GENERAL IDEA
Today, numerous conceptions of "system" exist.1 Most authors start with the object to be studied and define the system in terms of that object.
Deutsch (quoted by Hamon) calls a system "an ensemble of parts or subsystems which interact in such a way that the components tend to change slowly enough to be provisionally treated as constants. These slowly changing parts can be called structures—if the exchanges occurring in their mutual relationships prove to be oriented towards maintaining or reproducing systems, they can be called functions.” Hamon specifies a set of rational elements, whose evolution is characterized mainly by feedback.
But he points out that this is the feedback of the whole on the parts, which assures the autonomy of the system in the whole of reality. Thus, the system is not a collection of objects placed side by side, nor a nonspecific aggregate. Many authors overlabor "feedback" as the true "key" to the system.
In contrast, Henri Lefebvre stresses only the difference between the whole and the sum of the parts: "A system is a set of relationships that adds something to the sum of the diverse elements. That is why we can speak of the principle of the isomorphism of the system. Very different elements can have homologous energy laws; in other words, a system is a totality having its own laws of structure. And in this way, aggregates always appear as subordinates."
However, Lefebvre draws the contestable idea that a system evolves purely in terms of its own internal logic. And for Meadows (in The Rome Report): "The structure of any system—i.e. the relations between elements, numerous, forming interlocking loops,
and sometimes with effects that are staggered in time—is as important in the evolution of the system as the nature of each individual element making it up."
Finally, there is Talcott Parsons's definition (The Social System, 1951):
Two or more entities make up a system if they are linked in such a way that a change of state in the first is followed by a change of state in the other(s), which, in turn, is followed by a new change in the first. This definition certainly characterizes an aspect of the technological system, but it is really too vague.
In any case, the facet of Parsons's thinking that applies especially well to the technological system is the idea that a system is inevitably both integrating and integrated (or rather a "structural organization of the interaction between units").
It involves a model, an equilibrium, a system of control.
I would like to single out several features in Parsons. The system is a set of elements interrelating in such a way that any evolution of one triggers a revolution of the whole, and any modification of the whole has repercussions on each element. Thus, quite plainly, we are by no means dealing with isolated objects, but rather with a network of interrelations. It is also obvious that the factors making up the system are not identical in nature. There are, for instance, quantitative and nonquantitative elements. Finally, it is certain that the individual factors do not all change at the same rate; the system has its specific process and speed of change in relation to the parts. Just as it has its special laws of development and transformation.
The second feature that I would like to emphasize is the following: The elements composing the system have a sort of preferential disposition to combine among themselves rather than with outside factors. The economic system implies a preferential relationship, which involves both a tendency to change for internal reasons and a resistance to external influences.
The third feature is obviously that a system able to be grasped at a moment of its composition is nevertheless dynamic. The interrelations between the parts are not of the same type as those between the parts of an engine, which do act upon one another and in terms of one another, but always keep repeating the same action. In a system, the acting factors modify the other elements, and the action is not repetitive but constantly innovative. The interrelations create an evolution. The system never coagulates—albeit remaining a system and recognizably System X, even after many evolutions.
The fourth feature is that a system existing as a totality can enter into relationships with other systems, other totalities.
Finally, it is common knowledge that one of the essential traits of a system is the feedback, or rather the "feedback structures,” which do not, however, make up the system itself
A system is thus characterized by two elements. On the one hand, the interrelations between the principle and significant elements of the whole (which, incidentally, can thus never be tested, all things being equal); on the other hand, its organic relationship to the outside: a system in the social sciences is necessarily open. It can never be considered in itself to the exclusion of any other relationship.
If I choose the term "system" to describe technology in present-day society, it is certainly not because the word is fashionable now, but because I feel that it fits technology. It is an indispensable tool for understanding what is meant by "technology," while disregarding the spectacular, the curious, the epiphenomena that make observation impossible. Take medicine. Once (especially in the past) doctors described ideal models of diseases, but each concrete case of typhus did not show all the hallmarks listed in books as belonging to the abstract disease and ending with paroxysm and death. Yet if the physician had not had that schema of the abstract disease, which was obtained by eliminating all secondary elements of chance, he would never have been able to tell that a set of symptoms corresponded to typhus. The system thus involves a choice of symptoms, factors, an analysis of their relationships.
But this is not a mere intellectual construction. There is quite definitely such a thing as a system-just as there was a disease expressed in a correlation between the systems that could be grouped and labeled.
Technology has now become so specific that we have to consider it in itself and as a system.2
By speaking of the technological system, I propose to take account of an important part of reality. This is no simple hypothesis of an aleatory development; I am not extrapolating from a curve while singling out quantitative data from the past in a particular sector. At the moment, technology, in its qualitative and quantitative aspects, has developed in such a way that we can conceive its “normal" development. There is a logic which makes the system.
Consequently, I propose to take reality into account by analyzing this system and its evolution. But obviously, I cannot do so with full certainty, for the technological system is not completed. It is not closed, it is not a system evolving by its own unique internal logic. Thus, it includes not only a large margin of chance but also a large
portion of probability. It is no use forecasting technological "inventions" (in 1990, we'll have this and that, etc.), for prophecies can be made only after an overall study of the system as such, not by totting up countless innovations and applications. Finally, to the extent that it is not "repetitive," the technological system, while giving us only one case to study, is more difficult than physical, ecological systems, etc., which have repeated cycles that can be observed.3
The technological system is formed by the existence of the technological phenomenon and by technological advance. I am using "technological phenomenon" in the sense that I gave it in The Technological Society, distinguishing it from technological operation, which has always existed throughout history.4
The technological phenomenon has been specific to Western civilization since the eighteenth century.5 It is characterized by consciousness, criticalness, rationality.6 I will not come back to that. But the technological phenomenon does not suffice per se to make up the system; in fact, it can be regarded as essentially static. One may be tempted to take the phenomenon as such, and, that being the case, to consider and analyze it.7 In so doing, one would not only be making the habitual error of this kind of "cut" at a given moment. One would also miss the system itself, which, as a system, is evolutionary. But I have to make myself clear. I do not mean that objects or the technological system are evolving. That goes without saying. It is an obvious fact, and it does not add anything. Everyone knows that the automobiles of 1970 are not those of 1930. But that does not make the technological object or, more generally, the phenomenon any different from any pebble. We have said that the technological system is made up of the phenomenon and of progression. The latter is not the modification or evolution of the object. Yet we are always tempted to think it is those things. "Everything flows," time goes by; hence, the object changes. One might almost say that evolution depends on that passing of time, a kind of force exterior to the object, a river bathing it and carrying it away.
But with technology, we are dealing with a totally different reality. For it is technology that works its own change. It has what Jouvenel calls "a permanent revolution of processes.” Progression is a part of the object itself; it is constitutive to the object. As we have said, there is no technology without progression. Technological progress is not evolving technology, it is not technological objects that change because they are improved, it is not an adding
up of influences on those machines or those organizations that impels them to adjust. Technology has as a specific given, the feature that it requires its own transformation for itself. From the very instant that it existed in its modern reality, it produced the phenomenon of progression. The progress with which we are imbued and whose ideology inspires all our judgments is a direct result of technology. It is not "technology progressing," it is a new and independent reality; it is the conjunction of the technological phenomenon and technological progress that constitutes the technological system. Hence, there are traits, regulations, "laws" (if one can still phrase it thus) in both. Technological progress takes place in a certain way and offers peculiarities distinguishing it from other types of evolution. Economic growth or cultural development does not happen along the same lines as technological progression. Therefore, the technological system is characterized by a set of specific traits that distinguish it from other verifiable systems.8
As for the singularity of this system, it reveals itself in the very circumstance that a technological factor always preferentially joins with another technological factor. An "attraction" exists between them, and it is clearly due not to the "nature" of either factor but to their belonging to the same system. Hence, the associations with external factors, depending on other systems-political, economic, ideological-are certainly not excluded, but they are always secondary.
Of course, in employing the word system, I do not mean that technology is alien to the other environments-political, economic, etc.
Technology is not a closed system. But it is a system in that each technological factor (a certain machine, for instance), is first linked to, connected with, dependent on, the ensemble of other technological factors before it relates to nontechnological elements. Or rather, to the extent that technology has become an environment, each technological factor is situated in that environment and constitutes it by subsisting on it.
There is a system just as one can say that cancer is a system. There is a similar mode of action in all the points at which the cancer manifests itself in the organism; there is a proliferation of a new tissue in regard to the old tissue, and there is a relationship between the metastases. A cancer within another living system is itself an organism-but incapable of surviving on its own. The same holds true for the technological system. On the one side, it can appear, develop, exist only to the extent that it integrates into a
social body existing apart from it. One cannot conceive of technology like
"nature," as able to live on its own. Social nature is preexistent to the technological system, which finds its integration, its possibilities, its support in social nature. Yet on the other side, the growth of technology does not leave the social body intact, nor does it allow its various elements to develop by and of themselves. For instance, there is no family per se, which, thanks to technology, would change as a family and find a new familial equilibrium. In reality, the technological impact challenges the totality of the family as a fact, the family is no longer a sociological reality attached to the body social in order to depend above all on the technological system. The family has now become the
"family-in-the-technological-environment."9
What is more, each technological factor is not first bound up with some group, some economic or social phenomenon; it is primarily integrated into the technological system. Hence, the mechanization of office work. The current idea is that the government/administration/offices complex remains dominant; and technology is integrating into it. An extra technological element is added to the bureaucratic organization, integrated into the administrative mechanism and attached to this activity.
Such a view of things obviously leads to regarding technology as put together out of disparate bits and pieces, with random and uncertain relations between them. Yet the opposite is true. Each technological element is associated with all the others preferentially. And when mechanization is introduced into offices, it is a kind of spearhead launched in that direction by the technological system. Administration is then modified; above all, it loses its determining character, and is now determined by the new apparatus. Unity is achieved not so much in the earlier framework (government/administration), but by means of the correlations between the diverse technologies. Thus there are no scattered technological factors, integrated into various social, political, economic contexts, which have their organizational principles, their unity, etc. Quite the reverse. There is a technological system having various modalities of intervention and attaching to itself every fragment of the human or social reality, which operation, moreover, removes that fragment from the tissue it was a part of. Hence, every technological factor, associated with the others, forms a more or less coherent and doubtlessly rigorous whole (the coherence is internal but not necessarily evident).
DEFINING THE SYSTEM
We will have to show at length in what way technology is a system and how that system functions; but in this paragraph, we can offer a general justification of this undertaking.
Total technization occurs when every aspect of human life is subjected to control and manipulation, to experimentation and observation, so that a demonstrable efficiency is achieved everywhere.10 The system is revealed in the change (a technological, social change, mobility, adjustment, etc., a necessary change for continuously solving the problems raised more and more swiftly by the very existence of technology), owing to the interdependence of all the components, owing to the totality and, finally, the stability attained. This last point is particularly essential. "Detechnicization" is impossible. The scope of the system is such that we cannot hope to go back. If we attempted a detechnicization, we would be like primitive forest-dwellers setting fire to their native environment. These four traits of technology offer a first glimpse of what may be called the system from an overall vantage point.
However, Simondon has shown that the technological object requires a separate treatment to be understood and for the whole to be grasped. The problem posed by Simondon, namely the specific knowledge of the technological object, shows that there is a system from which that object cannot be divorced. The technological object must be taken in the totality of its relations and genetically. According to Simondon, the mode of existence of technological objects is definite because it proceeds from a genesis. But this genesis creates not only objects. It creates, first, a "technological reality," then a general technicity:
It is the ensemble, the interconnection [of technologies] that makes this both natural and human polytechnical universe. . . . In existence, for the natural world and for the human world, the technologies are not separated. However, for technological thinking, they are virtually separated, because there does not exist a thinking developed highly enough to permit theorizing about this technical network of concrete ensembles. . . . Beyond technical determinations and norms, we would have to discover polytechnical and technological determinations and norms. There exists a world of the plurality of technologies, with its own peculiar structures.
Simondon considers this the true task of philosophy. It strikes us that the philosopher (in general, for Simondon manages to demonstrate the opposite) is rather ill-equipped to proceed toward this
discovery. In reality, the discovery would be of an artificial universe to be taken on its own terms, in its own specificity.
"The technological object, becoming detachable, can be grouped with other technological objects according to such and such an arrangement: the technological world offers an indefinite availability of groupings and connections. . . . Constructing a technological object means preparing an availability: the industrial grouping is not the only one to be realized with technological objects-we can also realize nonproductive groupings, whose goal is to attach man to nature through a regulated concatenation of organized mediations, to create a coupling between human thought and nature. The technological world intervenes here as a system of convertibility."
Thus, this technological system exists not only by its intrinsic relationship, but also because the objects to which the technologies are applied are systems themselves. "Nature," "Society.” Since "Nature" and "Society" have existed as systems (the ecosystem, for instance), technology, applied to separated, specified, differentiated aspects of the one and then of the other, has finally covered them in their entirety. But these parceling operations (the correspondence of a technology to, or the creation of a technological object for, a certain natural need, a certain natural challenge, had an interrelationship, owing not to their technological qualification at the outset, but to their application to systems. It was only gradually, with the acquisition of second- and third-degree technologies, that technology, constituted as a veritable continuous tissue, then as an environment, became, in turn, a system in itself, independent of its objects. At that moment, the technologies became coherent with respect to one another, they were organized in terms of one another. The elements, the technological factors, were not simply juxtaposed, they combined with one another. An ensemble was established: of "solidarities," connections, coordination among all the objects, methods, etc., of technology.
We must, however, pinpoint something here. When I speak of a system, I do not mean that I am constructing a system intended for descriptive and operational analysis and based on simulation by a data-processing model. I could say that, to a certain extent, I am applying systemic analysis to a concrete ensemble. But rather, I believe I can establish that the technological phenomena have combined in such a way as to now present the characteristics
We must, however, pinpoint something here. When I speak of a system, I do not mean that I am constructing a system intended for descriptive and operational analysis and based on simulation by a data-processing model. I could say that, to a certain extent, I am applying systemic analysis to a concrete ensemble. But rather, I believe I can establish that the technological phenomena have combined in such a way as to now present the characteristics