understood as a "conversation of gestures" in which two (at least) persons (or, best, personae) enter in contact, establish a channel, etc. (see Jacobson), and discover that they must take the "other" (the "third") into account in the shaping of their own "next" messages.

In the background, and for our purposes, is a critique of one of the most common sense theory of communication and one of its major consequences:

  1. that communication has to do with the transfer of bits of information from one person to the next (and thus with articulation, coding, and reception), and
  2. that, if we understand the conditions (context, intention, code, etc.) we can predict (or "explain") what is communicated and thereby tinker with these conditions to attain a state of unhindered transfer of information

Communication, from my point of view, has to do with getting people to act together (cum-unique-action). Transferring information is less central than getting the miscellaneous units of some potential group to do something uniquely appropriate to the moment to happen.  In this context the issue for a speaker is not simply to transfer "meaning." It is to convince someone else to do something. The issue, from a research perspective is figuring out what is involved and what can happen (It is not to figure out what are the independent variables and what will happen when these are manipulated.

Historically:

  1. the need to design machines that change concurrently with changes in what they are targeting. From:
    1. Ballistic guidance (only possible at the moment of lauch); e.g. canon shells. TO
    2. self-correcting guidance; e.g. "smart bombs": the need for mechanisms to
      1. sense the other
      2. change one's own behavior
  2. Bateson once analogized the difference as that between kicking a stone (that will move ballistically) and kicking a dog that will move not only ballistically but in other ways, using his own energy to add a more complex form of response (from fleeing to turning around and biting)
  3. Technically, the question is one of "teleology" (purpose)--change to change. This is not so much a matter of
    1. identifying the "goal" (what could the "goal" of a machine be?)

      as of

    2. understanding the mechanisms involved in making machines that
      1. adapt
      2. change
      3. learn

      in reaction to other machines as they themselves

      1. adapt
      2. change
      3. learn
    3. Mathematical explorations of these matters include such matters as
      1. "Cellular automata."
      2. complexity theory and
        1. models of how flocks of birds fly could this model children playing in a couryard? in a classroom?

          pigeons on a ledge

        2. another example of this for modeling musical improvisation by Tim Blackwell (2002): (you may want to check first the summary of this research written for a popular audience)
    4. And returning to human beings organizing each other:
      1. Garfinkel on traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. Note that this is partially modeled by Craig Reynolds as "Crowd path following" (He also modeled queueing behavior, another of Garfinkel's recent interest, as "queuing".
  4. System theory should thus not be approached as
    1. a theory of homeostasis in circular system (with the thermostat as basic analogy)

      but rather as

    2. a theory of evolution in history
      1. A <---> B

        but

      2. A1 ----> B1
        |
        V
        A2 ----> B2
    3. A theory of local interactional uncertainty within reconstructed constraints: e.g. "negotiating pain" during hospital labor
Some questions
(in the context of this course)
  • In what way can one say that a classroom is (not) a system?
  • How might G.H. Mead's discussion of the conversation of gesture be related to our discussion of systems?
  • What does the analogy of a man kicking a dog stress in our understanding of systematicity in interaction?