Friday, May 21, 2021

Systems Seduction: The Aesthetics of Decentralisation

Essay Competition Winner
by Gary Zhexi Zhang
Published on Jul 16, 2018
DOI10.21428/2bfc3a68


“Ecology in the widest sense turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences) in circuits.”
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind1


How do we deal with unimaginable complexity? Today, the prospect of ecological crisis looms over our every move, as new technologies unfurl absentmindedly into the political realm, somehow managing to disrupt a biosphere in the process. In so many areas of art and science, our situation demands that we think in terms of heterogenous systems and porous boundaries. Today, as the artist Hito Steyerl once put it, ‘an upload comes down as a shitstorm.’2 The 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth, which warned that the world system would collapse in 100 years given ‘business as usual’, served timely, epochal notice on our vision of exponential ‘progress’. Moreover, its use of Jay Forrester’s ‘World3’ model of planetary systems dynamics prefigured of our contemporary obsession with data and simulation for understanding where we are, and where we’re headed. As Joi Ito’s manifesto suggests, the once-unpopular interdisciplinary science of cybernetics has returned as a paradigm through which to understand knotted social, technological and environmental issues. A cybernetic vision of open systems and regulatory feedback seems to offer a conceptual schema with through we might negotiate a more hopeful future, or at very least, weather the shitstorm. Meanwhile, the internet has brought information networks out of the realm of military engineering and metaphysics and into the fabric of social life itself. Unpredictable networks and ecological entanglements confront us daily, from fake news to climate change, to remind us of our lack of control — a little hubris goes a long way. The challenge is to develop new strategies, polities and intelligences that can engage in these complex systems with humility and care.

What is lost and what is found when we answer the call to think ‘ecosystemically’? In what follows, I want to take a step back, in order to contextualize the resurgence of the ‘systems approach’ and its bearing on how we understand technology and society. In doing so, I consider this nebulous discourse as a both an ontological enquiry and increasingly, a design brief. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, the political economist Adam Smith refers to the ‘spirit of system’ as an ‘intoxicating’ impulse which is ‘founded upon the love of humanity’, yet whose trajectory can also be ‘[inflamed] to the madness of fanaticism’. For Smith, the zealous ‘man of system’ imagines he can ‘arrange different members of a great society' like pieces on a chess board.3 The cybernetic approach, on the other hand, invites contingency and perturbation, emphasizing dynamism and resilience in a non-linear world. Nonetheless, the ‘spirit of system’ is still going strong, nowhere more evidently than in the feverish discourse around blockchain, whose evangelists suggest that a new protocols will transform society for the better. Today, decentralization is the dominant paradigm through which we think about systems. To the apparent failures of central planning and the confrontations of complexity, decentralization presents itself as a socio-technical panacea: by giving a little more agency to the parts over the whole, we could make way for emergent interactions of a truly creative kind. From asynchronous logistics to embodied intelligence, contemporary practitioners are mobilizing self-organizing behaviors to navigate, optimize, and negotiate complex ecologies. If the systems approach offers a conceptual schema for how the world works, then decentralization offers a political theory for how it ‘should’ be organized — one which is being advocated across the ideological spectrum, from libertarian Silicon Valley capitalists like Peter Thiel to commons-oriented activists like the P2P Foundation. But what does it mean to design for the part over the whole, govern for the individual over the collective, build the platform over the society?

I call this the aesthetics of decentralization because it deals not with a particular set of facts, but something more like a diagram, a ‘spirit’, and a mode of production visible across many disciplines, throughout the last century and increasingly in the present. Here I follow the philosopher Jacques Rancière’s understanding of aesthetics as the ‘distribution of the sensible’, a sensorial training through which we learn to acknowledge the world, and correspondingly, the techniques by which the world is ‘given’ to our senses.4 The way we see, the cultures we foster, and the technologies we build consolidate an aesthetics that defines what we think the system is: and in turn, our place and identity within it. These techniques demarcate what is knowable and thinkable; what is self-evident and what is left out. The development of an aesthetics can be understood as a kind of patterning, a sensorial patina which determines what is meaningful signal, and what is lost to an ocean of noise.
The Seduction of Systems

The history of systems thinking is a story of desire and anxiety, as Norbert Wiener, the pioneer of cybernetics, knew well. ‘Like the red queen’, he wrote, ‘we are running as fast as we can just to stay where we are’.’5 Perhaps such anxiety is inevitable, as we can neither hope to control the system in its entirety, nor absolve ourselves of our presence and let complexity do its work. Though the cybernetic approach to systems is generally associated with the dawn of information theory in the mid-twentieth century, the impulse to understand the world through a science of organization predates the invention of bits and bytes. The late nineteenth century saw a powerful tendency towards the synthesis of social theory with a materialist philosophy of nature, galvanized by techno-scientific advances and revolutionary political fervor. Following Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’, Vladimir Lenin famously proclaimed that ‘everything is connected to everything else.’6 Meanwhile, Alexander Bogdanov, Lenin’s intellectual comrade and latterly ousted political rival, was arguably the first modern systems theorist. Between 1901 and 1922, Bogdanov, a physician, philosopher, economist, science-fiction writer and revolutionary, developed the a monumental work of ‘universal organizational science’, which he called ‘Tectology’. ‘All human activity’, he wrote in 1913,


is […] organizing or disorganizing. This means that any human activity, whether it is technical, social, cognitive or artistic, can be considered as some material of organizational experience and be explored from the organizational point of view.7


Tectology is seldom discussed today, but readers of Wiener’s cybernetics or Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory should notice deep affinities with those later sciences of organization within Bogdanov’s writing. Later, Wiener would argue that ‘information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.’8 Though earlier monist philosophers, like Spinoza or Lucretius, had also understood nature in terms of a universal ‘substance’, Bogdanov sought a formal theory of its regulatory dynamics, ‘from the point of view of the relationship among all of its parts and the relationship between the whole and its environment, i.e. all external systems.’9 Indeed, Bogdanov understood the physical realm of the natural sciences and the ethereal stuff of communication, cognition and consciousness as part of the same living ‘currency’, foreshadowing the expansive commodification of intangible quantities such as attention and affect by our contemporary data industries.

Bogdanov’s ideas echoed a late-nineteenth century impulse towards a totalizing system of nature, combining the natural sciences with a nascent social science and moral philosophy. The term ‘tectology’ was in fact borrowed from the German artist and naturalist, Ernst Haeckel (renowned for his richly detailed illustrations of flora and fauna), who coined it to describe the ‘science of structures in the organic individual.’ For Haeckel, the organization of biological species formed part of a ‘world riddle’, by which he understood the nature of matter and energy to be consistent with that of consciousness.10 Meanwhile, Haeckel’s contemporary in England, the biologist and polymath Herbert Spencer, developed a totalizing ‘synthetic philosophy’ undergirded by evolutionary theory and thermodynamics. Spencer conceived of society as a ‘social organism’ — an evolved, self-regulating system, even claiming morality to be ‘a species of transcendental physiology’,11 and comparing the legal contract to the exchange of substances between the internal organs.12 For an era captivated by the sciences of ecology and evolution, the biological metaphor would be an enduring one, weaving human beings into the tapestry of nature, and more darkly, evincing the existing social order as an extension of ‘natural' law.

For Spencer, the growth of increasingly complex systems produced a ‘mutual dependency between parts’ by which different ‘organisms’ could be understood by analogy. Moving fluidly between scientific inquiry and social comment, he mobilized his theories in support of a radically libertarian agenda which was at turns utilitarian, individualist and ultimately, profoundly conservative. A fierce critic of social reform, he viewed social welfare as enslavement to the state; societies, like species, were subject to the ‘survival of the fittest’ (a phrase he coined), and thus develop most ideally unrestrained by government. Indeed, today Spencer is perhaps best remembered (along with Haeckel) as one of the founding thinkers of what became Social Darwinism, a discourse whose darker tones led to eugenics. ‘The law of organic process’, he wrote, ‘is the law of all progress’.13 Victorian capitalists like Andrew Carnegie took great comfort in Spencer’s evolutionism; the powerful understood their positions not only to be optimal for society, but to be confirmed by the natural order.14 Spencer’s immensely influential organicist ‘theories of everything’ exemplified the systematic impulse of the late nineteenth century, prefiguring the organizational sciences of the twentieth. As Norbert Wiener would later emphasize, communication and control are two sides of the same coin: the prospect of systematic knowledge through biological or statistical abstraction gave credence to grand theories of social structure. Mathematics turned to politics, biology to morality; the systematic imaginary of biological order propagated across society and culture by the passage of translation and metaphor. Thomas Malthus, for instance, whose Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) anticipated the Limits to Growth, concluded his grim demographic forecast with proposals for reproductive constraints on the poor. (His Essay, in turn, had a profound influence on Darwin’s theory of natural selection). Then, as now, such assured prescriptions on societal organization seldom engaged with the lives they most deeply affect, and more rarely still accounted for the privileged status of the prescriber.


Ecology and the Rationalization of Nature

As Adam Smith observed, a utopian impulse underlies the ‘spirit of system’. ('Whose utopia?’, remains the question). Furthermore, systems are beautiful: modern, biologically inclined theories of organization were not mechanistic, but unpredictable, dynamic and creative. They invoke a choreography of lively actors whose aggregate local interactions seemed to produce a universal harmony. By intimating these rhythms and cadences, systems theory promised to reveal deep structures about the world. As a boy, Wiener was himself an aspiring naturalist; he would later reflect that ‘diagrams of complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization […] executed my interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery’.15 The enlightenment narrative of man's transcendence over nature was replaced by something arguably more sublime, a vision of humanity intricately enmeshed within the web of life. As Karl Marx wrote, ‘what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.’16 A capacity for imagination and structure invokes the two-handed nature of the systems aesthetic. One hand, held captive by wondrous complexity, and and the other, raised towards abstraction, rationalization and control. One could call the latter a technological impulse, following Heidegger’s understanding of technology as a mode of ‘revelation’.17

The dawn of analogue electronics introduced the rational language of electrical engineering into the ecosystemic imaginary. Circuit notation enabled the spatial representation of dynamic systems through electrical schematics, lending systems theory the logical aura of mathematical equations. In the 1950s, the pioneer of systems ecology, Howard T. Odum, developed an ‘energy circuit language’ called ‘energese’. In his wide-ranging analysis of pine forests, atmospheric gas cycles, and socio-economic systems, Odum utilized an inventory of symbols borrowed directly from electronics, while also adding a host of his own, more abstract glyphs, such as a hexagon representing ‘self-regulation’, or dollar signs representing an economic transaction.18 Echoing the military origins of cybernetics, these ‘black boxes’ made ecosystemic complexes visible and operable to the minds of engineers. In turn, this diagrammatic approach would be used to form a rationalistic model of far less quantifiable systems. Odum’s textbook, Environment, Power and Society (1971) includes an extraordinary chapter entitled ‘An Energetic Basis for Religion’, in which he maps an ecosystemic model of moral activity. ‘Religion’, writes Odum, ‘consists of programs of learned human behavior shared with other people and taught in religious institutions controlled by religious leaders.’ In one diagram, the sun's energy flows into the realm of ‘good works’ and ‘soul’, which in turn is wired up to a rectangular program labelled ‘Natural Selection, Pearly Gates’. ‘Disordering Hell’s Fire’, meanwhile, is represented by an electrical base, connected to constellation of symbols labelled ‘Realm of the Devil’s Works’.

Inherently reductive in its methodology (Odum called his method a ‘detail eliminator’), the systems approach is characterized by a tension between its expansive application to ever more complex worlds which, in turn, would inevitably overflow its capture. Odum’s analysis is curiously resonant with the writings of surrealist French philosopher Georges Bataille, for whom the surplus energy of society — the ‘accursed share’ — would find its ultimate expression in the glorious excess of opulence or war. In the allegory of the ‘Solar Anus’, Bataille imagines the earth as a planetary organism, sublime and abject, in the cyclical throes of of erotic eruption. At every moment, like entropy’s ‘disordering fire’, the ontological anxiety of chaos seeped into the sciences of control. Whether in Spencer, Odum, or Bataille, the nominally rationalistic schema was seldom more than a few steps away from theodicy. In a very real sense’, Norbert Wiener would write in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), ‘we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet.’19



The Aesthetics of Decentralization


Like the cybernetics of Wiener and his colleagues, Odum’s systems ecology invoked a world of lively matter, both living and inert. ‘Purposeful mechanisms’, he wrote, ‘are self-organized into a decentralized program of ecosystem control.’20 If decentralization describes the nature of a global system without a single source of control, self-organization can be understood as the interactive local dynamics by which global order is constituted. The enduring influence of this idea proliferated across disciplines, from geology to computer science, perhaps most famously in Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock’s 'Gaia hypothesis’, the controversial proposition that the earth is a self-regulating ‘organism’. With the birth of cybernetics, decentralization and self-organization became not only the principle of systems theory, but a tenet of systems design and engineering. The first, and arguably most elegant, example of this was W. Ross Ashby’s ‘homeostat’. The English psychiatrist modified and connected four Royal Air Force bomb control units to produce a machine capable of responding to environmental perturbations and returning to equilibrium. For Ashby, the homeostat’s ‘ultrastability’ was analogous to the brain’s capacity for learning, as well as to the evolutionary process of natural selection — adaptive behaviors within dynamic environments, whose implicate order was purposeful only in appearance.

From the systems view, decentralization involved the automation of control: decentred from the behavior of individual agents, organization was an emergent property of the system as a whole. The idea that systems were, to some extent, essentially autonomous would be of powerful inspiration to artists, dreamers and technocrats alike. It evinced unpredictable, responsive and creative systems — more collaborator than instrument — producing intricate patterns of order far beyond their designers’ limited prescriptions. These patterns were to be found everywhere, from computational cellular automata to the distribution of human societies. Stewart Brand’s countercultural ‘bible’ of the late 1960s, The Whole Earth Catalog, is littered with references to chaos theory, ecological metabolisms and ‘whole systems’. For Brand, Buckminster Fuller and other leading futurists of the hippy generation, the beauty of self-organization affirmed the ‘bottom-up’ transformation of society and the self, against the destruction wrought by centralized governments and corporations. Self-organization gave them hope: the dissemination of technology and knowledge would engender forms of individual self-actualization they believed necessary for a more utopian society to take shape.

In 1968, Jack Burnham, an artist and writer who was then a fellow of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, published an essay entitled ‘Systems Esthetics’. ‘We are now in transition’, declared Burnham, ‘from an object-oriented culture to a systems-oriented culture.’ For Burnham, the ‘creation of stable, on-going relationships between organic and non-organic systems’ within all ‘matrixes of human activity’ was now the primary context for artistic and aesthetic investigation.21 In 1970, Burnham organized ‘Software — Information technology: its meaning for art’ at the Jewish Museum, New York. The exhibition involving leading conceptual artists of the day, such as Vito Acconci and Hans Haacke, new media art pioneers such as Sonia Sheridan and Nam June Paik, as well as Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group, which would later become the MIT Media Lab. Although it was, at the time, an unqualified technical and financial disaster that contributed to the dismissal of the museum’s director, ‘Software’ was a landmark experiment in which artists and technologists investigated information technology not as mere tool or entertainment, but as a process and a cultural paradigm. In Negroponte’s contribution, SEEK, a group of gerbils inhabited an architectural environment made of of modular blocks, which were manipulated by a robotic arm in response to the gerbil’s movements. As it turned out, the gerbils were not model citizens for Negroponte’s cybernetic ‘city’, choosing instead to attack each other.22 Nonetheless, SEEK exemplified the enduring influence of self-organizing, emergent principles on architects, planners and social scientists to this day. With simple rules and responsive environments, it suggested, complexity performs itself. The ‘social organism’ of the nineteenth century grew into the evolutionary algorithms, ‘soft architecture machines’ and artificial societies of the information age. As the gerbils might attest, these models often stumbled over their own ambition, more reflective of the will of the designer than of intelligent design itself.

Meanwhile, over at RAND corporation, Paul Baran was working on the schematics for a distributed communications network which would become ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. The principles of decentralized organization reified the idea that stability and control could be built into a system through its morphological, protocological and infrastructural design. Not only were decentralized systems more resilient to perturbation, their asynchronous logistics and self-regulating feedback could efficiently automate complex processes once relegated to burdensome (and vulnerable) centralized management. Again, Bogdanov was prescient here. In his science-fiction novel Red Star (1908), the Soviet theorist imagines a decentralized, self-regulating economic organization known as the ‘Institute of Statistics’. Set in a communist society on Mars, the ‘Institute’ would


keep track of the flow of goods into and out of the stockpiles and monitor the productivity of all enterprises and the changes in their work forces. […] The Institute then computes the difference between the existing and the desired situation for each vocational area and communicates the result to all places of employment. Equilibrium is soon established by a stream of volunteers.23


Bogdanov’s technocratic utopia, imagined four decades before the invention of computers, bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘smart cities’ of today, in which omniscient sensors and ubiquitous computing promise to solve all manner of socio-technical challenges. In Bogdanov’s city, through a non-coercive machinery of urban-scale regulation and control, ‘equilibrium is soon established’ by a labors of a voluntary citizenry. As the historian of science Orit Halpern points out, contemporary ubiquitous computing is ‘imagined as necessary to supplant, and displace, the role of democratic governance.’24 Far from a socialist utopia, ’futuristic’ smart cities like Songdo, South Korea are marketed to global elites as a technologically-enhanced Special Economic Zones, replete with financial deregulation, tax incentives and luxury real estate.

Therein lies the contemporary dogma of decentralization. Since the early days of the internet, the design of decentralized information networks have developed in tandem with the libertarian ideal that, with technologies to ensure the secure and unfettered communication between individuals, governance would organize itself. Though the early dreams of crypto-anarchy were short-lived, the dramatic and egregious centralization of power on the internet by corporations and states in the past two decades has returned the question of decentralization to the fore. The emergence of blockchain’s decentralized, ‘trustless’ networks are perhaps the most concrete iteration of this fantasy to date. Viewed energetically, ‘proof-of-work’ implementations of blockchain automate the labor of institutional ‘trust’ to the cryptographic infrastructure of the network, securing by algorithmic consensus and computational work, rather than the physical, political and emotional labor involved in forming and maintaining social institutions. Similarly, smart contracts bind individuals via the insurance of executable code, rather than a social contract per se.

Even if we are to ignore proof-of-work’s disastrous impact on the environment, the contemporary discourse around crypto-currencies largely rests on the notion that with the right technological conditions, politics and society will follow — in this case in the direction of individual emancipation from silos of institutional power. As journalists Michael Casey and Paul Vigna write in The Age of Cryptocurrency, ‘It speaks to the tantalizing prospect that we can take away power […] from the banks, governments, lawyers [...] and transfer it to the periphery, to We, the People.’25 When Odum’s proposed his systems ecology as a ‘detail eliminator’, he was abstracting from observable phenomena in order to bring the general picture into clearer focus. Blockchain’s ‘trustless’ utopia does the opposite, reducing the full range of human activity to game-theoretic dynamics of self-interested individuals. Where the nineteenth century philosophers concluded that socio-political systems behaved in accordance with evolution and competition, these ‘natural laws’ — and the social values they encode — are now the work of systems designers and engineers. Blockchain is a libertarian to its core, built for competition over co-operation, accumulation over distribution. When political organization is conceived as a genre of game design, we need to consider the values and assumptions at play, and currently, blockchain’s are powerfully skewed.

My intention here is not to dismiss the potentials of distributed ledger technologies, which clearly represent a important milestone in the development of secure, decentralized databases. Rather, it is to reject the implication that technological decentralization in our ever more informatic world is inherently aligned with a more progressive trajectory for society as a whole. Despite the cacophony of political conjecture, the story of blockchain so far is a tale of financial speculation, in which the cash rewards reaped by bankers and venture capitalists are largely a result of the techno-utopian hype. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The prospect of decentralizing control does not absolve us of the hard work of politics, and blockchain has so far failed to transfer power to ‘We, the people’, whatever the white papers might claim. Political economy cannot be replaced by technology alone. As Karl Marx understood over a century ago, the worth we attach to technological progress is not intrinsic: it is only as valuable as the relations amongst people that they produce. Today, technological wealth produced by society as a whole largely oils the machinery of capitalist accumulation for the few. While we have yet to witness the decentralization of control, the collective wealth produced by of the decentralization of production — that is, the ‘sharing economy’, the big data industry, and other platforms that monetize our daily social interactions — remains firmly in the service of exploitative (centralized) corporations. Whether in logistical services like Uber or social media platforms like Facebook, it is not so difficult — nor even particularly radical — to imagine decentralized, peer-to-peer services which value is produced by and for society as a whole. Nonetheless, it would require governance, by nationalization or other means: the distributed network is not identical to the commons.

What does it mean to design decentralized systems that sit so comfortably within the regime of contemporary capitalism? If our current systems are flawed, then the technologies we build cannot be tolerant of the power structures in which we’re enmeshed — attending to business as usual, albeit at accelerated pace. ‘All is well since all grows better,’ reflected the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, happily inspired by Spencer’s evolutionist thought. Uncritically, the seductive power of the systems approach seems to reveal an intricate map that affirms the ‘nature of things’ as the way they ought to be — a conservative tendency that must be resisted. As the feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks declare in their ‘Xenofeminist’ manifesto, ‘if nature is unjust, change nature!’.26


In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, the feminist technology scholar Donna Haraway describes an emancipatory figure that is ‘wary of holism, but needy of connection.’27 Even longer ago, in 1960, the computer visionary Ted Nelson conceived of Project Xanadu, a would-be alternative to the World Wide Web which privileged ‘visible connections’ between links. Nelson, who invented the concept of hypertext, understood from the outset that information technologies would only make us wiser if they helped us to comprehend the ways in which the complexities of our world are interconnected. These pioneering ideas remind us that rather than deferring our cognitive and political labour to increasingly automated systems, only by constantly traversing these connections can we produce a critical and reflexive understanding of how knowledge, power, and society are organized. Through this kind of systems approach, neither siding with parts nor wholes, but forever in a process of negotiation, we might realize a more emancipatory politics and its concomitant technological forms. The philosopher Jacques Rancière conceives of the ‘political’ as the ‘part of those that have no part’:28 those which are precluded by the distribution of the sensible. The systems approach offers conceptual insights, but begs ever more questions of how we navigate our predicament. The aesthetics of decentralization reveals a rhizomatic scene, an intuition that our routes are chaotic and ambulatory, not headlong and domineering. As Haraway wrote, over thirty years ago now, ‘single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many headed monsters […] in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling.’29 We don’t need totalizing narratives but a proliferation of daydreams: lateral, experimental and situated within the localities of political experience. We need to imagine systems that read signals other than market signals, that answer to dreams other than Silicon Valley dreams. Contemporary transhumanists and singularitarians should take note once last time of Alexander Bogdanov’s pioneering example: the great theorist died in middle age from a botched blood transfusion, a process by which he had hoped to gain perpetual youth.


Notes:
[1] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 491.

[2] Hito Steyerl, ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?’, E-flux Journal #49, November 2013. URL: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/

[3] Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1759] 1976), p. 185.

[4] The word ‘data’ originates in the Latin ‘to give’, or ‘that is given’.

[5] Norbert Wiener, I am a Mathematician, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), p. 324.

[6] Quoted in Arvid Nelson, Cold War Ecology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. xvi.

[7] The word “tectology” was first coined by Ernst Haeckel to describe the “science of structures in the organic individual”, though Bogdanov generalised the term. The Science of Life, 97

[8] George Gorelik, ‘Bogdanov's Tektology: Its Nature, Development and Influence’ in Studies in Soviet Thought, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jul., 1983), p. 40.

[9] Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (London: Free Association Books, [1950] 1989), p. 132.

[10] Gorelik, ‘Bogdanov's Tektology’, p. 40.

[11] Ernst Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science, trans J. Gilchrist (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1895), p. 46.

[12] Quoted in Walter M. Simon, ’Herbert Spencer and the “Social Organism”’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1960), p. 295.

[13] Quoted in Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 98.

[14] Herbert Spencer, ’Progress: Its Law and Cause’ in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), p. 9.

[15] Stephen Shapin, ‘Man with a Plan’, The New Yorker, August 13, 2017. URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/man-with-a-plan

[16] Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1953), p. 64.

[17] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), p. 198.

[18] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977), p. 12.

[19] Explored in depth in: Irina Chernyakova, ‘Systems of Valuation’, M.Arch thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013.

[20] Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p. 40.

[21] Howard T. Odum, Environment, Power and Society, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 [1971]), p. 170.

[22] Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Esthetics’ in Artforum, September 1968., p. 31.

[23] Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montford, The New Media Reader, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 253.

[24] Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star, translated by Loren Raymond Graham and Richard Stites. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, [1908] 1984), p. 66.

[25] Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 25.

[26] Michael Casey and Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency (New York: Picador, 2016), p. 8.

[27] Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, URL: http://www.laboriacuboniks.net

[28] Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 70.



The ‘Emergence’ of the New World View was with Tektology, not Systemology; with Alexander Bogdanov, not Ludwig Von Bertalanffy!

In 1927 German professor Johann Plenge (1874-1963) did publish his review of the first edition of the German translation of Alexander Bogdanov’s Tektology: General Science of Organisation (1926). The very same year Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, who would later be known as the founder of the General Systems Theory (German Allgemeine Systemlehre), completed his dissertation in which he developed his initial ideas. The following year, in 1928, Bogdanov died as a result of a blood exchange experiment he conducted on a student, who survived from Malaria at the end, and Von Bertalanffy published his new study titled Kritische Theorie der Formbildung (Critical Theory of Development), in Berlin.

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Johann Plenge

Plenge’s review of Tektology was negatively critical. He thought of Bogdanov and his bold attempt as flawed. To him, Bogdanov was intoxicated by Marxism and Marxist ideology and his Tektology was dismissing all the differences amongst the vast variety of types of organizations and degree of complexity amongst systems under investigation. He also highlighted Bogdanov’s own claim to be “distant from morality as mathematics” in order to warn the reader that such an approach has the potential to generate an ethicless total-control mechanism -similar to the one indeed created by Stalin later on. However, Bogdanov himself made his warnings public about the dystopian future applications of such science with much emphasis, especially in an authoritarian framework like of Lenin’s creation. Bogdanov also gave a lifelong struggle against Lenin’s authoritarian politics which gave way to rise of the personal cult of Lenin after the Revolution, and Stalinism after Lenin died. The result of this was Bogdnaov’s political demise and removal of his name from the official Russian historiography (White, 2018). Whereas Plenge did dedicate his work to create his own personality cult. And later Hayek would accuse Plenge of inspiring the national-socialist ideology (Hayek, 1944). What is important to note here is that while Plenge was complaining about Bogdanov’s Tektology of not recognizing the differences in forms and contents between varieties of ‘organizations’ of systems for instance by conscious man or self-organization in nature etc., he was missing all the point Tektology was making: the argument for the need and actually building unified, non-reductionist meta-science that is investigating possible generalizations, common organisational patterns and principles to all complex wholes, no matter physical, material, social or psychic or otherwise. Exactly this has later become the main promise of the GST as proposed by Von Bertalanffy. Beyond that, most of the principles proposed by Von Bertalanffy between 1927-1950s can indeed be found in almost word-to-word identical fashion in Bogdanov’s Tektology, which was delivered between 1911-1928 in its original Russian. Milan Zelený quotes from N. N. Mosieev, in his 1988 article titled Tectology: “All systems problematic, undertaken by L. von Bertalanffy and his followers, is contained, practically in toto, within the theory of organizations of A. A. Bogdanov, but not vice versa. For these reasons, it seems to me that the “general systems theory” represents a significant step backward in comparison with Bogdanov’s “Tektology” which, after its author’s death, was unfortunately never reissued in the Russian language. [This should certainly be corrected in 1989-90, M.Z.]” (note is original by Zelený). Sadovsky, Gorelik, Zelený, Dudley, Gare, and others have shown the similarities between GST and Tektology, and to what extend Tektology exceeded the GST. According to this “Bogdanov’s work anticipated the (entire) systems quest of the twentieth century” (Dudley, 1996). Indeed all piecemeal developments and discoveries of systems concepts, mechanisms, and principles: like open-closed systems, bifurcation, emergence, self-organization, self-regulation or feedback mechanism, autopoiesis as well as a concrete methodology for studying the variety of systems were addressed and explicitly described in Tektology.

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Ludwig Von Bertalanffy

In pursuing his negative critique, Plenge was also joining the term ‘general systems’ science/theory/doctrine’ for the first time, suggesting as a replacement for ‘tektology’. The term ‘system’ is used 23 times in that article and several times to redescribe Tektology as a general science of systems of reality (Plenge, 1927). Plenge was the first to join the term ‘general systems’ to refer Tektology in his 1927 paper however the term later come to be solely associated solely with Von Bertalanffy’s work (Boulding, 1956/2004; Hofkrichner, 2005 and 2010). This requires historians to reconsider the entire intellectual history of the GST. Moreover the issue of Bogdanov’s influence on GST needs a clarification. It is a fact that both Tektology and Plenge’s review of it got published in Von Bertalanffy’s own native German, and this happens at the time he was on top of the topic; studying and developing his initial ideas of ‘general systems theory’ since 1926. Moreover between 1924 and 1926 Von Bertalanffy studied at the University of Vienna, where he completed his Ph.D. dissertation titled (translation) “Fechner and the Problem of Integration of the Higher Order” (BCSSS archive). When he was studying biology here “five hours a week he went to the lectures of Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) on “Logic and Epistemology” and took part in a seminar organized by this neo-positivist philosopher and founder of the famous “Vienna Circle” in 1929.” (Pouvreau, 2009). According to Zelený Moritz Schlick, “… the author of General Theory of Knowledge (Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre) in 1918”, “.. was backing Bogdanov in his lectures..” (1988, p. 332). The fact that Von Bertalanffy’s teacher at Vienna University, on epistemology knew about Bogdanov and Tektology and was talking about it in his lectures minimizes the chance that Von Bertalanffy did miss it and not picked it up. Especially if we consider that he took part in a seminar organized by Schlick. Von Bertalanffy published his first book in two years after completing his doctoral dissertation and the publisher was located in Berlin, where Tektology was published too. That year the second edition of the German translation of Tektology’s came out and Bogdanov died.

Von Bertalanffy was so fresh in his studies on the idea so closely following the debates related to ‘unity of science’ movement, which was popular in Vienna and Berlin circles to both of which both Bogdanov and Plenge were known figures. Hayek devoted an entire chapter on Plenge in his Road to Serfdom to which Von Bertalanffy refers in his “An Outline for the General Systems Theory” (1950). Hayek and Bertalanffy also met at the 1960 Symposium on Principles of Self-Organization, organized by Heinz von Foerster, a relative of Hayek and Wittgenstein. These connections increase the chance that Bertalanffy knew Plenge, and decrease the chance that he did develop his ideas totally independently from those of Bogdanov’s. Although it seems almost impossible for Von Bertalanffy to miss neither the German translation of Tektology, of which the second edition came out just in two years nor a review by someone like Plenge, especially also hearing about it from his teacher Moritz Schlick. Yet still, he did never refer or credit his precursor, even after the rediscovery of Tektology in the 1960s in Russia (Pouvreau, 2009) Von Bertalanffy, who was explicitly anti-ideological (especially in terms of Marxism), remained silent on the issue. After Von Bertalanffy died in 1972, Bogdanov and Tektology gained wider international recognition as the forerunner and precursor of systems thinking and cybernetics. Yet to a large extent because of Von Bertalanffy’s silence this recognition remained rather limited. In the end, Von Bertalanffy and his GST still gets most credits even today as the founder of the Systems Thinking and he enjoys such recognition against the historical facts and new generations still takes Von Bertalanffy’s foundership status as granted. We will never know how would have Von Bertalanffy reviewed Tektology if he had lived through the 70s and 80s. When suggesting to see Tektology as an attempt to build a general system science (Allgemeine Systemtlehre) Plenge was also offering another, shorter, term general “systematology” to use instead of tektology. It is very ironic that a similar term ‘systemology’ is being suggested 80 years later, by new generation systems scholars (Pouvreau and Drack, 2007) to replace the term with Bertalanffy’s GST, celebrating it as a full-fledged science of systems.

Image result for alexander bogdanov
Alexander Bogdanov

All in all, taking together the fact that the terms ‘general systems theory’ (Allgemeine Systemslehre) and ‘general science of systems’ were already coined in the 1920s by Johann Plenge in describing Bogdanov’s Tektology, and the fact that Tektology was inclusive of almost all (and identical) terms and principles suggested by Von Bertallanfy and presented more (Dudley, 1996) we finally have to conclude that it was not Ludwig Von Bertalanffy and his GST but Bogdanov and his Tektology was the real moment of emergence of the new world view that called later in the 20th century systems and later complexity thinking. What emerged as Tektology, in its original form, however, was a critical and historical unified science, serving for building new systems and eventually a world to be replaced with capitalism; instead of a tool-box for solving its problems, or change management technology for managerial and ruling classes’ use. As a promise of new world-view (as picked up by Von Bertalanffy), it meant to be developed by, from the point of view, and the for the purpose of the ruled and oppressed (the part left out by Von Bertalanffy). This latter aspect was the main characteristic of Bogdanov’s work and meant to take social power relations and inequality at the core -as the main characteristic of the epistemology that lied underneath all enterprise. It meant also taking social classes as the parts forming the societal whole ontologically. These main aspects of Bogdanov’s Tektology were unsurprisingly shaved off (or totally missed) in Von Bertalanffy’s version.

Since the early 2000s, there emerged a discussion on the nature of the development of the systems paradigm, and made calls for understanding the reasons behind its relative failure -in becoming a genuinely general / universal science with a clear and unifying methodology and principles, as it was promised yet not delivered by Von Bertalanffy and his colleagues like Boulding (1956/2004). Thus leading figures in systems thinkers community have started to debate and invite their colleagues and for a return to origins and re-evaluation (Rousseau et. al. 2016). Rousseau and at. al. even developed a proposal for such a model for ‘really’ general General Systemotology (2018). Yet although they do themselves make the call to the original sources where they return at best is again to the work of Von Bertalanffy, and those came after him. Even though ‘the emergence phenomena’ is one of the key topics for the scholars and experts of system and complexity thinking it is a serious contradiction that these thinkers insist on referring Von Bertalanffy as the founder and the inventor of the GST and skipping to engage the general and unifying methodology proposed already by Bogdanov in Tektology.

Even if there was no case of plagiarism whatsoever to talk about for Von Bertalanffy’s work there is an urgent need for broader recognition of and engagement with Bogdanov’s work and his Tektology as the precursor of the GST -as well as Cybernetics, OR, etc. The current situation is misleading and promoting a wrong conception of ‘the emergence of systems/complexity thinking itself’, and as a result, new researchers are missing an important source of inspiration. Even more ironically, Marxian and post-Marxian scholars and theorists who were inspired and influenced by systems thinking do not know about and recognize Bogdanov and Tektology; amongst them worldwide recognized scholars and philosophers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze, Jaques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Bob Jessop, Antonio Negri, so on so forth. This must change and it is high time to turn from a historical mistake and make the correction.

References

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science, page: His Life – Bertalanffy’s Origins and his First Education. Retrieved 2019-02-04 Archived July 25, 2011, at the Wayback Machine

Boulding K. (1956/2004) “General Systems Theory – The Skeleton of Science”, in Management Science Vol. 2 No. 3, April 1956, 197-208. Reprinted in E:CO Vol. 6 Nos. 1-2, Fall 2004, 127-139.

Dudley, P. (1996) “Back to Basics? Tektology and General System Theory (GST)”, Systems Practice, Vol. 9 No. 3., 273-284.

Hayek, F. A. (1944) Road to Serfdom,GeorgeRoutledge&Sons.

Hofkirchner, W. (2010) General Systems Theory: The Origins of General Systems Theory. Online at: www.hofkirchner.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/GSTcombined.pdf

Hofkirchner, W. (2005) “Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Forerunner of Evolutionary Systems Theory”, in: Gu, J., Chroust, G. (eds.) The New Role of Systems Sciences For a Knowledge-based Society, Proceedings of the First World Congress of the International Federation for Systems Research, Kobe, Japan, CD-ROM (ISBN 4-903092-02-X), 6

Plenge, J. (1927) “Um die Allgemeine Organisationslehre”, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 25. Bd. (1927), pp. 18-29, online at: https://ia802808.us.archive.org/1/items/PlengeReviewOfTektology/Plenge%20Review%20of%20Tektology.pdf [Google translated version of Plenge’s review is online at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/125b9eToOruGxJ1HL4sv5SsCupz0XX-sJg4dKlUNfQZY/edit?fbclid=IwAR18hpcKwGAQVlwz_KbRQd0nHyYkLZRRbI0pu7F15iDGiTzL07uHhlXayzE%5D

Prouveau, D. (2009) The Dialectical Tragedy of the Concept of Wholeness: Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Biography Revisited, ISCE Publishing.

Pouvreau, D. and Drack, M. (2007) “On the history of Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s “General Systemology”, and on its relationship to cybernetics”, International Journal of General Systems, Vol. 36 No. 3 June 2007, pp. 281-337.

Rousseau, D. et. al. (2018) General Systemology: Transdisciplinarity for Discovery, Insight, and Innovation, Spingler.

Rousseau, D., Bellingham, J., Wilby, J., & Blachfellner, S. (2016) “In Search of General Systems Theory”, Systema, pp. 76-99.

Susiluoto, I. (1982) The Origins and Development of Systems Thinking in the Soviet Union, Dissertationes Humanarum Litteratum no. 30, Academia Scientarium Fennica, Helsinki, 1982.

White, J. (2018) Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov, Historical Materialism Book Series, Brill.

Zelený, M. (1988) “Tectology”, International Journal of General Systems, Vol. 14, No. 4, 331-342.

The ‘Emergence’ of the New World View was with Tektology, not Systemology; with Alexander Bogdanov, not Ludwig Von Bertalanffy! | Social Network Unionism (wordpress.com)

 

Bogdanov and His Work

Review: David Rowley on two new publications

John Biggart, Georgii Glovelli, and Avraham YassourBogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928. Aldershot,England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998. vii + 495 pp. Notes and appendices. $85.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-85972-623-2.

John Biggart, Georgii Glovelli, and Avraham YassourAlexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998. x + 362 pp. Figures, notes, appendices, and index. $72.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-85972-678-X.

Reviewed by David G. Rowley, Department of Social Science, University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
Published by H-Russia (May, 2000).

How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?

Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) -- scientist, philosopher, economist, physician, novelist, poet, and Marxist revolutionary -- is mostly ignored by general histories of Europe and Russia and generally appears only as a minor character in the more specialized works of Russian philosophy and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. Yet it seems that no one who becomes familiar with his work fails to be utterly impressed by it. Most Bogdanov scholars believe him to be one of the most creative and profound European thinkers of his age.

Bogdanov was an original philosopher who attempted to reconstruct Marxism upon a modern epistemological footing (replacing Plekhanov's correspondence theory of knowledge with a sophisticated reinterpretation of Ernst Mach's Empiriocriticism). [1] His conception of the role that culture would play in building Communism bears a striking resemblance to Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony. [2] Most importantly of all, in his Tektology: Universal Organization Science, Bogdanov ambitiously proposed that all physical, biological, and human sciences could be unified by treating them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. His work anticipated in many important ways Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory. [3]

Bogdanov also had the potential of making important and humane contributions to Russia. His idea of Proletarian Culture suggested a non-violent path to Communism, [4] his political principles were far more moderate than Lenin's, [5] and his contributions to the theory of economic planning, if taken into account by Soviet planners, might have produced a viable and humane economic system. [6] Bogdanov was a practicing medical doctor throughout his career and helped to organize the Soviet Union's pioneering Institute for Blood Transfusion. (He died in the course of an experimental transfusion in which he exchanged his blood with that of a patient.) [7] Finally, Bogdanov was apoet and a novelist -- once again a pioneer -- in the genre of science fiction. [8]

Nevertheless Bogdanov's fame in the West has never extended beyond a rather small group of specialists on Russian and Soviet intellectual history. Perhaps because he was an active Marxist revolutionary, he was ignored by his contemporary European philosophers and scientists, and his impact on the development of Western philosophy and science was nil.

In the Soviet Union, conversely, Bogdanov was very well known indeed -- as a Bolshevik pariah. Ever after their famous break in 1909, when Lenin engineered Bogdanov's ouster from the leadership of the Bolshevik faction, Lenin relentlessly attacked and denigrated Bogdanov's ideas. He saw to it that Bogdanov's philosophy would always be branded as false, anti-Marxist, and anathema for Russian Communists. Bogdanov's works were published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but their influence is difficult to gauge. Because the accusation of "Bogdanovism" was career-ending, anyone who had been influenced by Bogdanov's thought would have attempted to conceal it.

Thus, the general tendency of works on Bogdanov has been to consider the "might-have-beens." How much more humane might the Communist regime have been had Bogdanov's political, cultural, and economic ideas been put into practice?

The ease of Western research on Soviet history has always depended on not only accessibility to Soviet archives but also the interests of Soviet archivists and bibliographers. The fact that Soviet historians took a negative view of Bogdanov was not important in itself (Western and Soviet scholars often disagreed on points of interpretation); what was crucial was the lack of interest in the gathering of information on Bogdanov's life and unpublished works. Research on Bogdanov's career was extremely difficult.

Like many another aspect of Russian life and culture, it was only at the end of the Brezhnev era that Russian scholars began to take an interest in Bogdanov and finally to appreciate his contributions to science and philosophy and his potential contributions to Soviet society. [9] In the late 1980s two international conferences on Bogdanov (the first in Moscow and the second in London) brought Russian and Western scholars together, and the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences established an International Commission on the Legacy of A. A. Bogdanov.

This collaboration of Russian and Western scholars has produced two volumes that will begin a new era in Bogdanov-studies: the first a bibliography and handbook for research, the second, an appraisal of Bogdanov's contributions to science.

I cannot find words adequately to praise John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour's collaborative work: Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1973-1928. This exhaustive bibliography, archive guide, and research handbook more than fulfills the most utopian dreams of any scholar interested in the life and thought of Bogdanov.

The book begins with three introductory chapters. In "The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov," John Biggart surveys not only the evolution of attitudes toward Bogdanov in the Soviet Union and Russia but also Bogdanov historiography and bibliography in the West. Georgii Gloveli outlines the chief features of Bogdanov's intellectual development in "Bogdanov as Scientist and Utopian." Finally, Nina S. Antonova and Natalya V. Drozdova describe and discuss the "Collection of the Central Party Archive."

The heart of the work is a chronological bibliography of every known piece of writing to have come from Bogdanov's hand -- not only his published writings (including books, articles, book reviews, and letters to the editor), but unpublished notes, letters, drafts, and even cartoons. For each item we are provided the Russian title (if titled), English translation of the title or description of item (if untitled), and where that item can be found. If the item was published, full citations are provided (if an article appeared in more than one journal, all references are given); the archival holding of the draft manuscript, if extant, is also given. For all unpublished manuscripts, complete archival information is provided for both Russian and foreign archives. Whenever one of Bogdanov's books was reviewed or one of his articles commented upon by his contemporaries, those reviews or comments are cited as well. For most of Bogdanov's letters or unpublished manuscripts, an English summary is given (and frequently an English summary of responses to Bogdanov's letters). Cross references are made to previously published bibliographies. The yearly bibliography is followed by "Undated Materials," "Political Cartoons," "New Editions, 1989-1998," and "Works in Translation" (in 22 languages from Armenian to Yiddish).

Three appendices are also invaluable. "Bogdanov: A Biographical Chronicle," by Peter Alexandrovich Plyutto presents the key events of Bogdanov's life, from birth to death, along with sources documenting those events (and, of course, the archival or published location of those sources). In "Aliases and Pseudonyms," Maya Davydovna Dvorkina lists all Bogdanov's aliases in chronological order and indicates the sources of the information. In Appendix 3, "Archives, Libraries, Sources," John Biggart provides a cross-reference to the former and contemporary names of Russian state archives and libraries. He lists and describes private collections of papers relating to Bogdanov, lists the relevant holdings of the Central Party Archive, discusses the nature and locations of Boris Nikolaevsky's six-volume collection of "Materialy" relative to Bogdanov's struggle with Lenin for the leadership of Bolshevism, lists the full names of the Russian and foreign libraries referred to in the bibliography, notes important relevant reference works, and concludes with a bibliography of publication of scholarly studies of Bogdanov in Western languages.

All in all, this is a monumental achievement. John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour will have the gratitude of all present and future Bogdanov scholars.

If Bogdanov and His Work provides the tools necessary for researching the life and thought of Alexander Bogdanov, its companion volume provides both explanations of why Bogdanov is worth study and suggestions of further avenues of inquiry.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, is the product of a conference on "The Origins of Organization Theory in Russia and the Soviet Union" held at the University of East Anglia, UK in 1995. The Russian and Ukrainian scholars who attended the conference more than confirm the attitudes long held by Bogdanov enthusiasts in the West. Their papers, though disagreeing on certain points of interpretation, are all tributes to Bogdanov's brilliance and creativity.

As the title suggests, the principal interest of the contributors is the nature and importance of what Bogdanov considered to be his greatest achievement: Tektology: General Organization Science, but they also comment insightfully and productively on other aspects of his philosophic and economic thought. [10]

The section on Bogdanov's philosophical foundations both evaluates Bogdanov's epistemology (Empiriomonism) and investigates its relation to Russian and Western European thought. To mention a few examples: James White discusses Bogdanov's intellectual debt to Ludwig Noire, and both White and Vadim Sadovsky show that Bogdanov was struggling with the relation between exterior reality and inner consciousness in very modern ways. Simona Poustilnik discusses Darwin's influence on Bogdanov's thought, and Peter Plyutto compares Bogdanov with the Russian systems-builder V. I. Vernadsky.

The section "Applications in Economics" covers an aspect of Bogdanov's career that has to my knowledge been ignored in the Anglophone academic world--his contribution to the theory of economic planning. Andrei Belykh argues that Bogdanov made a profound impact on Soviet economic thought and particularly on planning in the early 1920s. Saltan Dzarasov suggests that Bogdanov was a forerunner of the theory of convergence because he proposed that economic planning and use of market relations should coexist in a collectivist society.

"General Theory of Systems" discusses the central issues of Tektology, Bogdanov's project to uncover the unity of the physical, biological, and human sciences by analyzing the basic patterns of organization that are common among them. Bogdanov posited a fundamental oneness of reality, asserted that scientific laws and processes are isomorphic among all fields of science, and that the apparent diversity among the various branches of science is due only to narrow specialization and incommensurable terminology. The scholars in this section recognize Bogdanov's Tektology as a revolutionary work that anticipated both cybernetics (automatic information processing and control) and general systems theory (the idea that all systems--physical, biological, and social--operate according to the same principles). Some of the most intriguing implications of Bogdanov's thought are raised in Peter Dudley, "Tektology: Birth of a Discipline?" Yunir Urmantsev, "Tektology and GST: A Comparative Analysis," Nemil Gorelik, "Tektology and Organizational Systems," David Schapiro, "A Tektological Approach to Multi-Connectivity and Dualism in Complicated Systems."

One of the most impressive aspects of this book is the stature of the scholars who participated in the conference. Some of the most respected names in Russia appear--indeed, almost half of the contributors are members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, economics, synergetics, systems analysis, and historyof the natural sciences. Moreover, it is a mark of contemporary Russian fascination with Bogdanov that both of these works will be published in Russian translation under the auspices of the "International Bogdanov Institute" which was founded late last year in Moscow with the support of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

However, the contemporary emphasis of the contributions somewhat limits the volume's usefulness to historians of Russia. The articles and roundtable discussions were not intended to introduce a Western audience to Bogdanov's thought. They are written by scholars very familiar with Bogdanov's works for other scholars with similar expertise. Moreover, the authors are, for the most part, writing for their Russian contemporaries rather than for western historians of Russia. That is, they are more interested in the validity and present-day usefulness of Bogdanov's ideas rather than in the light that Bogdanov's works cast on Russian society and culture from the early 1890s to the late 1920s.

Western historians will find it of interest in two ways, however.

First, Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia provides Western observers a glimpse of contemporary Russian intellectual culture. It is only natural that a work dealing with Bogdanov's Organization Science should approach his work from an objective, scientific viewpoint, but in their comments the authors reveal rather different preoccupations from the cultural and philosophic concerns of the West. Like Westerners they are very interested in questioning and deconstructing old paradigms and narratives, but unlike them they seem to take as unproblematic the nature of consciousness and its relation to exterior reality. Vadim Sadovsky, as I mentioned above, does connect Bogdanov's epistemology to problems of post-modernism, but this is an aspect of his thought that receives very little attention from the other contributors. Instead they treat Bogdanov as a realist, concerned less with the problem of how human thought constructs the world than with how the world is constructed in itself.

They represent Bogdanov as the last of the nineteenth-century systems-builders, and they themselves are interested not only in systems science but in systems-building (among authors they take very seriously are Nikolai Fedorov, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Lev Gumilev). In this regard it is significant that, although the contributors to this volume cite current Western scientific work in information science and evolutionary biology, they do not place Bogdanov in the context of contemporary Western philosophic and scholarly thought. Instead, they examine his relationship to Comte, Spengler, Spencer, Schumpeter, and Jung. It thus appears that the Russophone academic community is looking for systematic explanations (modeled on the natural sciences) of historical development.

I do not intend this comment as Anglo-American-centric criticism of these Russian and Ukrainian scholars for not sharing Western concerns. I merely point out that they have a different intellectual agenda. Indeed, the West could benefit from their refreshing corrective to the Western belief in a disjuncture between language and reality. The Western postmodern focus on reality as a discursive construction is a project that many in the West find tedious, pointless, and perhaps even socially harmful. Much may be gained from sharing Bogdanov's confidence that the world actually exists, that its basic principles can be discovered, and that this knowledge can be used to make it a better place.

Second, although Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia is likely to be of immediate use mainly to Western evolutionary biologists, information scientists, and systems theorists, it nevertheless may suggest to historians some interesting avenues of research. For example, the frequent references to Russian scholars and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be welcome starting points for those who would like to consider Bogdanov less as a Marxist revolutionary and more as a Russian philosopher and sociologist of knowledge who also happened to be a Marxist.

Perhaps the feature to which scholars should pay particular heed is the short bibliography "Publications in Western Languages" which appears in both volumes. Although not completely up-to-date (it lists only one article published since 1992) it appears otherwise to be fairly exhaustive. Yet it includes only 81 books and articles in English, French, German, and Italian. For a thinker, scientist, and activist of Bogdanov's originality and depth, this is the merest beginning. There is plenty of fertile ground for future research. Students of Russian science, culture, and intellectual life who are seeking topics for master's or doctor's theses will be well served by both these works--but particularly by Bogdanov and His Work.

Thanks to the work of Biggart, Glovelli, and Yassour, we can expect a revolution in the field of Bogdanov-studies. Scholars are prepared as never before seriously to seek answers to the question: How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?

Notes

[1]. For discussion of his philosophy of knowledge, see Eileen Kelly, "Empiriocriticism: A Bolshevik Philosophy?" Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, 22, no. 1 (Jan-Mar, 1981) and David G. Rowley, Millenarian Bolshevism, 1900-1920 (New York: Garland, 1987).
[2]. Zenovia Sochor, "Was Bogdanov Russia's Answer to Gramsci?" Studies in Soviet Thought, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1981).
[3]. For a survey of Bogdanov's thought in this regard see S. V. Utechin, "Philosophy and Society: Alexander Bogdanov," in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: Allen and Unwin,1962). There are now two English versions of Tektology. George Gorelik translated one of Bogdanov's abridgments of Tektology under the title Essays in Tektology. The General Science of Organization (Seaside, California: Intersystems Publications Limited, 1984). A full English translation of the 1989 Russian edition has also appeared: Bogdanov's Tektology, Book 1, forward by Vadim N. Sadovsky and Vladimir V. Kelle. Edited, with an introdcution by Peter Dudley (Hull, UK: Center for Systems Studies, 1996).
However, Bogdanov's insights into systems science had no real impact upon the West. It seems certain that Norbert Weiner was unfamiliar with his work, and Nikita Moiseev (in his contribution to Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia) is the only scholar who asserts that Ludwig von Bertalanffy "must have known of Bogdanov's work." The consensus holds that Bertalanffy did not.
[4]. See David G. Rowley, "Lenin and Bogdanov: Epistemology and Revolution," Studies in East European Thought, 48, no. 1 (March 1996).
[5]. See Zenovia Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
[6]. See the articles by Andrei Belykh and Saltan Dzarasov (listed below) in the volume under review.
[7]. See Douglas W. Huestis, "The Life and Death of Alexander Bogdanov, Physician, Journal of Medical Biography, 4, no. 3 (1996).
[8]. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, eds., Alexander Bogdanov: Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
[9]. In Chapter 1 of Bogdanov and His Work, "The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov," John Biggart recounts this process.
[10]. Here is the full table of contents:
*Part One: Introduction
John Biggart, "Introduction," Leonid Abalkin, "Bogdanov's Tektology: Towards a New Paradigm."
*Part Two: Philosophical Foundations
Galina Alekseeva, "Bogdanov and the Development of Science in the Twentieth Century," James White, "Sources and Precursors of Bogdanov's Tektology," Vadim Sadovsky, "From Empiriomonism to Tektology," Natalya Kusminykh, "Monist Philosophy as the Basis of Tektology," Simona Poustilnik "Biological Ideas in Tektology," Peter Plyutto "Pioneers in systems Thinking: Bogdanov and Vernadsky," and Georgii Gloveli "Psychological Applications of Tektology."
*Part Three: Applications to Economics
Nadezhda Figurovskaya, "The Economic Ideas of Bogdanov," Andrei Belykh, "Bogdanov's Tektology and Economic Theory," Vladimir Maevsky, "Bogdanov and the Theory of Economic Evolution," Saltan Dzarasov, "Plan and Market in Bogdanov's Tektology," and Victor Parmenov "Tektology and Economic Reconstruction."
*Part Four: General Theory of Systems
Nikita Moiseev, "Tektology in contemporary perspective," Peter Dudley, "Tektology: Birth of a Discipline?" Yunir Urmantsev, "Tektology and GST: A Comparative Analysis," Nemil Gorelik, "Tektology and organizational systems," David Schapiro, "A Tektological Approach to Multi-Connectivity and Dualism in Complicated Systems." Mikhail Kuzmin, "Social Genetics and Organizational Science."
* Part Five: Appendices
John Biggart "Tektology: Editions and Translations," John Biggart and Francis King, "Profiles of Russian scientists and Philosophers."

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Posted: 2 June 2000