Steven Johnson (2001), Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, London: Penguin. There are many well-worn examples of organisms that oscillate between single and collective states - slime mold is a classic example of this phenomena. The interest is in how an adaptive complex organism could assemble itself 'bottom-up', without a central 'top-down' control mechanism. This 'emergent behaviour' has clear implications for the study of living and artificial things, as well as decentralised thinking in general. In characterising this area as 'the unknown science of self-organization,' Johnson cites an interesting mix of historical figures: Adam Smith, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin and Alan Turing (2001: 18) - and this says something about its interdisciplinary foundation and application. To define the terms in more detail: 'emergence' takes place when low-level routines lead to complex interactions that produce a coherent higher-level pattern; when this has a purpose or responds to its environment, it can also said to be 'adaptive' (Johnson, 2001: 20). The study of ant colonies reveal that there is no discernable hierarchy at work despite appearances. Although humans have named the ants in provocative terms, the 'queen' is not an authority figure, merely an egg-laying ant and does not direct or exploit the workers (incidentally, the workers are female and unpaid; a marxist-feminist analysis could be useful here but outside my scope). It is not a 'command economy' but one that demonstrates decentralised behaviour (Johnson, 2001: 32). Johnson describes the development of the industrial city of Manchester in parallel, revealing its chaotic emergence at the centre of the industrial revolution. It is famously described by Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), witnessing its urban squalor, its 'filth and disgusting grime, the equal of which is not to be found [...] a planless chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings. And how can people be clean with no proper opportunity for satisfying the most natural and ordinary wants.' (1978: 580 & 582). Clearly Engels is not observing chaos as such but an underlying order where the workers and the industrialists are separated in class distinctions - he would see the complex local interactions forming a particular totality. The conditions he observed had clear origins: 'Everything which here rouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch. [...] This manufacture has achieved, which, without these workers, this poverty, this slavery could not have lived.' (1978: 584) The city may not be planned like this as such, for it is far too complex, but it emerges according to class interests - the new world order of its time. But how? Engels sought to explain this by the dialectical laws in nature but also expressed his disgust of a lust for profit in other subsequent texts. Many commentators continue to regard the destruction of the urban environment as integral to the accumulation of capital (the more recent work of David Harvey, for instance). In contrast, Johnson does not develop this as an ideological problem, but instead chooses to explain this 'pattern' as 'systematic' complexity, as 'a strange kind of order, a pattern in the streets that furthered the political values of Manchester's elite without being planned by them' (2001: 40). He further cites the work of Alan Turing in his 'morphogenesis' paper (1954) detecting patterns in the apparent chaos of code, as an early example of the understanding of emergent behaviour. For Johnson, this has lead to the use of complexity for urban planning, regarding the city as a self-organising organism - working on the principle that a system learns through evaluating feedback loops. Feedback is in direct correlation to the interconnectedness of the system. Building upon Wiener's work on feedback and control in Cybernetics (1949), Johnson describes the development of software that does not simply follow instructions but that responds to the idea that simple instructions might lead to complex behaviour. Working with genetic algorithms, the principles of 'natural selection' and evolution theory could be seen in parallel to the development of fitter programs. Software can be seen in terms of 'genotypes' (DNA in cells) and 'phenotypes' (the higher level form of behaviour) as machine code and what happens when it runs. The programmer would set the parameters that defined the fitness, and the software would evolve 'autonomously'. Fundamental questions remain here on the position of the programmer and the idea of autonomous behaviour. The programmer writes the rules for the software and although the software also demonstrates other behaviours, the conditions are also determined externally. There is a dialectics of control and feedback or emergence perhaps. Inspired by the program Tracker that simulated the behaviour of the ant colony of sixteen thousand ants, Johnson's conclusion is that despite our tendency to look for a controlling mechanism, 'we are starting to think using the conceptual tools of bottom-up systems. Just like the clock maker metaphors of the Enlightenment, or the dialectical logic of the nineteenth century, the emergent worldview belongs to this moment in time, shaping our thought habits and colouring our perception of the world (2001: 66). This says it all. What his analysis lacks here is an understanding of history and, although unwittingly he describes ideology's mechanism of shaping thoughts and perception, of politics. Importantly, emergence is not a mystical force but can be explained, and responds differently to different external environments (Johnson, 2001: 116). Society is a system that is self-organised but also is capable of learning and can be seen to be adaptive from the bottom up. This is the popular definition of 'intelligence' after all, and humans are relatively 'self-aware'. It is also a very general description of political consciousness - cue Luk‡cs's History and Class Consciousness or the like. [add something here to qualify this] Emergent behaviour is not simply the natural order of things, and its understanding should result in imagining and making better systems. Feedback is crucial to this - in the example of society, could education be characterised as feedback encouraging adaptive behaviour? Johnson gives the example of a thermostat to describe the necessity of feedback in more detail: 'Negative feedback, then, is a way of reaching an equilibrium point despite unpredictable - and changing - external conditions. The "negativity" keeps the system in check, just as "positive feedback" propels other systems onward. [...] It is, in other words, a way of transforming a complex system into a complex adaptive system.' (2001: 138-9) Negative feedback is the more adaptive version, controlling the temperature according to external conditions. His further example in the context of economics is Adam Smith in identifying the prices of goods and the 'feedback' of wages (2001: 156). Emergent systems are rule-based systems, working with low-levels rules from which the emergent behaviour derives. Feedback loops too clearly express control and the expression of (surplus) values: 'When we come across a system that doesn't work well, there's no point denouncing the use of feedback itself. Better to figure out the specific rules of the system at hand and start thinking of ways to wire it so that the feedback routines promote the values we want promoted.' (Johnson, 2001: 162). At last, there's an echo of the revolutionary impulse in the description of emergence. Towards the end of his book, Johnson does discuss the political implication of emergence. There is plenty of evidence of decentralised or distributed systems thinking across the political spectrum - to criticise centralised control of the State and the unelected powers of multinational corporations (2001: 224). The metaphors are difficult though and can be skewed accordingly - in support of the anti-capitalist protest movement that combines smaller localised groups or in support of globalisation as an unregulated free market. What we may discover is what Dostoevsky observed in London in 1862: '... that apparent disorder that is in actuality the highest degree of bourgeois order' (in Berman, 1999: 88) -- What distinguishes emergence from complexity is that emergence is physical whereas complexity is also conceptual genesis (according to Isabelle Stengers, in Kember, 2003: 190). Thus it entails more metaphorical potential.