The fragile orchestration of open systems did not necessarily inspire reverent feeling so much as endorse a heavily armed anxiety about the unpredictability of the world. Here the openness and open-endedness of the system becomes a problem for swift solution. The thought of an open system, it seems, does not necessarily induce appreciation for life in general. If General System Theory encourages us to re-imagine our social worlds as fragile and temporary collaborations, it has also justified considerable investments in securing one’s own fragile world against its ‘threat environment’, or, in rendering unlivable the environments of others. To reconsider the world as an open system may compel nothing so much as a vigorous defence of the normal against all disturbance and deviance. Devised in appreciation of life, Bertalanffy’s open system eventually lent itself to the cause of permanent warfare and the pre-emptive strike. ~
We may read this as an alternative politics to our various horrors of ‘the system’ and our individual powerlessness within it. Life, in Bertalanffy’s theory, is not the mystical property of free beings untrammelled by forces beyond them, rather it is the very fact of relation, exchange and association within a messy and contingent world. Life as , and not against, system. Fuller’s letter was ultimately composed in vain. Bertalanffy died before his nomination could be considered. But had he, or shall we say his system, continued living into the extremes of old age, he might have worried at the ends to which his thought was applied. Indeed the basic concepts elaborated in General System Theory , once radical and utopian suggestions, found wide appeal among the architects of the paranoid nationalism of his adopted country. Consider, for example, the introductory sentences of the US State Department’s 2011: A National Strategic Narrative : ‘The twenty-first century is an open system in which unpredictable external events/ phenomena are constantly disturbing and disrupting the system.’ 3 One or another concept of open systems has come to supply a good deal of intellectual firepower for a new era of American militarisation. Defence research institutes are now flush with scholars insisting — not unlike Bertalanffy once did — that students adopt a new model of the world-as-dynamic-system. How else, they ask, to advance American interests in the complicated twenty-first century? A pair of US Army War College professors theorise that Americans require nothing less than ‘an ecological metaphor to examine an organizational response to a changing environment. The ‘open system’ ecological metaphor is rooted in chaos, complexity, and systems theories. Several elements of the metaphor can be applied to the military’s adaptation to the evolving threat, security, and operational environments.’ 4 Of course, even in Bertalanffy’s lifetime the theory of open systems helped frame new modes of war-making. As early as the 1960s Charles Fritz, a disaster sociologist at the Institute for Defense Analysis, recommended his colleagues conceive of normal national life as a ‘steady state’. The new concept would help to conceive of a more precise science of disasters whose purpose was ‘to produce the maximal amount of disruption to the enemy in the event of war’. 5
We can’t find a larger image for the psychedelic Italian edition, but it is reminiscent of both Aubrey Beardsley and Rorschach tests: polar fascinations of the 1960s. The Spanish version is a development of one of Bertalanffy’s diagrams, and the Soviet cover, from 1972 shows the individual as part of a larger, cooperative system.
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all images pulled from various websites, without permission thus their miniscule size
3 Slaughter, Anne Marie. ‘Preface’ to A National Strategic Narrative . Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Centre, 2011 4 Braun. William and Allen, Charles, ‘Shaping a Twenty-first Century Defense Strategy’, JPME Today 73:2, 2014, 52-59. 5 Fritz, Charles E. ‘Disaster’ in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (editors), Contemporary Social Problems . New York: Harcourt, 1961
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