Bruce Clarke
“The narratives of the world are numberless,” Roland Barthes began a famous essay, continuing, “Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories” (Barthes 1978: 79). Were we to substitute “systems” for Barthes’s “narrative” and “story,” we would have in each case a proper statement. The systems of the world are also numberless. They, too, come in a multitude of forms impressed upon many different mediums. In this sense, then, the alignment of narrative and systems is instructive, for a major complication of systems theory is the proliferation of its genres. A “prodigious variety” of kinds and conceptual models of systems has been treated under the same heading of “systems theory.”
A system may be any complex totality composed of interdependent elements. However, the strong sense of the system concept denotes a complex ensemble unified in such a way that a process emerges from, and only from, the interdependent interactions of those elements. Systems theory attends to both the elements and the processes of the systems it observes. For instance, a genome – the full packet of DNA within every cell – is a double-helical structure composed of molecules, a macromolecule ordered so as to encode and replicate genetic information. However, the genome is only one element of the entire cellular system. In order to get to the processes of life, you need to bring together the entirety of a cell. All of the interdependent and interacting elements (structures or sub-systems) of that complex totality – genome, organelles, cytoplasm, and membrane – come together to produce the ongoing processes of cellular life. As such, the cell is the minimal form of a living system.
An element/process distinction can now be observed between Barthes’s statement about narrative and the strong definition of systems. As a complex structure of signs, the literary object, such as a narrative text, is an element ready to be taken up and processed by an observing system. However, the narrative subject – the observer of the text – can be one of, or be comprised of, multiple systems, most immediately the psychic systems (or minds) producing perceptions and intuitions of the text, and the social systems (or conversations) within which the text circulates as an element of literary communication. At least one more distinction must be noted: in their prodigious variety, systems may be physical or technological, biological or cultural, natural or artificial, or a combination of all of the above. Unlike stories, nothing restricts the nature of systems to “man’s” dominion. In this way, systems theory lends itself to the discourse of posthumanism.
The discourse of thermodynamics has had significant effects on the production of literary texts and cultural allegories (Clarke 2001). So let us pick up the story of systems theory with the distinction between dynamic and thermodynamic systems and the emergence of thermodynamics at mid-nineteenth century. Newton’s laws dealt with the motions of masses and distribution of forces in dynamical systems, say, a planet in orbit around another celestial body, or a mechanical clock. The rise of steam engines forced the thermodynamic issue. Thermo (heat)-dynamics (motion) is the physics of the motion of heat, which motion is always observed to be from hotter to cooler bodies. Heat engines are mechanical systems that exploit the thermal differential between a hot body – a heat source – and a cool one – a heat sink. If you can get thermal energies moving from source to sink, you can tap those dynamics to produce work. But there must be an apparatus for the enclosure of the process away from the environment at large. The ideal heat engine is thus a closed system, one in which all heat exchanges remain internal to the system and thus maximally convertible into work. This is called the environmental closure of thermodynamic systems.
Systems theory is concerned at all times to treat system processes in relation to their environments. Thermodynamically considered, heat engines receive fuel from their environments to produce the energies their systems enclose, and give back to their environments focused forces, say, from a driveshaft, ready for mechanical application. In worldly practice, however, it is impossible to achieve complete efficiency by the perfect material closure of any system. The concept of entropy, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, arose in part as a measure of that inevitable inefficiency. Moreover, as Rudolf Clausius famously rendered his formulation of the second law, within a closed system, over time, entropy tends to a maximum. And the entropic side-effects of thermodynamic systems, the spent or wasted energy and matter exhausted as a consequence of their processes, are also vented to their environments.
The motions of dynamical systems are at least conceptually reversible in time. But to reverse the course of entropy, one would have to run time backwards. Whereas a clock or a ceiling fan can be made to run in reverse, there is no switch to turn time around. The dissipation of energies involved in thermodynamic processes is irreversible. As a consequence, entropy has been called “time’s arrow.” Like a spring-loaded clock running down, in their thermodynamic description, all worldly processes tend toward equilibrium, the loss or washing out of their energic differentials. By the end of the nineteenth century, this cognizance of the irreversible temporality of thermodynamic systems had fostered a cultural imaginary in which one toils in ultimate futility against a zero-sum outcome, “heat death,” the final dissipation of all heat differentials, the universal coming to rest in a state of inert equilibrium.
Early in the development of steam engines, a qualitatively different sort of mechanism was invented in conjunction with it, the Governor that automatically stabilized the rate at which the engine operated. In 1868, leading British physicist James Clerk Maxwell wrote up the first theoretical analysis of the Governor (Maxwell 1868). He considered it in its status as a dynamical system in which the centrifugal forces spun off of the engine’s performance are channeled into mechanical control effects. Coupled to and regulating a thermodynamical system, the mechanical Governor used the steam engine’s output of work to operate a valve regulating its input of energy.
The Governor is considered to be the prototypical cybernetic control system. Cybernetic systems theory took its name from the Greek root of “governor”– kybernetes, meaning “steersman.” The Governor controls the system it governs through negative feedback: it measures a process (extracts information about energy) and feeds that measure back into the process so as to damp its amplification past a set-point with a reduction that steers it back to the desired rate. “The first great paper on cybernetics” (Mead, quoted in Brand 1976: 33), “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” states: “All purposeful behavior may be considered to require negative feed-back. If a goal is to be attained, some signals from the goal are necessary at some time to direct the behavior” (Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow 1943: 19). Cybernetic systems theory emerged at mid-twentieth century at the confluence of military and civilian interests in communication and control systems – for instance, the manual and remote control of forces and weapons by means of communications among human operators and mechanical processes. Flanking these cybernetic demands were developments in computation and information technologies advancing the sophistication with which machines, from dynamos to computers, could be rendered communicable with – if not necessarily more intelligent (although that aim was to follow), then at least more perceptive and responsive, more “alive.”
The cultural impact of the first cybernetics on literary and cinematic narratives has obviously been enormous. Cyborgs, anyone? The post-nuclear-war story-world of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the source text for the movie Blade Runner (1984), is especially interesting for its interplay of theoretical elements tapped from both thermodynamic and cybernetic systems. The fallout-challenged “special” J.R. Isidore explains to the cybernetic organism Pris Stratton the closed-system laws of entropy, renamed kipple: “No one can win against kipple … except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like my apartment. … The universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization” (Dick 1968: 65–66). Human android-terminator Rick Deckard’s later rumination makes the denotation of kipple explicit: “In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy” (98–99). Self-reflexive cybernetic terminology is salted over hard-boiled dialogue when the covert android, Inspector Garland, informs Deckard about the detective bureau they’re in, “This is a homeostatic enterprise. … We’re a closed loop” (123). Updated through the man-made heat death of H-bombs, the specter of thermal inertia provides the deep background for anxious indifferentiations between organic and cybernetic beings. After sex with the introspective cyborg Rachael, Deckard contradicts her blunt declaration, “I’m not alive,” citing her technological ontology as a blend of organic and electronic components: “Legally you’re not. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity” (198). Eventually, however, he concludes that even the “electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are” (241).
It has become standard to equate cybernetics with systems theory per se, and also to center the origin story of this amalgam on the Macy Conferences, originally titled “Circular Causality and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems,” later shortened to “Cybernetics.” These were convened between 1946 and 1953 by Warren McCulloch and Frank Fremont-Smith and attended off and on by major luminaries in fields ranging from mathematics and information theory to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, including Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead. Less well remembered is the 1954 founding of the Society for General Systems Research (SGSR), which since 1988 has continued as the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS). Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the phrase “systems theory” was just as likely to indicate work deriving from the efforts of this group to generalize the system concept across the natural and human sciences, and thereby, it was thought, to challenge traditional academic regimes and the sway of strictly reductionist methods.
As an object of theoretical investigation, the system concept has been bound up with such initiatives for interdisciplinary syntheses. It has long borne the mantle for integrative and holistic efforts, both within the natural sciences and between them and other branches of learning. On the margins of this group, it may be mentioned, was the idiosyncratic systems thinker R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, and the author of a compendious written oeuvre especially championed by the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (Brand 1968–71). The chapter of Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth titled “General Systems Theory” defines synergy as the “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts” (Fuller 1963: 71).
The SGSR wing of systems theory is best remembered now for the work of the Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy – the author of General System Theory (GST). Von Betalanffy’s mode of systems theory was based solely on a system analysis of organisms viewed from the thermodynamic issue. Specifically, in relation to their environments, living beings are not closed systems but open to fluxes of matter and energy. This significant addendum to the dominance of classical closed-system models, von Bertalanffy stressed, received crucial support from the concurrent development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues had delineated far-from-equilibrium “dissipative structures” that offered abiotic versions of self-organizing and environmentally open systems, alongside von Bertalanffy’s redescription of biological organisms as open systems.
Niklas Luhmann credits von Bertalanffy with an important step beyond traditional holism, replacing the “difference between whole and part with that between system and environment. This transformation, of which Ludwig von Bertalanffy is the leading author, enabled one to interrelate the theory of the organism, thermodynamics, and evolutionary theory” (Luhmann 1995: 6–7). However, von Bertalanffy’s insistent delimitation to the model of open systems and polemical swerve away from control systems did not provide a sufficient base for the transdisciplinary generalization of systems theory. Rather, he mistook cybernetic feedback mechanisms for the closed thermodynamic systems to which they may be coupled: “A feedback system is closed thermodynamically and kinetically; it has no metabolism. In an open system increase of order and decrease of entropy is thermodynamically possible” (von Bertalanffy 1968: 150). Luhmann has also summarized the conceptual threshold which GST could not cross: “While this open-systems paradigm has been asserted and accepted within systems theory, a surpassingly radical further step has been taken in the discussions of the last two decades. It concerns contributions to a theory of self-referential systems” (Luhmann 1995: 8).
As systems theory moved into the later decades of the twentieth century, its most obvious literary manifestation was a multifarious welter of systems discourses, more or less popular or technical as the case may be, but typically too multidisciplinary and/or extrascientific to be placed into traditional pigeon-holes. In addition to the work of Fuller, another case in point is the far-flung and bracing work of Gregory Bateson. Throughout the 1970s, Bateson’s lifework, selected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson 1972), animated the intellectual counterculture at large, in particular the whole-systems-oriented audience for the periodical successor to the Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly. Bateson explained to CoEvolution Quarterly’s editor, Brand, the seminal importance of “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology” in a way that forecast the philosophical stakes of the turn from first-order self-regulation to second-order self-reference. That 1943 report on “the formal character of seeking mechanisms,” he remarked, produced
a solution to the problem of purpose. From Aristotle on, the final cause has always been the mystery. … We didn’t realize then (at least I didn’t realize it, though McCulloch may have) that the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed for recursiveness.
(Brand 1976: 33)
Second-order systems theory has pursued that wholesale reconstruction of operational logic. These neocybernetic developments have pressed the analysis of recursive processes beyond organic, mechanical, and computational control processes toward the formal autonomy that endows natural systems with their cognitive capacities. If, in classical cybernetics, circular functions and feedback mechanisms are treated “objectively” as instrumental for the self-regulation of a system, second-order cybernetics is aimed in particular at that characteristic of natural systems, from cells on up, whereby circular recursion constitutes the system in the first place. The logic of self-reference is the abstract counterpart of circular self-constitution.
However, in the milieu of the classical syllogism, self-referential propositions produce paradoxical conclusions. For instance, in the famous Liar’s paradox, Epimenides the Cretan states: “All Cretans are liars.” But since he is also a member of the major class – and this is the form self-reference takes in this example – the truth value of his claim cannot be determined. If he’s lying, then he’s telling the truth, and vice versa. But operational processes differ from logical propositions. In this distinction we have a clear application of the divergence Bateson predicted, between the classical humanist logic that banishes paradox from its calculation of truth values and the posthumanist logic of neocybernetics that sets paradox to work. “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 1994). In the realm of recursive operations, self-referential processes unfold over time to bind those operations into autonomous wholes. Self-referential systems are self-constituting.
Chronologically as well as conceptually, the unfolding of the theory of self-referential systems runs parallel with the metafictional and “cognitive” turns in narrative literature (LeClair 1987; Tabbi 2002). The foregrounding of paradox by narrative embedding, metalepsis, and mise-en-abyme are to postmodern narrative aesthetics – from Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” to Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad to Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – what self-referential recursion and system differentiation – the emergence of systems within systems – are to second-order systems theory (Clarke 2008). And while the connections of this phase of systems theory to works of imaginative literature may be less obvious than those of thermodynamics and first-order cybernetics, they are also more deeply inscribed in a pervasive intellectual culture. They are also more likely to be reciprocal. Von Foerster, Varela, and Luhmann were each in their own way accomplished students of literature, philosophy, and theory in the broad sense. It is this wider range and the theoretical acumen in its discourse that renders second-order systems theory most salient for the posthumanities. The imprint of second-order systems theory in literary studies so far has registered largely in broad-based studies examining literary-critical and philosophical concerns in ecology, environmentalism, embodiment, and ethics in the light of systems-theoretical concepts (Wolfe 1998; McMurry 2003; Clarke and Hansen 2009).
The current default sense of the phrase systems theory is the body of work associated with the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. The line to Luhmann’s development of self-referential systems theory ties to von Foerster’s cognitive and epistemological work in second-order cybernetics and goes directly through Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s biological systems concept of autopoiesis. Under the regime of self-referential systems, “self-regulation” (as in the quote above from von Foerster 2003a) changes sense from automatic control to autonomous self-constitution, and the open/closed polarity is sublated by a supplementary relation binding environmental openness to operational closure. The concept of autopoiesis can clarify what is at stake here. Maturana and Varela introduced the theory of autopoiesis in the context of biological organization. Autopoiesis – literally, “self-making”–named the recognition that a living system, such as a cell or an organism built up from cells, is a self-referential system: it is the processual product of its own production. Autopoietic self-production is thereby, in Maturana and Varela’s phrase, “organizationally closed.” The autopoietic process turns upon itself, recursively: the organization enables the production that maintains the organization, and so on. Open to the material-energetic flux of its environment, an autopoietic system is closed or “information-tight” in the sense that it is self-operating, or autonomous. It self-maintains the continuous production of the components that bind and replenish the system that produces the components that bind and replenish the system (Maturana and Varela 1980).
The concept of autopoiesis has developed along two main lines of application. The first extends its scientific propriety as a biological theory of the organization of living systems. Researchers taking up the work of Maturana and/or Varela have traced the implications of autopoiesis beyond the realm of individuated cells and organisms. Biological autopoiesis has been studied in relation to computational self-organization (Winograd and Flores 1987), theories of the origin of living systems (Luisi 2006), neurophysiology and neurophenomenology (Thompson 2007), artificial life (Bourgine and Stewart 2004), and artificial intelligence (Froese and Ziemke 2009). It has also been brought up to the level of the biosphere with Earth systems theories of planetary self-regulation, Gaia theory as elaborated by microbiologist Lynn Margulis (Clarke 2009).
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