A social system can have a structure.
It can contain dependencies, boundaries, centres and peripheries. Some relations may be dense, others sparse. Some pathways may be familiar, others difficult to traverse.
But the structure exists only because particular organisms participate in it.
So we need to ask a more personal question:
How does an individual organism inhabit a topology of mattering?
The answer cannot simply be that the individual occupies a position on a social map.
No organism encounters the entire social system at once.
Each has a history.
Each has a particular set of relationships.
Each has developed particular capacities for responding to, recognising and participating in the relations that surround it.
This is where the concept of repertoire becomes important.
The social world is larger than any participant
A social system contains more possibilities than any one participant can realise.
There are roles they do not occupy.
Practices they do not know.
Relationships they do not enter.
Distinctions they do not readily make.
Institutions whose workings they barely understand.
Meanings that have never become part of their experience.
The social system therefore contains a much larger potential than any individual's participation in it.
This is where the distinction between collective reservoir and individual repertoire becomes useful.
The collective system provides a reservoir of available possibilities.
An individual develops a repertoire through their particular history of participation.
The two are related, but they are not identical.
A repertoire is not a possession
We should be careful about what we mean by repertoire.
It is tempting to think of it as a collection of things stored inside an individual.
But that would make it sound like an inventory.
A repertoire is better understood as a historically developed capacity for participation.
It includes distinctions someone can readily make.
Patterns they can recognise.
Practices they can perform.
Relations they can anticipate.
Ways of construing what happens around them.
It is therefore less like a library and more like a set of possibilities made available through previous participation.
The collective reservoir
The social system provides the wider reservoir.
A language has possibilities that no individual speaker exhausts.
A culture contains practices that no individual knows.
A profession contains procedures that some practitioners never encounter.
A political system contains forms of participation that many citizens never use.
The collective reservoir is therefore larger than any repertoire.
This is not a defect.
It is what allows social differentiation.
Participants can specialise.
They can occupy different roles.
They can develop different capacities.
They can learn from one another.
The social system depends partly upon the fact that its participants do not all know or do the same things.
Repertoire as differentiated access
This gives us a first approximation:
A repertoire provides differentiated access to the possibilities available within a social system.
But "access" should not be understood too literally.
A person may be aware that a practice exists without knowing how to participate in it.
They may occupy a social position that formally gives them access to something without possessing the repertoire required to use it.
Conversely, someone may develop a repertoire that allows them to move between regions of the topology that are difficult for others to navigate.
Repertoire therefore mediates the relation between what the social system makes possible and what an individual can actually construe and do.
Learning to move
This suggests a useful image.
A social topology contains pathways.
An individual's repertoire affects which pathways they can recognise and traverse.
A child entering a community does not initially know the whole structure.
They learn.
How to approach others.
When to speak.
What counts as appropriate.
What kinds of help can be requested.
Which relationships are close.
Which boundaries should not be crossed.
Which actions have consequences.
Much of this learning does not begin with explicit rules.
It begins with participation.
The individual learns the topology by living through its mattering-relations.
Mattering before explicit meaning
This is an important continuation of our earlier argument.
A child may learn that a certain action upsets another person long before being able to formulate a theory of that person's emotional state.
They may learn that some adults can be approached directly while others cannot.
They may learn that certain behaviours attract approval or disapproval.
The relations first become significant through consequences.
Only later are they necessarily named and symbolically articulated.
The individual repertoire therefore develops partly through experience of mattering before it becomes a repertoire of explicit meanings.
Repertoire is not the same as preference
Another distinction is important.
If someone repeatedly participates in a particular region of the social topology, that does not necessarily mean they prefer it in some simple psychological sense.
Their participation may arise from dependence.
Necessity.
Habit.
Opportunity.
Role.
Constraint.
Affection.
Obligation.
Or many things at once.
A repertoire describes what forms of participation have become available and practised.
It does not by itself tell us what the individual consciously prefers.
The topology constrains the repertoire
The relation is therefore reciprocal.
An individual develops a repertoire through participation in a social system.
But the structure of that system also constrains what repertoire can readily develop.
Some practices are accessible.
Others are difficult.
Some forms of knowledge circulate freely.
Others are restricted.
Some positions expose people to many social relations.
Others isolate them.
The topology therefore shapes the conditions under which repertoires develop.
The repertoire transforms the topology
But the reverse also occurs.
An individual can introduce a new practice.
Make a new connection.
Carry a practice from one region into another.
Teach someone else.
Refuse an established role.
Invent a new way of coordinating.
The repertoire can therefore become a source of structural change.
The relation is recursive:
topology → participation → repertoire → altered participation → transformed topology
The individual is not merely located within the social system.
They can help reorganise it.
Bridges and repertoire
This gives us a particularly interesting interpretation of the bridges we discussed in the previous post.
A bridge connects regions of a topology.
But what enables an individual to become a bridge?
Often, a repertoire spanning more than one region.
Someone who participates in two communities may understand practices that are unfamiliar to each.
They can translate expectations.
Recognise correspondences.
Carry information.
Coordinate action.
Their significance does not arise simply from being physically present in two places.
It arises from possessing a repertoire that allows them to participate meaningfully in both.
Boundary crossing
The same principle applies at social boundaries.
A boundary separates regions of mattering.
Crossing it may require learning another way of acting.
A person entering a profession acquires new practices.
Someone entering another culture learns new expectations.
Someone moving between social classes may encounter different repertoires of language, conduct and interaction.
The topology may remain continuous across the boundary.
But the participant's repertoire has to change for the new region to become navigable.
This suggests that social transformation can sometimes begin with repertoire expansion.
Repertoire can be narrow or broad
Participants can have very different repertoire breadth.
A highly specialised role may involve deep competence in one region of the topology and relatively little access to others.
A mediator may have a broader repertoire spanning several domains.
A marginal participant may have partial access to several regions without being fully integrated into any.
Again, breadth should not be equated with superiority.
A narrow repertoire can be highly effective in a stable environment.
A broad repertoire can become valuable when environments change.
The adaptive significance depends upon the topology and its dynamics.
Repertoire and uncertainty
A changing topology creates a particularly interesting problem.
A participant whose repertoire is well suited to the current configuration may become less effective when the structure shifts.
A new technology can make old practices less useful.
A new institution can create unfamiliar roles.
A political crisis can alter social boundaries.
A migration can bring previously separate repertoires into contact.
The individual then faces a mismatch between established repertoire and changed topology.
Adaptation may require repertoire transformation.
Innovation begins here
This gives us a possible mechanism for social innovation.
A participant encounters a problem that cannot be handled easily with their existing repertoire.
They experiment.
A new practice works.
Others adopt it.
The practice becomes part of the collective reservoir.
The topology changes.
Future participants now inherit a different field of possibilities.
So:
mismatch → innovation → uptake → expanded reservoir → transformed topology
This is not guaranteed.
Many innovations disappear.
But when one persists, the social system changes.
The repertoire is historical
An individual's repertoire therefore has a history.
It is shaped by what they have encountered.
Whom they have interacted with.
Which practices they have learned.
Which regions of the social system they have occupied.
Which transitions they have survived.
This history matters because it changes future possibilities.
Two people entering the same social situation can construe it differently because their repertoires differ.
They do not encounter exactly the same social topology.
They encounter the topology through different histories of participation.
The same topology, different worlds
This gives us a useful formulation:
There may be one social topology, but many experienced pathways through it.
The topology is relational and collective.
The repertoire is individual and historical.
The two should not be collapsed.
A person does not carry a private topology inside their head.
Nor does the collective topology determine exactly what the individual experiences.
The repertoire mediates between them.
Where affiliation begins
We are now approaching the question of affiliation.
People do not necessarily affiliate simply because they occupy the same location in a formal social structure.
Nor do they need identical repertoires.
Affiliation may become possible when participants have sufficient overlap in the ways they can participate in and construe particular regions of mattering.
Two people may have very different lives but share enough repertoire to recognise one another as participants in the same social world.
Conversely, people may share a formal institution while possessing such different repertoires that their experiences of it are quite different.
Affiliation therefore may involve overlap rather than identity.
Repertoire overlap
Imagine two participants whose repertoires overlap strongly around cooperation, mutual assistance and collective responsibility.
They may readily recognise one another's actions as compatible.
Another participant may occupy the same institution but have a repertoire organised around competition, autonomy and individual achievement.
The institutional topology is shared.
The repertoires are different.
The same interaction can therefore matter differently to the participants.
This is where social differentiation becomes increasingly interesting.
But we must not turn repertoire into ideology
At this stage, we should resist interpreting repertoires as explicit belief systems.
A repertoire can include practices long before anyone formulates a doctrine.
A person may know how to cooperate without possessing a theory of cooperation.
They may know how to behave in a hierarchy without believing hierarchy is desirable.
They may navigate a social boundary without being able to explain it.
Explicit ideology comes later.
Repertoire is about capacity for participation and construal.
From repertoire to symbolic articulation
Eventually, however, some of these distinctions can become available for explicit symbolic construal.
People name relations.
Describe roles.
Tell stories about their position.
Develop concepts of justice, authority, freedom, belonging or obligation.
A practice becomes a norm.
A relationship becomes an identity.
A pattern of mattering becomes a value.
The repertoire becomes increasingly semiotic.
This is where the social and semiotic levels begin to approach one another.
The collective reservoir changes
When an individual innovation is taken up by others, something important happens.
The new possibility no longer belongs only to one repertoire.
It enters the collective reservoir.
Others can now learn it.
Teach it.
Modify it.
Combine it with existing practices.
What was once an individual possibility becomes a collective resource.
This is one way social systems evolve their potentials.
The collective reservoir changes through the experiences and innovations of participants.
The social system learns
We can therefore describe social learning as a transformation of the collective reservoir.
Participants experiment.
Some practices succeed.
Others disappear.
Some distinctions become important.
Others lose relevance.
The reservoir changes.
The topology may change as a result.
And new repertoires develop within the transformed environment.
The process is recursive:
individual participation → innovation → collective uptake → transformed reservoir → new individual repertoires
The topology is therefore inhabited, not merely occupied
This may be the most important conclusion of the post.
A social topology is not a map on which people sit like counters.
It is a dynamic field of relations that participants learn to navigate.
They discover pathways.
Encounter boundaries.
Develop competencies.
Form dependencies.
Build bridges.
Become attached to regions.
Sometimes become trapped within them.
Sometimes discover routes between them.
Their repertoires make some trajectories more probable than others.
And their activity can alter the topology itself.
Before political affiliation
This is why we still should not begin with political categories.
Before someone can identify with a political movement, they have already acquired a repertoire of ways of construing social relations.
They have learned what kinds of dependence feel normal.
What kinds of hierarchy are intelligible.
What kinds of cooperation are expected.
Which boundaries matter.
Which forms of change are familiar or alarming.
Only later do these patterns become articulated as explicit political positions.
Political affiliation is therefore unlikely to be the beginning of the process.
It is a symbolically elaborated form of prior participation in social mattering.
A possible dynamic
We can now see a possible pathway:
social topology → participation → repertoire → repertoire overlap → affiliation
But the reverse must also remain visible:
affiliation → coordinated participation → altered social relations → transformed topology
This is why affiliation will need to be treated as dynamic rather than merely categorical.
An affiliation can change the relations that made it possible.
And now the biological substrate returns
There is another reason to keep the Edelman connection in view.
An individual repertoire does not float free of biology.
Participants remain organisms with value systems.
Their needs, sensitivities and adaptive histories shape the conditions under which social relations become consequential.
But social participation transforms the contexts in which those value systems operate.
The relation is therefore not:
biology or culture.
It is:
biological organisation participating within socially organised environments.
The social topology becomes part of the organism's world of significance.
What we have established
We began with a collective topology of mattering.
We have now added the individual participant.
Each participant has a value system.
Through history, they develop a repertoire.
The repertoire provides differentiated capacities for recognising, construal and participation within the social topology.
The topology constrains repertoire development.
Repertoire enables particular pathways through the topology.
Participation can alter the collective reservoir.
The reservoir can then alter future repertoires.
The resulting loop is:
topology ↔ repertoire ↔ participation
And from the overlaps among repertoires, new forms of affiliation may emerge.
The next question
But affiliation is not simply a matter of having similar repertoires.
People may share only part of their repertoire.
They may participate in the same region of mattering for different reasons.
They may move into new regions together.
They may discover that their repertoires overlap in some respects while diverging in others.
So what exactly makes an affiliation stable?
What makes a collection of participants begin to recognise themselves as a we?
And how does an alignment of mattering become a named social formation?
That is the next question:
How do we find our neighbours in a topology of mattering?
No comments:
Post a Comment