Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining ... - Moodle

Morphogenesas versus structuration 479
His approving quotation from Eco gives the full flavour of insubstantiality,
light years away from the examination of real structures.
'Semiotics suggests a sort of molecular landscape in which what we
are accustomed to recognize as everyday forms turn out to be the
result of transitory chemical aggregations . . . revealing that where
we thought we saw images there were only strategically arranged
aggregations of black and white points, alternations of presence and
absence'.78 To ground this view of codes in a 'broader theory of
social practice' merely adds the indeterminacy problem. For practices
themselves are seen as transformations of virtual orders of differences
(of codes in time and space). Societal changes thus become indeterminate,
they are like the shaking of a kaleidoscope-shifting patterns
produced by the manipulation of oppositions by the population
at large.
Finally, given the mutuality of codes and practices (in which we
cannot simply identify pre-existing codes which generate messages
because messages also enter into the reconstitution of codes in the
duality of structure), their interplay becomes analytically intractable,
for how can we 'break-in' to the circuit (Analytical dualism is of
course the device employed in morphogenesis to deal with its ongoing,
circular systemic processes, but this is proscribed here.) In practice
the answer is, by imputation, interpretation or interpolation-as was
seen with the 'structural principles'-but this merely reinvokes
Levi-Strauss's problem of the absent context of justification.
The difference in sociological enterprise, as Giddens initially stated
it, is illusory. The morphogenetic perspective is not only concerned
with the identification and elaboration of social structures, it is
preoccupied above all with the specification of the mechanisms
involved-with the feedback 'process that contains both negative
(stabilizing or rigidifying) elements and positive (structure-elaborating,
or increasingly disorganizing) features'.79 This is the way in which
institutional structures help to create and recreate themselves in an
ongoing developmental process. The ultimate difference is not one of
enterprise, for an adequate theory of stabilization, disorganization
and elaboration obviously incorporates the instantiation of structure,
just as an adequate theory of instantiation must specify the conditions
of morphostasis and morphogenesis. The theory of structuration
remains incomplete because it provides an insufficient account of the
mechanisms of stable replication versus the genesis of new social
forms, and will do so while ever it resists unpacking these two
connotations of 'reproduction'.
Margaret S. Archer
Department of Sociology
University of Warwick