Are Systems Even A Thing?

No substantive sleep since midnight-6AM on Sunday night (Monday morning). Systems on/in the brain. Foregrounded (no substantive intervening sleep): "The Great Wall of China," the first part of The Castle, Leviathan and the Air Pump, and We Have Never Been Modern. Backgrounded but relevant: Parsons/Luhmann vs. Derrida/Deleuze.

More questions than answers:

- Do "systems" emerge through autopoesis or through some sort of (external?) constitutive differentiation? If the former, from whence and when does this capacity emerge? If the latter, what is that which makes the difference?

- How inevitable is the effect of temporality on systems? Does differance work differently because of the internet? Is temporality an insurmountable problem for Luhmann (& co)?

- As a speaking/writing/human? subject, do "I" inevitably have better ability to understand human (psychic/written/etc?) systems than ones centered around objects or forces? A worse ability? If we can write histories using historical actors' categories for human actors, can we do the same for nonhuman objects? (Yes, they gather and organize humans and objects around them in certain ways... can we say that these arrangements "mean" anything?) How do we do that?

- What's the difference between information and knowledge? (Perhaps: knowledge is constitutive of a system, information moves within it. If that's the case, how does this segregation operate, how can it be contested, and do the problems with systems/structures apply to "knowledge," but just in the longer term?

- Quasi-object = virtual object? Quasi-object = virtual object minus articulation of relationship to time?

- Could any human say or write the true conditions of her situation within a system?

Consider rather the river in spring. It rises until it grows mightier and nourishes more richly the soil on the long stretch of its banks, still maintaining its own course until it reaches the sea, where it is all the more welcome because it is a worthier ally. Thus far may you urge your meditations on the decrees of the high command. But after that the river overflows its banks, loses outline and shape, slows down the speed of its current, tries to ignore its destiny by forming little seas in the interior of the land, damages the fields, and yet cannot maintain itself for long in its new expanse, but must run back between its banks again, must even dry up wretchedly in the hot season that presently follows. Thus far may you urge your meditations on the decrees of the high command.

Is the system as a whole ("God")? Is that why he can't talk to us except through representations? What authorizes the representations?

- What is information, anyway? Can it be defined as anything more than... something moving through the system that is treated as meaningful by elements within?

- What is the system's "unconscious"? Can information be unconscious?

- Are systems even a thing? "Hermeneutically sealed," so to speak? [Thanks to Plurabelle for punnery.] Can their excesses be understood in terms of their interactions with other systems... separated out from the core itself? (I'm thinking no? This, sort of in conjunction with the previous bullet point, was a big problem I had with Luhmann...)

- No monad/subject can encompass all of the plane of immanence (except arguably itself/God/whatever)... how can/would we know if there were generalizable properties of systems at all? Where do these properties fall on the contingent/inevitable spectrum? What epistemological standards do we use to find these properties (assuming that's the sort of thing we might want to do)?

Uh, probably have more to say about all this, but I have miles to read before I sleep.