I hope John and other read me not as saying that human social institutions
ARE machine-like, but rather as I intended only that their social
technologies follow a machine-like logic and that their aspirations and
conditions of sustainability and explicit strategies for expansion and
survival are machine-like, and so, as John rightly says, very contrary to
the messiness of human behavior and organic environments.
I would not want to be read as following those cognitivist theories which
seem to say that thinking itself IS like what "experts" try to present
their thinking as LOOKING like (rational, systematic, deductive, etc.), or
any sociology that models how human communities really WORK as following a
rigid machine logic. We are sloppy to the core -- and that is our STRENGTH!
But it is not our POLICY. Or rather not the policy that guides
institutional decision-making, allocation of resources, exercise of power,
at least in official ways that very often are quite important (which is not
to say that real institutions/communities don't always act also in
unofficial ways and need to do so to get anything done at all).
YES, we need alternative models of what was once called more "organic"
views of social institutions (and equally of cognition, or more flexibly,
of meaning-making practices and their bodily-environmental bases) ....
today we have "fuzzy" models, and as John knows "neural network" models,
and other sorts of complex-system models in which there are many roads to
every Rome, and many variants of every Rome on arriving there(s). This is
great for understanding how these systems really do work.
But that is just what throws into relief for me the contradiction with
institutions own theories and policies regarding how they should work and
what they should do in their own interests ... which is much more to act
with the machine logic driven goals that aim at predictability and control,
inside and out.
John is right again that small-scale institutions like the family or the
friendship peer-group tend to operate in ways that put less emphasis on
predictability and control. And this is where the issue of SCALE comes in.
At small scales like this one doesn't need much predictability and control;
we can cope and find ways to improvise. The timescale, spacescale, and
number scale (of people) is well within our range of tolerances as
individual humans. It is when we try to operate as members of much larger
organizations that we operate our more rigid social technologies
(explicitly, and smooth their rough edges and blunt their contradictions
with informal, implicit "looser" behaviors).
The problem I am pointing to comes as scale increases to the point where
the official logic of the institutions manages to so hem us in with
regulations and obstacles that we lose the necessary "wiggle room" that in
fact is what keeps the institutions running in the first place (and very
unofficially and sub rosa).
The fuller analysis is more complicated, since there are additional scales
to take into account. There are also issues of "coupling" -- how many other
systems' behaviors impinge in important ways on ours? if only a few, we
need less predictability and control, and can manage improvisationally ...
but when there are too many, and their interactions are likely to
constantly surprise us with challenges to our survivability, what do we do?
Modernist institutions try to hyper-regulate. That strategy will fail,
catastrophically, at both lower levels (people too hemmed in to help the
institution survive) and higher ones (which require more unpredictability
and wiggle room from the institutions themselves in order to sustain
organization at still higher levels, the ones that are becoming more
important now for perhaps the first time in human history, the real
globalization).
What we need are social technologies of "fault tolerance" rather than the
modernist ones of "fault avoidance". That's perhaps a subject for another
message, however.
JAY.
At 09:45 AM 7/31/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Jay, you say:
>
>"Modernist institutions belong to the Machine Age; they live through
>a cybernetic technology of predictability and control, internally as
>also in their requirements for controlled and predictable
>environments."
>
>The problem, surely, is that they can't have either condition.
>Institutions composed of human habit and patterned practice cannot
>internally regular enough to fulfill the requirements of a cybernetic
>model. Nor can "the world" be made so regular. Whatever the world may
>be like behind our representations of it, the consequences of our
>actions leads to the conclusion that it resists interpretation as a
>cybernetic/clockwork model.
---------------------------
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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