The complexity of social systems: Could hegemony emerge from the micro-politics of the individual?

Paul Cilliers’s intervention on complexity theory concentrates on neural networks and poststructuralist thought. Cilliers lucidly points out a fundamental issue that must be grasped about complexity: It is useful to distinguish between the notions of ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. Complexity focuses on the shifting and evolving ‘intricate relationships’ between components. ‘In “cutting up” a system, the analytical method destroys what it seeks to understand’. The historical bloc is a concept A. Gramsci defines as a ‘complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble’ of the institutional orders of state, economy and civil society. ‘Hegemony and discourse are mutually conditioned in the sense that hegemonic practice shapes and reshapes discourse, which in turn provides the conditions of possibility for hegemonic articulation’. Complexity theory may enable political thinkers, and sociologists to heal the late twentieth century rift in radical thought between predominantly Marxist-based political thought and the poststructuralist cadre almost defined by the distrust of what they viewed as the other’s essentialism.