Emergence and Embodiment

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.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Neocybernetic Emergence / Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N26. 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 Tompson 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, Lohmann, 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

“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 Imagination