Restricted Complexity, General Complexity
The essay that names the argument the rest of this trail is having. Morin divides the field in two. Restricted complexity is complexity admitted as a property of systems while the classical apparatus stays intact: the observer remains outside, the search for law continues, and complexity becomes one more thing to model, which is the programme he associates with Santa Fe. General complexity is the harder claim, that complexity reaches back and damages the way we know, so the problem is not only that systems are complicated but that the classical method of understanding them is part of what needs revising. His three culprits are named: the principle of universal determinism, of which Laplace's demon is the emblem; the principle of reduction, which explains a whole by its parts; and the principle of disjunction, which separates knowledge into disciplines that then cannot speak to each other. He is candid that restricted complexity was the necessary breach, and that without it nothing would have opened at all. Its usefulness on this map is that the distinction is a diagnostic rather than a side. Arguments about whether complexity can be given a tidy definition, whether cybernetics belongs in the ancestry, whether the epistemological turn is rigour or drift, are almost always two people standing on either side of this line without naming it, and they were named in 2005. The corpus's own commitments sit on the general side, alongside Cilliers, who appears in the same volume, and Preiser, and Juarrero. The critical read is real and Morin invites it. He writes discursively and by accumulation rather than by argument, more manifesto than analysis, which reads to Anglophone empiricists as evasion and is a fair part of why the two traditions talk past each other. His own terms, notably the dialogic and the recursive, are asserted more often than they are demonstrated. Read for the map of the disagreement rather than for a method, and note that it opens by citing Weaver, whose 1948 paper opens this trail.
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