Re: <nettime> Managing complexity?

Hi Brian,

I gather from what you write that you agree with my quest for care of the autopoietic self, the need to work from the inside out, and that the inevitable gaze from within the system means that you can never perceive the whole system; but the central question is how one resists the invasions of power from outside that tend to subvert all of this. I fully agree that constructing an effective resistance is critical, and that we must engage with the political dimension in doing so. The question is how we go about it, and what tools we select for the politics we need. I get the sense that we agree on ends but diverge a bit on what we consider appropriate means.

Let me start with observing that this is a discussion thread on how one ‘manages’ complexity. I don’t really need to point it out given you are the original provocateur of the thread but do so just to draw attention to the inevitability of complexity. And this is where I start having concerns about too great a reliance on the construction of structural models of the situation as “an analysis that is crucial to action”, for to do so raises the danger of losing touch with the fundamentals of complexity. My concerns are:

To attempt to capture the system in a single model is to resist complexity by resorting to simplicity, whereas one must remain within a position of embracing complexity.
One can lose oneself in a level of abstraction distanced to the point of isolation from the practice of everyday life.
When the model dominates, the self can define itself only in reference to it and faces the danger of erasing its own autonomy.
The desire to be comprehensive makes the model too heavy to be useful.

I draw attention to the fact that I do not object to constructing structural models per se but am only concerned about having too great a reliance on them to the point that one considers them crucial to action. I should also add that in the previous post if I gave the impression that I sought to build a dichotomy between open and closed systems, then I apologise that I did not express myself clearly. I would eschew such a dichotomy and posit that it is a shuttle between open and closed modes of being that is crucial. To elaborate, let me propose that each of us lives at three levels of experience:

First-Person Experience: Where one is aware of one’s own body and mind as a sentient being. The authenticity of being one feels here is unparalleled, for it is not just a conceptual understanding, but a full sensory awareness that validates one’s existence in the world.
Second-Person Experience: Where one interacts with other beings.
Third-Person Experience: Where one can comprehend concepts and systems that exist beyond the levels of first- and second-person experience. This covers conceptual models and notions of truth, and also covers aesthetics: skilled artistic practitioners talk about being ‘possessed’ by their craft once they achieve a certain level of mastery in it.

In “The View from Within”, the collection of essays on the study of consciousness edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, the editors’ introduction to the book observes that each of these levels of experience are embedded within social and natural networks (the inevitable partial view from within that lies at the heart of complexity). Therefore, each level cannot hold by itself, and the movement back and forth between the levels is a process by which each critiques, challenges, and thereby, validates the other. Put too much faith in first-person experience, and one faces the danger of being confined to a blinkered self-indulgent perspective that leads to systemic fragility at wider levels of complexity. Put too much faith in third-person experience, and the definition of the self is reduced to referential terms of function or purpose, and the self’s autonomy goes unrecognised. The difference with humans is that we are reflexive beings, we can not only engage with the world, but we can also think about ourselves and the nature of that engagement. We can be within our own autonomy, or we can conceptually step outside it. A reliance on third-person experience encourages us to endanger our own autonomy by anchoring ourselves outside it. The continued movement between all three levels is important. Third-person concepts require validation by the authenticity of the first-person level, and the potential narrow self-indulgence of first-person experience needs the challenge of third-person experience. Second-person experience is a crucial bridge level, where resonances can be observed in the second-person with both first-person and third-person existence to validate all three levels.

We have inherited operating models that derive from the faith placed in rationality during the Enlightenment. At that time, the fact that every being possessed the capacity for reason was a useful argument to challenge traditional hierarchies to push for democratic equality. But that led to excessive faith in conceptual models at the risk of suppressing the autonomy of the self. Complexity is resisted by the illusion of simplicity, and the inherent nature of such a system is that it emphasises top-down rather than bottom-up modes of operation, with a reliance on expertise. Complex systems are dependent on bottom-up modes also functioning, and the autonomy of the self is crucial here.

John O’Donohue writes in two books – ‘Anam Cara’ and ‘Walking on the Pastures of Wonder’ – that there is magic in our own autonomy. We are inherently creative artists. The very act of speaking coaxes words and thoughts out of silence, the act of dancing coaxes beauty out of stillness, the act of loving coaxes community out of solitude. This creative potential is infinite to the point of being intimidating if there is no framework to guide it. The framework I propose is the ongoing movement across the three levels of experience. I subscribe to Charles Taylor’s proposal in ‘The Ethics of Authenticity’, that we have moved through phases in history on the sources we rely on for authenticity. We initially sourced it in traditional wisdom but discovered the repressive hierarchies in this reliance. Modernity than replaced tradition with instrumental reason as the source, but with post-modern doubt we have run up against constraints here. Taylor proposes that we now turn to spaces of engagement as the source, arguing that authenticity is like language: the capacity for it is inborn, but lies unrealised if we do not engage in conversation. And these spaces of engagement have to contain the movement across levels.

But we still live in the residue of the Enlightenment, have been schooled to devalue the individual self as idiosyncratic and subjective, and place all our faith in third-person experience. In this mode we have no framework for coming to terms with our own creativity and begin to fear it. As O’Donohue observes, “One of the sad things is that so many people are frightened by the wonder of their own presence. They are dying to tie themselves into a system, a role, an image or a predetermined identity that other people have settled for them.” We accept this fragmented self, delegating a great deal of understanding to ‘expertise’, accepting the belief that we are incapable of fully understanding or participating in what the experts decide.

This comes to the central question you raise: how do we construct resistance to the invasions of power? But what exactly is the form of power we must resist? Let me (at the risk of over-simplification) categorise it into two broad types:

Knowledge-Power: We are indebted to Michel Foucault here, who showed us that power can never last in the long-term by relying on force. It sustains itself by constructing and preserving knowledge systems that everyone considers proper and desirable.
Invisible Hacking: This comes from a digital era that Foucault could not have predicted. It comes from the detailed data trails we leave in cyberspace, the tools of big data analytics, and the invisibility of those who exploit the data trails we leave. As Yuval Noah Hariri observes, humans are now hackable animals, and can be hacked without their knowing or realising that this hacking is taking place.

Different strategies of resistance are needed in each case (it would get too complicated here to deal with the fact that the two cases intersect, so for the sake of discussion, let me treat them as separable). In the latter case of invisible hacking, I would subscribe to Lawrence Lessig’s argument that we must recognise that cyberspace is a different beast that needs a framework of law that is different from that applicable to physical space. By extending the legal framework of the physical world to the cyber world, we grant high degrees of invisibility to the structures of power. We need to develop law for cyberspace that strips power of its mask of invisibility.

On the knowledge-power case, the problem is not an inherent visibility. What we need to see is clearly visible, we have been conditioned to wear lenses whose distortions prevent us from seeing it. To remove these lenses, we need to restore the autonomy of the autopoietic self I argue for earlier. That takes us to a different dimension of the challenge of resistance. It is relatively easy to construct this resistance at a personal level. Scaling this resistance from the personal to the political is a far greater challenge. This requires structures of communicative action at large scales, and it is easy to assume that this can only be done through conceptual models that can be circulated at these large scales. This brings us to the question I raise early in this post on the heaviness of conceptual models.

In the memo on ‘Lightness’ in ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’, Italo Calvino reflects on the early phases of his career as a writer, and the gulf that kept widening between the grace and lightness of good writing on one hand and the world he wished to write about on the other. The complexity of the world drove him to include more and more in the scope of his writing, and eventually his ability to write was pinned down by a petrifying mass of fact. This seemingly inevitable petrification makes him recall the Greek myth of Medusa whose gaze turns whoever looks at her into stone. The person who is able to slay Medusa is Perseus, who embodies lightness, having wings on his sandals, and the ability to walk on clouds. Perseus succeeds in his task by refusing to look at Medusa directly, looking at her only indirectly in the form of a reflection on a polished shield. Calvino suggest that this myth is an allegory on the poet’s relationship with the world: a refusal to take on the heaviness that derives from the direct glance of rationality, preferring the lightness can only come from the indirect glance of metaphor. To me, this is an echo of an argument made by another Italian two centuries earlier: Gianbattista Vico, who argued that you can understand something well only if you have made it yourself, man has not made the world so he can never understand it, so he understands it by remaking it in his own mind.

This sounds literary or philosophical, and far removed from politics. But there are precedents of this perspective being applied in politics, and the case I am personally most familiar with is the leadership that Mohandas K. Gandhi offered to India’s freedom struggle to free herself from colonialism. We tend to think of Gandhi from the perspective of his ethics and politics, but his poetics is a neglected dimension. This poetic ability did not live in a literal capability of writing poetry, revealing itself in his ability to recast the spirit of freedom in metaphors such as the spinning wheel and salt. This empowered the freedom movement at a national scale by making a complex issue easily comprehensible by large masses of people and lending unity and coherence to a diverse set of struggles. It is important to note that Gandhi led a freedom movement for national independence without ever evoking an appeal for nationalism. Freedom was defined as ‘swaraj’: a term he coined that derives from ‘swa’ (self) and ‘raj’ (rule). He aimed not for national control but ‘self-rule’: a politics whose primary goal was the restoration of the autonomous self, and he chose his metaphors accordingly.

So I see a three-pronged attack of resistance that is necessary:

A remaking of the social contract that centres on spatialising a political and equitable public realm aimed at sustaining an autopoietic self that moves across all the levels of experience to scale from there to autopoietic community. Our current model of the social contract assumes a politically passive citizen who surrenders to the expertise of governance, and the public realm in our cities is reduced to spaces that only serve the superficial functions of movement, leisure and consumption.
A politics that offers hope without resorting to tribalism, doing so through a poetics that employs metaphors that liberate people rather than enslaving them.
Design of digital tools that build connections between the virtual and the physical, subjecting cyberspace to the scaling laws of complex physical systems.

Best,

Prem