A living organism does not inhabit an indifferent world.
Some things support its continued organisation.
Some threaten it.
Some changes make action possible.
Others make action urgent.
Some conditions can be ignored.
Others cannot.
Life is therefore already selective.
This is the point at which we can begin thinking about value.
Not value in the sense of money, morality or explicit judgement.
Something more basic:
the world matters differently to an organism according to the consequences its differences have for that organism.
Gerald Edelman's notion of biological value gives us a useful way of thinking about this. A living system is organised so that some states have greater significance for its continuing organisation than others.
Before anything is named as valuable, something can already matter.
And this gives us our starting point.
A world of differential value
Imagine an organism encountering a change in its environment.
The change may be tiny.
A temperature difference.
A chemical trace.
A variation in light.
A sound.
A movement.
What matters is not the physical magnitude of the difference by itself.
What matters is what the difference does.
One change may have no consequence.
Another may alter behaviour.
Another may affect the organism's capacity to maintain itself.
The organism therefore does not inhabit a world in which all differences are equivalent.
Its organisation makes distinctions among them.
Some become consequential.
Some become negligible.
The living system is already situated within a field of differential value.
We can call this mattering.
Mattering before meaning
This gives us an important distinction.
An organism can respond to something that means nothing to it.
A temperature does not have to symbolise anything before it can matter.
A predator does not have to represent danger in words before its presence affects behaviour.
A chemical substance does not need a name before an organism can respond to it.
So:
mattering does not require meaning.
This is not to say that mattering is simple.
A living system can be extraordinarily sensitive to subtle differences and can integrate information from many sources before responding.
But the significance involved is still different from symbolic meaning.
A difference matters because of its consequences within an organised system.
It does not yet have to mean something.
When one organism enters the picture
Now suppose another organism appears.
The situation changes.
The second organism is not simply another object in the environment.
It can itself act.
Its behaviour can change.
It can move, approach, withdraw, compete, cooperate or respond.
Its actions can alter the possibilities available to the first organism.
And the first organism can do the same to the second.
Something new has emerged:
a difference can now matter between organisms.
A movement may cause another organism to retreat.
A sound may attract another.
A sudden change of direction may alter the behaviour of those nearby.
One organism's state becomes part of another organism's conditions of action.
Mattering has become relational.
From value to signalling
This is where the distinction between mattering and meaning needs another term.
A difference produced by one organism can matter to another without meaning anything symbolically.
When that difference changes the receiver's behaviour or disposition, it can function as a signal.
A movement can signal danger.
A posture can signal aggression or submission.
A sound can signal the presence of food.
A change in direction can signal an impending change in the group's movement.
The signal need not represent anything.
Its essential property is that it is consequential within an interaction.
We can therefore distinguish:
mattering: a difference has consequences for an organised system;
signal: a difference that matters operates between systems and alters the disposition of another system;
sign: a form participates in a symbolic system and becomes available for meaning.
The third does not simply extend the second by degree.
It introduces a different kind of organisation.
We will return to that much later.
For now, the important point is that signalling belongs to the prehistory of meaning without itself being meaning.
The flock
Birds provide an elegant example.
A flock wheeling through the air can form extraordinarily complex shapes.
There is no need to imagine a leader drawing the shape in advance.
Each bird responds to nearby birds and to changing environmental conditions.
Its behaviour changes because others are moving.
Their movements change because it is moving.
The collective pattern emerges.
The important point for us is not whether a flock is already a "society" in the full sense.
It is that local, value-sensitive interactions can generate large-scale organisation.
The movement of one bird can function as a signal to others.
The others respond.
Their responses become signals in turn.
A dynamic collective pattern emerges from the circulation of consequential differences.
The bait ball
A threatened school of fish offers another example.
A predator approaches.
The fish respond.
They change direction.
They cluster.
They spread.
They compress.
The local response of one fish alters the possibilities available to its neighbours, which respond in turn.
The resulting bait ball is therefore not simply a collection of individual reactions.
It is an emergent configuration produced through signalling and coupled response.
Again, there need be no symbolic representation of the whole.
The collective organisation can arise from local relations among organisms that respond to what matters.
The remarkable thing about collective form
These examples reveal a principle that will become central to our investigation.
A collective pattern need not be imposed from above.
It can be generated from below through recurrent local relations.
No bird needs to possess the complete shape of the flock.
No fish needs to know the geometry of the bait ball.
The large-scale form emerges from interactions among organisms whose own behaviour is already organised by differential value.
The collective does not exist only in the individuals.
Nor does it float above them independently.
It emerges between them.
But is this already society?
We should be careful.
A flock and a bait ball are not automatically equivalent to a human social system.
Their organisation differs.
Their repertoires differ.
Their histories differ.
Their relations of dependence and coordination differ.
The question is therefore not:
Are birds and fish secretly doing politics?
It is:
What can these systems teach us about how collective organisation can emerge from value-sensitive interaction?
That question is narrower and more useful.
Recurrence changes the relation
A single interaction is an event.
If similar interactions recur, something else can happen.
One organism's action repeatedly affects another.
Certain responses become more probable.
Certain pathways of interaction become familiar.
Some patterns are reinforced.
Others disappear.
The relation acquires a history.
A difference that matters once can become a difference that matters reliably.
This is the beginning of structure.
From signalling to coordination
Repeated signalling can produce coordination.
One organism acts.
Another responds.
The first adjusts.
The second responds again.
The relation develops a pattern.
The pattern can stabilise without being explicitly represented by any participant.
This is important because it shows that organised collective behaviour does not require a symbolic account of itself.
Coordination can precede meaning.
A group can become organised around what matters before it has a symbolic theory of what it is doing.
Social mattering
This is the point at which we can begin to use mattering in a specifically social sense.
An organism's biological value concerns the differential consequences of states for its own organisation.
Social mattering arises when value is distributed through relations among organisms.
What matters to one participant partly depends upon what another participant does.
One organism's action can sustain, constrain, protect, threaten or enable another.
The significance is therefore no longer located solely within an organism.
It is organised between participants.
Halliday's social system
This gives us a useful way into Halliday's taxonomy.
Halliday describes a social system as:
a biological system with the added component of "value".
At first sight, this might sound as though social organisms somehow acquire value that biological organisms previously lacked.
But that cannot be quite right.
Biological organisms already possess value in Edelman's sense.
The more interesting interpretation is that, at the social level, value is further organised through relations among organisms.
The added feature is not value appearing from nowhere.
It is the emergence of a new organisation of value.
Social value is manifested in forms of social structure.
From individual value to relational value
We can therefore make a provisional distinction.
At the biological level:
value concerns differential consequences for an organism's own organisation.
At the social level:
mattering concerns differential consequences within relations among organisms.
The distinction should not be made too rigidly.
An organism's own value system remains active in social interaction.
But the social system introduces another layer.
What matters to one organism increasingly depends upon the actions and states of others.
Value has become relationally distributed.
Structure begins in recurrence
When relations of mattering recur, they can stabilise.
Some become expected.
Some become avoided.
Some become reinforced.
Some become asymmetric.
Some become reciprocal.
A relation that persists becomes part of the conditions under which future interaction occurs.
The past has entered the organisation of the present.
This is how structure can emerge without first being designed as a structure.
Dynamic structure
We should therefore resist imagining social structure as a frozen arrangement of positions.
A flock is constantly changing.
A bait ball is constantly changing.
A colony changes as conditions change.
Human groups change as people enter, leave, cooperate, compete and reorganise their relations.
Structure may persist through change.
A stable pattern need not be static.
It can be a trajectory through a changing field of possibilities.
That observation will become important when we later consider topology.
Local relations, collective form
A local interaction can therefore have collective consequences.
One organism changes position.
Others respond.
Their responses alter the configuration.
The new configuration changes what each organism can do next.
This gives us a recursive loop:
local mattering → collective configuration → changed local possibilities
The collective pattern feeds back into the participants that generated it.
This is one of the defining characteristics of emergent organisation.
The topology begins to appear
We can now say, provisionally, what we mean by a topology of mattering.
Not a map of where people are.
Not a ranking of values from high to low.
Not a list of social groups.
Rather:
a topology of mattering would describe the relational organisation formed by patterns of consequence among participants in a collective system.
Who depends upon whom?
Where are relations reciprocal?
Where are they asymmetric?
Where do several relations converge?
Where are the boundaries?
Which pathways of interaction are well established?
Which are difficult?
Where can a small change propagate through the system?
These are questions about relational structure.
Before affiliation
It is tempting to begin social analysis with named categories:
family,
tribe,
class,
profession,
political party,
religion,
nation.
But these are already highly elaborated forms of social organisation.
Our present concern is more basic.
Before there are named affiliations, there are relations through which organisms matter to one another.
Those relations recur.
They stabilise.
They differentiate.
Eventually they may become recognised as forms of membership or affiliation.
We therefore want to begin before affiliation.
Before meaning
We also want to remain before meaning, at least for the moment.
A relation can matter socially without having a symbolic account.
A colony can organise labour without possessing a theory of labour.
A flock can coordinate without naming the flock.
Human beings can develop dependencies before they formulate them explicitly.
Meaning arrives into a world in which social mattering is already organised.
This is why Halliday's later formulation is so important:
“Semiotic systems are social systems where value has been further transformed into meaning.”
The semiotic level does not replace the social.
It transforms something already present.
Signal is not yet sign
We can now see why the distinction we introduced earlier will remain important throughout this series.
A signal can coordinate action.
A sign can mean.
The signal belongs to the organisation of mattering between systems.
The sign belongs to a symbolic system.
A flock can coordinate through signals without possessing a symbolic meaning system.
An insect colony can organise immensely complex exchanges without requiring language in the human sense.
Human social systems can contain signals and signs simultaneously.
The emergence of signs is therefore not the beginning of sociality.
It is a transformation within an already organised social world.
What we have established
We began with biological value.
Living systems differentiate among consequential conditions.
Then organisms interact.
Their actions alter one another's possibilities.
Some consequential differences function as signals.
Repeated signalling can produce coordination.
Repeated coordination can stabilise exchanges and relations.
Those relations can become an organisation of social mattering.
And social mattering can generate collective structures that feed back into the possibilities of the participants.
The movement so far is therefore:
individual value → consequential difference → signal → coordination → social mattering → emergent collective form
We have not yet reached the semiotic level.
But we can now see why it is possible.
The next problem
Collective organisation can be transient, recurrent or highly differentiated.
Some systems involve temporary coordination.
Others develop persistent exchanges.
Others develop specialised roles and durable dependencies.
Eusocial insects are particularly revealing because their colonies display elaborate organisation of labour, resource exchange, protection and reproduction.
Halliday himself used eusocial insects as an example of social systems.
They therefore provide a natural next step in our investigation.
The question is no longer merely how organisms respond to one another.
It is:
How does an exchange of value become a durable form of social structure?
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