the mechanistic world picture with another, of sublime global systematicity: ‘Possibly the model of the world as a great organisation can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost in the last sanguinary decades of human history.’ General System Theory aspires to restore unity and relation to a world that has been analysed (and subsequently broken) into fragments, and to the extent that it is successful, it will remove humans from the path to the species’ end. But ‘reverence for the living’ is not just a platitude. Bertalanffy was trained as a biologist and at the core of his work is a radically expansive redefinition of life itself. Bertalanffy’s major innovation was to reinterpret life itself as a kind of systematicity. Thus to revere the living is not just to loathe the destruction of human life, rather, to avert mass destruction one must learn to recognise life differently. Bertalanffy’s first significant article, perhaps the foundation of all subsequent work, quietly outlines a new theory of life through an opposition of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems. 2 He asks us to consider a sealed vessel in which chemical reactants have been brought together. No materials enter or leave the vessel. A complicated reaction occurs, slowly or quickly, and then the chemicals slowly settle into their permanent end state. Now imagine instead a cell that ‘maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components’. The cell is constantly at work to block or permit entry to foreign materials, metabolising them and assimilating or disposing of them. Bertalanffy’s point is that the sealed vessel and the cell present utterly distinct temporalities. Within the sealed vessel, the exemplary ‘closed system’, time is the engine of a process whose course is known in advance. The sealed vessel has but one end-state, and time draws its contents toward that state without digression. And when it arrives at that end- state, nothing else will ever occur. But in the lively open system of cells we find a condition of permanent flux and indeterminacy, and a constant effort to stretch the system’s existence from one instant into the next, and into the next after that. Open systems, Bertalanffy argues, make up our lived reality, and the ongoing labour of a system’s self-maintenance is the process of life itself. Life, however ingloriously, adds up to nothing more than an open system in a state of temporary exchange with its environment, what Bertalanffy calls ‘the steady state’. Death is merely the disturbance that throws the system permanently out of sync.
units in isolation from one another misses the proverbial forest for the trees. Bertalanffy argues that the proper object of any science, whether social, psychological, or biological, is the quality of ‘wholeness’ — rather than parts in themselves he focusses on their sums. A science of wholeness redirects attention to the dynamic patterns of interaction among parts as they make up the vital processes of larger-scale phenomena: cells, fisheries, psyches, societies, planetary ecologies. What matters is not the thing in itself and its immutable properties, but what so many things amount to in each others’ presence, across time. Can one develop a vocabulary that accounts at once for the rise and fall of civilisations and the life and death of a cell? Bertalanffy’s systems theory aims to generalise the principles according to which almost all things may emerge, change, maintain themselves and disappear. General System Theory travels far afield from the nefarious politics of ‘the system’. System is such a primordial characteristic of Bertalanffy’s world that it makes little sense to speak of systems as a threat to either the free-willed and autonomous individual, or of one’s dreams of escaping system altogether. To Bertalanffy, we are always somewhere within an infinite hierarchy of systems. The individual, whether construed biologically or psychically, is itself a variety of system, not an indivisible unit but a complex of elements in a holding pattern of interaction. And in turn there can be little horror of assimilation into something larger than the self if every entity, in turn, is necessarily party to processes of greater scale. The science of whole systems aspires to another kind of politics entirely. As he wrote about mainstream science: ‘The mechanistic world view, taking the play of physical particles as ultimate reality, found expression in a civilisation which glorifies physical technology that has led eventually to the catastrophes of our time.’ This is Bertalanffy’s impetus for the formation of a theory of a general system: modern thought has misdiagnosed the world as an arbitrary collection of independent, individual bits moving reliably along pre-determined tracks; humans accordingly take a view of nature as mechanistic and of human beings as machines, and they have come to worship machinic power. Nuclear warfare and the real extinction of the human species follows as the logical conclusion of this line of thought. Bertalanffy believes that humans’ basic way of thinking about matter has lead them to the brink of nonexistence. And so his solution to our crisis is not in any traditional sense a political one. He offers an alternative at the level of our basic metaphysics where salvation lies in replacing
The covers for General System Theory on the facing page illustrate many of the fears of 1960s: categorisation, stuck in boxes, part of a diagram, loss of individuality. The covers on this page, mostly from the 2000s and Europe show none of these fears, rather the individual is in some relationship with some sort of context, from nature to molecular biology.
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2 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. ‘The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology’. Science vol. 111, no. 2872 pp 23-29
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