autopoiesis

Carsten Schinko on Niklas Luhmann’s Analogue Loyalty.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young gets inside De Landa’s total history.

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,‘To talk of many things:Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -Of cabbages - and kings -And why the sea is boiling hot -And whether pigs have wings.’Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass

Total history comes in waves. During the first decades of the twentieth century a number of prominent studies appeared that were written either by amateur historians such as Oswald Spengler or professionals like Arnold Toynbee and that mobilized a wide range of alternative disciplines in order to provide a new comprehensive view of history on a global scale. An ambitious commitment ‘to talk of many things’ - that is, to extend the domain of historiography far beyond its traditional boundaries - was linked to the elaboration of all-inclusive algorithms designed to account for the basic dynamics of history, be it the morphologically programmed blooming and withering of autonomous cultures in Spengler’s Decline of the West or the challenge-response scheme of Toynbee’s Study of History. Several reasons conspired to slow down the production of further such grand narratives following the Second World War, not the least of which was the increased institutionalization of historiography, but it appears that we are now caught up in a second wave of total histories. Once again, they are written by historians and non-historians alike, and once again the extension of the disciplinary boundaries is linked to a liberal import of ideas and methods from hitherto unrelated or ‘irrelevant’ fields.

The culmination of ebr version 2.0 (an html- and java-based Web production), the spring 1999 “gathering of threads” introduced an important component into the journal design: the thREAD that actively conducts readers among affiliated essays.

(Source: ebr)

Linda Brigham reviews the Spring and Fall 1995 issues of Cultural Critique.

Where is the real you? Behind the eyeballs, right; the center of a panoptical cinema, your virtual head spinning around like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Watching the world go by.

Wrong. The address of the Enlightenment Subject has been vacant for a long time, and the front door now opens on a brick wall, or on the threshold of an abyss. So where do we send the mail? One answer to that question is the subject of two special issues of the journal Cultural Critique, subtitled “The Politics of Systems and Environments” (Spring and Fall, 1995). As William Rasch and Cary Wolfe explain in their introduction to the first number, the term “systems” stands in the place of the old subject, and “environments” replaces the old object. Like the old subject/object dichotomy, systems and environments are relative terms; each system becomes environment to another system. But systems and environments also manifest reciprocity: in complex self-referential systems (organism and societies for example), systems-as-observers (an ocular metaphor for perception in general) know they observe observers.

Over the last two decades, many recent forms of electronic literature have revealed a strong aptitude for hypertextuality and hypermediality. Meanwhile, we have assisted to the progressive emergence of innovative examples of print fiction that may be defined as «writing machines»,1 because they strive to incorporate the aesthetics and the symbolic forms of the electronic media. These kinds of narrative are often characterised by an "autopoietic" potentiality, since they often tend to include a multiplicity of media sources while preserving the autonomy of their literary function. As Joseph Tabbi observes: «Defining the literary as a self-organizing composition, or poiesis, is not to close off the literary field; instead, by creating new distinctions such a definition can actually facilitate literary interactions with the media environment».2 At the same time, some examples of print and electronic 'writing machines' are also characterized by an «exopoietic function». As the philosopher John Nolt points out (in the disciplinary context of the environmental ethics): «In exopoiesis, an organism functions not for its own benefit, but rather for the benefit of something related to it, to which it is therefore of instrumental value».3 Applying this concept to the literary field, the aim of this article is to analyse the structures and the fruition of four recent novels, in order to understand how the electronic environment promotes a complex relationship between exopoiesis and literariness. William Gibson's novels "Pattern Recognition" (2003) and "Spook Country" (2007) became the core of the projects of some online communities: users begun to build online databases by annotating the various narrative segments, in order to link them to other online searchable resources. These images, videos, and texts are indirectly related to the literary plot, being at the same time independent from it. Similarly, "Flight Paths" (2007) is an electronic «networked novel» that was developed by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph alongside a related hypermedial database containing images, videos, newspaper articles and other texts, which may be continuously updated by the readers. Finally, the verse novel "Only Revolutions" (2006) was written by Mark Z. Danielewski with the help of a well established group of readers involved in his online forum, in order to discuss the various aspects of the novel and to suggest possible connections to other material. In all these cases, the reading of the literary work seems to be perceived as not sufficient in itself and it requires the support of a parallel electronic environment, such as a database or a forum. Moreover, the authors purposefully prearranged the structural and poetic nature of their works to promote an exopoietic non-autonomy of the literary text, the fragments of the latter being exploited in order to become part of non-literary fluxes of online information. These works are not only «distributed narratives»,4 which spread themselves across different media platforms and authorial voices, but they are also novels whose reading engenders a problematization of many of the most relevant aspects that usually define the literariness of a text, like its «open» nature and the the logic of «possible worlds» that were discussed by Umberto Eco and other scholars in the fields of semiotics and narratology.5 The exopoietic function of literary works in electronic environments may be a proper field of analysis to understand how it is possible to conceive literature as a process that runs along with other information strategies.1 See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, Cambridge (MA) - London: The MIT Press, 2002, p. 112. 2 Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, Minneapolis - London: University of Minnesota Press, c2002, p. 8. 3 John Nolt, "The Move from Is to Good in Environmental Ethics," in «Philosophy Publications and Other Works» Vol. 31, 2009, pp. 135-154; p. 149. Web. 29-07-2011. . 4 See Jill Walker, “Distributed Narratives. Telling Stories Across Networks,” Presented at AoIR 5.0, Brighton, September 21, 2004 by Dr. Jill Walker, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen. Web. 12-10-2010. . 5 See: Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, London: Macmillan, 1984, p. 18; The Open Work, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 3-24; On Literature, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 pp. 14-15; Cesare Segre, Introduction to the Analysis of the Literary Text, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse how the contents and the structures of the Anglo-American novel have been influenced by the emergence of digital and telematic media during the last two decades. One of the primary targets is to identify the common strategies adopted by electronic and printed novels to analyze the complexity and to try, at the same time, to escape from the “trap” of language. In my introduction I argue about the increasing relevance of the pattern/randomness dialectic into the narrative field. In the first chapter, while analysing the two novels Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers and Exegesis (1997) by Astro Teller, I try to show how computational practices are affecting the literary fruition and authorship along with the role that the novel might play as an instrument of knowledge and cultural interaction. In the subsequent chapters I bring together literary analysis and network culture, focusing on different notions such as the database as a symbolic form, the properties of connectionist networks, the idea of transliteracy and the concepts of autopoiesis and exopoiesis. For this very reason, I examined five different works: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's Flight Paths (2007) and The Unknown (1998), developed by Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt. These literary texts propose different strategies to assimilate the structures and the dynamics proper to the networks in order to create new cognitive paradigms. It would seem that, through specific narrative structures and topics, some of the novelists of the last fifteen years are abandoning the self-reflexivity typical of the previous postmodern tradition in order to suggest an idea of fiction as an instrument to connect individual and contingency, reader and text, text and media ecology.

Source: author's abstract

In this article, I examine computer worms and viruses as part of the genealogy of network media, of the discourse networks of the contemporary media condition. While popular and professional arguments concerning these miniprograms often see them solely as malicious code, worms and viruses might equally be approached as revealing the very basics of their environment. Such a media-ecological perspective relies on notions of self-referentiality and autopoiesis that problematize the often all-too-hasty depictions of viruses as malicious software, products of vandal juveniles. In other words, worms and viruses are not antithetical to contemporary digital culture, but reveal essential traits of the techno-cultural logic that characterizes the computerized media culture of recent decades.