Overview
A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the fourteen engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genreāa form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called āsystemā to compete with the essay and the treatise. Drawing on the history of system from Galileo's āmessage from the starsā and Newton's āsystem of the worldā to today's ācomputational universe,ā Siskin illuminates the role that the genre of system has played in the shaping and reshaping of modern knowledge.
Previous engagements with systems have involved making them, using them, or imagining better ones. Siskin offers an innovative perspective by investigating system itself. He considers the past and present, moving from the āsystem of the worldā to āa world full of systems.ā He traces the turn to system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and describes this primary form of Enlightenment as a mediator of political, cultural, and social modernityāpointing to the moment when people began to āblame the systemā for working both too well (āyou can't beat the systemā) and not well enough (it always seems to ābreak downā). Throughout, his touchstones are: what system is and how it has changed; how it has mediated knowledge; and how it has worked in the world.
This book title, System (The Shaping of Modern Knowledge), ISBN: 9780262534673, by Clifford Siskin, published by MIT Press (September 8, 2017) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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