On June 12, 2024, in its obituary of the sociologist Harrison C. White, who died on May 19 of that year, the New York Times praises White in the headline as a “groundbreaking (and inscrutable) sociologist.” As evidence of “inscrutability,” it quotes a sentence from Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Action (White, 1992, p. 4): “There is no tidy atom and no embracing world, only complex situations, long strings reptating as in a polymer goo, or in a mineral before it hardens.” One is tempted to mistake “reptating” for a misprint and read “repeating,” especially as the self-similar repetition of certain structures is typical of polymers, but it is in fact “reptating” that is meant. Reptation is a technical term from polymer research which, according to Wikipedia, means the “snake-like movement of a polymer out of a polymer network (diffusion).” The reference to polymers can be explained by the fact that White was studying the physics of polymers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in the 1950s when he began to take an interest in sociology in evening classes taught by Karl W. Deutsch.
It is obvious that this sentence must seem incomprehensible at first. It is not for nothing that White’s language is compared to that of James Joyce (in Finnegans Wake, to be sure, not just in Ulysses). Additionally, it is not for nothing that he must be considered untranslatable (in France they try anyway, White, 2011). But to what extent is it evidence of a “groundbreaking” sociological insight?
First, the terminology is striking. At most, economics, which needs this abstraction to be able to examine equilibrium and disequilibrium conditions on markets, speaks of atoms with reference to individuals who are therefore “rational.” “Tidy atoms” are the prerequisite for ensuring that there is sufficient leeway (“empty spaces” to be filled) to be able to adapt “rationally” to changing conditions. However, this does not mean that you will find anything in social reality that is tidy, clean, and orderly. In addition, there can be no talk of an “embracing world” if it is associated with either protection or coercion (or both) framing, if not cornering, those individuals. White’s sociology is not about the bipolarity of micro-diversity and order.
Instead, it is about complex situations. “Complexity” is a term that Auguste Comte already used to distinguish the object of sociology from simpler and at the same time more general objects of other sciences, such as astronomy, physics, and chemistry. Complexity or, rather, “complication,” according to Comte (1995/1839, p. 95f.), is the condition of a situation where social phenomena must succeed in maintaining themselves “statically” on the one hand, i.e., to distinguish themselves from other phenomena on the axis of simultaneity, and on the other hand to develop “dynamically” according to their inner tendencies, i.e., to differentiate and integrate themselves on the time axis. From moment to moment and from position to position, a “consensus” (Comte, 1995/1839) is to be found that relates the two dimensions to each other as reciprocal solutions to their problems. Complex, according to Comte, moreover, are those objects in which we ourselves are involved. Both reasons explain why he gives sociology a higher degree of complexity than physiology and why the “positive” observation of the specifics of this object by a new scientific discipline, called sociology, which engages with the respective conditions in their “complication croissante” (Comte, 1995/1839, p. 111), is even more important.
Talking about a “situation” in this context is almost tautological but is explained by the maximum commitment of sociology to an object that is what it is, because it is itself the problem that it has to overcome: the problem of the situation. However, White differs here and elsewhere from the position of Talcott Parsons, whose theory of action is not based on the situation, but on the orientation towards a situation, even if this orientation itself contributes to the situation, i.e., the agent as an “empirical system” is both a system and a point of reference. Parsons examines, if you will, translations of situations into orientations and relies for the possibility of this translation, threatened by the problem of double contingency, on norms and values of the cultural system of maintaining latent patterns (Parsons et al., 1951, p. 16), while White enters into the turmoil of the situation itself (“we work outward from situations rather than impose boundaries,” White, 2008, p. xvii), and like Luhmann (1995, p. 124), searches for solutions in time, including coincidences, to which all participants are committed, “finding footing in different networks in differing domain contexts” (White, 2008, p. 7).
By rejecting the idea of tidy atoms in an already ordered world and opting for complex situations, White moves within the familiar terrain of the sociological tradition. In the next step, however, he breaks with this tradition and becomes groundbreaking. For he explains complex situations by comparing them with a polymer slime, goo or glue, or rather not with this slime, goo or glue itself, but with the snake-like movement (reptation) of this polymer in a polymer network. Additionally, he adds that the social can be compared to a mineral before it hardens. The social is unavoidably in a state of transition, be it movement in a network or the postponement of hardening.
It should be noted that not only the metaphor but also the sociological view gained from the physics of polymers undermines the complexity hierarchy of the sciences as imagined by Comte. Polymers, those intricate networks of macromolecules, are at least as specific and therefore as complex as social situations. In addition, thanks to quantum physics, the same now also applies to atomic particles. Complexity is the gateway formula to any kind of science. With White, sociology remains as groundbreaking as it has been since Comte. In the guise of “complication” (in both senses of the word: as complicated state of affairs and as, for example, in medicine, the unexpected/undesirable development of a condition), it discovers a complexity that has also been making itself known in the natural sciences since the middle of the last century. For the complication not only threatens the phenomena but also constitutes them by establishing their complexity. Snake-like, like reptiles, the phenomena move from their network into their network.
Although Randall Collins (2005, p. xi) already describes the quote taken up by the New York Times as “famous,” neither White nor the secondary literature (Azarian, 2005; Fontdevila, 2018; Schmitt & Fuhse, 2015) seem to have returned to the concept of reptation in a more than implicit way. This is surprising, as it seems to be better suited than almost any other to describe the scopes of movement in social entanglements that are caused by these scopes of movement. Of course, since the “postmodern” discussion (Sokal & Bricmont, 1998) at the latest, we have become cautious about importing scientific concepts into the social sciences, but this should not prevent us from treating structural similarities as such.
Reptation describes the movement of long molecular chains, i.e., polymers, in networks that consist of long molecular chains (de Gennes, 1971; Doi & Edwards, 1986). It is therefore about the self-restraint of units that make each other’s lives difficult, but also easier, because they could not move outside these networks. Apparently, it has been possible to formulate quite precise models of linear polymers, whose beginning and end can be defined, while circularly structured polymers still elude modeling (Abadi et al., 2018). It is obvious that this is also a fruitful paradigm for sociological network research because the same properties of entities that are responsible for fresh action and experience can also be made responsible for limiting action and experience. If I understand this correctly, just as in physical models, forces and voids are needed to describe the motion of atoms and molecules, so in biochemical models, neighborhoods, contacts, and frictions are needed to describe a dynamic in emulsions that consists of the same elements that depend on them. In research, the concept of virtual tubes is used to describe the path dependence of the movements of polymers (Abadi et al., 2018), thus drawing attention to the question of whether the snake-like movements of polymers depend only on their encounters and entanglements or whether they also have a certain autonomy.
White, despite his intensive study of the work of Niklas Luhmann (White 2008, p. 177ff., 237ff.), rejected working with the form calculus of George Spencer-Brown (2008/1969). Like Luhmann’s concept of “environment,” the calculus is said to be a distraction from the “main lines of science and modeling” (White, 2008, p. 353). The concept of reptation could be an occasion to rethink this double rejection. This is because, in Spencer-Brown’s sense, the system-theoretical concept of form implies the reintroduction of the distinction between system and environment into the form of their distinction and thus, the idea of an autonomous design of dependency. The distinction between system and environment oscillates within the form of its distinction, so that one gains the concept of an indeterminacy that can only be translated into the next operation, a movement, through “imaginary” solutions, and there reproduces the problem including the possibility of its solution.
Social units are “social” in precisely the sense that they take up a relationship to their environment and translate it into their own operations, without allowing themselves to be determined by this environment. If you will, you can call it self-reference, or: control of identity. Luhmann (1982, p. 61) has already referred to Spencer-Brown’s form calculus in his proposal to “let in a bit of fresh air” (p. 48) into Parsons’ AGIL scheme by reducing it to the two axes of differentiation in matter and reproduction in time. In form calculus, too, each distinction has two dimensions: You can repeat it (in time), and you can cross it (in matter) by switching between its two sides. This gives Comte’s distinction between static and dynamic the rank of a calculus. A Spencer-Brown transformation (Baecker 2023) regards every social phenomenon as a recursive operation in a reflexive field of alternative possibilities, reptating its way along.