Nonlinearity and the Sociological Frame
Durkheim and Linear History: A Short Overview and Abridgement
Introductions and Greetings
For the first article of, presumably and hopefully, many i’ll be posting I wanted to set myself straight. “Choose a simple topic and explore your worldview,” I was initially thinking. However, like how life usually goes it quickly became more complicated than i’d anticipated. So, while this might not be the best standard, among many a history of “first entries”, I figured this particular article would still be important enough to explore as a healthy introduction to an analysis i’ll be posting later this month.
To start off, the subject we’ll be exploring is one of Sociology's “greatest”(perhaps, important is more fitting) statistics: suicide rates, acts, and their signals of societal change. When I was researching topics for this blog I saw these particular intersecting discussions boiling inside: of ethics and morality, collective and individual desires, formal data analytics and “spontaneous factors”. Naturally I latched on and couldn’t help but direct my full attention towards it. There was almost too much to talk about.
The specific article that we’ll be focusing on, and dissecting(at least in part), will be Social complexity, modernity and suicide: an assessment of Durkheim’s suicide from the perspective of a non-linear analysis of complex social systems by Rosalia Condorelli. I’ll be giving my preliminary thoughts and explanations(the linguistic, sacred, historical framing) of some key paragraphs in the beginning of the first third of the essay. The middle and latter portions of the research paper are focused on the mathematical analytics of complex systems. I’ll be getting to it, eventually. Those methods have a few direct correspondence to key ways to map social environments, however it would take far to long to do it justice herein.
Shall we?
Preliminary Remarks on Durkheim
Commentary: Durkheim stands as icon, for the unflinching amount of research backing much of his sociological framing. However, the bigger picture isn’t quite there.
The peculiar aspect of Durkheim lies in having depicted with efficaciousness the dark side of freedom. If it is true that the relentless progress of individualism frees man from tradition’s shackles, it is likewise true that freedom comes at a price, and the price is isolation and even more: paradoxically, it is the loss of one’s identity, the loss of life’s meaning itself or of every reason of existing.
[…] Durkheimian Theory seems to suggest an interpretation of suicide growth process as susceptible of an progressive, potentially unlimited, increase as modernization increases. Durkheim, of course, never rigorously “formalized” such an idea, but the sense which transpires from his numerous statements seems to leave little doubt.
However, beginning to Halbwachs (1930), more recent studies reveal other different scenarios. In the long run, despite continued modernizing process, several studies, investigating the modernization impact on suicide during a long time frame (from 50 to 100 years and over), found a certain tendency to suicide rates stabilizing (the so called leveling-outeffect) or even falling in the more industrialized Western world, in particular beginning with the second half of the twentieth century.
The benefits of industrial-machine production would offset social isolation effects induced by low levels of domestic and religious integration.
From our perspective, the observable change of suicide trend since 1961 showed a dissonance with Durkheim’s theoretical prediction. Increases in economic prosperity and consumption styles seemed to be a deterring factor on suicides.
On Nonlinearity and the Sociological Frame
Commentary: Modernity has forced certain linguistic framing devices into a corner. Sociological research must take a new “leap”.
In other words, they seem to legitimate the hypothesis of a restrained suicide growth process and therefore to cast in doubt the possibility to find an explanation within the classical conception of social change which assumes all systems, and social system too, as systems being characterized by interactions based on linear proportionality between cause and effect.
[…] from our perspective they may be better understood in the light of the new concept of complex adaptive systems, systems which are composed of several elements interacting in a nonlinear way and, consequentially, subjected to a nonlinear, emergentist process of social change. This new approach had many implications for Social Sciences.
Because of its implications, in neither of the two senses (stability/homeostasis or maximum entropy) equilibrium did it appear however appropriate in describing social systems as far as they are open systems
Rather, from complexity perspective, this concept means acknowledging that complex and even seemingly stochastic behaviour can be fully generated by a determinate structure underlying the logic of human behaviour and, therefore, its indeterminacy is just inherent to a particular structural mechanism underlying social interaction processes (cit., p. 429), whose logic revealed now a nonlinear structure.
In conclusion, to apply the concept of dissipative structure or complex adaptive system to the study of society means looking at social systems as “inherently historical entities” whose evolution “is driven as much by internal instability as by external perturbation”(Harvey and Reed 1997, p. 306), using environmental feedback for learning and adaptation
Connecting the Dots
Commentary: The distinction between “reliability” versus “predictability”, à la Katzian Generative Anthropology, comes barreling forward.
In a system governed by a linear causality and negative feedback the whole dynamic of evolution tends to go off in a stable order and there is no place for surprise, for unexpected and surprising changes of internal system structures.
Many of these studies found, in particular, that social systems, with reference to their movements over time, fluctuate between different critical points (bifurcation points) rather than follow a direct path, presenting a bounded development process.
[…] some found themselves uncomfortable with the romantic Prigoginian idea that the vision of a complex, unpredictable, without certainty world but able to emphasizes the re-enchantment of nature is more comforting than the scientific vision of a predictable, timeless, deterministic world; […]
What has been traditionally considered separate objects of study—on one hand, free human acts, with their uncertainty and unpredictability, and on the other hand, nature, with its inner order—has created a gap between the Social and the Natural Sciences. The Complexity Theory (or Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory) shows this gap to be largely artificial, redeeming the Social Sciences from being a minority science, in Kant’s terminology, or in Kiel and Elliott’s modern terminology, a “scientific stepchild” compared to the so-called “hard” sciences (Elliott and Kiel 1997, p. 3).
Concluding Remarks
Hopefully, the brief overview above is helpful in laying out the general sentiments and structure. When put in this manner it becomes much more apparent the need for almost a divine intervention within many of these older, ‘decrepit’ models. This idea that, within even Sociology's complex linguistic history, we arive back at this sense of unsettling revelatory enchantment is fascinating and deserving of discussion.
Within Generative Anthropology, specifically, this type of experience would be considered a new meeting with the ostensive. Rather than other modes of analysis, where hypothetical events follow each other logically and are far-and-away from reality(linear analysis), the ostensive is revelatory and must be present with us; as the nature of “spontaneity” and “historical entities” suggests in the article.
Let’s consider it like this: if history were to be enframed in a particular era(or even a particular social vector), would it perpetually and progressively expand the effects of that “era” to infinity? The research is pointing to no. Explicitly, we can say the pursuit of, for example, technological modernization, ad infinitum, won’t cause complete and total social disintegration. The cultural effect this suggests is that simply we, as humans, don’t act in progressive mannerisms but rather through “non-linear” leaps in how we communicate with each other. Similar to climbing a mountain, with rugged stepped terrain, as opposed to a sheer vertical uphill climb. Ultimately, to be human is to adapt, to change. To be able to commune with the spontaneous is to be human, likewise.
Anyways, hope the weekdays treat many of you well. I’ll pick up more of the nitty gritty aspects when we do the book review at month end, with a much more in depth article. Until then, relax, enjoy some music.