Tag Archives: Derrida

On the Presence of Complexity:

In today’s post, I am following up on the theme of complexity by drawing upon ideas from Derrida to further explore these concepts. I will start with a fundamental question regarding the basic premise- Is complexity an inherent property of a situation, independent of the observer, or does it emerge through observation and purpose? In other words, is complexity a given phenomenon in the external world or is it constructed?

This question might seem strange to some, while straightforward to others. Some might argue that this leads us down the path of solipsism, while others might contend that this approach is superior as it pushes us away from naive realism. In this article, we will examine the perspective where complexity manifests as an observer-dependent phenomenon, shaped by intention, purpose, and the limitations of presence. Through Derrida’s philosophical framework, we will explore how complexity emerges not as an absolute property, but as a relational phenomenon tied to observer intention and capability.

When we discuss observer-independent properties, we generally refer to physical properties of a situation that are ‘objective’. Consider the example of a termite hill. The material composition, number of tunnels, number of intersections, and other dimensional properties are indeed independent of the observer. However, I would posit that complexity is fundamentally different, and this difference can be demonstrated through three levels of analysis.

First, at the ontological level, complexity emerges as a second-order property. While first-order properties like mass, dimension, or quantity exist independently, complexity arises from the relationships between these properties. These relationships do not exist in isolation but are perceived and constructed through an observer’s cognitive framework. For instance, in our termite hill example, the mere presence of multiple tunnels does not inherently create complexity – it is the observer’s attempt to understand their interconnections, purpose, and evolutionary significance that generates the perception of complexity.

Second, at the epistemological level, complexity manifests through the limitations and capabilities of the observer. Consider two observers of the same termite hill: an entomologist and a child. The entomologist might find the structure’s organization relatively straightforward due to their understanding of termite behavior and construction patterns. The child, lacking this specialized knowledge, might perceive the same structure as overwhelmingly complex. This demonstrates that complexity is not merely about what is being observed, but about the relationship between the observer’s knowledge framework and the observed phenomenon.

Third, at the teleological level, complexity emerges through purpose and intention. When we declare something as ‘complex’, we are not making a purely objective observation. Instead, this declaration typically arises from a specific purpose or intention. This may be tied to the need to manage a situation, the desire to understand a situation, the need to solve a problem or the obligation to make decisions.

This three-tiered analysis demonstrates that the concept of complexity makes most sense when an observer is involved. As Derrida notes in “Of Grammatology” [1]– There is no outside-text. Similarly, there is no complexity outside of our purposeful engagement with situations. The very act of identifying complexity is embedded in our intentions and purposes. Complexity ’emerges’ when we try to understand something, manage something, or achieve something. It is inextricably tied to our purposes and capabilities.

The next point to consider is how différance structures our understanding of complexity. When we identify something as complex, we explain it through emergence. This emergence is further explained through various properties, which in turn point to relationships that lead us back to emergence and complexity. This pattern mirrors Derrida’s différance, where meaning is constantly deferred through a chain of references.

As he notes in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” [2]:

The center is not the center… the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay.

In his deconstructionist approach, Derrida critiqued the traditional metaphysical idea that meaning or reality is grounded in an immediate, fully present essence—something that can be directly perceived and understood without ambiguity. This notion of “presence” suggests that there is a fundamental truth or meaning that is self-evident and immediately accessible to the mind. However, Derrida challenges this assumption, arguing that meaning is never fully present or directly available. Complexity, in this view, is never completely “present.” It is always understood in relation to other concepts, each of which itself requires further explanation and definition. In this way, complexity can never be reduced to a simple, fixed presence; instead, it is always deferred, dependent on the play of differences and relationships between terms.

Derrida’s concept of différance provides crucial insights into how complexity ‘operates’. In “Margins of Philosophy” [3], he writes:

Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each so-called ‘present’ element… is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of its past element and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element.

Complexity is never purely present. It carries traces of past experiences, and it points toward future implications. In this perspective, complexity exists in a network of relationships. The concept of trace is particularly relevant to understanding complexity. In “Of Grammatology” [1], Derrida explains:

The presence-absence of the trace… carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled.

This suggests that complexity is both present (in our observation) and absent (in its continual deferral). Complexity carries within itself marks of our purposes and intentions. It also contains traces of our past experiences and future expectations. This leads us to a nuanced understanding of complexity as a perspective of possibilities. This is further illuminated by Derrida’s critique of ‘presence’ in “Speech and Phenomena” [4]:

The presence of the perceived present can appear as such only inasmuch as it is continuously compounded with a nonpresence and nonperception, with primary memory and expectation.

Derrida explores the idea that our perception of the present moment is inherently tied to our understanding of time, memory, and anticipation. In other words, we cannot fully experience or recognize the “present” unless it is continuously linked to what is not present—our memory of the past and our expectations for the future. This further supports the view of complexity as being grounded in our capabilities and shaped by our purposes. It is influenced by our past experiences and directed toward future actions.

Final Thoughts

Much like Berkeley’s question of whether a tree falling in the forest will make a sound if there is no one to hear it, I propose that complexity requires an observer. Complexity measures are always knowledge and purpose-relative. This means that different purposes yield different complexities. What is complex to one observer may be merely complicated to another. No absolute measure can exist independent of purpose. Consider the example of a pandemic: there may be objective properties such as transmission rate, virus size, and type, but the notion of complexity makes sense only within the network of relationships, purposes, and meanings. Here, complexity emerges through various needs such as public health management, economic considerations, and social conditions.

As Derrida’s philosophy suggests, complexity exists not as a presence but as a network of relationships, purposes, and meanings. There is no ‘ground’ for complexity as a pure property independent of an observer. This view offers a more nuanced and practical approach to understanding and managing complex situations. This perspective changes how we approach complex challenges, suggesting that effective management requires understanding not just situations, but the purposes, capabilities, and contexts that make them complex in the first place.

Managing complexity within this framework requires understanding the specific purposes of the participants, their capabilities, contextual factors, and available resources. We should appreciate multiple perspectives and not fear provisional solutions. I invite readers to check out this post that goes deeper into Derrida’s deconstruction.

I will conclude with Derrida’s words:

There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer any simple origin. For what is reflected it split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, or the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.

(Simply put, the above passage suggests that representation or reflection always results in a gap because they are inherently split. This gap creates a difference between the original and its image. As a result, the traditional notion of a stable origin or source is undermined. Instead, meaning emerges through a play of differences. The idea that “one plus one makes at least three” indicates that when an origin is reflected or represented, a third element, the difference or gap between them, emerges. This reveals that neither the original nor its reflection is self-contained or stable.)

Always keep on learning…

[1] Of Grammatology, Derrida. 1967

[2] Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, Derrida. 1970

[3] Margins of Philosophy, Derrida. 1972

[4] Speech and Phenomena, Derrida. 1967

Deconstructing Systems – There is Nothing Outside the Text:

In today’s post, I am looking at ideas of the famous Algerian-French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. Derrida is often described as a post-structuralist philosopher. His most famous idea is deconstruction. Deconstruction is often associated with analyzing literary works. The basic notion of deconstruction can be loosely explained as when a text is produced, the author dies, and the reader is born. A text is presented as a coherent whole with a basic idea in the center. The language in the text is all about the idea in the center. The assumption is that the central idea has a fixed meaning. The point of deconstruction is then to disturb this coherent whole, and challenge the hierarchy of the coherent whole. The intent of deconstruction is discovery; the discovery of what is hidden behind the elaborate plot to stage the central idea. It is an attempt to subvert the dominant theme.

Deconstruction is taking the text apart to understand the structure of the text as it is written, and to determine the meaning in several different ways by challenging the hierarchy put in focus by the author. Derrida believed that in language we always prefer hierarchies. We prefer good over bad, or day over night etc. Most often this behavior of focusing on hierarchies results in believing them to be the ultimate truth. We tend to think in terms of false dichotomies. It has to be “this” or “that”. If I don’t do “this”, I am “bad”. Deconstruction always pushes us to look at it from another side or perspective. Deconstruction challenges the notion that language is a closed system – that the meaning is fixed. Derrida viewed language to be an open system, where meaning is not fixed and can depend on the context, the culture and the social realm in which it was constructed. Every perspective is an attempt to focus on certain ideas. But in the act of doing this, we are forced to ignore certain other ideas. The act of deconstruction is an attempt to look at the ideas that lay concealed in the text.

Another important idea that Derrida put forward was differance. Derrida came up with this as a play on words. Derrida is putting two different ideas together into one word. The two different ideas are that of difference (how one word get its meaning by being different to another), and deference (how the meaning of a word is provided in terms of yet more words). The idea of differance is that the complete meaning is always deferred (postponed) and is also differential. The dictionary is a great example to explain differance. The meaning of a word is given in terms of other words. The meaning of those words is given in terms of yet another set of words, and so on.

Derrida’s most famous quotation is – Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. This is often translated as “There is nothing outside the text.” This idea is misrepresented as all ideas are contained in language and that you cannot go outside the language. Derrida was not saying this. A better translation is – There is no outside-text. Here the outside-text refers to an inset in a book, something that is provided in a book as a supplement to provide clarity. We can see this as an outside authority trying to shed light on the book. Derrida is saying that there is no such thing. The meaning is not fixed, and what is presented as a closed system is actually an open system. We have to understand the historicity and context of the text to gain better understanding. Derrida is inviting us to feel the texture of text. As Alex Callinicos explained it:

Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language (in the French original he actually wrote ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – ‘There is no outside-text’). Rather he was saying that once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything acquires the instability and ambiguity that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language.

 Derrida says that every text deconstructs themselves. Every text has contradictions, and the author has written the text in a forceful manner to stay away from the internal contradictions. Derrida is inviting us to challenge the coherence of text by pulling on the central idea and supplementing it to distort the balance. Paul Ricoeur wonderfully explained deconstruction as an act that uncovers the question behind the answers already provided in the text. The answers are already there, and our job then is to find the questions. We cannot assume that we have understood the entire meaning of the text. We have to undo what we have learned and try to feel the texture of the relations of the words to each other in the text.

Derrida was influenced by the ideas of Ferdinand de Sassure, who was a pioneer of a movement called Structuralism. Structuralism presents language as a self-enclosed system in which the important relationships are not those between words and the real objects to which they refer, but rather those internal to language and consisting in the interrelations of signifiers. Ferdinand de Sassure stated that in language, there are only differences. Derrida went a step further this. He challenged the idea of the continuous movement of differences and postponement of meaning that came as a result of structuralism. Callinicos explained this beautifully:

There is no stable halting point in language, but only what Derrida called ‘infinite play’, the endless slippages through which meaning is sought but never found. The only way to stop this play of difference would be if there were what Derrida called a ‘transcendental signified’ – a meaning that exists outside language and that therefore isn’t liable to this constant process of subversion inherent in signification. But the transcendental signified is nothing but an illusion, sustained by the ‘metaphysics of presence’, the belief at the heart of the western philosophical tradition that we can gain direct access to the world independently of the different ways in which we talk about and act on it…

He (Derrida) believed that it was impossible to escape the metaphysics of presence. Meaning in the shape of the ‘transcendental signified’ may be an illusion, but it is a necessary illusion. Derrida summed this tension up by inventing the word ‘differance’, which combines the meanings of ‘differ’ and ‘defer’. Language is a play of differences in which meaning is endlessly deferred, but constantly posed. The idea of differance informed Derrida’s particular practice of philosophy, which he called deconstruction. The idea was to scrutinize texts – particularly philosophical classics – to expose both how they participated in the metaphysics of presence and also the flaws and tensions through which the limitations of this way of thinking were revealed. As a result, these texts would end up very different from how they had seemed when Derrida started on them: they would have been dismantled – deconstructed.

 Deconstructing Systems:

At this point, I will look at deconstructing Systems. The idea of a System is very much aligned to the ideas of Structuralism. A system is viewed as a whole with interconnected parts working together. The focus is on the benefit of the whole. The whole is the central idea of Systems Thinking. The whole is said to be more than the sum of its parts. The parts must be sub-servient to the whole.

When we approach systems with the ideas of deconstruction, we realize that every system is contingent on who is observing the system. There is no system without an observer. This makes all systems to be human systems. We have to consider the role of the observer and the impossibility of an objective world. As the famous Cybernetician, Klaus Krippendorff said – whatever is outside our nervous system is accessible only through our nervous system, and cannot be observed directly and separated from how that nervous system operates. We may refer to and talk about the same “system.” However, what constitutes the system, its complexity and what we desire its purpose to be all are dependent on the observer. All systems are constructed in a social realm. After all, meaning is assigned in the social realm, where we bring forth the world together through “languaging.” What the whole is and whether a part should be subservient to the whole depends upon who constructs the system as a mental construct to make sense of the world. If you consider the healthcare system, what it means and what it should do depends on who you talk to. If you talk to the healthcare provider or the insurance company or the patient, you would get different answers as to what the healthcare system means and what it should be doing. There is no one objective healthcare system. We can all identify the parts, but what the “system” means cannot be objectively identified. We must look at this from different perspectives to challenge the metanarratives. We should welcome multiple perspectives. Every perspective reveals certain attributes that were hidden before; the process of which knowingly or unknowingly requires hiding certain other attributes. From the discussion, we might say that – The center does not hold in systems.

There are many similarities between the hard systems approach of Systems Thinking and Structuralism. We talk of systems as if they are real and that everyone can objectively view and understand it. Gavin. P. Hendricks sheds some light on this:

Structuralism argues that the structure of language itself produces ‘reality’. That homo sapiens (humans) can think only through language and, therefore, our perceptions of reality are determined by the structure of language. The source of meaning is not an individual’s experiences or being but signs and grammar that govern language. Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places the structure at the center. It is the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Meaning does not come from individuals but from the socially constructed system that governs what any individual can do.

Derrida’s ideas obviously rejected the notions put forth by Structuralism. Derrida’s ideas support pluralism. There is no outside-text doesn’t mean that there is no text for us to process. It means that the text can be interpreted in multiple meaningful ways. And of course, this does not mean that all of them are valid. This would be the idea of relativism.  As Derrida said, meaning is made possible by relations of words to other words within the network of structures that language is. The different meanings generated through deconstruction (pluralism) are meaningful to those who generated them. This idea is something that we need to bring back into “the front” of Systems Thinking. Derrida invites us to dissolve the hierarchy of the whole in the system that you have created, and look at the part that you have marginalized in your system. When we view the part from another perspective, we suddenly realize that the center of our system does not align with the center of the new different view.

I will finish with wise words from Richard Rorty:

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

The corollary of course is- there is nothing out there giving us meaning or purpose, except that which we have constructed ourselves.

Please maintain social distance and wear masks. Stay safe and Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was When a Machine Breaks…: