ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

"Transcendental Systems": Technocratic Expertise, Mystical Experience, and Systems Theory, 1950-1980

• In Event: Computer Sciences

English Abstract

Historians of cybernetics and systems theory often associate this interdisciplinary field with Cold War rationality. Indeed, the professional journals of systems theory teem with computer models, man-machine systems, and statistical analyses. Yet the commonplace association between systems theory and rationalism is belied by the surprising ubiquity of appeals to mystical experience and ecological wholeness in the self-presentation of postwar systems theorists. What accounts for this confluence of technocracy and transcendence? Focusing on the life and career of the Vienna-born systems biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, this paper explores the role of the ineffable in the construction of Cold War scientific expertise. Bertalanffy – frequently named the “father of general systems theory” and cited enthusiastically by cyberneticists – dedicated his postwar career to promoting General System Theory (Allgemeine Systemlehre) on both sides of the Atlantic. Rooted in biological holism, General System Theory offered Cold War experts insight into the “higher level” organization of a globalizing world. Drawing on proceedings of the Society for General Systems Research, along with Bertalanffy’s personal correspondence with figures like Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler, and Abraham Maslow, I show how references to mystical and “peak” experiences reinforced the expansive truth claims of systems theory. Direct experience of “the whole” served as a ground for wide-ranging technocratic power. By foregrounding this history, I offer new tools for making sense of entanglements between technocratic, ecological, and countercultural visions of “system” in the 1960s and beyond.

Author

• Libby O'Neil, Mississippi State University