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It is a pleasure to present my lecture, „L’Endomilieu: The Interior is the Exterior of the System” at the 40th ASPLF Congress, “Cosmos: milieu, environment, univers,” at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Abstract

The topic of this paper is an explanation of the inside/outside relation between the milieu and the system.
I would like to place this discussion in the midst of two seemingly opposing views: On the one hand,
the post-structuralist legacy of Foucault, along with the concept of environment of Deleuze and Guattari,
who have assigned the latter towards an outside, and on the other hand, the concept of milieu of theories
of operational closure (Heinz von Foerster, Niklas Luhmann, Gotthard Günther, etc), according to which
the milieu is placed inside the system.
The concept of environment represents an outside for both ecological studies and general systems
theory. It is regarded as an outside that interacts with the system. The self-organization theories initiated
a turn in the system/environment paradigm. Milieu or environment are no longer introduced into the
order of observation as the outside, but only through their difference from the system or, in other words,
via the opposition of system/environment. Through the dialectical method of re-entry, operative theories
assume that there is no longer an outside, and if there is, it is introduced into the system as a blind spot.
Thus, self-organization theories that have formulated openness to the outside and closure to the inside
and provided formalization accodringly, contribute to the abolition of the concept of outside. The
dissolution of an external objective reality is realized in exchange for an omnipotent subject that can see
or observe everything. The inside of the system becomes the outside for self-organization theories as
soon as it turns into a blind spot. The inside of a system, the black box that controls it and simultaneously
classifies its input, forms the unpredictable outside of the observer.
A dialogue between post-structuralist positions on the outside of thinking in combination with the
approaches of the disappearance of the outside in the operative theories can be very fruitful for today’s
conversations about an increasingly complex world and its means to observe its epistemology.