Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems

1. Narrative and Systems

o n e Narrative and Systems Narratives of Modernity Narrative is a primary formal and thematic program running on the complex infrastructures of social and psychic systems. The medium of narrative in society is the network of metabiotic meaning systems and their media environments. The maintenance-in-being of narratives in any textual medium has to be continuously reconstructed within social systems that can use them as elements of communicative exchange. Over time these contingencies ensure the continuous transformation of narratives and, from fictions of metamorphosis to histories of social evolution, the continuous recreation of narratives of transformation. For instance, the emergence of cybernetics has been changing the way we narrate modernity. We have only recently noticed that systems are inexorably coupled to the environments they distinguish themselves from to arise as systems. It is as if the environments of systems had long occupied 13 14 Posthuman Metamorphosis cognitive blind spots from which they have now been shifted into view. Yet the belated emergence of our environmental awareness seems to have accompanied or occasioned a related breakdown in modern social certainty, particularly Western certainties about the ‘‘universality’’ of its definition of the human and the global centrality or ‘‘firstness’’ of its ‘‘world.’’ Jean-Franc ̧ois Lyotard famously defined postmodernity as the historical period that witnesses that lapse: ‘‘The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.’’1 This withering of the grand narratives of modernity has been variously felt to be a loss or a gain, but still, a profound event, worthy of its own historical distinction. Niklas Luhmann’s discourse on modernity acknowledges this description but deflates its profundity. Luhmann withdraws the singularity of this semantics and reinscribes this description as an unavoidable effect of modern social complexity. ‘‘Postmodernity’’ is one of many ways to observe communicative formations in the operation of modern social systems and their dissolution over time. ‘‘The proclamation of the ‘postmodern’ has at least one virtue,’’ he writes in the preface to his Observations on Modernity: ‘‘It has clarified that contemporary society has lost faith in the correctness of its self-description.’’2 But this in itself fails to distinguish the postmodern from the modern per se. Rather, in Luhmann’s account, the phenomenon Lyotard has described is a belated acknowledgement of the fictionality of grand narratives all along: ‘‘There is no métarécit because there are no external observers. Whenever we use communication—and how could it be otherwise —we are already operating within society.’’3 That is, even if we could arrive at a metaperspective on the social systems in which we are already interpellated, we could not communicate that perspective to those systems. Just as the mass media co-opts any attempt to use them to indicate a state of affairs transcending the society at hand—‘‘transgression and subversion never get ‘on the air’ without being subtly negated as they are; transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their meaning ’’4 —the reception of communication within given systems deletes the metasystemic character of any message.5 Bruno Latour has suggested another provocative version of the breakdown of modern metanarratives. In We Have Never Been Modern, Latour purports to deconstruct the metanarrative of modernity itself.6 A summary of Latour’s historical thesis might go like this: modernity arose from the Narrative and Systems 15 suppression of the supposed incoherence of premodern ideas—their mixing up of natural and cultural causalities—but this sorting operation occurred at the price of enforced separations between natural objects and social subjects that have now in turn lost their coherence as well. According to Latour , by pursuing an anthropology of technoscientific practices, critical science studies has now unraveled the modern unraveling of premodernity. Latour would reform academic protocols and resolve the distinctly modern conflict between industrial societies and the ecological constraints of the natural world. He concludes We Have Never Been Modern with a prescription for a politics of nonmodern collectives, presenting the state of ‘‘nonmodernity ,’’ complete with a ‘‘nonmodern Constitution’’ for a ‘‘parliament of things,’’ as a way beyond the impasses of modern ontological separatisms. Luhmann’s theory of modern social systems, in contrast, is uninflected by Latour’s brand of dialectical drama.7 What Latour perceives as modernity —an enforced purification...