theoretical appropriations | politics by cameron hu
below and on following pages: various editions of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory . A book cover must act as a kind of précis, a graphic
life and death in the open system
abstract of an abstract theory that nonetheless
whether one evaded them or learned to love them, systems presented fixed and immutable forms, machinic media of restriction and confinement, obstacles to the wild and organic flourishing of life. In the final accounting, our sense of system affiliated and perhaps still affiliates with death. It is curious, then, that just months after Smithson and Holt recorded East Coast, West Coast , no less an avatar of the counterculture than Buckminster Fuller found himself writing in support of a Nobel prize for the proponent of a theory of a ‘general system’. Fuller insisted that such a theory was absolutely essential if the movement of scientific and technological progress was to be diverted, as he wrote of nuclear research, ‘from lethal to vital uses.’ Is this the suggestion of a different version of the systems worldview, one whose political affordances may be distinct from those of ‘the system’ as such? Ludwig von Bertalanffy — Austrian born, son of a railwayman (and so hatched, perhaps, into a fully clockwork and Newtonian universe), itinerant professor orbiting the outer stations of the North American academy — authored at least a dozen books that culminate in his General System Theory of1968. 1 The book’s dull title and industrial prose belie the semi- mystical, even cosmic scope of Bertalanffy’s work. It amounts to an argument for the mass assumption of a new global consciousness: one that proceeds from the sublime and lively unity of the entire world to the necessity of a unified science to describe it. This new science is to rescue humans from themselves. ‘The question of what course the scientific world-conception will take,’ he writes, ‘is at the same time a question of the destiny of mankind.’ General System Theory is the document of a strange project to transform humans’ image of the world, and in doing so redeem the world itself. Bertalanffy’s theory of systems is complicated but relies on a simple premise. Modern science, he insists, has erred in studying the world via a process of reduction in which particles are identified, separated from their environments and then described in terms of individual properties. Attention to elementary
In the middle of the last century it was not uncommon to open a book or watch a film or attend a lecture only to be informed that you, at this very moment and without having previously known it, were within or even trapped by one or another ‘system’. This would not have come as good news. The systems discovered to bear down upon the ordinary subject — whether the symbolic structures tirelessly excavated by scholars, or the previously unspoken political or economic orders named by activists — were typically all-pervasive and unbearably restrictive. System came to serve as a flexible shorthand for a wide range of inflexible social arrangements. The term conveyed a rigidity, totality, and permanence that was suddenly apparent everywhere. It lent itself to whichever order challenged our cherished expectations about the capacities of individual human beings: that they acted autonomously, fashioned their own personalities and sensibilities from whole cloth, and more or less independently determined the course of their own futures. System dwarfed individual action. It dimmed the heroic possibilities of a human life. How, then, to carry out a life at all? One could dream about ways out of the system, in search of (and so perhaps expressing) a previous era’s bequest of human freedom. Or, as with an entire generation of artists and scholars, one might develop increasingly sophisticated methods to enjoy one’s disinheritance. You might count among these the entire adventure of structuralist and post-structuralist thought, as well as the funniest document of the whole of American conceptual art, which stages precisely this opposition of equally depressive strategies for ongoing existence in a systematic world. The video East Coast, West Coast (1969) mounts an informal conversation between Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, who play caricatures of quintessentially California and New York artists. Smithson, possibly tripping on something strong, has bought ten bicycles and just wants to ‘get on the bicycle and ride, man… feel the sunshine’. Holt, however, insists that Smithson must get with the program: ‘you could make a lot of plans for these ten bicycles, a lot of plans, you could make diagrams within a system’. But no matter
resonates within the graphic language of popular culture.
14
1 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications . New York: George Braziller, 1968
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator