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Parsons’s Concept of Society: From the Perspective of Negative or Subtractive

Ontology

Working Paper · October 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23959.68004

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

Parsons’s Concept of Society:

From the Perspective of Negative or Subtractive Ontology

Piet Strydom
University College Cork, Ireland

Introduction
In this sketch for a subsection to be included in a piece dealing with a cognitive social-scientific
conception of cultural structure – for example, the cognitive order of society and cultural models –
Parsons’s systems theoretical conceptualization of society is subjected to a brief critical
consideration from the perspective of a negative or, better, a subtractive ontology. As regards the
latter, in the background are Hegel’s (1967, 2010) concern with ‘negativity’, Theodor Adorno’s
(1970) ‘negative dialectics’ and his use of the word ‘subtractive’ and Alain Badiou’s (2007) notion of
a ‘subtractive ontology’, but at its core it is inspired by a few basic ideas regarding ‘infinity’ (Strydom
2017) and related ones drawn from Georg Cantor’s set theory (Dantzig 2007; Badiou 2007; Nelson
2008). As Adorno stresses, such an ontology is accessible only to an approach that is properly
‘reflexive’.

Parsons’s concept of society

It is well-established in the critical literature (e.g. Habermas 1987) that Parsons’s conception of
society underwent a significant change from initially being rooted in the Kantian inspired theory of
action to being couched from his middle period onwards in the framework of the general theory of
living systems. Henceforth, his intellectual development proceeded from the most basic systems
theoretical assumption to the effect that the interrelationships between elements, components or
parts all together form a whole and, further, that this holds for all levels, from the lowest to each
and every one succeeding it. The opening idea of the relations of an actor to the various components
and dimensions of the action situation in which he/she is located was displaced by the notion of the
general action system which encompasses culture, society, personality and the behavioural system.
It would be a thankless task, made all the more tedious by Parsons’s changing classifications, to
undertake tracing his progressive shift of the systems reference point and thus the periodic addition
of yet another next-level dimension in order to arrive at an increasingly comprehensive account
embracing higher and higher manifestations of systems organization. Instead, stock will be taken
briefly of two moments in the development of his theory with a view to grasping his concept of
society – i.e., the earlier presentation of society as a social system and its later contextualization by
the system of the basic conditions of human existence.

Society as a social system

In his middle period in the 1950s and 60s, Parsons put forward the conception of society as a social
system comprised of the economic, political, social integrative and cultural pattern-maintenance
subsystems which maintain their respective boundaries relative to each other as environments.
These four subsystems are respectively repositories of resources, goals, norms and values which
enable them to contribute to the fulfilment – in accordance with the AGIL schema – of the adaptive,
goal-attainment, integrative and latency or pattern-maintenance functions simultaneously along the
temporal and spatial axes on behalf of society.

It requires little reflection on the diagrammatic presentation (Table 1 below) of this complex by
means of a fourfold cross-tabulation to appreciate that Parsons was thinking about the
interdependent relations, which he regarded as empirical rather than conceptual, in terms of a
whole. Indeed, he is emphatic about this, writing: ‘System…is…the concept around which all
sophisticated theory in the conceptually generalizing disciplines is and must be organized. This is

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

because any regularity of relationship can be more adequately understood if the whole complex of
multiple interdependencies of which it forms a part is taken into account’ (1977: 177, my emphasis).

Adaptation Goal-attainment

Economy Polity
(resources) (goals)

Pattern-maintenance Integrative subsystem

(values) (norms)

Latency Integration
time
space

Table 1: Society as social system

However, the overriding concern with the whole gives rise to a problem that bears directly on the
conceptualization of society, all the more so insofar as it is presented in conjunction with an
objectivistic emphasis on the empirical. A consistent pursuit of the conceptual strand in dealing with
the social system, without denying the necessity of the empirical dimension, by contrast would have
yielded the insight that not only something exceeding or more than the social system qua whole is at
issue, but also that ontological assumptions of a presentist or objective-empirical kind are
insufficient. What we have in Parsons’s conception is a sharply delimited, self-enclosed complex that
is available to observation and empirical registering – in other words, a construction that can be
regarded as assuming an ontology of presence. He thus submits that society as social system ‘could
be exhaustively analyzed in terms of processes and structures referable to the solution –
simultaneously or in sequence – of the four functional problems…’ (1977: 43, my emphasis).
Considered from the contrasting perspective of mathematical set theory, for example, it is obvious
that, if the social system is a set and its subsystems are its subsets, the necessary and inalienable
component of any and every set, the ‘empty set’ or ‘null set’ (Nelson 2008: 145, 313) having no
content, is conspicuously absent. This means that Parsons is oblivious to the negative dimension
and, hence, lacks the more complex subtractive ontology that would allow, unlike a presentist
ontology, a more adequate concept of society. Throughout, even when shifting to higher levels of
systems organization, this absence remained a mark of his systems theoretical conceptualization.
There is therefore yet more to his conception of society.

The system of the basic conditions of human existence

Given Parsons’s fascination with ever higher levels of systems organization, it comes as no surprise
that this self-enclosed ontology of presence was reinforced in his later work. In the mid-1960s, he
did indeed indicate that the social system maintains interdependent relations not only internally
among its subsystems, but also externally with bordering environments – what he called the
‘physical-organic environment’ and ‘ultimate reality’ (1966: 28). Later, however, he consolidated and
fortified this view by the introduction of the conception of the system of the basic conditions of
human existence. What he called ‘the human condition’ (1978: 382) was now also conceived as a
system. Being beyond the social system, this further level represents the highest relevant level of
systems organization.

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

L I

Culture Society
Ultimate reality:
Telic system
Behavioural Personality
system

Physical-chemical Human organism

nature

A G

Table 2: The system of the basic conditions of human existence

Here Parsons shifts the reference point beyond the general action system, which includes society, to
the next higher level which, in fact, is the highest level from the human perspective. This upgrading
of reference level and hence of logical type is achieved still in terms of the conceptual apparatus of
systems theory, as most graphically attested by his calling of ‘ultimate reality’ the ‘telic system’
(1978: 356). It is obviously designated thus in order to comply with the objectivistic demand of
systems thinking. At the same time, however, the notion of the telic system gives rise to the
suspicion of an anomalous inclusion. Insofar as system remains the superordinate concept, Parsons
continues thinking of a whole, a self-enclosed objectified complex of relations of interdependency
within the framework of which the general action system interacts indirectly with both physical-
chemical-organic-genetic nature and ultimate reality, while the components of the general action
system interact directly with one another. This whole systems complex is effectively treated as an
objective totality, but what is remarkable is that this projection gets doubled-up by the telic system
insofar as it represents the imaginary totality of ultimate reality. Parsons goes so far as to equate the
telic system with religion as the highest complex of cybernetic controlling values and to insist that
this systems component presupposes belief in the existence of God.

Several closely interrelated observations can be made about the position Parsons adopts here. The
first concerns the impossibility of the closure of systems theory. Just before von Bertalanffy’s
establishment of systems theory in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a debate raged about formal
systems stimulated by Cantor’s set theory, particularly his proof that every ‘set’ has a ‘power set’
which exceeds it on the basis of all its parts being taken together, including crucially also the ‘empty
set’ (Nelson 2008). Gödel’s incisive contribution was to bring this debate to a close by the
introduction of his ‘incompleteness theorem’ (Nelson 2008: 196) which established that a formal
system includes undecidable components. On the one hand, one could perhaps take Parsons’s
upgrading of systems organization from society as a social system to the human condition as being
equivalent to identifying the power set – or meta-structure – of society considered as a set, but he
conspicuously lacks the empty set – which means to say, lacking the dormant action, intervention
and transformation capacity and associated potentials required for outstripping the confines of the
system. On the other hand, one could perhaps take Parsons’s appeal to ultimate reality as an
attempt to register the incompleteness of systems theory, but then he blocked this interpretation by
specifically having reduced it by means of the systems concept to the telic system.

No doubt, Parsons’s sensitivity to the related question of time is promising. He is emphatic about
including time-extended processes in his conceptualization of society, particularly as an essential
dimension of the fulfilment of the functions of subsystems, but a question arises as soon as one calls

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

to mind the historical background of the modern understanding of time and the implicated problem
of infinity (Panofsky 1955; Dantzig 2007; Wootton 2016). Beginning with the introduction of zero or
the concept of nothing and the application of geometrical principles first in perspective painting and
then cartography, involving people like Fibonacci, Brunelleschi, Aberti, Dürer, Bruno and Galileo, the
mathematization of nature and the consequent scientific revolution not only made the problem of
time central, but by the same token also overturned the Aristotelian assumption of bounded spheres
which were unfit to accommodate such related notions as vanishing point and real infinity. In a
crucial respect, peculiarly enough, Parsons does not understand time-extended processes and hence
infinity in a sense appropriate to science, including the social sciences, but persists along the lines of
those Aristotelians and other early moderns who opposed science and its concept of infinity. By way
of the notion of ultimate reality cast in the mould of religion, he continues embracing divine infinity
instead of real infinity (Strydom 2017).

This anomalous and anachronistic attachment to an imaginary totality in the social scientific context
casts a shadow over the ‘L’ (latency) and pattern-maintenance pillar of Parsons’s four-function
schema. First, in a misrecognition of the structuring effect of the abstract cognitive order of
objective/intellectual, social/normative and subjective/aesthetic principles which get selectively
composed in a situation-relevant manner, cultural-systemic pattern-maintenance is in an all too
concrete or substantive manner understood as exerting control lower down the cybernetic hierarchy
by religiously infused cultural values. Once again taking cues from set theory, it would be more
adequate to regard the cognitive order with its objective, social and subjective sectors and
corresponding key principles of truth, right and truthfulness as being equivalent to the power set or
meta-structure of society as a set structurally consisting of economic, political, social and cultural
components and, further, to conceive these principles as cognitive structures that get selectively
combined or composed in the construction of cultural models, including cultural models regulating
religious orientations, commitments and practices.

Second, Parsons takes the concept of latency to mean ‘latent tension-management’, the
management of latent tensions in a system or situation, whereas latency properly understood
invokes the negative or subtractive dimension. Apart from the empty set, the organically rooted
dormant human capacities for creativity, action and intervention, this dimension refers in this case in
particular to the anthropologically deep-seated but culturally preserved holistic, indefinitely
expansive, inexhaustible, diffuse and opaque cognitive complexes which are in excess of any and
every system and are presupposed by the cognitive order principles as their basic conditions – for
example, language, logic, mathematics and informational redundancy. It is the infinite excess
represented by these cognitive complexes – an excess in the literature too narrowly conceived as
‘semantic surplus’ – that lies behind the cognitive order and provides its principles with their
limitless potential on which different interpretations of real possibilities as well as new disclosures
feed. Here one enters the expanse of the dimension of the ‘void’ (Hegel) or the ‘non-conceptual’ and
‘non-identical’ that always shadows any and every conceptual endeavour one might embark upon
and without which a critical theory of society would not be possible. Adorno writes: ‘The concept is a
moment like any other in dialectical logic. In it survives its being mediated by the non-conceptual
property of its meaning, which for its part grounds its conceptual character…..To direct
conceptualization toward the non-identical is the very hinge of negative dialectics. The insight into
the constitutive character of the non-conceptuality of the concept eliminates the compulsion toward
identity thinking which the concept carries along with it when it is not accompanied by such
persistent reflection’ (1970: 22, my translation).

Negative or subtractive ontology

Critical social science, particularly Critical Theory, cannot do without a negative or subtractive
ontology if it were to fulfil its defining task of a critique of the multilevel reifications plaguing existing

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

social reality. This ontology enables it to avoid the ‘identity thinking’ towards which all the
mainstream approaches tend – not only the limitations of systems theory, including Parsons’s at
best only half-thought-through concept of society, but also the debilitating attachment of
empiricism to observables, phenomenology to the essence of things and hermeneutics to available
meanings. The concern with the negative or subtracted beyond observables, essences and meanings
is by no means idealistic or obscurantist. While it does not exclude the observation, close description
and interpretation of the meaning of phenomena, it is basically materialist. It reckons with a
dimension that does not exist or appear in reality, is not observable, does not have an essence which
can be looked at and, finally, to which no meaning can be ascribed – yet, a dimension that is of the
greatest significance to social reality and its study. The materialist thrust of this ontology can be
graphically yet only partially indicated by pointing to reality as something that simultaneously is
what it is and what is not or is not yet, something that has vast potentials and realizable possibilities,
something that can develop, change and become something different, something else than it is at
present. The recognition of potentials, possibilities, the propensity to develop, change and become
something else, needless to point out, is of vital importance to any critical approach, above all
Critical Theory.

To make this negative or subtractive dimension a little more palpable a few of its aspects can be
singled out in a preliminary manner – seven to begin with:
_________________________________________________________________________________
Immanent Transcendent

3 real infinity:
virtual cognitive order: divergent
truth/untruth 2
infinite excess:
right/wrong 4 •language
evolutionary structure-formation gaps •logic
& stabilization truthfulness/ •mathematics
7 mendacity •redundancy
6 gap
5 unrealizable
1 what is/what is not cultural models
Ø π real infinity:
organic natural historical & historical-constructive convergent
genetic processes
dormant
capacities &
potentials
__________________________________________________________________________________

Figure 1: The negative or subtractive dimension

The aspects identified in this figure can be briefly circumscribed as follows:

(1) rooted in the infinite process of natural history, the organic genetically delimited dormant or
latent human action, intervention and transformation capacities and the implicated potentials
which, first of all, allow the emergence and being of a person or of an object and, second, harbour
the unfulfilled potential of the person or object to develop, change or become what it is not but
want to or could become; corresponding to the ‘empty set Ø’ (Nelson 2008; Badiou 2007) and to

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Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

Hegel’s (1967: section 6) ‘negativity’, Adorno’s (1970: 64) ‘Nichtseiende’, non-being, and Badiou’s
(2007: 373) ‘indiscernible’

(2) the infinite excess – i.e., the holistic, indefinitely expansive, inexhaustible, diffuse and opaque
implications and potentials – culturally preserved and implicated in such cognitive complexes as
language, logic, mathematics and informational redundancy which is presupposed by the cognitive
order principles as their basic condition; implicating what Adorno (1970: 22) calls the
‘Nichtbegriffliche’, the non-conceptual as well as the ‘Nichtidentische’, the non-identical –
Habermas’s (1987: 123ff.) notion of the ‘lifeworld background’ being partially comparable – in
accordance with real infinity in the divergent sense

(3) the virtual transcendent meta-structural cognitive order of society, corresponding to the ‘power
set’ (Nelson 2008; Badiou 2007), consisting of the principles presupposed by the human
sociocultural form of life which have become evolutionarily stabilized on the basis of different types
of structure formation, i.e., the evolution of the human brain-mind and the evolution of social and
cultural structures – principles imposed by the human mind on the infinite process to rein it in, if not
to stop it (Strydom 2017); principles whose positive preference value implicates their negative value
(e.g. truth/falsity); principles which, as soon as they are drawn upon and applied immanently in a
situation-relevant determinate form, fall back into their indeterminate background of conditions so
that the accompanying excess makes it is impossible to pin them down fully – once again,
Habermas’s (1987: 123ff.) notion of the ‘lifeworld background’ being partially comparable

(4) the gaps and incompatibilities between cognitive order sectors and between principles and,
therefore, potential tensions and conflicts immanently due, for example, to overemphasis on one to
the detriment of another (e.g. ‘instrumental rationality’ or ‘functional rationality’ snuffing out the
social/normative sector; within the normative sector, freedom eroding solidarity or the difficulty in
balancing freedom and equality)

(5) the ‘non-identical’ (Adorno 1970: 16) or the ‘inexistent’ (Badiou 2013: 587) – i.e., the Other, the
subaltern, discriminated, suppressed, discarded and excluded in a minimal or the least possible
mode of existence – at the level of the infinite process of the historical construction and organization
of society

(6) the immanent cultural models directing, guiding and regulating orientations, actions, practices,
organizational arrangements and so forth at the level of the infinite process of historical
construction and organization of society, but models in principle unrealizable, always receding in a
way reminiscent of the unreachable value of pi (π) in accordance with real infinity in the convergent
sense (Dantzig 2007; Strydom 2017); and finally

(7) the gap, abyss or chasm between the immanent and the transcendent, between the set and the
power set, between the structure and the meta-structure, between the structured sociocultural
domain, usually called society, and the cognitive order of society and its conditions – a gap, a
dialectical contradiction of vital importance to Critical Theory, that allows for discretion or different
interpretations and enforces the need for decision-making which is necessary to avoid disappearing
into the void of oblivion and thus non-being; a gap where the immanent application of transcendent
cognitive order principles via cultural models occurs and, hence, where the stark difference between
pure reason and impure reason becomes apparent (Strydom 2011).

References
Adorno, Theodor (1970) Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Badiou, Alain (2007) Being and Event. London: Bloomsbury.

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 Strydom, Workbook VIII, Entries 47, ‘Subtractive Ontology’ pp. 143ff, and 48 ‘Parsons’s Concept of Society’, pp. 148ff 9.10.2017

Badiou, Alain, (2013) Logics of Worlds. London: Bloomsbury.

Dantzig, Tobias (2007) Number. New York: Penguin Group.
Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2. Cambridge: Polity.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1967) Philosophy of Right. London: Oxford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2010) The Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, David (2008) Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics. London: Penguin Books.
Panofsky, Erwin (1955) Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor.
Parsons, Talcott (1966) Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall.
Parsons, Talcott (1977) Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory. New York: Free Press.
Parsons, Talcott (1978) Action Theory and the Human Condition. New York: Free Press.
Strydom, Piet (2011) Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology. London: Routledge.
Strydom, Piet (2017) ‘Infinity, Infinite Processes and Limit Concepts: Recovering a Neglected
Background of Social and Critical Theory’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 43(8): 793-811. DOI:
10.1177/091453717692845
Wootton, David (2016) The Invention of Science. London: Penguin Books.

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