communication +1 Volume 3 Afterlives of Systems Article 1 2014 Introduction Christina Vagt Technische Universität Berlin,
[email protected] Florian Sprenger
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Vagt, Christina and Sprenger, Florian (2014) "Introduction," communication +1: Vol. 3, Article 1. Available at: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol3/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in communication +1 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Keywords systems theory, afterlife, history, warburg, technology Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This article is available in communication +1: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol3/iss1/1 Vagt and Sprenger: Introduction Under the impression of today’s planetary crises, the rise of ecological thinking, as well as technologies of smart, ubiquitous systems and the impression of global interconnectedness, there appears a new desire to excavate the remnants of the past. To investigate the historical and epistemological foundations of current systems thinking promises to lead to an understanding of the current condition that we are in – and its technological groundings. When system-oriented thinking emerged within biological contexts in the first half of the 20 th Century, it came along with universal pretensions: the concepts of ecosystems (Tansley) and general systems theory (von Bertalanffy) were both immersed in longstanding struggles between materialism and holism.