Habits are autopoietic.  Doing something habitual offers us the comfort of pleasant familiarity.  Doing it, however, makes it more comfortably familiar.  Thus, a positive feedback cycle is established.  Often, we form opinions about our habits, thinking they are the right way to do things.   In fact, if we do them long enough, we build up a resistance to breaking the string.  (Simply saying, "I've had a soft-boiled egg for breakfast every morning for the past 30 years." is better than having to add "except for July 19, 1993.")

     Addictions are also autopoietic.  In this case, comfortable familiarity is not necessary (though we may experience that), since the drug to which we've become addicted supplies the attraction to itself.  Once we've become a smoker, we crave a cigarette.  Each cigarette we smoke temporarily relieves the craving but also sets up the chemistry for an even stronger craving later on.  Addictions operate on a two-step positive feedback cycle.

     1.  Smoking establishes a craving for a cigarette.
     2.  Craving a cigarette leads to smoking one. (Go to step 1)

     Notice how this differs from other, seemingly similar repretitive behaviors.  Suppose you bump your arm, so it feels sore.  That feeling is likely to lead you to rub the painful area.  Rubbing the bump makes it feel better, so you stop rubbing.  When you stop, however, the soreness returns, so you rub some more.  As it begins to feel better, you stop rubbing, and the soreness returns.  So you again rub. . .  This is a negative feedback loop.

     The example of rubbing a bump is not an autopoietic process, however (or we'd all be still rubbing all our old owies).  In this case, rubbing the bump actually reduces the stimulus for rubbing (the soreness) rather than increasing it as in the case of habits and addictions.  Or (to cover my lack of physiological expertise), rubbing may simply make life more comfortable while you wait for the body to take care of the soreness--at which point the need to rub disappears.

     We could go on with examples of autopoietic processes at work within individuals, it is more relevant to take a fateful step into what Rob Serling might have called "The Sociological Zone."  The three basic sociological paradigms each reveal examples of autopoiesis on a grander scale.

     Thanks to the wonders of symbolic interactionism, we can see any number of autopoietic relationships and interaction patterns.  At this microsociological level, we can see the links between sociology and psychology.

     As a very simple example, consider a sado-masochistic relationship.  At a psychological level, the masochist is one who gets pleasure from being abused, whereas the sadist enjoys administering abuse.  When the two are put together, they establish a symbiotic, autopoietic relationship.  Their dance of giving and getting pain becomes habitual, even addictive.  Sometimes, it can take on subtle overtones, as exressed in the old saw:

          Masochist: Beat me!
          Sadist: No.

     During the 1980s and 1990s, clinical sociologists and psychologists  began giving special attention to dysfunctional relationships and dysfunctional families.  These were autopoietic interaction patterns judged not to be in the best interests of the parties involved.  Alcoholics were often the focus of such attention.

     An alcoholic in a relationship or a family, has a host of psychological needs that go beyond a physiological craving for alcohol.  Studies of alcoholism often involve the dependency: the alcoholic needs to be dependent on others.  Thus, the alcoholic is, in a sense, looking for people to be dependent on.

     Realize that I am not saying there is anything wrong with needing someone's help.  All of us are in that position from time to time, and some people (due to a physical handicap, for example) may need help on a permanent basis.  The difference is seen in whether the dependent person would be willing to have the dependency go away, would be willing to be independent.  Thus, the blind person who would be delighted to be sighted or even to be totally independent while blind is not the kind of person I am talking about.  The alcoholic is.  Alcoholics seem to need to be dependent for the sake of dependency.

     Happily (for the alcoholic) there are other people who exhibit a need to have others dependent on them.  Sometimes, we talk somewhat sarcastically about a "mothering instinct" in people who are not necessarily mothers.  Some people seem to need to take care of others, to have others dependent on them.

     Please realize this is not to suggest there is anything wrong from the altruistic act of aiding others in need, but I am referring here specifically to people who have an obsessional need to help.  The healthy person feels good helping those in need, and is quite happy not to be helping when no one needs it.  In fact, the healthy person is happiest when no one is suffering and in need.  The dysfunctional helper is one who is unhappy unless they have someone dependent on them.

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Footnote:  If you are troubled by the slippery slide from singular to plural pronouns in the paragraph above, I beg your forebearance.  This is not an inadvertent error on my part or a malfeasance of office by my editor.  Rather, it is part of an ongoing campaign to eradicate the dilemma of the "third-person masculine pronoun" by simply blessing a linguistic convention all but the most pedantic of us uses in everyday conversation.  Thanks for your support.
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     The unhappy marriage of dysfunctional helpers and needers of help is commonly referred to as a co-dependent relationship, and clinicians also speak of co-dependent families.  In the family of an alcoholic, for example, it may first look as though only one person--the alcoholic--is dependent.  As you examine the extent to which each member has formed habitual interaction patterns in such a way as to satisfy their own psychological needs, you begin to recognize that all are dependent.  They are dependent on the network of habitual interaction patterns and on the roles that each other individual plays in it.

     In the person saddled with a dysfunctional mothering instinct decides to stop playing the game, the alcoholic is likely to do something dramatic (get sick, attempt suicide, run away) that will suck the helper back into the habitual patterns.  Perhaps more pervertedly, if the alcoholic were to begin recovering, that would threaten the needs of all the others enmeshed in the network, and they would subtly and unconsciously seek to subvert the recovery.  This dilemma, by the way, is not that much different from parents who suffer what we've come to call the "empty-nest syndrome."  People (particularly mothers without outside employment) who have organized their lives around the needs of their dependent children often have great difficulty letting go of those interaction patterns as their children mature to independence.

     In an important sense, the interactionist paradigm is devoted to the discovery of autopoietic interaction processes.  We are less interested in the chance encounters that run their course and disappear from human experience afterward.  But show us an interaction pattern that has some quality that makes it habitual among interacting humans--either the interactive patterns that come to characterize the relations in a particular groups or the established practices that make up social structure--and we are fulfilled.  We are driven to uncover and understand that which becomes habitual rather than that which comes and goes.

     I think you will have gotten by now a good sense of how the interactionist paradigm in sociology can reveal autopoietic processes in social affairs.  Let's look at a few examples that might be revealed by the social systems, or structural-functional, paradigm.

     Picking up on the summary comments about autopoiesis and interactionism, it could also be said that the social systems paradigm is totally addressed to autopoietic structures.  From this point of view, sociologists seek to discover the ways in which we organize ourselves autopoietically--intentionally or not.  Here's a familiar example.

     The so-called "wage-price spiral" is a good example of an autopoietic structure that can be more easily observed from a macrosociological point of view, such as the social systems paradigm than can be observed with microsociological lens.  The four key elements in the wage-price spiral are:

          ï  The cost of producing goods and services
          ï  The prices charged for goods and services
          ï  The wage needs of consumers
          ï  The wages paid those producing good and services

     Once the price of goods and services goes up, for whatever reason, the individuals in the system need an increased income in order to "keep up with the cost of living."  Wage increases, however, increase the cost of producing good and services, requiring further increases in the prices charged.  Thus, inflation is the result of an autopoietic process.  It was in an honest recognition of this that then-President Jimmy Carter told an unhappy public that "keeping up with inflation is inflation."

     The "arms race" that characterized the cold war of the 1950s through the 1980s offers an example of an international autopoietic system.  Any increase in nuclear weapons by the U.S., for example, threatened the security of the U.S.S.R., who responded by increasing their nuclear stockpile.  This, of course, threatened the U.S., who increased their arms further.

     Both of the preceding examples illustrate what the system dynamics researchers call positive feedback loops.  The quantities involved--cost, wages, prices, number of nuclear weapons--keep increasing.  Some autopietic processes create the stable equilibrium of what are called negative feedback loops.  Here's an example.

     Returning to the field of economics, the capitalist system of supply and demand is an autopoietic, negative feedback loop.  The key elements are: price of a good, the amount produced, the amount purchased, the amount available for purchase, and the resulting competition to get some.  We could start our observation of the cycle at any point.  As you'll see, negative feedback loops are typically more complex than positive ones.

     ï As people purchase the good, the supply decreases

     ï The scarcity increases competition for what's left

     ï  As competition increases, so does the price

     ï  Increased prices raise the incentive to produce more

     ï  Increased production increases the supply

     ï  This reduced scarcity eases the competition to get some

     ï  Prices drop

     ï  There is less incentive to produce

     ï  Supply decreases for lack of production

     ï  Go to step 2 above

     There are any number of other macrosociological examples of autopoietic systems, but I think you will have gotten the point.  Notice that we might employ a more microsociological lens to understand the interpersonal dynamics at work at any one of the steps outlined above.  For example, what are the interactive patterns by which competition for goods is converted into increased prices.  At the same time, however, there is an autopoietic process occuring at the macrosociological level as well.

     Finally, as we turn to the conflict paradigm, we see once again the centrality of autopoietic processes.  The previous example of the arms race is also a good example of the conflict paradigm.  Or, consider the phenomenon of "dirty politics" in a presidential campaign.  Once the first mud has been slung, the target will feel a strong need to counterattack, for fear of seeming to confirm the initial allegation.  Mud thrown back produces more of the same.  Soon, we have a system feeding on itself autopoietically.

     Though it has an autopoietic quality, mud-slinging in political campaigns does tend to have a finite duration, more or less ending on election day.  Even though resentments may linger and even be regenerated in subsequent campaign, they do not necessarily generate permanent structures.  Other examples illustrate this potential, however.

     Marx's observation of the class struggle is a good example of the autopoietic permanence of social conflict.  The ruling class exerts the force of social control (through police, military, schools, churches, etc.) in order to maintain it's dominance over the oppressed masses.  Should the masses begin to protest their oppression, the ruling class would increase the intensity of social control.  As protest abated, control could be less intrusive.  Thus the conflicting desires to dominate and to avoid domination play out in a continuing autpoietic dance.

     Notice how the conflict paradigm supplements the interactionist and social systems paradigms rather than conflicting with them.  Another way of expressing this is to say that conflict theory can be either macrosociological or microsociological.  Thus, for example, we could recast the wage-price spiral in terms of the conflicts among capitalists, consumers, and wage-earners.  Or the co-dependent family could be analyzed in terms of the struggle for domination among the parties involved.

ID: 14923 -- Monday, October 18, 1993 at 9:27

(c) Earl Babbie 2000