Secretly Seeking System—Instituting the Social
The subject here is system’s shaping of the subject of culture, literature, and liberalism—the modern self. Narrow-but-deep selves emerged from system’s role in mediating the formation of narrow-but-deep disciplines. With Mary Hays supplying a primary example, the chapter shows that when systems are extended through disciplinary travel so that they can no longer do what isolated systems do—they talk to themselves, the parts making a whole—another kind of self must be formally interpolated to do the talking. Embedded systems yield a newly expressive “I”—that is why in blaming The System we are also somehow blaming ourselves. This chapter bookends the tale of system and self by juxtaposing An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club” from 1720 to Douglas Englebart’s report on Augmenting Human Intellect from 1962. In the former, young women try to improve themselves through system—both by forming a “club” as a social incarnation of system and by writing systems. In the latter, Englebart describes a “system” in which humans improve themselves by interfacing with technology. The presentation of this report announced the invention of the computer mouse. The chapter concludes by showing how issues of gender and privilege, secrecy and privacy, individual and national development, mix with new kinds of order and method generated by system.