The Alternative Culture of Cybernetics

Abstract

The Alternative Culture of Cybernetics Henry Sussman (bio) Neocybernetics and Narrative Bruce Clarke University of Minnesota Press www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/neocybernetics-and-narrative 248 Pages; Print, $25.00 Postmodern, self-reflexive texts as well as their cyberpunk spawn are well understood as fictive reworkings of cybernetic developments. Narratives of bodily transformation in the cybernetic era are often feedback loops reentering the forms of computation and communication technologies into the stories communicated.... Narrative embedding is the primary textual analog of systematic self-reference. The zigzag play and sequence of embedded and embedding narrative frames reenacts the essential paradoxicality in the operation of observing systems. Systems theory reconceives form not as the mere shape of things but as the cognitive boundaries by which thoughts and things are distinguished and observed. Embedded and embedding narrative frames assume precisely this self-referential sense of form by marking the virtual edges of narrative structures. Beginning with his own Posthuman Metamorphosis in 2008 and a co-edited anthology, Emergence and Embodiment the following year, Bruce Clarke has furnished systems theory with a remarkably wide-reaching update, synthesis, consolidation, and reset. This with his invariable self-effacement and irony. His books and articles since that juncture have relentlessly assumed the task of lending the field a cogent voice, bearing, and positionality within the marketplace and politics of critical deliberation. Together with Clarke's 2014 Neocybernetics and Narrative, these studies embody decades of patient stake-out at systems theory's remote outposts; from the seminal post-War Macy Conferences to the 1960's counterculture of San Francisco and The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968); from the German systems and media theories of Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann to the Chilean (although Paris-marinated) biology that brought us autopoiesis; from the platform of French High Theory underwriting Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in their wild narrative argosies, to the Wiltshire, England and Amherst, Massachusetts, whence, respectively, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis issued their game-changing minority reports on the co-symbiotic partnerings deciding the fates of geosphere, biosphere, and finally, of Life itself. Clarke's role as a purveyor of sorely needed insight and structure from one branch office of systems theory to another, as a translator, in the fullest meaning of the term, is richly evident in the above epigraph, from a chapter in Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008) entitled "Metamorphosis and Embedding." The cascading excitement in the passage takes off from a "formal correspondence between recursive forms in the operation of systems and in the structure of narratives." Clarke notes, with an exuberance carrying over from the earlier registration of the same correspondence, on the part of Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), that the recursive operations of cybernetic programs and media were always anticipated, in the annals of culture, by embedded stories-within-stories and self-generating narrative cycles, from the Arabian Nights to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987-1989). What is distinctive about Clarke's engagement with this crucial interface are the comprehensiveness and up-to-dateness of the conceptual toolbox that he brings to bear upon it. First among equals in this theoretical kit are the Social Systems of Niklas Luhmann (1995). The self-referential capability that Clarke attributes to systems, as well as the frame by which a system delineates and sequesters itself, are part and parcel of a pitched division of labor by which, in Luhmann's account, agents, and interests precipitate themselves out of the contexts and surrounds both containing and sustaining them. Clarke's elucidation in the epigraph furnishes compelling evidence as to the full systematic pyrotechnics common to self-fashioning literature and cybernetic technology. And Clarke does not neglect to fill in a vital cognitive capability also embedded within improvisational literature as well as cyber-operations, this entering by way of the self-reference and observation with which Luhmann fits out the dynamics of social systems. The passage ends in a playful escalation of levels of storytelling; this foreshadows the choreography of leaps by which Clarke playfully alights on the dispersed ateliers of systematic sensibility in cultural elucidation. The freshness of Clarke's critique is defined in large measure by...