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 ▴
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