We have now reached the point at which we can ask what, precisely, we mean by social structure.
We began with individual organisms, each organised by its own system of biological value.
A difference produced by one organism can matter to another.
Such a difference can function as a signal.
The receiving organism's value system is engaged.
Its response changes the conditions encountered by others.
When such interactions recur, they can become coordinated patterns.
And when those patterns persist and differentiate, collective forms become social structures.
This gives us a provisional description:
social structure is an organisation of relations among value-organised participants.
But that description leaves something out.
Relations have a shape.
Some are close.
Some are distant.
Some are reciprocal.
Some are asymmetric.
Some connect many participants.
Others connect only a few.
Some are stable.
Some are fragile.
Some changes propagate widely.
Others remain local.
If social structure is an organisation of mattering-relations, then perhaps we should ask:
What is the shape of mattering?
That is where topology enters our investigation.
From landscape to topology
We have sometimes spoken informally of a value landscape.
It is a useful image.
We can imagine different things mattering differently, with participants situated in different regions of a field of significance.
But a landscape can tempt us into thinking in terms of locations and quantities.
Topology suggests something else.
A topology is concerned less with how much of something there is than with how things are related.
Proximity.
Connectivity.
Boundaries.
Continuity.
Paths.
Regions.
Transitions.
For our purposes, the important question is therefore not:
How much does this participant value X?
but:
How is this participant related to others through what matters?
The object of inquiry is the structure of the relations.
Mattering is relational
Suppose organism A's behaviour affects organism B.
B responds according to its own value system.
That response affects A or another participant.
The important feature is not simply that A and B have values.
It is that their value-sensitive organisations have become coupled.
A's possibilities depend partly upon B.
B's possibilities depend partly upon A.
Repeated coupling creates a relation.
The relation can be weak or strong.
Temporary or persistent.
Symmetrical or asymmetrical.
Central or peripheral.
A topology of mattering would therefore begin with these connections.
Not all relations are equal
Consider two participants who occasionally interact.
Their relation may be consequential, but only weakly integrated into their wider activity.
Now consider two organisms whose survival depends heavily upon one another's behaviour.
The relation is very different.
The consequences are stronger.
The interaction is more recurrent.
More future possibilities depend upon maintaining it.
The two participants are, in a topological sense, more tightly connected.
This gives us a useful distinction:
social proximity need not mean physical proximity.
Two people can be physically distant but deeply interdependent.
Two people can be side by side but socially unrelated.
Topology allows us to describe the structure of dependence without confusing it with spatial distance.
Reciprocity and asymmetry
Some mattering-relations are reciprocal.
A influences B.
B influences A.
Others are strongly asymmetric.
One participant's actions substantially affect another's possibilities, while the reverse effect is much weaker.
Parent and offspring provide one kind of asymmetry.
Dominance relations provide another.
A specialist whose activity affects an entire organisation may occupy another.
Asymmetry does not by itself make a relation pathological or unjust.
It simply tells us something about its structure.
The topology therefore needs to accommodate direction, not merely connection.
Dependency
Dependency may be one of the most important dimensions.
Suppose B can maintain an important part of its activity only because A performs some recurrent function.
Then A occupies a particular structural position.
If A disappears, B's possibilities change sharply.
The relation has high consequence.
Conversely, A may depend little upon B.
The relation is asymmetric.
A topology of mattering would therefore need to represent not only that A and B are connected, but how their possibilities depend upon one another.
This is where social structure begins to become more than a network diagram.
Dense regions
Now imagine a cluster of participants whose possibilities are tightly interconnected.
Many of their activities matter to one another.
Changes in one part of the cluster affect many others.
They share practices.
Resources circulate.
Expectations develop.
The group has become a dense region of mattering.
Families may form such regions.
Workplaces.
Communities.
Professional networks.
Institutions.
But the topology need not presume that every member is equally connected to every other.
The internal structure may contain centres, peripheries, bridges and boundaries.
Boundaries
Every organised system has some way of distinguishing what belongs within it from what lies beyond it.
A boundary need not be a physical wall.
It can be a pattern of mattering.
Inside the boundary, actions have many recurrent consequences.
Outside it, those consequences may be weaker or differently organised.
A colony distinguishes inside from outside.
A family distinguishes members from strangers.
A profession distinguishes participants through competence and role.
A nation distinguishes citizens from outsiders.
These boundaries can be porous.
They can change.
They can overlap.
But they are still relational structures.
Bridges
Some participants connect regions that would otherwise be relatively distant.
They move between groups.
They carry information.
Resources.
Practices.
They may belong meaningfully to more than one social domain.
Such participants can act as bridges in the topology.
A bridge can be structurally important precisely because its disappearance disconnects regions that were previously linked.
Again, this is not simply about physical movement.
It is about the circulation of consequential relations.
Bottlenecks
The reverse is also possible.
A system may depend heavily upon one small point of connection.
A particular participant, role or institution may mediate many pathways.
If that connection fails, many other relations are disrupted.
The topology therefore contains not only dense regions and bridges but bottlenecks.
This suggests that social structure has something like a relational geometry of vulnerability.
Some parts are robust.
Others are fragile.
Some disturbances remain local.
Others propagate.
The propagation of change
This brings us to an especially important property of a topology.
A change in one place can alter possibilities elsewhere.
A small disturbance can remain local.
Or it can spread through densely coupled relations.
A workplace can absorb the loss of one participant.
Or a highly specialised participant may be difficult to replace.
A shortage in one part of a system can propagate through dependencies.
A change in one institution can affect several others.
The topology therefore describes not merely who is connected, but how consequences can travel.
From structure to dynamics
So far we have mostly been describing a structure.
But social systems are not static.
Relations change.
Participants enter and leave.
Dependencies strengthen or weaken.
Boundaries move.
New connections form.
Old ones disappear.
A topology therefore gives us a map of possible and actual relations, but we also need to know how the system moves through that relational space.
This is where dynamics enters.
We can distinguish:
topology — the organisation of possible relational configurations;
dynamics — the trajectories by which the system moves among them.
A social formation can therefore retain a recognisable structure while continuously changing its state.
Stability
Some regions of a social topology are relatively stable.
Once established, the relations tend to reproduce themselves.
People know what is expected.
Resources circulate predictably.
Roles are familiar.
A change in one part is absorbed without reorganising the whole.
Such a configuration may function as an attractor in a loose sense: the system repeatedly returns to a similar pattern.
We should be cautious with mathematical terminology here.
But the intuition is useful.
Social structures can have preferred modes of organisation.
Instability
Other configurations may be fragile.
Small changes can produce large consequences.
A resource shortage can reorganise relationships.
A conflict can split a group.
A technological innovation can make an established role unnecessary.
A new dependency can create a new centre of influence.
A system may therefore move rapidly from one configuration to another.
The topology is not simply a set of stable regions.
It contains transitions.
A social system can survive by changing
This leads to an important distinction.
Persistence does not necessarily mean remaining in the same configuration.
A system can preserve what matters to it by changing how its relations are organised.
A colony reallocates labour.
A community changes its practices.
An institution reforms itself.
A society adopts a new technology.
The structure changes so that some underlying valued conditions can be maintained.
This will become important later when we consider the tension between reproduction and transformation.
For now, the important point is:
stability can itself involve movement through the topology.
What exactly is being valued?
We have been deliberately avoiding a list of abstract values.
That remains important.
The topology should not begin with categories such as:
freedom,
security,
equality,
loyalty,
tradition.
Those may eventually become important.
But they are already forms of symbolic articulation.
Our starting point is more concrete:
What consequences among participants become recurrently organised?
Who enables whose activity?
Who constrains whose possibilities?
Who depends upon whom?
Who protects whom?
Who competes with whom?
Who coordinates with whom?
These relations constitute the topology before we name them as values.
Social mattering as pattern
This gives us a more precise definition:
Social mattering is not a collective feeling or a shared substance. It is the patterned organisation of how the value-sensitive activity of one participant affects the possibilities of others.
A topology of mattering is therefore a model of those patterns.
This keeps individual and social levels distinct.
Individuals retain their own value systems.
The social system consists in the organisation of their consequential coupling.
That distinction will remain essential.
Topology is not yet meaning
Nor have we crossed into the semiotic realm.
A relation can have a structure without being symbolically construed.
A dependency can exist without having a name.
A hierarchy can operate without a theory of hierarchy.
A boundary can matter without being represented as a boundary.
The symbolic articulation comes later.
First there is the structure.
Then there is the possibility of construing that structure as meaning.
This preserves Halliday's sequence:
biological value → social value → meaning
while giving the middle term a more differentiated account.
A topology can contain multiple overlapping structures
Another important possibility follows.
A participant does not have to occupy one social topology.
The same person may simultaneously be part of a family network, professional network, friendship network, civic network and political network.
These structures may overlap.
Their regions may intersect.
Their expectations may conflict.
One relation may strengthen another.
Another may cut across it.
Social life may therefore consist not of one topology but of multiple partially overlapping topologies of mattering.
This could become important later when we consider affiliation.
Affiliation is not just membership
A named group tells us relatively little about how someone participates in it.
Two people can belong to the same organisation while occupying quite different relational positions.
They may depend upon different participants.
Have different responsibilities.
Have different pathways of influence.
Possess different repertoires.
Their formal membership is the same.
Their trajectories through the topology are not.
This suggests that affiliation will need to be treated dynamically.
Towards the individual
We have therefore reached the point at which the topology cannot be studied without asking how individual organisms participate in it.
The social structure provides a field of possibilities.
But participants do not all experience or construe that field in the same way.
Their histories differ.
Their capacities differ.
Their repertoires differ.
Some relations are highly familiar.
Others are barely accessible.
Some pathways are easy to recognise.
Others require learning.
The next step is therefore to bring the individual back into the picture.
Repertoire
This is where the distinction between collective reservoir and individual repertoire becomes useful.
A social system can contain a large potential of practices, meanings and distinctions.
No individual participates in all of them.
Each person develops a repertoire through their history of participation.
That repertoire gives them particular capacities to recognise and construe the social world.
In our present context, we can provisionally ask:
Does an individual's repertoire mediate how they participate in the topology of mattering?
Perhaps some regions of the topology are more accessible to them than others.
Some pathways are familiar.
Others are difficult.
Some distinctions are immediately salient.
Others barely available.
We should treat this as a question, not yet a conclusion.
The topology and the repertoire are reciprocal
The relation should not be one-way.
A participant's repertoire is shaped by their history within the social system.
But their participation can also change the system.
A new practice may spread.
A new relation may become established.
An innovation may alter the collective reservoir.
A participant can therefore transform the topology through their activity.
We have another recursive relation:
topology → repertoire → participation → altered topology
This recursion will become increasingly important as the series develops.
Before political affiliation
We can now see why it is premature to begin with politics.
Political affiliations are already symbolically elaborated patterns of social mattering.
They have histories.
Institutions.
Identities.
Narratives.
Symbols.
Before we can understand them, we should understand the relational structures within which they emerge.
Otherwise we risk mistaking the symbolic map for the territory.
And yet the map matters
This does not mean symbols are unimportant.
Quite the opposite.
Once a social relation becomes symbolically construed, the symbolic form can become part of the social structure itself.
A category can create a boundary.
A title can organise a role.
A legal designation can change dependencies.
An identity can coordinate affiliation.
Meaning can alter mattering.
We will eventually return to this feedback.
But first we need to understand the topology that meaning enters.
What we have established
We began with individual value systems.
Signals couple them.
Recurrent coupling generates collective form.
Persistent patterns become social structure.
Social structure has relational shape.
It contains:
regions,
boundaries,
dependencies,
asymmetries,
bridges,
bottlenecks,
pathways,
attractors,
transitions.
Together, these suggest that social mattering may be describable as a dynamic topology.
We should still be cautious.
We have not yet demonstrated that a formal topological model is possible.
We have identified a kind of structure for which topology might be a useful mathematical and conceptual language.
That is enough for now.
The next question
But there is a problem.
A topology belongs to a social system as a whole.
Individuals participate in it differently.
They do not possess the same histories, capacities or repertoires.
Some can recognise pathways that others cannot.
Some occupy several regions simultaneously.
Some can move between regions.
Some are confined by the structure.
Some transform it.
So the next question is:
How does an individual inhabit a topology of mattering?
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