I have been grappling with the work of Humberto Maturana and his student and later collaborator Francisco Varela for many years. But until I stumbled across this paper by Vincent Kenny I hadn’t twigged the direct relevance of their ideas to purposive drift. But reading this quote from Kenny’s paper the links seem pretty clear:
“‘Every system is where it is, in a present, in congruence with its medium, and cannot be anywhere else.’ This is a typical statement by Maturana whereby he means to underline the coherence and congruence of each system in its domain of existence. A human system may not like where he is in the medium, and may feel extremely badly about what “life” has doled out to him, but he is where he is through a coherent series of structural interactions and changes in his ontogenic drift. It is interesting that we apply the word “drifter” in a pejorative manner to those folks who most obviously exemplify the human condition of structural drift, as if we , by our ‘rootedness’ were escaping this essential constraint and thereby exerting ‘control’ or ‘steering’ over our lives in a determining way.
Both the living system and the medium change in congruence with one another. They change their structure / shape so that they fit together in a drift. The concept of drift does not imply a chaotic situation because it is being determined on a moment-to-moment basis by the interactions. The path of drift is contingent upon the interactions. So unilateral steering is an illusion. This path of drift is a path without any choices. It is a path of conservation of (a) the organisation of the living system and (b) of congruence with the medium. This is the paradigm for survival.”
While some commentators have described Maturana and Varela’s ideas as representing “purposeless drift” in the sense that they are arguing against the idea of pre-determined outcomes. but I think this quote from Maturana suggests he may have similar ideas to mine about the purposiveness of drift:
“..this pleasure – I am not speaking about the “pleasure principle”- I am speaking about what happens whenever you take an organism and look at it in its normal circumstance. It lives in well being. Don’t you feel the bird flying, or the little mouse moving in the woods, are both well? If you were to catch the mouse and put it in the cage, what you would observe is that the mouse would move in what you would interpret as an attempt to get out. If you were to be put into a cage, you would do the same. You would not feel comfortable, and to attempt to get out as a way of recovering well being. And if you don’t attempt to get out, you become depressed and die. This is the case whether you are attempting to get out of a physical cage or a conceptual cage – whenever you realise that you are in a cage – or that you are where you do not want to be. The moment that you realise that you are where you do not want to be, you begin to do things which constitute the satisfaction of your wanting to get out from where you do not want to be. So when I say pleasure, I mean it in the sense of well being, or comfort, that is the case in the absence of discomfort.”
(Compare this to my ChangeThis manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”and spot the similarities. As Bob Sutton remarked, “There are no new ideas”.)