Sociopoiesis and the Dangers of A-historicizing Society in Systems Research | Interview with Paul Prew by Robert D. King

January 22, 2015

Robert King (RK): In this third interview I’ll be talking with Dr. Paul Prew of Minnesota State University, Mankato where he teaches in the Department of Sociology and Corrections. Paul received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon. His research and personal interests all revolve around the growing concerns regarding the destruction of our environment. Of particular interest to Paul is how these environmental threats are forcing changes in indigenous groups as well as in poorer nations around the world. To get a first-hand look at these issues, he has traveled to Ecuador to learn from an indigenous group, Sarayaku, and struggles by other groups resisting environmental degradation and threats to their livelihood. Paul’s publications are in critical sociology and pedagogy and systems theories and the environment.

(RK) There is a certain, probably detrimental polysemy with regard to the definition and use of the concept of system. Some have argued that system is a concept that is too general, even generic, appearing in numerous fields but without offering determinate conceptual precision to any one of them. I wonder if you have a position on this general polysemy. If you do, can you explain?

Paul Prew (PP): I think the clarity and precision of the use of terms like “system” is a very important issue, but one that should be understood in the context in which the terms are used. I think academic work should be made accessible to the general public, and in this endeavor, sometimes it is necessary to soften the edges of the precise nature of our definitions to make them relevant to people outside of the academy. For example, social science makes specific distinctions between transgender and transsexual. They are two very discrete terms, although not unrelated. People in the LGBTQ community use these terms very differently than social science, and sometimes use them interchangeably in everyday conversation, and we must respect this usage. However, when analyzing issues surrounding transgender and transsexual, we must be precise with each other to maintain clarity in our definitions and conceptualizations. While I would never tell someone going through sex reassignment surgery that s/he is not transgender, but is transsexual, I would demand social scientists do make their definitions clear and consistent. I think our ability to be relevant and promote understanding is dependent on our ability to translate our findings to the general public. Thus, there may be situations where we loosen the definitions to allow greater accessibility, but we also must be careful not to run roughshod over the meanings and definitions of terms already in use.

A central concern driving my own research in this field is the precise use of terminology. As I familiarize myself with the system and complexity literatures, I notice terms take on different meanings for the social and physical sciences. I have noticed that researchers have used physical science terms like entropy, autopoiesis, metabolism, etc. in ways that are more metaphor than precise definitions. I will expand on this a bit more, but I think the greatest error I find is the naturalizing of historical processes. I think the limited progress made in attempting to apply systems and complexity thinking to the social world is the inability to distinguish the differences between thermodynamic processes and interpretive / social processes. There is a decided difference between the sensation of my habanero hot sauce on my tongue and my attempt to communicate how “hot” it is to my friends. The sensation is a cognate response across a physical boundary between my tongue and the capsicum in the chili pepper. My description of the heat of the sauce is a social construct, not a physical one. For me, I cannot conceive that a theory used to understand the physical processes of taste could be used to understand the social processes of interaction. The sensation I derive from putting homemade habanero sauce on my pizza may originate from similar physical processes as a police officer rubbing capsicum in my eyes, but the situations cannot be explained in the same way. I have a hard time envisioning a general theory, systems or otherwise, that would explain the specific circumstances that brought about a police officer rubbing pepper spray in my eyes. This circumstance can only be understood historically. My individual biography is only understandable in the broader historical circumstance in which it occurs.

There are ways in which the physical science definitions can be applied to society, but it involves the physical interchange of people in society with the environment. Colonialism, monopoly capitalism, feudalism, etc. were all social modes of production used to organize thermodynamic flows through the society. In this way, we may be able to understand how physical sciences may help us understand this environmental interaction because there are certain principles such as dissipation that can be applied directly as originally defined. However, when attempting to understand communication between individuals or entities in the social system, the terms must be redefined to fit the conceptualization.

As I write this, I am reading Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems with an eye to this particular issue. I reserve final judgment until I finish my rereading, but so far, Luhmann’s use of terms such as autopoiesis and entropy are defined and applied strictly in a social context, and for me, contrary to their original application. For example, Luhmann states, “a system is entropic if information about one element does not permit inferences about others” (Luhmann Social Systems 1995, page 49). From my understanding, entropy is defined physically, not in terms of cognitive capability. I have great difficulty reconciling entropy as a physical science concept with Luhmann’s application to conceptual inferences. Using a physical science term specifically designed to define physical processes to describe social interactions muddies the meaning of terms and their usefulness for application between disciplines.

Part of the difficulty is the conflation of cognate with conscious. Cognate indicates a feedback between organism and environment, where consciousness is relevant largely in a social context. While this is difficult to communicate briefly, the difference between cognate and consciousness is similar to the difference between “environment” as the physical reality external to the organism and the historical use of “environment” used by social scientists to describe social environment. My initial sense of the social science literature utilizing physical science terminology is that the distinction between these two “environments” continues to be conflated. For me, there is something very different about the physical fact that I have gone without water for three days and how I, and others, define the discovery of my listless, dehydrated form. Both take place in the context of their respective environments, but for me, the importance lies not in how my dehydration is defined, but in the physical fact that I will die without water. I am not against using terms interdisciplinarily, but I think there needs to be a certain degree of respect for the term as it is originally conceived, especially when the application of the term ahistoricizes society.

It is much easier to discuss the need for precision with terms that have been more recently coined or confined to specific disciplines. The use of the term system poses greater issues largely because the term is already used in so many different ways by social sciences, physical sciences, and the general public. In the same way an anarchist cringes when the general public uses “anarchy” to describe a state of lawless disorder, physical scientists cringe when people interchange “chaos” with random. At the moment, these prior / alternative usages are already established. It is the same way with system.

Prior to being introduced to systems theory, I was introduced to systems in the social sciences largely through the world-systems perspective. In the social sciences, there are different ways in which systems are understood. One perspective, the functionalist, is argued to analyze systems as a set of entities that operate to perform certain functions to maintain the system. The functionalist perspective of systems derives from a biological metaphor of organs in a body. Each organ performs different functions to preserve the larger system. In the context of society, we have institutions like economics, religion, politics, education, etc. that contribute to maintaining the equilibrium of the society. While the functionalist perspective has changed over the years to update the organic model, perspectives characterized as functionalist heavily center on the entities like institutions or organs, and not the relations between them. Another understanding of systems in the social sciences derives from the dialectical approach of political economy. Systems are sets of relationships. Understanding any system requires the understanding of how all of the various relationships operate at the various levels of the system. The focus is not on the “parts” as in a functionalist perspective, but in the relationships within the system.

I came to the notion of systems through the world-systems perspective that focuses on the relationships between capital and labor, and the colonizers and the colonized. In a class on the world-systems perspective taught by Wilma Dunaway, we covered Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange, and then followed it with a section on the environment. This fortuitous coupling of thematic elements led me to contemplate the unequal exchange of environmental goods. As wealthy nations extract ecological resources from former colonized regions of the world, ecological processes are disturbed. Just as flows of wealth move from the colonized regions, flows of environmental resources also move from colonized to colonizer. Take bananas for example. The growth of bananas and other crops strips nutrients from the soil that are shipped to the wealthy regions of the world. The compost, if composted, from the banana enriches the soil of the wealthy nation, and not the colonized. Since I started thinking about these ideas in the late 1990s, ecological unequal exchange has developed its own very productive literature stream. In this class, we also read an article by Immanuel Wallerstein who mentioned Iyla Prigogine. I then began my interest in complexity studies that highlighted the differences between how the notion of system was used differently by the various approaches.

For me, it is not possible to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to how systems is used, but I think it is possible to be clear about the way the term is being used and how it is defined. When I first began researching complexity and systems, I found similar language being used by biologists discussing food webs, which was very different than the complexity involved in cellular metabolic processes. I think the distinctions between general system theory, systems thinking, and systems philosophy are helpful. I also think that we should not allow their existence to constrain our thinking or analysis. We can step outside of these specific definitions to carve our own understandings, but we must be very clear how our conceptions mirror or deviate from the original.

(RK): What attracted you to the scholarship in systems theory?

(PP): I came to systems theory in a very circuitous fashion. While I have a fondness for complexity theory, my own acquaintance with systems theory proper is limited. There are so many authors that I need to read such as von Bertalanffy. I tended to be attracted to systems theory in the physical sciences through a systems approach in the social sciences. After reading “The End of Certainties” by Immanuel Wallerstein, I began reading Iyla Prigogine. The notion of dissipative structures led me to contemplate capitalism as a dissipative structure. Wilma Dunaway was gracious enough to publish my early thoughts along these lines in the conference proceedings from the 2001 Political Economy of the World-System conference. While comparing capitalism to a dissipative structure was not a new idea (Harvey and Reed, Straussfogel, Bunker, and notably Georgescu-Roegen among others preceded my thinking), I contemplated the mobility of capital and the global nature of environmental destruction. Entropy was no longer a local, but a global phenomenon. Capitalist enterprises, but not the local citizens, are able to avoid the consequences of local environmental degradation and are also able to externalize their global ecological effects to increase their own complexity. The inherently expansionary nature of capitalism ensures that entropy will exceed the thermodynamic limits necessary for the preservation of society and also a multitude of species on the planet.

While in Eugene, Oregon, I met a number of scholars who influenced my thinking. Taking courses with John Bellamy Foster deepened my understanding of Marx’s analysis of the environment. I began integrating Marx’s concept of an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism” with a discussion of intensive and extensive exploitation of resources in Marx’s Capital. Initially, I envisioned intensive and extensive rifts in metabolic processes. For example, imbalancing natural processes by increasing thermodynamic throughput would be an intensive rift, while depletion of environmental resources by expanding the scope of exploitation would be an extensive rift. After feedback from John Bellamy Foster and conversations with Brett Clark and Philip Mancus, I have subsequently revised my conceptualization. They argued that rifts are not extensive or intensive. A metabolic rift is simply that, a metabolic rift. While they may not fully agree with my revised ideas, I still distinguish between extensive processes and intensive processes, but they both produce a metabolic rift. I feel that the distinction is still important because there are differences between intensive (temporal) processes of exploitation and extensive (geographic) exploitation. For me, it is helpful to recognize the difference between manipulating the growth rate of trees to increase output (which may destabilize soil chemistry) and expanding deforestation (which expands depletion of resources). Conceptually, I think it makes sense to make this distinction, but I have not had the time to follow up this line of thought with research.

As I began to think about the notion of metabolism, I began attending complexity classes taught by Alder Fuller (https://ermahge.usefedora.com/). In those classes, my understanding of complexity sciences deepened, and I was introduced to the concept autopoiesis. Autopoiesis added a layer of conceptual complexity to my application of dissipative structures to capitalism. In a number of conversations with Alder, I came to the conclusion that societies cannot be autopoeitic, contrary to Luhmann. Most glaringly, the boundary condition of autopoiesis cannot be met. As a result, I coined the term “sociopoietic” to describe a society’s interaction within nature. Since this time of rapid conceptual development, I have been interested in how complexity sciences are applied to society from both the physical and social science perspectives.

So far, I find myself disappointed by the application of complexity or systems thinking to society. I have found that most physical scientists tend to ahistoricize society. For example, notions of networks by Buchanan tend to naturalize concentration of wealth as a process of accumulation around nodes with greater connections. The problem of modeling human behavior, such as riots or wealth accumulation, with network theory is the loss of historical context. Rioters, or wealth, may coalesce around existing coagulations, but the social/historical cause of the riot or the specific circumstances of wealth generation are lost to general theories of behavior. Relevant to this concern, C. Wright Mills cautioned against grand theory that relies on broad generalizations and fails to historically situate social phenomena. Systems theory, as it has been currently applied to the social sciences, tends to suffer from the fault of grand theory. Broad theoretical generalizations are applied to social contexts but lack historical specificity. Conceptualizations like the power-law can explain everything and nothing at the same time. The idea that aggregations tend to further aggregate may be applied to patterns of behavior in society, but the consonance of theory and behavior do not help explain why the pattern occurs. Social movements, riots, wealth accumulation, economic panics, etc. may all follow the power-law pattern, but why a global economic crisis originates in Taiwan instead of Nigeria can only be explained historically. This is the fundamental problem with grand theory. The theory may closely model human behavior, but it does not allow us to determine the cause of the pattern, nor predict future social behavior. Grand theory provides the illusion of explanation, but leaves us lacking any concrete understanding of the processes involved.

Social scientists, on the other hand, tend to misappropriate terms from physical sciences. I have recently read a number of researchers who apply the term entropy to society in a very general and imprecise fashion. When applied to capitalism specifically, entropy is conceptualized as a negative outcome of the capitalist production process. While there is a degree of truth to this assertion, all societies are entropic. Capitalism is no different. All societies metabolize, as the scholars of industrial or social metabolism would suggest. All societies move matter and energy through them to maintain their complexity. As a result, a certain degree of entropy results. The fact that capitalism is entropic should not be alarming nor that surprising. All dissipative structures maintain their complexity at the expense of generating greater entropy in the surrounding environment. The true concern is the rate of entropy and the potential for disrupting the sustainability of the metabolic processes, both for society and for other relationships, in the environment. Thus, it is not entropy that is the central concern, but the potential for metabolic rifts as a result of the rate of entropy necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist system. The use of entropy in this way by these scholars transforms entropy from a simple fact into a nefarious process. As I sit here typing, I am generating entropy through the heat generated to digest the food necessary for my own survival. It is not a nefarious process, but a simple fact of complex structures. Complexity is maintained through greater entropy in our surrounding environment. By focusing on entropy, and defining the problem as entropy, the fundamental underlying problem is overlooked.

These are the sorts of questions and issues that keep me interested in the complexity sciences. As I confront the literature and discuss these ideas with my colleagues, my own thoughts evolve. Presently, my overriding interest in complexity and systems theory is an attempt to bridge the physical and social sciences effectively. The development of the concept of sociopoiesis is an attempt to link the two traditions.

(RK): Can you say more about your concept of sociopoiesis?

(PP): Sociopoiesis began as an attempt to apply autopoiesis to society, but has developed into a means to clarify the various attempts to understand society in a complexity worldview. Sociopoiesis recognizes the metabolism of society as a dissipative structure, but also the conditions of being self-generating and self-perpetuating. Societies maintain their complexity through the flow of matter and energy through them. In this process, they produce the components necessary for their functioning and also replace and maintain these components. The only condition of autopoiesis that societies do not meet is self-bounding. While we can point to political, language, social, or other barriers, these are not analogous to the physical boundaries in an autopoeitic network. Sociopoiesis is the specific relationship of metabolism between society and the environment that is understood not only as a flow of resources through the society, but also the complex interactions necessary for its continued operation.

Sociopoiesis integrates physical science notions of dissipation and metabolism with the historical specificity of the historical social science. By combining the two approaches, we are able to understand society in a more complex fashion. Marx, and others, have discussed historical epochs and the “modes of production” associated with these epochs. Sociopoiesis can be understood as a “mode of production,” but it is a deliberate attempt to make blatant the interrelationship between nature and society. A specific sociopoiesis has a logic that organizes the flow of material and energy through the society necessary for its reproduction. If we take capitalism, we can see that its central logic is accumulation that necessitates ever-increasing growth. The fundamental goal is profit maximization to facilitate growth. As such, interactions with nature are going to be organized to fulfill profit needs. Thus, sociopoiesis makes use of social science understandings of societies, but is not limited to the social sciences. Embedded in complexity, the concept recognizes that effects of society’s interaction within nature may not be linear. Per unit increases in CO2 production will not lead to equivalent increases in temperature. Metabolic rifts that develop from the operation of the capitalist system will have complex effects that not always predictable in a linear sense. The metabolism of natural resources through society is more than an input/output chart, but has complex effects.

The historical capitalist world-economy organizes these metabolic flows geographically and temporally. Our historical understanding of capitalism allows us to develop an understanding of an ecologically unequal exchange that occurs between the “periphery” and the “core” of the system. This organization leads to specific ecological rifts that are geographically dispersed in an unequal fashion. These metabolic rifts are not simply depletion and pollution, but are disruptions in natural metabolic processes.

Vandana Shiva’s analysis of capitalist agriculture provides and example of the application of sociopoiesis. The so-called “green revolution” applied to the poorer regions of the world disrupted social relationships to encourage the growth of cash crops in an effort to address national debt repayment. The application of industrial agricultural techniques reduced food security for local populations as well as polluted local environments with the use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Resulting from the central logic of capitalism, the promotion of industrial agriculture is a mechanism to ensure profit maximization by transforming subsistence production into commodity production. This transformation is central to the capitalist sociopoiesis. The focus on profits externalizes the costs to the producers and the environment in general. The relationship with the environment dictated by the capitalist sociopoiesis leads to specific non-linear consequences – metabolic rifts. Effects of industrial fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides exceed an extensive depletion of the local environment. They are intentionally intensifying natural processes to increase profit making, but producing rifts in natural metabolic processes. As a result of runoff from industrial agriculture eutrophication can occur, producing complex negative ecological impacts beyond simple depletion of resources or material/energetic throughput. Capitalism’s impact is not limited to a dangerous level of throughput, but also produces metabolic rifts rooted in imbalanced natural relationships. Industrial agriculture has a number of effects, but industrial agriculture intensifies the uptake of certain elements from the soil. This intensification of ecological relationships imbalances soil chemistry leading to a metabolic rift. The imbalance is not simply depletion of the soil, but understood in terms of complexity relationships. The physical science understanding of the specific nature of the soil imbalance is understood in the social science understanding of the historical context resulting from the capitalist logic. What I wish to emphasize with the concept sociopoiesis is that our relationship with the environment is understood historically but also must be understood in complexity terms.

Fundamentally, sociopoiesis does not represent something completely new. What sociopoiesis does is integrate various understandings of social and ecological knowledge. While I think the idea of metabolic rift is a very promising concept, sociopoiesis is able to take that idea and provide a framework to allow physical scientists to apply it. Physical scientists can apply complexity notions to ecological processes disrupted by the capitalist logic. Physical scientists are also able to historicize their complexity understandings of social behavior. The term sociopoiesis is really a term meant to remind scholars to integrate, appropriately, the physical and social sciences.

(RK): Thanks so much for your time today, Paul.
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