System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange

by Anthony Wilden

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1980 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Genres: Language, Philosophy

576 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s entirely possible that Anthony Wilden’s System and Structure is the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century that no one’s ever read. Indeed, it’s tempting, while reading the tome, to give up entirely on the very enterprise of philosophy altogether. If Wilden, whose writing could traverse the plains of psychoanalysis and science, ecology and literature, politics and mathematics - all in magnificent, imaginative and original form - if this luminous, radiating intelligence could and does remain in the shadows of contemporary thought, what hope do the rest of us have?

That all said, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising in retrospect. At home neither in the worlds of structuralism, systems science, psychoanalysis or Marxism- the four theoretical pillars upon which System and Structure rests - Wilden's book carves out for itself a singular position in the landscape of thought, one as dependent on its milieu as it is critically distant from it. Written for those prepared to follow, say, detailed chemical descriptions of axon function in nerve cells, discussions of the role of negation in Hegelian idealism and Freudian metapsychology, as well as investigations into structure of repetition in the literature of Italo Svevo and Michel de Montaigne, there's an ambition and intensity to System and Structure that isn't at all for the philosophically light hearted.

As far as what it's all really about, one could perhaps call this a book of epistemology, or better yet, a book about the use and abuse of epistemology. Leveraging Gregory Bateson's notion of 'logical typing' (itself derived from Russell and Whitehead, but here applied to epistemology in general rather than to mathematical formalisms), Wilden's book takes to task the many 'reductionist' epistemologies that, instead of paying attention to the various (levels of) contexts which condition any scientific or philosophical investigation, insist instead upon the context-free nature of analysis. Thus from ecology to evolution, anthropology to political economy, Wilden relentlessly exposes the intellectual and ethical abysses into which we fall when we ignore the complex play of contexts and relations which define our world.

Now, while it's true that 'pay attention to context!' doesn't strike the most radical bell on first ring, the fierceness and firmness by which Wilden holds to his principles makes all the more obvious just how little adhered to such notions are - both consciously and otherwise. Information and communication theory, cybernetics, Levi-Straussian anthropology, Piagetian structuralism, Lacanian semiosis - all are held to the fire here and found wanting. Reading through that list, there's a case to be made for the somewhat dated character of the references here, but in truth, the untimeliness of Wilden's work simply reflects all the better the lengths we have yet to go to make ourselves equal to this masterwork of philosophical reflection.

[Bill Bogert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my step after Bateson. Wilden, especially in the first edition of the book, was not shy about his own political radicalism. The notion of the play between analog and digital, the political choice involved in framing or punctuating remains key to the way I look at the world. More important than ever, now that the digital revolution has obscured the analog.

[Oliver Hockenhull · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radical philosophy, essential writings, of continuing value.