Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

Foreword: Writing Between

foreword Writing Between n. katherine hayles Years ago I had the exhilarating—and frustrating—experience of coteaching an interdisciplinary seminar on reflexivity with a physicist and philosopher. The physicist led us through Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to show how reflexivity entered into mathematics and physics; the philosopher guided us through Aristotle, Kant, Fichte, and others to trace the roots of reflexivity in the philosophical tradition; I added readings by Borges, Hofstadter, and Calvino. Yet in the end, the students appeared to be even more confused about what reflexivity was than when the seminar began; whether this can be counted as progress I leave to a Zen master to decide. In any event, despite our best efforts our stated goal of illuminating the expansive range and importance of reflexivity in a variety of fields certainly fell short of its mark. I am all the more impressed, then, with Ira Livingston’s achievement in Between฀Science฀and฀Literature:฀An฀Introduction฀to฀Autopoetics. Instructed by the lessons of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic Thousand฀Plateaus, Humberto Maturana’s autopoiesis,and Foucault ’s epistemic analyses, he creates a powerful—dare I say seductive?— demonstration of reflexivity that argues for its seminal importance as the mode of performance characteristic of the postmodern era. Sensitive to the sweeping nature of such a claim, he is careful to avoid a “presentist” error that would locate reflexivity exclusively as a postmodernist phenomenon, illustrating its dynamics with a wide diversity of examples ranging from the “See Spot run” primers used to teach reading in the 1950s to Romantic poems and contemporary popular culture. The argument, rather, maintains 00.FM.i-xiv_Livi.indd฀฀฀9 9/27/05฀฀฀3:05:02฀PM x . foreword that reflexivity in the contemporary era has become so interwoven with globalization, capitalist dynamics, scientific theories, verbal creations, and popular culture that it qualifies as the governing episteme of this period. Writing with the easy confidence of someone who has thought deeply and well about his tutor texts,Livingston draws on many theorists without being overmastered by any.He is open to the lessons of many,but nearly everything he uses he also modifies at the same time. From Maturana, for example, he takes the idea of a system whose sole object is to reproduce itself, but he crucially modifies Maturana’s autopoietic theory by insisting that all systems are continuously open to the environment and networked with other systems. From Luhmann he takes the important idea that a system copies into itself the system/environment distinction fundamental to its construction as a system, but he also modifies Luhmann by blurring the boundaries between system and environment,interpreting them through the rhizomatic dynamics of Deleuze and Guattari’s “Body without Organs.” He learns from Foucault but also insists that the circulation between physical materialities and discursive structures operates through continuous feedback loops that give physical realities a discursive dimension and systems of discourse physical effects. This part of his argument transforms into an analysis of the “science wars” as the reification of a false dichotomy between words and things. As he lucidly shows, words have performative effects that make them operate like things, while things have rhetorical dimensions that inescapably shape their significance and meaning. Above all, he sees systems bound together in a network through which flows of power and meaning circulate, each affecting the others and affected by them. Interfaces and boundaries, both within systems and between them, become the foci of special attention as sites where these flows become almost too evident—places,that is,where the dynamics that reveal these interconnections are “hidden in plain sight.” This book is more, however, than a discursive argument. It is also an experiment in rhetorical form and the performative possibilities of creating gaps and fissures (should we call them interfaces?) between discrete sections where connections are implied rather than explicated, left deliberately ambiguous so as to maximize the diverse ways in which readers can put the parts together. In a sense, the text exploits the radical polysemy of hypertext, though the exponential proliferation of possible pathways is achieved not through linking structures but through a certain cognitive indeterminacy and ambiguity about how the parts connect. Moving easily between homey examples, autobiographical narrative, and dense theoretical argumentation, Between฀Science฀and฀Literature performs what it argues for, the importance 00.FM.i-xiv_Livi.indd฀฀฀10 9...