SHARING IN ACTION: BOGDANOV, THE LIVING EXPERIENCE AND THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (original) (raw)
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The paper discusses concepts of 'nature' and 'life' as subjected to historical changes. The 21st century seems to be obsesssed with 'life' and 'nature', which are reconfigured as objects of simulation practices and of a multitude of technoscientific enterprises as well as of political struggle. While the transformations of concepts of 'nature' and 'life' show of the afterlife of 20th century's system theory, the related discourses are remarkably twofolded. On the one hand the discourse of environmentalism with the paradigm of ecological crises, centered around ideas of resource management, sustainability, the general idea of an 'endangered nature' and the interconnectedness of global politics and individual actions, on the other hand the optimistic promises of artificial life, with synthetic biology and digital cyborg technologies as its avantgarde, which are very much driven by the idea of technoscientific mastery to surpass natures 'weakness' and by desires to improve 'life' and to even refashion 'life itself'. The historical influences and epistemological shifts of system thinking are significant within bothdistinctive and interwoven fields: environmentalism and artificial life. The article undertakesto enlighten the history of both projetcs following their essential linksto system thinking and system theory. We willargue that while the history of the concept of 'nature' is deeply linked to the roots of modern societes, it finally starts to disappear as an independent causal forceafterit hasturned into a 'resource' and 'environment'. A historical landmark of this transformation was described by Marshall McLuhan, who insisted on the topological inversion initiated by the exploration of space, namely theSputnik shock: man is no longer surrounded by nature, which is instead encircled by human technology. The prominent image of planet earth seen from space is not onlya symbol of global ecological awareness, but signifies paradoxically how the era of ecology ends that of nature. However, the concepts of system thinking arebe traced back at least to the middle of the 19^th century, where ecological thought emergerd at the intersectionsof biology andgeography. If the concept of 'ecology' substitutes 'nature' it is only a small step to the re-establishing of 'nature' in its new 'gestalt' as computer simulated world model. Resurrected asamere interrelation of system variables at the level of global simulations'nature'strikes as a zombie. As asecond turning point of the rewriting of the matrixof life we will discuss is the advance of ‘games’ since the early 1970ies, with the example of ‘Game of life’ (‘Life’) as a significant landmark. When 'life' becomes 'Life' it is by computerized modeling and the reconfigurationof ‘life’ as a dynamic process. Computer games can be thought of as instances of the popularization of cybernetic system thinking, functioning as interdiscoursive fragments between the specialized discourse of system theories and the sphere of ‘common sense’ (Nohr 2008), where the specific “gaming situation” (Eskelinen 2001) foregrounds playful individual action and manipulation of system objects within a set of given rules or the manipulation of system rules itself on the level of the ‘code’. ‘Life’ not only popularized von Neumann’s ideas of two dimensional cellular automata as a ‘model’ of machinic self-reproduction so that it became a part of early home computer and hacker cultures, where its algorithm spread continuously until today, but also inspired research on artificial life (Langton 1988) and theories about complexity and self-organization in biological ‘systems’ (Camazine 2008). Both, the limits-to-growth discourse and the algorithmic model of self-reproduction of ‘Life’, are discusses as distinct yet interwoven manifestations and mediations of system theory. While they can be regarded as referring to different scales of application (macro-economic reasoning in the case of limits-to-growth, modeling of bottom-up-complexity on a micro-level in the case of ‘Life’) and distinctive disciplines (economic and ecological research vs. mathematical theory of automata and artificial life studies) they share some common ground in being “algorithmic media” (Marks 2014) that are functional as “rhetorical software” (Doyle 1997) and as “allegorithms” (Galloway 2006) of the new compositions of the techno-biological and techno-ecological situation of the 21st century.
Bogdanov’s Organisational Science, the Commons and Sustainability
This essay uses Bogdanov’s Tektology, or organisational science to compare three forms of organisation: Bourgeois corporation, the Soldierpeasant army and the Exemplary laboratory and their role as competing organisational forms offering marketbased, commandbased and commonsbased approaches to social organisation. Bogdanov’s role as an educational innovator is compared with that of Gustavo Esteva, and both are linked to the exemplarylaboratory organisation as a way of combining learning with the commons. One outcome of Bogdanov’s approach which is featured is that of Vladimir Vernadsky, the Ukrainian biogeochemist who discovered the role of man and other living creatures in the generation of CO2 in the atmosphere. This reflects the strengths of Bogdanov’s Tektology as way of approaching sustainability, which at the same time fits with a commons-based innovative approach rooted in a dynamic around autonomy and mutuality.
A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology
L'écologie, tâche de la pensée/ecology, the task of thinking"1 says Michel Deguy. Our task of thinking, to be precise: our task of thinking today and to come, our next task of thinking. But the question then remains: what is this future task all about? What are its outlines? What are its stakes? From where has our becomingecological been written? And how is this emergence of a general ecology as opposed to a restricted ecology, which is taking place before our very eyes, to be char acterized? Deguy's exact phrase, "the task of thinking," employed to highlight the urgency and scope of the eco logical question, had originally been used by Heidegger to sum up the end of philosophy and the reversal of thinking that had been caused by the technological ful fillment of metaphysics as cybernetics. This choice of phrase is highly significant, as shining through it, at least between the lines, Deguy allows us to perceive a reference to the process of cyberneticization as the technological condition of the general ecology of thought. This also to an extent goes against Heidegger's
2000, Eco-cybernetics: the ecology and cybernetics of missing emergences
Kybernetes 29,7/8, 928-942., 2000
Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi-level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico-additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied.
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 that Niklas Luhmann’s work both illuminates and goes beyond.
Navigating through an “ecological desert and a sociological hell”
Kybernetes, 2015
Purpose – The governance of the relationship between humans and the biophysical world has been based on a paradigm characterized by dualistic thinking and scientism. This has led to the Anthropocene. The purpose of this paper is to reframe human-biosphere governance in terms of “cyber-systemics”, a neologism that is useful, the authors argue, not only for breaking out of this dualistic paradigm in human-environmental governance but also of the dualism associated with the use of systems and cybernetics. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper the authors draw on their own research praxis to exemplify how the intellectual lineages of cybernetics and systems have been mutually influencing their doings, and how new forms of governance practices that explore different framing choices might contribute to building innovative governance approaches attuned to the problematique of the Anthropocene, for instance through institutional designs for cyber-systemic governance. Findings – The gr...
Aleksandr Bogdanov and Systems Theory
Democracy & Nature, 2000
The significance and potential of systems theory and complexity theory are best appreciated through an understanding of their origins. Arguably, their originator was the Russian philosopher and revolutionary, Aleksandr Bogdanov. Bogdanov anticipated later developments of systems theory and complexity theory in his efforts to lay the foundations for a new, post-capitalist culture and science. This science would overcome the division between the natural and the human sciences and enable workers to organise themselves and their productive activity. It would be central to the culture of a society in which class and gender divisions have been transcended. At the same time it would free people from the deformed thinking of class societies, enabling them to appreciate both the limitations and the significance of their environments and other forms of life. In this paper it is argued that whatever Bogdanov's limitations, such a science is still required if we are to create a society free of class divisions, and that it is in this light that developments in systems theory and complexity theory should be judged.
Aleksandr Bogdanov’s Podbor and Proletkult: An Adaptive Systems Perspective
Cultural Science Journal
If one accepts (following Poustilnik 1995 and 1998) that Aleksandr Bogdanov’s intention in using the term podbor over otbor aimed at defining the process by which the ‘system in its environment’ comes into and continues in existence, one is also constrained to accept that such systems are active agents in the definition of self. Systems that create and maintain themselves in this way actively ‘assemble’ or construct themselves in reference to the nature of their relationship with their environments, rather than passively surviving in relation to environmental conditions. By extending this interpretation (of the choice of podbor over otbor) to the proletariat, as an individually and collectively adaptive system, it becomes possible to visualize the Proletkult as a conscious project to create an environment where it (the proletariat) could construct and adapt itself as a politically active, relevant and dominant class, thereby placing creative and cultural workers in the forefront of ...
Eco-cybernetics: the ecology and cybernetics of missing emergences
2000
Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi-level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico-additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied.. .. to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution (Descartes, 1637).
Anarchist Studies, 2023
Research or concepts in the biological field have often been used as a basis to root political projects of different orientations. In the libertarian literature, there have also been attempts to explore the link between the natural world and the possibility of freedom by combining discoveries in biological fields and research in philosophical/political fields. In the first part of our work, we analyse Peter Kropotkin’s thought, especially his theory of mutual aid, focusing on his proto- ecological concepts. This section also focuses on the Social Ecology of Murray Bookchin in the context of the evolution of life in the natural world. The concepts of cooperation, empathy and mutual aid are explored, and also revolu- tion, federalism and egalitarian ethics. In the second part, we review these ideas and concepts, drawing on insights from recent discoveries in the study of ecology and evolutionary biology. We conclude our review by discussing how these natural principles can inform social projects and social organisation, identifying how mismatches between social and biological organisation have contributed to inequality and domination.