I think we can ask the most primitive question: What is a system? Now I don’t think we can answer it. It’s a sort of undefinable. You start with the idea of a system.
—Professor of Physics Leonard Susskind, Lecture I of “The Theoretical Minimum,” an online introduction to quantum mechanics, Stanford University, 20121
For over four hundred years, we have been saying, as Galileo promised in his message from the stars, more and more about system. But saying more, as Leonard Susskind declares at the start of his introductory lecture on quantum mechanics, has not helped us to say what it is. In fact, the more we say about system—the more we use it in different contexts and to different ends—the less likely we are to answer the “what” question with a definition. What we can do instead with an “undefinable” is pay very careful attention to what kind of thing we assume it to be. If this book could send its own message across the disciplinary divide, the first point would be quite simple: don’t “start with the idea of a system” (emphasis mine) and get stuck with the problem of a fixed definition; start with system as a particular kind of thing that can be explained. Our word for kind is genre.2
By engaging system as a genre—as a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to know it—this book illuminates system’s role in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge. To take the idea route is to lose sight of that role as we sink not only into the problem of definition but also into the familiar divide of the abstract versus the physical. Understood as a genre, however, system can describe what we see, as with Galileo, operate a computer, or be made on a page, like a sonnet or a letter. Starting in the seventeenth century, more and more people wrote and published works that they named and titled “system”—turning system into one of the genres, along with competitors such as treatises and essays, that filled the Enlightenment with the work of writing. These genres competed because they shared features with each other; each one is discernible as a kind by the features it has and has not shared with other kinds. In that sense, genres exist in their interrelations with other genres.
I identify features of system, such as its scalability, that can help us explain why system came to play such a central role in efforts to know the world for so long. Beginning with Galileo’s sighting of Jupiter’s lunar system, the argument tracks what people have called “system” in its many intellectual and social incarnations, from Newton’s system and the proliferating systems that generated Enlightenment, to the modern disciplines that emerged from it, to Darwin’s algorithmic system of survival and our own plethora of new uses for, and kinds of, system—including network, nervous, computing, and communication systems, as well as systems theory, self-organizing systems, and system professionals.
Because the question of system is—as Susskind sees it in physics—a “primitive” (fundamental) one in so many of those realms, it deserves answers that can speak across the centuries and across the differences. That is what I hope my turn to genre can deliver. Since, as I invoke them here and explain in detail in chapter 1, genres are dynamic—they are historically emergent classifications—those answers will be robust not essentialistic, empirical not logical. What things at what times were actually called system? What were their characteristic features? Did those features change? Were some more persistent than others? Were those features shared with other genres? How did those combinations of features change? What work did these genres perform? And with what effects?
By altering how we know the world, system has changed it. But seeing it as a genre highlights how system itself has also changed. I will examine that versatility in terms of system being both scalable (systems within systems) and adaptable (to different conditions and substrates). The plethora today of new uses for, and kinds of, system emerges from, or is made visible by, the shift into electronic and digital technologies. In the eighteenth century, systems were also powerful and ubiquitous. However, the technology that embodied them then was different: the printed word was the proliferating technology, and system was increasingly invoked and used as a specific form of writing. That form competed with other written forms, particularly the essay, to great effect, helping to reshape and reorganize knowledge into the modern disciplines.
On one horizon of this book, then, are earlier, pre-Enlightenment efforts to explain the world by articulating what Galileo called a “system of the world.” On the other is our post-Enlightenment world full of knowledge systems, a world in which system may have yet one more disorienting explanation up its sleeve. In what some are proposing as another Baconian instauration—a revolutionary new kind of science—the Enlightenment’s once startling conviction that the world can be known by making systems is being turned on its head. In consensus-making collections such as A Computable Universe: Understanding and Exploring Nature as Computation (Zenil 2013), knowledge itself—embodied in a computational system—makes the world.
To grasp what’s at stake in scanning these horizons—that is, to understand system’s purchase on the modernity we now inhabit—we need to engage system as not just an abstract concept or idea but as something materially in the world—something specific, concrete, and countable. That is why system has worked in that world to shape knowledge—and that is why I am counting on genre to help us identify and understand the history of that work. This is not, of course, the conventional way to discuss system or track it over time. In fact, we tend not to dwell on system as something that has a history or, per Susskind, even a definition; most often, we either make systems or we use them. Prior engagements with system have almost always been a matter of imagining or engineering a better one—or claiming, often through systems theory, that things “actually” work that way.
When they don’t, system takes the blame. Today, even as we admit new systems of all kinds—operating systems, support systems, ecosystems, phone systems—into our lives, we do not hesitate to “blame the system,” as in that which, in its most popular form, works both too well—“you can’t beat The System”—and not well enough—it always seems to “break down.” But what is surprising is that this is not just a recent habit—a bad attitude of cynical times. System and blame, I will demonstrate, have tales to tell about each other. When did systems become things that could be blamed? When did those things become means for reshaping knowledge? And when and how did those means manifest themselves in the world as social, political, and cultural forms?
Finding Answers
The endeavor of this book is to make system’s many manifestations visible, and thus magnification is as crucial to my message as it was to Galileo when he aimed his telescope toward Jupiter. In both cases, the point is to increase that “wonderful effect” of making distant things appear “as though nearby” (Galilei [1610] 1989, 37). For Galileo, as I detail below, this was a matter both of optimizing his optics and of shaping a message from the stars that could best convey and amplify what he saw.
This book begins by taking on those same two tasks. After chapter 1 introduces genre as a better way to see system, chapter 2 turns to devising a form of inquiry that can best convey system’s message. The most likely suspect, of course, is to write “a history” of system. But among this book’s unexpected findings is that one of the most telling ways that system shaped modern knowledge was to reshape history itself. Historia has taken many forms; like system, it has been a kind of writing that has changed over time. Those changes matter for this book because of system’s role in changing history—and also because history, in turn, played a role in changing system: the two genres transformed each other.
I track their fates by first recovering the roles that Galileo and Francis Bacon assigned to system and history in their plans for advancing knowledge. In doing so, I recover from Bacon a form that I hope advances my effort to know system. The name of that form—literary history—may appear familiar, but my strategy here is to revamp the scope and purpose of our modern version of it. I take my cue from Bacon, who saw the writing of literary history as crucially important to the advancement of knowledge—and for a simple reason: its subject in his scheme was knowledge itself. “HISTORIA LITERARUM” was the living “eye” of the “history of the world,” for it recounted that world’s “story of learning” (Bacon [1605] 2008, 175–176).3 For Bacon—and through much of the eighteenth century—literary was a comprehensive term inclusive of all written records, not the selection of specific kinds and qualities that became our modern disciplinary category of “Literature.”
To reclaim this earlier and broader sense of literary is to acknowledge our own place in the history of how, as Bacon put it, “knowledges” change. Our moment of change is marked by the institutional configuration of narrow-but-deep disciplines (Siskin 1998a, 20) and by increasing attention paid to the possibility of alternative arrangements (e.g., inter- and dedisciplinarity). This book participates in that moment by taking a form of inquiry out of its current disciplinary silo so that it can track system’s role in the shaping of those silos. My strategy, then, is to recover and take on Bacon’s unrealized ambition for literary history as the story of learning in order to tell the specific tale of system’s role in it.
Bacon saw the difficulty of assembling a literary history at this imposing scale, so he started with a wish list of 130 “particular” histories to help him to do it (Bacon [1620] 2000, 232–238). I describe that strategy in chapter 2 and use it to identify histories particularly useful to this book. These are histories in which system’s effects on knowledge are most visible—histories of mediation, blame, and the real. I hope these moves—recovering the force of both Bacon’s ambition and historia’s robust record of operating in the plural—clarify rather than cloud. Not surprisingly in a book about a form, form matters—and these experiments in form aspire to be useful methodologically for others venturing into projects of this scope.
Systems Above/Systems Below
To focus on how knowledge—including my own—takes form, we need to zoom not only up and out to the celestial systems of Galilean cosmology but also down and into the worldly systems of what we currently call “infrastructure.” Since the early twentieth century, that term has pointed us to what is “infra,” that is, “below.” Although aimed in a different direction than Galileo’s telescope, the analytic tool of infrastructure also magnifies. Through it, we see how every society relies on underlying structures to bring it to life—structures supplying such services as transportation, energy, and communication. And infrastructure directs our attention as well to the next level down—to how those structures depend in turn on the specific physical forms that support assumes: roads and bridges, power grids, telephone networks.
Most important for this book, however, is the distinctive way that infrastructure achieves its highest resolution. The workings of infrastructures become most visible when infrastructures don’t work—when, in Paul Edwards’s words, “the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout” (Edwards 2010, 9). Only then, when we try to fix them, do we fully appreciate how surprisingly complex they are. Rebuilding requires not only silicon, concrete, and wires but the information and knowledge that built—and are built into—the structures themselves.
To attend to infrastructure is thus to attend to the subject Bacon specified for his “just story of learning”: “knowledges … their diverse administrations and managings” (Bacon [1605] 2008, 176). My contribution to that story is thus also a contribution to MIT’s Infrastructures series. Being a part of that series offers a broad disciplinary context and audience for my focus on how knowledge is generated, shaped, and put to work in the world. In turn, this book offers a specific contribution to the study of infrastructure—and for a specific reason: work on infrastructure has posed the very same “primitive question” that troubles physics. The fact that the question surfaces here as well confirms how fundamentally primitive a question it is: What is system?
System is not infrastructure. The system question arises in this field not because infrastructures are systems but because system is their analytic foil; it is invoked to highlight the distinctive nature of infrastructures. Because they are “sunk into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements, and technologies,” infrastructures are never “built from the center with a single design philosophy.” Rather they are “built from the ground up in modular units” (Edwards et al. 2007, 33), their development an “oscillation between the desire for smooth, system-like behavior and the need to combine capabilities no single system can provide” (Edwards 2010, 12).
System, then, is a crucial component of infrastructures but only one of the units that comprise them—the “spectrum” running from systems to networks to Internetworks or webs. Making these jumps in form is thus a central issue for infrastructure studies: how do infrastructures evolve in scope and complexity from single systems to “widely shared, highly accessible” compound structures (Edwards et al., 2007, 12, i)? At stake here are the dynamics of scale, specifically the scalability of systems. “How did “the world” become a system?” asks Paul Edwards at the start of his account of climate science as a “global knowledge infrastructure” (Edwards 2010, 8, 3).
That is precisely the same question that drives my inquiry into system’s emergence as the primary form of Enlightenment and the norm for modern knowledge. System offers to this series an account of scalability as one of the primary features of the genre of system. It can thus document over time system’s role in scaling knowledge up and down from Galileo’s “System of the World” to Newton’s to Enlightenment encyclopedism to modern disciplinarity and, now, the computational universe. By aspiring to the scope of a Baconian literary history, we can better explain how these varied uses of system shaped knowledge in a manner that supports the building of infrastructures. Conversely, we can also grasp how, because of scalability, infrastructures can be subsumed into larger systems. The fact that infrastructures are not systems is precisely the reason we need to know what system has been, what it is, and what it can enable.
As an example of long-form knowledge in print, this explanation is itself, of course, a kind of system; in writing a book, I have made the modern version of what we will see is an eighteenth-century choice—one enshrined in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionaryof the English Language (1755)—between writing a system and writing an essay. And as a system, the feature of boundaries—of what should and can be within the bounds of this book—comes to the fore. That is a concern of every book, as it is for every system, but it is magnified here by Bacon’s vision of a comprehensive literary history stretching from “age to age.” That full stretch cannot, of course, be the task of one book. The criteria for what will have to find a place in future systems, as well as links to earlier efforts by others to scale up, are taken up more fully in the discussion in chapter 2 of histories for system.
For now, I want to foreground two protocols that governed my decisions about what to include in this book. By protocols I mean enabling constraints. This book is neither an example of “systems theory” nor a survey of every instance of system and the theorizing of it. It’s not an example, because my goal is not to theorize system as an explanation of the way things actually work. It’s not a register of every appearance and use of system since the early seventeenth century (though it features many of them), because my goal is to explain, not survey. This book mounts a specific, historical argument about system: it is an explanation of how system became a primary form for shaping knowledge during the Enlightenment and where it might be headed in the future. My hope for this book is that its message of the significance of system and its staying power—that there was and will be, as Galileo put it, more to say4—resonates with the message he sent as system first entered into the burgeoning world of knowledge making in the early seventeenth century.
A Message from the Stars(Sidereus Nuncius), 1610
On the seventh day of January of the present year, 1610, at the first hour of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the heavens through a spyglass, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view. As I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before, owing to want of power in my other spyglass. That is, three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet. Although I believed them to belong to the number of fixed stars, yet they made me wonder somewhat, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a straight line parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest of the stars equal to them in magnitude. … I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there were three stars in the heavens moving around Jupiter, like Venus and Mercury around the sun. This was finally established as clear as daylight by numerous other subsequent observations.
The message delivered in 1610 was clear—“as clear as daylight,” as Galileo exclaimed after gazing into the night sky. Stars that he had believed to be “fixed” turned out to be, upon subsequent observation, “moving around Jupiter.” These three little stars, he “decided unhesitatingly,” were actually three moons. But that wasn’t why Galileo decided to rush his “new observations” into print as “an announcement to all philosophers and mathematicians.”6 The discovery of new heavenly bodies was certainly exciting, but that wasn’t the “message.”
What mattered more than the bodies themselves was what they formed: together with their home planet, these bodies constituted a system. And what was at stake for knowledge—knowledge of the “true and physical constitution of the world” (Galilei 2008, 152)—was not that this was the first but the second such system that had been observed. To the earth and its moon, Galileo had added a second system—and that made all the difference. It changed how the first was understood. If all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth, then the moon was like the sun and the planets—just another part of a single and comprehensive “system of the world.” But seeing Jupiter as a system with its own moons cast the earth and its moon in a different light: as a system unto themselves, the moon assumed a new status as the only body to revolve around the earth.
Copernicus had, of course, made that argument in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543, but for seventy years, the debate had stalled, sharing the same fate that Galileo’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, declared for all knowledge. “The sciences,” Bacon complained in arguments for “advancement” and “restoration” that chronologically bracketed Galileo’s message, “are almost stopped in their tracks.”7 Although some astronomers were attracted by its mathematics, heliocentrism had failed to provoke even the official ire of the Church through the remainder of the sixteenth century.
The basic reason for what looks to us like a puzzling delay was that there was too much to lose. “Accepting Copernicus’s system,” as Albert Van Helden points out, “meant abandoning Aristotelian physics,” and thus opening up a host of questions to a need for entirely new explanations:
Why does a stone thrown up come straight down if the Earth underneath it is rotating rapidly to the east? Since bodies can only have one sort of motion at a time, how can the Earth have several? And if the Earth is a planet, why should it be the only planet with a moon [emphasis mine]?8
To discover that it was not the only one, Galileo realized, was to break the logjam—to acquire, at last,
a notable and splendid argument to remove the scruple of those who can tolerate the revolution of the planets around the sun in the Copernican system, but are so disturbed by the motion of one moon around the earth (while both accomplish an orbit of a year’s length around the sun) that they think this constitution of the universe must be rejected as impossible. (Galilei [1610] 2008, 83)
At stake in sorting out “system” was not just knowledge but knowledge that was load bearing9—knowledge, that is, that made more knowledge possible. The translator’s choice of “Splendid” is thus not quite adequate to Galileo’s Latin adjective for this “argument”: “praeclarum” points to a specific kind of argument, one that brings clarity.10 This argument made new knowledge possible, preparing the way for the resolution of the revolution debate in Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems two decades later (1632).
The message of the stars in 1610 was thus clear and enabling. Galileo saw that those stars were moons, and what they told him was something new: the world is a system full of systems. This book—the one under your observation—is also about seeing systems; in a sense, it is an update on their proliferation. For us, the system of the world has become a world full of systems. In both tellings, systems are found to be pervasive, and finding more of them—especially in places where they have not been observed before—raises possibilities for new knowledge. That same year, for example, in which Galileo found a “system” in deep space—1610—is the year the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites for the first appearance of the word system in English to refer to “The whole scheme of created things, the universe”:
1610 J. Selden Michael! in M. Drayton Poems (rev. ed.) sig. A5, Thy Martiall Pyrrhique, and thy Epique straine Digesting Warres with heart-vniting Loues. (The two first Authors of what is compos’d In this round Systeme All).11
Why does system surface in these different ways—appearing in Galileo’s glass and venturing into the vernacular? Why then? Why does this apparent coincidence expand so rapidly into a historical cluster over the next few decades? By the 1630s, when Galileo publishes his “World Systems” manifesto, system becomes a descriptor for things of all kinds, as in the OED’s second sighting of system in 1638: J. Mede, “Man’s life is a systeme of divers ages. … The yeare is a systeme of foure seasons.”
The Shape of System and the Shape of This Book
With the help of new tools—but tools that look through time rather than into space—I hope to track this proliferation, including its causes and its effects. To that end, I have organized this book into three parts. They link this monograph to larger, collaborative endeavors that have helped me at crucial points to reenvision it, from the making of the collection This Is Enlightenment, to the ongoing efforts of the Re:Enlightenment Project (www.reenlightenment.org), to understand and to transform our Enlightenment inheritance. In addition to its other goals, this book aims to contribute to that joint enterprise. The premise behind my title is that engaging system is crucial to understanding Enlightenment and the forms of modern knowledge that emerged from it. And that understanding is, in turn, essential to reshaping the legacy of Enlightenment today. To that end, I have organized System: The Shaping of Modern Knowledge so that the woof that threads through its chronological warp follows the project’s touchstones for recovering and reanimating the Enlightenment goal to know the world:
Those touchstones are:
Past and Present—How should the historical Enlightenment relate to the possibilities for Enlightenment now?
Mediating Technologies—How can we reconceive our structures and tools for making knowledge work in the world?
Connectivities—How can we reconnect across the boundaries and divisions—institutional, professional, disciplinary—that arose after Enlightenment?
To focus in on system, I have recast these three queries to serve as coordinates for exploring that genre: What is system, and how has it changed? How has system mediated knowledge? How has system worked in the world? Configured by these retouched touchstones, this book stands not only as a stand-alone monograph but—playing on what I call system’s scalability (wholes that become parts of larger wholes)—as a project that is part of a larger collaborative Project.
With all the risks of omission and distortion that a distillation of a book carries, here is a bullet-point list, paced by changing deployments of system, of the principal arguments of this book. To present them in this format—the sequential schematizing of parts in a whole that, I show, features in so many systems—highlights how central the travels of system still are to writing the long-form knowledge that we call “books.”
Part I, “Past and Present,” sets the book’s formal strategy and its temporal horizons in the ways I have already described. To recuperate literary history as what Bacon called the story of learning, I recover the multiplicity of historia itself. Instead of writing a single “history of system,” I build my argument by putting system into a range of different histories. The other significant innovation in the first two chapters is the debut of what Bacon would call a new “instrument.” Like Galileo’s spyglass, the computational and visualization technique I call Tectonics zooms in—in this case, to clarify how our modern disciplines emerged from Enlightenment through the late eighteenth-century collision of two genres: system and history.
Part II, “Mediating Knowledge,” 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 (2011) calls “guesswork” (10). Deutsch’s explanation of science as itself explanatory rather than descriptive has helped me to recast system as a historically specific genre of choice for explanation. That turn to system as an enabling form of guesswork 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. In chapter 3 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? 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 our species’ ability to, as Francis Bacon put it, “advance knowledge”? The primary generic marker of what came to be called Enlightenment, I conclude, was the monumental effort to scale up systems into Master Systems that persisted from roughly the 1730s through the 1780s.12 During the next two decades, I argue in chapter 4, those 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.
Part III, “Connectivities,” pursues the effects of that saturation by identifying the social incarnations of system—the ways that system re-formed society itself. Turning to system as a genre interrelated with other genres provides us with a way of understanding and articulating how behaving in writing—and in other technologies and substrates—connects to other kinds of social behaviors. For this touchstone, I engage system as a form that mediated modernity, thus highlighting connectivities as well as differences between past and present. I show how that mediation gave rise to the concept and practice of systematizing and its sister phenomenon of “instituting.” Each of the three chapters in this third part focuses on one of the three categories through which we have come to apprehend ourselves and our behaviors: the political (including the logic of liberalism), the cultural (and the formation of Literature), and the social (from clubs to interfaces). Together they describe one of the primary, cumulative effects of system’s work in the world: how we came to blame The System.
What follows in the Coda to this book is necessarily more speculative, for it brings us into the open-endedness of the present. But at the very least, I hope to show in conclusion that there is considerable evidence that now may be the time of one more bullet point in system’s shaping of knowledge and ourselves.
