Context: In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. Problem: Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. Method: This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. Results: In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. Implications: As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture.

Key words: Heinz von Foerster, American counterculture, Biological Computer Laboratory, heuristics, pedagogy, cognition.

“Gaming the Trace” builds up the power of narrative structures from a consideration, first, of the trace – the event of minimal inscription – and next, of what is latent in the reception – that is, the construction – of the trace. I coin a word to capture this combination of grammatological event and observing process, semiolepsis, and relate these dynamics to an allegory of narrative reception. Metempsychosis, or the tale of the transmission of the soul from one body to another, comes forward as an allegory of the reception of the trace. From here the essay moves to an interrogation of the movie Avatar’s mise en scène of the avatar system – its telling, its design specs, and its phantasmagoric realizations of technological metempsychoses. It turns out that an actual media technology exterior to that frame feeds another digital “transmission of soul” back into the physiological metamorphoses of the storyworld. Relevance: The essay expounds as well as applies a broadly Luhmannian framework of systems differentiations. Its methodology throughout is an application of epistemological constructivism and second-order systems theory.

In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communication in his 1967 work “The Mind of the Dolphin.” The eight-year-old project that “The Mind of the Dolphin” recounts for public consumption details his aspiration to achieve an unprecedented breakthrough beyond companionate communion to fully abstract linguistic communication across species boundaries. Between 1959 and 1968 Lilly wagered and lost his mainstream scientific career largely over this audacious, ultimately inconclusive bid to establish and document for scientific validation “communication with a nonhuman mind.” In that effort, however, he mobilized the best available tools, a cutting-edge array of cybernetic concepts. He leaned heavily on the information theory bound up with first-order cybernetics and operated with heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era. Relevance: As I will elicit through some close readings of his texts, Lilly also homed in on crucial epistemological renovations with a constructivist redescription of cognition that may have influenced and motivated his colleague Heinz von Foerster’s more renowned formulations, arriving in the early 1970s, of a second-order cybernetics.

Open peer commentary on the article ““Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance” by Tom Scholte. Upshot: Scholte’s approach to theater as a black box to be probed indicates that the vocabulary of second-order cybernetics provides an analytical repertoire adequate to the complexity of theatrical phenomena, from the construction of the play in rehearsal to the delivery of the play in performance. While it was hard to discern the precise details in some of Scholte’s experimental protocols, we found his larger discussion to be provocative and effective in mapping the recursivities of theatrical processes.

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.

Emergence and Embodiment focuses on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Maturana and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.

This essay offers an overview of the issues addressed in our volume Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory (Clarke & Hansen, 2009), a collective effort to update the legacy of second-order thinking in systems theory. We review the history that has unfolded secondfrom first-order cybernetics, and take exception to some recent accounts that discount the importance of the second-order or neocybernetic line of development. We argue that neocybernetic concepts in the line from von Foerster to Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann challenge not just the rigidities of AI and first-order mechanical and social systems engineering, but also, and more profoundly, the epistemological foundations of philosophical humanism. We join Dirk Baecker and others’ calls for a slowing down of systems theorizations, and acknowledge a similar need for a slowing down, in our case of everything that has recently come together under the rubric of the posthuman, for the purpose of careful neocybernetic consideration. To understand today’s hyper-acceleration of technoscientific incursions into the human, and to arrive at more highly articulated observations of the systemic situatedness of cognition, we correlate epistemological closure with the phenomena of ontological emergence. If the human is and has always already been posthuman, this understanding demands the perspective afforded by neocybernetic recursion.