Systematicity: the human as ecology

This thesis investigates a foundational question in the humanities and social sciences: the interplay between individual agency and social structures. By problematising the ontological and epistemological status of the human subject as a self-evident, discrete and bounded entity, this thesis argues for a reexamination of the view that moral agency is necessarily located in a given individual. What is agency if the sense that I am the author of my intentions is born of the system that enables me in the first place? This is the motivating question behind sociologys inception, one that informs a shift in methodological emphasis from the subjective and the particular to the objective and the general. This extension of the empirical methods of science to the study of morality, politics and history not only enlarged the conventional definition of science, but also what being human means. Yet, the challenge of reconciling notions of subjectivity and objectivity is evident in the precarious position that contemporary sociology continues to embody: as neither fully humanities nor fully science. This is often amplified in social scientific accounts that align nature and/or biology with determinism, and humanity with the agency to enact social change.This thesis begins with an extended meditation on the sociological problem of individuation through the works of Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim. As this problem has been taken up in systems science and cybernetics scholarship, a close engagement with three prominent systems theorists, namely, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson and Cary Wolfe, provides us with a novel means to challenge and reconceptualise received assumptions that underpin the ethics and politics of humanism. These analyses in chapters two to four examine, respectively, the interface between system-environment, neurology-ecology, human-posthuman. This thesis concludes with an empirical case study of sensory substitution, a phenomenon whose manifestation as both a neurological and an ecological condition evokes the very problem of locating the origin of agency, in this case, neuroplasticity. As neuroplasticity disperses any simple notion of identity as discrete, static and separate, indeed, neurology is an expression of systematicity, the certainty that grounds human identity will need to be substantially reworked