inter-stratal tension

theoretical pedagogy

May 29

eldoneducation and academia, epistemology, systems and logical typing context, knowledge, system 9 Comments

excerpts from the introduction to
System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange.
Second edition
ANTHONY WILDEN 1972 & 1980

INTRODUCTION • XXIX
The reader will already have noted that, if there is one constantly recurring question for a critical and ecosystemic viewpoint, it is the real and material question of context. Obviously, the academic discourse, as well as the dissenting academic discourse, has signification only in terms of the real context in which it occurs. As has been pointed out, the systemic characteristics of this context, with its recognized and unrecognized codings of goals, are ultimately dependent on particular types of socioeconomic organization in history.

One hypothesis of these essays is that the assumption or goal of ‘pure’ knowledge is an outworn rationalization. ALL KNOWLEDGE is INSTRUMENTAL. In the terms of modem communications theory, information (coded variety) is everywhere, but knowledge can occur only within the ecosystemic context of a goalseeking adaptive system peopled by goalseeking [individuals] required to ask how the knowledge has been coded and filtered; and what it is being used for, and for whom.

Thus one of the contexts of knowledge is the temporal context: past, present, and future. But the ideology of pure or objective knowledge to which the academic is expected to owe allegiance – besides protecting teachers and researchers from questions about the actual use value of their work – cannot deal adequately with time and place. It is an absolutist, non-contextual, non-temporal morality akin to that of a fundamentalist religion.
This is a fundamentalism that depends first on the misconstruction of closure and context; second on the correlative lack of understanding that contexts have levels; and third on its inability to deal with the real questions of logical typing in biological and social systems.

For example, the necessary abstraction of a system from its context in order that it may be studied – which should of course be accompanied by an overt attempt to avoid decontextualization by understanding the potentially paradoxical effects of such an abstraction – is quite commonly used, implicitly, to justify the pretended and actual abstraction or isolation of researchers from THEIR many contexts: from their socioeconomic status in a heterarchy of academic privilege, for example; from their actual functions in a system of liberal indoctrination; and from their spoken and unspoken commitments to ideological and political views – all of which the student may expect to find in one transformation or another in their work and in their teaching.

[…] We used to be warned by people who called themselves the ‘Old Left’ in the 1960s not to ‘politicize’ the university – a warning that made little sense to those of us newly arrived in the academic propaganda machine.

As has been pointed out in part, context, whether in theory or praxis, is a question of punctuation or closure – both AT a given level of relationship and, more importantly, BETWEEN levels of relationship.

Moreover, besides its historically peculiar attempts at closure from its real context and indeed from and between many of its own parts, the scientific discourse appears to have been composed by the inhabitants of Flatland (Abbott, 1884). We know that the discourse displays a dogged incapacity to deal adequately with system-environment relations (both practical and theoretical), even when they are considered on a single plane. But this incapacity becomes almost insignificant when understood within the context of the extraordinary ingenuity with which the scientific discourse persistently fails to recognize the realities of LEVELS OF RELATION and of RELATIONS BETWEEN LEVELS in open systems, in their environments, and, above all, between system and environment.

The basic model used by the social-contract systems theorists, however, obscured by their reaction to the Newtonian atomism of ‘The whole is the sum of its parts’ by the less overt atomism of what is sometimes mistaken for holism, the dictum that ‘The whole is MORE than the SUM of its parts’, it still confers on the parts an ontological status over their relations. The revised dictum is thus a form of PSEUDOHOLISM.
…..Thus, apart from considering the boundary relationship represented as existing between system and environment as such, one key characteristic we should look at is the representation of the boundaries – and KINDS of boundary – said to exist between the various subsystems within the whole,

What I am arguing, then, is that from two directions, as it were – from the projection of the Imaginary status of the ‘self into everyday life; and from the projection of the private-property relations of the dominant mode of production under capitalism (private property being quite distinct from the PERSONAL property with which it is often ideologically confused), from the projection of these novel relations of possession and production into the domain of biology and psychology – there arises in the scientific discourse a complex network of confused relations which by successive abstraction from the Real comes to masquerade in academia and in business as ‘systems theory’, as the theory of ‘interpersonal communication’, as ‘environmental’ as ‘administrative communications theory’ (or management by outright manipulation), or indeed as any number of other profitable or even pathological modes of translating an original alienation of the person into the production and reproduction of the self as a commodity.
What we seem regularly to find in these pseudo-systemic approaches – i.e., neither communicational nor ecosystemic – is in other words a projection, distinctively mediated and constrained by the codes of the present structure of our socioeconomic system, a projection of the experienced structures of ECONOMIC INDIVIDUALISM which are not the same as the structures of sociohuman individuality – into the structure of society, into the structure of the person, and into the structure of the ongoing relationships between them. The *system* thus constructed is, in sum, a mere aggregate or heap of (supposed) SELF-SUFFICIENCIES. It is an atomistic collection of so many Imaginary replicas of ‘(individual) human natures’, as it were, an aggregate ; of a number of so-called ‘humans-in-the-state-of
nature’ (male organisms, of course), who apparently ran into each other while out for a constitutional in the woods one day; and then, for various reasons – depending on the author of the fairytale – sat down and invented society by means of a ‘contract’.

That the boundary between you and me might actually be distinct from both of us together, and not the double edge of the private property of our selves, for example; or that this boundary we share with others might also be the actual locus of all communication and exchange between us – such co-dependency in the Real seems not even to modem systems philosophy. Boundaries, far from being barriers, are the locus of relations for open systems in reality; and it is our relation to these boundaries, including our discovery of them and their discovery of us, which surely makes us what we become.

[…] For, where Relativity tells us that all physical standpoints for observation are ultimately equivalent (equally valued), and where Indeterminacy tells us that at a certain level all such observations become equivalent (equally indeterminate) – both of which are clearly true – the liberal aspects of the dominant ideology, in one of its classic contradictions, tell us that all ideas and therefore all punctuations, are equal in value – which is manifestly false.

If the general contentions of this brief outline and analysis are accepted, then, since there is no demonstrable long-range survival value in the ‘pure’ knowledge, in the so-called ‘advance of science’, or in the so-called ‘civilized thought’ of the academic discourse, we might well ask ourselves what the function of the ‘unit of knowledge’ in the particular kind of bourgeois kinship system represented by the university can possibly be.
The answer is not far to seek. The function of the circulation of the ‘unit’ of knowledge in the academic discourse seems to be primarily that of maintaining the homeostasis of the relationships of the academic establishment. As anybody who has attended more than one academic symposium or read more than one or two scholarly journals must surely recognize, the supreme value of remaining silent when you have nothing relevant to say is not a recognized academic virtue. Somebody suggested a few years ago that the first requirement for the receipt of the Ph.D. should be a promise not to publish anything for at least ten years. But NOT to publish or perish is unthinkable in an industry whose product is ‘knowledge’. All the corporate necessities of production for the sake of accumulation under the constraints of competition would have to be rejected. Without such growth and accumulation, it is unlikely that the corporation would continue profitably to survive.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the so-called ‘knowledge explosion’ of the past thirty years or so has little to do with knowledge as such. It has primarily to do with knowledge as a commodity produced by the ‘knowledge industry’ (Clark Kerr). And like every other form of industrial production in North America today, its most significant side-effect is pollution: the pollution of minds. This explosion is an ‘information explosion’ only in the sense that the contemporary organization of the academic establishment depends upon everyone finding SOME-THING to exchange and communicate in order to obtain funds and to maintain and reproduce the system.
This communication of units of information would be perfectly rational if the university really were the ‘primitive society with ownership in common’ that its fantasies describe it to be. In reality, however, the communication processes of contemporary academia seem to serve explicitly or implicitly to deny or disavow the progressive alienation of the faculty member – and of most of the students – from any relation significantly resembling the real life of the rest of humanity, who are less privileged in terms of leisure, status, caste, and class.
Where once one might have tried to say that the work of the ‘intellectual’ or the ‘artist’ is essentially creative and unalienated, the logistics of the university’s lines of production have demonstrated that its workers are alienated laborers also (if more in the spiritual than in the material sense). Whereas workers are alienated in the classic sense because they do not fully share in the fruits of their labor, academicians are alienated because their labor is, so often, quite fruitless. Academic products – books, papers, ‘communications’, footnotes, courses – thus become the objects of Imaginary production and exchange.
The alienation of the relationships between people which this process implies is indeed a mirror, as it were, of the impotence of the academic compared with the ruthless inefficiency of the university machinery. In this context, the question of whether the units of knowledge have demonstrable use value in their exchanges becomes less and less significant. These units nevertheless express a predominant exchange value; and in this sense they are indeed useful – as currency. Unfortunately this currency was devalued by the inflation of knowledge long ago.
The system of the academic exchange of knowledge does of course have a practical function: like the ‘primitive’ system, it is highly redundant and resistant to noise. But the collective injunction of reciprocal exchange in a ‘primitive’ and non-commoditized society – for which the environment is the world of nature and other similarly organized groups, and in which there is ‘room to move’ both spatially and temporally – performs a symbiotic and rational function. In contrast, the existence of such an anomaly in industrialized capitalist civilization (state or private) simply contributes to the long-range instability of the system it continues to serve.
In more recent years, however, academia has been constrained, mostly by economic realities, to recognize some aspects of its anomalous situation. Research must be more ‘applied’, we hear, teaching more oriented to the ‘community’, textbooks more ‘relevant’ to ‘public service’. In form and in apparent goals such reforms sound most welcome. It is only when one examines the content of what actually happens as a result – the expansion of pseudoliberating and social control programs, such as ‘organization theory’, courses in ‘How to Communicate’, and criminology, for example that one realizes that academia has once again been enlisted, along with other parts of the media – those that have been advertising a Depression for the last few years, for instance, judging by the quantity and indeed the quality of their mass-produced and computerized fantasies academia has been enlisted in the latest of our social counter-insurgency programs: Attitude Change by Behavior Manipulation.