Aesthetics and Systems

Systems are articulated things. They represent a set of differentiations. At the same time they are also whole things. The problem is that as systems get more complex, the sense of their wholeness becomes more and more obscure. Increasing lower level clarity (distinct articulation) makes macro level coherence harder to see. Aesthetics plays a curious role here – marginalised within the system, cut off from ordinary practical life, and opposed to any form of conceptually informed understanding, it somehow has to gesture to a unity that its very articulation has obscured.