Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Emergence and Embodiment" provides a useful overview and detailed analyses of the complex field of neocybernetics and its major thinkers. It indicates the significance and breadth of interdisciplinary work being done in the wake of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, and George Spencer-Brown, even as it makes demands on its readers to rethink some of their assumptions about he last forty years of 'theory' in the humanities and the interdisciplinary social sciences."--Robert Markley, author of "Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Emergence and Embodiment

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Neocybernetic Emergence BRUCE CLARKE AND MARK B. N. HANSEN...................................................................1Interview with Heinz von Foerster INTERVIEWER: BRUCE CLARKE................................................................................26Heinz von Foerster's Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory BRUCE CLARKE.....................................................34The Early Days of Autopoiesis FRANCISCO J VARELA...........................................................................................62Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology EVAN THOMPSON........................................................................77Beyond Autopoiesis: Inflections of Emergence and Politics in Francisco Varela JOHN PROTEVI.................................................94System-Environment Hybrids MARK B. N. HANSEN...............................................................................................113Self-Organization and Autopoiesis NIKLAS LUHMANN...........................................................................................143Space Is the Place: The Laws of Form and Social Systems MICHAEL SCHILTZ....................................................................157Improvisation: Form and Event-A Spencer-Brownian Calculation EDGAR LANDGRAF................................................................179Communication versus Communion in Modern Psychic Systems: Maturana, Luhmann, and Cognitive Neurology LINDA BRIGHAM.........................205Meaning as Event-Machine, or Systems Theory and "The Reconstruction of Deconstruction": Derrida and Luhmann CARY WOLFE.....................220Complex Visuality: The Radical Middleground IRA LIVINGSTON.................................................................................246Bibliography................................................................................................................................263Contributors................................................................................................................................279Index.......................................................................................................................................281

Chapter One

July 20, 2001, Pescadero, California

INTERVIEWER: BRUCE CLARKE

Family in Vienna

Bruce Clarke: I wanted to ask you about your very unique style, your playful way of putting professional papers together. Did you always write that way?

Heinz von Foerster: I think my answer is that I'm from Vienna. At the time I was born, at the turn of the century, Vienna was so multicultural-fabulous in medicine, in architecture, in art and painting and drawing. Ernst Mach and people like that came from Vienna. My family belonged to this whirlwind of people. My father was an architect with the electric industry but had lots of friends in mathematics and physics. My mother came from an artistic family. Her people were dancers, painters, sculptors, poets, and I was a little kid tossed into this bunch of different people who met at the home of my parents. My grandmother kept a kind of salon where people from different universes met. The actress Eleanor Duse came to the house.

What was your grandmother's name?

Marie Lang. She published the first European journal on women's liberation, and she was therefore known all over Europe.

Did they have the suffrage issue-the women's suffrage movement that began in the nineteenth century?

They were not directly members of it. My grandmother founded something which came from the British suffrage movement ... the settlements, for poor people. And my mother and some of her friends founded one of those settlements in Vienna. So when I was a little boy, staying with my grandmother, sitting under her gigantic desk with big legs, I had my little chair there, and then all the ladies argued about philosophy, women's labor, and the rights of women. So as a kid I was familiar with the political and the cultural problems which arise in a society.

Uncle Ludwig

In many cases people are victims of semantics. They are not aware of what they are saying. My role is to be a semantic cleaning boy, who comes out with a big broom.

That was Wittgenstein's point.

Exactly.

To sweep the pointless arguments off the stage.

Exactly. You see, I was a Wittgenstein victim when I was nineteen or twenty. I think I knew the Tractatus by heart....

Now are you related to Wittgenstein?

Yes, I am related distantly.

You have a cousin named Wittgenstein....

Yes, my grandmother married twice. And from her first marriage there are children that are related directly to Wittgenstein. I knew Uncle Ludwig when I was about eleven or twelve. I think I can even localize the time when I met him. My mother was a very good friend of his sister, Margarethe. They were very, very close. I was with her visiting Aunt Margarethe, and a young man came in. He asked me, "Heinz, what would you like to become when you are grown up?" Now I had just passed a very crucial examination. I wanted to get out of grade school and go into the gymnasium. Wittgenstein asked me what I would like to become, and I said I would like to be a Naturforscher [scientist]. To me that was a combination of Fridtjov Nansen and Madame Curie. He said, but then you have to know a lot. I said, but I know a lot; I just passed the examination. And then he said, you know a lot, but you don't know-how right you are. I said, what? I don't know how right I am? This was my first encounter with Uncle Ludwig.

Later on I became deeply involved in the Tractatus. And there was a nephew, a real nephew of Ludwig's by the name of Karl, who also knew the Tractatus by heart: "Heinz, can you tell me proposition 6.24?" I said, "Of course, that's an easy proposition." "Yes, but Heinz what about 7.1?" ... I was really a pest: "Apologies, ladies and gentlemen; what you are saying is all wrong. According to proposition 2.7 in the Tractatus ... that is the case." They said, "Poor Heinz, what can we do with you?"

Luhmann and Maturana

Were some of your papers driven by the invitations you received?

In most cases it was the consequence of an invitation, either to write a paper or to give a lecture. I tried to strike a balance, to give a paper people should enjoy. I don't want to talk gibberish that nobody understands. Who are these people and what are they interested in and why did they invite me? This is what I ask myself first, and then I sit down and say, what can I tell them?

As it was with the Luhmann thing, you see. They were all academics. I wanted to do two things. Number one, even if you are not a sociologist, you can say very tough things about sociology which are not easy to digest and which are not being observed, even by the sociologists themselves. The other thing is that you can make them laugh. So I had the flower bouquet-the mathematics for afterward.

Is it easy to get a magical bouquet?

Of course, if you are a professional magician, you can produce them. It is no problem. I was in fact looking forward...