Goethean science / holistic science

"Goethean science" is a holistic approach to science (as opposed to analytical and reductionist), named such because of the method associated with Goethe and described in his science writings. The Goethean approach to the total process overlaps with the dialectical approach, of seeing processes not as a collection of parts, but as relationships and interconnections.

Here is a quote from Henri Bortoft's book, The Wholeness of Nature (subtitled "Goethe's way toward a science of conscious participation in Nature"), Lindisfarne Books, 1996.

"[A] relationship cannot be experienced as such in the analytical mode of consciousness. Since in this mode it is the elements which are related that stand out in experience, the relationship itself can only seem to be a shadowy abstraction to the intellectual mind. The perception of a relationship as such would require a simultaneous perception of the whole, and hence the restructuring of consciousness into the holistic mode... The perception of a necessary connection is the perception of a relationship as a real factor in the phenomenon, instead of being only a mental abstraction added on to what is experienced by the senses. The reality of a relationship, the necessity of a connection, is not experienced as such either by the senses alone or by the intellectual mind. Hence any attempt to understand this reality in terms of these faculties is bound to find that it vanishes from the phenomenon itself and appears to be only a subjective belief." (99)

[Note: My criticism of at least this part of Bortoft's book is that he does not say how or why there is a necessary connection in the phenomenon he cites as examples, like certain structures in mammals, only that there is such a thing.]

The Goethean approach is seen as a way around Hume's assertion that, because there is no sense impression from which necessary connection can be derived, "necessary connections" do not exist. For Hume, two events appeared "conjoined" (or in "constant conjunction") and that was it -- nothing "necessary" or necessarily "connected" about them, only something "habitually" seen, "contingent correlations".

I don’t see what Hume's problems was -- an experimentally repeatable phenomenon given the same conditions or field of operation, seems enough to perceive or know the necessary connection. As Engels wrote (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy):

The most telling refutation of this as of all other philosophical crotchets is practice — namely, experiment and industry. If we are able to prove the correctness of our conception of a natural process by making it ourselves, bringing it into being out of its conditions and making it serve our own purposes into the bargain, then there is an end to the Kantian ungraspable "thing-in-itself". The chemical substances produced in the bodies of plants and animals remained just such "things-in-themselves" until organic chemistry began to produce them one after another, whereupon the "thing-in-itself" became a thing for us — as, for instance, alizarin, the coloring matter of the madder, which we no longer trouble to grow in the madder roots in the field, but produce much more cheaply and simply from coal tar.

Setting aside Engels' sense of "things for us" and "making it serve our purposes", and the sort of objectification and alienation from nature that it implies, there are two methods here of apprehending "necessary connection". On the one hand, a Goethean, method arising out of non-analytic mental activity -- holistic, right-brain, intuited apprehension. On the other, a method arising from interacting with matter (call it "practice", "labor" or "production"; or "fiddling", "experimenting", or "hacking").

My interest in "necessary connection" has to do with "laws" as "necessary connections", and the bundle of laws present in a phenomenon (or network) is the law system. And the law system determines the behaviors, the nature of the network.

Although "network" sounds so schematic and technical.

jd

Here's a link to the paper that I am giving at the Global Studies Association meeting in Knoxville tomorrow (5/13/05) on networks and globalization:

"Networks and globalization" (html) / (pdf)

jd

Here are a couple of other online resources, these on economics and networks:

Economics of Networks (This is the website of Nicholas Economides at the Stern School of Business, New York University.


Network Economics series from the Social Science Research Network (link copied from the "Economics of Networks" site).

jd

Here's a link to an interesting discussion between writer Joline Blais and artist Jon Ippolito on "Evaluating Collaborative Work, Interauthorship, Open Content".

jd

I realize this is old news, but the story is illustrative of (1) the vulnerability of modern systems to a network-based offensive strategy and (2) another way that electronics-based society, or at least a capitalist one, leads towards the police(d) state.

Dissertation Could Be Security Threat: Student's Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information By Laura Blumenfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 8, 2003; Page A01.

For his geography dissertation, George Mason U. grad student Sean Gorman mapped the businesses and industry, and overlayed them with the fiber-optic networks that connect them. Although based on publicly available information, the work assembles in one place a map to obvious places to snip-snip and shut down sections of the economy. "For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society."

jd

On the Limits of the Limits of Networking

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker's essay on "The Limits of Networking" highlights some of the weaknesses of the discussion of "networks" and "networking" and the "network form" on the Left.

Galloway and Thacker's piece is a response to another piece by Gert Lovink and Florian Schneider, "Notes on the State of Networking" that appeared in the February, 2004 makeworld paper #4. The title is a pun on "state" as a physics term and "state" as a political term, as in the exercise of class power. "Networks", they write, "are the emerging form of organization in our time." But like assertions that we participate in a "knowledge economy" or live in the "information society", such statements are redundancies. All organizations are networks of some sort; an economy is impossible without knowledge, no matter what the level of technological development; society without information would not be a society.

I am being deliberately obtuse here, because there is common conflation of "networks" and the "network form". "Network" is device for talking about any process as the interaction of nodes via links -- a universal architectural structure, a powerful device for comprehending phenomena. "Network form" attempts to describe a means of organization in contrast to "hierarchical form". Discussions about the "network form" fail to appreciate the insights that network science has to offer. The result is a shallow conception (networks are conceived as "ahistorical entities" per Galloway and Thacker) doomed to political and organizational failure.

Per Lovink + Scheider:

"A radical critique of the information society implies analyzing the passages from the state of territory and the state of population to the state of networked globality or: Info-Empire....Rather than a simple application to improve life or increase efficiency, life becomes intrinsically networking and networking comes alive as unconditional attribute of social existence... The ultimate goal of networking has been, and still is, to free the user from the bonds of locality and identity. Power [counterposed to "networking" jd] responds to the presence of increasing mobility and communications of the multitudes with attempts to regulate them in the framework of traditional regimes that cannot be abandoned, but need to be reconfigured from scratch and recompiled against the networking paradigm: borders and property, labour and recreation, education and entertainment industries undergo radical transformations."

For Galloway + Thacker, their "point of departure" with L+S is that "Info-Empire" "must be defined at the level of the medium itself." They critique the popular conception of networks amongst the new new Left -- really, the "network form":

"In many current political discussions, networks are seen as the new paradigm of social and political organization. The reason is that networks [that is, the "network form" - jd] exhibit a set of properties that distinguishes them from the more centralized power structures. These structures are often taken to be merely abstract, formal aspects of the network -- which is itself characterized as a kind of meta-structure... What we end up with is a 'metaphysics of networks.'... What we question is not the network concept itself for, as a number of network examples show, they can indeed be effective modes of struggle. What we do question is the undue and exclusive reliance on the metaphysics of the network, as if this ahistorical concept legitimizes itself by merely existing."

I think G+T correctly challenge the fetishization of networks. Without a deepening of understanding of networks -- that they are expressions of a "law system" that binds the network to an operative environment -- we are left with the "metaphysics of networks". By "operative environment" I mean certain conditions which exist which render the necessary connections -- the law system -- operable. In the social world, this would be, for example, the mode of production, or more broadly, "history". The connections in a pre-agricultural economy are not constrained by the law of the maximization of profit that defines a capitalist economy. The links of "worker/boss" or property are, in the language of computers, no-ops -- not operative.

In the modern environment of electronics. with all of the production and communication possibilities they enable ("to free the user from the bonds of locality and identity"), the contest is not over "power" vs "network", but rather the law system itself that defines or gives a particular character to the network. The political challenge is to overthrow the law system, to re-make the network.

Galloway and Thacker use the narrower concept of "protocols" as the "what" that defines the network. In computer networking terms, "protocols" are the agreed upon rules that nodes use to enable links or communication. An agreement on protocol is a pre-requisite for links to be established. So in this sense, the protocols will determine, to a great extent, the nature of the links and hence the dynamics of the network. Political work then, needs to be "counter-protocological." And they clarify, the action is not counter-anything. "Counter-" implies reaction, restoration, conservation, preservation. Rather, political work needs to be "hypertrophic" -- pushing beyond, creating the new, exploring and claiming the undiscovered country.

Protocol is really a kind of grammar, or syntax. Inasmuch as the syntactical rules of language constrain our imagination, I can accept the notion of protocol as a form of control. But at the same time, communication is impossible without syntax. As Florian Cramer noted in her response on nettime-l to the G+T piece:

But as with any play, consisting of a ruleset and its free execution, control is never total to the extent that it wouldn't permit freedom... Freedom and control thus are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent on each other. To envision communication systems without control - i.e. languages without rules, networks without protocols - and find them desirable, would be utterly an infantilist vision of a pre-language paradise.

To focus in on "protocol" as the description of what defines the network misdirects, or does not go far enough. In computer networks, protocols are probably some of the most neutral aspects of the network, and to push the metaphor into the social network obscures too much. "Law system" is total and comprehensive, and not "neutral" in the way that "protocols" can be read as neutral, as the floor on which the great social contest plays out.

For the network of society, the fundamental relationship of private property in the age of electronics defines the network behavior. "Private property" describes only one possible mode of linking. If "private property" is the protocol in the most general metaphoric sense -- a system of constraints on the interactions between human beings -- well then bring on the counter-protocological practice and lets hypertrophe the network.

In any case, it's that understanding of network dynamics, the historical context and constraints and opportunities -- the law system that informs, binds, sets boundaries, describes, defines etc. etc. that seems to have been missing in the Discussion. And without the comprehension of those network dynamics -- what is and what needs to be done -- progress will be impossible.

"Close Doesn't Always Count in Winning Games" by Benedict Carey (New York Times, 3/7/05):

[S]ocial scientists who have studied group performance under pressure say that often it is decentralized groups (like the Yankees) that prove more resilient than strongly connected ones (like the Red Sox); they are better able to weather outside criticism and internal quarrels.

Evidence from personality profiles and from studies of military, corporate and space flight crews suggests that looser ties between group members can be a strength, if the team includes individuals who can generate collective emotion when needed. And the Yankees have several of them.

Some other key points:

-- "Winning is more likely to create team unity than vice versa, Torre has said repeatedly, and the evidence backs him up, said Dr. Richard Moreland, a professor of psychology and management at the University of Pittsburgh."

-- "When a common purpose is shared, loosely tied groups can function better than strongly bonded ones when it comes to containing dissent or bickering, research suggests." It allows individuals to withdraw from squabbles without disrupting the group's work.

-- "On a tightly knit team, by contrast, a falling out between key members can divide a squad, forcing people to take sides, psychologists say."

-- "Whether such independent, loosely tied people ultimately succeed as a unit depends not only on strong management, researchers say, but on the presence of individual group members who can circulate through disparate parts of the team, reduce conflict and help generate collective spirit when it is needed."