Cybernetic Causality and Social Power

Models of power in social theory can be advanced by embracing holistic epistemology. Doing this requires first acknowledging that social theoretical activity is implicitly grounded in the habits of mechanism or summativity, the separation of wholes into parts and its inevitable extension to linear causality . The alternative of holism, looking at things in terms of their properties of interrelatedness, suggests ways to embrace ideas about power that have been suggested by authors like Foucault, Butler, Scott, and Dowding. In these works it is possible to detect struggle against the implicit divisive demands of mechanism while trying to portray something that is amorphous, fluid, explosive, dampening, happening at multiple levels, and non-linear. At the same time there is a kind of magnetic pull to issues of causality in the sense that talk about power drifts to the issue of this thing called power making good or bad things happen or having the capacity to make them happen. A shift to holistic epistemology allows possibilities in modelling power through the alternative of cybernetic causality. This construct hast the ability to move, breathe, resist, explode, contain, in ways that power is experienced and described by social observers and can’t be captured by mechanistic linear causality.