We have followed biological organisation downward and then upward again.
A bacterium can possess biological value without relationship.
Organisms can become significant to one another through signalling.
Formerly independent organisms can become integrated into larger individuals.
Distributed processes can produce collective form.
Cells can differentiate into components of a new organism.
Colonial organisms can become so interdependent that individuality itself becomes difficult to locate.
Yet none of these transitions necessarily gives us social mattering.
So where is the threshold?
When does biological value become socially organised?
Interaction is not enough
Organisms affect one another everywhere.
One eats another.
One shades another.
One releases a chemical.
One competes for a resource.
These relations can be consequential without being social.
The crucial question is whether the relationship itself becomes part of a persistent organisation of participation.
Another organism is no longer merely something that affects me.
It becomes someone whose behaviour forms part of the conditions under which I participate.
That is a stronger relation.
Eusocial insects give us the clearer case
Ants, bees and termites provide especially striking examples because their colonies exhibit differentiated roles, persistent coordination and extensive interdependence among members.
An ant responding to a pheromone is still responding through its own value system.
But the pheromone is produced by another organism.
Its effect alters the receiving ant's activity.
That activity affects other ants.
The pattern recurs.
The colony therefore develops stable pathways through which the activities of individuals become mutually consequential.
We have moved beyond isolated signalling.
The relation itself has become organised.
From signal to social structure
Our sequence can now be sharpened:
value → signal → coupled response → recurrent relation → social structure
The pheromone remains a signal, not a sign.
The ant need not symbolically construe what another ant is doing.
But the colony has acquired an organisation in which individual behaviour is continually shaped by the behaviour of other participants.
That is the beginning of social mattering.
The individual still matters
This is important.
We should not say that the colony has somehow replaced the individual value systems of its members.
Each ant remains an organism.
Its own organisation still matters to it.
Social mattering is built from those individual value systems.
The novelty lies in their recurrent coupling.
A participant becomes consequential to another participant.
The relation becomes part of the organisation.
From collective coordination to social organisation
We can now distinguish two things that are easy to conflate.
A flock can form through local interactions.
A bait ball can arise through coordinated responses.
A swarm can change direction without a leader.
These are examples of collective coordination.
A social system adds something further:
persistent relations among differentiated participants.
The participants do not merely respond together.
Their relationships become part of the structure they inhabit.
Repertoire begins here
This is also where our earlier concept of repertoire becomes especially useful.
An ant's repertoire is not simply a list of possible movements.
It includes ways of participating in the colony's organisation.
Different circumstances elicit different patterns.
Repeated interactions stabilise expectations.
The participant becomes adapted not only to its physical environment but to the relational environment constituted by other participants.
The repertoire is therefore beginning to acquire a social dimension.
The colony becomes a topology
Now our language of topology becomes more than metaphor.
Some participants occupy central positions.
Some interactions connect distant regions.
Some pathways are densely populated.
Others are sparse.
Some relations are stable.
Others temporary.
The colony acquires a relational shape.
Its topology is generated by the ways in which individual mattering becomes organised through participation.
But social mattering is not just mutual usefulness
Two organisms can be useful to one another without forming a social system.
The stronger criterion is recurrence.
The same kinds of relationships are reproduced.
Roles stabilise.
Expectations emerge.
Patterns persist beyond individual encounters.
The organisation therefore acquires a history.
Social structure is not simply interaction repeated.
It is recurrent interaction becoming organised.
The human case is an elaboration, not a new beginning
Once we see the threshold this way, human sociality becomes easier to place.
Human societies add enormous complexity:
language;
institutions;
norms;
identities;
symbolic categories.
But they do not invent social mattering from nothing.
They elaborate a much older biological possibility:
other participants can become consequential to the organisation of my own life.
Meaning comes later.
Social mattering comes first.
From mattering to meaning
We can now see more clearly what Halliday's formulation implies.
A social system is a biological system in which value has become socially organised.
A semiotic system then further transforms that value into meaning.
The sequence becomes:
biological value
↓
relational significance
↓
social mattering
↓
meaning
This is not a ladder in which one level abolishes the previous one.
Each new level reorganises the possibilities of the one beneath it.
The threshold is gradual
We should not expect a single moment at which biology suddenly becomes society.
Different organisms will occupy different points along a continuum of organisation.
Some have transient coordination.
Some have persistent associations.
Some have differentiated roles.
Some have complex interdependence.
The useful question is therefore not:
"Is this organism social?"
but:
"What degree and kind of relational organisation does this organism instantiate?"
That question lets biology remain more interesting than our categories.
What the social threshold gives us
We can now return to the title of the series.
The natural history of mattering is not simply the history of things becoming more intelligent.
It is the history of value becoming organised at increasingly complex levels.
At first, what matters is internal to an organism.
Then another organism becomes significant.
Then relations become recurrent.
Then a social topology emerges.
Eventually, those relations can become symbolically construed as meaning.
The path is therefore:
value → relation → organisation → social mattering → meaning
And now the plants become interesting
We have reached the threshold from another direction.
We know what social mattering looks like in animals with elaborate collective organisation.
But what happens in organisms that do not have nervous systems, brains or anything resembling animal sociality?
Plants can respond to their environments.
They can alter growth.
They can exchange chemical signals.
They can form intimate associations with other organisms.
Trees can persist for decades or centuries, participating in ecological networks whose timescales are radically different from ours.
So the next question is not whether plants are secretly animals without brains.
It is:
What does relational significance look like in a form of life whose organisation is radically different from ours?
That takes us to plants.
Plants Without Nervous Systems
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