Staying Alive: Cybernetic Persistence

Abstract

Staying Alive:Cybernetic Persistence Bruce Clarke (bio) In some recent writings I ventured to describe what I've called neocybernetic systems theory.1 One way I've approached this description is by drawing a contrast with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, or ANT.2 A sympathetic colleague remarked that if Latour could own ANT, I should lay claim to my own acronym—NST. Thus, a key difference between these theories is that ANT is built around the concept of network, whereas NST is built around the concept of system. The crucial difference between these two forms is that a network is an unbounded structure—in this respect, it offers an environment open for nodal ramification by its actors, but no internally generated dynamics of its own. In contrast, the specific systems at the fore of NST are, in my formulation, autopoietic systems. That is, they are self-producing, hence internally generated, and in key regards, autonomous, systems: that's what makes them neocybernetic. Even while such systems are open with regard to energy flow, their organizations close upon themselves in processual distinction from the environments that afford them—as in the paradigmatic case of the living cell.3 While both of these theories range well beyond literary application, the idea of literary cybernetics admirably pursued in this NLH forum necessarily turns on the fundamental category of system. And the concept of system—as abstracted from the specific range of technological, biological, psychic, and social instantiations developed in NST—is coupled to a coconstitutive metaconcept of the environment. The environments of NST are themselves potentially suffused with systems, but they are not—they are to be distinguished from—systems per se. As defined in this discourse, an environment is unbounded and, as such, too complex to be systematized. Environments are the mediums out of which systems achieve their forms, the resources from which the productive closures of systems emerge. In any event, this is the theory-form I've taken in my own work in literary cybernetics—literary NST if you will. It pivots from Heinz von Foerster's discourse of recursion and self-reference in second-order cybernetics, to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's coupling of autopoiesis and cognition, to the uptake of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form in both Varela and Niklas Luhmann's social systems [End Page 1281] theory.4 This cluster of work was the Stanford school in systems theory as I came upon this material at the end of the 1990s: Luhmann and Friedrich Kittler, and thus von Foerster and Claude Shannon, mediated through David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Tim Lenoir, and Stanford University Press's Writing Science series. But cybernetics itself, as Heather Love and Lea Pao develop the topic, is larger than this particular line of elaboration. In their introduction, "Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity," Love and Pao note the robust interdisciplinary mix at the fabled Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, which ran between 1946-53, but they also observe that these gatherings were thin with regard to representatives from the arts and humanities. It would appear that the British reception of the first cybernetics, from the "Cybernetic Serendipity" of Gordon Pask to the conceptual practice of Roy Ascott, was rather more festive.5 Whatever the case, art historians such as Charissa Terranova have been excavating major, broadly international artistic engagements with the conceptual fecundity and liberatory potential of "fuzzy cybernetics" pretty much since its inception.6 And Love and Pao also note the rich roster of documentation and critical work on "concepts like recursion, self-reference, self-organization, the feedback loop, entropy, entanglement, and emergence" (3) developed over recent decades in the history of science and with the rise of scholarship in literature and science, science and technology studies (STS), and media studies. In fact, "cybernetics" contains so many multitudes that it has become, according to Pao, a "fuzzy" concept. This is hard to deny. To begin with, it contains what is now denominated as first-order cybernetics: the classical discourse around feedback mechanisms and circular operations in biological and social systems that informed the Macy Conferences variously peopled by Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, Warren Mc-Culloch, W...