Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Distinguished Horn Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. His research focuses on systems theory, narrative theory, and ecology. He was the 2019 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. In 2010-11 he was Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM), Bauhaus-University Weimar. His latest books are Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, edited with Sebastien Dutreuil, Writing Gaia: the Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He edits the book series Meaning Systems at Fordham University Press, and co-curates the website Gaia Systems. Phone: 1-806-928-9486 Address: Department of English Texas Tech University Lubbock, TX USA 79409-3091
THE SPACE OF TECHNICITY Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, 2024
If Gaia arises as the production of a co-constructed biosphere-geosphere, and if living organisms... more If Gaia arises as the production of a co-constructed biosphere-geosphere, and if living organisms are the fundamental source of the “technical detours” that are now turning Earth’s veins into our planetary technosphere, then Gaia’s own contingent recursivities as a planetary system would already have been over eons an encompassing case of a planetary technics as that emerges precisely from the form and resources of living systems. This essay will argue that Margulis’s science provides a detailed sketch if not a fully developed brief for such a consequential conception, one that can now be brought to bear on the philosophy of technology.
Dr. Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on Augu... more Dr. Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on August 27, 2021. Their conversation centered on Clarke’s presentation and development of Lynn Margulis’s neocybernetic approach to the Gaia concept in Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. Often seen as an outlier in science since its debut in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory has run a long and varied course, gradually bringing the Earth and life sciences into closer integration around new understandings of planetary dynamics. This interview explores the development of Gaia’s scientific variants and some key theoretical frames that have been brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Particular attention is paid to Margulis’s adaptation of the concept of autopoiesis, which she viewed as providing a clarifying criterion for the autonomous self-production and symbiotic collaboration of living systems, in contrast to the first-order and computational cybernetics of control systems favored by Lovelock. Clarke’s own work in this area extends Margulis’s autopoietic approach to the Gaian system.
Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, Dec 31, 2023
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faste... more The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite [. . .] the general robustness of life on Earth. (Robinson 2020: 43)
This passage from The Ministry for the Future has the generic curiosity of presenting scientific statements about the Anthropocene situation along with plausible conclusions based on those constructions, while stationed within the invented story of a climate-fiction novel. My essay is largely addressed to the former, the nonfiction discourse rather than the fictive imagination of our time of climate crisis, although I will eventually bring these two threads together. The apocalyptic content to be explored here is largely drawn from the same stock of documentation as the plausible conclusions that inform Robinson’s narrative. I approach the topical theme of cultural desperation as a reasonable affect and not at all ironically as an overheated response. But sheer desperation left to itself is likely to drive bad decisions and so to compound both itself and its causes. One way to defuse the negative amplifications of such positive feedbacks, as I hope to explain, is by placing them in Gaian context.
Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, 2022
The concept of autopoiesis redirected attention to the ''self-production" and continuous self-mai... more The concept of autopoiesis redirected attention to the ''self-production" and continuous self-maintenance of living systems--a change of focus making the genome part of a much larger cellular apparatus characterized by cyclical metabolic processes. Although the autopoiesis concept would have a significant if heterogeneous reception, both the genomic and the autopoietic views of life would become contested in their turn by major advances in our understanding of symbiosis as a decisive dynamic that binds living systems into multigenomic communities and collective consortiums. The rise of holobiont theory, in turn, has led to higher profiles for the ideas of sympoiesis and symbiopoiesis that were critical responses to the original presentation of autopoiesis. In this article, we tackle this confrontation of concepts, especially as played out in Margulis's own work.
Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice, 2023
A sizable body of scholarship has been unfolding the presence and the significance of the vast re... more A sizable body of scholarship has been unfolding the presence and the significance of the vast repertoire of sensory channels and communicative techniques natural processes take up to hold communities of non- human and non- animal organisms together. The Overstory observes and creatively voices these recent trends in the biochemistry and community ecology of plant behavior. It threads these themes through a series of human characters to whom the trees themselves are calling out: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (O, 165). Richard Powers’ novel offers a fictional reflection on new modes of cross- species understanding by placing its human characters at the margins and in milieux where other species share the same medium and invite them to consort with their symbiotic neighbors. Critical responses to The Overstory novel have already explored a wide range of recent research in plant cognition and communication. This essay discusses these connections through considerations of animacy, animism, and processes of origina-tion and metamorphosis, as these themes take on form within the narrative. It then draws on Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’ presentation of “involutionary momentum” as that concept is brought into focus by an episode in the novel’s adaptation of the recent history of forest ecology. In this instance, The Overstory retails this scientific discipline’s struggle out of the grip of neo- Darwinist orthodoxy in order to clear ontological space for the natural dynamics of ecological communication across species and kingdoms, culminating in the depiction of a human character receiving arboreal enlightenment.
Gaia now confronts us with states of operation and response that threaten long-term habitability ... more Gaia now confronts us with states of operation and response that threaten long-term habitability for many species. Authored by a strong team of accomplished scholars—astrophysicist Adam Frank, planetary scientist David Grinspoon, and astrobiologist Sara Walker—the recent article “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process” probes ideas concerning a viable planetary integration of the technosphere with the biosphere. However, the concept of intelligence comes up short in their efforts to integrate planetary biology and technological society. In short, their description of planetary intelligence wavers between a control regime and an autonomous process. The conceptual strains of “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process” indicate that the preferable, properly Gaian formulation is planetary cognition, a theoretical framing that embeds the technosphere within its biospheric conditions of possibility.
In this essay I contrast a great late-twentieth century science fiction, Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco, ... more In this essay I contrast a great late-twentieth century science fiction, Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco, published in 1986, to a great twenty-first century science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, published in 2015, regarding their treatments of artificial, computational intelligence in relation to organic, embodied intelligence. The stories of both novels are largely set on starships launched from outposts in our solar system by near-future technological societies pursuing dreams of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, in the case of Fiasco, or of the human settlement of distant worlds, in the case of Aurora. Both literary texts offer ample opportunity to reflect on the interrelation of narrative and cognition as these matters arise in the representation of autopoietic life and organic ecologies in relation to machine intelligence and of the wider environmental contingencies pertaining to these various modes of system operations. I will anticipate my thesis about this comparison here just by noting that the journey through space told by Fiasco is linear, a one-way ticket to an unhappy destination, whereas the journey told by Aurora is circular, a failed mission with a successful homecoming. And as Heinz von Foerster noted shortly after Fiasco was written, "Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity" (Von Foerster, 1990, p. 225).
The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, eds. Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru, 2021
This article addresses systems theory in its second-order line of development—neocybernetic syste... more This article addresses systems theory in its second-order line of development—neocybernetic systems theory (NST)—as that takes off from the recursive turn in second-order cybernetics and the concept of autopoiesis developed in biological systems theory. Niklas Luhmann radicalized second-order cybernetics’ epistemological constructivism and lifted the conceptual architecture of autopoiesis out of its original biological reference, reformatting them within his theory of social systems as composed of communications (rather than persons). Within NST, social systems theory also develops a concept of world society. Modernity brings world society forth as the final horizon of psychic and social operations. Critical perspectives on world society as constituted in social systems theory include the alternative world concepts in John Law’s amalgamation of science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) and Arturo Escobar’s systems-theoretical approach to design theory. In Luhmann’s own presentation, functional differentiation in world society generates inequality and social exclusion as a matter of course. Because social systems cannot be steered, they must be nudged by their environments. Moreover, world society may also be placed in planetary context as open to the psychic processing of ecological noise, or in the phrase of Isabelle Stengers, the intrusion of Gaia. This newly insistent recognition of environmental agency informs Lynn Margulis’s world concept of autopoietic Gaia, a system concept with the potential to change world society’s current course toward an ecological dead end.
At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a ... more At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a slow-rolling revelation, a protracted unraveling, for it took me quite a while to unwrap cybernetics’ conceptual core from out of the layers of adjacent or covering discourses that had obscured or forgotten their own origins in the fecundity of cybernetic ideas. Heinz von Foerster’s relation to the Whole Earth Catalog and the systems counterculture around CoEvolution Quarterly were instrumental for my subsequent cybernetic development toward the work of Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann on the one hand, and Lovelock and Margulis on the other.
Planetary Logics in Contemporary Performance, Sorbonne Nouvelle, May 4, 2017
This talk will orbit the spatial form of Gaia, the “biological cybernetic system” originally hypo... more This talk will orbit the spatial form of Gaia, the “biological cybernetic system” originally hypothesized by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and 1970s. Grasping the form of Gaia is crucial for thinking the place of the human in relation to its world. While Gaia has typically been treated as a singular planetary “whole system” on the model of a living cell or an organism, Bruno Latour reads Lovelock against the grain to extract an anti-holistic construction of Gaia. Latour’s recent writings address Gaia as “a tiny membrane,” the “thin surface film of the Earth,” which he terms the “critical zone,” the place we appear to be in the effort to construe our being as somewhere inside Gaia. In the rest of this talk I bring Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology to bear on Latour’s Gaia in relation to key scientific treatments of Gaia’s boundaries in James Lovelock and Tyler Volk. Stated in Sloterdijk’s idiom, what has now been made explicit is that Gaia is the immunitary ur-sphere, the originary celestial canopy. We just did not realize until recently that our lives took place not under its care but inside its processes.
Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” affords a non-systemic perspective on control ... more Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” affords a non-systemic perspective on control in systems theory, specifically, in the line of second-order systems theory that connects Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann. The latent political and cybernetic subtexts of Deleuze’s “Postscript” are detailed in Antonio Negri’s interview with Deleuze, “Control and Becoming.” But in the transit from the dialogical text of “Control and Becoming” to the monological statement “Control Societies,” the topic of communication falls clean away from the latter. And while the concept of communication is as foundational to neocybernetic developments in systems theory as it was to the first cybernetics, in that same development, as I will detail, the concept of control undergoes a radical dismantling. However, once Deleuze cuts the discussion of control societies loose from Negri’s intervention, he also puts communication under erasure, eliminating the very concept by which systems theory defines society, a social system of whatever stripe being one that produces an autopoiesis of communication. The concept of control society stabilized in Deleuze’s text, then, is constructed by an unhinging of control with the deletion or un-marking of communication—its cybernetic counterpart as well as its virtual infrastructure, its contingent systemic modality.
At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James ... more At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch
What would be the form of a Gaian biopolitics? Current biopolitical thought provides an apt occas... more What would be the form of a Gaian biopolitics? Current biopolitical thought provides an apt occasion to consolidate some abiding theoretical leads developed several decades earlier in the milieu of the systems counterculture, a loosely collegial group of seminal scientific thinkers, including Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela, whose intellectual adventures were chronicled in the Whole Earth Catalog, its journalistic successor, CoEvolution Quarterly, and in their collaborative pursuit of a “planetary culture” organized and published by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson. Within the systems counterculture, second-order developments of cybernetic ideas and practices led them beyond mainstream doctrines and institutions. Varela in particular then made the planetary immunitary connection explicit in remarking that the immune system itself may be taken as operating “like a microcosmic version of Gaia.” This essay thinks biological systems theory, Gaia theory, and biopolitics together through their shared participation in immunitary discourses.
Until recently, the Earth and its inhabitants were living happily in the holocene epoch, the begi... more Until recently, the Earth and its inhabitants were living happily in the holocene epoch, the beginning of which was stipulated as the end of the last ice age. However, for over a decade, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) has been promoting the notion of a new geological epoch, “the anthropocene,” to the point that its meme, as they say, has begun to go viral. “The anthropocene” is purportedly to be distinguished from the holocene by the sheer aggregation of humanity’s global effects. Our planetary footprint is now to be accorded primary credit for the geological status of the planet--hence, “the anthropocene.” However, I am placing this term in scare quotes to remind my reader that at as of yet, “the anthropocene” is not an observation, it is a slogan. It has been invented and presented to our attention for a cluster of reasons that are significantly other than scientific.
In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communic... more In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communication in his 1967 work The Mind of the Dolphin. The eight-year-old project that The Mind of the Dolphin recounts for public consumption details his aspiration to achieve an unprecedented breakthrough beyond companionate communion to fully abstract linguistic communication across species boundaries. Between 1959 and 1968 Lilly wagered and lost his mainstream scientific career largely over this audacious, ultimately inconclusive bid to establish and document for scientific validation “communication with a nonhuman mind.” In that effort, however, he mobilized the best available tools, a cutting-edge array of cybernetic concepts. He leaned heavily on the information theory bound up with first-order cybernetics and operated with heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era. As I will elicit through some close readings of his texts, in that process Lilly also homed in on crucial epistemological renovations with a constructivist redescription of cognition that may have influenced and motivated his colleague Heinz von Foerster’s more renowned formulations, arriving in the early 1970s, of a second-order cybernetics.
Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemolo... more Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. > Problem • Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.
THE SPACE OF TECHNICITY Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, 2024
If Gaia arises as the production of a co-constructed biosphere-geosphere, and if living organisms... more If Gaia arises as the production of a co-constructed biosphere-geosphere, and if living organisms are the fundamental source of the “technical detours” that are now turning Earth’s veins into our planetary technosphere, then Gaia’s own contingent recursivities as a planetary system would already have been over eons an encompassing case of a planetary technics as that emerges precisely from the form and resources of living systems. This essay will argue that Margulis’s science provides a detailed sketch if not a fully developed brief for such a consequential conception, one that can now be brought to bear on the philosophy of technology.
Dr. Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on Augu... more Dr. Asijit Datta interviewed literature and science scholar Bruce Clarke during a webinar on August 27, 2021. Their conversation centered on Clarke’s presentation and development of Lynn Margulis’s neocybernetic approach to the Gaia concept in Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. Often seen as an outlier in science since its debut in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, Gaia theory has run a long and varied course, gradually bringing the Earth and life sciences into closer integration around new understandings of planetary dynamics. This interview explores the development of Gaia’s scientific variants and some key theoretical frames that have been brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Particular attention is paid to Margulis’s adaptation of the concept of autopoiesis, which she viewed as providing a clarifying criterion for the autonomous self-production and symbiotic collaboration of living systems, in contrast to the first-order and computational cybernetics of control systems favored by Lovelock. Clarke’s own work in this area extends Margulis’s autopoietic approach to the Gaian system.
Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene, Dec 31, 2023
The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faste... more The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth's history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite [. . .] the general robustness of life on Earth. (Robinson 2020: 43)
This passage from The Ministry for the Future has the generic curiosity of presenting scientific statements about the Anthropocene situation along with plausible conclusions based on those constructions, while stationed within the invented story of a climate-fiction novel. My essay is largely addressed to the former, the nonfiction discourse rather than the fictive imagination of our time of climate crisis, although I will eventually bring these two threads together. The apocalyptic content to be explored here is largely drawn from the same stock of documentation as the plausible conclusions that inform Robinson’s narrative. I approach the topical theme of cultural desperation as a reasonable affect and not at all ironically as an overheated response. But sheer desperation left to itself is likely to drive bad decisions and so to compound both itself and its causes. One way to defuse the negative amplifications of such positive feedbacks, as I hope to explain, is by placing them in Gaian context.
Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, 2022
The concept of autopoiesis redirected attention to the ''self-production" and continuous self-mai... more The concept of autopoiesis redirected attention to the ''self-production" and continuous self-maintenance of living systems--a change of focus making the genome part of a much larger cellular apparatus characterized by cyclical metabolic processes. Although the autopoiesis concept would have a significant if heterogeneous reception, both the genomic and the autopoietic views of life would become contested in their turn by major advances in our understanding of symbiosis as a decisive dynamic that binds living systems into multigenomic communities and collective consortiums. The rise of holobiont theory, in turn, has led to higher profiles for the ideas of sympoiesis and symbiopoiesis that were critical responses to the original presentation of autopoiesis. In this article, we tackle this confrontation of concepts, especially as played out in Margulis's own work.
Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice, 2023
A sizable body of scholarship has been unfolding the presence and the significance of the vast re... more A sizable body of scholarship has been unfolding the presence and the significance of the vast repertoire of sensory channels and communicative techniques natural processes take up to hold communities of non- human and non- animal organisms together. The Overstory observes and creatively voices these recent trends in the biochemistry and community ecology of plant behavior. It threads these themes through a series of human characters to whom the trees themselves are calling out: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (O, 165). Richard Powers’ novel offers a fictional reflection on new modes of cross- species understanding by placing its human characters at the margins and in milieux where other species share the same medium and invite them to consort with their symbiotic neighbors. Critical responses to The Overstory novel have already explored a wide range of recent research in plant cognition and communication. This essay discusses these connections through considerations of animacy, animism, and processes of origina-tion and metamorphosis, as these themes take on form within the narrative. It then draws on Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’ presentation of “involutionary momentum” as that concept is brought into focus by an episode in the novel’s adaptation of the recent history of forest ecology. In this instance, The Overstory retails this scientific discipline’s struggle out of the grip of neo- Darwinist orthodoxy in order to clear ontological space for the natural dynamics of ecological communication across species and kingdoms, culminating in the depiction of a human character receiving arboreal enlightenment.
Gaia now confronts us with states of operation and response that threaten long-term habitability ... more Gaia now confronts us with states of operation and response that threaten long-term habitability for many species. Authored by a strong team of accomplished scholars—astrophysicist Adam Frank, planetary scientist David Grinspoon, and astrobiologist Sara Walker—the recent article “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process” probes ideas concerning a viable planetary integration of the technosphere with the biosphere. However, the concept of intelligence comes up short in their efforts to integrate planetary biology and technological society. In short, their description of planetary intelligence wavers between a control regime and an autonomous process. The conceptual strains of “Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process” indicate that the preferable, properly Gaian formulation is planetary cognition, a theoretical framing that embeds the technosphere within its biospheric conditions of possibility.
In this essay I contrast a great late-twentieth century science fiction, Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco, ... more In this essay I contrast a great late-twentieth century science fiction, Stanislaw Lem's Fiasco, published in 1986, to a great twenty-first century science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, published in 2015, regarding their treatments of artificial, computational intelligence in relation to organic, embodied intelligence. The stories of both novels are largely set on starships launched from outposts in our solar system by near-future technological societies pursuing dreams of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, in the case of Fiasco, or of the human settlement of distant worlds, in the case of Aurora. Both literary texts offer ample opportunity to reflect on the interrelation of narrative and cognition as these matters arise in the representation of autopoietic life and organic ecologies in relation to machine intelligence and of the wider environmental contingencies pertaining to these various modes of system operations. I will anticipate my thesis about this comparison here just by noting that the journey through space told by Fiasco is linear, a one-way ticket to an unhappy destination, whereas the journey told by Aurora is circular, a failed mission with a successful homecoming. And as Heinz von Foerster noted shortly after Fiasco was written, "Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity" (Von Foerster, 1990, p. 225).
The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory, eds. Jeffrey Di Leo and Christian Moraru, 2021
This article addresses systems theory in its second-order line of development—neocybernetic syste... more This article addresses systems theory in its second-order line of development—neocybernetic systems theory (NST)—as that takes off from the recursive turn in second-order cybernetics and the concept of autopoiesis developed in biological systems theory. Niklas Luhmann radicalized second-order cybernetics’ epistemological constructivism and lifted the conceptual architecture of autopoiesis out of its original biological reference, reformatting them within his theory of social systems as composed of communications (rather than persons). Within NST, social systems theory also develops a concept of world society. Modernity brings world society forth as the final horizon of psychic and social operations. Critical perspectives on world society as constituted in social systems theory include the alternative world concepts in John Law’s amalgamation of science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) and Arturo Escobar’s systems-theoretical approach to design theory. In Luhmann’s own presentation, functional differentiation in world society generates inequality and social exclusion as a matter of course. Because social systems cannot be steered, they must be nudged by their environments. Moreover, world society may also be placed in planetary context as open to the psychic processing of ecological noise, or in the phrase of Isabelle Stengers, the intrusion of Gaia. This newly insistent recognition of environmental agency informs Lynn Margulis’s world concept of autopoietic Gaia, a system concept with the potential to change world society’s current course toward an ecological dead end.
At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a ... more At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a slow-rolling revelation, a protracted unraveling, for it took me quite a while to unwrap cybernetics’ conceptual core from out of the layers of adjacent or covering discourses that had obscured or forgotten their own origins in the fecundity of cybernetic ideas. Heinz von Foerster’s relation to the Whole Earth Catalog and the systems counterculture around CoEvolution Quarterly were instrumental for my subsequent cybernetic development toward the work of Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann on the one hand, and Lovelock and Margulis on the other.
Planetary Logics in Contemporary Performance, Sorbonne Nouvelle, May 4, 2017
This talk will orbit the spatial form of Gaia, the “biological cybernetic system” originally hypo... more This talk will orbit the spatial form of Gaia, the “biological cybernetic system” originally hypothesized by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and 1970s. Grasping the form of Gaia is crucial for thinking the place of the human in relation to its world. While Gaia has typically been treated as a singular planetary “whole system” on the model of a living cell or an organism, Bruno Latour reads Lovelock against the grain to extract an anti-holistic construction of Gaia. Latour’s recent writings address Gaia as “a tiny membrane,” the “thin surface film of the Earth,” which he terms the “critical zone,” the place we appear to be in the effort to construe our being as somewhere inside Gaia. In the rest of this talk I bring Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology to bear on Latour’s Gaia in relation to key scientific treatments of Gaia’s boundaries in James Lovelock and Tyler Volk. Stated in Sloterdijk’s idiom, what has now been made explicit is that Gaia is the immunitary ur-sphere, the originary celestial canopy. We just did not realize until recently that our lives took place not under its care but inside its processes.
Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” affords a non-systemic perspective on control ... more Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on Control Societies” affords a non-systemic perspective on control in systems theory, specifically, in the line of second-order systems theory that connects Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann. The latent political and cybernetic subtexts of Deleuze’s “Postscript” are detailed in Antonio Negri’s interview with Deleuze, “Control and Becoming.” But in the transit from the dialogical text of “Control and Becoming” to the monological statement “Control Societies,” the topic of communication falls clean away from the latter. And while the concept of communication is as foundational to neocybernetic developments in systems theory as it was to the first cybernetics, in that same development, as I will detail, the concept of control undergoes a radical dismantling. However, once Deleuze cuts the discussion of control societies loose from Negri’s intervention, he also puts communication under erasure, eliminating the very concept by which systems theory defines society, a social system of whatever stripe being one that produces an autopoiesis of communication. The concept of control society stabilized in Deleuze’s text, then, is constructed by an unhinging of control with the deletion or un-marking of communication—its cybernetic counterpart as well as its virtual infrastructure, its contingent systemic modality.
At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James ... more At its inception innocent of philosophical or metaphysical designs, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis was soon liberated from the precincts of scientific cultivation to enter into cultural free association. Nonetheless, scientific and scholarly attention and debate have long precipitated a bona fide discourse of Gaia theory. Moreover, intellectually serious extra-scientific figures of Gaia have also been on the rise in the last decade. This essay treats a selection of these newer Gaian figures, specifically, Isabelle Stengers’s Gaia the Intruder and Bruno Latour’s secular Gaia, in relation to Lovelock’s Gaia and Lynn Margulis’s evocations of autopoietic Gaia. When nuanced through second-order systems theory, the discourse of autopoietic Gaia satisfies Stengers’s and Latour’s demands for a non-holistic, heterogeneous yet coherent Gaia concept fit for communicative efficacy in the so-called Anthropocene epoch
What would be the form of a Gaian biopolitics? Current biopolitical thought provides an apt occas... more What would be the form of a Gaian biopolitics? Current biopolitical thought provides an apt occasion to consolidate some abiding theoretical leads developed several decades earlier in the milieu of the systems counterculture, a loosely collegial group of seminal scientific thinkers, including Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela, whose intellectual adventures were chronicled in the Whole Earth Catalog, its journalistic successor, CoEvolution Quarterly, and in their collaborative pursuit of a “planetary culture” organized and published by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson. Within the systems counterculture, second-order developments of cybernetic ideas and practices led them beyond mainstream doctrines and institutions. Varela in particular then made the planetary immunitary connection explicit in remarking that the immune system itself may be taken as operating “like a microcosmic version of Gaia.” This essay thinks biological systems theory, Gaia theory, and biopolitics together through their shared participation in immunitary discourses.
Until recently, the Earth and its inhabitants were living happily in the holocene epoch, the begi... more Until recently, the Earth and its inhabitants were living happily in the holocene epoch, the beginning of which was stipulated as the end of the last ice age. However, for over a decade, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) has been promoting the notion of a new geological epoch, “the anthropocene,” to the point that its meme, as they say, has begun to go viral. “The anthropocene” is purportedly to be distinguished from the holocene by the sheer aggregation of humanity’s global effects. Our planetary footprint is now to be accorded primary credit for the geological status of the planet--hence, “the anthropocene.” However, I am placing this term in scare quotes to remind my reader that at as of yet, “the anthropocene” is not an observation, it is a slogan. It has been invented and presented to our attention for a cluster of reasons that are significantly other than scientific.
In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communic... more In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communication in his 1967 work The Mind of the Dolphin. The eight-year-old project that The Mind of the Dolphin recounts for public consumption details his aspiration to achieve an unprecedented breakthrough beyond companionate communion to fully abstract linguistic communication across species boundaries. Between 1959 and 1968 Lilly wagered and lost his mainstream scientific career largely over this audacious, ultimately inconclusive bid to establish and document for scientific validation “communication with a nonhuman mind.” In that effort, however, he mobilized the best available tools, a cutting-edge array of cybernetic concepts. He leaned heavily on the information theory bound up with first-order cybernetics and operated with heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era. As I will elicit through some close readings of his texts, in that process Lilly also homed in on crucial epistemological renovations with a constructivist redescription of cognition that may have influenced and motivated his colleague Heinz von Foerster’s more renowned formulations, arriving in the early 1970s, of a second-order cybernetics.
Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemolo... more Context • In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. > Problem • Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.
In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They sugges... more In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental hi...
GAIAN SYSTEMS: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, 2020
Now out.
*Gaian Systems* reviews and assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought t... more Now out.
*Gaian Systems* reviews and assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on the discourse of Gaia. Gaia theory is systems theory. In particular, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s initial Gaia research was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. A primary outlet for the Gaia hypothesis was CoEvolution Quarterly, the periodical successor to the Whole Earth Catalog. This venue insured that early in their mutual developments, Gaia theory intersected with second-order cybernetics, a leading edge of systems theory’s own epoch of countercultural transformations.
The recent Gaia discourses of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour variously contest its cybernetic status. *Gaian Systems* sharpens this debate by engaging Latour in particular on the issue of Gaia’s systems description. Lovelock and Margulis consistently position Gaia theory as an application of either first- or second-order cybernetic systems theory. From these affirmations and exigencies I extend my own systems-theoretical synthesis under the technical phrase metabiotic Gaia. *Gaian Systems* shows how metabiotic Gaia discourse illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations, including system boundaries, biopolitics, the immunitary paradigm, symbiosis, the holobiont, astrobiology, the Anthropocene, the geological turn, and the new geocentrism.
*Gaian Systems* uniquely traces the particular signature of Lynn Margulis on the evolution of Gaia theory. Other critical treatments tend to take Lovelock’s Gaia as the last word on the topic. In fact, Margulis occasionally published her own variations on Lovelock’s cybernetics. This study is the first to follow Margulis’s lead to see what the autopoietic turn can add to Gaia’s conception and description. *Gaian Systems* also makes selections from Margulis’s unpublished professional correspondence available for the first time. Additionally, no previous study has gone into this level of detail on the commerce of the Gaia hypothesis with the systems counterculture, the remarkable collegial network established by the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly, and the Lindisfarne Association.
Informed evocations of Gaia theory now accompany a growing sense of emergency over an Earth system in peril of entering a new regime unconducive to many current life forms, including, of course, our own. The rise of Gaia theory preceded and prepared for the current recognitions of a global climatic and environmental crisis. These trends have run together with a discourse of the Anthropocene through which to acknowledge the massive accumulation of humanity’s activities now altering the functioning of the Earth system. However, whatever its current state may be, we now effectively observe the Earth system of our present concern through the Gaia concept, a massively complex but newly concrete presence for our planetary imagination to grasp as a way to a symbiotic planet whose resources are more evenly distributed. The current phrase “Earth system” is the mainstreamed locution for Lovelock’s original thought of Gaia over half a century ago as a “biological cybernetic system.” Gaia is systems thinking at and for the planetary level.
Introduction: An Epistemological Transition Part 1. Gaia Discourse 1. A Paradigm Shift 2. Thinkers of Gaia 3. Neocybernetics of Gaia Part 2. The Systems Counterculture 4. The Whole Earth Network 5. The Lindisfarne Connection 6. Margulis and Autopoiesis Part 3. Gaian Enquiries 7. The Planetary Imaginary 8. Planetary Immunity 9. Astrobiology and the Anthropocene
Earth, Life & System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet honors the science of Lynn Margulis... more Earth, Life & System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet honors the science of Lynn Margulis by exploring its repercussions and related topics across numerous disciplines.
This collection brings together specialists in paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, geobiology, developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science to address the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science. These include astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of Earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and Earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions.
Neocybernetics and Narrative opens a new chapter in Bruce Clarke’s project of rethinking narrativ... more Neocybernetics and Narrative opens a new chapter in Bruce Clarke’s project of rethinking narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into media studies and narrative theory. Clarke offers readers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, he interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Mind of My Mind), movies (Avatar, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), as well as Aramis, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway.
With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars, The R... more With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume:
•links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
•surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
•traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism.
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.
With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.
Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was m... more Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work.
In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.
Contributors. Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe
From Dr. Moreau’s Beast People to David Cronenberg’s Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem’s robot constructo... more From Dr. Moreau’s Beast People to David Cronenberg’s Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem’s robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler’s human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs.
New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman.
Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox.
Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.
My talk at the Lynn Margulis Memorial symposium, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, March 23... more My talk at the Lynn Margulis Memorial symposium, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, March 23-25, 2012:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jZo3E09RVI&feature=youtu.be
A longer version, with documentation: “‘Gaia is not an Organism’: The Early Scientific Collaboration of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock,” in _Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel_, ed. Dorion Sagan (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012), 32-43.
In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They sugges... more In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007.
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman is the first work of its kind to gather d... more The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman is the first work of its kind to gather diverse critical treatments of the posthuman and posthumanism together in a single volume. Fifteen scholars from six different countries address the historical and aesthetic dimensions of posthuman figures alongside posthumanism as a new paradigm in the critical humanities. The three parts and their chapters trace the history of the posthuman in literature and other media, including film and video games, and identify major political, philosophical, and techno-scientific issues raised in the literary and cinematic narratives of the posthuman and posthumanist discourses. The volume surveys the key works, primary modes, and critical theories engaged by depictions of the posthuman and discussions about posthumanism.
With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars,The Ro... more With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars,The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume:
- Links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
- Surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
- Traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.
Part One: Literatures and Sciences Introduction 1. AI and ALife - John Johnston 2. Alchemy - Mark S. Morrisson 3. Biology - Sabine Sielke 4. Chaos and Complexity Theory - Ira Livingston 5. Chemistry - Jay Labinger 6. Climate Science - Robert Markley 7. Cognitive Science - Joseph Tabbi 8. Cybernetics - Søren Brier 9. Ecology - Stacy Alaimo 10. Evolution - David Amigoni 11. Genetics - Judith Roof 12. Geology - Stephen A. Norwick 13. Information Theory - Philipp Schweighauser 14. Mathematics - Brain Rotman 15. Medicine - George Rousseau 16. Nanotechnology - Colin Milburn 17. Physics - Dirk Vanderbeke 18. Psychoanalysis - Arkady Plotnitsky 19. Systems Theory - Bruce Clarke 20. Thermodynamics - John Bruni Part Two: Disciplinary and Theoretical Approaches Introduction 21. Agricultural Studies - Susan Squier 22. Animal Studies - Richard Nash 23. Art Connections - Robert Pepperell 24. Cultural Science Studies - Maureen McNeil 25. Deconstruction - Vicky Kirby 26. E-Literature - Joseph Tabbi 27. Feminist Science Studies - Susan Squier and Melissa Littlefield 28. Game Studies - Ivan Callus and Gordon Calleja 29. History of Science - Henning Schmidgen 30. Media Studies - Mark B. N. Hansen 31. Philosophy of Science - Alfred Nordmann 32. Posthumanism - Neil Badmington 33. Science Fiction - Lisa Yaszek 34. Semiotics - Paul Cobley Part Three: Periods and Cultures Introduction 35. Greece and Rome - Emma Gee 36. Middle Ages and Early Renaissance - Arielle Saiber 37. Scientific "Revolution" I: Copernicus to Boyle - Alvin Snider 38. Scientific "Revolution" II: Newton to Laplace - Lucinda Cole 39. Romanticism - Noah Heringman 40. Industrialism - Virginia Richter 41. Russia - Kenneth Knoespel 42. Japan - Thomas Lamarre 43. Modernism - Hugh Crawford 44. Postmodernism - Stefan Herbrechter
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Papers by Bruce Clarke
This passage from The Ministry for the Future has the generic curiosity of presenting scientific statements about the Anthropocene situation along with plausible conclusions based on those constructions, while stationed within the invented story of a climate-fiction novel. My essay is largely addressed to the former, the nonfiction discourse rather than the fictive imagination of our time of climate crisis, although I will eventually bring these two threads together. The apocalyptic content to be explored here is largely drawn from the same stock of documentation as the plausible conclusions that inform Robinson’s narrative. I approach the topical theme of cultural desperation as a reasonable affect and not at all ironically as an overheated response. But sheer desperation left to itself is likely to drive bad decisions and so to compound both itself and its causes. One way to defuse the negative amplifications of such positive feedbacks, as I hope to explain, is by placing them in Gaian context.
metabolic processes. Although the autopoiesis concept would have a significant if heterogeneous reception, both the genomic and the autopoietic
views of life would become contested in their turn by major advances in our understanding of symbiosis as a decisive dynamic that binds living systems into multigenomic communities and collective consortiums. The rise
of holobiont theory, in turn, has led to higher profiles for the ideas of sympoiesis and symbiopoiesis that were critical responses to the original presentation of autopoiesis. In this article, we tackle this confrontation of concepts, especially as played out in Margulis's own work.
to whom the trees themselves are calling out: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (O, 165). Richard Powers’ novel offers a fictional reflection on new modes of cross- species understanding by placing its human characters at the margins and in milieux where other species share the same medium and invite them to consort with their symbiotic neighbors. Critical responses to The Overstory novel have already explored a wide range of recent research in plant cognition and communication.
This essay discusses these connections through considerations of animacy, animism, and processes of origina-tion and metamorphosis, as these themes take on form within the narrative. It then draws on Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’ presentation of “involutionary momentum” as that concept is brought into focus by an episode in the novel’s adaptation of the recent history of forest ecology. In this instance, The Overstory retails this scientific discipline’s struggle out of the grip of neo- Darwinist orthodoxy in order to clear ontological space for the natural dynamics of ecological communication across species and kingdoms, culminating in the depiction of a human character receiving arboreal enlightenment.
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.
This passage from The Ministry for the Future has the generic curiosity of presenting scientific statements about the Anthropocene situation along with plausible conclusions based on those constructions, while stationed within the invented story of a climate-fiction novel. My essay is largely addressed to the former, the nonfiction discourse rather than the fictive imagination of our time of climate crisis, although I will eventually bring these two threads together. The apocalyptic content to be explored here is largely drawn from the same stock of documentation as the plausible conclusions that inform Robinson’s narrative. I approach the topical theme of cultural desperation as a reasonable affect and not at all ironically as an overheated response. But sheer desperation left to itself is likely to drive bad decisions and so to compound both itself and its causes. One way to defuse the negative amplifications of such positive feedbacks, as I hope to explain, is by placing them in Gaian context.
metabolic processes. Although the autopoiesis concept would have a significant if heterogeneous reception, both the genomic and the autopoietic
views of life would become contested in their turn by major advances in our understanding of symbiosis as a decisive dynamic that binds living systems into multigenomic communities and collective consortiums. The rise
of holobiont theory, in turn, has led to higher profiles for the ideas of sympoiesis and symbiopoiesis that were critical responses to the original presentation of autopoiesis. In this article, we tackle this confrontation of concepts, especially as played out in Margulis's own work.
to whom the trees themselves are calling out: “The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help” (O, 165). Richard Powers’ novel offers a fictional reflection on new modes of cross- species understanding by placing its human characters at the margins and in milieux where other species share the same medium and invite them to consort with their symbiotic neighbors. Critical responses to The Overstory novel have already explored a wide range of recent research in plant cognition and communication.
This essay discusses these connections through considerations of animacy, animism, and processes of origina-tion and metamorphosis, as these themes take on form within the narrative. It then draws on Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers’ presentation of “involutionary momentum” as that concept is brought into focus by an episode in the novel’s adaptation of the recent history of forest ecology. In this instance, The Overstory retails this scientific discipline’s struggle out of the grip of neo- Darwinist orthodoxy in order to clear ontological space for the natural dynamics of ecological communication across species and kingdoms, culminating in the depiction of a human character receiving arboreal enlightenment.
radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. > Method • This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. > Results • In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. > Implications • As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. > Key words • Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.
*Gaian Systems* reviews and assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on the discourse of Gaia. Gaia theory is systems theory. In particular, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s initial Gaia research was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. A primary outlet for the Gaia hypothesis was CoEvolution Quarterly, the periodical successor to the Whole Earth Catalog. This venue insured that early in their mutual developments, Gaia theory intersected with second-order cybernetics, a leading edge of systems theory’s own epoch of countercultural transformations.
The recent Gaia discourses of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour variously contest its cybernetic status. *Gaian Systems* sharpens this debate by engaging Latour in particular on the issue of Gaia’s systems description. Lovelock and Margulis consistently position Gaia theory as an application of either first- or second-order cybernetic systems theory. From these affirmations and exigencies I extend my own systems-theoretical synthesis under the technical phrase metabiotic Gaia. *Gaian Systems* shows how metabiotic Gaia discourse illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations, including system boundaries, biopolitics, the immunitary paradigm, symbiosis, the holobiont, astrobiology, the Anthropocene, the geological turn, and the new geocentrism.
*Gaian Systems* uniquely traces the particular signature of Lynn Margulis on the evolution of Gaia theory. Other critical treatments tend to take Lovelock’s Gaia as the last word on the topic. In fact, Margulis occasionally published her own variations on Lovelock’s cybernetics. This study is the first to follow Margulis’s lead to see what the autopoietic turn can add to Gaia’s conception and description. *Gaian Systems* also makes selections from Margulis’s unpublished professional correspondence available for the first time. Additionally, no previous study has gone into this level of detail on the commerce of the Gaia hypothesis with the systems counterculture, the remarkable collegial network established by the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly, and the Lindisfarne Association.
Informed evocations of Gaia theory now accompany a growing sense of emergency over an Earth system in peril of entering a new regime unconducive to many current life forms, including, of course, our own. The rise of Gaia theory preceded and prepared for the current recognitions of a global climatic and environmental crisis. These trends have run together with a discourse of the Anthropocene through which to acknowledge the massive accumulation of humanity’s activities now altering the functioning of the Earth system. However, whatever its current state may be, we now effectively observe the Earth system of our present concern through the Gaia concept, a massively complex but newly concrete presence for our planetary imagination to grasp as a way to a symbiotic planet whose resources are more evenly distributed. The current phrase “Earth system” is the mainstreamed locution for Lovelock’s original thought of Gaia over half a century ago as a “biological cybernetic system.” Gaia is systems thinking at and for the planetary level.
Introduction: An Epistemological Transition
Part 1. Gaia Discourse
1. A Paradigm Shift
2. Thinkers of Gaia
3. Neocybernetics of Gaia
Part 2. The Systems Counterculture
4. The Whole Earth Network
5. The Lindisfarne Connection
6. Margulis and Autopoiesis
Part 3. Gaian Enquiries
7. The Planetary Imaginary
8. Planetary Immunity
9. Astrobiology and the Anthropocene
This collection brings together specialists in paleontology, molecular biology, evolutionary theory, geobiology, developmental systems theory, archaeology, history of science, cultural science studies, and literature and science to address the multiple themes that animated Margulis’s science. These include astrobiology and the origin of life, ecology and symbiosis from the microbial to the planetary scale, the coupled interactions of Earthly environments and evolving life in Gaia theory and Earth system science, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions.
•links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
•surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
•traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism.
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.
With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.
In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.
Contributors. Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe
New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman.
Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox.
Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jZo3E09RVI&feature=youtu.be
A longer version, with documentation: “‘Gaia is not an Organism’: The Early Scientific Collaboration of Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock,” in _Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel_, ed. Dorion Sagan (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012), 32-43.
- Links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics
- Surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics
- Traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism
Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers.
Part One: Literatures and Sciences Introduction 1. AI and ALife - John Johnston 2. Alchemy - Mark S. Morrisson 3. Biology - Sabine Sielke 4. Chaos and Complexity Theory - Ira Livingston 5. Chemistry - Jay Labinger 6. Climate Science - Robert Markley 7. Cognitive Science - Joseph Tabbi 8. Cybernetics - Søren Brier 9. Ecology - Stacy Alaimo 10. Evolution - David Amigoni 11. Genetics - Judith Roof 12. Geology - Stephen A. Norwick 13. Information Theory - Philipp Schweighauser 14. Mathematics - Brain Rotman 15. Medicine - George Rousseau 16. Nanotechnology - Colin Milburn 17. Physics - Dirk Vanderbeke 18. Psychoanalysis - Arkady Plotnitsky 19. Systems Theory - Bruce Clarke 20. Thermodynamics - John Bruni Part Two: Disciplinary and Theoretical Approaches Introduction 21. Agricultural Studies - Susan Squier 22. Animal Studies - Richard Nash 23. Art Connections - Robert Pepperell 24. Cultural Science Studies - Maureen McNeil 25. Deconstruction - Vicky Kirby 26. E-Literature - Joseph Tabbi 27. Feminist Science Studies - Susan Squier and Melissa Littlefield 28. Game Studies - Ivan Callus and Gordon Calleja 29. History of Science - Henning Schmidgen 30. Media Studies - Mark B. N. Hansen 31. Philosophy of Science - Alfred Nordmann 32. Posthumanism - Neil Badmington 33. Science Fiction - Lisa Yaszek 34. Semiotics - Paul Cobley Part Three: Periods and Cultures Introduction 35. Greece and Rome - Emma Gee 36. Middle Ages and Early Renaissance - Arielle Saiber 37. Scientific "Revolution" I: Copernicus to Boyle - Alvin Snider 38. Scientific "Revolution" II: Newton to Laplace - Lucinda Cole 39. Romanticism - Noah Heringman 40. Industrialism - Virginia Richter 41. Russia - Kenneth Knoespel 42. Japan - Thomas Lamarre 43. Modernism - Hugh Crawford 44. Postmodernism - Stefan Herbrechter