Description
Book SynopsisExplores the cultural legacy of cybernetics and neocybernetics that offers new insight on the role of the human in an era of the posthuman.
Trade Review“
Emergence and Embodiment is an outstanding collection of sharp, well-crafted essays by prominent authors in the field of science and literature studies, all of whom have made major contributions to discussions of cybernetics, poststructuralism, and posthumanism. Here they demonstrate the viability of neocybernetics as a resource for resolving the dilemmas of the posthuman raised by newer fields of artificial life, complexity theory, and cellular automata.”—
Tim Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society, Duke University
“
Emergence and Embodiment provides a useful overview and detailed analyses of the complex field of neocybernetics and its major thinkers. It indicates the significance and breadth of interdisciplinary work being done in the wake of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, and George Spencer-Brown, even as it makes demands on its readers to rethink some of their assumptions about he last forty years of ‘theory’ in the humanities and the interdisciplinary social sciences.”—
Robert Markley, author of
Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the ImaginationTable of Contents Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Neocybernetic Emergence / Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N26. 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 Tompson 77
Beyond Autopoiesis: Inflections 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: The
Laws 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, Lohmann, 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
