Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

It preserves the web-like pattern of organization but undergoes continual structuralchanges. It does this through a developmental process of structural coupling with theenvironment. New connections in the autopoietic network are created either throughenvironmental influences or as a result of the system’s internal dynamics. Structural couplingrefers to recurrent interactions with the environment each of which triggers structuralchanges in the system. For instance, an organism’s nervous system changes its connectivitywith every sense perception 26 . However, in keeping with the autonomous character ofautopoietic systems, the environment only triggers the structural changes, it does not specifyor direct them. Not all disturbances cause structural changes. It is the living system thatspecifies which perturbations from the environment trigger them 27 . There are manydisturbances that do not cause structural changes because they are “foreign” to the system.In this way each living system builds up its own distinctive world according to its owndistinctive structure. As it keeps interacting with its environment, a living organism willundergo a sequence of structural changes, and over time it will form its own, individualpathway of structural coupling.At any point on this pathway, the structure of the organism is a record of previousstructural changes and thus of previous interactions, i.e. history. It is path-dependent. And aseach structural change affects the organism’s future behavior the behavior of it is influencedby its structure. The implication is that the structural changes in the system constitute acts ofcognition. The organism’s structure conditions the course of its interactions and restricts thestructural changes that the interactions may trigger in it 28 . For example, when a living systemreaches a bifurcation point, as described by Prigogine, its history of structural coupling willdetermine the new pathways that become available, but which pathway the system will takeremains unpredictable.Already by 1986 the concept had been picked up by other disciplines such asorganization theory 29 . Noting the similarity with Prigogine’s ideas, Morgan suggests that thetheory of autopoiesis thus encourages us to understand the transformation or evolution ofliving systems as a result of internally generated change. These changes may stem fromrandom modifications introduced through processes of re-preproduction, or through thecombination of chance interactions and connections that give rise to the development ofnew system relations. Random variations provides the seed of possibility that allows theemergence and evolution of new system identities. Random changes can trigger interactionsthat reverberate throughout the system, the final consequences being determined by whetheror not the current identity of the system will dampen the effects of the new disturbancethrough compensatory changes elsewhere, or whether a new configuration of relations willbe allowed to emerge. Thus rather than suggesting that the system adapts to an environmentor that the environment selects the system configuration that survives, autopoiesis placesprincipal emphasis on the way the total system of interactions shapes its own future. Inproviding this kind of explanation, autopoiesis presents and alternative to classical Darwiniantheory 30 .And that was the very assertion of Stuart Kauffman, who incorporated these ideas inhis concept of the self-organization of living systems in his influential The Origins of Order.Akin to simple chemical reactions which undergo dramatic transitions when they reach acertain level of complexity, he saw molecules beginning spontaneously to combine to form26 Ibid, (1996), pp.218-19.27 Ibid, p.266.28 Ibid, pp.220.29 See for instance Morgan, chapter 8.30 Morgan (1986), pp.235-40, in particular pp.239-40.130