It's a maths conference! It's rock 'n' roll!

[tcpip]

Over the past few months I've been co-writing a paper for the International Conference for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The paper is a combination of number theory (especially complex numbers,
percolation, criticality, fractal dimensions) and critical-functional social theory (the AGIL shema, uneven development, crises, system/lifworld distinction). It's all about the mathematical modelling of societies, their evolution and when they collapse due to internal contradictions and so forth. It uses (at least from my end) material from Talcott Parsons, Jeffrey Alexander and Jurgen Habermas.

I have just been told that a full-colour A0 poster has been made to advertise the paper. Previously I had been under the evident error that such posters are usually used for advertising recent tours by popular (or subcultural) musicians.

Oh well. As Pythagoras pointed out, even music consists of numbers. Tres rock-n-roll.

Comments

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm trying to imagine Habermas and Parsons together (Alexander is unknown to me).

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Alexander developed functionalism to take into account historical and interpretative sociology criticism. Specifically, the discussion is around uneven development in the AGIL schema and the need for axiomatic changes in a social system. The best book on this is 'Neofunctionalism' (1985 iirc).

As for Habermas, well, he's always tried to incorporate Parsons into his work although he is highly critical of the universalizing tendencies of "the system" bringing dysfunctional results to the lifeworld of cultural reproduction.

Parsons is a strange one. I mean he started out with a theory of action and ended up with all-inclusive systems theory. Habermas wryly notes that as he got older he even started to get somewhat metaphysical about his systems theory, talking of "ultimate values" and so forth.

Existentialism gets us all in the end :)