Age of the World System

“The Age of the World System” is a course that studies the world’s two cybernetic “moments”— the remapping of global power at the end of World War II and, we argue, another remapping of that power today — in relation to each other.

Cybernetics — colloquially, the study of the regulation of systems — and systems theory more generally are not only conceptual approaches or frameworks that help us explain the world. In as much as they are bound up with both the production and fracturing of scientific knowledge along political lines, this course explores how cybernetics helps shape the world, in the 20th century and today.

This course therefore combines systems theory, area studies, and epistemology in order to demonstrate how seemingly abstract ideas of what a system is are bound up in political propositions about how the world should be.