Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

Conclusion: The Neocybernetic Posthuman

c o n c l u s i o n The Neocybernetic Posthuman To return a last time to Latour’s term, narratives of bodily transformation are nonmodern—at once archaic and posthuman. The narrative metamorphs of every era are allegorical beings that index systemic complexes. Their altered bodies convey the materialities of their own mediated being and the forms of the psychic and social systems in the environments to which their media couple them. Narrative mythopoesis is a nonmodern reflection on the human as a nexus for a complex embedding of systems and environments with operational concurrence but without overriding operational unity. Despite the garish predictions of cyberdigital gurus, there will be no lingua franca or metacode into which all corporeal and systemic phenomena can ultimately be translated.1 Visions of organic abandonment through digital convergence mystify the posthuman. In contrast, with Luhmann the neocybernetic posthuman starts here: ‘‘There is no fundamental common ground among systems.’’2 What is the case is a common relation of difference: the system–environment 193 194 Posthuman Metamorphosis distinction. Autopoietic systems of whatever kind must observe their environments across operational boundaries. But the operations that carry observations out are strictly internal to each system. Luhmann continues about the operational closure of system processes in Social Systems: ‘‘No system unity can exist between mechanical and conscious operations, between chemical operations and those that communicate meaning. There are machines, chemical systems, living systems, conscious systems, and (social) systems that communicate via meaning; but no system unities encompass all these at once. A human being may appear to himself or to an observer as a unity, but he is not a system.’’3 Posthumanism cognizes the human as one among numberless other situations of complexity—a productive disunity tasked with the quest, different for every psychic and social system, of working out a viable coordination of its systemic and environmental multiplicities. In this study we have contemplated fictive images of systemic merger— the classical image of the human along with its perennial mythopoetic projection , the metamorph—as allegories of the reality of systems distinctions. The emergence of languages, of mythic and literary narratives, are primordial social responses to the forms of limitation and inaccessibility instituted by the necessary separation yet functional combination or structural coupling of distinct yet interpenetrated, coevolving systems. The basic gesture of mythopoetic metamorphoses is the construction of images and narratives of merger among functionally coupled but operationally closed systems: • the merger of physical and psychic systems in the form of gods, spirits, and demons • the merger of living and psychic systems in theology’s immortal soul • the merger of distinct psychic systems (souls) in the erotic sublime • the merger of physical and living systems in vitalism’s life force • the merger of physical, neural, and mechanical systems in the robot • the merger of living, psychic, and mechanical systems in the cyborg • the merger of distinct genetic systems (species) in the metamorph The system reference that goes unmarked in each instance is the social system, for which each mythopoetic cluster functions as a viable communicative offer, generally in a narrative medium. The neocybernetic turn on these fabulations is to understand such assemblages not as images of fusion Conclusion 195 that reduce the multiple to unity, but as constructions that achieve narrative viability as complex signs of interpenetrations that integrate while maintaining systemic differences. On the level of biotic systems, Margulis and Sagan have been eloquently arguing for over two decades about the natural metamorphoses of biological evolution: ‘‘All organisms of greater morphological complexity than bacteria, that is, nucleated or eukaryotic organisms (whether single-celled or multicellular), are also polygenomic. They have selves of multiple origins . . . comprised of heterologous different-sourced genomic systems that each evolved from more than one kind of ancestor.’’4 On the level of metabiotic systems, Luhmann writes: ‘‘Consciousness compensates for the operative closure of the nervous system, just as the social system compensates for the closure of consciousness.’’5 According to the best scientific and social theorizing at my disposal, the discrete merger of separate systems into hybrid consortiums is the way the world works. In that case, stories about imaginary versions of them are effective narrative compensations for the contingencies of systemic closure that remain once the mergers have been accomplished. Mythopoetic assemblages from the Sphinx to the Brundlefly to the construct offspring of humans and aliens convey images of the necessary hybridity...