According to the American Society for Cybernetics (2012), there is no unified comprehensive account of a far-reaching narrative that takes into account all of the Macy Conferences and what was discussed and accomplished at these meetings. This chapter will thus propose how group dialogues on concepts such as information and feedback allowed the Macy Conferences to act as a catalyst for second-order systems theory, when fi rstorder, steady-state models of homeostasis became supplanted by those of self-reference in observing systems. I will trace how such a development transpired through a conferences-wide interdisciplinary mindset that promoted the idea of refl exivity. According to N. Katherine Hayles, the conferences’ singular achievement was to create a “new paradigm” for “looking at human beings … as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines,” by routing Claude Shannon’s information theory through Warren McCulloch’s “model of neural functioning” and John von Neumann’s work in “biological systems” and then capitalizing on Norbert Wiener’s “visionary” talent for disseminating the “larger implications” of such a paradigm shift. From this perspective, the most crucial work would achieve its fruition after the end of the Macy conferences. Yet the foundations for such work were, perforce, cast during the discussions at the conferences that epitomize science in the making and, as such, warrant our careful attention.

“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.

At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a slow-rolling revelation, a protracted unraveling, for it took me quite a while to unwrap cybernetics’ conceptual core from out of the layers of adjacent or covering discourses that had obscured or forgotten their own origins in the fecundity of cybernetic ideas. Heinz von Foerster’s relation to the Whole Earth Catalog and the systems counterculture around CoEvolution Quarterly were instrumental for my subsequent cybernetic development toward the work of Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann on the one hand, and Lovelock and Margulis on the other.

Key words: autopoiesis, gaia theory, heinz von foerster, information theory, neocybernetics, second-order systems theory, the systems counterculture.

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.

Using second-order systems theory, the concept of ‘sustainability’ shifts from a normative starting point to a probabilistic expectation that is open to investigation. While first-order systems can be considered as observable translations of input into output, second-order systems theory adds the perspective of evolution to networks of first-order systems. Complex and dynamic systems are not instucted by incoming signals, but disturbed. They are able to adapt the cycles of their behaviour. Consequently, second-order delineations are not ‘given’ but are continuously reconstructed. These systems have no ‘natural’ delineations, and their ‘limits to growth’ remain a provisional hypothesis. The likelihood of the various progresions can be specified only in terms of a model. Among other things, changes betwen technological trajectories within the current regrime can be distinguished from the possible transition to a regime of sustainable technological development.