wallpaper dinding

One of the principal casualties of the economic crisis is economic theory. (Maybe bad theory is often the root cause of bad things!). The imputation of rationality behind economic behaviour is something that clearly has become highly suspect with the scale of apparently irrational economic decisions made by everyone from home-buyers to hedge-fund managers. With my recent posts about sensuality, I wonder if there's a link to be made between sensual experience, rationality and economics.

In doing this, I might start by relating rationality to communication, and 'irrationality' to sensuality. This may seem a bit of a strong step in the first place... but let's see where it gets us...

1. Rationality and Communication
I think we have to ask how we judge somebody to be rational. As with all judgements, it relies on our making communications with the person we are judging - or at least observing communications they make with other people. In making such judgements, we carry expectations of what we would consider to be 'rational' behaviour. If the behaviour we experience does not satisfy these expectations then we might well consider a person to be irrational. Thus, there is a dimension to rationality which relates directly to the success of communications that a person makes. If utterances made cannot be processed by anyone else, then they will not be successful; they be deemed irrational; but they will still have some sensual import...

2. Irrationality and Sensuality
We wouldn't be surprised if an 'irrational' person responded to sensual stimuli in same way that rational people might. For example, the reaction of what we might deem to be an 'irrational' person to a beautiful sunset may not be that different to that of a "rational" person.
The 'irrational' utterances of a person will still have sensual import... we are sometimes deeply affected by the utterances of "foolish" characters... sometimes they reveal more truth than those 'saner' characters (for example, Lear's fool.. who appears wiser than Lear himself).. but often there is not a discussion to be had.. the issues are too difficult for communication. It's worth noting that Socrates 4 'divine madnesses' are all sensual: telestic madness (madness of ritual), prophetic madness, poetic madness (madness of the muses) and erotic madness.

In an earlier post, I was particularly interested in the triangulation between the topology of the 'landscape of knowledge' and the range of 'moves' that we feel we have available to us at any particular time, and I was thinking about topological game theory as a way of thinking about this.

Now I have a different sort of 'triangulation' with perhaps a bit more definition. The sensual and the rational both focus on the person. The rational is quite explicit in its functioning: utterances must be made, communications need to be successful, meaning must be established, and so. This is a fairly concrete process, although it depends on the state of the individual participating in the communications. The key thing about rational responses is that there is a set process of establishing information (thinking what to say), establishing utterance (thinking how to say it) and interpretation (thinking what was said) in the other person.

In sensual experience, this is not the case. Sensual experience can happen with different parts of the sensory system at any time: we can be shocked, tickled, transformed, love-struck or grief-stricken at any moment without any warning, before we've even had time to think about it. Damasio calls emotion the 'fast route' of cognition, and I think this fits with our experience.

The point about these two things going on is that there is one perceiving system, but it is stimulated by two quite different methods, and both those methods are present at the same time.

So that's perception. What about wealth, possession, power? I think these things are sensory impulses resulting from individual states of those who exhibit the desire for them. Why does this arise in some people? Why do bankers and city traders behave in this way and others are less inclined to? Because they can? I think the answer has to do with knowledge and the forms that knowledge takes.

Knowledge is a type of communicative performance which results (partly) in a domain of rational communications. There are sensual aspects to these performances (which I have refered to as the different forms of knowledge) but basically, knowledge communications depend on reproduction by individuals whose psychic states can process the communications in ways that are understandable by others around them. There may be something about these communications concerning what they do to individual psychic states that gives rise to the sensory impulses that then lead to social pathology. In this way, it's not so different from terrorist cells or drug addicts:
...and so on...

When we look at things like this, we begin to see that private property and the concept of 'ownership' is not a 'property' of a thing, but rather a dynamic process, which has a social trajectory. Understanding the mechanisms of the process may be the first step to intervening with it and doing something about terrible disenfranchisement which is going on at the moment with the economic crisis.

Drawing together my recent thoughts on knowledge performance, and the last few days thinking about sensuality and 'psychic systems' leads me to the following tentative conclusions:

1. Any knowledge performance combines a communication with sensual stimuli
2. The multiple descriptions of knowledge (Person-form, content-form, tool-form, purpose-form) are apprehended in the combination of sensual performances (with people, with content, with tools, with a context) and communicative performances.
3. traditional constructivist pedagogy focuses only on the communicative aspects and ignores the sensual. It does this because it doesn't possess a language for talking about the sensual.
4. By understanding a psychic system as:

• responsible for making selections regarding communication
• open to direct manipulation from sensual stimulae

means that we can conceive of understanding as the state which emerges as a result of combined sensual stimulation and communication.
5. Consciousness/perception/memory/etc (inasmuch as it makes sense to talk about them) is the continuous process of regulation between the psychic system and the external stimulae of communication and sensual experience.

But this raises questions about the nature of reality.

Those operations which are concerned with System 5 'dropping its guard' - for example, falling in love, are most interesting. It is at this moment we might perceive an oceanic state that one might associate with perception of a spiritual world beyond our individuality. Yet, we may be suggesting that this perceptive mode is a necessary state that the individual must be in in order to maintain viability. This is obvious for falling in love (otherwise we wouldn't be here!), but it may also be the case for religious experience. In other words, our experience of transcendence (an experience of God) is not an experience of supernatural reality. It is the result of viable operations of the individual.

My catholicism is somewhat perturbed!

However, we have to be careful here. Because in lowering our perceptual guard and making more things relevant (as in falling in love), we play our part not only in individual viability, but also in social viability. For in adjusting ourselves in this way, and taking on more communications and sensual experiences as relevant perceptions, our selection of effective communicative action is improved. We become more aware of the social trajectories of the action and the distinctions we make. In other words, there is a state of seeing the relevance of everything which opens us up to what we might see as a deep 'moral sense'.

To what extent might the 'voices of the dead' be part of this perception of all-relevance? I think we may seek to understand (or explain) what we perceive in an oceanic state as being the voices of the dead. Believing it may be part of the process which opens us up further to deeper perception. But in reality, Bataille is right: it may be just ourselves and our individuality on one side, and the vast infinity of death on the other. Loving God is simply a way we have come to understand this.

On emotions, Luhmann states:
"emotions are not representations that refer to the environment but internal adaptations to internal problem situations in the psychic system that concern the ongoing production of the systems elements by the system's elements." (Social Systems, 1995, p 274)
He goes on to say:
"In terms of their function, emotions can be compared to immune systems; they seem to assume an immunizing role for the psychic system. With unusual means, they secure the continuing performance of autopoiesis - here not the autopoiesis of life but consciousness - in the face of problems that arise, and in doing so they use simplified procedures of discrimination, which permit decisions without considering the consequences. They can augment and weaken without direct reference to occurrences in the environment, depending on consciousnes's own experience of itself."
I find this quite fascinating and powerful. However, the detail is missing for me, and I want a clearer idea of what the psychic system looks like in order that it can maintain it's viability in this way and produce the wide range of emotions we all know.

Maybe it can be represented using Beer's VSM...

What this characterisation would give us is a way of thinking how the different parts of the psychic system might 'augment' and 'weaken' and how this augmentation and weakening relate to specific emotional states.

1. Falling in love and grief
The feeling that we get when we gaze into a lover's eyes. Like Bataille's concept of 'transgression', this takes the individual out of themselves and into the infinite. Luhmann, in "Love as Passion" talks of the threshold for discriminating about relevant communications becoming lower: everything becomes relevant. That means everything related to the identity of a person becomes swallowed into the overwhelming experience of another person. This suggests that what is augmented is 'System 5': the controlling system that loosens its grip on the homeostat that controls the other regulating mechanisms and hence gives the system its identity. Grief is the converse of this process: the loss of identity which threatens viability.

2. Feeling confident, proud, excited.
This may relate to a state where communications received from the outside are entirely anticipated by the system. Nothing unexpected happens, everything is under control. This may reflect an augmentation of the capacity of System 4 in predicting futures effectively.

3. Feeling driven, focused, lustful, energized
System 3 is the organiser and motivator. Augmenting activity at System 3 would produce energy. It's interesting to think how one might feel both proud and energized: very much 'in the zone'. However, at moments of loss of self-control, where system 3 is augmented, but system 4 diminished, this might produce aimless energy: violence, lust.

4. Feeling anxious and intuitive
I think the realm of anxiety and intuition is system 2, the anti-oscillator. I think in combination with a system 5 that is augmented to make more communication relevant, maybe system 2 plays a role in intuiting things that are going on. It may be here that we have 'gut feelings'. However, an augmented system 2 can also be anxious, worrying about how the system 1 operations can be kept under control.

5. Feeling angry and joyful
What's going on in system 1 of a psychic system? If we look at the job of the psychic system as Luhmann describes it, its job is to make selections: selecting information, utterances, and decoding meaning from communications received. When this works, and selections made result in viable communications, which in turn result in effective selections, all is well. Augmenting system 1 might result in a feeling of joy. But when it is not right, where the selections are wrong, or result in ineffective communications, then anger will be the result. The system cannot communicate its identity because of the environment it is in.

This is a bit sketchy, but I think its worth exploring. What's particularly interesting is the combination of different regulatory 'augmentations' and their emotional counterparts. It's also important to not lose sight of sensual experience.  This doesn't work like verbal communication. The regulating mechanisms of the psychic system 'talk' directly to the source of sensual stimulation. Thus, music can stimulate the psychic system in this way.

The context of an emotional experience is also important. We don't fall in love with everyone. I was always struck as to how Alan Clarke could possibly find Mrs. Thatcher sexy! But that's to do with power I guess. Power would assert the individuality and separability of a psychic system possibly to a point where it might need to 'fall in love' (i.e. augment system 5) to rebalance itself.

Lots to think on....

There's some common ground to explore between Luhmann's work on communication and Bataille's work on eroticism and transgression which is interesting me - particularly as I think about the 'caress of learning'. My principle thought, in line with Bataille, is that every caress is a boundary-crossing between the individual and the infinite. Every caress takes us from what we know to be our own, to something where our individuality dissolves. Within this, there seems to be a family resemblance between a resonant cathedral, the sound of breathing, a kiss.... all tend towards the infinite. If learning and teaching are like caressing (and I think there's something in this), then teaching and learning are also 'boundary-crossing', where we are taken from what we know to be our own and we dissolved into something infinite. Typically, we might identify such an experience and exclaim "that's cool!".... of course, in this way, iPhones, Facebook and agent-based modelling all have the capacity to caress too.

Boundary-crossing is present in Luhmann when he talks about art. "Perception cannot communicate and communication cannot perceive"; art is a special form of communication which escapes the binary code of language's "yes" or "no" and connects directly from one perception system to another. Clearly, caressing does a similar thing; the domain of sensuality becomes a consensual domain of apprehending the infinite. But I'm being rather poetic when I want to be precise...!

What's the point? Well, Luhmann would say that the point is communication. And the fact that we have art is because it allows the perception system (Psychic system) to reorganise in such a way as to make communications more probable. That really is what we aim to achieve in education too...

Bataille's "becoming aware of the infinite" may simply be way of describing the sensation we feel when our perception is enlarged. What makes our perception larger is sensual experience. It may be sensual experience gained through religious ritual; the sensuality of silence, of awareness of breathing and life. It may be a sensual experience of seeing a naked body. It may be a sensual experience of listening to music or seeing art. In each case, it is our perception that is engaged, and through being engaged, it is enlarged. Through being enlarged, we perceive something more infinite that our individuality, which is largely defined by our communications. It is the enlarging of perception and the involvement of sensuality in the process of enlarging perception that leads Bataille to equate the religious and the erotic. But I suspect he looks at it from the wrong end... if he looked from the perspective of what goes on in perception and its relationship to communication, I think his insights would have expanded from just looking at religion and eroticism.

I've just completed two papers which make use of Luhmann's theory of communication, and as often is the case, I learn new things as I look deeper into Luhmann's work. What's really hit me is the extent to which Luhmann thought about social form and how he made distinctions about it. For whilst his theory is really a theory about communication, he sees social forms as particular  bounded communication systems. What holds each system together is what he calls a 'contingency formula': a central paradox which acts as a sort of 'strange attractor' (I think) around which the communications of a system revolve.

His analysis of social form therefore involves identifying the various contingency formulae of different social systems: he does this for law, art, love and intimacy, education, religion, economics, science.. all with the intent on pursuing his main goal which is to understand the constraints of modernity. The method is quite simple:
1. look at a network of communication - sometimes Luhmann focusses on what might be considered a 'community of practice' (Law, for example)
2. ask yourself "what is the paradox here?" - identify the contingency formula
3. analyse how the communications are reproduced against the background of that contingency formula: what Luhmann would call the 'code' of communication. (at least, this is my understanding...)

So, for example, the contingency formula of education is "cultivation". Luhmann explains his thinking around education as:

“Speaking about education (upbringing/education, LQ), one primarily thinks about intentional activities that try to develop a person’s abilities and foster his/her ability for social communion”


Qvortrup has commented that "[Cultivation] is a concept for something that cannot be generally defined, but for which a word is needed that signals a mutual understanding and agreement." (see http://seminar.net/files/LarsQvortrup-SocietysEdSystem.pdf)

The "word that cannot be generally defined, but for which a word is needed that signals a mutual understanding and agreement" is the essence of a contingency formula. For Law, it is "Justice". For religion, it is "God", for science, it is "limitationality" - i.e. the idea that our knowledge always requires further research.

I like this method, and it is similar to my thinking around the difficulties that  learners have with things like computer programming. Obviously, their attempt to program computers isn't a 'social' system at all, but nevertheless, there's some pattern of communication there centring around a contradiction. Similarly, I'm currently working with diabetic teenagers who are struggling to control their blood glucose: again, there are communication patterns centring around a contradiction. With the computer students, I set about trying to identify the contradiction. Learning for those students was a process of becoming aware of the contradiction and how the code of their communicative actions (practices, ways of thinking) was leading to these contradictions. This led to a redefinition of the 'code of communication' that surrounded the contingency formula: new practices, new ways of thinking. It may be that the contingency formula in these examples is still "cultivation", but there's certainly something to be gained from looking at small-scale patterns of communication which are contradictory.

Luhmann's analysis of the development of love and intimacy (which is one of his best books) over the last 500 years charts a similar development of the 'code' of love. His work on art is similar.

A lot of people find Luhmann very dense and difficult. Although he is difficult, I think he's also the most scholarly of all cybernetic writers: his reading and erudition are as fine as many literary and art historians and this coupled with his combination of very tight definitions and high sensitivity to the human condition have made him a figure of great interest to me.