Systems philosophy, which I distinguish from the sociological "systems theory," is very much a field not of armchair speculation, but of empirical research, and modern political-economy. The very notion of system is today inseparable from modern society's attempt to manage and monitor itself. Michel Foucault, French philosopher and intellectual historian of the 1960s through 80s, characterized society through the ways in which it observed itself, controlled itself, and defined itself. The core concepts that define and articulate systems are precisely ones of control and observation. However, just what systems philosophy means by these terms is less clear than that doxa which tends to define our most common understanding of systems. We tend to think of systems as imparting an organization to their elements that are at least minimally alien to these elements. Systems, in everyday parlance, have thus been commonly treated as alien to our freedoms (as bureaucracies), our desires, and we commonly hear it said that systems should be resisted, or overturned. But what ideas of control and observation does systems philosophy entertain?

Control: In systems philosophy control is a way of designating the way in which systems *communicate* or maintain themselves. System maintenance is indeed a question of the manner in which a system communicates. This discourse of "communication" owes in largest part to the cyberneticians of the 20th century, such as Norbert Weiner, etc. Control, for Weiner, was only an act of communication while control only occurs for systems if communication also happens. We are far less weary of the idea of communication than we are of control, but the reasons for this are generally ideological.

The cybernetic development of the concept of control was meant to challenge older philosophical ideas of causation. Classical laws of cause and effect were based on the idea that there was more being or perfection in the cause than in the effect (such as God in comparison with his creatures). As philosophers took the idea that God, or basic substances, could possibly possess less being, or less force and efficacy than the things they caused to be unsound reasoning, so a tradition of thought had it that cause preceded effect and that cause explained effect. We still tend to think this way today. Yet in social communication, for instance, it is easy to see that we have to wait for causes to cause their effects and that causes can cause many, sometimes surprising, effects. Time and uncertaintly have been imported into our active understanding of social communication. The cyberneticians realized that causes *select* their effects and that effects have to select their causes.

More to come...