Writing upon System—Instituting Culture

The acting out of liberalism’s politics of blame helped to configure a new public space—a space other than the overtly political—in which to adjudicate claims about what parts of The System worked and what did not, what was of lasting value and what needed to be reformed. Those deliberations became the domain of “culture”—a term first used in its modern sense in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Once culture entered the West’s conceptual vocabulary, every group had one—in fact, every group still has to have one. Culture enacts the formal structure of system semantically as an imperative: parts (can and should) fit together into a whole. Reorganizing internally the very unity that it helped to contrive, “culture” also came to signify a subset of itself. Among the totality of activities that we call a “culture,” is “Culture”: in Raymond Williams’s words, “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.” “Literature” was similarly doubled: what had been an inclusive category of all learning was systematized and narrowed into a high Culture subset of itself. To explain this process, this chapter tracks system’s ongoing role in configuring a period (Romantic, including Hume, Blake, Rousseau, Byron) and an author’s career (Wordsworth’s). These are “secret” histories in that system’s role has been largely written out of both narratives as part of the Arnoldian effort to elevate Culture and Literature by obscuring their links to what he saw as the contingent business of system-making.

Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

Re:Enlightenment (Algorithmically Enhanced Systems)

To bring the story of system forward to the present, this Coda recounts the author’s involvement in an attempt to reshape knowledge called the Whole Enchilada group. Its work highlighted the ongoing importance of Darwin to current efforts at reform. Building on Daniel Dennett’s focus on the algorithmic in Darwin—the “If … then” format of his arguments—the Coda examines how algorithm and system have been deployed as variations of each other: if we reverse engineer any complex system we will find the simple algorithm that generated it. Just as we engage system as something both conceptual—a way of knowing the world—and as something that is really there, that constitutes part of that world, so algorithm is both a formal mode of producing knowledge about the world and—thanks to its simple-to-complex mechanicity—constitutive of that world. Using David Deutsch’s arguments about knowledge and virtual reality, the Coda then asks “Have we been able to know the world through system because the world is, in fact, itself structured as a system?” This question leads to a turn to Stephen Wolfram’s “new science” and the possibility of significant change: a reformulating on the Enlightenment’s once startling conviction that the world could be known through complex master SYSTEMS into the notion that knowledge—in the form of simple, iterative systems—renders the world. The book ends by emphasizing the persistence of system in the growing consensus that the universe is computational—with system generating the world it helps us to know.

Engaging System

This chapter explains how we can best “see” system using new tools, just as Galileo saw system using his improved spyglass. It starts with a graph of the astonishingly linear rise of the percentage of texts referencing system during the eighteenth century and then turns back to Bacon’s and Galileo’s efforts to use their new “resources” to move knowledge forward from Scholastic debate: the Jovian lunar “system” became evidence for a new “system of the world.” The chapter then engages Walter Ong’s question of how “system” took such rapid hold of the physical and intellectual worlds at the turn into the seventeenth century—a connection represented as a handshake in a 1640 frontispiece to Bacon’s Advancement of Knowledge. To Ong’s and Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the effect of print, the chapter turns to the concept of genre to add to the answer both a generic feature of system itself—its ability to act as a scalable technology—and a comparison to another genre—the fragmentary efforts of the “essay.” The chapter concludes with graphs comparing counts of “system” and “essay” during the eighteenth century and with an analysis of how system proliferated by scaling up parts into wholes and vice versa. That scalability allowed for both Enlightenment encyclopaedism and what the physicist David Deutsch calls “error-correction.”

Histories for Systems

History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.

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.

Blaming the System—Instituting the Political

This chapter pursues the effects of that proliferation by identifying the social incarnations of system—the ways that system re-formed society itself. It situates system as a form that mediated modernity, and shows how that mediation gave rise to the concept and practice of systematizing, its sister phenomenon of “instituting,” and the phenomenon of blaming “The System.” System became an object to blame as the traveling of system into other forms produced a new formal effect—a sense of expansive but attenuated authority: something that works both too well—“you can’t beat The System”—and not well enough—it always seems to “break down.” This chapter tracks that notion of blame in the novel, especially in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Anna Barbauld’s editorial efforts, and links it to what I call “the logic of liberalism.” In that logic, what Smith called the “simple system of natural liberty,” came to be known, simply, as “the system.” In blaming it, we configure “things as they are” as needing change, as capable of being changed, as providing the means of effecting that change, and, crucially as always failing enough to maintain an ongoing need for change. As demonstrated by Macaulay’s speech on the Reform Bill, Liberalism’s object will always be in need of reform because those reforms will always fall short. Liberalism always needs system as an object to blame.

The Project of Enlightenment (Master Systems)

This chapter offers a new take on the history of science by detailing how the turn from Scholasticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took the form of a gradual turn to system as the “firmer” form of what the physicist, and Enlightenment scholar, David Deutsch calls “guesswork.” That turn was completed in grand fashion with Newton’s decision to communicate his principles and laws philosophically by adding a “System of the World” to his treatise. I explain how and why Newton came very close—repeatedly—to sending the Principia into the world without any “System” at all. Why was system such a vexed issue in the late seventeenth century? What was at stake for Newton in choosing to write a system over competitors such as “hypothesis”? And why, once it did make it onto the printed page, did system become so successful that a copy of Newton’s system was launched into space as one of humanity’s calling cards three centuries later? How did that particular form of knowledge come to represent—for Condillac, Goldsmith, Hume, Pownall, Granger—our species’ good and bad efforts to advance knowledge? The primary generic marker of what came to be called Enlightenment, I conclude, were the monumental efforts—highlighted by Adam Smith’s project for Scotland—to scale up systems into master SYSTEMs that persisted from roughly the 1730s through the 1780s.

Prologue: “The Most Primitive Question”

The Prologues argues that the question “What is a system?” is a fundamental question across the disciplines, from quantum mechanics to the social sciences and humanities. To answer the question we need to see system not as an “idea” needing a definition but as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to know it. We can then identify features of that genre, such as scalability, that explain why system came to play such a central role in efforts to know the world for so long. We can also count systems and account for their becoming something to blame, as in “blaming the system,” and for the role they play in constituting infrastructure. The Prologue then begins this tale of how system has mediated knowledge by turning back to Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s lunar system, the entry of “system” into English, and a discussion of the role of The Re:Enlightenment Project’s touchstones—past and present, mediating technologies, connectivities—in shaping this book.