Manuel DeLanda...My Home is My Memory...Doors 2
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On the other hand, cities are also the home of governmental, commercial, religious and other hierarchies, in which decision-making is centralized, and the effects of decisions travel through well defined chains of command. At every level of this chain, that is, at every rank, the human components are very homogenous: the very process of rising through the ranks performs a sorting operation which results in more or less uniform behaviour within each level. Indeed, the correct functioning of a command chain assumes this uniformity and predictability. And yet, here as elsewhere, when we actually study a given hierarchical structure we are bound to find mixtures of meshwork elements, even if only in small proportions.
Moreover, as markets grow in complexity they can generate hierarchies and viceversa. Take for example, the big fairs that existed in Europe form the 13th. century on: at the top they had the money markets, followed by luxury goods markets, while at the bottom we find food and other elementary goods. Hence these fairs were veritable hierarchies of meshworks. Similarly, when we analyse the interactions between goverments, large commercial monopolies and oligopolies, eclesiastical, medical and military authorities we find that they usually interlock in varying ways, complementing one another without losing their individual differences. Since no `super-hierarchy' is controlling this process of mutual accomodation, the overall process suggests a meshwork of hierarchies.
Drawing some analogies with biological processes may be as useful in analysing home towns as it was in exploring individual homes. Some evolutionary biologists have suggested, for example, that any entity that replicates itself, regardless of the nature of the process, can evolve in the exact same way as creatures with genes do. The first candidate for a non-genetic replicator was, of course, Richard Dawkings `memes': patterns of behaviour that replicate themselves across a given animal population through imitation. The best studied example of memes is bird songs. Although the basic structure of the song, an impoverished skeleton, is genetically hard-wired, the full song with all its fluorishes, harmonies and counterpoints is not. Individual birds must be exposed to actual full songs by other birds of their species in order to develop their own. Since bird songs form local dialects and change over generations, they are indeed a replicator as much as genes are.
Human beings, on the other hand, are the home of other replicators. While we house memes just like birds do, for example most fashions and fads are propagated by imitation, we also speak languages and these do not replicate by imitation but by enforced repetition. When people learn the sounds (or phonemes) of English, for example, they do not imitate them: they shoot for a norm, they attempt to repeat a standard sound, and they must do so if they want to be intelligible to the rest of the English speaking community. A similar point applies to both vocabulary and syntactical rules. They are replicators but not memes. It is thanks to this flow of norms through human populations that all our languages have evolved.
Now, to return to our main subject, economists Nelson and Winter, authors of the very influential theory of evolutionary economics, have suggested that the institutional inhabitants of cities are replicators too. They claim that the daily routines of a given institution, together with whatever formalized regulations the institution may have, form a kind of `organizational memory'. When a commercial organization, for example, opens a new branch outside of its home town, and sends some staff there to preserve continuity, informal routines as well as formalized procedures become replicated, and in an important sense, the institution itself has given birth to an offspring. A similar process ocurrs when a given city colonizes foreign land and replicates its governmental and religious institutions there. Since the copying of routines (and even rules) is subject to alterations and local adaptations, there is here enough variation that some sorting process equivalent to natural selection can use as raw materials for evolution. Since our private homes are part of this population of institutions, some of the details of their architecture as well as the daily routines that make up our lives may have evolved in a process like this. So considering the two lines of my argument, the self-organization of expressive affordances as well as the evolution of institutions via routine and rule replication, our homes are like bird territories in more than a metaphorical sense.
The main problem with what I have said so far is that I have concentrated exclusively on the informational aspects of the problem. That is, I discussed expressive affordances and genetic, memetic and normative patterns and pretended for a while that that is all that mattered. But, of course, bird territories and human homes involve more that just information. In particular, they need a constant supply of matter and energy in order to work. The function of territories is, indeed, that of creating a protected source of food supplies. Urban homes too, have always been connected to local markets where they draw their supplies. Perhaps the best ilustration of the crucial role played by matter-energy is provided by the action of genetic replicators. As is well know, all individual genes do is to code for enzymes (and other proteins) which are large molecules capable of accelerating or decelerating chemical reactions, and thus, of being used as control agents for metabolic functions. This catalytic function of enzymes may be described as the ability to force systems of molecules to switch from one stable state (called an attractor) to another. But as is well known in contemporary thermodynamics, it is the flow of energy through a system that creates the stable states in the first place.
Catalysts without a flow of matter-energy are powerless. In order to perform their magic, genes and their control products depend on the flow of biomass through the food webs that characterize ecosystems. A birds territory is as much a genetic and memetic structure, as it is an energetic and material one, and so are are our homes. Not only were they always connected to food webs via markets, the first other public connection that they established was with sewers, that is, the same nutritional flow from the other side. True, it was later traversed mostly by informational flows, telephone, radio, t.v., and networked computers, but as before, these flows of catalysts can only perform their magic on energetic materials capable of self-organization. We tend to forget not only the flow of food but also the flow of electricity into our homes, as well as the electric and hormonal flows in our bodies which play such crucial role in the `feeling of home'. And we tend to talk of the `information age' without realizing that the future is as much about energy and materials as is about information. The common dependency on matter-energy between territories and homes is, I believe, another respect is which they are alike beyond metaphor.
Biological metaphors have been used in the past, many times with terrible results. For example, positivist philosophers in the 19th. century compared cities and organisms and concluded that both have homeostatic mechanisms to keep them in internal harmony. This embodied a very romantic view of both nature and society, which disregarded friction, conflict and other nonlinearities that make simple self-regulation impossible. Today, nonlinear models are more sophisticated than that, and more importantly, have revealed that the friction exorcised from those romanticized views is essential to the self-organization of meshworks. A similar point applies to `invisible hand' economics, where perfect rationality and perfect competition are supposed to benefit society automatically. Nonlinear simulations of market formation include not only bounded rationality, that is, a realistic limited degree of problem-solving skills, but also delays, bottlenecks and other sources of friction which are also key to their self-organization.
Thus, we have learned to draw better analogies and to discover more realistic metaphors. But the question now is, are they still mere metaphors?. The answer to this is that some are and some are not and the ones that are not give us a good idea of how to get rid of metaphors altogether. For example, when we compare genes, memes, norms and routines we are not, I believe, thinking metaphorically any longer. What we are saying is that, any replicator which is coupled to a sorting device (a selection pressure of any kind) results in a kind of `probing head' capable of exploring a virtual space of possible forms. These forms may be animal bodies, bird songs, human languages or urban institutions, but all are evolved through a blind probing and groping in the space of possibilities. In a way, coupling a replicator and a sorting device results in an `virtual searching device' which may be incarnated in different material and energetic physical supports. This abstract `probing head' has in fact been incarnated in computer software: the famous `genetic algorith', which can be used to breed other software programs. Genetic algorithms, for example, are used to implement some of the non-homunculi modules of behavioural AI.
Let me use another example to illustrate this crucial point. When we say, as marxists used to say, that `class struggle is the motor of history' we are using the word `motor' in a metaphorical sense. But when we say that a hurricane is a steam motor we are not: we are saying that it embodies the same engineering diagram as a steam motor, that is, that it runs on a reservoir of heat, that it oparates through thermal differences, and that it runs matter and energy through a Carnot cycle. Thus, the difference between metaphorical and literal uses of a term consists sometimes in the difference between embodying a purely linguistic analogy and an engineering working diagram. The comparison of genes and memes or norms is clearly a diagrammatic (not a linguistic) one: all three embody an abstract searching device. What about comparing human homes and bird territories? Are there abstract machines behind the formation of meshworks and hierarchies that would allow us to make the comparison in a diagrammatic way?
As a matter of fact I believe there are, although a discussion of them would take me into areas hardly related to our theme here. All I can say now is that it is one and the same process (or rather different processes embodying the same abstract machine) which results in entities as different as human hierarchies, the bodies of animal species and even sedimentary rocks, all of which are structures in which homogenous elements are articulated together.
Similarly, markets, ecosytems and even igneous rocks are all structures where heterogenous elements are linked together without imposing uniformity over them. As it is clear from the history of AI, that is, from the domination of hierachical symbolic thinking and the obstacles which connectionism found to become a legitimate branch of cognitive science, humanity finds it much easier to think in terms of articulated homogeneities rather than articulated heterogeneities. But it is the latter, I believe, that hold the secret for a better future. Perhaps we can learn from birds, and why not even rocks, the secrets of non-homogenous thinking.
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Last updated: 16 feb1995
© copyright Manuel De Landa, 1994
