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Paradox and the Form of Metamorphosis: Systems Theory in AMidsummer Ni^fhfs Dream B r u c e C l a r k e T E X A S T E C H U N I V E R S I T Y Agrowingbodyofscholarlyworkisrethinkingtheshapeandevolutionof therelationsamongscience,technology,sociology,psychology,philosophy, history,literature,andthearts,throughcybernetictermsdWhatcouldA Midsummer Ni^ht^s Dream have to tell us about such things? For one, it play that plays upon perceptual and social paradoxes, and according to the seminal cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, “In cybernetics you learn that par^ adoxisnotbadforyou,butitisgoodforyou,ifyoutakethedynamicso theparadoxseriously”(Franchietal).VonFoersterdevelopedastrainot cybernetics concerned with the “observation of observation”: order”cyberneticsrisestoameta-perspectiveonitsownprocedures.Wi thismove,neocyberneticmethoddovetailswithliterarytheoryinitsinterest in self-reference and paradox as discursive and epistemological problems, y lookingatthewaysthatthisShakespearetextlooksattheformsobserving systems use to operate, Ihope to interest both literature and systems peop e aneocybernetic approach to narrative and dramatic observation. In amovement parallel to but distinct from the rise of strimtur Europe,themetadisciplineofcyberneticswassetforwardinthewes WarrenMcCulloch,NorbertWiener,andJohnvonNeumann,andmengorously transplanted to Soviet and European subcultures.^ From a nectingbiologicalandcomputationalsystemsbywayofinformaoon^ andcommunicationstechnology,cyberneticswasacademicy streamed under the namesArtificial Intelligence and, more broad y, puter science in the service of command-and-control systems. ’ current interest for textual disciplines, media studies, „ ™herderivesmoreimportantlyfromthetranslationsofsuch °tmrvRate netics into social and cognitive systems theories developed by Gregory nat sonandHeinzvonFoerster.Emergingfromtheinitial™P' framework connecting the natural and human sciences wi* mlormauon technologies,theneocyberneticspioneeredbyBatesonanvon and extended by thinkers such as Serres, Atlan, Latour, Stengers, Deleuze, Guattari,Maturana,Varela,andLuhmann,isakeycurrentintheposthu¬ manities—historical, interpretive, and theoretical investigations using con¬ cepts such as narrative, medium, assemblage, information, noise, network, andcommunicationtoremaptheterrainofknowledgewithreferencetothe operational boundaries of systems and their environments. Thisworkisbothinspiredandadmonishedbytheunfoldingofcyberi s a i n 1 7 3 Intertexts, Vol. 8, No. 22004 ©Texas Tech University Press I N T E R T E X T S 1 7 4 netics, its institutional ups and downs, its cultural impacts and resistances, and its continuing intellectual and social promise. The fields of cognitive sci¬ ence, chaos and complexity theory, and the key notions of evolution, emer¬ gence, self-organization, and autopoiesis, already inform philosophical, liter¬ ary, and historical conversations devoted to thinking through this shift from subject to system. The humanist subject that unified perception and com¬ munication in one monad is now observed as an amalgamation or structural coupling of multiple observing systems. With this move the noumenal unity of the humanist subject gives way to aposthuman observation of the differ¬ ential relations of living and nonliving systems and their environments, such as human and nonhuman bodies and societies. At the forefront of current neocybernetic work thinking through the widest cultural ramifications of this paradigm shift from the human to the posthuman is the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann investigated the ways that difference and operational closure among living and nonliving systems shape their openness and coupling to complex envi¬ ronments and other systems. For Luhmann, as Iwill discuss in greater detail later, there is paradox in the very cognitive move—marking adistinction— that brings any observation about. Paradoxes of distinction infect any and all cognitions, and observing systems must elicit and resolve these cognitive issues in order to operate.^ What Iwill argue here is that the cognitive effects of narrative and rhetorical structures in discursive and dramatic fictions, such as Shakespeare’s, rehearse, both dramatically and thematically, the framing and deframing of paradox that neocybernetics observes in cognition per se. In particular, the operational “unfolding” of paradox in the observation of distinctions by meaning systems has its literary analogue in the embedding and dis-embedding of narrative and dramatic frames—stories within stories or plays within plays.^ The zigzag play and sequence of embedding and embedded frames in literary and narrative forms reenacts the operational paradoxicality of observing systems. AMidsummerTHighthDreamisbuiltupontheobservationofobserva¬ tionandsoofferssomevividdramaticformulationsofthesebasalparadoxes ofdistinction.Theplayrevelsinthetransformationsofidentityproducedby shifting observational frames, and bodies forth the ironies and inversions of formintheshapeofdreambeingsthatexhibittheparadoxicalunitiesofthe distinctions that structure the waking world. Narrative embeddings and chiasticstructurationsinterpenetratethisdrama ’spanoramaofmetamorphic changes.Literarymetamorphosisinturncanbereadasanallegoryofthe incessanttemporaldissolutionandreconstructionofformswithinautopoietic systems.® Literary metamorphosis replicates the incessant protean restructurations of viable systems, of constant fluxes within the medium of elements out of which forms can be assembled and observations inscribed— inthecaseofpsychicandsocialsystems,themediumofmeanings.Thedis¬ solutionsnecessarytothemaintenanceofcognitiveformationsareusually occludedorrenderedunconsciousbythepsychicsystem’sveryoperation,as 1 7 5 CLARKE: Paradox and the Form of Metamorphosis consciousness remains on the inside...

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