System and structure : essays in communication and exchange / Anthony Wilden

Introduction (1980). The scientific discourse : knowledge as commodity -- The symbolic, the imaginary, and the real : Lacan, Lev́i-Strauss, and Freud -- Metaphor and metonymy : Freud's semiotic model of condensation and displacement -- Death, desire and repetition : Commentary on Svevo's Confessions of Zeno -- Montaigne on the paradoxes of individualism : a communication about communication -- The double bind : schizophrenia and God̈el -- Beyond the entropy principle in Freud -- Analog and digital communicatiopn : on negation, signification, and meaning -- Epistemology and ecology: the difference that makes the difference -- Nature and culture : the emergence of symbolic and imaginary exchange -- Critique of phallocentrism : David Paul Schreber on women's liberation -- The structure as law and order : Piaget's genetic structuralism -- Ecosystem and metasystem : a morphogenic model of emergence in open systems -- Order from disorder : noise, trace, and event in evolution and in history -- The scientific discourse as propaganda : the binary opposition -- Language and communication -- Linguistics and semiotics : the unconscious structured like language -- The ideology of opposition and identity : critique of Lacan's theory of the mirror-stage in childhood.

By its trans-disciplinary perspective on the humanities and social sciences and its unconventional approach to controversial subjects, System and Structure has long established its position as a leading text in the study of social, psychological, and economic relations from a systemic and communicational point of view.

Includes bibliographical references and index