Educational Complexity and Organizational Recursion

A second property of complexity is what Edgar Morin calls organizational recursion. Taborga and Lawrimore both use the more common term feedback, which I think fails to capture the richer implications of the complex interactions inherent in complex systems, but feedback provides an easier starting place with organizational recursion, so I start there.

Taborga says:

Feedback is particularly relevant to complexity. The system responds to and acts on feedback within the system and received from the outside world. A project team, for example, can change course when it receives feedback that a risk has been discovered.

Lawrimore says:

Feedback Impacts Systems: The primary way a system interacts with its environment or other systems is through feedback. When you move your hand, your nerves provide feedback signals to your brain so you know where your hand is. When a customer tells you he likes or dislikes something which your organization is doing, that is important feedback. Feedback in the form of information or signals is essential for an organization to be able to adapt to changes in its environment. Feedback within the organization is also essential for people to adapt to each other. Feedback occurs in two forms: balancing, which keeps the system stable by limiting change (like a thermostat), and reinforcing, which intensifies the change or activity.

Most people seem to understand simple feedback—our fingers tentatively touch a piece of metal, and we get sensory feedback that tells us if the metal is hot or cold or safe to handle—but I suspect that most see feedback in this linear fashion, something like a stimulus-response mechanism: we see a piece of chocolate, and our mouth waters. This seems to be the gist of feedback for Taborga and Lawrimore, but it is too narrow a view to explain complexity.

Morin's concept of organizational recursion is better. In his book On Complexity (2008), Morin says that recursion is:

a process where the products and the effects are at the same time causes and producers of what produces them. … The recursive idea is, therefore, an idea that has broken away from the linear idea of cause and effect, of product/producer, or structure/superstructure, because everything that is product comes back on what produces it in a cycle that is itself self-constituting, self-organizing, and self-producing. (49, 50)

Morin uses the recursive loops among people and societies to help us visualize this dynamic feedback loop: "individuals produce society that produces individuals" (49). This is a problematic concept for our view of simple classrooms. As Nicolescu has demonstrated, complexity undermines the hegemony of local causality: that any given event is necessarily caused by (follows from) another, previous event proximate in space and time. Does society follow from the interactions of a collection of people, or do the interactions of a collection of people follow from the society? The answer is yes, and that's a damned nuisance for those who want to find the magic causal bullet for any situation.

Recursive, or circular, causality seriously complexifies our understanding of schooling (as well as everything else), for it suggests that a student is both the product of her school and also the producer, in part, of that school. Without the school, the student would not be quite what she is, for the school feeds back into the student. Likewise, without the student, the school would not be quite what it is, for the student feeds back into the school. This recursive feedback loop constantly changes both agents, which in turn changes the other, again and over again.

This circular causality enlarges our sense of how education takes place. Traditionally, we have assumed that a teacher's instruction is the local, effective cause of a student's learning. Our entire assessment regime for student, teacher, and curriculum is based on this assumption. If the student is learning, then the teacher did something right to make that happen—end of story. However, circular causality says that local causality is only a part of the story, often not the largest part. Rather, we must factor in the recursive, evolving interactions of the student and teacher, then the recursive interactions of the student to other students, then the recursive interactions of the student to the content, to her family, to her outside social groups, and so forth, until we finally realize that the single student's learning can be assessed only in the nexus of all the recursive interactions, what Morin calls retro-eco-interactions, with all of her connections, including whatever local causes are, in fact, present. Measuring a student's learning is like measuring a thunderstorm: a few numbers are a start, but just barely, and those numbers can be as obfuscating as enlightening.

Boundaries and the System

A fourth concept that Morin discusses in The Reform of Thought is the system, or organization. If I understand Morin correctly, then he means by system any self-organizing entity that pulls itself together  in such a manner that allows it to function as an entity and that provides the organized substrate for the emergence of properties and capabilities not necessarily inherent in the individual parts. The whole entity, then, is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, consciousness is not a property of individual neurons, but it emerges when enough neurons self-organize into a functioning human brain within a functioning eco-system. As near as I can tell, systems appear to be all-inclusive—the ultimate vacation resorts. I cannot think of anything that is not both itself a system and a part of another system. Even strings on the micro-scale and the Universe on the macro-scale may be systems within systems. If string theorists are correct, then our Universe is just one system within a system of Universes. Maybe strings themselves are systems. After all, we once thought atoms were the smallest things possible, and we've moved way beyond that idea. We will likely move again.

This concept of system quite likely includes the other concepts that I've considered in my exploration of boundaries: the included middle, the dialogic, circular causality, and the holographic principle. Or perhaps I'm being drawn to the realization that all of these concepts suggest and implicate the others. Each of them, in true transdisciplinary fashion, is difficult to think about alone. Rather, they make more sense when seen as a whole. They represent the nature of boundaries as

• the included middles that join rather than separate but without merging, 
• the dialogics that juxtapose and hold in a creative, dynamic dance distinct entities, becoming the fertile zone where new things emerge and enrich both entities,
• the circular causalities that enable the flow of energy, matter, and information between the distinct entities, again enriching and sustaining both,
• the holographic principles that encode the whole within the part, like stem cells able to self-reproduce the entity, and finally,
• the systems that nestle systems within systems within systems.

Really. Can we understand any of this if we don't see that the part is within the system is within the part and that this is irreducibly loopy? Can we understand Mending Wall if we don't see that the narrator and the neighbor are a self-forming, self-organizing system, joined and at the same time distinguished at an included middle that expresses their dynamic dance and creates the zone in which they both assert their independence and their dependence, their individuality and their kinship, defining their independence in terms of their dependence and vice versa, and that echoes the patterns of molecules, societies, and stars.

Well, at any rate, I think that's what Mending Wall means to me. I have no idea what the poem meant to Robert Frost, and the question is somewhat irrelevant to my discussion which hasn't been about Frost but about boundaries. Still, I feel just strong enough to believe that, if he were here, I might persuade him.

Boundaries and the Loop of Circular Causality

A second characteristic to emerge from thinking of boundaries as included middles is circular causality, or the feedback loop. In The Reform of Thought (2008), Morin begins his explanation of circular causality by quoting Pascal: "I hold knowing the whole to be impossible if I do not know the parts nor can I know the parts if I do not know the whole." If I understand correctly, then Pascal is suggesting a loop of energy and information between the part and the whole, the entity and its ecosystem, this side and that. Neither the part nor the whole can exist without this loop, and this loop is greatly responsible for defining both the part and the whole. Think in terms of strings <—> atoms <—> molecules <—> cells <—> organs <—> bodies <—> families <—> societies  <—> planet <—> solar system <—> well, you get the idea.

Boundaries are the zones of engagement that enable the loop of energy and information into the individual and then out again into whatever systems the individual is a part. This loop of energy and information is not benign; rather, it changes both the individual and the system so that the individual develops by feeding and informing itself from its systems, and those systems in turn develop by feeding and informing themselves both from the individuals that make them systems and from the larger systems of which they are parts. Boundaries, then, are not cellophane wrappers, but semi-permeable membranes that help manage the ebb and flow of information and energy from the system to the individual and back again.

This loop is a fundamental characteristic of boundaries as included middles. This circular causality is fundamental to physical, chemical, biological, social, intellectual, and spiritual processes as well. It is the very life-blood of economics and of rhetoric and poetic. It is the eucharistic ground of Reality. We eat that we might engage that we might eat again. As Morin explains so clearly using ourselves as the examples:

An obvious example of this kind of loop is ourselves, because we are products of a cycle of biological reproduction in which we are, at the same time, producers, in order that the cycle continues. We are the product-producers. Thus, society is the product of interactions among individuals, but on the global level, in fact, new qualities emerge which, retroactive to individuals—language, culture— permit them to be fulfilled as individuals. Individuals produce the society that produces individuals. (The Reform of Thought, 25)

Frost's Mending Wall neatly embodies this loop, which by the way, is never resolved, for resolution is death. Mending Wall begins with the narrator's feed forward: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. The neighbor is a bit slow on the return, but finally in Line 27, he feeds back: Good fences make good neighbors. The narrator muses over this return shot, but volleys again in Line 36: Something there is that doesn't love a wall. Unperturbed, the neighbor returns the volley in the last line, Line 46: Good fences make good neighbors. The two mantras anchor the poem in the first and last lines, and they echo through the poem in Lines 27 and 36. And so they loop, round and round, and this circular causality gives the poem its life. It is the game between the narrator and neighbor that keeps them engaged that feeds both with information first, and then with energy. Each brings energy to the wall, exchanging both energy and information in a relationship that seems satisfactory and satisfying to them both. This circular causality is the bootstrap operation that creates the relationship that defines the two of them together and that makes the adjoining farms what they are.

I don't mean to suggest that this particular loop between this narrator and this neighbor is static and unchanging. It is not. Eventually, the exchanges of energy and information through this loop, especially when compounded with all the other loops at other boundaries in the lives of these two men, will lead to enough changes within the men that the exchanges between them will also change, and then the boundary itself will change. But the poem gives us a pleasing snapshot of the dynamic engagement between the narrator and his neighbor, and for me, that captures much of the dynamic nature of boundaries. It also says to me that boundaries are absolutely necessary. We must have those zones of engagement between ourselves and our environments. Otherwise, we die.

Morin draws two important inferences from this circular causality. First, "we have to deal with the product-producer" (25). This is a common theme on the Internet, where consumers of information have been turned into producers of information: or prosumers. More and more, we find it impossible to ignore the loop of energy and information between individuals and their societies as technology moves the means of production into the hands of individuals. At first, technology was only for the elite and privileged, but now it is for everyone. Not everyone likes that.

Second, we need "to understand the notion of self-production and self-organization" (25). This self-organization involves us in one of those fundamental, paradoxical dialogics: independence within dependence. As Morin says, "When we reflect on self-organization, we understand it as an ultimately paradoxical notion: a self-organized, self-producing reality consumed by energy. It therefore deteriorates; it therefore has a need to draw energy from its environment and, by the same token, to depend on this environment, which at the same time provides it with its autonomy" (25, 26).

These inferences capture some wonderful nuances in the relationship between the narrator and his neighbor. First, they are the products of the boundaries that they themselves produce. This production is not once and for all, but it deteriorates and requires regeneration; thus, as the narrator says, "on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again." Our boundaries require maintenance. Finally, the boundary defines both the autonomy and the dependence of the narrator and his neighbor. They are both decidedly what they are because of their interactions. They both have the integrity of self, but only within the context of each other. I think I like this loopy thinking.