Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

Notes

n o t e s introduction: posthuman metamorphosis 1. This is the overall thesis of my previous study of the Western literature of metamorphosis from classical to modern times, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis. 2. See Halberstam and Livingston, ed., Posthuman Bodies; Badmington, ed., Posthumanism; Lenoir, ed., ‘‘Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape, Part One: Embracing the Posthuman’’ and ‘‘Part Two: Corporeal Axiomatics’’; Badmington, ed., ‘‘Posthuman Conditions’’; Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture; and Weinstone, Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism. 3. Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, 227. 4. See Hardison, Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century. 5. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature , and Informatics, 3. 6. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. See Clarke, ‘‘Friedrich Kittler’s Technosublime.’’ 7. See Tabbi, ed., Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology, esp. Paulson, ‘‘The Literary Canon in the Age of its Technological Obsolescence,’’ 227–49. 8. For a standard critique of the ‘‘radical technophilia’’ associated with the main line of first-order cybernetics, see Bendle, ‘‘Teleportation, Cyborgs and the Posthuman Ideology.’’ More to the point is Rossini, ‘‘Figurations of Posthumanity in Contemporary Science/Fiction: All Too Human(ist)?’’ 9. See Hayles, Posthuman; DuPuy, The Mechanization of the Mind: On the Origins of Cognitive Science; and von Foerster, Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics, 135–40. 10. Brand, ‘‘For God’s Sake, Margaret: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead,’’ 33. 197 198 Notes to Pages 6–11 11. Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind stands at the threshold of the second -order turn. On second-order cybernetics in technoscientific context, see Heylighen, ‘‘Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics.’’ For a range of approaches connecting second-order cybernetics to disciplines across the humanities and the cognitive and social sciences, see Serres, The Parasite; Paulson, The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information; all of Niklas Luhmann’s work: his most comprehensive statement currently in English translation is Social Systems; Wellbery, ed., ‘‘Observation, Difference, Form: Literary Studies and Second-Order Cybernetics’’; Wolfe, ‘‘Systems Theory: Maturana and Varela with Luhmann’’; Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation ; Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions; Livingston, Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics; and Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems. 12. Von Foerster, ‘‘On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments.’’ See also Brier, ‘‘The Construction of Information and Communication: A Cybersemiotic Reentry into Heinz von Foerster’s Metaphysical Construction of Second-Order Cybernetics.’’ 13. Working from Henri Atlan’s adaptations of von Foerster, Serres cultivates le parasite, his figure for the transformative agency of informatic noise and for the observer who can add signal and noise together. In addition to The Parasite, see ‘‘Platonic Dialogue’’ and ‘‘The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics,’’ in Serres, Hermes, 65–83. 14. See Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. 15. The convergence of von Foerster and Luhmann on a problem opened by Maturana and Varela—the ‘‘composition’’ of multiple autopoietic systems—is particularly clear in von Foerster, ‘‘Luhmann.’’ 16. Luhmann, ‘‘The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and a Reality That Remains Unknown,’’ 147. 17. On trivial and nontrivial machines, see von Foerster, ‘‘Luhmann’’; and Niklas Luhmann, ‘‘The Control of Intransparency.’’ We will return to these matters in chapter 5. 18. This usage is drawn from Luhmann’s text: see ‘‘I See Something You Don’t See,’’ 190. According to von Foerster, ‘‘in cybernetics you learn that paradox is not bad for you, but it is good for you, if you take the dynamics of the paradox seriously.’’ Von Foerster, ‘‘Interview.’’ 19. Latour, Aramis, 119. 20. Haraway, ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century.’’ 21. Haraway, ‘‘Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order.’’ Rosi Braidotti assesses Haraway’s theoretical contributions in ‘‘Posthuman , All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology.’’ Notes to Pages 11–22 199 22. Instrumental in bringing a wide academic audience to Butler’s science fiction, Haraway’s ‘‘Manifesto’’ highlighted Dawn, the first volume of the Xenogenesis trilogy. About the first edition of Margulis and Sagan’s What is Life? Haraway writes: ‘‘These writers cross-stitch technology, organic beings, and inorganic nature into a cobbled together, profoundly materialist and dynamic biosphere. . . . Margulis and Sagan provide an historical narrative with a future that...