Martin Packer raises interesting questions from Habermas, and more
generally about 'systems theory'.
As so often, this term means a lot of different things in different
scholarly traditions. Habermas is involved in a longterm debate (talk about
time scales!) with Luhmann in Germany (who will rule German sociology, more
or less), and Luhmann is the systems theory guy. Luhmann has many
interesting ideas, but his versions of ST are a little too cybernetic for
my taste, a little too much emphasis on the pathways of interactions, and
on goal-dependence, with too little emergence, self-organization. Luhmann
does use some semiotics and notions of mediation, but they seem later
developments. Habermas uses the standard antidote to formalism, which is
phenomenology (lifeworld). I agree this is needed for a better balanced mix
in the theory-kit. Narrative is the phenomenological answer (historically,
recently) to more formal semiotics of discourse. We've been over this
ground already.
Latour also offers a critique of systems theory, which I agree with, that
the standard versions don't allow for the full complexity, and especially
the historical contingency of 'networks' and their over-time development
(and dissipation).
Bourdieu has a nice mix of phenomenological and system theory, with more of
a developmental rather than a cybernetic emphasis (habitus). But he does
not get down to the micro-event level, and has neither narrative nor other
semiotic discourse or event analysis tools built in. Latour has wanted to
integrate semiotic mediations but his collaborator in this area died very
young and since then things have wandered a bit.
My own model continue to evolve and is not meant to be tightly coherent,
but more a bricolage of compatible, but strictly logically consistent,
theory tools, of which the most general one across scales is the notion of
an ecosocial system, which can be construed more like a Latourian network
than like a Luhmannian cybernetic system, and in which semiotic mediation
is critical to system dynamics (see chapter 5 of _Textual Politics_).
The terminology of my 'puzzle pieces' was not meant to be exclusive to any
particular theory type, but to seek to guide the mix and match of tools.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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