Bruce Clarke is Professor of English at Texas Tech University and a past president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. His books include Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics.

Mark B. N. Hansen is Professor of Literature at Duke University. He is the author of New Philosophy for New Media and Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media.

Emergence and Embodiment

New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4581-7

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..viiIntroduction: Neocybernetic Emergence BRUCE CLARKE AND MARK B. N. HANSEN………………………………………………………….1Interview with Heinz von Foerster INTERVIEWER: BRUCE CLARKE……………………………………………………………………..26Heinz von Foerster’s Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory BRUCE CLARKE……………………………………………..34The Early Days of Autopoiesis FRANCISCO J VARELA……………………………………………………………………………….62Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology EVAN THOMPSON………………………………………………………………77Beyond Autopoiesis: Inflections of Emergence and Politics in Francisco Varela JOHN PROTEVI………………………………………….94System-Environment Hybrids MARK B. N. HANSEN…………………………………………………………………………………..113Self-Organization and Autopoiesis NIKLAS LUHMANN……………………………………………………………………………….143Space Is the Place: The Laws of Form and Social Systems MICHAEL SCHILTZ…………………………………………………………..157Improvisation: Form and Event-A Spencer-Brownian Calculation EDGAR LANDGRAF……………………………………………………….179Communication versus Communion in Modern Psychic Systems: Maturana, Luhmann, and Cognitive Neurology LINDA BRIGHAM…………………….205Meaning as Event-Machine, or Systems Theory and “The Reconstruction of Deconstruction”: Derrida and Luhmann CARY WOLFE…………………220Complex Visuality: The Radical Middleground IRA LIVINGSTON………………………………………………………………………246Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..263Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..279Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………281

Chapter One

Interview with Heinz von Foerster

July 20, 2001, Pescadero, California

INTERVIEWER: BRUCE CLARKE

Family in Vienna

Bruce Clarke: I wanted to ask you about your very unique style, your playful way of putting professional papers together. Did you always write that way?

Heinz von Foerster: I think my answer is that I’m from Vienna. At the time I was born, at the turn of the century, Vienna was so multicultural-fabulous in medicine, in architecture, in art and painting and drawing. Ernst Mach and people like that came from Vienna. My family belonged to this whirlwind of people. My father was an architect with the electric industry but had lots of friends in mathematics and physics. My mother came from an artistic family. Her people were dancers, painters, sculptors, poets, and I was a little kid tossed into this bunch of different people who met at the home of my parents. My grandmother kept a kind of salon where people from different universes met. The actress Eleanor Duse came to the house.

What was your grandmother’s name?

Marie Lang. She published the first European journal on women’s liberation, and she was therefore known all over Europe.

Did they have the suffrage issue-the women’s suffrage movement that began in the nineteenth century?

They were not directly members of it. My grandmother founded something which came from the British suffrage movement … the settlements, for poor people. And my mother and some of her friends founded one of those settlements in Vienna. So when I was a little boy, staying with my grandmother, sitting under her gigantic desk with big legs, I had my little chair there, and then all the ladies argued about philosophy, women’s labor, and the rights of women. So as a kid I was familiar with the political and the cultural problems which arise in a society.

Uncle Ludwig

In many cases people are victims of semantics. They are not aware of what they are saying. My role is to be a semantic cleaning boy, who comes out with a big broom.

That was Wittgenstein’s point.

Exactly.

To sweep the pointless arguments off the stage.

Exactly. You see, I was a Wittgenstein victim when I was nineteen or twenty. I think I knew the Tractatus by heart….

Now are you related to Wittgenstein?

Yes, I am related distantly.

You have a cousin named Wittgenstein….

Yes, my grandmother married twice. And from her first marriage there are children that are related directly to Wittgenstein. I knew Uncle Ludwig when I was about eleven or twelve. I think I can even localize the time when I met him. My mother was a very good friend of his sister, Margarethe. They were very, very close. I was with her visiting Aunt Margarethe, and a young man came in. He asked me, “Heinz, what would you like to become when you are grown up?” Now I had just passed a very crucial examination. I wanted to get out of grade school and go into the gymnasium. Wittgenstein asked me what I would like to become, and I said I would like to be a Naturforscher [scientist]. To me that was a combination of Fridtjov Nansen and Madame Curie. He said, but then you have to know a lot. I said, but I know a lot; I just passed the examination. And then he said, you know a lot, but you don’t know-how right you are. I said, what? I don’t know how right I am? This was my first encounter with Uncle Ludwig.

Later on I became deeply involved in the Tractatus. And there was a nephew, a real nephew of Ludwig’s by the name of Karl, who also knew the Tractatus by heart: “Heinz, can you tell me proposition 6.24?” I said, “Of course, that’s an easy proposition.” “Yes, but Heinz what about 7.1?” … I was really a pest: “Apologies, ladies and gentlemen; what you are saying is all wrong. According to proposition 2.7 in the Tractatus … that is the case.” They said, “Poor Heinz, what can we do with you?”

Luhmann and Maturana

Were some of your papers driven by the invitations you received?

In most cases it was the consequence of an invitation, either to write a paper or to give a lecture. I tried to strike a balance, to give a paper people should enjoy. I don’t want to talk gibberish that nobody understands. Who are these people and what are they interested in and why did they invite me? This is what I ask myself first, and then I sit down and say, what can I tell them?

As it was with the Luhmann thing, you see. They were all academics. I wanted to do two things. Number one, even if you are not a sociologist, you can say very tough things about sociology which are not easy to digest and which are not being observed, even by the sociologists themselves. The other thing is that you can make them laugh. So I had the flower bouquet-the mathematics for afterward.

Is it easy to get a magical bouquet?

Of course, if you are a professional magician, you can produce them. It is no problem. I was in fact looking forward to that moment: to see what will be on these professors’ faces when I produce that flower bouquet.

Now were these Luhmann’s colleagues?

I think it was the whole faculty of the University of Bielefeld and the members of the research organization that celebrated Luhmann’s retirement. So it was mostly high academia collected there.

Did you have much interaction with Luhmann over the years?

No, not at all. Luhmann himself corresponded a lot with me. He visited me; he was here himself, sitting on this chair; and he was very interested in me because he knew Heinz understands autopoiesis. And he wanted to articulate autopoiesis for social theory. And I always told him, “Be very careful; you will step on Maturana’s toes. The most sensitive things, maybe there are already some swellings on his toes.” But I know Maturana very well. In fact I was present when Varela and Maturana invented the notion of autopoiesis and wrote their first paper. When I left Chile, I took that paper, which was not really completely written, and with one of my students we finished it up so that the Spanglish became English. I even wrote into that paper, “We thank Heinz von Foerster very much for the editorial help.”

Well, that’s only right! Now I came into systems theory a couple of years ago. I did a seminar at Cornell last summer with David Wellbery, and we learned a lot of Luhmann. And then I started talking Luhmann with some of my literature and science friends, and they’re Maturana and Varela fans.

That’s the two directions.

And I’m trying to understand why-what is their problem with Luhmann?

Their problem with Luhmann is they [Maturana and Varela] do not want to have autopoiesis applied to social theory. This is just a personal idiosyncrasy. They would like to keep autopoiesis solely for biological discussion or biological research.

But Maturana and Varela seem also highly socially motivated and make their own ethical statements on the basis of autopoiesis….

Particularly Maturana. He doesn’t want his ideas even being mentioned by someone else.

Well, the cat is out of the bag now.

Changing Social Theory

I flew to the German cybernetics society meeting in Nuremberg. So I said, going over I can think or dream a paper up during the flight. With eighteen hours between San Francisco and Frankfurt, it’ll be easy for me to write up that paper. When I was sitting in the airplane, I realized I had not used my German for twenty years, and I had no idea what to do about it. So I was writing that paper for the German cybernetics society the whole way. When I arrived there, I took my scribbled things out and went to the conference. It was in the Meistersinger Halle, a very large conference room with about two thousand people or something like that. So I started to read and I couldn’t; at the moment I stood on the lectern, they switched on four thousand watts of lights because it was of course a televised affair. So I was completely blind to the audience. Under the tremendous four-kilowatt lamps, sweat was running down my forehead, the heat was unbearable, and then I tried to invent my paper. But apparently I succeeded. When I was through, I had to get into fresh air; I couldn’t stay in that room anymore. So I walked out, sitting on the sidewalk, and a gentleman came running up to me. “Do you know what they were saying?” I said, “No, I couldn’t listen to myself; it was too hot.” “They said, ‘You’ve changed social theory!'” I said, “I hope to the better.” He went on, “You have to come to conferences.” The firm Siemens had organized a program for establishing all the foreign workers, whether from Turkey, from Romania, who came to work in Germany.

The Gastarbeiter.

Pools for the children, entertainment for the grownups, etc. etc. He said, “You’ve changed social theory. You have to tell them what to do about the Turks in Germany.” I said, “Very easy-import Turkish girls.”

“Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors”

Immediately the next day I took the train to Geneva, there to present this story-object, which was to celebrate Piaget’s eightieth birthday. So I presented that story. It produced the greatest uproar of antagonism I have ever received. When I finished with “thank you very much,” I only could hear “Boo!” They were really jumping at me. “Whatever mathematics you have presented here has nothing to do with mathematics; in fact it has nothing to do with anything! I don’t know what you are doing here! Where did you come from, from Mars?”

Well, I was in a very good mood overall…. Whenever I got some of the broadsides shot against me, I had a funny answer. So everybody laughed and nobody was angry. It was a very entertaining hour of argumentation, where people said to me, “This is utter nonsense!” And I said, “Why do you say utter? Why don’t you just say nonsense?”

I confess I found it difficult going.

This is a very difficult paper.

The first time I read it, I really had no idea….

It’s utterly incomprehensible.

But I have come back to it recently, and this is now after studying systems theory and reading Luhmann and also reading some Varela.

It was Varela who said this is my most important paper.

I think I see why he would say that, because it compresses the argument about circularity almost as far down as one could do.

Precisely, yes.

So let me try to describe your argument.

Yes, wonderful. I would be delighted.

Well, if the nervous system is organizationally closed, and this is the case for you and for me and for all nervous systems….

Exactly.

Then how is it that we can agree on the world outside of us? Since we’re both inventing it for ourselves all the time. And whereas in a traditional approach, one would say the world is full of objects and they present themselves to us and we simply are aware of their existence because our nervous systems represent them to us or give the objects to us, then there’s no problem. But if you’re going to be rigorous about a constructivist epistemology, then you should not talk about objects. Because we don’t know them.

Exactly.

So it’s an effort simply to shift the vocabulary of our discussion, and so let us say that objects present “tokens for eigenbehaviors,” which we can establish.

I think you understood it very well. I’ve never gotten such a good report about that paper! I do think there is one point missing in your story, but it is only missing in your story and not in your knowledge. This is that we are both in our world, both in each other’s world. You are in mine, and I am in your world; therefore we establish our eigenbehavior for each other. And we may not agree, but we are caught in the same loop.

That’s the two ourobori together.

If I do that with my eyeglasses-I never poke them in my eyes, I put them properly on the nose, I find my pocket where the eyeglasses go. This is a very stable behavior. Piaget published a crucial paper making the key point that we can understand things only by handling them, by moving them, by moving our own body.

Right. Or we realize that our nervous system is operating in terms of these feedback loops, and so you need the confirmation of the two.

Exactly. There’s a circularity. Piaget’s central point was that you need the motorium to understand the sensorium. If you only look, you will not understand. You have to touch, you have to move, and then you will understand. Or grasp-that’s a good metaphorical statement. You have to grasp things in order to grasp them…. There are easier papers than that!

The Magician

Did you get the paper on Luhmann?

Yes…. “How Recursive Is Communication?”

Yes, it’s a little bit queer. My problem was that all the great German professori were sitting in this gigantic room, all with beards, and they were such caricatures I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was not a single smile to be seen. And I had to do something to produce a smile from one of these guys. I used to be a magician when I was a kid.

Oh, I see.

And so I pulled out a bouquet of flowers.

Well, that makes sense. For instance, in your paper “On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments,” you begin with two paradoxes.

Exactly.

Do you think that is the magician touch?

Exactly. And the interesting thing is that the magician is doing just the opposite of what most people think-hiding something. No, the magician is making things so clear that everybody can see what is going on. And that is the miracle. You must let them see the miracle, making it so convincing that absolutely nothing is hidden, nothing is under the table, everything is on the table, and that makes the whole thing very magical.

Chapter Two

Heinz von Foerster’s Demons

The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory

BRUCE CLARKE

At its inception the discourse of cybernetics centered on the cluster of topics given by the initial title of the famed Macy Conferences, ten of which occurred between 1946 through 1953, “Circular Causality and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems.” The interdisciplinary group here assembled brought together philosophically minded scientific polymaths and pioneers of electronic computation and information theory, such as Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon, with anthropological social scientists such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. A student of the Vienna circle trained in mathematics, physics, and electrical engineering, Heinz von Foerster in 1949 landed newly arrived in the United States and somewhat miraculously in the midst of this uncommon aggregation, in the middle of its run, and, despite minimal proficiency in English, was appointed (by McCulloch) the secretary of the Macy Conference proceedings. A year later and in the influential wake of Norbert Wiener’s 1948 book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, von Foerster suggested changing the name of the Macy Conferences to simply “Cybernetics,” and his suggestion was adopted.

The Macy Conferences represent the high point of the first interdisciplinary synthesis through which cybernetics came forward as a metadiscipline, bringing physical, mathematical, and engineering concepts of entropy, information, and feedback toward an integrated study of complex mechanical, computational, biological, psychic, and social systems. However, in the years after the Macy Conferences closed up shop, this cybernetic synthesis gradually splintered into noncommunicating specializations. Broadly considered, it diverged sharply back into subject/object dichotomy and Cartesian dualism-what could be called “hard” and “soft” camps. The former monopolized its resources, hoarded its grants, and redirected the mathematical and engineering sides of cybernetics toward Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics, computer science, and command-control-communications technologies. To its credit, this is why you now have a computer on your desk and an iPhone in your pocket. The latter camp, often loosely identified with the work of Gregory Bateson, gradually gathered up the cognitive and philosophical insights of cybernetics toward matters of managerial and social systems, psychotherapy, and epistemology. Few persons besides von Foerster could be said to have had a foot in both camps, and no other vision of a holistic cybernetics was forthcoming to split the difference between them. Instead, the abandoned middle ground was eventually filled up with a multifarious cultural mythology centered on celebratory and cautionary images of the cyborg, a theoretical figure built up from variously real and imaginary mergers of biological bodies and electronic brains.

(Continues…)

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