Relational Embodiment

A network of observed state changes

In my last post, I suggested that the ‘Embodiment Problem’ is a way to consider the question: what is a social organization? Which is to ask, how is a social organization, or social system, embodied? The question is essentially the same as the ones explored in the paper ‘Social Systems- Where is the Ground?’.

Here, I will suggest a partial answer to this question, or a way to further explore the question, by suggesting the concept of ‘Relational Embodiment’. (It is possible the concept is developed more thoroughly somewhere else, but it hasn’t come to my attention, at least as a specific concept.) Perhaps some are familiar with the term as a therapeutic one, but I aim to suggest it as one which can be applied to social systems, perhaps even beyond social systems. It is only the start of considering the ‘Embodiment Problem’ and not, by any means, a fully adequate answer.

To take a step back: we are considering social organizations, and just so there is no confusion, ‘human’ ones. Indeed, there may be social organizations beyond the human realm, such as ones with insects or animals or other life forms, but the ones that are being explored here, and are the basis of this inquiry, are the ones in which the human imagination and processes of human embodiment are mysteriously and profoundly infused. Thus, one might say ‘socio-cultural’ systems is a better term, but I use the term social organization as a blanket term to consider social organizations in this human sense. It is perhaps important to meditate here even on the range of the term ‘social organization’, and how another term might be better, maybe even ‘spiritual organizations’.

Whatever the case, let us consider this notion of ‘relational embodiment’, the suggestion that social organizations, or social systems, are embodied through relations. What does this mean? Put simply, it means that the ‘embodiment’ of the system is not in one specific entity which might be observed as one body, at least to those who are in it, but in the state changes on each agent in the system, and how these agents communicate this to one another within a network.

I want to repeat this suggestion, since it is an important one, and not one that is easily understandable: the ‘embodiment’ of the system is not in one specific entity which might be observed as one body, but in the state changes on each agent in the system, and how these agents communicate this to one another within a network.

Thus, there is an emphasis on the ‘states’ of the agents in the social organization, and moreover how these ‘states’ are potentially transformed and metabolized in networks throughout the organization.

As the variety of social systems is immense, we might say that the state observation requires a specific kind of ‘signal’ or is expecting a specific kind of ‘signal’. Namely, that the state change is in regard to a particular kind of ‘state change’, depending on the size and nature of the social organization. (In a university, that state change might be the ability to show that you learned material). However, as pointed out in my last post, it is nearly impossible to identify where one social system ends and one begins, so perhaps social systems contain many different kinds of state change.

Whatever the case, a network of organized and observed state changes among agents is, perhaps, one way to consider a social system, or at least a way to partially understand it, and we might refer to this as ‘relational embodiment’, or the notion that social systems are embodied through relationships. It is not ‘a thing we can observe’ but it is state changes among agents which are observed by agents, and when these observational state changes individuate in some sort of way, whatever that means, one might say that there is a social organization.

I want to move slowly here, and not make too many suggestions at once, since this is highly conceptual territory. And so, for now, I want to leave this post here as a short one, one which takes a lot of effort to thoroughly consider. And I would leave with a reformulation of the ‘Embodiment Problem’ which might be suggested as: where exactly is a social system embodied, if not in the relationships of our shared understanding of how we exist in that social system?

Additional note: One might suggest that a ‘social system’ is not so different from a ‘state observer’, which is ‘a system that provides an estimate of the internal state of a given real system, from measurements of the input and output of the real system.’ I only suggest this as a way to potentially ground social systems in something that already has been developed, but I am not all that familiar with ‘control theory’, and only making a suggestion here. Whatever the case, we might say that a social system emerges from the observed (or estimated) state changes of the interactions of the agents who compose the social system.