Reading :: Complexity and Postmodernism

Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems
By Paul Cilliers

In this 1998 book, Paul Cilliers, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, explores postmodern theory through the lens of complexity theory. Someone I follow on Twitter mentioned this book a while ago, saying that it helped him to really understand postmodernist theory in a way he hadn't before, so I picked it up.

Full disclosure: I generally don't like reading philosophy. I'm not sure whether this is because I am too applied, or too concrete a thinker, or not well prepared, or whether the style of philosophy texts tends to be unfamiliar or obtuse to me. The philosophy texts that have worked best for me have been texts such as Latour's, which are usually well illustrated with concrete examples gathered from qualitative research or based on descriptions of social systems.  

Cilliers does not write in the Latour vein, and complexity theory, like postmodern theory, is often presented in abstract terms. So I found myself skimming through the book as I often do with philosophical texts. But I did gather some interesting points.

First, in the Preface, Cilliers notes that there's a difference between complex and complicated. "Things like computers and jumbo jets are complicated," he says: they have a large number of components, but can be described in terms of these individual components. But 

In a complex system, on the other hand, the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be understood simply by analysing its components. Moreover, these relationships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organisation. This can result in novel features, usually referred to in terms of emergent properties. (pp.viii-ix)

In the first chapter, Cilliers explores complexity further. He points out that Claude Shannon developed the basis for information theory by using entropy as a measure of information content in a message: "By replacing 'energy' with 'information' in the equations of thermodynamics, he could show that the amount of information in a message is equal to its 'entropy'. The more disorderly a message, the higher is its information content" (p.8). One "problematic implication" is that "if information equals entropy, then the message with the highest information content is the one that is completely random. Obviously there is some tension between the concepts of 'information' and 'randomness'" (p.8). He goes on to discuss Chaitin's insight that randomness should not be defined in terms of unpredictability but rather incompressibility. For instance, imagine 1000 characters, and each character is a 3. (Notice that I was able to describe that set of numbers perfectly in the italicized sentence, using far less than 1000 characters—I could compress it.) (p.9)

Based on this discussion, Cilliers asserts that "A complex system cannot be reduced to a simple one if it wasn't simple (or perhaps merely complicated) to start out with" (p.9). 

Complex systems, Cillers says, have two "indispensable capabilities": the processes of representation and self-organization (p.10). For complex systems, veridical representation isn't adequate: meaning is conferred by "the relationships between the structural components of the system itself" (p.11). And in terms of self-organization, "a complex system, such as a living organism or a growing economy, has to develop its structure and be able to adapt that structure in order to cope with changes in the environment" (p.12). 

This first chapter, frankly, was the most interesting to me because I'm interested in the basics of complexity theory—although I'd prefer to explore it with an extended, well-developed example rather than the quick cuts we get here. The rest of the book turns to post-structuralism and postmodernism, which the author sees as addressing complexity. The gist is that postmodernism is responding to the issues of complexity. Unfortunately I found myself skimming through this part and can't give an adequate review of it.