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Overview
A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called “system” to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's “message from the stars” and Newton's “system of the world” to today's “computational universe,” Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge.
Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the “system of the world” to “a world full of systems.” He traces the turn to system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernity—pointing to the moment when people began to “blame the system” for working both too well (“you can't beat the system”) and not well enough (it always seems to “break down”). Throughout, his touchstones are: what system is and how it has changed; how it has mediated knowledge; and how it has worked in the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780262534673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MIT Press |
| Publication date: | 09/08/2017 |
| Series: | Infrastructures |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 330 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue: "The Most Primitive Question" 1
I Past and Present-From the "System of The World" to a World Full of Systems 15
1 Engaging System 17
2 Histories for Systems 43
II Mediating Knowledge-System and the Fate of Enlightenment 79
3 The Project of Enlightenment (Master Systems) 81
4 Disciplinarity (Enbedded and Specialized Systems) 121
III Connectivities-System and the Instituting of Modernity 147
5 Blaming the System-Instituting the Political 149
6 Writing Upon System-Instituting Culture 171
7 Secretly Seeking System-Instituting the Social 203
Coda 225
Re: Enlightenment (Algorithmically Enhanced Ssytems) 227
Appendix A Notes on Visualizations 241
Appendix B Title Containing Essay(s) in the Plural versus the Singular 247
Notes 249
References 267
Index 301
What People are Saying About This
Clifford Siskin's fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the history of 'system' performs the vital service of helping the reader think more deeply and richly not only about ideas but about the systems of everyday thought we use to engage with the world.
Clifford Siskin's fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the history of 'system' performs the vital service of helping the reader think more deeply and richly not only about ideas but about the systems of everyday thought we use to engage with the world.
—Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts
This is a landmark book, both revisionary and provocative, that advances a new appreciation of 'system' as the norm for modern knowledge. Siskin challenges our understanding of how history was conceived and knowledge was and is formed. The intellectual range of this study is compelling—from an innovative recovery of literary history and the quantitative mapping of big bibliographical data to a redefinition of Enlightenment. It suggests in new ways how disciplinarity developed and the social mediation of information worked.
—James Raven, Professor of Modern History, University of Essex and Fellow of Magdalene College, CambridgeSiskin has rethought the intellectual history between the Enlightenment and today in terms of a unifying concept: how 'systems' became the prevailing mode of explanation in science and elsewhere. Illuminating and thought-provoking throughout.
—David Deutsch, Visiting Professor of Physics, University of Oxford; author of The Beginning of InfinityClifford Siskin's fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the history of 'system' performs the vital service of helping the reader think more deeply and richly not only about ideas but about the systems of everyday thought we use to engage with the world.
—Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of ArtsSiskin has rethought the intellectual history between the Enlightenment and today in terms of a unifying concept: how 'systems' became the prevailing mode of explanation in science and elsewhere. Illuminating and thought-provoking throughout.
This is a landmark book, both revisionary and provocative, that advances a new appreciation of 'system' as the norm for modern knowledge. Siskin challenges our understanding of how history was conceived and knowledge was and is formed. The intellectual range of this study is compelling—from an innovative recovery of literary history and the quantitative mapping of big bibliographical data to a redefinition of Enlightenment. It suggests in new ways how disciplinarity developed and the social mediation of information worked.