Organized Complexity.

Professor Bourbaki, Shenyang, 2009.

A few decades before Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the rhizome, American scientist Warren Weaver was already aware of the inherent complexities of nature and the hurdles anticipated by the scientific community in deciphering them. In 1948 in an article entitled ‘Science and Complexity’, Weaver divided the history of modern science into three distinct stages: The first period, covering most of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, encapsulated what he denominated as ‘problems of simplicity’. Most scientists during this period were fundamentally trying to understand the influence of one variable over another. The second phase, taking place during the first half of the twentieth century, involved ‘problems of disorganized complexity’. This was a period of time when researchers started conceiving systems with a substantial number of variables, but the way many of these variables interacted was thought to be random and sometimes chaotic. The last stage defined by Weaver, initiated in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing to this day, is critically shaped by ‘problems of organized complexity’. Not only have we recognized the presence of exceedingly complex systems, with a large number of variables, but we have recognized the notion that these variables are highly interconnected and interdependent.

Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information, Princeton Architectural Press, 2011, p.45.