Complexity, ecology and the materiality of information

This article contributes to understanding the effect of complexity theory on the social sciences. It analyses the relationships between complex processes of self-organization and the environment or ecology in which these dynamics take place. Two factors are prioritized: the role of information in the formation of complex structure and the development of 'land-scapes' or topologies of possibility (and impossibility). The authors argue for an ontology that founds both material and informational structures, and for a radical continuity between the general thermodynamics of emergent complex orders, cognitive theory and the complex structures of human thought and culture.