Zusammenfassung
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.
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Notes
- 1.
Years ago, I did what I could to configure the rich overlay of tropes, structures, and allegorical components now justifying a claim on the part of the Phänomenologie des Geistes to operating as a proto-cybernetic system. See my The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (1982), pp. 15–62.
- 2.
Hofstadter’s Computer Science textbook for the general public at the outset of the cybernetic age, Gödel, Escher, Bach, was notable not only for its receptivity to fanciful literature, mind-boggling graphics, and Zen kōans; through the careful, multifaceted elucidation he devoted to mathematical processes (e.g., recursion, isomorphism, quining, Gödel-numbering), Hofstadter also broached, well ahead of the curve, a rhetoric of numbers, particularly as marshaled in cybernetic programs, to stand alongside the figural awareness and capability that are so much, in different ways, the province of departments of Literature, Classics, and Philosophy. Would that undergraduate General Education curricula had caught up by now with Hofstadter’s bold outreach initiative. On this point, see my Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition (2014), pp. 121–130, 270–279, 337–353.
- 3.
See, for example, Derrida, 1976, pp. 18–26, 30–44, 216–255; Derrida, 1981, pp. 95–117, 142–155.
- 4.
This is of course the title to a pioneering attempt to secure the place of improvisational fiction, reveling in its permutational capability–particularly in its more popular genres–within the canon. See Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (1975).
References
Bruce Clarke and Mark B.N. Hansen, eds., Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory (Durham, NC and London: Duke Universitry Press, 2009).
Calvino, Italo (1976): „A Sign in Space,“ in: idem, Cosmicomics, transl. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 31–42.
Clarke, Bruce (2008): Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems, New York: Fordham University Press.
Clarke, Bruce (2014): Neocybernetics and Narrative, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1981): Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Henry Sussman,The Hegelian Aftermath: Reagings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Hofstadter, Douglas (2007): I Am a Strange Loop, New York: Basic Books.
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1980): Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York: Vintage Books.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Latour, Bruno (1996): Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, transl. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Luhmann, Niklas (1995): Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr, with Dirk Baecker, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Macksey, Richard, and Eugenio Donato (eds.) (1970): The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan (1995): What is Life? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Margulis, Lynn (1998): Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, New York: Basic Books.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J Varela (1980): Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Boston, MA: D. Reidel.
Scholes, Robert (1975): Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press.
Sussman, Henry (2014): Playful Intelligence: Digitizing Tradition, London: Bloomsbury.
Wiener, Norbert (1954): The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
weiterführende Literatur
Clarke, Bruce, and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.) (2009): Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1976): Of Grammatology, trans. and intro. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sussman, Henry (1982): The Hegelian Aftermath: Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Sussman, H. (2021). A Mellow Synthesis. In: Baecker, D. (eds) Schlüsselwerke der Systemtheorie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-33415-4_39
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