emergence and separability

From: Jay Lemke (jllbc@cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Date: Sun May 26 2002 - 11:11:02 PDT


Following on from my posting about emergence vs. emergentism, and before I
forget how to decipher my notes in the margins of the paper Keith kindly
shared with the list on "unresolved tensions" or what other people wrote
back then in the discussion, here are a few thoughts about the
"separability" issues.

Unfortunately, I do have to agree with Keith that Giddens does not give us
a fully developed view of how to conceptualize the relations between social
practices at the level of individual action and social processes at the
level at which they constitute macro-social structure. Of course no one
else really does either. I don't know the critiques by Margaret Archer,
maybe I'll have a look at them, but my real interest is in the problem
itself. I've already said that by and large I think process ontology is
more useful than thing-ontology, though I don't happen to believe that
ontology is a useful guide to methodology in any case. (Ontology is the
most speculative of all discourses, the true heir of theology.) Practices,
activities, systems of interdependent processes, interactions, networks of
interactions --- all are fundamentally process notions and all are more
useful as units of analysis, or foci of inquiry, than are individuals,
things, static structures, artifacts, or reified entities like "language"
or "culture" or "society" regarded as thing-like. If it's hard to
consistently write and talk in process terms and be intelligible, that's a
function of the discourses and linguistic forms we are heir to from a long
history. It will take quite a while for such things to change, and more
than likely we'll keep a lot of the old forms, but learn how to use them
more "safely".

Frankly, I find it hard to see why an organism is more "real" than an
ecosystem, or a quantum field more real than an utterance. They are all
equally "material" or constitutive of what we call the material, or
constituted from what we call the material. In process terms, what are real
are metabolism, nutrient flow, interaction, and talking. The notion of "the
individual" is a hodgepodge conflating multiple discourses (social,
psychological, biological, physical) and practices of operational
definition that are not consistent with one another and are held together
mainly by our own cultural imperative for individual moral responsibility
and a devoted faith in the a prior reality of a 'natural kind'. I spend
most of chapter 5 of my book Textual Politics dis-conflating the notion of
"an individual" as any sort of unitary entity or useful theoretical construct.

Giddens, like many ambitious sociologists, tries to unify too quickly
across the micro/macro divide. It is not very persuasive, and this seems to
be Archer's argument, that you can account for all that's interesting about
individual behavior in terms of large-scale social processes or patterns,
or vice versa. Giddens tries to mediate between levels, as Bourdieu and
many others do (I like B's version much better), by saying the the
macrosocial is also constituted, just like the individual, out of systems
of social practices. The problem is that if we want a model like this, then
we have to recognize that there are MANY organizational scales of social
practices/processes, and that what a practice or process looks like at one
level may be quite different from what it looks like at another level. Not
all practices/processes are of the same kind, operate at the same timescale
or extensional scale, have similar qualitative properties, can interact
directly with one another, etc. It is not just micro and macro, it is about
a dozen (or more) qualitiatively distinct levels spanning from the
infra-micro (neurological, biochemical) to the supra-macro (linguistic
change, climate change, biological evolution). You can find "yourself" --
as an egocentric individual looking to find yourself -- somewhere in the
middle (no surprise! we're in the middle because that's where _we're_
looking from in defining these levels), but by and large the more remotely
micro and the more distantly macro levels have less to do with how you
participate in some particular situation on some occasion than do the
levels of processes/practices that are nearer in scale to our activity.
(There are important exceptions to this "insulation" of distant levels from
one another, but that's another discussion.)

It is perfectly reasonable to say that what a person does is in part
typical of what people like him/her do: that we act in ways that are in
many respects typical of our historical era, our culture(s), our
genders/sexualities, class fractions and trajectories, subculture(s), local
communities, etc. You do not have to take any of these categories seriously
as an entity in order to do comparisons. If you want to know what is
genuinely "individual" about someone, you first have to consider how they
intersect these typicalities, and then see what they do that is not in any
way category-typical or is even unique. We can talk about these relations
in terms of what is constrained or what is enabled, and we have to figure
out exactly how large-scale patterns are mediated down to our own
organismic level and actional timescale (via habitus, biographical
development, encounters with persons and artifacts, etc.). What comes down
also goes up: averaging over the many actions of many people, subject to
always already pre-existing higher level processes-in-progress and their
apparent structures, we get the constitution of larger-scale, longer-term
processes -- but not ex nihilo. It is not true that there is "nothing but"
individual action going on in the world, and much of that action is already
a part of larger-scale processes and patterns, whether we are aware of them
or not. I find it as much an oversimplification to do ethnomethodology or
conversation analysis without regard for cross-site typicalities and
inter-occasional connections, too extremely bottom-up, as I do efforts to
totally conflate macrosocial with microsocial.

Giddens and most sociologists on the left have seriously problems with
agency. They want to preserve individual agency in order to preserve
political progressivism, as much as those on the right want it in order to
preserve moral accountability. I think that Giddens takes some of the
shortcuts he does mainly because he does not want to end up with a top-down
theory. It is really hard, once you take a top-down perspective, to figure
out how individual actions could possibly change long-term, large-scale
social patterns. And of course they cannot. At least not directly and
immediately. They have to be mediated up through many levels of
organization: through groups, communities, institutions, artifacts,
discourses, political movements, etc. It is easy to trace the downward
influences because they have already happened! It is much harder to
_imagine_ the upward scenarios, because they must somehow come together
with distant actions in ways that it is hard to see as other than
unpredictable, and so uncontrollable. Social science was created as a tool
for (modernist) social engineering, but that goal may not be either
desirable or attainable.

The position described for Archer also seems to participate in the desire
for bottom-up agency. But it sounds like a too-simplified form of what I
would call emergentism. Yes, there is a certain autonomy to each emergent
level of ecosocial organization, that's why we call it a level. And yes
that means that contra Giddens we can't just smush the whole complex of
levels into a single unity of social practices. But it is much too extreme
to turn complex emergence and multi-level dynamics into a sort of
level-by-level-holism. The different levels are only dynamically
constituted (here again process ontology helps) from the interactions of
processes at the level(s) below, enabled/constrained by the
already-in-progress processes at the level(s) above. Each level is a sort
of contingent conspiracy between the levels above and below.

So what about the poor, old individual? or more to the point, what about
poor old individualist psychology? or even what to do about
individual-scale issues in a sociocultural psychology?

As you probably know, I personally long ago concluded that if psychology is
defined by its focus on the individual scale then it can't really operate
as an autonomous discipline. You can't take as your object just one 'level'
in the hierarchy; you have to constitute that level from above and below,
and probably what is traditionally included in psychology is already
several levels (from perception to activity to learning to development). I
can't formulate social/individual "separability" as an issue because
neither individuals nor society or culture can be more than casual words
for me. They certainly are not real entities that I must pay attention to,
and each names a conflation of many phenomena that need to be sorted out
according to timescale and extensional levels and specific forms of mutual
contextualization and co-constitution. Indidivual psychology is impossible,
but not because of Giddens-style inseparability.

What I do sometimes find to be a useful notion is "individuation", which is
the process by which a developing system acquires features that are allowed
by the typical developmental trajectory of its kind/species, but that are
not required as such. These are usually matters of fine differentiation,
more variations in How than differences in What. They are what constitutes
the uniqueness of each trajectory, while still falling within the
"envelope" of typical trajectories. An analysis of the individual level for
its own sake (idiographic, not nomothetic) could deal with the ways an
individual trajectory was unique (biography), but if we want to know what
are the typical ways in which trajectories vary in relation to each other,
we are again back to looking at levels above and below, and likewise if we
are interested in knowing how any given uniqueness may have mattered to
anyone else.

Emergence, at least in its complex systems version, is not a purely
bottom-up paradigm (though there are those who talk as if it were,
especially in computer science and some simulation approaches, but
certainly not in biology or even Prigogine's physics and chemistry), and it
does not imply totally autonomous phenomena at each level (though people
argue for this sometimes just as a way to reject reductionism). It is all
about inter-level or cross-level relationships, best conceived three at a
time (not two, as in macro/micro binarism). Most usefully it provides a lot
of rather new and specific models for inter-level relationships, and this
is what is really interesting about it. Unfortunately these new
perspectives do not at all fit neatly into the older philosophical
categories that are still used to classify theories and organize discussions.

JAY.

PS. The references in my last note also apply to points made here, but
chaps 5 and 6 in Textual Politics might also be useful for seing the use I
make of the others.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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