The Rules Are No Game: The Strategy of Communications by Anthony WildenReview by: John D. JacksonThe Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Summer,1989), pp. 405-406Published by: Canadian Journal of SociologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3340618 .

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Anthony Wilden, The Rules are No Game: The Strategy of Communications. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987, 432 pp., hardcover.

"But many metaphors are meant" (cited by Anthony Wilden) "We had the experience but missed the meaning" (from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Musical Cats) "You reach people through metaphor" (from M. Ondaatje's novel, In The Skin of a Lion)

"Whatever else it is, all behavior is communication," is Anthony's Wilden's first of 59 axioms of communication which conclude this chef-d'oeuvre. The Rules are no Game is a major addition to the literature in cultural studies and general sociology. The book is composed of three related works - "The Naming of the Parts and the 20th Century War" (63 pp.), "The Strategy of Communications" (215 pp.) concluding with a 19-page postscript on context theory, and "Women in Production: The Chorus Line" (17 pp.). Add to this 75 pages of bibliography, the most complete and up-to-date listing to appear in any recent text.

This is a book written by a scholar and teacher for teachers and scholars. It comprehends information theory, communications theory, cybernetics, kinesthetics, semiotics, and systems theory. Grand Theory? Yes and no. It is Grand Theory in the depth and scope of its synthesis. It is not Grand Theory in that it is well grounded in daily experience. But most especially it is not Grand Theory because it has a recognizable subject - the author. Those familiar with the repositioning of the author as the novel historically moved into a prominent position vis-a-vis the epic, will know that one of the effects was a reduction of the hierarchical distance between author and reader. Professor Wilden accomplishes this reduction, an uncommon practice in "scientific writing," by actively placing himself in the text.

As I read the book I was aware of his presence as a thinker and teacher. Writing in

"plain style," the author introduces himself in "The Naming of the Parts and the 20th Century War" as a person with grandparents and parents who grew up in a particular cultural, economic, and political setting. The author and, therefore, his thoughts have a context. Is there a better way to profess or teach? Context theory is the message - a perspective

oriented to information, goalseeking, constraint, relationships, reciprocity, levels of reality, levels of responsibility, levels of communication and control, requisite diversity, innovation, openness, cooperation, the capacity to utilize unexpected novelty, and thus towards long-range survival and the future (p. 310).

The synthesis is carefully and patiently constructed, concept by concept and proposi- tion by proposition. Levels of reality, kinship, ideology, language, symbolization, subjec- tivity and objectivity, discourse, signs, semiotics, system and structure, and dialectics are expounded and integrated into a strategy of communication - an open and enriching perspective calling for a contextual and many-sided logic, while rejecting neither dialectic nor analytic logic, but void of empty rhetoric and narrow positivism. This is a textbook which will serve well any teacher in the human sciences willing to work (i.e., it is not a publisher's formula text with multiple choice questions ready for tomorrow's quiz).

The textbook-like qualities lie in the pedagogical expertise of the author. However, I

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would not recommend that the work be put aside because it is a textbook. Most certainly use it as a textbook, but it is much more. It is the building of critical social theory at its best.

At the core of Professor Wilden's context theory lies a conceptualization of systems which a reader of my generation educated on this side of the Atlantic would be inclined to associate with Talcott Parsons' general system of action. A close reading dispels any temptation to draw a parallel. To put this another way, one can read Wilden against Parsons, but not the other way around. Readers will recall Parsons' notion of the general system of action as a hierarchy of control in which the behavioural organism was posited as the point of articulation with the physical environment, the former subsumed under the personality system which in turn operated under the control of the social system. Ultimate control was located in the cultural system.

In contrast, Wilden's dependent hierarchy of constraint (not control) links nature to culture with complexity and the potential for emergent properties increasing from inorganic to organic nature, to the means of production and reproduction, to the social relations of same, and to culture, the means of representation. The "lower orders (as systems) depend on higher orders (as environments) for structure and survival." The level of generality and inclusion increases from lower to higher orders. Thus, the Extinction Rule:

To test for the orientation of a dependent hierarchy, mentally abolish each level (or order) in turn, and note which level(s), or order(s), will necessarily become extinct if it becomes extinct. (p. 74)

Absent is the human centred mastery of organic and inorganic nature present in Parsons' thinking. Absent is the mechanistic and deterministic concept of control. Absent is the mixing of logical types. Present is the acknowledgement of "emergent qualities," qualitities not predictable from the knowledge of the systems in which they arise and increasing as the order of complexity from higher to lower orders increases.

Parsons was influenced by cybernetics and the concept of cybernetic causality. Its influence on his work increased throughout the early sixties. However, to take Parsons as intellectually kin to Wilden would be an error. Wilden was a student and colleague of Jacques Lacan. Accordingly, he brings to his work all the insights of Lacan's rewriting of Freud and the richness of the post-structuralists. I do not mean to imply that the work is derivative. On the contrary, this is an original casting of context theory. I might add that Professor Wilden escapes the bind of male-dominance found in Lacan's work. The Rules are No Game is open to women, a fact clearly demonstrated in "Women in Production: The Chorus Line 1932-1980," a discussion of the production and showing of a 55-minute video montage of fifteen musical numbers from eleven Hollywood films and one Broadway show.

Based on a distinction between the real and the imaginary, energy and information, and orders of complexity Professor Wilden discusses system and structure, code and message, metaphor and metonymy, negation and the dialectic. For the reader not specialized in communications and cultural studies, this book will serve as an excellent introduction. It will introduce the French, British, and American literature in the field. The author is very persuasive.

"The Inevitable Rule: The system that destroys its environment destroys itself."

Concordia University John D. Jackson

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