Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

1 The Livingthinglikeness of Language

1 The Livingthinglikeness of Language ฀ This book is an introduction to a constellation of ideas about selfreference and performativity.What these ideas have in common,to start with, is that they develop alternatives to the narrowly realist view of referential language.The focus on this common feature makes the book an introduction to the most important axis of literary and cultural theory throughout the past century.Along the way the reader will find various definitions of terms, examples and vignettes, images and catchphrases, exercises, and thought experiments that are intended to manufacture new intuitions about words as things. But the axis of literary and cultural theory of the past century is turning, so this book also faces the future: as Allen Ginsberg said, “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” The work of this book is best described as the groundwork of creating and expanding the interzone between, on one hand, self-reference and performativity in literary and cultural theory and, on the other, related notions of autopoiesis and self-organizing systems in biology and other sciences and social sciences. What has made such an interzone possible is nothing less than an ongoing sea change in the relations among ways of knowing and engaging the world,in the discursive฀ecology. This book is a synthesis, an attempt to assess the basic conceptual and historical cruxes of this interzone and to push and pull them a little further. My general term for the interzone is autopoetics, that is, the study of “self-making” systems. The more specific term autopoiesis was first coined in 1972 by Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana to describe the biological “self-making” of living creatures (see chapter 13) and most famously adapted since then by German 01-05.1-30_Livi.indd฀฀฀1 9/6/05฀฀฀10:38:24฀AM 2 . between science and literature sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who describes the same process in social systems . My focus is on related processes in the realm of meaning, language, and culture. I have removed the i from autopoiesis in order to vernacularize the word but also to mark what I would like to remove from the concept (its reliance on specific, ideologically bound notions of the self, the I) and, by referencing poetics more pointedly, to mark the realms of culture and meaning I would like to include. When I say that the work of this book is groundwork, what I mean is just about the opposite of laying down a stable foundation and a lot more like Wittgenstein’s saying that “the whole of language must be thoroughly ploughed up” (277) and that it is philosophy’s job to do so. This kind of groundwork goes through the workings of language, minutely turning and overturning as it goes, creating a more fertile ground in which new kinds of things can grow. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way,” wrote Wittgenstein (shifting the metaphor): “he who understands me finally recognises them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” (31). Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman once explained to an interviewer that his own early shift from philosophy into biology had been catalyzed by his realization that “if I had to choose, I would rather be Einstein than Wittgenstein” (cited in Waldrop 105). In other words, he preferred to make discoveries about the real things of hard science rather than the mere words and ideas of philosophy. But the title of Kauffman’s subsequent book, Investigations —“blatantly borrowed,” as he puts it (50), from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical฀Investigations—signals another shift.Wittgenstein became exemplary for Kauffman in having followed his own advice and “thrown away the ladder” of his own more narrow early view of language (“logical atomism ”) in favor of a more dynamic engagement with the livingthinglikeness of language, the forms of language constituting something like “forms of life.” Kauffman replays this shift in his own Wittgensteinization, or, rather, he got to a point where he no longer had to choose between Einstein and Wittgenstein and could split฀the฀difference, though it should also be noted that Einsteinian things and Wittgensteinian words were already moving into more of the same neighborhood anyway.The shift that keeps happening here is not Wittgenstein’s or Kauffman’s but part of the long-term sea change in ways of knowing the world, little waves on the surface of...