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Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics-the study of communication and control systems-was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics' attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work.In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana's and Varela's creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela's later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann's adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.Contributors. Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	30 octobre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822391388
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Emergence and Embodiment

science and cultural theory

A Series Edited by Barbara Herrnstein Smith

and E. Roy Weintraub

Emergence and Embodiment

New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory

edited by bruce clarke and mark b. n. hansen

Duke University Press•Durham & London•2009

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paperb

Typeset in Minion by

Achorn International Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

Contents

Acknowledgments•vii

Introduction: Neocybernetic Emergence bruce clarke and mark b. n. hansen•1

Interview with Heinz von Foerster interviewer: bruce clarke•26

Heinz von Foerster’s Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory bruce clarke•34

The Early Days of Autopoiesis francisco j. varela•62

Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology evan thompson•77

Beyond Autopoiesis: Inections of Emergence and Politics in Francisco Varela john protevi•94

System-Environment Hybrids mark b. n. hansen•113

Self-Organization and Autopoiesis niklas luhmann•143

Space Is the Place: TheLaws of Form and Social Systems michael schiltz•157

Improvisation: Form and Event— A Spencer-Brownian Calculation edgar landgraf•179

Communication versus Communion in Modern Psychic Systems: Maturana, Luhmann, and Cognitive Neurology linda brigham•205

Meaning as Event-Machine, or Systems Theory and “The Reconstruction of Deconstruction”: Derrida and Luhmann cary wolfe•220

Complex Visuality: The Radical Middleground ira livingston•246

Bibliography•263 Contributors•279 Index•281

Acknowledgments

The groundwork for this volume was a set of conference panels Bruce Clarke organized for the third international meeting of the Society for Literature, Sci-ence, and the Arts, held June2004in Paris, France. The panelists for “Neocy-bernetic Emergence I and II” were Bruce Clarke, Steven Meyer, Mark Hansen, Eric White, Edgar Landgraf, and Cary Wolfe. We would like to thank all the participants in this volume for their con-tributions. We are happy to acknowledge Thomas von Foerster for his kind approval of the text of the interview with Heinz von Foerster and Amanda Pask Heitler for her permission to republish images created by Gordon Pask for von Foerster’s “On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments.” We are grateful to Carl-Auer-Systeme Verlag for permission to publish a trans-lated excerpt ofEinführung in die Systemtheorie, by Niklas Luhmann, and to Amy Cohen-Varela and JohnWiley and Sons, Ltd., for permission to republish Francisco J. Varela’s memoir, “The Early Days of Autopoiesis,” originally pub-lished inSystems Research. It has been a pleasure to work with Reynolds Smith and the staffat Duke University Press. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the assistance and support of Yves Abrioux, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Timothy Lenoir, Lynn Margulis, Robert Markley, Albert Müller, Manuela Rossini, and William Irwin Thompson.

Introduction

Neocybernetic Emergence

bruce clarke and mark b. n. hansen

In his introduction toObserving Systems, “The Ages of Heinz von Foerster,” ﬁrst published in1981, Francisco Varela concluded with a characterization of 1 “the last age of Heinz.” In the chronology of secondorder cybernetics, this would be considered itsrstage, the period during the early1970s when von Foerster laid out his groundbreaking sketches of, in Varela’s words, “recursive mechanisms in cognitive systems,” thereby producing the initial formulations 2 for a cybernetics of cybernetics. What struck Varela in the early1980s was the extent to which the force of von Foerster’s cognitive innovations had not yet gained secure footholds in the mainstream academy, had “notpermeated our intellectual preferences and current thinking”:

There is little doubt that our current models about cognition, the nervous system, and artiﬁcial intelligence are severely dominated by the notion that information is represented from an outthere into an inhere, processed, and an output produced. There is still virtually no challenge to the view of objectivity understood as the condition of independence of descriptions, rather than a circle of mutual elucidation. Further, there is little acceptance yet that the key idea to make these points of view scientiﬁc programmes is the operational closure of cognizing systems, living or otherwise. These are 3 precisely the leitmotives of Heinz’s last stage.

Since Varela made this observation, there has certainly been some signiﬁcant, if modest, penetration of these fundamental cognitive motifs into the “intel lectual preferences” of thinkers across the spectrum of natural, mathematical,and discursive disciplines. As we see it, however, Varela’s words still ring trueof our present time, and to the extent that they do, this volume of essays has important work to do. For it is only by theorizing the operational closure ofcognizing systems that cultural theory can rescue agency—albeit agency of

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