The intention of this article is to suggest that some of the concepts used by
cyberneticians studying evolving self-
organising systems may be relevant to anarchist theory, and that some of the conclusions drawn from this study tend to favour libertarian models of social organisation. Much of the specifically cybernetic material is drawn from lectures given by
Gordon Pask and
Stafford Beer at
Salford College of Advanced Technology. They are not, of course, responsible for any conclusions drawn, except where explicitly stated.
Firstly, what do we mean by a self-organising system? One definition is simply ‘a system in which to order increases as time passes’, that is, in which the ratio of the variety exhibited to the maximum possible variety decreases; variety being a measure of the complexity of the system as it appears to an observer, the uncertainty for the observer regarding its behaviour. A system with large variety will have a larger number of possible states than one with smaller variety. Thus such a system may start by exhibiting very varied behaviour, e.g. a large number of different responses to a given stimulus may appear equally likely, but over a period of time the hehaviour becomes less erratic, more predictable—fewer and fewer distinct responses to a given stimulus are possible (or, better, have a significantly high probability.)
This definition is, however, in osme ways restrictive. The best such a system can do is to reach some sort of optimum state and stay there. Also, if we regard the system as a control system attempting to maintain stability in a fluctuating environment, the types of disturbance with which it can deal are limited by the fixed maximum variety of the system. This point will be dealt with later. The essential thing is that unpredictable disturbances are liable to prove too much for the system.
Such considerations suggest that it would be more fruitful to incorporate in the definition the idea that the maximum possible variety might also differ at different times. Thus Pask restricts the term to situations where the history of ‘the system’ can best be represented as a series S₀ S₁ … S
ₙ each term a system with fixed maximum variety, and each self-organising in the first sense. With this definition we are
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able to deal with control systems of the type found in living organisms. Indeed, with a few limited exceptions, biological and social organisation are, up to now, the only fields in which such control systems can be found. Some of the exceptions, in the shape of artificially constructed systems, despite their crude and elementary nature in comparison with living organisms, do however exhibit remarkably advanced behaviour, at least in comparison with conventional controllers.
For an example of self-organising behaviour in this sense, we may consider a human being learning to solve certain types of problem, as his behaviour appears to an observer. Over an interval the behaviour may appear self-organising in the first sense. When, however, the learner adopts a new concept or method, there will be a discontinuity in the development of the behaviour, after which it will again be self-organising in the first sense, for a time, but now incorporating new possibilities, and so on.
In many discussions of control situations the concept of ‘Hierarchy’ appears very quickly. This may tend to make the anarchist recoil, but should not do so, since the usage is a technical one and does not coincide with the use of the term in anarchist criticisms of political organisation.
Firstly, the cybernetician makes a very important distinction between two types of hierarchy, the anatomical and the functional, to use the terminology adopted by Pask. The former is the type exemplified in part by hierarchical social organisation in the normal sense (e.g. ‘tree of command’ structure in industry), that is: there are two (if two levels) actual distinguishable concrete entities involved. The latter refers to the case where there may be only one entity, but there are two or more levels of information structure operating in the system—as for example in some types of neuron networks. A comparable concept is Melman’s ‘disalienated decision procedure’.[1] This idea might, I think, be suggestive to anarchists.
Secondly, even in the case of ‘anatomical hierarchy’, the term only means that parts of the system can be distinguished dealing with different levels of decision making and learning, e.g. some parts may deal directly with the environment, while other parts relate to activity of these first parts, or some parts learn about individual occurrences, while others learn about sequences of individual occurrences, and others again about classes of sequences.
Even in the anatomical sense, then, the term need have none of the connotations of coercive sanctions in a ruler-ruled relationship which are common in other usages.
An important phenomenon in self-organising systems is interaction between the information flowing in the system and the structure of the system. In a complex system this leads to Redundancy of Potential Command—it is impossible to pick out the critical decision-making element, since this will change from one time to another, and depend on the information in the system. It will be evident that this implies that the idea of a hierarchy can have only limited application in such a system.
