On the Use and Abuse of Systems for Life
Francis Halsall
“I mistrust all systematists and avoid them. The will to system is a lack of integrity.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason
and compare: my business is to create.”
William Blake,
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
Even if, like Nietzsche, we mistrust or avoid or even try to pretend they don’t exist systems are unavoidable. There is a powerful volition that underwrites and insures contemporary life. This is the desire to find and create systems. Adam Smith (the master systematizer of the Scottish Enlightenment1) in Theory of Moral Sentiments called this: ‘system love’. Systems, Smith said, flourished in modernity and could be witnessed everywhere as ways of organising things such as knowledge, writing, people and infrastructure. These include economic systems, social systems, educational systems, military systems and so on. System love proposes profound equivalence between a love of beauty and a love of systems and acknowledges all the complexity and ambiguity that love entails. Such love I call, in a nod to Nietzsche, the will-to-system
This will-to-system is a kind of continuity woven into the networks of the history of modernity. It takes many different forms: scientific; economic; pedagogical; aesthetic; occult; conspiratorial; magical; weird. In Newton’s scientific method he sought to prove what he calls the ‘System of the World’. Philosophical systems, such as Kant’s three Critiques, attempted to create a ‘critical system’ through the patient and methodical construction of philosophical systems that were sufficiently internally coherent to erect an edifice of knowledge upon. Conspiracy theorists love to blame ‘The System’ be that a shadowy network of 10ft tall blood drinking lizards, Big-Pharma or the Deep-State. And the logic of systems peppers the practices of modern ritual from Freemasonry to Magick such as Aleister Crowley’s hermetic occultism or the counter modernity of esoteric movements such as Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and The Golden Dawn. Israel Regardie, one of Crowley’s erstwhile followers and scholar of the history of magic, acknowledged that it is system that lies at the heart of ritual practices when he wrote about the ‘already magnificent’ system of The Golden Dawn, whose: ‘magical technique is of supreme and inestimable importance to mankind at large. In it the work of academic psychology may find a logical conclusion, so that it may develop further its own particular contribution to modern life and culture. For the system indicates the psychological solution of the animo problem. “Arise! Shine! For thy light is come!”’2
All artists deploy this will-to-system and work with systems whether they consider them in magical or more prosaic terms; and whether they are reconciled to this truth or not. The necessary acts of promulgation all require systems of dispersion, distribution and display: exhibition; publishing, printing; writing; selling; shipping or whatever else happens to art these days. Even something as apparently isolated and autonomous as a solitary painter working by themselves in a studio will invoke systems that extend beyond the canvas and walls. Just by virtue of picking up a brush it becomes a wand that conjures up the history of the system of painting and its accumulated accretions, lines of flight, dead ends and blind-spots. System, in other words, is a way of thinking about both mediums and works of art. Both are complex structures with their own particular functions of self-organisation that are also enmeshed in other systems that could be technological; economic; infrastructural; linguistic; material; bodily or whatever.
Considering mediums and works of art in systemic terms rather than as autonomous entities acknowledges that their identities are, by necessity, not fixed but rather dispersed throughout systems. This might apply to other identities that are also nested within systems of communication and control with ambivalent and complex consequences.
Thinking of identity through systems explains how those identities (and their correlate, experience) can be embedded within, and thus shaped by, networks of power. Capital, class, empire, gender: these are just some of the frameworks for identity and experience that have, quite rightly, been called into question and taken to task. It can be political, ethical and aesthetic acts that heave systems of power into view and open their black boxes to scrutiny and decolonisation.
Yet; if identity is systemic then it is something achieved collectively rather than individually. This coupling of identity with collective action suggests the possibility of alternative form of system-based politics grounded in interconnectivity and shared aesthetic experience as the origin for agency and action. This is a politics of improvisation involving collaborations within and via open systems that not only involve humans but also other agents such as animals, objects, infrastructure, environments and other systems in which identities become labile, fluid and in creative transitions between states. It is a politics of transitions predicated on contingency, collaboration, consideration and care. A good example of this is the flow achieved by a group of improvising musicians playing in harmony in which individual choices are augmented by a collective process of decision making that involves not only all the players but also the affordances of the instruments, expectations of the audience and feedback from the environment. This is the state of collective experience that the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called, in his ‘systems-based model of creativity,’ ‘The Flow’3. When flowing all external concerns melt away and the throb and the thrum of the activity is all that matters.
Systems can be tools or mechanisms to transition between complexity and simplicity in delicate states of homeostasis. They can tidy up a messy world by bringing some semblance of pattern, order and coherence. But they can also bring vitality and unpredictability to situations that have become ossified or sclerotic. When the world is too complex it becomes overwhelming; when it is systematized it might become simpler and graspable. Too much complexity is unmanageable; yet too much simplicity can be barbarous and inhumane.
The use and abuse of systems sits on a spectrum that can be parsed through another reference borrowed from Nietzsche. At one end is the Apollonian understanding of systems as a metaphor for organisation that ensures boundaries, internal coherence and discreet functions like the patient, dutiful thermostat that keeps a system at a constant, comfortable temperature. At the other, Dionysian, end systems are autopoietic, un-steerable and chaotically careening out of control on their own unknowable trajectories like the whorls of starlings in a murmuration.
The artists in Letter Like Shapes, Word Like Sequences all sit somewhere on this spectrum balancing order and chaos. Each demonstrate that artists create their own systems but do so only in collaboration with other people, agents and things. The systems they explore include languages, archives, communities, histories and customs. Sometimes those systems are worked with at other times dissented from. They might be celebrated, rejected or queered. They could be used or abused.
The gift that systems offer is something more than the combination of their constituent parts. There are technical terms to describe this including autopoiesis, emergence, bifurcation, recursion and positive feedback. These describe how when things become complex, they might begin to exhibit behaviour that is self-organising, stochastic, unpredictable. But there are other terms, perhaps more familiar to us, that describe those moments when the behaviour of systems transcends their individual parts and begin to take flight. For this transcendence perhaps words like flow, magic or life are apt.
The title of this essay is cribbed from Nietzsche’s The Use and Abuse of History for Life, one of his ‘untimely’ or unseasonable meditations. In that text Nietzsche considers three attitudes to history, each of which come with inherent advantages and disadvantages. The monumental attitude recognises great events and figures from history at the expense of the vitality of the present; the antiquarian is patient and methodical in understanding the minutiae of the past whilst perhaps missing larger patterns and tendencies; whilst the critical attitude has a healthy scepticism toward the past that risks a paralysing lack of action in their own time. For Nietzsche both historical and unhistorical approaches were equally necessary to the flourishing of ‘an individual, a community and a system of culture.’4 Each of these three attitudes can also be mapped onto modes of engagement in systems as mechanisms and structures that might facilitate, fascinate or frustrate action. Or perhaps we might admit that how one relates to systems mirrors one relationship to that most troubling and contested of legacies; those of modernity. Are the legacies of modernity embedded into structures and systems that fetter or enslave and must be utterly decolonized or transcended? Or is there something that remains in the systems of modernism, an unfinished project, in the words of Habermas,5 worth recouping?
This cribbing of mine is mischievous given that Nietzsche is the most unsystematic of thinkers and voiced his own animus to them. Despite this his sometimes breathtaking rhetorical flourishes provide a useful foil in thinking about how systems might be used and abused. And as he almost writes:
‘We do need [Systems], but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements. In other words, we need [Systems] for life and action, not as a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a self life and a cowardly or base action.’6 After all, systems are, above all else, the origin of history, action and life.
1 Clifford Siskin, The System, (MIT Press, 2016)
2 Israel Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic (Falcon
Press, 1983) pg 82
3 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Systems Model of Creativity, (Springer, 2014) emphasis added
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, (The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1957), pg. 8 emphasis added
5 Jürgen Habermas, and Seyla Ben-Habib, ‘Modernity Versus Postmodernity,’ Special Issue on Modernism, New German Critique, 22 (Winter, 1981) pp. 3-14
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, (The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1957), pg. 3 with the word system replacing history.