Excerpt: Emergence and Embodiment is a collective effort to update the historical legacy of second-order cybernetics. In order to understand today’s hyperacceleration of technoscientific incursions into the human and in order to arrive at more highly articulated observations of the systemic situatedness of cognition, all of the contributors correlate epistemological closure with the phenomena of ontological emergence. In this respect, and despite their diversity, they forcefully testify that the latter cannot be understood independently of the former. The contemporary understanding that the human is and has always already been posthuman could not have emerged, and cannot be rendered productive, without the perspective afforded by neocybernetic recursion.

Editors’ note: We give here a translation from Luhmann’s Einführung in die Systemtheorie, the transcript of a lecture series Luhmann gave at the University of Bielefeld during the winter term 1991–92. The book was published four years after Luhmann’s death, on the initiative of its editor, who slightly edited the recorded materials and added the footnotes. The text reproduces the oral characteristics of a lecture addressed to newcomers to systems theory within an academic context. In the following discussion, as an example of the self-organization of structures within autopoietic systems, Luhmann circles around the phenomenon of language acquisition. Language cannot be inserted into persons as an “input” by which they can then produce language as “output.” Rather, in the co-production of psychic and social systems, linguistic structures and operations self-organize (if at all) due to psychic-systemic constructions of communicative events in their environment.

Excerpt: Francisco Varela’s work is a monumental achievement in twentieth-century biological and biophilosophical thought. After his early collaboration in neocybernetics with Humberto Maturana (autopoiesis), Varela made fundamental contributions to immunology (network theory), artificial life (cellular automata), cognitive science (enaction), philosophy of mind (neurophenomenology), brain studies (the brainweb), and East-West dialogue (the Mind and Life conferences). In the course of his career, Varela influenced many important collaborators and interlocutors, formed a generation of excellent students, and touched the lives of many with the intensity of his mind, the sharpness of his wit, and the strength of his spirit. In this essay, I will trace some of the key turning points in his thought, with special focus on the concept of emergence, which was always central to his work, and on questions of politics, which operate at the margins of his thought. I will divide Varela’s work into three periods – autopoiesis, enaction, and radical embodiment – each of which is marked by a guiding concept; a specific methodology; a research focus; an inflection in the notion of emergence; and a characteristic political question that specifies a scale of what I will call “political physiology” – that is, the formation of “bodies politic” at the civic, somatic, and “evental” scales. These terms refer to the formation of political states, politically constituted individuals, and their intersection in political encounters respectively.

Excerpt: The single most striking characteristic of George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form is the variety of misunderstandings concerning its reception. Its basic idea is actually quite easy: “form” or “something” is identical to the difference it makes (with anything else) and (thus) eventually different from itself. All “something” or “form” or “being” is explained as the residual of a more fundamental level of operations (namely, the construction of difference), including the “calculus of indications” explaining the very Laws of Form. Due to its constructivist nature, the calculus has enjoyed admiration from a variety of people, some of whom are regarded of major importance in their respective scientific disciplines. After a meeting with Spencer Brown in 1965, the philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell congratulated the young and unknown mathematician for the power and simplicity of this calculus with its extraordinary notation. In 1969, shortly after the publication of LoF ‘s first edition, the father of neocybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, enthusiastically described it as a book that “should be in the hands of all young people.” In the cybernetic tradition, by the way, LoF ‘s resonance is undiminished. The international journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing published a Charles Sanders Peirce and George Spencer Brown double issue in 2001; there exist two extensive Web sites with LoF material and new Spencer Brown mathematical work (see “Spencer Brown–related sources” in the notes below); and a revised English edition of LoF is forthcoming. One would conclude that LoF is very much alive indeed. But as noted above, appraisal for the calculus is certainly not univocal. There exist (some very advanced) criticisms of the calculus. Some authors regard it as misconstrued from its very beginning: for Cull and Frank, the Laws of Form is no more than the Flaws of Form. The greater bulk of disapproving comments is, however, less than a spelled-out, intricate argument. In general, it aims at the status of LoF within the mathematical tradition and rejects it as a mere variant of Boolean algebra, simply using a new notation. Nil novum sub sole, so to speak. Whatever be the case, LoF ‘s thinking, especially where it concerns its far-reaching constructivist implications, has clearly not yet been well established. Spencer Brown’s (promising) claims notwithstanding, the context of his work, its notation, and its exotic vocabulary need a great deal of clarification.

Excerpt: In addition to this new methodological approach, neurophenomenology is also informed by an autopoietic conception of life; an enactive conception of mind; and a phenomenological conception of intentionality, subjectivity, and the lived body. These link neurophenomenology to what Francisco [Varela] called “renewed ontologies” of mind and life. This idea of renewed ontologies is what I want to talk about today.