Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: Building upon Richards’s notions of “design by constraint” and the usefulness of assigning collaborative tasks to conference participants, this commentary suggests a basic application of Pask’s conversation theory as a potential aide to fruitful knowledge construction in a conference setting.

Upshot: Operational concepts underpinning a proposed cybersemiotic theatrical laboratory are further refined while questions regarding its experimental orientation remain.

Open peer commentary on the article “Design Research as a Variety of Second-Order Cybernetic Practice” by Ben Sweeting. Upshot: This commentary adds environmental architect Lawrence Halprin to Sweeting’s list of examples of design research as second-order cybernetic practice.

Context: The thoroughly second-order cybernetic underpinnings of naturalist theatre have gone almost entirely unremarked in the literature of both theatre studies and cybernetics itself. As a result, rich opportunities for the two fields to draw mutual benefit and break new ground through both theoretical and empirical investigations of these underpinnings have, thus far, gone untapped. Problem: The field of cybernetics continues to remain academically marginalized for, among other things, its alleged lack of experimental rigor. At the same time, the field of theatre studies finds itself at an impasse between post-structuralist semioticians and embodied cognitivists regarding key onto-epistemological issues. A program of research framing and utilizing naturalist theatre as a second-order cybernetic/cybersemiotic laboratory holds much promise in addressing both matters and lending credence to Ross Ashby’s assertion that “the discovery that two fields are related leads to each branch helping in the development of the other.” Method: After establishing the nature of the onto-epistemological deadlock within theatre studies, this article examines the application of cybernetic heuristics within naturalistic theatre, leading to a second-order cybernetic analysis of its processes of production and reception and the outline of an experimental program for exploring these processes further. Results: Foundations for a model of naturalist theatre as a cybersemiotic laboratory grounded in a novel operationalization of Gordon Pask’s conversation theory. Implications: The proposed laboratory could result in the generation of quantitative and qualitative research pertaining to several dimensions of second-order cybernetics; particularly cybersemiotics, which, as a result, may end up better positioned to help dissolve onto-epistemological deadlocks between constructivists and realists of all stripes across the academy and beyond. Constructivist content: I argue that an analysis of naturalistic theatre’s processes of meaning-making filtered through the constructivist ontological agnosticism of second-order cybernetics offers a productive middle way forward for those on both sides of the social constructivist/embodied cognitive realist divide, within and beyond theatre studies. The article draws upon the works of Gregory Bateson, Søren Brier, Ranulph Glanville, Heinz von Foerster, and Niklas Luhmann.

Key words: Naturalism, eigenbehaviours, conversation theory, entailment structures.

Context: Despite the best efforts of postmodern, social constructivist scholars to discredit the notion that “realistic” works of theatre and film could contain genuine onto-epistemic goods, many lay observers (i.e., audiences) continue to describe individual performances and productions as more or less “truthful” than one another. Recently, some performance scholars have pushed back against the postmodern position and turned to contemporary cognitive science to undergird their insistence that the embodied nature of reception and perception does, in fact, allow audiences of such works to access “truths” within them. The literature of cybernetics (first- or second-order) has been almost entirely absent from the debate. Problem: While the hardcore scepticism of social constructivism may be unsatisfactory in fully accounting for the enduring power and appeal of dramatic art, a retreat to epistemic certainty in the name of cognitive science would be equally unwise. This article proposes the notion of “eigenbehavior” as a conceptual bridge that might facilitate the synthesis of the most useful insights from both perspectives and open up new avenues of study and research. Method: The article uses synthetic argumentation to propose a theory of eigenform within the context of theatrical performance. Results: Emerging from this argumentation is a conception of eigenform that is novel in its emphasis on the distinction between its bio-structured and socio-structured features. Implications: The insights in this article will be of value to scholars and practitioners of the dramatic arts and can be productively extended into cognate domains across the humanities. Constructivist content: The article draws on the works of constructivists such as von Glasersfeld, von Foerster, Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann and is grounded in such constructivist perspectives as cybersemiotics, theory of autopoiesis, and systems theory. Key Words: Social systems, semiotics, language, acting, culture, ethics.

Upshot: Two main critiques of the target article have surfaced fairly consistently across the five commentaries: (1) It does not go far enough in its critique of naturalism’s reification of a supposedly universal subjectivity; (2) The proposed bio-social spectrum of eigenforms lacks coherence due to its mixing of logical types. The first critique is refuted, primarily, by revealing the quasi “straw man” nature of an argument resting too heavily on “mainstream” instances of naturalist performance while the second is embraced and the alternative metaphor of domains within a “bio-cultural matrix” is offered as a corrective. In conclusion, a model of naturalistic theatrical practice is described that might productively respond to issues raised across the commentaries by oscillating between domains.