Monday, January 20, 2020

Steps to an Ecology of Systems: Whole Earth and Systemic Holism

Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures,

 eds. Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 259-88., 2011



In this essay I give the term holism some precision as naming a
systems discourse that is still framed to some extent in a traditional
part/whole manner, and which, as a consequence, encounters the
problematics of totalization. With some important exceptions, holism
 in this sense is still at work in many of the American-based
cybernetics and systems discourses that run from 1968-71 through
 the expanding iterations of the Whole Earth Catalog, and from 
1974-84 through its quarterly journalistic spin-off, CoEvolution Quarterly. 
Visions of global unity are accorded ultimate value. As parts of the
 biosphere, organisms, species, societies, and their technologies may
 co-evolve, but it is the whole Earth that gathers them into an ecological
 union rendered as a singular totality. This holistic, counter-reductionist
 orientation was both out in front of mainstream scientific and
 social thinking – countercultural in the best sense – and at the same
 time, prone to certain theoretical equivocations and impasses tha
t Niklas Luhmann’s work both illuminates and goes beyond.

Publication Date: 2011
Publication Name: Addressing Modernity: Social Systems Theory and U.S. Cultures, eds. Hannes Bergthaller and Carsten Schinko (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 259-88.Show less ▴




Bruce Clarke
Texas Tech University
Faculty Member

Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and former chair in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. Research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century literature and science, with special interests in systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. 2010-11 Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Bauhaus-University Weimar. Edits the book series Meaning Systems: http://fordhampress.com/index.php/series-imprints/series/meaning-systems.html

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