[for "The Whole Earth, parts thereof," a symposium on the Whole Earth Catalog, UC/Davis, May 8, 2006]

 

Bruce Clarke

Department of English

Texas Tech University

Lubbock, TX 79409-3091

bruce.clarke@ttu.edu

 

“The Flow of Energy Through a System”:

Getting Started with Systems in the Whole Earth Catalog

 

In 1985 the PBS science series Nova produced the documentary “Gaia: Goddess of the Earth,” exploring the Gaia concept first proposed in the late 1960s by the British freelance atmospheric chemist James Lovelock, and developed in the 1970s in collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis. The Gaia hypothesis initially advanced the claim that the totality of the biosphere was itself a living being. The atmosphere, the oceans, and the continents comprise a planetary environment which, coevolving with life as a whole, has become a living organ of Gaia’s planetary being. The title of his 1988 book The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, retains that eye-catching rhetoric, but in the text itself Lovelock deployed a more technical, less mythopoetic idiom: “Through Gaia theory, I see the Earth and the life it bears as a system, a system that has the capacity to regulate the temperature and the composition of the Earth’s surface and to keep it comfortable for living organisms” (31). And this language of systems rather than beings is also the idiom of discussion of the Nova episode, which aired on Tuesday, January 28, 1986, the day of the Challenger disaster, and which, as a result, in the words of Lynn Margulis, “was seen by no one.” Here’s a piece of what most everybody missed :

 

[turn speakers on and click here]

 

We will return later to the connection between the Whole Earth Catalog and Gaia theory.  But to begin with, in this documentary reference from the mid-80s, the Catalog is presented simply as a sample of “counterculture publications.” But were there others that also “popularized the science of automatic control systems—cybernetics—in both living things and machines”? I don’t know of any. The Catalog immediately set itself apart from other upstart and mainstream publishing ventures by erecting a platform on which to disseminate a remarkably broad selection and high level of information about systems, from the hard-core cybernetics of biological, mechanical, and computer systems to the extensions of systems theory into social-scientific and humanistic disciplines. As far as I have been able to trace this thread, from the Catalog’s second incarnation in the 128-page Spring 1969 issue to the October 1980 issue of the Next Whole Earth Catalog, it has always opened with a section called “Understanding Whole Systems.”  So, what is this systems vibe, where did it come from, and how does it factor into the project as a whole?

 

Part of the answer lies in the phenomenon of cybernetics, which does cover “the science of automatic control systems.” As the Gaia documentary indicates, the science of cybernetics corresponds directly to Lovelock’s thesis about Gaia as an automatic, that is, self-regulatory system for environmental homeostasis, that is, the maintenance by living things of livable conditions on Earth throughout evolutionary time.  In the Spring 1969 Catalog, however, entries on cybernetics proper occur not in the section Understanding Whole Systems, but in the later section on Communication. The rationale for this is clarified by the entry there on Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, first published in 1948. As Wiener, the inventor of the term and the prophet of the science of cybernetics, argues there, the concept of communication bridges organic systems to mechanical systems. Conceptually as well as functionally, communication names the virtual or actual circuit between source and destination, sender and receiver, by which the system concept negotiates the commonalities among physical, mechanical, biological, psychic, and social operations.

 

By the Last Whole Earth Catalog, issued in 1971, a new entry on Wiener’s follow-up volume, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, has joined other cyberneticists and systems thinkers—Buckminster Fuller, Heinz von Foerster, Ludwig von Bertalanffy—in an expanded Understanding Whole Systems section. At the same time, the Communications section in that issue reviews another cluster of key cyberneticists—H. Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch—along with the book Systems Thinking, for which the head note, signed SB for the Catalog's creator and main editor, Stewart Brand, reads: “Well, this should be in ‘Understanding Whole Systems.’ . . . It’s here so you can connect it up with cybernetics and your own bodily and social open-systems functioning. In the light of systems thinking statements like ‘He not busy being born is busy dying’ have precise truth” (316-17).

 

It’d be fun to expound the systemic veracity of this terrific reference to Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Right, Ma,” but instead, let’s pick up another thread of the systems theme. Here’s the outside back cover of the Spring ’69 issue. The caption reads: “The flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system.” A legend on the inside back cover reads: “The cover photograph is from NASA’s Apollo 8 mission. The statement is from Energy Flow in Biology (by Harold Morowitz . . .).” Stewart Brand graduated from Stanford University in 1960 with a degree in biology; perhaps that training explains why he would be in touch with such a technical volume, replete with dense mathematical notations. In fact, Morowitz’s book is not reviewed in any Catalog whose index I have been able to consult: it clearly transcends the limits of popular accessibility that are implicit in the Catalog’s selections. Nevertheless, its opening remarks are plain and simple: “The purpose of this book is to discuss and present evidence for the general thesis that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system. The motivation for this approach is biological and has its origins in an attempt to find a physical rationale for the extremely high degree of molecular order encountered in living systems” (2).

 

The utility of the statement Brand sampled from Morowitz for that back cover (and which reemerges verbatim on the inside front cover of the Last Whole Earth Catalog) is that it generalizes from biological systems in particular to systems in general. It helps that the energy concept is also easily extended from the literal thermodynamic sense in which Morowitz uses it to broad figurative applications.  For instance, through social systems it is not energy per se but information that “flows”—it is the recursive interchange of communications that “acts to organize the system.” And with this shift to communication we unlock the self-referential metaphor by which Brand transfers the sense of Morowitz’s biophysical thesis to the publication to which he has affixed it: the communications disseminated from and fed back into the Whole Earth Catalog will “act to organize” its own operation as well as all those countercultural individuals, households, and communes who use it to, as the hippies would say, get their shit together.

 

This semantic flexibility underscores the bridging and consolidating power of the system concept. It is why one typically uses the plural “systems,” as in “systems theory,” rather than the singular. In the singular, “the system” is almost always pejorative, synonymous with “the” anonymous singular “man” one would love to stick it to. But examined more dispassionately, the system concept always implies a multiple aggregate: no system occupies an environment in which there are no other systems, and any system is the sum and more than the sum of its particular parts. Moreover, for many classes of systems, their “parts” occur as such only because of the operation of the whole system to begin with. Take the membrane of a living cell: the material atoms and molecules are donated by the environment, as is the energy locked up in nutrients or delivered by sunlight. But given the right combination of those elements, the formation of that organ and its maintenance as a functional semipermeable structure are produced by the living system as a whole, as part of its own self-production.

 

So the systems Morowitz was talking about are cells and organisms, but it makes perfect sense to scale his statement up to the biosphere, as a “whole system” in its own right and as a metaphor for complex social and technological organization. The origin and evolution of life on Earth into an interlocking of ecosystems has unfolded from the self-organization of matter under the constant fall and flow of solar energy, a total process wrapped in the swirling membrane of an atmosphere that for over three billion years has itself been reconstituted and regulated by living processes. From the start, one of the most brilliant visual rhetorical strokes of the Whole Earth Catalog has been to capitalize on the iconography of this world, the living Earth seen from space. Holding up the mirror to global wholeness, through these images we see the Earth as a systemic totality.

 

Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test reports concerning Stewart Brand:

One day he took some LSD, right after an Explorer satellite went up to photograph the earth, and as the old synapses began rapping around inside his skull at 5,000 thoughts per second, he was struck with one of those questions that inflame men’s brains: Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?—and he drove across American from Berkeley, California to 116^th Street, New York City, selling buttons with that legend on them . . . . (224)

When NASA finally released those images, clearly Brand was poised to exploit them for their mind-altering potential. After all, what better (and also safer) way than gazing on space photos of the Earth to get really high? The caption on the inside front cover of the Last Whole Earth Catalog reads: “The famous Apollo 8 picture of Earthrise over the Moon that established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness (dry moon, barren space) and began to bend human consciousness.”

 

Pulling these threads together, then, we see that the whole systems concept informs the Whole Earth Catalog from top to bottom, from the cover graphics to both the discursive and the visual content of the Understanding Whole Systems sections that lead off and so epitomize every Catalog. The systems concept orients one to a synoptic view of things, presses one to a conceptual elevation from which the boundaries of complex entities show forth against their environments. It is in this spirit that one might construe or excuse the psychedelic afflatus that leads off the purpose statement prefacing every version of the Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” It doesn’t say, “we are gods.” Rather, in imitation and material fulfillment of our visions of the divine, we have created mind-blowing technological systems by which we can now rise to a literally transcendent view of ourselves and our world, a view previously reserved to whatever deities might be imagined to be looking down on mundane affairs. In this spirit as well, we can think of browsing the Catalog from front to back as an extended hovering over of synoptic views of the multifarious items it catalogs.

 

With this is mind, let’s look in more detail at the Understanding Whole Systems section. The items it catalogs are almost exclusively books and posters. In the Last Whole Earth Catalog, this initial section now contains items distributed in previous issues to the Communication section. In all versions between ’69 and ’71, the pride of first place in the Catalog goes to Buckminster Fuller, whose “insights,” Brand states in the head note, “initiated this catalog” (3).  By ’71 six works of Fuller’s are written up, including Ideas and Integrities, from which the following statement is cited: “I define ‘synergy’ as follows: Synergy is the unique behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by behavior of their respective subsystems’ events” (3). “Synergy” is, like “cybernetics,” one of the great systems-theoretical neologisms. Today its use has been somewhat displaced by the term “emergence,” as in the title of the book published in 2002 by our friend Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex. But the current sciences of emergence and complexity are the direct inheritors of the cybernetic systems theories championed in the first run of Whole Earth Catalogs.

 

We proceed from the works of Buckminster Fuller to page 5, headed Cosmos, offering a poster of the Andromeda galaxy, a book titled Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, the Hubble Atlas of Galaxies, and Olaf Stapleson’s Star Maker, in which, we read:

 

“A man’s consciousness unwillingly departs his body and his planet . . . this leads to galactic and cosmic consciousness . . . . The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. . . . Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.”

 

        Pages 6 and 7, titled “Universe” and “Earth,” loop back from a view of space to a view from space.  We return from further cosmic perspectives, in The Atlas of the Universe, to the Earth seen from space in NASA’s Earth Photo Books, or from technoscientific transcendence of to technoscientific self-reflection on the Earth. The motif of aerial observation, a god’s or an astronaut’s-eye-view, continues to depict the understanding of whole systems. Pages 8 and 9, titled “Energy” and “Geography,” review books on the biosphere, the environment, and two world atlases.

     

        Pages 10 and 11, “Surface” and “Clouds,” perform a further loop down and back up between the surface of the Earth and that of the human body. Playing again on the aerial or synoptic metaphor for systems observation, Brand writes about Joseph Royce’s 1965 volume Surface Anatomy: “The whole lovely system of the human creature, seen from without, surface by surface, is here” (10), then returns on the next page to another volume of aerial photography, Hanns Reich’s The World from Above.

 

In all this we are reminded of an entry on Stewart Brand’s vita, posted on his home page at the well.com, and which suggests a formative experience equally as important as hanging out with the Merry Pranksters: “1960-62, Active duty, U.S. Army officer. Qualified Airborne and took up skydiving.” Lasting impressions, not just of being airborne but also, once aloft, of jumping out into the wild blue yonder and contemplating strange territories from high above, would appear to underwrite Brand’s head note on p.16 of the Last Whole Earth Catalog, addressing this section of the Catalog as a whole: “Understanding whole systems is knowing how to fly. You can rise above local circumstances, travel with blurring speed, and set down in a place wholly distant, strange, and wonderful. Or maybe not so wonderful, in which case you best know how to take off in a tight situation, and remember where home is.”

 

At this point in the Last Whole Earth Catalog an entry emerges that is not immediately recognizable as a contribution to the discourse of systems. However, its positioning thoughtfully implies that the “wholeness” of whole systems is related to the concept of form, insofar as form defines the functional boundaries of things. This entry first appeared on p.14 of the Spring 1970 Catalog, and reappears verbatim on p.12 of the Last Catalog. It is a review of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, written by the important cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, who was at that time Director of the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Von Foerster contributes a lengthy head note, much longer than any previous one, what amounts to an introductory lesson in Spencer-Brown’s “calculus of indications.”  Here’s just a taste of von Foerster’s text: 

. . . Laws are not descriptions, they are commands, injunctions: “Do!” Thus, the first constructive proposition in this book (page 3) is the injunction: “Draw a distinction!” an exhortation to perform the primordial creative act.

After this, practically everything else follows smoothly: a rigorous foundation of arithmetic, of algebra, of logic, of a calculus of indications, intentions, and desires; a rigorous development of laws of form, may they be of logical relations, of descriptions of the universe by physicists and cosmologists, or of functions of the nervous system which generates descriptions of the universe of which it is a part. . . .

The work of thinkers such as von Foerster and Spencer-Brown leads directly to what comes to be called second-order cybernetics, with its own particular outgrowths in philosophy—epistemological constructivism and naturalized phenomenology, biological systems theory—autopoiesis, symbiogenesis, and systemic immunology, and advances in social systems theory, managerial systems, and psychotherapy. The Catalog, along with its successor operation as the CoEvolution Quarterly, has played a key role in the further development of systems theory altogether, and especially of those components of systems theory that transcended its original orientation to engineering applications and “automatic control systems.” The Catalog deserves credit for significantly promoting lines of systems theory that fed into key developments in the sciences of nonlinearity, complexity, cognition, and emergence.

 

In the confines of this talk I cannot open up these developments in any detail, but in closing I will try to indicate some crucial threads that connect the systems theories outlined in the initial run of Whole Earth Catalogs to the succeeding publications that carry on the discursive spirit of Understanding Whole Systems. Key concepts here are observation and self-reference, which combine to underscore the notion of self-observation. These concepts have of course been implicit throughout the Catalog’s considerations of whole systems by means of observational technologies that allow us to look back at our own world and see it, and thus ourselves, in a wholly new way. In the excerpts from Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form cited in von Foerster’s review, this self-observational dynamic is taken up at a powerful level of logical-mathematical generalization: “We cannot escape the fact,” Spencer-Brown writes, “that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself”: 

            This is indeed amazing.

            Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

            But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen.  In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i. e., is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself. . . .

Seeded here is an important kernel of further sophistication in the refinement of systems thinking going forward into the 1970s. Raising one’s conceptual view to the level of whole systems, one also becomes aware of one’s own virtual situation both as an observing system in one’s own right and as a sentient component within higher-order social/technological systems of observation. Eventually, one also registers the fact and irrevocable formal contingency that no system of observation can ever really see the whole picture. As Spencer-Brown points out, the world “will always partially elude itself”: there will always be a blind spot in the picture, at which we cannot see that we cannot see the totality of what we are. To understand whole systems is also to understand that no system is ever entirely whole: there is always an environment beyond it, which is indispensable to it, but the extent of which will be to some degree unfathomable.

        This is a way of restating the self-referential nature of any observation. Any attempt at an “objective” view retains a “subjective” component, which must be factored in to any complete (yet always ultimately incomplete) view of our environment. And any attempt at an “objective” view of ourselves necessarily throws the part of ourselves we are viewing with into momentary eclipse. This was von Foerster’s point in remarking how Laws of Form enables one to calculate regarding “functions of the nervous system”—that is, the sheer sensory and cognitive machinery of any individual human subject taken as an observing system—“which generates descriptions of the universe of which it is a part.” In Spencer-Brown's technical terms, observation depends on acts of distinction which necessarily self-divide into a marked and an unmarked space. To see what we have distinguished demands for the time being that we do not see what our distinction has left aside. In sum, with the inclusion of the review of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form, the Whole Earth Catalog virtually deconstructed its own holism.
 

In the Summer 1976 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, there is a wonderful reprise of these matters in an interview titled “On Observing Whole Systems,” with the late systems biologist Francisco Varela, who was both a colleague of von Foerster’s and an important expositor of Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. Here I’ll just cite Brand’s introduction for this article, in which he refers directly to what, by then, von Foerster himself had nominated as the transition from first-order to second-order cybernetics:  

Francisco Varela is a mathematician and neurologist whose special interest is the logic of self-reference. This sounds abstruse, but I share the opinion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, G. Spencer Brown, Heinz von Foerster and others that failure to understand self-reference is the poison in the brain of most Western misbehavior, public and personal.

In his recent landmark paper, “A Calculus of Self-Reference” and in this interview, Francisco is helping build what Von Foerster calls “a cybernetics of observing-systems,” which is the rest of the story after “the cybernetics of observed systems”—feedback, goal-seeking, and such.

A year earlier the CoEvolution Quarterly had also published a landmark article by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, “The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere—the Gaia Hypothesis,” in the midst of which Brand interpolated a section titled “Gaia and Cybernetics” extracted from a more technical paper the same authors had previously placed in the scientific journal Tellus. I mention these details in closing to underscore the continuity of cybernetic systems theory tying together the whole-earth iconography that framed and animated the initial conceptual formation of the Catalog with its successive editions as they gather in the cutting edge of later scientific developments. In The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock will discuss the indispensability as well as the incompleteness of the holistic perspective, in a way that both confirms the insistent holism of the Whole Earth Catalog while also insisting on its supplementation with the pragmatic reductionism of traditional science: “In the understanding of a microbe, an animal, or a plant, the top-down physiological view of life as a whole system harmoniously merges with the bottom-up view originating from molecular biology: that life is an assembly made from a vast set of ultramicroscopic parts” (29). That’s cool—but, the outside back cover of the Next Whole Earth Catalog demonstrates that, for sheer exhilaration and elevation, the technoscientific contemplation of this reverse perspective, our own cosmic self-reference as a whole planetary system, is still the more powerful and sorely-needed kick in the head.