In the previous post, we began with a distinction that will remain important throughout this series.
An organism has its own system of biological value.
A difference can matter to that organism because of its consequences for the organism's own organisation.
When another organism enters the picture, something new becomes possible.
One organism's state or behaviour can alter the conditions under which another acts.
A consequential difference can function as a signal.
Repeated signalling can produce coordination.
And when such interactions become recurrently organised, something larger can emerge:
a collective form.
But we need to be precise about what this means.
A collective form is not necessarily a new organism with a shared value system.
The organisms retain their own value systems.
What changes is the organisation of the relations among them.
This is where eusocial insects become particularly revealing.
A colony is more than a crowd
An ant colony, bee colony or termite colony contains many organisms.
But simply adding the organisms together does not explain the colony.
What matters is the organisation of their relations.
Some individuals forage.
Some care for young.
Some defend the colony.
Some reproduce.
Others perform different tasks depending upon circumstances.
The pattern is not fixed in every detail.
Individuals respond to local conditions.
Tasks can change.
Signals circulate.
The environment changes.
The collective organisation is continually produced through interactions among organisms whose own behaviour remains value-sensitive.
The colony is not an organism in miniature.
It is a collective pattern generated through relations among organisms.
Halliday's example
This is especially interesting because Halliday himself used eusocial insects as an example when discussing social systems.
His formulation is that a social system is:
a biological system with the added component of "value".
At first, that might sound as though social organisms acquire value that biological organisms previously lacked.
But biological organisms already have value in Edelman's sense.
The more interesting interpretation is that value becomes organised relationally.
The biological value system remains located in the individual organism.
What changes is that the organism's behaviour now enters recurrent relations with the value-sensitive behaviour of other organisms.
Social organisation emerges from those couplings.
Signals become part of a system
Ants, bees and termites coordinate through signals of many kinds.
Chemical traces.
Tactile contact.
Posture.
Movement.
Changes in local conditions.
These need not be signs in the symbolic sense.
They matter because they engage the value-sensitive organisation of other organisms and alter their dispositions.
A pheromone trail can alter where another ant moves.
An alarm signal can engage the defensive organisation of nearby individuals.
A change in brood conditions can alter subsequent activity.
The basic relation is therefore not simply:
signal → response
but:
signal → engagement of another organism's value system → value-sensitive response
That distinction matters.
The receiving organism is not a passive mechanism triggered by an external button.
Its response depends upon its own organisation and circumstances.
And that response can itself become consequential to other organisms.
Coordination becomes recurrent
A single signal can coordinate a response.
Repeated signalling can produce a pattern.
One organism acts.
Another's value system is engaged.
The second responds.
Its response changes the conditions encountered by the first or by others.
Those organisms respond in turn.
The relation develops a history.
Certain pathways become more probable.
Others become less likely.
The participants become coupled because each organism's value-sensitive responses alter the conditions encountered by the others.
Thus:
individual value systems become coupled through recurrent interaction.
This is the foundation of collective form.
From event to pattern
A signal is an event.
Coordination is a relation among events.
A collective form is a persistent pattern produced through recurrent relations.
Once a pattern becomes established, it begins to influence the very interactions that reproduce it.
A pheromone trail laid down by one ant changes the behaviour of others.
Their activity alters the trail.
A nest structure changes possibilities for movement.
The state of the brood changes patterns of activity.
The resulting organisation feeds back into subsequent behaviour.
We therefore have:
interaction → collective pattern → changed local possibilities → further interaction
The pattern is emergent, but it is also causally consequential.
Distributed memory
This gives collective organisation a kind of distributed memory.
Earlier interactions leave traces.
Those traces affect later interactions.
A chemical trail persists.
A structure remains.
A change in local conditions alters subsequent responses.
The collective therefore does not need a central representation of its own history.
Its history can be embodied in the environment and relations through which participants subsequently act.
This will become important when we later think about social structure.
Differentiated participation
Eusocial systems are particularly interesting because collective organisation becomes differentiated.
Not every organism participates in the same way.
Some forage.
Some nurse.
Some defend.
Some reproduce.
The important question is not whether these are "roles" in the human symbolic sense.
It is that different patterns of participation have different consequences for the other organisms in the colony.
A forager's activity changes the conditions encountered by others.
A defender's activity changes the conditions of those it protects.
Care of brood affects the future conditions under which other organisms operate.
Reproductive activity changes the demographic organisation of the colony.
Each organism remains organised around its own value system.
But its activity becomes embedded in a network of consequences for others.
Social mattering is not a collective feeling
This distinction is essential.
We should not imagine that the colony itself experiences a single undifferentiated value.
Rather:
social mattering is the organisation of individual mattering through relations among organisms.
The organisms have their own systems of value.
Their states and activities alter one another's conditions.
Those consequential relations become recurrent and structured.
The social level therefore lies in the organisation of the relations, not in the emergence of a collective subject that possesses values independently of its participants.
This is the sense in which we can speak of social value.
Value becomes structural
Halliday's formulation now becomes particularly interesting.
If social value is manifested in forms of structure, then structure can be understood as one way in which relations of mattering become organised and durable.
A social structure is therefore not simply a collection of positions.
It is a pattern of consequential relations.
Some participants depend upon others.
Some relations are reciprocal.
Others are strongly asymmetric.
Some pathways connect many participants.
Others are relatively isolated.
The structure is the organised form taken by these relations.
The collective organisation acquires capacities
Although the collective is not itself an organismic value system in the sense we have given to that term, the organisation can nevertheless possess capacities that no individual participant possesses.
A colony can regulate its environment.
Redistribute labour.
Respond collectively to threats.
Alter the structure of its nest.
Adapt patterns of activity to changing conditions.
These are collective capacities.
They emerge from the relations among participants.
But they feed back into those participants by changing the conditions under which they act.
This is a key feature of emergence:
the collective pattern is generated by individual interactions, then becomes part of the environment of those interactions.
Why this matters for social structure
Human social structure is obviously much more elaborate.
Humans have language.
Institutions.
Explicit rules.
Narratives.
Symbols.
Law.
But these later developments should not obscure the more basic substrate.
Before a role can be named, someone must occupy a position in a pattern of consequential relations.
Before an institution can be symbolically represented, behaviour must already be organised in some recurrent way.
Before a social value can become an ideology, something must already matter within the relations of the group.
The colony therefore provides a useful lower boundary for our investigation.
It shows that social organisation does not require symbolic meaning.
Structure without signs
This is where our distinction between signal and sign becomes especially useful.
A colony can coordinate through signals.
Its participants can engage one another's value systems.
Responses can become coupled.
Patterns can recur.
Roles can differentiate.
Collective capacities can emerge.
None of this requires signs in the human symbolic sense.
The sign therefore does not mark the beginning of sociality.
It marks a later transformation of an already organised social world.
This will eventually allow us to connect Halliday's social and semiotic levels without collapsing them.
From collective form to social structure
We can now sharpen another distinction.
A collective form is a pattern produced by interacting organisms.
A social structure is a recurrent organisation of consequential relations that becomes part of the conditions under which future interactions occur.
The difference is one of persistence and self-reproduction.
A flock may form a collective shape and dissolve.
A colony's patterns of organisation can persist across generations.
Human institutions can persist across centuries.
Yet persistence need not imply immobility.
Structure can be continually reproduced through changing interactions.
It can be stable through change.
Dynamics remain essential
This means that we should not imagine social structure as a static arrangement.
A colony changes with food availability.
Threats alter patterns of defence.
The development of brood changes labour.
Seasonal conditions alter activity.
The structure is continually reorganised.
So we need two related concepts:
structure — the organisation of relations;
dynamics — the ways in which that organisation changes over time.
This distinction will become important when we introduce topology.
A topology will describe relational organisation.
Its dynamics will describe trajectories through that organisation.
Local mattering, collective form
We can now formulate the core mechanism more carefully.
Each organism has its own value system.
Its state and behaviour matter to other organisms when they alter their conditions of action.
Signals mediate some of these interactions by engaging other organisms' value systems.
Responses become coupled.
Repeated coupling produces persistent patterns.
Those patterns become collective organisation.
The collective organisation then changes the conditions under which individuals act.
Thus:
individual mattering → relational coupling → collective form → changed individual possibilities
The collective does not replace the individual value systems.
It organises their interactions.
The topology begins to acquire an object
We can now see what our proposed topology might eventually describe.
It will not be a map of abstract values.
Nor a ranking of what people consider important.
It will concern the relational structure through which individual value systems become socially coupled.
We might eventually ask:
Who affects whose conditions?
Where are dependencies?
Which relations are reciprocal?
Which are asymmetric?
Where do several pathways converge?
Which parts of the network are densely connected?
Where are the boundaries?
Where can small perturbations propagate?
These are questions about the shape of relational organisation.
A topology is not a hierarchy
This distinction matters.
A topology is concerned with relations such as proximity, connectivity, boundaries and possible transitions.
Two participants may be socially "close" because many relations connect them, even if they occupy very different roles.
Two positions may be far apart because moving between them requires extensive reorganisation.
A boundary may separate one region of mattering from another.
A small change may produce a large reconfiguration if the system is near a critical transition.
None of this requires ranking.
The topology concerns relational structure, not a scale from high to low.
From colony to human society
The analogy must remain cautious.
Human society cannot be reduced to eusocial organisation.
Humans have vastly more differentiated repertoires.
We can represent our relations.
We can formulate rules.
We can imagine alternatives.
We can argue over what should matter.
We can redesign our institutions.
But these symbolic capacities operate upon a substrate of actual relations among organisms.
People matter to one another through dependence, care, authority, cooperation, exchange, competition, recognition and many other relations.
The symbolic layer can transform those relations.
It does not create the entire substrate from nothing.
Adaptation and continuity
This also returns us to Edelman.
Biological value is connected to the organism's continued organisation.
At the social level, recurrent patterns of relations can contribute to the persistence or transformation of the collective.
Some forms of organisation support continuity.
Others create vulnerability.
Some become useful under one set of conditions and maladaptive under another.
Social structure therefore has an adaptive history.
It reflects what forms of relation have enabled a collective to persist, reproduce and respond to changing conditions.
But adaptation can also require transformation.
A structure can preserve itself by changing.
That tension will become important later.
The beginnings of topology
We can now see why the topology idea matters.
A social system is not just a population.
It is an organised pattern of relations among participants.
Those relations can have:
density,
asymmetry,
reciprocity,
boundaries,
pathways,
persistence,
instability.
They can change over time.
They can reorganise suddenly or gradually.
The topology is therefore a way of asking about the shape of social mattering-relations.
We have not yet constructed such a topology.
But we now know what kind of thing it would have to describe.
Before affiliation
It is tempting to begin with familiar categories:
family,
class,
profession,
political movement,
nation.
But those categories are already symbolic and institutional elaborations.
Our question is earlier.
How do stable patterns of consequential relations arise in the first place?
How do they persist?
How do they differentiate?
How do participants become differently positioned within them?
Only after answering those questions should we ask how people come to recognise themselves as belonging to particular social formations.
Before meaning
The same principle applies to meaning.
A social relation can matter before it is explicitly represented.
A dependency can exist before it is named.
A role can operate before it is described.
A pattern of authority can be reproduced before anyone writes a theory of authority.
Meaning can later construe these relations.
Halliday's formulation therefore becomes particularly significant:
“Semiotic systems are social systems where value has been further transformed into meaning.”
The transformation presupposes the social organisation of value.
Meaning arrives into a world already structured by mattering.
What we have established
We began with organisms whose behaviour is organised by their own systems of biological value.
Their consequential differences can function as signals.
Repeated signalling can produce coordination.
Coordination can become recurrent coupling.
Recurrent coupling can generate collective form.
When those patterns become persistent, differentiated and self-reproducing, they become forms of social structure.
The result is:
individual value → signal → coordination → recurrent coupling → collective form → social structure
And social mattering can now be understood more precisely:
the organisation of individual mattering through recurrent relations among participants.
That is the substrate from which our topology will emerge.
The next question
We have reached the point at which "structure" can no longer be treated simply as a collection of positions.
If social structure is an organised pattern of mattering-relations, it must have a shape.
Some relations are near to one another.
Some are distant.
Some form clusters.
Some mark boundaries.
Some pathways are easy to move through.
Others are difficult.
Some configurations are stable.
Others unstable.
So the next question is:
What would it mean to describe the shape of social mattering as a topology?
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