The Membrane That Listens

Abstract

Under a microscope a single cell looks like a small, self-contained world. It is not. Everything that keeps it alive happens at its edge. The membrane around it is a few molecules thick, and it does two jobs at once. It holds the cell together, so that what is inside stays organised. And it is constantly letting things through, nutrients in, waste out, signals in both directions, so that the cell knows what is happening around it and can respond. A cell with no membrane dissolves into its surroundings. A cell with a membrane that lets nothing through starves, and dies without knowing why. That image is the best short description of what this book has been calling embeddedness. Karl Polanyi's argument in The Great Transformation , traced in chapter 2, was that a market needs a membrane of social relations around it: law, custom, obligation, the claims of land and of human life. Remove the membrane, try to make the market the thing everything else lives inside, and the society it serves begins to come apart.