Emergence and Embodiment

SCIENCE AND CULTURAL THEORY

Emergence and Embodiment New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory

EDITED BY BRUCE CLARKE AND MARK B. N. HANSEN

Duh Univorsity Press' D",ham & umd~n ~009

e ,009 Duke Uni, .... >ity !'r ... AU rights ",rwd

!'rinted in the Un ited SUt .. of A"""ic. on .dd-f, 1"1"" M

o.. ignl by Amy Ruth Buch,,,,,,n Trr

Conlents

Ark".,,,,!rdgmnm "~ II

Inuoduclion: N~ic Em~rgon uuu U .. IU ANO .......... NAnu

Inltrvi

lmprOV;j.;l!ion, Form and h~mA Spc'n.u Brownian CalculaTion

lO'~~ lUDGUI 179

Communkation vuj.u, Communion in MO(i(rn P~ychic SySl~m" M~lura"". Luhmann, and CogniTin N~urology l1"OA "".AM . ~

M(~ning'" E' ..... t.Machi .... ,or Sysl(1TU lloeory and -Th~ ~onRnKtion of Df'construction", IHrrid. and Luhmann (AU WOUI =

CQmplc~ Viou.U;Iy; The Radic;Li ~1 ;ddleground I~A llVIN'$TON >46

Bibliography' J61 COrlrribur()f'J 179 /rulu >31

Acknowledgments

The groundwork for Ihis volume wa, a..,1 of conference pand, Bruce darke organize

Introduction

Neocybrmetic Emergence

BRUCE CLARKE AND MARK B. N. HANSEN

tn his introduction to Obserdng Syslc,m, "The AgfS of Heinz yon Foerster," fim published in 1981, Francisco Varela concluded with a charaneriz.l1ion of "the laS! age of Heinz." ' In the chronology of second-order cybernelics, thi' would be considered its fim age, the period during the earl)' 1970' when ,-on Foerster laid out hi' ground-breaking sketches of, in Varela', words, "recu"i"e mechanisms in cgniliYe systems," thereby producing the initial formulations for a ~meti(s of cybernetics,' \Vhat ,truck \' arela in the early 1980, wa, the extent to which Ihe force of von Foerstd. mgniti"e innovations had not yfl gained secure foothold, in the mainstream academy, had" nol permeated our intellectual preferencfS and current thinking":

There i, liule doubtth,t our current model .. about cognition, the ne,,"Ous 'ystem, and artificial intelligence are severely dominated by the notion that information i. represented from an out-there into an in-here, processed, and an output produced. There is still vinually no challenge 10 the ,'iew of objectivity understood as the condition of independence of descriplions, ralher than a circle of mutual elucidation. Further, Ihere is lillie accepTance yfl thaI the key idea 10 mah Ihese points of view scientific programmes is the operalional closure of cognizing 'ysTem., living or OIherwise. These are preci .. ly the leitl11oli,'" of Heinz', lasl stage. J

Since Varela made this observalion, Ihere has cenainl), been some significant, if modeS!, penflration of Ihese fundamental mgnili"" mOTif, into the "intel -lectual preference, of Ihinh" across Ihe 'I,.,ctrum of natural, mathematical, and discu .. iYe disciplines. As we ",. iI , howel-", Varela' , word, 'till ring lrue of our pr.sent lime, and 10 lhe extent Ihat the)' do, Ihis mlume of essays h., imponant work to do. For il is only b), Iheorizing Ihe operational clo,ure of cognizing systems that cult ural Iheory can rescue agency---allwil agen'}" of

2 BRUCE CU,RK! AND MUK I. N. HANSEN

a far more complex "ariety than that of traditional humanism--from being overrun by the technoscientific p,oces", that are evel)where transforming the material world in which we live today. Indeed, g iven the aneleration in t" h-noscient ific dewlopment since the H)-Sos----acceieration that has witnes.sed the ad,'ent of artificial life, complexity theory, and o ther t" hnoscienc .. of emer-gence-the imperative to theorize the operational closure of cognizing systems has. arguably. neyer been more urgent , Better late than never. "cond-order cybernetics can perhaps now final ly come through on its promi" to prD>ide the ecology of mind best fitted to the demands of our int ellectual, institutional. and global crises.

from CVb~'n .. t ics to Neocybrnetiu

The cultural history of cybernetics is still being written. There is no authorita -tive version but rather a swarm of competing accounts. Giwn the welter of disciplines engJged in the mowment, as well .. the self-reAexive turn in cy -bernetic thought il" lf, a definiti"e history would be an impos.sible proj"t. As has often been told . howeyer, the first cybernet ics emerged in the ''NOS as a technoscienc. of communication and control. drawing from mathematical physics, neurophysiology. information technology. and s)mbolic logic. Histori-cally concurrent with the postwar spread of linguistic structuralism in Europe, cybernetic, was set forward in the United States and then vigorously trans-planted to Soviet and European subcultures. From a base conn"ting biological and computational systems by way of information theory and communica-tions technology. cybernetics was academically mainstreamed under the names Anificial Intelligence (AI ) and, more broadly, computer science in the sen'ice of command-and-control systems. But due to the long interdisciplinary roster of Warren McCulloch's in>it""s to the Macy Conferences----including Law-rence Frank. Heinrich Klilver, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Lawrence Kubie-----

INT~ODUCTIO" J

argueessiwly driwn to commu-nicat~. Whil~ this was nOi in fact a satisfactory criterion of distinction b"tween human ~ing' and olh~r living and nonhing Ihi ngs. it did show that from the slart. cyb"rn~tics PUI I h~ ontology of "humanity" into queslion .

Lr .. than a decade lat.r. W. Ro .. Ashby d.flected Wi.ner, ~mphasis on hu -man communication and control loward the ontological neutrality of daud. Shannon's informalion thwry.' ln a similar "oin. Gregory Bate,;on wrote of the fim cybernelic< thai its ~subject matler" extended across traditional disciplin -ary registers in focusing on "the propositional or informalional aSped form/substance binary' -rhe individuality of the body is that of a name rather than that of a stone. is that of a form rath .. than that of a bit of sub,tance. "" Nevertheless, the teleportation of that form for th~ purpost of rematerialization at a di>!ance would almost surely im'ol\'e at le",t Ih. momen-tary drstru way. To hold an org,mism stable while part of it is b"ing slowlydestroye

4 BRUCE ClARKE AND MARK I. N. HANSEN

being during such a radical recon.truction. It is not due to any impossibility oftheid ... "

One could gen.ralizr from Wi.ner and Ashby-as well as from much of i15 popular offspring in cyberpunk and other technoid fanta,i.s-that first order cybernetics remains inscribed within da"ical sc;"ntific thought : it hold, onto humanist and idealist duali.m. that de"ribe the world in term. of an e

l~noDUCTlo H S

FirsT-order cybernetics undersco .. d the provisional nature or Ihe w~'truct ~1i,,1'S5 of cognitions within obsen'ing systems, but il did so by undercutting the .ignificance and contribution of materialJ"nerg~ic environments 10 the cognilive .ystem, that emerge within them, The sTrong constructivism of nw-cybernetic system. thwry deal, with the world by promoting a new lewl of al1e"tion to the media of its forms or, more concrelely, to the rnvironm"",.nd the embo

6 aRue( CLUK( AN!) "'-ARK 8. H. HAHS(N

and transformatively. N

l~nODUCTIO H 7

humanity at large in it. geobiological context: "The reality .nd re,urrence of symbiosis in evolution suggest, that we are still in an inv.,i,'e, 'parasitic ' stage and we must ,low down. share, and reunite oursd"", with other ~ing. if we arr to achieve evolutionary longevity."" Summarizing thi' bro.d neocyber-netic ron .. nsus, Dirk Baecker write. that "One of the most important as(lfft' of systems theoretical thinking is to proc",d slowly. to look at things .gain. and to take the time to spell them out .... We .hould not jump. a. system, do, from one ",'ent to the nnt simply to ,how that we can do .... Rather, we should look back at each instance, again as sy'tems do, to s.,. how we effected the last jump.""

Following the .. complementary invocations for a ',Iowingdown" oftfCh-noscientific hybrid" of fCological depredations, and of systems-theoretical theorizati ons, we acknowledge a similar need for a slowing down---in our ca.o;e of e .... rything that has rfCently come together under the rubric of the "post-hu man"- for the purpo'" of careful neocy!lernetic consideration." By now already a cultural diche lacking definitional consensus, the po,thuman has !leen wielded to encompass "'e~1hing from contemporary throrizing and cutting-Mge cultural history; to work in nontraditionalscien

8 !Rue( CLA RK( AND ' .... RK 8. N. HANS(M always been posthuman in the sense that it has alway, involwd an ext.rioriza t;on Dr "'olution by means other than life (ao the work of Andr' l.eroi-Gourhan and. more recently. Bernard Stiegler ha, ,hown), the m.assive contemporary ac-

ceeration in processe, of posthumani7.ation poses the pro'pect of a qualitatiw shift in the economy between autonomy and environmenta l entanglement." Wheth .. thi' ,hift entail, the abandonment of a utonomy as regulation of reg ulation is. crucial question facing cultural theorists today.

One eloquent position here-that of Katherine Hal'le, in My Mother \Vas a Co"'put

INTROD (J(lIO ~ 9

IIltnt: "Boundari~s of all kind. ha"e bffome p"rmoabl~ to th~ supposed Dlh .. , Code p"rmeales language and is p"rmealed by it; eie from which systems are generatod in the 11m place. Thi. mow shon-circu it. the machinery of emergence before emergence even gots ,tarud.

Nroqbernetic> contend. that it i. preci,ely the injunction aga inst such flows of informatioll across the boundary demarcating an aut opoietic or self-r.ferential . ystem from it. environment that dri","s the throry'. crucial insights into theoptrations of .. If-,.ferential and recursive forms, It is nDl a mal1erof "policing" op"rational boundarie.: not only are they self-prOOucing and sdf-maintaining, but they are the condition of the possibilityof 'ystemic functions in the I1rst place. The em'ironment can ptnurb li" ing, psychic. and >DCial . ys tems but cannot o{'

10 BRUCf ClARKf AND MARK B. N. HANSEN

oper.l1ional dosu~far from ~ing 'imply oppo5td to openn.---is in fact th. precondition for openn .... which i, to say for any cogniti,'e capacity what-

~-er. Al;. num~r of contributo", demonstrate. thi' generalized correlation of closure with cognition inform' Varela", d"'dopment of n.ocybernetic>-'p"'ificaUy hi. deydopm.nt of the openne .. -from -closure principle-from its initial theorization in rdation to autopoi.tic ')"ltem, to th. meta -autopoietic a,semblage, that, arguably, characterize contemporary society.

In their variou, characterization, of "utopoi",i" Maturana and Varel. cor-relate organizational clo,ure with interactional openn ... : it is an organism', (or ')"ltem', ) self-perpetuation that allows it to he structurally coupled to the environment. In thi' ,-olume, Evan Thompson restates thi' core neocr~rnetic in'ight from the pe"recti ... of V arela 'slater work bridging life and mind , n.u-ro""i.nce and phenomenology, through the concept of aut opoi .. i>: "The self-transcending mowm.nt oflif. i, none other than metabolism, and metaboli,m i. none other than the biochemical instantiation of the .utopoietic organization. That organization must remain invariant---{}therwi .. the organi,m di.s-but the only way autopoi .. is can stay in place i, through the incessant material nux of metaboli,m. In other word" the operational c/o,"reof autopoi .. i, demand, that the organi,m he an open 'ptem. " Thi' nuanced concept of closure al", inform' Luhmann", remark that with second-order 'ystem, theory, "The (,ub-""Juently classical) distinction between "closed' and 'open' .}~tems," as that was previously defin.d in regard to .!lopoietic physical and m",hanieal system, under strictly thermodynamic regim ... "is replaced by the quostion of how rof-ref,rem;,,1 rio,"", mn m'iH' op",ne. l! Arguments that .. ,ume clo,ure to he the 'imple binary opposite of openness fall ,hon of the letter and complexity of neocybernetic conceptualization.

Put another WO)', in order for a 'ystem to perpetuate itself, it must maintain its capacity to .. duce environmental compl.xity, which is to ..,y to proce .. it not as direct input but a. penurbation catalyzing (intern al ) structur.1 change. A, von Foerster', postulate of cogniti,-e homeostasi," has it (.nd thi' would certainly hold for autopoietic 'ystem, in general), "The normu, system i, or-ganized (or organizes it .. IO '" that it computes a stable reality,' ''' The chal -I.nge we propose to take on here is p,"cisel)" the one ad,-anced by Hayles in the name of the contemporary t",hnoscienc .. of emergence , To Hayles', claim that neocybernetics C'3/lnot embrace the complexity of contemporary emergence< and their permeation of 'ptem, boundaries, we reply that th~"l'roc....,s cml Ix UIliUrslood r/lro!lgh rloe corrrhltiOlJ of 'pre",;, rlosurr and op,mrru. What i, needed is a generaliz,uion of the openness-from-dosure principle that i, capable of addr .... ing the full complexity of (Ont~mporary system, operations and envi-

INTRODuCTION 11

ronmental couplings. To dewlap ,uch a generalization, we propose to explore how nrious facet' of neocyi>ernetics---run n i ng the !}Imu t from V arda' 5 work on living s}~tem' to Luhmann', account of communicational autopoi.,is---.. Neoc},bernetic, facili tates a concept of emergence that differs in alleasl one fundamental way from the concepl of emergence central to contem-porary techno",iences and the regime of com pUiation. Whereas the lalter underst:lnd, emergern:e as a mOl'ement ff()m the,impl~ to the complex (d. Wolfram', maxim: from 'imple rules., complex behavior), neocybernetics "iews it as a movement ff()m Ihe (haolically complex to the manageably complex." In line wilh what Luhmann calls ,Uro"'plrxijimlion, il is. gl"en that any panicular 'ptem that emerges within an environment is nec=r-ily leM complex than thai environment (,ince the latter will alwap contain ",allY olher systems). Indeed, one of the capi tal advantages of the concepl of Ihe ... If-referential sptem (as against the notion of the subjecl) is its d el iMation of such a '} ~tem ',capaci t}' to manage environmental complex-ityand indeed to derive its identily and ils autopoiesi, from its continua! nt'td 10 r...:l uce t he complexity of the en>"i ron ment by proceMi ng it through systemic constraints. Our eooe3''Of he", will be to produce "iab!e accounts of emergence Ihat meel the terms of Ha)'b's obje

12 nliCE nARK! AND MARK!. N. HAHSU

account.> of complexity i, pr",i .. ly it' mo,.e fine ",al.-d and dynamic ac count of operational dosure .

H .. e neocybernetics ,can endorse the objection rai .. d by Ray Kurzweil against Wolfram', new ",ience-to wit. that it explores the emergence of com plex patterns at a first level of complexity. leaving aside the crucial i"ue of how th.se I"'l1erns self-organi,. to create higher levels of complexity." And. indee!- to >r

INTROOUCTION 13

volum~). Following in Ihe wake of the .. similarities and also of the technosci -mces of eme' gencr that are undeniably at work in our world today. the task facing neocyl>< thai of showing how the ineluctable .. Ifdiffer~nti.tion of. system that must maintain its autonomy ov .. time can yidd the emergenc~ of Ihe new. which is to say how it can yirld emerg.nc~ understood in its cu rrent usage as the appra,ance al the 'fstem's globallevol of properties thai do not nist at the local level of a 'y'lem', compon.nts.

Another way to undersland this 'pecification mum. u, to our claim con c.rning th. 'prcificity of the neocybe rnetic concept of emergenc~namely, Ihat in contrast to the te

14 aRliCE ClARK! A~D MARK!. N. ~USU

Di,tinction ~nd As.emblage

At a more generalle"d, the epistemological collStructi,i.m of nroc),bernetic. pro,"i des new fram .. of om.rvJI ion d i'po,ing one to rna rk '} ~tem!em'i ron ment distinctions more rigorously. Thi. i, an analytical option lih an)' other, but arguabl)" it ;. one with real purcha", on the ind uetable ",If-referenu entail.-d by and embedded within all descriptions. The "If-evident propooition Jl the self-referential origin of system, theory a, a scientific discourse i, that "there are .)stems," foUowed immediately by its corollary: ""There are self-referential

S}~tem'." When Luhmann goes on to indicate that all the heterogeneou, a.-semblag .. of biotic and metabiotic ')""tem, and their en"ironmen" are just a, self-referential as the "self-reflecti .... ubject ~ of Western metaphysic, that pri"ileged itself on its .upposedly unique possession of refl",i,-ity, the neocyber-netic description of .ystems cuts across the grain of classical logic. Whereas the trrm "reflexivity" retailed by Hayl ... Morowill, a nd othe .. retains the ,ubjectiv-ist connotation of "ret1ection'" in "the mirror of the mind," we have preferred the posthumani

INTRODUCTION "

In pari, then, Ihe goal of 'his volume is 10 sel aside a 101 of Ihe anachronislic ",mami" Ihal ha\', accrele

.6 BRUCf ClARK[ AND MARK B. N. HANSfN

drew on as an ' miS" from Wittg,n>!,in's Vienna, and the "magical"" nature of psychic system. in >!nKting a Reality" of 1973, by way of contra>!ing the .ingularity of metaphysical solip.ism with the multiplicities of epistemological constructi vism. Not only does it take multiple demo", to conceptualize negent.opy in informational system,. but it also takes the co construction of at least two operationally clo",d Db",,,,ers to proou a reality: "Reality appears as. con.istent ref .. ence frame for at least two ob",,,,., . ~ The concluding "'C1ion of the essay unfolds this powerful statement from the 19.19 paper as a prefiguration of the n

INTROOUCTION t7

As Varda has femini

,8 BRUCf ClARKf AND MARK B. N. HANSEN

,ynchronic and diachronic emersence (creation of nowl organiz.ation), and radical embodiment can account for 'ynchronic, diachronic. and tramver-.aJ emergence (body-brain-environ ment loops). Protevi ..." thi' Ian ... wider conceptual scheme as nece"a~' to an undemanding of poli'icalencounters in all their dimensions.

In line with Thompwn and Protevi, in "Sy,tem-En\'ironment Hybrid, Mark Hamen also focuse, on Varela's conceptualizati on of emergence with the coupling of autopaietic system, and embodied ell\~ronmental world,. His 'pecific aim h .. e is less to explicate the trajectory of Varela 's thin king for itsdf than to position Varela---and ,pecifically Varela's decoupling of autonomy (do-,urd from autopai .. is in hi ' key 1979 text, Prindpb of Biological AulolW"'r---at the origin of a mode of conceiving contemporary cogniti"e agency as massi\'ely technically di'tributrd. Varela's decou pling of autonomy from autopo;"'i, fa cilitate. the deployment of dosure at a hi gher level of indusiwne .. and with a complrx internal differentiation. Such a modification is necessary, Hansen argues, if we are to throrize the multiple and differentiated levels of autonomy that characterize what he caUs "systemen,ironment hybrid," (HI!S), complex. hybrid fomlS of embodied, cognitive enact ion t hat in\'ol,.. human cognizers coupled with technicall)' ad\'anced environmental processe, wielding their own agency. Drawing impiration from Bruno latour' , description of contemporary hUlllan/nonhulllan hybrid. as "'ther horrible melting pots," Han"n po,i -tions SEH. at cros'-purpose' to Luhmann's desc ri ption of operationall y closed "Y'tenlS functioning through effective decomplexification of the en vironment. According to Hamen, it is preci"ly .u,h decomplexification that has become both highly problematic and atypical in toda)"'. techno'phere, where we are continuall)" acting together with cognitivdy sophisticated machines; in our technosphere, the agency and complexity of the environment .imply cannot be reduced to a fu nCiion of a system.

While Han"n foUow. Luhntann in maintai ning that selection is key to in -stituting difference into what would otherwise remain und ifferentiated chao,. he depans from Luhmann when he asks whether the institution of difference might rath .. cross over system-environment boundaries and thu, underwrite hybrid fomlS of agency comprised of human beings and complex technological processes. In thi' endeavor, Hansen draw, on the work of Katherine Hayles, Andy Clark, and Felix Guau"ri, all of whom argue for the need to complicate the concept of cl osure in light of the technically rich environment' in which we Ii.-, and act in our world today. To dewlop a strong account of en \'iron -mental ag,ncy, Hansen turns to two French thinkers-political philosopher Cornelius Castoriadi. and biophenomenologist Gilben Simondon- whose

INTRoDUCTIo N 19

work hdp.1D expand the impact of Varela' , dKoupling of aUionomy from autopoiesi,. Combined wit h Varela' , insistence on the integrily of the human and on continuity aero" divergent levd. of being, Castoriadi. ' , differentiation ofle,.el, of aUlDnomy and hi. conceplion of radical creativity and Simondon', pri\'ileging of the agency of the el,,"ironmenl (what he call. lhe "preindividual") in the operation of all pnxeMeS of indi\'iduation furnish the 1001. nre .. ",'}' to Iheorize, in a broadly nffiCybernelic mode , the functioning of 'EH' that emerge in Ihe wake of the contemporary complexification of our lechno'phere. Ralher Ihan possessing institutional (autopoietic) dosure that cut. across Ihe human, loday', .EHS are crealed and dynamically evolve Ihrough whal Hansen calls "technical dosures. " provi,ional form. of closure facilitated by contingent conjunclion. of human. and IKhnologi ...

One major goal of this ,olum. is to work Ih rough Ihelingering cont rover sies owr Ihepurchase and application of the concepl of aUlopoi .. i. , without blurring the imporlant differenc .. slaked out by the key th! epilomized in Ih. developnH ... nt of anificiallife research, and broughllo powerful and ironic narrative realization in Richard Powers', Ga"'re~ 2../. Luhmann formulates the distinction in conci", terms: self-organizalion rdalos 10 aUlOpoirsi. as Sltuctures relate 10 .ystem,. The importanl point i. nol lnal cenain .yslems "'are" self-organizing, bUI ralh .. Ihal because certain

20 BRuCE nARK[ A~D MAU!. N. ~AN5U

'ptem, a .. self-referentially or operationally dosed, their formation ofint.rnal "ructur., can re,ult only from processe, of wlf-org,mization. As Luhmann puts it. "ther. i, no importation of structures from dsewh .. e." To devdop this point. Luhmann works through a serie, of notions---ex~ation. m.mory. and the determ i nation of the observ.r - relating the structuraliry of a utopo i.tic '}"5U m, to th.ir "",pornlit)'. Sy'temic muctu"" partake of the time of the '}"Stem and h"'r effect only in the present moment of it' operation,. Thi' mntingency is most mncretely obvious in the life of a cell but i, also .n,hrined in the trui,m one applies to psychic and social ,y,um" mind" and relationship" Uw i, or /0" if; an autopoi.tic 'ystem i, always about the bu'in .... , from moment to moment, of reeomt""ting its structure .

The continuation of the Luhmann excerpt take, up autopoiesis pro",r and includes some important reminiscenc .. ofh" com'ersation, with "'aturana. For instaner, Luhmann gi. .. his version of the anecdote concerning the praxi"poi~i' distinction that Varela related about Maturana in "Early Days.~ He also join' von Foerster in commenting on Maturon. and Varela', hesitation to apply the con-cept of autopoi .. is to the proc,,"ses of social communication. It i, OUT hope that the overlapping concern, of the readings .\.Sembl.d in thi' volume will help to bury this bone of contention and allow ev.ryone concern.d with the further de-",lopment of nrocybernetics to mo\" on to more frui tful initiatives. What unites all of the essaY' """,mbled here is the concept of operational closure. As Luhmann e""lains, the recognition of operational desu,"" "i, connr

INT~ODU 'TI O N 21

a plOtologic of distinctions., rehea"ing th. form. of any possible observation. FlOm this angle, it d.rive. its imponance flOm its unu.uJI r.alization and in novati"e.xpan.ion of topological awarene ... II addre .... something not often r.alizrd, the contingency of Eudid.an 'pact'-in particular two-dim.nsional spac"......."nd d.monstrates that by reconceiving the form of .pace. we mal' mran-ingfullyand more .a.ily conceive of forms that ... nter" their own .pace. For instance, di.tinctions written on a torus can .ubven (turn under) th~r bound aries, travel thlOugh the torus., and rcenter the spa" they distinguish, turning up in their own forms."

Thi' re

22 n UC ( ClARK( AN O MARK 8. N. HAN S(N

In the semnd part of hi. essay, Landgraf explores the neocybernetic shift from an ontological to an operational viewpoint, in order to account for the emph"'i' improvisation (and conteml"'ra'Y an in general ) puts on performance and effKt over dep;ction and meaning. In line with Schiltz', disSion of Laws of Fo,m .. a protologic, Landgraf .hows how Spencer-Brown', foml concept aUow, us to conceive of afT in pre r'1'",,,,ntational terms: we can understand the "nper;'nce" of cogniti"e engagement with .n without having to .ssume an interpretive , tance toward the work, but . 1>0 without having to ,ubscribe to ontological notions of "materiality" or nistenti.listic definitions of the human body.nd ourbeing in-the-world . In'tead, we can mmprehend the anistic ""em as created by the multiple, mnsciou, and subconscious. operations the psychic and nervous systems (learned to ) perform when they obS

tNTRODUCTION '3

not generally at the command of psychic system, imerpenelrated by modern social sy'tem" Thi' scenario ,uggests that Fredric fameson', observation of the waning of affect in modernity has a systems-theoretical foundation.

CaryWolfe'. "Meaning a, Event !\1achine, or System. Theoryand The Re-construction of Decon>lruction' " returns to the n

24 n Ue[ (lAUE ANO MARK B. N. HANSEN

Both Derrida and Luhmann. then. undertake two crucia l disarticulation> that mah their work thoroughly anti -representationalist and resolutely rosthu manist: on one hand, of psychic systems and consciousness from social systems and communication. and on the other. of language in the strict sense as a type of symbolically generalizffi communications medi.~ (Luhmann) from the more fundamental drnamics of meaning that comprehend it. For both thinkers. in other words. language may be human. but meaning is not. and this allows us to think the .. lations between human and nonhuman worlds (technical, social. animal, and biological) with a renewed appr

INTQODUCTION 25

Not.,

t. \,,,01 "IotrodUoo, "Cybernetic I'.xpI.n.,ion: in SI

Interview with Heinz VOll Foersta

Ju/y 20, 2001, Pescmlcro, Californ ia INTERVIEWER: BRUCE CLARKE

family in Vienn a

Bm" Clarke: I ",anted 10 ad ''I)~ ,d>o~t YO'" vcry ~n;q'" .r,1~, your playful ... a), of pUlling P"'jes>;oNal f'ii~rs togeiller. Did )'ou nlwaJS ""';1. tllal way" Heinz von Foe"'er: I think my answer is that I' m from Vienna, At the time I wa, oorn, at the turn of the century, Vienna wa, so muhicuhural---fabulous in medicine, in architecture, in an and painting and drawing. Ernst Mach and people like Ihal came from Vienna, My family belonged to Ihis "'hirlwind of people. jI,ly father was an architect with the electric industry bm had lot, of frienm in malhematics and ph}~ics. My mother came from an anistic family. Her people were dancers, painters., sculptors. poets, and I was .Iinle kid tossed into thi' bunch of different people who met .t th. home of my parent'. My grandmother kept a kind of .. Ion whe .. people from different univer .. , mel. Th. act .. " Ele.nor Du.., rame to Ihe hou..,.

Marie Lang. She publi,hed Ihe first European journal on women', liberation, and ,he was IMrefore known all owr Europe.

Did Illey h".., til. '''/frag' ;5Sul'--lhe wo'"en', suffrage n"" .. ""m III~I brg~" in III. ninelemlll cen l"'y"

They w ... not directly members of il. My grandmother founded something which (ame from the Brilish suffrage move men t ... Ih ..,ttlement,. for poor people. And my mother .nd some of her friends founded one of tho.., ..,nle-m.nts in Vienna. So when r was a liule boy, Slaying wilh my grandmother, ' ining under her gigantic desk with big legs. I had m)'little (hair there. and Ihen all the ladi"" .rgued aoout philosophy, women', laoor, .nd the right. of

INTERVIEW WITH HEINZ VO N fOU STE R 27

women. So a. a kid [was familiar wilh Ihe po[iti(a[ and the culi ural problem, which an", in a society.

Un

28 BRuCE nARK[ A~D ~!I"Z YON fOfRSTU

10 proposition 1.7 in Ihe Traclal", .. . Ihal is the c ..... " Thoy said. Poor Heinz. whal con we do with youl"

Luhmann and Maturana

Wer~ so"'~ of yo"r pap .... , dril'fM by rh~ iMl"rmiorls YO" rcrei.."d! In mosl (ases;t was Ihe consequence of an ;mitalion. either to wrile a paper or 10 giw a ledure . Ilried to strike a balance. 10 giw a paper people should enjoy. I don'l want 10 lalk gibberish Ihat nobody undersland . Who are Ihrse I"'0pl. and whal are Ihoy inlerested in and why di d Ihey in\'ile me~ This i, whall a,k myself11 .. I. and Ihen I sit down and say. what can I leU them~

A, it was wilh Ihe Luhmann Ihing, you su.' They were all academi" . I wanted 10 do Iwo Ihing'. Number one, ewn if you are not a sociologisl, you can sa)" "ery 10Ugh things aboul sociology which .re nol ea,y 10 dige" and which are nol being observed, ewn b)' Ihe sociologisls Ihem",lw,. The other Ihing i, thai you can mah Ihem laugh. So I had Ihe tlow .. bouquet- Ihe mathematics for afterward .

I. it "'Sf 10 gel a ""'gim/toollqlle/?

Of course. if you are a profl'5SiollaI magician, you can produce them. It is no problem. I was in fact looking forward 10 Ihat moment : to see whal will be on Ihrse professors' facr, when I produce Ihal tlower bouquet.

Now were Ihesr Lul",,,,,,,, 's rolleaglll'5i

I Ihink il wa, the whole facult y of Ihe University of Bielefeld and Ihe members of Ihe rrsearch organizalion Ihal celebrated Luhmann's retirement. So il was ",ostly hi gh academia collffled there.

Did)"" hm'e ","ch imemdi"., wilh Luhma"" oW!" rh~ )"" ... 1 No, nol al all. Luhmann him",lf corre'ponded a 101 with me. H. visiled me; h. was her. himself, silling on thi' chair; and he was wry interesled in me l>e

INTERVIEW WITH HEIN l YON roUSTER 29

Spangli'h becia llheory, Thi' is juST. pe.sonal idios}lluas}'. They would likr 10 keep autopoie,i, >oldy for biological discussion o. biologi -c-al.esearch.

Bul Malurmm ""d Varda "",n "Iso highl)" sociall)" moti''a/rll a",1 ",,,ke IIIdr OW"

10 n ue( ClARK( AN O Hf l NZ VOM fOfRSHR came running up 10 me. "Do you know what they were saying!" I 'kIid. "No, I couldn't]isten to mystlf; it was too hOI." "They said, 'You'w changed social theoryi' " ! said, "I hope 10 Ih . better," He wem on. "You ha". to come to conference,." The firm Siemen, had organized a program for establi'hing aU the foreign workers, whether from Turkey, from Romania, who came to work in Germany,

TI,e Gastarbeiter,

Pool, for the children. enlenainmenl for the grownups.. etc. etc. He said, "You've changed

,MTnV'EW WITH HE'HZ VON fOIRSTER )1

Prffisdy, y ....

Sc lei me Iry 10 describe your arguJllem.

Ve,., wonderful. 1 would be ddighted.

\\'ell. if 1/" II,."",U' .,~I"" j, organiZiHio,"IIl1y do,,",l. and lhi, j, Ihe case for )'0"' "lid for "" alld for all nerl'Ou, .,~""". Exactly.

The," how i, illhalwua/l "gree 0/1 rhe world oU/'ide of U,? Siner "",'" bolh inl'fnl-i/lg ir for ourml'f' "lIlile rime. A",I whcr,.." in a "",/WolI,,1 app'Oland. Vou h"'e to touch, you h"'e to moYe. "nd then you will understand.

32 &RUCI ClARK! AND HEINl YoN FoERSrn

Or grasp--that', a good metaphorical 'tatrment. You haw to gra,p things in order to grasp them .. .. There are easier papt"rs than thatl

The Magician

Did you get the papt"r on Luhmann?

y .... ... "How Rwmi", /s eo",,,,uniwtioll!"

Y .s. it', a lillie bit que ... My problem "a. that aU the great German professor> were .illing in this gigantic room. all with beards, and they " ... re such carica tures I couldn' t belie", mye)'es. There was not a .ingle .mile to be ....,n. And I had to do something to produce a smile from o"e of the .. guys. I u .. d to be magician when 1 was a kid.

Oh. I .....

And so J puUeNilJ Luhm.nn : , o",,ohy program.t the Univer,i'y 01 Bieler.ld on l'rt for lunmmn', ' i"y-fifth birthJ'r .nd r

INTERVIEW WITH HEINZ VON mUSTER 33

to Ritcr.l'.ul E. \\''''ton .nd Kenneth L Wilson. for their on P"", "or hand> NikJ .. l.uhmann copi'" of ,h, .. rt Kko >r i.lly bound for t hi. 0 ic n: .. he do",uo bouq u

Heinz von Foerster's Demons

The Emergence o/Second-Order Systems TIII:,ory

BRUCE CLARKE

At it. inception the discou",", of cybernetic ... mered on the du>!er of topic. gi"en by the initial tide of the famed Macy Confe .. nc." ten of which occurrro bet",,,,,n 1946 through 195}, "Circular Can>ality and Fee

HEINl VON fOERSTER'S DEMONS JS

toward Arlillcial Intelligence (.ition" For scientific papers they are remarkably high rhetorical performances. Seri -ous argum.nt, about mailers ofbiologicaJ com putation, 'yslem/environment int errelalion, and perceptual and cogniti,'e construction typically turn on a

16 aRUCE ClAUE

pr~~ntational rhetoric that pbc~s them. as it w .... on a magician', stage and presto! turn, thorn into visible ,hap

HEINl VON f OUSTU' S DEMONS 37

"",nl, i, Maxwell's Ikmon, a sun Foersler implicitly plays de"i]'s ad,'ocate to Maxwell'. Demon, a. Ih~ d~mon', scientific fame was first t'Slablished as a ,u

38 tR UC E ClARK(

but has eyolvN into a supple theoretical fact with real con~uen .. s for the deyelopment of modern " ience. The demon ' uccessful run has reotN on it. conducting thought ex~riments in fruitful dirfCtions. And fow heuristic entitie, from the annal. of 'e been a. thoroughl), anthropomor-phiZDrspite their temperature differential. among the molt'Ollrs in both cham-bers "there "'ill be ,-eloci1i .. of all magnit ud ... ~ It is Ih. random di'tribution of molreular veloc iti . ,., together with the partitioning (CD) of th. total.}"tem. thai proyide. the opening for an intelligent agent to fix the molfCular loltery. "Now conceiye a finite being who knows the path. and ",locities of all the 1ll0lfCuies by .imple inspection but ",ho can do no work, except to o~n and close a hole in the diaphragm by mea", of a ,lide without mass." Supplementing the d),namical sys"m al the microlevel. the d.mon famously let' only hotter molfCulrs from B go into A. whe .. it is already hOI. and only colder onrs from A go into B. where it i. already cold. bywhich stratagem the second law is ,-iolatN in that rhe hOlier "ts,,1 rakts hear fro", the cold .. wilhOlu ex/ernal "gen!ical variation, in alr.ady ~n .. getic particles,

c

,

D

HEINl VON fOERSTfR'S DEMONS 39

Maxwell', 5~"~ 10' TIl.,moTIlousnt -[.o;p.,lm~"t.

the demon re"erse. the probable drift toward thermal equilibrium and, so the legend goes., sa" .. the world from the 'pe

40 nUe! CLARK!

po,,~.,~d was strictly internal: the hoi. in th~ partition, which the d.mon open~d or dru.! to allow ",Ie~O n Self.Orga ni,i ng Systems and Thei ' Environments"

Mock Falla .. )" J: There Is Such a Thing as a Sdf-Organuing Sy

HIINZ VON mUSTU'S DfMONS 41

Tho f!M ronmon,,1 (IO'UfO 01. S.U-()rg"ni, ing Sy"om (r.d"...,).

two mutually ~xdU5ive parts : the one part is completely occupiN with a self-organizing syslrm 5" while the other part we may call the environment E. of thi' self-organizing 'ystem: 5, & E" = U, ....

Undoubtedly, if thi s stlf-organizing system is permitted to do its job of organizing itstlf for a litt l~ while. its entrol'Y mu,t haw dffreased during this tim e ... othe""i .. we would not call it a stlf-organizing system. but just a mechanica.! ... or 3 thermodynamical . .. sy"tem. In order to accom-plish thi .. the entropy in the remaining pari of our finilr uni ... r ... i.e. the entropy in the environment must have inneased .. . otherwist the Second Law of Thermodynamics is '''olated . ... Henc~ th .. , tate of th~ uni ... rse will be more di>organized than before .. .. in other word, the activity of the system wa, a di>organizing one. and we may justly ,ali such a system a "di>organizing system."'

In thi' pa,sage ,'on Foemer play, fast and loose wit h. or rather mocks. (L' the noncoincidelKe of the system 5.'5 selforganization with its "di>orga -niling" of its o/her, the environment E., and {l ' the di,tinction betw..,n en -ergy and information. That i,. for th~ momen! he equivocate, between. on the one hand, thermodrnamic entropy as th .. ",easure of >ome real rNuction in th. sum of u",ble energy within 3 material system and. on the other hand, entropy a, re

42 aRUCE ClARKE

non -nistence of stlf-organizing systems, I pro~ to continue the uStitutes for itselfby emerging as a 'ystem. The in .. parability of the 'y'tem} environment dyad is a primary and pimt.1 premiS

KflNZ YON fOfRSTU'S OfMO~S 43

arises when we. men, consider oursdves to 0., self-organizing 'ystem,. We may insist that intro'ption doe. not !"rmit u, to decide whether the world as we see it i. .. al ,' or just a phantasmagory, a dream. an illu,ion of our fanc)'.~" What if Ihe only reality i. in fact the .. If in teTm, of which the mind carries out its self-organization! If Ihat were the ca"" " my originallh .. i, ., .. rting the nonsensicality of the conception of an isolated .. If-organizing system would piliably collapse. I shall now proceed to .how the reality of the world as we see il. by "dlldi" ,,01 "bsII,dll'" of the th is: th is world i. only in our imagin.tion and the only reality i, the imagining '1," " Or aga in (says von Foerster, honorary cousin of Ludwig IVittgenstein ) I ,hall now make. superannuated philosophical conu ndru m----

44 aRUn ClARKE

TheM.nwlththe

Bowlor H.t (dr.WfI by Gor.on P''').

real SJ'SI~m~ the nonniSlrnce of an fnl'ironmrnt is ~imply not forthcoming. So solip,ism is nol the real problem bUI rather a metaphor for a real propen'ity 10 conce ntrJle on th e 'ystem cone ept without mai nta ining sufficient consideration of its neH"sary

H[INZ ~O" FOUS TER'S DfMONS 4 5

proof, a rhetorical argum~nt masqu~",ding a, a logical ,,ing re -establi.hed reality, it may be intere.ting to note that reality appears as a consi. -tent referenc~ frame for at least two observers.M" And if we examine th~ MBH carefully. we ".,. that he con. trucl5 in imagination IWI} ow,w", one of whi ch confirm, hi. reality by imagining him. The total figure, then, prrfigures what second-order cybernetic, will cali the obse ... '.tion of ob.ervation. Through a reticulation of le .... l, of OO .. rvation. it present. a .. cond-order ,'iew of the rpi.temological .ituation, which rewal, that the solipsist, in turn, exi,ts both a, the figment of it. own figments and as the OO .. rvation of another ow ... 'er.

For the solipsi't to confess that its own exi,tence depend, on the real ity of an other in it' en>ironment i parable of the overcoming of ontological id~a1i.m by epi.temological con'tructi>'i.m. Taken as. diagram of rffursive co-cognition, then. the M"H i, not a sterile "'i,e-m-~bJ'",e, haU of mirrors, or vi -cious circle of the .. me aU O\'er .gain. Literally considered, tbe MBH does not .imply .. If-r~iterate in a mode of infinite rrgr""s; rather, an other i, interpo .. d between the .. If and it . .. nection. Thi. i. better understood a, a productive

46 U UCI CLA RKf

oscillation, a, the image of a mut ual em~dding of the oth .. within the self and the self within the other. The m""'ge is that the reality one can know depends on the communication of reality from one obsen'" to another, which d.".nds on "a consistent reference frame" withi n which "at lea51two ollsen'ers" are emlx-dded so .. to con,truct a con"ersation aoout that reality.

As we haw just seen, ' On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environm.nt s adumbrates the explicit epistemological const",cti"i,m of von Foerster'. b ter ""'y' ",ith a system. theory built on the premises of recursi",ly structured system}environment coupl ... A multiplicity of mutuall y reinforcing ob .. .,,-en maintains rdationship. and states of stable C1o

HtlNZ ~o" mUSTER'S of MONS 47

(I,ud. Sh.nnon', D.fin~ion 0/ R.dund.n! a matter of "negentropy, as that term WJ.5 used at the time to identify informational order with negative entropy. Self-organizing system, can al", tran.lat~ the rx,r",a/ IIoisrof their .n\ironments into s),stemic gain: "Thus. in my r .. taurant selforganizing systems do not only feed upon order. they .lso find noise on tho menu."" With the formulations that "reality appears as a consistent referenc~ fram~ for at least two ob",rv

" UUc[CLlRKf

H , "'. H 'H ,

I ., ., Hoi", ron

1 f .. ",.,',

'nt.,n.1 and

""~ [ ... """

"""""'" ,.-_.,

-, -

~"

thooey, the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, and th~ autopoietic 'y,tem. lhrorie, ofMalUrana and Varela and NikJas luhmann."

To demonstrate the ordor-from -noise principle, von F"""ter play. a sophis-ticated game of 'tacking blocks. Conjur..d up to probe Shannon's mathematic. of information in light of a dual'Y5tem-and -. m-ironmem approach to Ih. self-organization concept, th. expo.ition oflhe order-from -noise principle is done up with magnetic cube, rem in isarne mag-netic pol .. , The probability is high that attracted ,urfaces wiU indee

HEINZ ~ON mUSTER'S DEMONS 49

lumbl.d 80 ... (drawn by Gordon V k).

rnergy wa, imponed inlo Maxwell', Demon', 'Y'tem. "No order was fed to the system 1 of the blocks I, juot cheap undirected energy: however. thanks to the little demons in the box, in the long run only tho", compon.ms of the noi", were ",lected which contributed to the inc rea", of ordrr in the system.'"

Best of al!, in thi' ",enario these offspring of J\.JaxweU', Demon are not entirely imaginary: "The co-operation of our demons~ i, guaranteed be

s.,f -orBanil. ,;on

from lioi ... (drawn I>y Gordon Pa,k).

HEINZ VO~ fOERSTER'S DEMO~S 51

~eo1ln

52 BRUC! CLARK!

cognition _ compUtat ions J Cognition .s Rurs~ Co mput.tlon.

of operational circularity by turning cybernetic I hinking upon itself. Luhmann has written about cybernetics in general that "the first innovation was the If-di>

HEINl VON fOfRSTfR'S OEIIION5

" SYbjPCt I Object

I Ilour>d.lry

From SubjI/Obje" to System Environment Sy"..,,/ErM ronment

Epi"emolo3'/,

de",ription. is .o1.!y the '}~tem'. affair , "The ,,,,';ro",,,,"t;, as it is. ~ However, there i. alway, more than one ob .. rving 'ystem; or again, cognition i. alway, aha a >elWcen .. If and other, between indu~jon and exdu-,iOlI- that render tho .. 'Y"tems operable at any giwn moment, maintainable from one mom.ntto the next, and sufficiently distinct from their environment and other sy"em, 10 maintain operation . Luhmann write" "Boundaril'S can be differentiated a pecific mechani,m. with t h. specific purpo'" of "'pant ing yet conn cannot convey to any ,)'''em the full complexity of another. e ... en if its capacity for proce"ing information would O1herwi .. be sufficient."

The figur. on page 5-1 diagrams the operation of .. entry a. a model of rffur-,ive cognition in the ",cond-order cybernetic description of observing system" This is how one construCl. a reality: an ob""rving 'ystem S, a nff ..... rily .. !f-referential form, creates.pistemological space for itselfby "",mering the \"inuai form of its o\'ill boundNi distinction from the environment BIE into itself a,

54 laUe! CLARKf

o , R~n!ry.s MoO~1 0/ R

HflNl YON fOERSTU 'S OEMONS 55

Thi , i, one reason why von Foerster concludes "On Constructing a Reality" with a coda acknowledging that his foregoing discu>sion could plausibly be dismi""d .. a plea for solipsism, if it were to be delimited by old philosophical habits, "the view that this world i, only in my imagination and the only reality is the imagining 'I.' Indeed, that was precisely what I wa, saying before, but I Wd> talking only about a s.ingle organism, The situation i, quite different when there at< two,"'" We see that the faUacy of solipsism alwa)" wa, an aberration but not a paradox: it was an inference logically induced by the id.alization of .ingularity, the re.idua l monothMlogism that aUowed the comception of dis-embodied observations----that i., the conception of the po"ibility of s)"tems without environments, and thus the possibility of a system una,companied by other s)"tem . Th. real paradox is that we could hal" gone so long imagining that th .. e could be not just mind. without bod i .. or world., but also mind, in the ab .. n" of other mind,.

As we recall, in dOn Self-Organizing Sysr.ms and Their En\'ironments," the Man with the Bowler Hat prefigured but did nol un fold the matter of cognitive self-reproduction, or the autopo;'sis of the psychic system. The main thru.t of thai .... y was self-organization as the emerg.nce of order from noise in material -energetic s)"tems. When the MBH makes an .ncore foun..,n yea" !ater, it is no longer put to work to .upport the reality of the em'ironment ~r se, but rather to suppon a view of that reality that now rests solely and explicitly on it. cognitive co-con.truction by mulliple observing .yst.ms. Misreadingsof the""H are more likely to occur in the context of thi' paper, however, be, \'on Foerster h .. le .. interest in using the MBH to satirize and dKonstruct the architectu re of sol ip.i.m. Rather, "solip-,ism" is morphed into "irresponsibil ity and blasted into a syst.ms dimen,ion that provides for its .. If-o\'ercoming. Where .. in the 1919 paper the mantra of the wli!"ist had been, "j in.ist that I am the .ole reality,~" the entire 1973 paper revolves around an initial con.tructivist postulate--'"The Environment as W. Perceive It Is Our Jt,..ention""- that would ""em considerably to up the solip,i.t 's .nte.

In.t.ad, from here we can see more clearly why Ih. ,""ond paradox in "On Self-Organizing S)'''el1l' and Their Environment s" was a mock fallacy, a state-ment that only seem, to oscillate belween true and false . Rather, it inrue,ju.t not true enough. Once again, a. in the first paradox regard ing 'ystem. without

56 BRun ClAR KE

environment'. ir caprul" "''''rrhing !rur bur MO/ .ujfirienr abo"lrr"Ury. Namely. wh"r js rrue (thaI is, as Ime as possible under co n'lruclivi'l con>1raim. on Ihe concept of"lrulh") i, Ihal we do have 10 con>truCi realily- "the environment as we perceive it;, our im'ention." But whal i, illSujfidrm is the implication Ihat when we do so, we are in the ",lip,ist i, situation of going it alone. In ' On ConsuuCling a Reality. " Ihe grammatical doubling of the consttuctivi't postulate (" the environment as ..... perceive it ~) carries the epistemological weight. Whereas solipsism proceed, in the singular. con'trueti,'ism proceed, in the plural. Solipsi,m is transcended not by negating its propo,ition but by forcing the complexity of the mult iple out of it' unitary ,implicity. Epi>temol-ogy pnx..m from classical capture by the ,i ngularity of the knowing mind to multiple knowledge> in social context,.

sond-order cybernetics =, in'tead a world ", constructed that any 'ingle observer', obsel"\,.tions may be rendered stable from moment to moment by the slruetural couplings and recursi"e conversation< of il< mult iple observ-ers. lust as all n .. ,'ou> system, and all organi,m, thai PO"'" them within themsel"e5 are virtual consortium, of multi ple ,ulOroietic 'ystems, '" are all ob""r\'er, bound into (what Varela call,) "obse,,'er-communitie," within which (what Luhmann call.) 5/Jdaiautopoiesis-the o ngoing self-production of and self-maintenance of commun;cation--produces (what von FOff.ller aU,) ri-ge""niuN-lhal i., , table )'et mobile and multiple .. cursive consensuse, about ,hared en"ironment'.

By w.y of conclu,ion. let us read some of Luhmann', opening mo,'., in Social Sy

NWtl YON rORSTU 'S OMONS 57

The footnote here is to von F"""'ter' , "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Em'ironmem',~ one of the essential !",ims of which wa, that in the >ugue for notion, of self-organization then abroad at the tum of the 1

58 BRun ClAR KE

fro m the 'y'temknvironment diff .. encr a, it i. mro within th e .y.tem it -self, the observer, in tum, being conceivable himself only a, a ",If-referential 'ystem.""

In "On Constructing a Reality" "on Foerster presents his own "ethico-ontological" understanding of n'"""ybernetic co-constructivi.m by forci ng the social issue out ofthe biological and neurological factors of operational cl05ure. wringing from the MB H the cognitive confession that "reality = community." H. unfold. from the pair ofintemal """' .. '." in the", OH a pair of co-constructing wei.l iml"'rati,'es------two performative ulterances bound together by a feedback loop , The "ethkal i",perm,,,,~ i. "Act al ways.., as to increase the number of choices", the "arst'ortkal ''''~rati>'i''' is "If you d",ire to see, learn how to act .... If ethic. concern, the oprmtionssystem. selfft for themseh'". esJlKially in..,far as these 'ystem, may be considered as self-refere ntial or "refimive" rntities. a .. thetia concerns the role of 00""''''''01'' in guid ing those operation" To .hift into the conceptual mode of second-order 'ystems theory, then. i, to .efonn classical dyads such as part/whole di"i,ion, or 5ubjfft/obja-Y dichotomies. in ord .. to reob .. r .... and gra,p the complex.Jy supplementary rather than merely exdmionary relation. of 'ystem/environment couples and to re -cognize the borde" that self-organizing, now aUlopojeric. system, mu,t use in order to operate.

Simply put. taking 'y'temic ",If- reference seriomly .ubvert' the notion of "objective" material or philo..,phica l foundations, And those ",ho bel ie"e in the actual or po

KflNZ YON fOfRSTU'S OEMONS 59

Note.

t . Fint hand .. rounlS of th"", ownlS ore &i,'en in von Foe,,,,,," "'i,h I'oe,ksrn. U"J,,-,Iu"di"g S1"lc,,",. 135-40 nd B,.nd, "Fo, God'. Sake, M.rga,et."

2. s.e. hi. f.mily min&ence. "In trodu"ion 10 Nato,.r Magic." An illustr .. ed biog-raphy of von ~Oler lin {;erm:tnJ i. (;ro",ung. H. rt m.n . Korn,.nd Mull"" H fi,,, .ppearance in Engli, I, The .nick wo. fln t publi,h.d in Y ovi .. and Cameron, 0" Sdf-O'&""Ui,,& Spurn>, 31--SO.

So Von P"""1 of. compend ium of "i-

.nt ilie P"P"'" o n M"""",Il'. INmon ,.., i .. , "Tho lif. of ~Iaxwell. demon can be ,i.,....! ",.folly in tenD> of th,,,,, m.jo, ph~." (Leff and Rex . AluXI>,d l'.' fR-Ilion, ;:). Th.a..d ... "MoxwcU ', Silver H.mmn" i, likely .tovi,m, cr. ~l.x",dr. D.mon"., Bri .n SI.de', (Jon.th.n Rhy>-M.ye,,1 g1.m pe,""n. in V~I .... , Go/;/", i",.

7. llK.u"" of ,It. notion of u>i ng demon '0 grn"''' nergy out of th in a i, whe, than. ",ilh M .. ,...u. '0 ,,,,tore .".n' enorgy (by ,he 1i,,1 1,10) from onu>a bJe to o>able fo,m, tbe demon i, "",, , i m plisticall y p,,,,,,n'oJ 'he ol"""ato, of. pe,petl1.11 mot>on machi"", ]-'0' more on M .. well ,nd hi. d,'mon from .Ii,,,,",u,,,,nd science perSpec1i,-., "",CI. rie, En"g}, f'orm~ ch, 4' anJ H.yI ... "Solf-Rdl",i", Mer.phon.

~o, more on the ~rigogin nd SlOng"", om 0"' of Chrw~ S1 in it> erumie .nJ b io'phe,ic conl, ;:~7J.

I;:. Yon Foe"',,, , ' O n Self-Org;1ni'ing Sy".,m~ 3-4. '.1. Ibid .. 4.

60 BRUCE ClARKI

4. s..,..on ,'''''''>tor with I'olor. "On Self-Ofgan i'ing ,ha, H.yles mi .... lhe

poinl ",hen .he comments. "Although ch .. mingly po.....J. ,he . rgumen, il logic. lly non~.in i, ing Sy"om.," I). '9. Ibtd. 30. Ibid. Jt. Von foe"t ... "On Con>tr"Cli ng ' lI.e,lity," ,,6. J2. Luhmann . "The Co ntrol of ln tr, .. up>fI ... ..., t l>< 'pp .... "u. o(hi. wo,k (o r pen',on Foe" .. , artie ..... I'or in>t.nce, ' he very I .... f, irly , hort p>.f"'T cited .bo .. , "1he Co ntrol o( In,ran'p>rmcy," men,ion. foor von !-'""", .. .. ,,>; "On Self-OrganiLing Systems" (in note 4); O/m",i"! SY"nn, (in no'. S);

" ~'i lKiple. ofs.!f-Orgdnization" (in note ~); ..,d the highly ob",ull.' 1945 to", >on !-'""""",', Uing carJ ",hen Ii", >i.it ing the Unit~d Su,.,. I)", c.,/ilch",i, (in note 21). s...... .Iso I\aler. " Kno .. kJgoanJ Ignorance."

l4. "I n 'he Ii"" qtl.lnor o( !the ,,..ent,,,h! C (. .ubjKtle .. oni,..",,'). conuin>

NEUH YON rORSHR'S OMONS 6,

view (i.e . hi, coordina'e 'Y'tem: Eimt.

~. O n thi. po int ..., my Po,lhumm, M,I"mo'l'ho,; .. 49. Luhmann. Soanl Sysl""~ 9. SO. Von Foe,,"'r. On Co n!truct ing a R

The Early Days of Autopoiesis

fRANCISCO J. VARELA

In this memoir, the origin of the notion of autopoiesis is presented from the point of view of the basic intellectual background which gives its specificity and from the role of the major actors involved in its articulation and its set-ting in Chile in the late 19608. Heinz von Foerster's role in this connection is exemplary, as he was an active, visionary, and supportive participant in this evolving conversation.

My homage to Heinz will be a story. He has been a mentor, friend, and inspiration for over thirty years, and there would be many stories to tell. But I think it is most appropriate to dwell on a particularly rich one: his role in the gestation and early days of the notion of autopoiesis. This is the first occasion in which I have publicly spoken about this period, and although I think it is important to go beyond the individual's roles, there is also the background of ideas and of social context that makes science alive. 1

What does it mean when an idea like autopoiesis, in its strict sense, a theory of cellular organization, gains visibility and prominence beyond professional biology and becomes capable of affecting distant fields of knowledge? My answer is that ultimately we can only understand this phenomenon because the idea contains a background of important historic sensibilities with which it aligns and resonates. This background of tendencies does not appear strictly delineated but rather as a retrospective, because ideas, like history, are possibilities to be cultivated, not a result of some mechanical determinism. At this distance, autopoiesis holds a privileged place, in my opinion, for having clearly and explicitly announced a tendency which today is already a force in many areas of cultural inquiry.

The tendency to which I refer, stated briefly, is the disappearance of intel-lectual and social space which makes cognition a mentalist representation and the human being a rational agent. It is the disappearance of what Heidegger calls the period of the image of the world and what could also be referred to

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIESIS 63

as Cartesianism. If autopoiesis has been influential it is because it was able to align itself with another project which focuses on the interpretive capacity of the living being and conceives of the human as an agent which doesn't discover the world but rather constitutes it. It is what we could call the ontological turn of modernity, which, toward the end of the twentieth century, is taking shape as a new space for social interaction and thought and which, undoubtedly, is progressively changing the face of science. In other words, autopoiesis is part of a picture much larger than biology, in which today it holds a privileged posi-tion. It is this syntony with a historical tendency, intuited more than known, which is the core of the early ideas on autopoiesis and whose development I hope to trace.2

The act of signing one's name to a text, more than claiming it as a personal possession, represents the placing of a milestone on a path. Ideas appear as movements of historical networks in which individuals are formed, rather than vice versa. Thus, Darwin already had Wallace waiting for him and Victorian England as the substratum; Einstein alone in his Swiss patent office had dia-logues with Lorentz against the backdrop of the world of German physics at the end of the century; Crick was already familiar with the ideas of Rose and Pauling when he met Watson, and his attitude was that of Cambridge in the 1950S. Mutatis mutandis, the history of autopoiesis also emerges out of prior work and is nourished by a unique substratum. It was all of Chile that played a fundamental role in this story.

Writing this story is, I insist, making a fold in history where men and ideas live because we are points of accumulation among the social networks in which we live, rather than individual wills or characters. One cannot claim to draw together the density of actions and conversations that constitute us in a neces-sarily unidimensional personal account. I don't pretend that what I say here is an objective narrative. What I offer is, for the first time, my own tenta-tive and open reading of how the notion of autopoiesis emerged and what has been its significance and development since. I have let everything I say mature over the years, and I believe it to be honest to the degree that I can take responsibility for being one of the direct participants in this creation, while maintaining an awareness that I cannot consider myself a holder of the truth.

To illuminate the background, I must begin with the roots of this story from my personal point of view. Paradoxically, only through recovering how the background appeared in the specificity of my perspective can I communi-cate to the reader the way in which this invention found its place on a broader horizon.

64 FRANdsco J. VARElA

The Years of Incubation

I belong to a generation of Chilean scientists who had the privilege of being young during one of the most creative periods in the history of the Chilean scientific community, the decade of the 1960s. As a teenager, I had an early vo-cation for intellectual work, and the biological sciences seemed my undoubted destiny. Upon finishing secondary school in 1963, I opted for the Universidad Cat6lica which announced an innovative undergraduate program in "Biological Sciences" following the third year of Medicine. As a medical student, I got to know the first researchers who fascinated me, people such as Luis Izquierdo, Juan Vial, Hector Croxato, and above all J oaqufn Luco, who definitively infected me with a passion for neurobiology. Not far into my first year, I asked Vial ifhe would take me on as an apprentice in his cellular biology laboratory. He gave me the key to a little door to his laboratory, overlooking Calle Marcoleta, where I spent my free time staining myelin on nerve cross-sections.

Juan Vial also gave me good advice, including his recommendation, in 1965, that I move to the newly opened Department of Sciences at the University of Chile to continue my training. It was a crucial step, because I left the world of traditional careers in order to fully enter the universe of exclusive scientific training, until then unknown in Chile. In a few borrowed classrooms on the top floor of the School of Engineering, I found my place to grow: a small group of young people excited about research and pure science and researcher-professors who taught future scientists with passion.

Apprentice to a Neurobiologist

The last piece of advice Vial gave me was to find work with Humberto Mat-urana, who had just left the University of Chile's Medical School for the new Department of Sciences. On a beautiful day in April 1966, I went to see him in his laboratory in the basement of one of the sections of the new school on Calle Independencia. At that time Maturana was already an important researcher, known for his work on the physiology of vision in several classic papers he had written at Harvard and MIT before returning to Chile.3 In Chile he continued to work on the physiology and anatomy of the retina in vertebrates.

To continue my apprenticeship in the trade, Humberto asked me to repeat experiments in electric recording on the optic tectum of the frog, which led me to investigate the problems of vision more deeply than I had ever done with a scientific problem. When I left the laboratory on Independencia to leave for the United States two years later, I had developed the ability to generate my

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIES!S 65

first research ideas. One was a hypothesis about the role of time in the opera-tion of the retina, which led to some experimental predictions which were the origin of my first scientific article.4 Maturana's influence was one of the pillars he gave me during my years of apprenticeship in Chile, but it is important that I touch on at least two other influential currents which had and continue to have an enormous impact on my intellectual history. The first was philosophy and certain key readings I discovered during these years of training. The second was discovering the world of cybernetics and theoretical biology; in both areas Heinz's role was to become essential.

Philosophical Reflection

During my high school years my readings in philosophy were as passionate as they were random, mixing Aristotle, Ortega y Gasset, Sartre, and Papini. In search of a more systematic training, when I transferred to the Department of Sciences in 1966, I also enrolled in philosophy at the old Instituto Pedagogico and began to participate regularly in guided readings with Roberto Torreti in the Humanities Center at the School of Engineering. The Institute's grand ideo-logical controversies didn't interest me as much as what I could discover thanks to the classes of Francisco Solar, which resonated with the German training of Torreti and which took form in the collections of the Center's library. There I discovered European phenomenology and began a reading, which continues to this day, ofHusserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. For ilie first time I seemed to find in these authors a preoccupation for the definition of the range oflived experience which I consider fundamental.

The second stunning discovery of these years was the social nature of sci-ence. lowe to Felix Schwartzman my early introduction to this world. In his course in the Department of Sciences, I came to know what until then was only known by a minority in Chile, the works of the French school in the history and philosophy of science: Alexandre Koyre (above all), Georges Canguilhem, and Gaston Bachelard. All of iliese authors express the counterintuitive conviction iliat scientific ideas are made and change abruptly, and not because of a lucky accumulation of "purely empirical evidence"; that they are sustained with im-ages and ideas which are neither given nor immutable; and that each age is blind to the foundation of what it considers certain and evident. The general public became aware of all this through Thomas Kuhn's famous book,S which couldn't have existed wiiliout the groundwork of the French school, which Kuhn quotes with reverence. Barely nineteen, I was relieved forever of my position as naive apprentice. Schwartzman's guided readings on the mission of

66 FRANCISCO I. VARElA

the scientist turned me into a critic of what I was receiving as my professional training.

Brain, Machines, and Mathematics

During that pioneering era, the Department of Sciences made few concessions when it came to training in mathematics. On my first day of class, without say-ing a word, the professor began to write: Let E be a vector space. The axioms for E are .... " After the initial shock of getting up to speed, I discovered in mathematics a language and a way of thinking that fascinated me. It was at this ripe time that I first encountered Heinz as exponent of mixing mathematics with brain studies. Although I didn't meet him in person until 1968, he became quite immediately a figure of great importance for me. His papers circulated in the laboratory, with fascinating titles such as "Circuitry of Clues to Platonic Ideation."6

In these sources I first realized a long tradition which seeks to express the properties of biological phenomena beyond their material particularities. As we all know now, it is a way of thinking that had only appeared in the 19508, more specifically with the publication of Cybernetics, by Norbert Wiener, and under the influence of another important person at MIT, Warren McCulloch,? whom Humberto had met in 1959-60 when he was working at MIT. Wiener, McCulloch, and von Foerster were the pioneers of the conjunction of episte-mological reflection, experimental research, and mathematical modeling. Only many years later was I able to appreciate these early days of cybernetics and the major role Heinz played in them as editor to the Macy Conferences.s

Entry into Experimental Epistemology

Apprenticeship for the trade of neurobiologist wasn't the only thing going on in the laboratory. Humberto had entered a period of frank questioning of

. certain dominant ideas in neurobiology; discussion, reading, and debate were daily events, spurred on by the presence of Gabriela Uribe, a physician of clear epistemological leanings who was working with Maturana at that time. Those were times of search and discussion focusing on what seemed a dissatisfaction, an anomaly. A basic dissatisfaction was the notion of information as the key to understanding the brain and cognition; the idea didn't appear to play an explicit role in the biological process. Humberto's intuition was that living beings are, as he said in those days, "self-referred," and in some way the nervous system was capable of generating its own conditions of reference. It was a question of

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIESIS 67

reformulating an orientation into an "experimental epistemology," a wonderful term introduced by McCulloch. Gabriela and Humberto had begun a study of certain chromatic effects similar to those described by E. Land in 1964, which were transformed into the topic around which a first attempt to reformulate visual perception as nonrepresentational was based.

The days of my traj ning in Chile were coming to an end. The Biology Depart-ment offered to support me in obtaining a scholarship from Harvard University to do a doctorate. I began to wrap up my student life in Chile aware that I was leaving with a clear focus in experimental epistemology and with three living pillars in my imagination.

Harvard and the Crisis of 1968

I left for Harvard in a Braniff jet on January 2, 1968, reading a text by Koyre on Plato. I arrived in Cambridge in the midst of a snowstorm, with no place to live, far from speaking fluent English, and with the threatening knowledge that ifI didn't get straight A's, my scholarship would be taken away. The first few months were hard, but once settled and getting to know my way around this new kingdom, I leaped head first into courses and seminars of all kinds: anthropology (studies on the natural ethology of primates were beginning); evo-lution (Stephen Jay Gould had just arrived at Harvard and was a sharp contrast to the classicist, Ernst Mayr); mathematics (the theory of dynamic nonlinear systems was discovered at this time); and philosophy and linguistics (Chomsky was the dominant figure along with Putnam and Quine). I found in Cambridge libraries until then only imagined, well stocked and open at all hours. I had the impression of having leapt into another galaxy, and I don't remember a single day in which I didn't feel like greedily absorbing everything at hand.

Long afterward I realized, with great surprise, that compared to most of my doctoral classmates, my interests and vision of science were frankly more heterodox and mature. Beyond that, I realized that talking V\~th pro-fessors about epistemological problems, as I was accustomed to doing in Santiago, was not looked upon favorably. The reaction was the same when I attempted to find a way to cultivate my interests in theoretical biology. The MIT of 1968 had already disappeared, with McCulloch retired and no one to replace him. My only point of reference continued to be von Foerster, whom I visited several times at the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Urbana, an active and productive center which he directed in those years. It was easy to see that my intellectual quest would have to be divided in two: the official and the private.

68 fRANCISCO J. VARELA

Officially, I was studying under Keith Porter, in whose laboratory I learned to work in cellular biology, and Torsten Wiesel, who not long thereafter received the Nobel Prize for his work on "information processing" in the visual cortex. I focused my interest on comparative aspects of vision and began work on the functional structure of the eyes in insects, which would become the subject'of my dissertation. By early 1970 I had already published four articles on the topic, and my dissertation was accepted in April of 1970.

Unofficially, outside the laboratory, I found myself for the first time living in a world infinitely more vast than that of Santiago, with young people from other cultures, in a place where nationalities and races blended. As fate would have it, those were the years of the mythic events that marked my generation. What began in Paris on the night of May 10, 1968, corresponded to the move-ment in North America, centered around its opposition to the Vietnam War. The Kent State incident was followed by the first student strikes in which I took part. There were dramatic moments like the night the police forced us out of Harvard Yard. The Cambridge years were for me the discovery of my involvement as a member of society and the possibility of taking responsibility for changes in my social surroundings. It was a rediscovery of myself, far from my Latin American roots, which my friends from The Movement exalted in the form of the Cuban revolution. I was not only occupied with science, but also with the dream of a new Latin America belonging to our generation.

Having discovered myself to be a social and political animal accentuated the need to maintain a public silence regarding my true interests. Faithful to the idea of science as an activity that is made and created by jumps and bold innovations, like other members of my generation, I cultivated the intention to return to Chile to create a different science, in which the anomalies which had already appeared in Chile and were accentuated in the United States could be transformed into scientific practice. Creating my own original science seemed to me to define my obligation to my past and my roots.

I graduated as Doctor of Biology in June of 1970. Against the protests of my professors, I declined a post as a researcher at Harvard and another as Assistant Professor at another American university. I decided to accept a position offered to me by the Department of Sciences, justifiably interested in a return on the investment they had made in my training. I returned to Chile on September 2,1970, and Allende's election two days later seemed to be my second and true graduation. At last the work could really begin, with key problems well defined, with the certainty of being as competent and well prepared as anyone on the world scientific scene, and within the context of working in an environment that had a future to build. Having provided the backdrop of the situation in

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIESIS 69

September 1970, I can return now to the specifics of the notion of autopoiesis and its gestation.

The Gestation of an Idea

Examining the Problem

The direct antecedent to the gestation of autopoiesis is the text that Maturana wrote in mid-1969, originally entitled "Neurophysiology of Cognition." Hum-berto had continued along his own line of questioning regarding the inadequacy of the ideas of information and representation to understand the biological system. He visited me on several occasions in Cambridge and, as in Santiago, we had long conversations. In the spring semester of 1969, Heinz invited him to come to the Biological Computer Laboratory for a few months, an opportunity which coincided with the international meeting of the Wenner-Gren Founda-tion on the subject of "Cognition: A Multiple View," a visionary title in light of the enormous development of what today are called the cognitive sciences but until then were not considered a scientific field.

Humberto prepared the text for this meeting, providing for the first time a dear and attractive expression of his matured ideas, in order to clarify what until then he alluded to as the self-referred nature ofliving beings and to definitively identify the notion of representation as the epistemological pivot which had to be changed. From his point of view, it was necessary to center attention on the internal linking of neuronal processes and to describe the nervous system as a "closed" system, as the text states. This article marks an important jump, and to this day I still believe that it was the indisputable beginning of a turn in a new direction. I remember having visited Humberto in Illinois and having discussed several difficult parts of the text while he was finishing it. The text appeared shortly thereafter, and the article opens with a paragraph thanking Heinz and me for the conversations we had on the topic.9 Not long after that Humberto reworked the text into a more definitive version which came to be called "Biology of Cognition."

This text touches summarily on an idea that had been intriguing me for some time and that as an assistant in -the cellular biology course taught by George Wald and James Watson at Harvard had appeared to me as a dear anomaly: one talked about the molecular constitution of the cell and used terms like self-maintenance, but no one, not even the two reunited Nobel Prize winners, knew what was meant by that. What was worse was that when I pushed the discussion in that direction during lunch, the habitual reaction

70 FRANCISCO I. VARElA

was a typical, "Francisco, always getting into philosophy." My notes from that time include several attempts to examine the basic autonomy of the cellular process as the basis of the autonomy oflife. Toward the end of 1969, Jean Piaget's opus magnum, entitled Biologie et Connaissance,lO appeared in the window of Schoenhof' s Foreign Books in Cambridge, in which he notes the clear need to reconsider biology on the basis of the autonomy ofliving systems, but Piaget's language and idiosyncrasies left me unsatisfied.

In his article, Humberto made the connection between the circular na-ture of neuronal processes and the fact that the organism is also a circular process of metabolic changes, as was illustrated with reference to a recent article by Commoner in Science, which discussed the new advances in the biochemistry of metabolism and its evolution. The question under exami-nation then was: if we leave the organization of the nervous system to the side for the moment and focus on the autonomy oflife in its cellular form, what can we say? This reflection on the circular nature of metabolism in living beings and its relation to cognitive operations, although barely filling a short page in the definitive version of "Biology of Cognition," would be a focal point from which the development of the idea of autopoiesis would be drawn.

Those were the final months of 1970, I was back in Chile, and the Biology Department approached me about taking on the introductory course in cellular biology for new students. Maturana and I were now colleagues in the Biology Department, with neighboring offices in the "transitional" (but still used) stalls in the new campus of the Department of Sciences on Calle Las Palmeras in Macul. Everything was in place to launch the exploration of the nature of the minimal organization of the living organism, and we didn't waste any time. In my notes the first mature outlines appear at the end of 1970, and toward the end of April 1971 appear more details along with a minimal model which would later be the subject of computer simulation. In May of 1971, the term autopoiesis appears in my notes as the result of the inspiration of our friend Jose M. Bulnes, who had just published a thesis on the Quixote in which he made use of the distinction between praxis and poiesis. A new word was appropriate because we wanted to designate something new. But the word only acquired power in association with the content our text assigned to it; its resonance reaches far beyond the mere charm of a neologism.

Those were months of almost constant work and discussion. Some of the ideas I tested with my students in the cellular biology course, others with colleagues in Chile. It was clear to us that we were embarking on a journey

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIESIS 71

that was consciously revolutionary and anti-orthodox and that this valor had everything to do with the mood in Chile, where possibilities were un-folding into a collective creativity. The months that led to the development of autopoiesis are inseparable from Chile at that time.

During the winter of 1971, we knew that we were dealing with an important concept and we decided to put it in writing. A friend lent us his house on Ca-chagua beach, where we went twice between June and December. The days at the beach were divided between long walks and a monastic rhythm of writing, which Humberto usually began and which I took over later in the day. At the same time I began a first draft (which Humberto revised) of a shorter article which would set forth the principal ideas with the aid of a simulation of a minimal model (which we called the "Protobe"; more on this below). Around December 15 (again according to my notes of 1971), we had a complete version of a text in English called "Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems." The typewritten version came to seventy-six pages, from which we made several dozen copies using the old blue ink mimeograph method. Although there were several later modifications, this text was to be published much later.

As has occurred often in the history of science, the creative dynamic between Maturana and myself resounded in an ascend,ing spiral, to which a mature inter-locutor contributed experience and previous consideration and a young scientist brought fresh perspectives and ideas. As is clear given the circumstances, the ideas did not emerge in one or two conversations, nor was it a simple question of making explicit what had already been said. What was in the background must be considered a qualitative leap. Such transitions are never simple, nor is it possible to retrace exactly how they came about, because there is always a blend of past and present, talents and weaknesses, imagination and inspiration. The mature concept of autopoiesis did have, as we have seen, clear roots, but between an idea and its roots exists a crucial jump. And just as Franklin's work is not the double helix ofWatson/Crick, nor Einstein's that of Lorentz's special relativity, the key ingredients of autopoiesis cannot be reduced to the mature expression of the idea, as is easily seen comparing the published texts. This is a limpid example of what I had already learned from my French teachers, that science has discontinuities, that it doesn't function by progressive empirical accumulation, and that it is inseparable from its social and historical context.

One Idea and Two Texts

As is inevitable, understanding unravels over the course of time and in propor-tion to its effects. So it isn't surprising that the text we finished toward the end of 1971 wasn't accepted immediately. In fact it was sent to at least five publishers

72 FRANCISCO I. VARElA

and journals, and without exception they considered it unpublishable. I re-member in January of 1972, my ex-professor Porter invited me to visit the new Biology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I gave an enthusiastic talk entitled "Cells as Autopoietic Machines." The reception was cold and distant, as was that of my colleagues at Berkeley whom I visited around that same time.

The difficulties of finding a publisher, added to the political climate in Chile at the end of 1972, made me feel alienated from the international scientific world. At the same time, the enthusiastic reception of certain people whom I respected was of enormous value. The first to have a clear perception of the possibilities of the idea was naturally our friend Heinz in the United States, with whom we had been in constant communication and who came to Chile during those years. Another well-known cyberneticist and system theorist who reacted positively was Stafford Beer, who came to Chile on a regular basis. In fact, Fernando Flores had contracted with him on behalf of the government to implement a revolutionary system of communications and regulation of the Chilean economy inspired by the nervous system; the system came to be called Proyecto Cinco. Beer responded to what was set out in the text with such enthusiasm that we decided to ask him for a preface, which he agreed to write immediately. In January 1972, 'with a fresh copy of the manuscript, I was invited to Mexico by Ivan Illich, to his CIDOC center in Cuernavaca." I gave him the manuscript the day I arrived, and I will never forget his reaction the follow-ing morning: "This is a classic text. You have managed to put autonomy at the center of science." Through Illich, the text made its way into the hands of the famous psychologist Erich Fromm, who invited me to his home retreat to discuss the new concept, which he immediately incorpo-rated into the book he was writing at the time. In Chile itself, Fernando Flores and other colleagues from Proyecto Cinco were also an attentive public to our way of thinking. With Flores we formed what would come to be a fruitful friendship, and many years later autopoiesis would figure among the important concepts he would use to develop his own ideas. It is hard to express what finding receptivity in people of this quality meant to me at the time.

Meanwhile the text continued to be rejected from a growing list of foreign publishers. So it was natural to address our own university press, and at the end of 1972 we signed a contract that included the translation of the text by Carmen Cienfuegos. De maquinas y seres vivos: Una teor{a de la organizaci6n biol6gica was printed in April 1973. The original English text did not ap-

THE EARLY DAYS OF AUTOPOIESIS 73

pear until 1980, when the idea had already acquired a certain popularity, in the prestigious Boston Studies on the Philosophy of Science series. This version contained an introduction signed by Maturana; the text, "Biology of Cognition"; Beer's and the text in question, "Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems."'3 According to what the editor tells me, this book has been the series' best-seller.

The brief article written in parallel to the longer text suffered a similar fate. As I mentioned above, in addition to a succinct presentation of the idea of autopoiesis, the intent of the article was to clarify the concept through a minimal case of autopoiesis. Toward the end of 1970 we had come to the conclusion that a simple case of autopoiesis would require two reactions: one of polymerization of membrane elements, the other, the "metabolic" generation of monomers. The latter had to be a reaction catalyzed by a third pre-existing element in the reaction. Once we had designed this reaction scheme, the next obvious step was to test a simulation of this minimal case (which soon came to be called the Protobe in our discussions) using cel-lular (or tessellated as they were called then) automata, introduced in the 1950S especially by John von Neumann. With the collaboration of Ricardo Uribe of the School of Engineering, the simulation rapidly provided the results our intuition had led us to expect: the spontaneous emergence in this artificial bi-dimensional world of units which self-distinguished by means of the formation of a "membrane" and which showed a capacity of self-repair. The paper was sent to several journals including Science and Nature, with results similar to those of the book: complete rejection. Heinz visited Chile in the winter of 1973 and helped us revvTite the text significantly. He took it back to the United States under his arm and sent it to the editor of the journal BioSystems, for which he was a member of the editorial board. The paper received some harsh commentary from reviewers but not long afterward was accepted and finally published in mid-1974. '4 It is important to mention this article here because it was the first publication on the idea of autopoiesis in English for an international public, which led the international community to take charge of the idea. In addition it anticipated what twenty years later would become the ex-plosive field now called artificial life and cellular automata.

Heinz's visit in July of 1973 took place in the midst of the approaching storm which plunged us all into an atmosphere of permanent crisis, with desperate attempts to stabilize a country that was breaking in two. As a militant supporter of President Allende's government, after September 11, I found myself threatened. Military intelligence came to the department

74 fRANCISCO J. VARElA

with lists of ex-party members, and on two occasions night patrols came looking for me at my house, where I no longer slept. I was dismissed from my post at the university on orders "from superiors." With my family I decided to sell everything and leave. The majority of my colleagues in the Department of Sciences also dispersed throughout the world. With the diaspora of the department's scientists ended a period of science in Chile, an important stage of my personal life, and with it the context which gave birth to the idea of autopoiesis. But naturally the idea would find new avatars, especially outside of Chile.

Coda

From my perspective in 1995, autopoiesis does not embody by itself a new vision of life and mind. Beside it appear other equally significant notions such as operational closure, enaction, natural drift, and phenomenologi-cal methodology. 1; The empirical references are consequently extended in new programs of detailed research, be they lymphocyte networks, the motion of insects, or cerebral imaging. It is a question of an edifice of new epistemological concepts and empirical results which have breadth and stand up to rigor. There have been twenty productive years during which the period of the formulation of autopoiesis marks, in retrospect, an im-portant milestone, as should be evident to the reader who has been patient enough to follow me this far.

But if this slow, sustained construction, full of corsi e ricorsi as is all intel-lectual and scientific creation, today has scientific viability, it is because it forms part of a historic sensibility which autopoiesis intuited in 1970-71. As I said at the start, there are no personal creations without a context: that an idea has impact is a historical fact and not a personal adventure or a question of "being right." Autopoiesis continues to be a good example of alignment with something which only today appears more dearly config-ured in various fields of the human cultural endeavor and which I identify with the term ontological turn. That is, a progressive mutation of thought which ends a long dominance of the social space of Cartesianism and which opens up to the sharp consciousness that humankind and life are the conditio