Complexity Theories, Social Theory, And the Question of Social Complexity

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2001 31: 323Philosophy of the Social SciencesPeter Stewart

Complexity Theories, Social Theory, and the Question of Social Complexity

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PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2001Stewart / THE QUESTION OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

Complexity Theories, Social Theory, andthe Question of Social Complexity

PETER STEWARTUniversity of South Africa

In this article, the author argues that complexity theories have limited use inthe study of society, and that social processes are too complex and particular tobe rigorously modeled in complexity terms. Theories of social complexity areshown to be inadequately developed, and typical weaknesses in the literatureon social complexity are discussed. Two stronger analyses, of Luhmann and ofHarvey and Reed, are also critically considered. New considerations regardingsocial complexity are advanced, on the lines that simplicity, complexity that canbe modeled, and incondensible complexity permeate society simultaneously.The difficulty of establishing complexity models for processes involving ongo-ing interpretation is discussed. It is argued that the notions of system and envi-ronment need recasting in social studies. Existing social studies and literature, itis argued, reflect a polymorphous, contextual, contingent, labyrinthine, dra-matic and political face to social complexity. Students of social complexity mustbe literate in such studies.

Society is highly complex in certain respects. Why is it, then, thatviews of society through the lens of complexity theory seem to missout on much of the complexity, opacity, and particularity of social pro-cesses? I must confess to a sense of wonder at the freshness and per-suasiveness of the historical and myriad approach to the naturalworld, which is embodied in the attempt to form new “sciences ofcomplexity.” It is a new rationality that preserves many unknowns; itsmathematics suggests great openness in historical material process.Yet my wonder is not evoked by complexity theories applied to thesocial world.

323

Received 30 June 1999

I would like to thank the University of South Africa for a sabbatical grant, whichassisted this project, and the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University ofCambridge for hosting me as a visiting scholar in the middle of 1998, which enabled meto pursue aspects of the project.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 31 No. 3, September 2001 323-360© 2001 Sage Publications



Furthermore, the attempts, serving a variety of interests, todevelop theories of the social by now form a huge, partly complemen-tary, partly contradictory heterogeneous field (for overviews, seeTurner 1996; Craib 1992; Swingewood 1984; Abraham 1977). Throughwhich gateways do complexity theories enter this teeming citadel?

While I will use the terms complexity theory and complexity theories inthis article, some authors (e.g., Baker 1993; Kiel and Elliott 1996; Eve,Horsfall, and Lee 1997, foreword) prefer chaos theory as the umbrellaterm to describe all nonlinear phenomena. However, chaos theoryrefers to processes that are describable by algebraic formulas (seeCilliers 1998, ix). Certainly determinate chaos (not to mention deter-minate linearity!) is a recurrent part of complex processes, but mathe-matical determinism is meaningless with regard to many biological,ecological, and social processes, in my opinion (see also Casti [1993]on this issue; Katz’s [1989] notion of “incondensable complexity” isalso relevant here). It seems to me that the main danger of the con-cept “complexity theory” is that its users are often preoccupied withsystemicity and an organismic model, and the phenomenon of emer-gence. However, using the resource of algorithmic complexity, com-plexity may be viewed without the assumption that it all fits andfunctions together. Theories of nonlinearity would also be an acceptablegeneral term, in my judgment.

To explore this topic, this article first considers some definitions ofcomplexity, which are shown to reflect different concerns. It is arguedthat definitions of social complexity are inadequate, but also that the-ories of complexity, including social complexity, are here to stay. Thensome limitations that recur in the literature on social complexity areexamined, and two stronger expositions of dissipative approaches tosociety are considered. This is followed by an attempt to more ade-quately outline the particular nature of social complexity by suggest-ing some principles for the study of social complexity and outliningsome social thought that has bearing on considerations of complexity.

WHAT IS COMPLEXITY?

The nature of complexity, and especially social complexity, is stillvery open to debate and further research.

Complexity is a matter of perspective or framing (which in our caserelates to human intention and interests), level of detail (fine or coarsegraining), and the result of perceiving through observation. A small

324 PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES / September 2001



stone could be described as a highly complex quantum entity, but itmay be simple in terms of its relative chemical inertness on a villagepath. This echoes Casti’s (1994, 276-77) argument, in which he arguedthat a systematic theory of complexity would have to proceedthrough a theory of models, relating observer to observed. An ana-lytic perspective may frame things to reveal or discount certaindetails, types of information, and kinds of complexity. Among thosecommitted to the scientific enterprise of making abstract models of“configurations of real world items,” the choice of items to pattern issomewhat arbitrary and “probably a mixture of intuition, insight, his-torical accident, cultural structure, and even the intrinsic nature of thehuman nervous system” (Katz 1986, 2). More broadly, there are waysof perceiving the world that do not predominantly involve the laborof rationality, observation, and abstraction. For example, aestheticappreciation involves other factors, as are perceptions structured bythe illogic of emotional life. In addition to perceptions influenced ordominated by the unconscious, perceptions in daily life utilize social-ized preconscious schemata (Bourdieu’s habitus) and at times an intu-itive intellect, “that simple vision to which truth offers itself like alandscape” (Pieper 1963, 26). For Ricoeur (cf. 1974, 1986) objecti-fication is a valid but limited mode of understanding, which takes itsplace as a moment in the imperatives of human becoming and theactive encounter with possibility.

Once we have a perspective able and willing to see complexity,there are differing definitions of, and approaches to, complexity. Thiswould seem to relate to the fact that there are a variety of disciplinaryapproaches involved (particularly mathematical, systems-theoretical,cybernetic, and biological), and a variety of problems are beingaddressed. Aided with computers and new theories, there areattempts to model the origins of life, to model afresh the mechanismsof evolution, and to map the workings of the human brain. A relatedproblem is working out how complex “dissipative,” “autocatalytic,”“self-organizing,” or “self-steering” entities, including social agents,solve complicated problems. A further problem is that of experiencedincreases in operational complexity—and attendant problems—inmodern, technological, mass society (for example, Zolo 1992;Dobuzinskis 1992). And the very issue of transposing mathematicaland biological models to society and testing nonlinear mathematicaland systems models against various institutions and social processesis itself a problem that will lead to redefinitions of complexity.

Stewart / THE QUESTION OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY 325



Katz (1986, 1) suggested that “irreducible heterogeneity is tanta-mount to complexity.” Formal definitions of complexity fit into twomain groups: definitions of algorithmic complexity, deriving largelyfrom computer mathematics; and organizational complexity, deriv-ing from the new biology and a revivified systems theory.

The first type of definition relates to issues of calculability andreproducibility and fabrication. Cohen and Stewart (1995, 20) pro-vided a simple version of algorithmic definitions: “We may tenta-tively define the complexity of a system as the quantity of informationneeded to describe it.”

A related definition—in the language of pattern theory—statesthat “the complexity of a pattern is the size of the minimal precursorpattern—the minimal templet—necessary for its construction” (Katz1986, 76). Katz, with his development of the notion of templets (i.e.,specific programs of fabrication) of both biological and random pat-terns, and Küppers, with his explication of the concept of boundaryconditions, advanced the debate on complexity by demonstrating thenecessity for explanations of phenomena in which “an a priori inde-terminable number of microstates is narrowed down to a few biologi-cally relevant ones” (Küppers 1995, 105) and in which “ephemeraltemplets” without long-term coherence create random phenomena(Katz 1986, 121). In these cases, no general explanations, formulae, orequations can adequately describe the relevant process; explanationmust have recourse to the specific causative configuration (such as aparticular arrangement of DNA or the particular circumstances thatcaused a traffic accident), which must in turn be largely explainedthrough their unique history and evolution. Through these uniqueand specific histories, these processes select a course throughunimaginably large sequence spaces. Küppers (1995, 98) mentionedthe figure of 102,400,000 microstates in sequence space for the bacterialgenome. More modestly, Kauffman (1995, 106) estimated that “thestate space of the human genomic regulatory system is at least 2100,000

or 1030,000.” Comparing these vast numbers to the estimated number ofparticles in the universe—about 1081, or the less than 1018 seconds inthe estimated history of the universe thus far (Poundstone 1987, 100-101), we get an index of the importance of the history and the uniquestructure (the templets or boundary conditions) of particular DNAconfigurations. It also indicates the importance of structures and pro-cesses that produce order within these huge sequence spaces. Fromthis perspective, the explanation of particular physical phenomenarequires closing in on “local knowledge” and broader particular




knowledge of structural, systemic, and environmental histories andknowledge of the extent of information and means of interpretation.

The second type of definition relates to organizational transitionsand emergence of new causative parameters. This latter perspectiverelates to surprising behavior (Nicolis and Prigogine 1989, 8) and itsanalysis. Coveney and Highfield (1995, 6) also gave an emergent defi-nition: “Within science . . . complexity is the study of the behaviour ofmacroscopic collections of (basic but interacting units) that areendowed with the potential to evolve.” This approach explores com-plexity primarily through the notion of the progressive emergence offar-from-equilibrium dissipative, autopoietic, or self-steering sys-tems in evolutionary space. Increasing complexity is displayed inmore complex self-steering forms and in ecosystemic environments(and their logical analogues), which increase in complexity as theircomponent systems coevolve (cf. Kaufmann 1993, 1995).

There have been inadequate efforts to clarify what type of com-plexity, or what types of complexities, occur at the social level. How-ever, there have been many attempts. For example, La Porte (1975, 6)argued that “the degree of complexity in organized social sys-tems . . . is a function of the number of system components . . . , the rela-tive differentiation or variety of these components . . . , and the degreeof interdependence among these components.” To this line of argu-ment, Zolo (1992, 3-4) added the dimensions of “instability or turbu-lence of the environment and . . . the tendency of its variables tochange along swift or unpredictable trajectories” and “the state ofcognitive circularity reached by agents who become aware of the highlevel of the complexity in their own environment.”

From the perspective of one humanities discipline, Sambrook andWhiten (1997) argued that (at least for the behavioral and cognitivesciences) organizational complexity is often more relevant than algo-rithmic complexity because the latter views random events as highlycomplex. They argued that the number of levels of organization in asystem (for instance, the number of hidden layers in a neural net orthe number of levels of reciprocal anticipation in one animal’s strat-egy toward another) is a truer reflection of complexity. “It is this deep,rather than broad, form of complexity in problem solving that meritsthe greatest attention” (p. 204). Similarly, Khalil (1995, 430) arguedthat while some social phenomena—such as mob behavior—can beanalyzed through models of nonlinear dynamics such as chaos andcatastrophe theories and dissipative structures, “the development ofinstitutions and the organization of labor resemble the evolution of




species and biological organization, rather than the discontinuity ofecosystems or chaotic structures.”

Luhmann, while using criteria such as differentiation and unpre-dictability in his descriptions of complexity, also used complexity inan existential way: complexity is a problem, and people need to be“shielded from the immense complexity and contingency of all thethings which could be deemed possible” (1986, 16). Luhmann distin-guished this immense complexity of the world from a lesser butincreasingly problematic complexity produced by social systems andtheir interrelations; it is this latter complexity that Luhmann wroteabout, with a pronounced organismic characterization of this socialsystem (see, for example, his Ecological communication [1989]).

Casti (1994) believed that an integrated science of complexity issome way away and would depend on taking complexity debatesbeyond ordinary language and formalizing the “symbols and syntax”of an appropriate logical system that is also responsive to the subjec-tive nature of complexity. This in turn would depend on “a muchmore ambitious program of creating a theory of models” (pp. 277-78).However, it seems that Casti was referring to the subjectivity of per-spective and scale rather than to the subjectivity of mode of percep-tion, symbolic representation, and partisan interests, which might bemore difficult to incorporate into a formal system.

There would seem to be a need for openness, clarity, and furtherwork, as regards a definition of complexity, and doubly so when itcomes to social complexity. For example, as I argue below, many arehighly skeptical as to the usefulness of portraying society as a wholeas a self-regulating system; yet many definitions of complexity aregeared only to considering single self-regulating systems.

COMPLEXITY THEORIES ARE HERE TO STAY

The whole area of determinate chaos, general nonlinearity, and theemergence of order through organizational complexity is a veryrefreshing and suggestive development within the natural sciences,and this development engenders far-reaching debates in many areasof knowledge. The province of natural science has been extended:“Theories of chaotic and complex systems have made it clear, evenmore than before, that a naturalistic explanation may be available,even in the absence of predictability” (Drees 1995, 223). By virtue ofthe new domain of objects open to research (namely, artificial net-




works simulating intelligence and the evolutionary emergence oforder, natural systems displaying order, and empirical nonlinear out-comes suggesting either determinate chaos or simply deviation from alinear model), and by virtue of the availability of new tools—primarilythe computer and specific software programs—this broad field ofresearch is destined to continue and grow. Particularly because of therelevance of “evolving” neural nets and genetic algorithms to theadvance of artificial intelligence (AI), and the relevance of this toincreasingly dominant informational capital, investment in somecomplexity research is assured. In a variety of other disciplinary con-texts, too, aspects of these new theories are being used to good effect.For example, in the area of environmental studies, especially globalenvironmental studies, systems models and models of self-regulationare proving fruitful (Odum 1993; Rambler, Margulis, and Fester 1989).Authors such as MacNeill, Winsemius, and Yakushiji (1991) andNorgaard (1994) endeavor to show how the world’s economy andecology act as a single far-from-equilibrium system. Futures researchhas also made use of the debates over complex systems.

The enthusiasm for complexity theory has led to new sub-disciplines and to a large academic and popular literature.1 Popularaccounts—and reputable scientists’ accounts—of complexity theoryhave often provided confident but avowedly speculative models ofhow these new perspectives in mathematics and systems theorymight apply to society.2 There also have been an increasing number ofattempts to use the concepts—and sometimes the cosmology—ofcomplexity theories for social analysis.3 There are studies of morequantifiable phenomena such as patterns of voting, purchasingbehavior, pavement avoidance strategies, and club membership. Par-adoxically, these investigations are rather simple processes with a bitof a twist; they involve fairly easy questions of quantification; theyrelate to rule-bound behavior and situations with low levels of per-sonal interaction. There have also been studies of more general pro-cesses, such as arms races, regime collapses, children’s friendships,and “self-organizing cities” (Portugali 1997; Kiel and Elliot 1996; Eve,Horsfall, and Lee 1997).

THE HORIZONS OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY THEORY

I would like to focus on four weaknesses that recur in the literature.First, there are those who attempt to use complexity theory in alliance




with systems theory as a general and dominant metatheory for thesocial sciences. Second, the myth that all or most social processes canusefully be quantified in mathematical terms persists. Third, themetabiological, organicist (and organismic) model of social systems isoften used uncritically. Last, theories of social complexity areparented by a limited range of social philosophies that are each sub-ject to ongoing social debate.

Complexity As Metatheory

Some writers attempt to use the discourse of complexity theory as asocial science metatheory, often coupled with a rhetoric of a “new par-adigm.” This is most explicit in the popular literature (for example,the work of Capra), but it is also current in the academic literature.Turner (1997, xxvii) claimed,

Social science . . . has until now been forced to use logical and mathe-matical instruments originally designed to deal with much simpler sys-tems . . . . But the essays in this book are the first fruits of an approachthat is as appropriate to social science as calculus is to the study ofmotion, or as non-Euclidian geometry was to relativistic physics.

Kenyon De Greene (1996, 273-74) argued heatedly against socialapproaches “developed during simpler times” and argued for “theirreplacement by paradigms which are better suited to the evolutionarysituation.” “If these theories act as perturbations and fluctuations,driving a restructure of social science, and if they help to generate newparadigm thinking, then the future can indeed be promising” (p. 292).

It is my contention that, in many cases, the use of complexity the-ory as a paradigmatic horizon has led to a reductionism in social stud-ies and, furthermore, that this reductionism relates to lack of expertisein the field they are entering. This reductionism is not because humansociety does not display innumerable signs of nonlinearity, high com-plexity, emergence, and autopoietic systems: it does. The reduction-ism is because we already know quite a lot about the autopoietic sys-tem known as a woman or man—and we know immediately that the“nature” of this system involves knowns and unknowns of history,language, family, personality, ideology, and education; and we knowthat there may be factors that cannot be identified in advance.

Complexity theories have developed mainly within specific natu-ral science fields. There is an innate (though not necessarily infertile)reductionism—and sometimes clumsiness—in bringing the method-




ologies and models from one discipline or skill into another, if this isnot done in dialogue and interaction with the existing disciplinarydebate. To take one example, in a “seminal . . . brilliant” essay (accord-ing to Francis 1993), Baker (1993) endeavored to delineate an “attrac-tor” for the social world that would explain chaos and order in society.In a discourse that portrays itself as anti-Newtonian yet scientific, andwhich is colored with naturalist images such as the Mandelbrot setand gypsy moths, Baker advanced the idea that

in the coming and going of . . . social relationships, an attractor isdiscernable that emerges repeatedly, as in the Mandelbrot set. Thisdynamic phenomenon creates the turbulence and recreates the order insocial life, and its pattern is redolent of autopoesis [sic] and dissipation. Itis that of centre-periphery . . . . Individuals, families, communities, vil-lages, companies and societies attempt to center their world and con-trol the flow of energy and information through it. . . . The centre has anentropic effect on the periphery, causing increased randomness andincreasing amounts of unusable resources. (Pp. 135-36, 139)

This is an interesting if speculative idea, which clearly relates tosociological debates about power; Baker (1993) did not take up thesedebates. Instead, he related it both to dependency theorists’ accountsof center and periphery in the world’s political economy and to theideas of some anthropologists on the nature of human action and per-ception. However, in discussing dependency theory, Baker stayedwith those theorists of the 1970s and 1980s who confirmed his viewswithout recognizing the subsequent debate around dependency the-ory and the eventual unviability of dependency theory in its classicform—the form he drew on.4 Similarly, Baker used a couple of anthro-pological sources to justify sweeping statements about human actionand interpretation. As with the issue of dependency theory, Bakerused reputable sources (George Herbert Mead and Berger andLuckmann, for example) but, again, these theorists represent one cor-ner of the debate. Bourdieu’s account of the constraints imposed byhabitus, for example, gave a significantly less volitionary picture ofhuman action and symbolization from that of Berger and Luckmann.5

At another level, human action no longer can be explained withoutrecourse to the psychoanalytical debate—a debate that is extremelywide. In Freud and Beyond, Mitchell and Black (1995) traced the hugearray of strands of psychoanalytic thought in the Freudian traditionalone. What psychological theory should accompany social analysis?Should it be the avant-garde psychoanalysis of Lacan or more clini-




cally pragmatic approaches such as the recent work of André Green(e.g., Green 1986) and the object relations school? My point is simplythis: without recourse to the specificities of the relevant social fields,and without engagement in the full debates concerning the fields, atheorist is in a weak position to make major generalizations. The con-cepts and the poetic imaginary of complexity theories may indeed attimes throw light on social process; however, whether Baker’s notionof “center-periphery” unveils a universal social attractor must bedetermined by social debates and research rather than by complexitymetatheory.

Reality Is Mathematical

“Reality is mathematical,” averred Aulin (1989, 313). “Complexitymay be defined as a set of deterministic theories that do not necessar-ily lead to long-term prediction” (Saperstein 1997, 105). This mathe-matical horizon, if rigidly maintained in the social field, leads to a pos-itivism of numerical and spatial relationships.

One version of the exaggeration of the significance of social phe-nomena that are best described through mathematics is demon-strated contained in some cruder exponents of chaos theory. A num-ber of theorists, dominated by the image of chaotic processes,wrongly infer that the unpredictability of real-world events is pre-dominantly due to processes of deterministic chaos entering intodeterministic systems due to “small random disturbances from out-side the model in question” (Saperstein 1997, 121). Chaotic processesin practice may be unpredictable, and it is often impractical to give amathematical account of the result of a combination of chaotic pro-cesses. But the world may be unpredictable and difficult to accountfor mathematically for other reasons.

Social contexts have particular physical histories, environmentalhistories, and human histories, which together produce a unique setof boundary conditions in each context; add to this the boundary con-ditions created by actual people attempting to act reflexively onaspects of the context. The heterogeneous set of boundary conditionsshaping real-world contexts is best described through codes or dis-courses that are able to retrieve aspects of these contextual histories or,to state it differently, that are able to retrieve the templets of theboundary conditions themselves. Eve (1997, 274-75) used the analogyof a car with chaotic physical processes being controlled by a sentient




driver to hypothesize that “most of the structure in society representshuman attempts to monitor deviations and minimize chaotic out-comes.” However, many factors concerning neither chaotic outcomesof given systems nor reflexive control of these chaotic outcomes willaffect the progress of a car. Its safety may be enhanced by the historicalphenomena of solar radiation and gravity. The Toyota templet and thesystem of roads and road signs as used on the journey will have mate-rial effects. The phone call giving an address received before settingout might be best represented through speech analysis, the psychol-ogy of sexual fantasy, and a city map. The drunk driver approaching isalso sentient in a fashion, but the outcome of his approach—largelydetermined by the driver’s steering and acceleration—will have con-tingent effects that may be more influential than chaotic processes.

Chaos theory also relies on variables that are determinate and rig-orously definable in relation to each other. How can this deal withphenomena such as the equipment for a children’s game, or thegrowth of middle-class narcissism—phenomena that take formwithin linguistic fields, emotional imaginaries, academic debates,and the ebb and flow of social struggle? While chaos theory can indi-cate the route to postpositivism, it is of little use among phenomenathat are symbolically constituted.

Social Systemicity

Theories of complex systems, while thriving on many-leveleddiversity, have a great weakness when applied to society, insofar asthe society as a whole is regarded as a complex system with its ownautopoietic strategy and exerting downward causation. This systemicconception of society has a history in sociological thought, a historythat reached a culmination in the later Parson’s functionalism (seeSwingewood 1984, 236 ff.; also Parsons 1977, 177-203). Yet this con-ception is greatly contested. While Parsonian functionalism stillenjoys some support, for example in the work of Luhmann and alsoamong those allied to neofunctionalism (see Alexander 1985, 1995;Münch and Smelser 1987), the criticism of the idea of an overall,coherent social system is strong. Giddens, for example, used the termsocial system in a more dispersed manner: some societies may be moresystematic than others; there are intersocietal systems; and we mustdrop the biological and physical images of system (1984, 163 ff.).Bourdieu said his notion of a field




excludes functionalism and organicism: the products of a given fieldmay be systematic without being the products of a system, and espe-cially of a system characterized by common functions, internal cohe-sion, and self-regulation—so many postulates of systems theory thatmust be rejected. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 103).

Lyotard (1984, 12) believed that the idea of society as a “unified total-ity” is a case of “what Horkheimer called the ‘paranoia’ of reason.” Yetmore polemically, Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 111) argued that “ ‘Soci-ety’ is not a valid object of discourse. There is no underlying principlefixing—and hence constituting—the whole field of differences.” Byvirtue of their organicist ideas, a large proportion of writers on socialcomplexity take what can be regarded as a weak position in social the-ory. This, however, does not deny the validity of investigating whetherparticular social systems are genuinely self-regulating.

Horizons of Social ComplexityTheory within Social Philosophy

The bulk of writing on social complexity is decidedly limited in itsrelation to socially relevant philosophical traditions such as phenom-enology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and modernist retrieval oflived experience in a devastated world (cf. Taylor 1989, 456 ff.).

As complexity approaches enter social debates, they have alliedthemselves with a variety of cultural positions (New Age discourse,managerial strategy) philosophical positions (realism, Marxism,antipositivism, poststructuralism), sociological theories (systems the-ories, evolutionary approaches), religious traditions (primarily East-ern and mystical traditions), and political positions (democracy, envi-ronmentalism, and Machiavellianism). At the same time, interestswithin these social fields have incorporated aspects of the new theo-ries as tools of their own strategies.

However, exponents of complexity theories have predomi-nantly identified themselves with a narrower grouping of philo-sophical approaches. Taken together as a single grouping, writingson complexity theory sit unsteadily astride two traditionallyantagonistic philosophic traditions: instrumentalism and enlighten-ment naturalism.6 On both counts, however, complexity theory is achild of the enlightenment and carries with it some of the baggage of“Westerncentrism.”7

At the same time, at a less theorized level, many proponents ofcomplexity theory seem to be using complexity theory as a weapon




against positivism and instrumentalism in social science. In orthodoxstatistical approaches—still strong in the United States—complexityis acceptably hidden in less-than-perfect correlations and thelogocentrism8 and nominalism of the categories employed. Much ofthe interest in complexity theory in the social sciences is in reaction tothese approaches. For people reacting in this way, complexity theoryis a sword for dealing with conventional statistics, behaviorism, andthe culture of “Newtonianism” and, instead, acknowledging unpre-dictability and the contingency of analysis and decisions(Dobuzinskis 1992; Allen 1994; O’Connor 1994; Hansson 1996; andmore tentatively, Back 1997). This broad antipositivism is compatiblewith a wide variety of social science traditions.

On the instrumentalist side, complexity theories are parented bymathematics and biology, the new ideas are used to inform manage-rial technique, neural nets can be used to inform estate agents of opti-mum prices for properties, fractal techniques can encode video infor-mation in less digital space, and some professional careers in biologyand mathematics are sustained by these new theoretical explorations.

In addition, a large number of the writers in the field see them-selves as scientists; Back (1997, 39, 50) saw complexity theory as thelatest in a maturing series of attempts to improve the traditional sta-tistical model “while working within the general paradigm of a sci-ence which uses the language of mathematics for its ideal expres-sion.” This series of attempts includes “gestalt and field theory,continuing through sociometry, information theory, game theory,catastrophe theory, and fuzzy sets to the current impact of chaos andcomplexity theories.” Accounts in natural science of complexity are“within the framework of the reductionistic research program,” inwhich “limitations with regard to our physical understanding of liv-ing things . . . are attributed exclusively to the material complexity ofthe phenomena under consideration” (Küppers 1995, 93). In thisrespect, complexity theories are much closer to the Western traditionof instrumentalism and “disengaged reason” (Taylor 1989, 495 ff.)than they are to the reaction to instrumentalism embodied in theromantic and modernist traditions, “which generally draw on a muchricher conception of human nature, which has an inner dimension”(Taylor 1989, 496).

Yet, complexity theories also have connections with a differentenlightenment tradition—that of naturalism. In this tradition, “thegoodness and significance of nature” is affirmed (Taylor 1989, 343), inopposition to dualist religious and philosophical thought. Enlighten-




ment naturalism has variously been systematically materialist, on theside of ordinary life and “the release of the stultified powers of natureand desire” (Taylor 1989, 343), and in reverential awe of physicalorder (Taylor 1989, 347 ff.). The popular science writings of Capra(1983) and Laszlo (1996) are cases of enlightenment naturalism, tiltingat dualism and affirming what the authors believed to be spiritualitiesin accord with naturalism.9 Stuart Kauffman (1995, 304) quoted him-self : “If one cannot find spirituality, awe and reverence in the unfold-ing, one is nuts.” For others, a realist version of naturalism links wellwith Marxism (see, for example, Reed and Harvey 1992; Harvey andReed 1996; Owen 1996; Krieglstein 1990). Harvey and Reed’s (1996)model is discussed below.

DISSIPATIVE MODELS ROOTEDIN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Case of Niklas Luhmann

In the rush of popular complexity literature since the mid-1980s,there was a strong sense of novelty, such that the links of complexitytheory to traditions such as systems theory were often obscured.Niklas Luhmann is a major (if much disputed) German social theoristwho has synthesized the tradition of systems theory as utilized byTalcott Parsons with cybernetics, with an autopoietic understandingof systems, and with a perspective of “the phenomenological disclo-sure of meaning” (Bednarz 1989, viii). Thus, Luhmann has a distinctposition from other writers on social complexity not only as regardsstatus and output (already in 1989 he had 6,000 pages in print in Ger-man [Bernadz 1989, vii]) but also as regards his synthesis of emergingideas of systems with existing social science traditions and philoso-phies. In this regard, Luhmann can be seen as more advanced or fur-ther immersed in the problematics of social science than many writerson social complexity.10 His work can be seen in part as a developmentof the functionalist theories of Parsons—whose later writings drewstrongly on systems theory and a metabiological characterization ofsociety.11 Parsons’s social theory, whatever its limitations, was deeplyinfluenced by other theorists of the first half of the twentieth century—particularly Weber, Durkheim, and Freud.12 Parsons’s and Luh-mann’s roots in interlinked sociological traditions and debates distin-guish them from much current writing on complexity theory, which is




often devoid of social theory or at best tentatively explores the linksbetween complexity and a given theory. A further difference is thatLuhmann’s work has been visible for several decades—especially inGermany—and there have been sustained evaluations of his work byother social theorists such as Habermas. Luhmann’s writing, and thecritiques of this writing, must to some extent inform any systematicdebate on social complexity. Yet, Luhmann’s writings are still rela-tively unknown in the current Anglo-American popularization ofcomplexity theory, and critical evaluations of Luhmann seem to becompletely unknown in these circles.13

Luhmann, from a systematic systems-theoretical perspective,started from the premise that “ ‘society’ signifies the all-encompassingsocial system of mutually referring communications” and from thepremise that “for any system the environment is more complex thanthe system itself” (1989, 7, 11). For Luhmann, the social system, as thesystem of communication, and a variety of shifting social subsystems,are naturalistic autopoietical systems struggling for survival within ageneral scheme of evolution; these systems exist in a world that is“overwhelmingly complex for every kind of real system” (1979, 6).Systems tend to increase their own complexity to reduce the complex-ity of their environment. The environment of a social system includessocial systems and subsystems outside itself, the natural environ-ment, and those parts of human life that are not “socially effectivecommunication”: “even the consciousness of psychical systemsbelongs to the environment of the societal system” (1989, 29). Thesocietal system thus encompasses all large-scale and public processes,institutions, and discourses (as filtered through the lens of communi-cation) and tends to exclude aspects of the immediate “lifeworld”14—and, I think, elements of the labor process and the economic system.

Luhmann’s work covers a very wide variety of themes, as variousas the welfare state and the systemic difficulties of democracy, a sys-tems view of the functionality of love, and the problematic relationbetween the societal system and the natural environment.15

Luhmann’s theory “is today incomparable when it comes to its pow-ers of conceptualization, its theoretical imaginativeness, and itscapacity for processing information” (Habermas 1987b, 354).

Luhmann’s theory has come into a fair amount of criticism.Habermas, who is the current social theorist of major standing whohas most engaged with Luhmann’s work, while acknowledgingLuhmann’s opus as a “competitive philosophical paradigm” (1992,22), perceived an “objectifying effect” . . . “to the extent that systems




theory penetrates into the lifeworld, introducing into it ametabiological perspective from which it then learns to see itself as asystem in an environment with other systems-in-an environment”(1987b, 384). Habermas saw Luhmann’s theory as a subtle recasting,through the aid of cybernetic theory, of the Western tradition in whichwe “understand ourselves in terms of objects” (1987b, 384).“Luhmann’s systems functionalism is actually based on the assump-tion that in modern societies the symbolically structured lifeworldhas already been driven back into the niches of a systematically self-sufficient society and been colonized by it” (1987a, 312)—a historicalassessment with which Habermas had considerable disagreement.Luhmann’s theory “separates out the ‘undercomplex’ lifeworld as anindigestible residue—precisely the realm of phenomena of a socialtheory that has not burned all bridges to the prescientific experienceof crisis” (1987b, 354). Luhmann in fact has been subjected to fairlysharp criticism from a number of writers. Ulrich Beck is another Ger-man theorist of modernity who drew on the work of Luhmann, andboth have written books on risk in modern societies. However, Beck’sbook is the classic text on the risk society, and Beck is generally criticalof Luhmann’s social analysis.16

My principal point here is this: by virtue of his integration into thefield of social theory and social research, Luhmann (as with Parsonsbefore him) becomes subject to complex debates not necessarilyinvolving complexity theory or systems theory. This, too, is the fate ofcurrent writings on social complexity.

Harvey and Reed’s Realist Model

Harvey and Reed (1996; Reed and Harvey 1992) were predomi-nantly concerned with using theories of dissipative systems to justifya realist approach that “sustains the particularity and plurality of thesocial world while preserving rational canons of scientific under-standing” (Harvey and Reed 1996, 297). They treated whole societies,or nations, or modes of production (it is not clear), as dissipative“social systems.” They did not discuss whether components withinthese macro systems, such as institutions or individuals, might also beseen as dissipative systems; rather, a structural analytic model waspresented that attempted to show levels of increasing complexityencompassed within the social system. Harvey and Reed did this bymapping research strategies onto the objects or processes to whichthey are applied (Harvey and Reed 1996, 307-9 ff.). Thus, while the




refraction of sunlight may be subjected to predictive or statisticalmodeling, processes of cultural and class struggle require the moreindeterminate modeling strategy of historical narrative.

The authors used this argument to assert that “social systems” con-sist of nested and emergent levels of increasing complexity. Thehigher levels (requiring historical narrative) incorporate processes inwhich humans “subjectively define themselves and their actions”; atthe same time, these levels, I infer, were for Harvey and Reed (1996) aprime source of the indeterminacy through which the dissipativesocial system is chaotically driven.

Harvey and Reed (1996) argued that there is a natural fit betweencomplexity theories and realist and Marxist philosophy. In some waysthis is persuasive: it can be argued that Marxism as a materialism is aform of naturalism and, following Bhaskar (1979, 3), that “an essen-tially realist view of science” can be the foundation for “a qualifiedantipositivist naturalism” (see also Bhaskar 1978).

Harvey and Reed’s (1996) model is in many respects a strong one.This is partly because the model is rooted in two strong (though cur-rently contested and relativized) traditions: philosophical realismand Marxism. Second, through the notion of emergent episte-mological levels, the model allows realist social science to switch toless deterministic methodologies, such as those including narrativeelements. Issues of high complexity are dealt with neatly through thenotions of emergence and levels. Harvey and Reed’s scheme sanc-tions a wide variety of social science methodologies; their argumentcan connect with many existing social science debates and acknowl-edge a wide, heterogeneous number of studies that may have validityand usefulness. It should be noted that Harvey and Reed’s model sug-gests that a realist complexity perspective ordains that there are levelsof society not describable through mathematics or the cyberneticmodeling on which current complexity theories depend. The modelalso suggests itself as a provisional tool to clarify issues of practicalresearch methodology.

Harvey and Reed’s (1996) model can be debated from a number ofangles. First, there are extensive debates over realist and Marxistepistemologies; and, if there is a natural fit between realism and theo-ries of complexity, criticisms of realism might affect these complexitytheories. We enter a much wider debate here. For example, MichaelDummett (1996) eventually advocated “subtle realism” as the mostdefensible philosophy, and writers such as Richard Rorty and RichardBernstein (e.g., Bernstein 1983) argued for pragmatic rather than rig-




orously realist approaches to society. There is an ongoing Britishdebate on realism involving figures such as Bhaskar, Rom Harré, andWilliam Outhwaite (Blomley 1998).

Second, the ontological levels suggested by Harvey and Reed(1996) are rather arbitrary. These are levels relating to the intrinsic lim-its of the various strategies of modeling social phenomena. They dosay that it is the “ontological structure of the dissipative social sys-tem . . . (and) the systemic and emergent nature of the ontological lev-els” (p. 322), rather than their particular descriptions, that is nonnego-tiable. However, their choice of levels, which they synthesized fromthe work of Kenneth Boulding and Neil Smelser, suggests an overlyabstract and structuralist social theory, variously Marxist and func-tionalist. Starting with the most simple category, that of “determinateregularities of the physical universe,” Harvey and Reed associatedthis only with predictive and statistical modeling; clearly, however,the phenomenon of chaos is also closely associated with “icono-graphic modelling” as in computer graphics, as Harvey and Reedthemselves said later (p. 318). Their third level, that of the ecologicalorganization of the local biotic community, might on occasion requireHarvey and Reed’s most abstract modeling strategy, that of historicalnarrative. Through what other strategy does one describe the toxicmarsh left by a departed factory or the extinction of the dinosaurs?

The middle ontological levels, some of which can be modeled sta-tistically and some not, consist of facilities, roles, norms, and values.The highest, most complex levels are those of “class struggle (and)conflict over cultural hegemony” and “societal evolution via histori-cal modes of production.” To me, these levels are extremely arbitrary.Why should the allocation of roles, for example, constitute an onto-logical level? Why are these functionalist concepts of midcenturysocial science and productivist Marxism used, rather than levelsestablished by some criterion of complexity? This could relate to lev-els of connectivity, which might assign mass society a lower aggregateconnectivity and complexity than a family or commune, and which islikely to place many human-made systems on a lower level of com-plexity than natural ecosystems. And why, at the top, is there “modeof production” to the exclusion of military, bureaucratic, and indus-trial regime (cf. Giddens 1981, 1987, 26 ff.; Foucault 1967, 1979)?

I think there is a logic behind Harvey and Reed’s (1996) categories,and it relates to my last line of criticism: that of their implied organi-




cism and overreification of systemicity. Harvey and Reed used thenotion of system uncritically and with considerably less subtlety thandid Luhmann, for example. The concepts used (norms, roles) can beseen as levels of function in a system rather than as emergent phe-nomena in their own right. The typology of ontological levels used byHarvey and Reed serves the notion of whole system, trading on themodernist notion of social system, possibly in the sense of nation-state. Albrow (1996, 119 ff.) argued persuasively against the notion ofthe nation-state as coherent system in the “global age.” If Harvey andReed are rather referring to transnational systems such as modes ofproduction, the population of such systems is far too small to justifythe risky strategies of far-from-equilibrium evolution. Their typologyworks against the dimensions of social process that relativize sys-temic elements, both in human experience and in historical outcomes.Rather, social heterogeneity is seen in functionalist terms: everythingis captured in the adaptive searches of the far-from-equilibrium socialsystem.

TOWARD A POSITIONING OF SOCIAL COMPLEXITY

Simplicity, complexity that can be modeled, and incondensiblecomplexity permeate all areas and “levels” of society simultaneously,though in an irregular fashion. For this reason, complexity models,while having validity for some analytic tasks, cannot substantiallyaccount for the events and particularities of the social world. Thewhole issue of social complexity needs to be rethought withoutassumptions of systemicity and without a laboring of “levels.”Unsystematic process and communication should be included, andresources from social theory and social studies should be more fullyused.

In the paragraphs that follow, I use a complexity perspective toattempt to flesh out arguments limiting the role of complexity theo-ries as regards society and to justify a perspective that sees roles forfinite rationality and nonlinear modeling as well as encounter, practi-cal immersion, and silence with regard to material and symbolic highcomplexity. The argument is then brought closer to social studies withparagraphs initiating a discussion on how complexity is reflected insocial studies not inspired by complexity theories.




Basic Principles for the Study of Social Complexity

The Human Horizon

The world in which we live is largely knowable by people. This ispartly because we are evolutionarily adapted to be of an appropriatesize and metabolic pace and to have mechanisms and horizons of per-ception broadly in tune with our natural and human-made environ-ment. We can bracket many high complexities that are below thresh-olds of response or that do not affect the net outcomes of mass process.At the same time, we appropriate and encounter the world in a specif-ically human way.

Ordinary language is clearly deeply involved with and adapted tothe complexities of the physical and social world while simulta-neously eliciting nonobjective modes of presencing and expression.An account of ordinary language—and more specialist languages—should be given that shows how an undoubtedly complex, heteroge-neous, and multifarious social realm can often be described andreferred to, to people’s satisfaction. Language has evolved with theability to reflect, model, symbolize, effectively bracket, and occludenonlinearity, complex systems, and heterogeneous dysfunction.

Untraceable Causative Templets

Each situation and happening has (at the level of a thought ex-periment) a full explanation or templet that involves material andsymbolic-communicative histories that instantiate themselves in thesituation or happening. Some of this history may be retraced, alongwith some of the structure of organic or organizational templets(DNA, McDonalds franchises), but large parts of the causative tem-plet are irretrievable: some parts are lost in the past; others are lost incurrent ephemeral processes; and in general, processes are forcedthrough the lenses of human semiotic, especially linguistic, interpre-tation, in which the battle for complete templeting is given up fromthe start in favor of tolerance of high complexity, approximation, andthe construction of physical, psychological, and discursive zones ofrelative order.




The Terrain of Particularity

Society is revealed as susceptible to useful description, yet, wheredescribable, it is endlessly instantiated in particulars that do not fol-low from generalities. Evolution differentiates forth massive particu-larities; it is largely this particularity that is in evidence to people.These particularities—sighs, flagella movements, clouds, the slaugh-ter that occurred in that Rwandan church—all have greatly complexorigins in an absolute analytical sense. At this level of particularity,which is also the level of continual reinstantiation of effective histo-ries, the world can be seen as reasonably definitive. This is becauseevolutionary differentiation of matter and life produces more andmore refined particularities, massive events (i.e., highly improbabledifferential sectorization of matter, energy, and pattern), and persis-tent structures. Massive inert forms and life also both display some-times excessive regularities within their particular history (such asbirdsong or the rhythm of the tides). Our ecosystems are interplaysamong physical regularity, fairly stable forms, and entirely ephemeralinteractions. In addition to this, human-made objects, systems, anddiscourses also have simple aspects to them. As a result of this,together with our prejudice in favor of particular comprehensibility,meaningful propositional references can be made to a huge range ofphenomena, and useful analytic and modeling processes can be pur-sued, including many of reducible complexity.

Incondensible Complexity

At the same time, especially at the level of the social, but also at thelevel of particular environmental conjunctures, this largely orderableterrain is bathed in processes of incondensible complexity (Katz1989).17 Many zones within society, and shifting zones within society,contain processes that are in practice incalculable; and a proportion ofsuch processes are in principle incalculable. Where there is a highnumber of types of connection in a network, as in an organic socialgroup; and where high numbers of variable influences all conditionan outcome, such as some utterances; and where contingency is high,as when you turn a foreign corner, processes of high, sometimes maxi-mally high, complexity will be common. This situation, aided and




abetted by ignorance, lack of information, and nonobjectifying prac-tices produces the regular newness that we constantly map onto ourday’s structure; it produces experiences of freshness, alienation, andoddity; it provides the chaotic environment to which institutionsmust respond; it provides the playground for human processes ofsymbolization that do not objectivize. However, the phenomena fromwhich we organize experiences are, in terms of objectified materialprocess, largely at a level of incondensible complexity. This is doublyso when human interpretation influences material process. Ourfamiliarity with this situation is reflected in our energy for new expe-riences, news, and the expectation that our daily life, while usuallyoccurring within bounded sets such as an institutional framework,will nevertheless have the character of unpredictable process of un-folding of particularity.

Eminently describable processes, such as the growth of a plant,might have the appearance of “too complicated for analysis” and becharacterized through rudimentary conventions and aesthetics; thesame might apply to ignorant views of complicated interinstitutionalfeedback effects. However, once one can establish even some of thecauses of a situation, its complexity can to that extent be character-ized, and possibly condensed, depending on the relation of what isknown to what is unknown. Rational knowledge may extend theprovince of that which can be analyzed, modeled, and predicted;however, in all real situations, theoretically reducible and incon-densible elements coexist. Incondensible elements can be at leastassociated with fleeting and highly local events and detail; withdiscourse shaping itself in relation to immediately prior discourse;and with the totality of events, processes, and interactions in a givensituation.

Areas and processes of informational high complexity, or“incondensible complexity” and hermeneutic or mathematicalindeterminism, should be identified and left to other discourses andmethodologies—principally in the forms of narrative and interpreta-tion (cf. Harvey and Reed 1996)—and also to silence and aestheticreception.

Unquantifiable Phenomena

There are types of human process that have large domains that can-not be meaningfully quantified. Consider, for example, biographicalaccounts, aesthetic experience (despite Bourdieu’s Distinction [1986],




in which Bourdieu, while convincingly demonstrating how taste isimplicated in social hierarchies, does not deal with the aesthetic part—enjoyment and understanding of the communication of the singular),and the evolution of public affairs as reflected in news. In general,processes in which the “objects” concerned are necessarily reconsti-tuted afresh through symbolic and interpretive means, through dis-course and debate, such as the interpretation of music or the nature ofa marriage proposal, any interpretation, including mathematical andstructuralist ones, must participate in the symbolic reconstitution ofthe object. In this situation, the categories or units of quantification inmathematical terms can dissolve and decohere with a fresh reconsti-tution of the object.

Complexity—as relations between measurable objects—may bebracketed from a phenomenological perspective, to which it is evi-dent that observation, analysis, and synthesis are not the only modesof perception. The work of Alfred Schutz is an example of this (seealso Craib’s [1992, 97 ff.] discussion of phenomenological sociology).Social phenomena may be constituted and received by “feeling,dreaming, experiencing, remembering and forgetting, and not simplyknowing” (Halton 1995, 273). The elucidation of certain modes ofexperience, interpretation, and action can be done through the (per-haps temporary) suspension of the objectivizing gaze and by follow-ing the imaginary of the lifeworld. This sort of approach may havegreat validity while not immediately engaging with phenomena,including nonlinearities, which can be mathematically defined orobjectively modeled. The phenomena they deal with are not alwaysusefully measurable, moreover. Complexities in this dimension arebetter appreciated through hermeneutic approximations, throughnarrative, and to some extent through postmodern discourses ofalterity and difference, of singularities and the unpresentable.

The Social Reduction of Complexity

If the immediate lifeworld of experience and action is too complexto manifest overall pattern, the orderly aspects of society could besought in factors that reduce complexity. Theorists such as Luhmannand Zygmunt Bauman argue that institutions and systems of societyare devices of simplification and order. Any system of successfullyapplied rules at least at one level reduces complexity; and factors suchas distance, deprivation, and isolation may also reduce the connectiv-ity of society. If so, mass societies with large populations will have




lower average connectivity among individuals and groups than asmall society or social grouping, other things being equal, and thushave a lower and more manageable level of complexity. Furthermore,the homeostatic devices most people have for screening information;finding visual, logical, and aesthetic form; and building a biographymay be a significant source of order, as may be shared systems ofrules, while the vicissitudes of the psyche and the stochastic processof daily life and encounter may work against this homeostasis. Thereare undoubtedly surprising features of society that reflect mathemati-cally describable nonlinearities—or even linearities. A proportion ofthe literature on complexity has already embarked on studies in thisarea, in a manner that is sensitive to the horizons of this approach.

Contingent Systems, Society As Environment

While nonlinearity is a safe (but often valueless) bet in the socialfield, there must be no assumption of systemicity, let aloneautopoiesis, beyond the evidence and informed interpretation. Asagainst Harvey and Reed’s account of a hierarchical and ultimatelyunified social structure and process, I would argue for more contin-gent, yet analytically accessible, concepts. For example, using thework of Bourdieu and others, John Thompson saw social-historicalanalysis as consisting of the analysis of spatio-temporal settings;fields of interaction in which individuals draw on rules, capitals, andhabituated practical schemata; institutions as “relatively stable clus-ters of rules and resources,” and social structure as “relatively stableasymmetries (in) social institutions and interaction . . . in terms of thedistribution of, and access to, resources, power, opportunities and lifechances” (Thompson 1990, 281-83).

At the same time, bearing in mind the fairly systematic features ofmany societies, including preindustrial societies, and the growth offormidable economic and political systems under industrialism, andwith the knowledge that human economy is one component of theglobal ecosystem, systemic perspectives should be retained—but ashypotheses, in need of empirical and theoretical justification. Soci-eties are more usefully seen as forms of containing environmental sys-tems rather than as organismic systems. There is scope for modelingsocieties and social processes as loose environmental systems withlow systemic requirements and great redundancy, which allow hugevarieties of social forms and diversity of local situations; and provid-ing an arena for experimentation, cooperation, and conflict—




although within certain basic boundaries of subsistence, environ-mental balance, and order, for example.

A complexity model of enduring social institutions and otherapparently dissipative human-made social phenomena could bedeveloped. This model should take into account the cultured nature(in the horticultural sense) of many social institutions; it may be thatindividuals and groups may simulate a self-steering institution in thehope that it will persist and grow; even market economies have beenartificially set up. Perhaps there are leaderless, self-steering social sys-tems at times; most social institutions are server institutions and lackautonomy in certain respects. Other systems, small businesses, forexample, may simply be tools of an individual or group strategy andbe constantly refashioned to the needs of that strategy. Something likea notion of a semisystem is necessary (if only to discard pretentioussystemic analysis) for various social phenomena such as a protector-ate or a football match. Or is the notion of system unhelpful as regardssome coherent, organized phenomena?

Reflections of Complexity in Social Studies

The points expressed above largely derive from a consideration ofthe complexity literature. What follows is a preliminary perspectiveon complexity as revealed in social studies not informed by complex-ity theories. Although it would be easy to expand and improve onwhat follows, that is the point: the nature of social complexity willlargely be revealed through such investigation.

Narrative and Authorial Vision

Narration and interpretation are ubiquitous in social studies, evenin many quantitative studies relying heavily on statistics. This is anindication that, even when discussing simple material, the inextricableconcurrence of different “levels” of complexity occurs. The preva-lence of narration also suggests that if we want to describe society andits complexity, we must find one using the structure of a natural lan-guage. And all histories—whether of particles or modes of production—require narration and end in silence.

While broader issues of narrative and interpretation are discussedin following paragraphs, the issue of narrative mode must also beraised. The narrative mode that a social study uses reveals its open-ness to complexity. Faithfulness to the evidence and accuracy is neces-




sary to reveal social complexity: without an attempt to be faithful towhat is, no piece or relation of this high complexity can be revealed.This remains so even if a negative hermeneutic or deconstructive orstatistical process is called for. Second, theoretical and empiricalopenness and the ability to learn from debates are necessary charac-teristics of an approach that can to some extent reveal social complex-ity. So too is an awareness of one’s horizons. Something of an aware-ness of plurality and of uncaptured difference, of the political ratherthe technical, I would also take as signs of acknowledgement of com-plexity. For Hannah Arendt (1959, 9-10), “Action . . . corresponds tothe human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not man, live onearth and inhabit the world . . . this plurality is specifically the condi-tion . . . of all political life.” Furthermore, complexity may be morestrongly revealed in the dramatic rather than the epic: GeorgeSteiner’s Tolstoy or Dostoevsky portrayed Dostoevsky the dramatist as“suspicious of total understanding and on the side of mys-tery . . . advancing into the labyrinth of the unnatural” (1967, 312-13).The immersion of an author in the decentering aspects of life that give“experience” and “maturity” are also often crucial indicators of thelevel of depth in a narrative. I would use these criteria to argue thatsociety’s complexity may be implicitly revealed or concealed inalmost any of the various sociological approaches and in other writ-ings on human society.

The Mixed Appropriation of Differential Complexity

Societies, or social formations, are too complex, shifting, ambigu-ous, extensive, and relentlessly instantiated in particulars for there tobe exhaustive social description or explanation, including “complex-ity” explanations. Any reasonably sensitive analyst of society knowssomething about these horizons: they are part of everyday life andpart of the historical experience of many generations.

Partly for this reason, the nature of society and of social complexityare open questions. At present, their best characterizations are implic-itly contained (amid much dross) within the combined subdisciplinaryfields of the social sciences and “humanities,” within local studies andlocal knowledge, and within traditions of phronesis and praxis(Bernstein 1983). A complexity approach must rise to, and acknowl-edge, these implicit—and sometimes more explicit—characterizationsbefore claiming privileged social knowledge.




Generally, social studies contain a mixture of approaches to socialcomplexity, variously reflecting people’s experience, attempting tosolve practical human problems, speaking of determinable states ofaffairs, using some statistics and quantification, interpreting informa-tion and texts, reflecting complex reality as contingent, trying to makesense of the whole, and, more negatively, developing a pseudosys-tematic view of the world and denying aspects of the world’s com-plexity for reasons of ideology and sectional interest. This reflectionendorses, and goes beyond, Harvey and Reed’s (1996) picture of onto-logical levels and Lee’s advice that we should aim to “make use ofboth narrative prose and mathematics to describe a world in whichindividual human and non-human interaction cumulate through lin-ear and nonlinear, local and global, probabilistic and deterministicprocesses” (1997, 29). But describing society through “narrative proseand mathematics” is similar to horse and rabbit pie: narrative has farmore varieties and far more symbols than does mathematics. Butclearly society has different kinds of complexity—and simplicity—all“occurring together” in a way that is best described not through a sin-gle systemic view but through a variety of quantitative, hermeneutic,polemic, speculative, and problem-solving methods.

Particular Discourses

It would seem that the route to understanding and explaining theoverall systemic and relational nature of many sectors and processesin society—and to give any sort of general account—lies through par-ticular discourses, traditions, disciplines, and literatures. Forinstance, if, as in one version of feminist discourse, it is broadly truethat “in men’s discourse, the world is designated as inanimate abstrac-tions integral to the subject’s world,” while “women’s discourse desig-nates men as subjects . . . and the world as concrete inanimate objectsbelonging to the universe of the other” (Irigaray 1993, 35), this mustaffect any general account of society. Similarly, if attempting to man-age being black in a northern culture “requires some specific forms ofdouble consciousness” as Paul Gilroy (1993, 1) maintained, this toomust have many historical and structural consequences; and in turnsocial theories, and theories of social complexity, will be renderedimpotent by ignoring these and numerous other significant processesmade visible in differentiated and specialized areas of social enquiry.




Hermeneutics

The hermeneutic moment in all social investigation displaces anyfinal formal model and introduces propositional and representationalelements that can be analyzed only through further, disputable, inter-pretation. The study of complex social phenomena is inevitablydrawn into this hermeneutic process.

The methodologies proposed by Giddens (1984, 327 ff.) and JohnThompson (1990, 272-327) and the philosophical tradition of criticalor depth hermeneutics18 can be used to show the necessity of herme-neutics in sociological study and, as exemplified in Giddens’s theoryof structuration, also the importance of recognizing the source ofmany actions in the new interpretations of social subjects and groups,as opposed to sources in external or even internal structural injunc-tions. Both Giddens and Thompson proposed strong synthetic meth-odologies involving both general social and symbolic structure andthe particularities of context and interpretation.

Any account of the complexity of society, regardless of the scopefor objective description, must go through the process of interpreta-tion and must acknowledge the potential social effect and creativity ofpeople. This has implications as to which overall models of conscioushuman shaping as opposed to structural constraint are generally andcontextually accurate.

Relationism: Pierre Bourdieu

Pierre Bourdieu used a “relational” method of investigating socialfields and of “constructing the object” to escape what he called therealist or substantialist mode of thinking . Bourdieu’s fields roughlycorrespond to Luhmann’s subsystems19; however, Bourdieu’s inten-tion was to suggest something more contingent and conflictual andmore rooted in the particularities of relational interaction than isreflected in an emergent, self-regulating model of a system. Bourdieu’smethod of scientifically uncovering social objects through adding tothe “science of scarcity,” a science of “the practical knowledge whichthe agents obtain for themselves by producing divisions and classifi-cations which are no less objective than those of the balance-sheets ofsocial physics” (Bourdieu 1986, 483), requires attentive, laboriouswork. It also requires a rigorous suspicion of the reification of ordi-nary language realism and of theoretical concepts: compared to thetraditions of structuration and depth-hermeneutics, lay people here




have few rational resources beyond their own strategizing. Bourdieurequired the building of a relational model that gradually uncoversthe traits of members of the relational set that are responsible for thedifferences within and structure of the object of investigation(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 224 ff.).

In this approach, Bourdieu in large measure was open to thepluriformity and flux of the things he investigated, which suggestskinship to some aspects of complexity theory. I think that Bourdieushowed, whatever the limits of his method,20 that there are levels ofrelational interaction and structure that are not immediately visible orsusceptible to theoretical deduction but rather to laborious recon-struction (see also Emirbayer 1997). In this light, the application ofmetatheoretical organismic models to society and its subsystemsseems highly premature; and physicalistic accounts of nonlinearity insociety that exclude the symbolic systems of classification are dab-bling with the edges of social structure and systematic features.

Contingency: Zygmunt Bauman

A contingent approach has been strong among some philosophersof history such as Isaiah Berlin and historians such as A.J.P. Taylor,and this is the attitude to social complexity in some postmodern cul-tural and social studies. The recent writings in social theory byZygmunt Bauman related the issues of structures and systems to thehigh complexity of contingency, passion, transient worldviews andrationalisms, and systems under attack and reshaping in the collec-tive heteronomy of particular processes and humans in action. “Thechaos and contingency which modernity spent two centuries toocclude out of the business of life is not just back in the field of vision,but appears there . . . naked, without cover or adornment”; the effortto bring the excluded peoples of the South into the modern order“opens up the floodgates through which chaos and contingency pourinto their, once orderly, lives” (Bauman 1995a, 27, 31-32).

For Bauman (1995b, 143),

The endemic indetermination leaves man free to choose, yet this free-dom is invariably deployed in frenzied efforts to foreclose thischoice . . . . The result is the system, which in Lyotard’s words “has theconsequence of causing the forgetting of what escapes it.” Whatescapes it is the other aspect of human condition . . . . No system hasever disposed of that residue. But what remains in that residue isfraught with system-building zeal . . . . The human condition is such




that in one fell swoop it spawns systems and the rebellions againstthem.

In this account, informed surely by the historical events of the holo-caust and the collapse of Eastern European state socialism, it is notjust the personal and private that is fluid and contingent; the publicterrain too simultaneously has systems in formation, dominance,opposition, and decay; the progress of systems and social stability arenot due to the self-steering of systems but rather of historical systemprojects of groups of people, projects that often end up being otherpeople’s disorder—as with the holocaust or “development.” Howstrong is Bauman’s model? Clearly, a portion of what he said re-lates closely to the issues of social complexity (especially as regardsmodern societies), but it does not accord with organismic or system-theoretical complexity perspectives. Furthermore, Bauman’s empha-sis on the unpredictable reiterates that many significant social pro-cesses are maximally complex in the random sense and formed bywhat Katz (1986) termed “ephemeral templets.”

Labyrinthine Complexity

In the industrial and modern eras, there is an aesthetic approach tosociety depicting existential and rational entrapment in endless andperverse social and psychological constraint, as in Kafka and PeterHandke, and labyrinthine social darkness, as in some of Mahler’smusic. Earlier, Dickens and Dostoevsky explored social darkness ofthe physical and psychological warrens of the nineteenth-centurycity. This immersion in nonhuman and inhuman systems and struc-tures I will term “labyrinthine complexity.” This perspective has someprecedent in classical accounts of life given by Dante and others.21 Par-ticularly French social theory has taken up elements of this vision, aswith Foucault and, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, Lacan.Bauman combines contingent perspectives with a picture of unfold-ing alienation and social domination and estranged progress.

This literature suggests that “the system is threatening thelifeworld,” in Habermas’s terms, and that perverse structure is repli-cated at the most intimate levels. The issue is more than that of capital-ist commodification and exploitation; bureaucratic and discursiveregimes are also implicated.

As regards complexity theories, this approach largely trades in anunquantifiable phenomenological currency. It calls into question the




boundaries between social systems and people by suggesting thatpeople are constantly constrained into performing intricate structuralroutines. It also suggests that there is no necessary connection betweenthe logic of systems in society and human welfare and well-being.

Ethics

Specific issues as regards social modeling—and thus complexitytheories—are raised by aspects of social process such as people’s cre-ating and contesting discourses and practices of ethics, rationality,and becoming, both within the horizon of mortality and at a generalsocial level (cf. Taylor 1989; Bloch [1959] 1995). This side of social pro-cess may not be functional in a naturalist sense; Slavoj Z iz#ek quotedChesterton’s remark that “civilization itself is the most sensational ofall departures and the most romantic of all rebellions . . . . It is based onthe fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies”(Z iz#ek 1991, p. 81). In a global environment, struggle toward a car-ing, just civilization must largely be seen from the perspective of theSouth, environmental protection and “the politics of the personal”: acivilization that is “sane, humane and ecological” (Robertson 1983).Practices on this terrain, led by intentionality, have a logic distin-guishable from the vegetative heteronomy of habitual social repro-duction, and thus will manifest specific complexities. Theoreticalwork, such as exploring the issue of social complexity, in its modestway and like other action, mostly replicates but sometimes refashionsone’s position in the politics of this civilization and the social processof practical-moral becoming in oneself and others.

CONCLUSION

Social processes and phenomena are far too complex for complex-ity theory to deal with, or profoundly elucidate, without the aid of theresources of the better of existing social theories and studies. Further-more, complexity theories do not provide a particularly effectivemetatheory of social processes. Having said that, I think that a farmore adequate theory of social complexity, conscious of its horizons,could be gradually constructed as an aid to the social theories inwhich it will be immersed. In this process, people involved with socialcomplexity will have to be sociologically literate, and should beengaged fully in the debates concerning the particular field and local




area with which they are dealing. In particular, this will involve realpeople in contested history.

NOTES

1. Some examples of the popular science literature in English on the general themeof nonlinearity are Woodcock and Davis (1980) on catastrophe theory; Eigen andWinkler (1983) on game theory; Douglas Hofstadter’s (1980) classic romance of para-doxical logic in the computer age, Gödel, Escher, Bach; Capra’s (1983) solar age polemicagainst “Cartesian-Newtonian thought”; Ruelle (1993) and Hall (1991) on chaos theory;and John Casti’s (1993) Searching for Certainty. More strictly on the theme of complexityare popular texts such as Laszlo’s Evolution: The Grand Synthesis (1987); Prigogine andStengers’s Order Out of Chaos (1985), which approached the topic from the philosophyof science; William Poundstone’s outline of how physical law and information conspireto create complexity in The Recursive Universe (1987); Waldrop’s chatty narrative Com-plexity (1984); Casti’s Complexification (1994); The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicityin a Complex World (Cohen and Stewart 1995); Davies’s The Cosmic Blueprint: Order andComplexity at the Edge of Chaos (1995); Coveney and Highfield’s systematic and clearFrontiers of Complexity (1995); Stuart Kauffman’s (1995) popularization of his own work;and Capra’s most sober relevant work, The Web of Life (1997). Paul Cilliers (1998) pro-vided a model of understanding based on neural nets and an organicist model of socialcomplexity to justify an objectivist reading of Derrida’s deconstruction.

2. Examples of this include highly speculative passages in Kauffman (1995), Capra(1997), Casti (1994), Laszlo (1987). More technical, scientific, and academic works, forexample, Kauffman (1989, 1993), Eigen (1996), Nicolis and Prigogine (1989), andPrigogine and Stengers (1985) are generally reticent on the question of social complex-ity. Helbing’s (1995) work was a cautious yet rigorous attempt to extend nonlinearmathematical techniques to social studies.

3. The bibliographies of Kiel and Elliot (1996, 325-45) and Eve, Horsfall, and Lee(1997, 281-300) each contain more than five hundred references to sources that contri-butors to the volumes have used in their efforts to relate concepts of chaos and complex-ity to social processes.

4. For some of the current debate on dependency theory, see Leys (1996), especially“Underdevelopment and Dependency: Critical Notes”; B. Hettne’s Development Theoryand the Three Worlds (1996); and Schuurman (1993). These all deal with reasons for thecollapse of the dependency paradigm in its classic form in the early 1980s. See alsoFeatherstone (1990) for debates on how cultural considerations might modify depend-ency theory.

5. See especially Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and Distinction(1986). See also a general overview of sociological theories of social action by Ian Craib(1992, 33-124).

6. Here I attempt to work within Charles Taylor’s (1989) description of historicalcurrents of social and philosophical thought, as they have influenced people’s self-constitution.

7. Sardar (1994) argued that in significant respects, the advent of complexity theo-ries merely carries forward Western attempts to dominate the globe while ignoringolder, and less manipulative, non-Western accounts of complexity.




8. This is Bourdieu’s (1986) term; see also my discussion of opinion surveys ofwhite South Africans under apartheid (Stewart 1994, chap. 3).

9. Prigogine and Stengers’s Order Out of Chaos (1985) has overlaps with Capra’sapproach, but by being more immersed in the philosophical debate, this text is far lesssweeping in its philosophic conclusions than is Capra’s.

10. At the same time, some more recent writers on social complexity such as DavidHarvey and Danilo Zolo (e.g., Zolo 1992) are informed fully by differing strains of con-temporary social theory. Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) is a classic ofneo-Marxist analysis and analysis in the modern tradition of cultural studies.

11. See, for example, Parsons (1977, 180): “a social system, like all living systems, isan open system engaged in a process of interchange . . . with its environment.” Craib(1992, 38) argued that Parsons “does not stop at saying social life is like a living system,he says that it is a living system of a particular type.”

12. This theoretical siting of Parsons’s work is outlined in Habermas (1987a, sectionVII) and in Peter Hamilton’s (1996) article on systems theory.

13. In the recent Chaos, Complexity and Sociology (Eve, Horsfall, and Lee 1997),Luhmann is mentioned briefly in three of twenty chapters and sections—and one ofthese three is written by an Austrian. Habermas’s significant critique is nowherementioned.

14. Habermas (1987a, 310) said that in Luhmann’s theory, “traditionally customarycontexts of action oriented to mutual understanding get shoved out into the environ-ments of systems.”

15. In addition to primarily theoretical texts on topics such as social differentiationand social systems, Luhmann has a number of rather theoreticist and nonempiricalbooks on topical themes such as Trust and Power (1979), Love As Passion (1986), EcologicalCommunication (1989), Political Theory in the Welfare State (1990), and Risk: A SociologicalTheory (1993).

16. For example, in Beck’s The Reinvention of Politics (1997), almost all the dozen or soreferences to Luhmann were in disagreement.

17. Funtowitz and Ravetz (1994) attempted to develop a notion of “emergent com-plexity” to deal with systems of higher complexity by virtue of containing intelligent,symbolizing moral beings.

18. See, for example, John Thompson’s Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thoughtof Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas (1981); also see Outhwaite (1996).

19. Bourdieu discussed the differences between these two concepts in Bourdieu andWacquant (1992, 102-4).

20. See, for example, Alexander’s (1995, 128-217)—hotly debated—charge ofreductionism.

21. This is outlined in Penelope Doob’s study, The Idea of the Labyrinth: From ClassicalAntiquity through the Middle Ages (1990), in which the author outlined the use of the ideaof labyrinths in Virgil, Chaucer, and Dante.

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Peter Stewart is an associate professor of development administration at Unisa in Preto-ria. He studied in Malawi, the U.S. and South Africa. He has published on developmentand on white political attitudes. He has been involved in political, gender and review oflife groups. He is married and lives in Johannesburg.




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Complexity Theories, Social Theory, And the Question of Social Complexity

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