Excerpt: This essay explores that history by focusing on certain developments within cybernetics from the immediate post-World War II period to the present. These developments can be understood as progressing in three waves. The first period, 1945–1960, marks the foundational stage during which cybernetics was forged as an interdisciplinary framework that would allow humans, animals, and machines to be constituted through the common denominators of feedback loops, signal transmission, and goal-seeking behavior. The forum for these developments was a series of conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation between 1946 and 1953. Through the Macy discussions and the research presented there, the discipline solidified around key concepts and was disseminated into American intellectual communities by Macy conferees, guests, and fellow travelers. Humans and machines had been equated for a long time, but it was largely through the Macy conferences that both were understood as information-processing systems.

Excerpt: In contrast to the circular processes of Humberto Maturana’s autopoiesis, the figure most apt to describe the third wave is a spiral. Whereas the sec¬ond wave is characterized by an attempt to include the observer in an ac¬count of the system’s functioning, in the third wave the emphasis falls on getting the system to evolve in new directions. Self-organization is no longer enough. The third wave wants to impart an upward tension to the re¬cursive loops of self-organizing processes so that, like a spring compressed and suddenly released, the processes break out of the pattern of circular self-organization and leap outward into the new.

Excerpt: This chapter follows the paths that Maturana and Varela took as they probed deeply into what it means to acknowledge that the observer, like the frog, does not so much discern preexisting systems as create them through the very act of observa¬tion.

Excerpt: My focus is this essay will be somewhat different than in How We Became Posthuman. Whereas there I emphasized connecting embodiment with information, here I will be concerned with the role of metaphor and constraint in re-envisioning agency within posthuman contexts. If the posthuman implies distributed cognition, then it must imply distributed agency as well, for multiplying the sites at which cognizing can take place also multiplies the entities who can count as agents. I will take as my tutor texts Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Enacting the posthuman primarily through speech acts, these two texts mirror each other. One is a work of popular science that occasionally looks as if it is trying to do philosophy, the other a work of philosophy that occasionally looks as if it is trying to do popular science. Both propose radical reconfigurations of agency, Dawkins through the selfish gene and Deleuze and Guattari through “desiring machines” that engage in a ceaseless play of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. What can their mobilizations of metaphor tell us about the cultural significance of the posthuman, and what does their use or neglect of constraints imply about the viability of their respective projects? What is at stake in redefining agency, and how do these redefinitions of agency fit together with distributed cognition? Perhaps most significantly, what do these projects imply about our ability to exercise agency? Should we count as conscious human subjects capable of meaningful action, or are we rather assemblages of selfish genes and mutating desiring machines?

Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical sites where Claude Shannon’s information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Joseph McElroy’s Plus, in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making.

Key words: autopoiesis, consciousness, cybernetics, media theory, narrative theory, posthumanism