In this Book
- Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS
- Book
- 2010
- Published by: University of Illinois Press
summary
Between Literature and Science follows through to its emerging 21st-century future the central insight of 20th-century literary and cultural theory: that language and culture, along with their subsystems and artifacts, are self-referential systems. The book explores the workings of self-reference (and the related performativity) in linguistic utterances and assorted texts, through examples of the more open social-discursive systems of post-structuralism and cultural studies, and into the sciences, where complex systems organized by recursive self-reference are now being embraced as an emergent paradigm. This paradigmatic convergence between the humanities and sciences is autopoetics (adapting biologist Hubert Maturana’s term for “self-making” systems), and it signals a long-term epistemological shift across the nature/culture divide so definitive for modernity. If cultural theory has taught us that language, because of its self-referential nature, cannot bear simple witness to the world, the new paradigmatic status of self-referential systems in the natural sciences points toward a revived kinship of language and culture with the world: language bears “witness” to the world.
The main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences. Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana/Varela/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience.
The main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences. Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana/Varela/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience.
Table of Contents
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- Foreword: Writing Between
- pp. ix-xii
- Acknowledgments
- p. xiii
- 2 Words and Things
- pp. 4-10
- 3 Thirds and Wings
- pp. 11-14
- 4 The Order of Things in a Nutshell
- pp. 15-24
- 6 An Introductory Vignette
- pp. 31-35
- 7 Sometimes a Cigar
- pp. 36-38
- 8 On Meaning
- pp. 39-42
- 9 Fact and Fiction
- pp. 43-50
- 10 How Bad Facts Make Good Theories
- pp. 51-57
- 11 Self-Reference I
- pp. 58-69
- 12 Self-Reference II
- pp. 70-77
- 13 Autopoiesis
- pp. 78-89
- 14 Poetic Interlude: Defrosting
- pp. 90-96
- 15 Performativity I: Power and Meaning
- pp. 97-108
- 16 Performativity II: Metacleavage
- pp. 109-119
- 18 Performativity III: Retroactivism
- pp. 124-133
- 19 The Return to Resemblance
- pp. 134-145
- 20 Gravity Cannot Be Held Responsible?
- pp. 146-159
- 21 Queer in a Queer World
- pp. 160-173
- 22 An Alienist History
- pp. 174-182
- Bibliography
- pp. 183-188
Additional Information
ISBN
9780252091742
Related ISBN(s)
9780252030086, 9780252072543
MARC Record
OCLC
811409922
Pages
208
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2005