Beyond Dualism: Niki Naturalized "PINE NUTS ARE EDIBLE."Euell GibbonsIn his compelling opening statement President Caspar has charged this workshop not to repeat the traditional account of the differences between the humanities and the sciences and the distance separating them. Bridging the gap between the "Two Cultures" was the concern of an earlier generation that, like our friend on the poster for this conference, seemed to wear bifocals. It was a generation obsessed with dualisms: mind/body, subject/object, signifier/signified, individual/society, nature/culture, realism/relativism, humans/machines. Several speakers in this workshop—Francisco Varela, Jean-François Lyotard, Friedrich Kittler as well as many of the commentators in the sessions to come—approach their work in ways that witness to the inadequacy of these binarisms. Their work has moved us beyond dualism to a refiguring of the humanities and the sciences. The writings of Niklas Luhmann have inspired many in this room and have been symptomatic of the philosophical reorientation that has gained momentum since the 1980s. In the few minutes allotted to me, I want to highlight some of the themes in Luhmann's presentation this morning which resonate with work by scientists and practitioners of the humanities, who routinely disregard the boundary between the humanities and sciences, and for whom such dualisms are unproductive.One of the dominant threads in Luhmann's work, and a theme central to his comments this morning, is a rethinking of the concept of nature. Originally attracted by the work of Talcott Parsons that had articulated sociology in terms of action theory and an early version of general systems theory, Luhmann in his monumental Soziale Systeme (1984) reoriented his approach in light of neurophysiologists and cognitive scientists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana's notion of autopoietic systems. Autopoietic systems are autonomous, self-referring, and self-constructing closed systems. This marriage of biology and systems theory served Luhmann as a springboard for reformulating and deepening some of the interesting features of Parsons' work. Maturana and Varela oriented their original formulation of autopoiesis toward biological, living systems. Luhmann proposed a more abstracted and inclusive theory of self-referential autopoietic systems, in which he viewed autopoiesis as a general form of system building using self-referential closure. This move opened the possibility of considering forms of autopoietic reproduction other than living systems. Luhmann distinguished three types of self-referential autopoietic systems: living systems, including cells, brains, organisms, etc.; psychic systems; and social systems. As closed, self-referential systems, autopoietic systems are sovereign with respect to the constitution of identities and differences: whatever they use as identities and differences is of their own making, and they cannot import those identities and differences crucial for their functioning from the outer world. Around these notions Luhmann elaborated the claim that meaning-producing and meaning-using systems can be distinguished from living systems, and even among meaning-systems he draws a distinction between psychic systems based on consciousness and meaning systems using communication. Society in this view, then, is treated as a meaning-producing communication system. In place of Parsonian and Habermasian action theory Luhmann located communication as the generative source of social systems.
A number of interesting implications follow from this synthesis of biological theory, systems theory and sociological theory, and many of these will resonate with familiar concerns of the humanities in the 80s and 90s. First, Luhmann's work implies the disappearance of the subject as an isolated, autonomous ego and the definition of meaning not as the actualization of the intentional structures of experience in a unique consciousness and pre-given subject, but rather as a selective relationship between system and world. The shift here is to a process-oriented account of meaning. Consciousness is no longer regarded as the subject of pre-given meanings "out there" and substantialized in reflection, but as "an-experiencing-with" in terms of processes for ordering experience. With this shift, we give up a picture theory of representation, the notion that information about an external world, which exists independently of the social system, is imported into the social system through a mirroring process. In Luhmann's terms social systems are self-referential, self-observing systems. As we have just heard in Professor Luhmann's discussion "On Nature," societies constitute worlds. They operate by making distinctions, through self-observation distinguishing themselves from something else: namely the environment of the system. This distinction between environment and system, between self-reference and other reference, is crucial to the construction of order within society. But environment is not to be understood as some pre-existing independent world. As we have heard, talk about ecological dangers—where "ecological" is understood as the environment of the social system—talk about pollution, energy crisis, degenerate nature, etc., is in a certain sense effort toward changing the order of communicative structures that constitute society. As the boundary of the social system, the environment described from the point of view of the system as ecosystem (today) or as cosmos (in antiquity) is constituted within the communicative codes of the social system and cannot be taken as given by a preconstituted world. The social construction of nature is therefore coterminous with the production of society, and indeed this outcome—that society does not communicate with nature, but only about nature—is a crucial aspect of the unavoidable demand that society produce and reproduce its own elements through communication. As Luhmann terms it, that is its autopoiesis. I cannot resist closing this brief discussion without pointing to some resonances between Luhmann's work and other approaches which seem to me to be related. These are approaches that abandon the Geisteswissenschaften/Naturwissenschaften divide. Luhmann's insistence that general autopoietic systems are not limited to living systems suggests that we might think about machines in similar fashion, indeed as Maturana and Varela first noted. Luhmann's break with representationalism and his embrace of a process-oriented account of meaning and reason, his emphasis on history, co-evolution, and the need for distinguishing first and second-order observers—all this is remarkably similar to the route taken by MIT robotics engineer Rodney Brooks. Brooks constructs six-legged insectoids that scramble over his desktop and machines that collect empty coca-cola cans in his office. Brooks' approach abandons the notion of a central robot mind with an internal representation of its environment and a set of plans directing its actions in that environment. In a move reminiscent of Luhmann's concern with embodying social systems in biological wetware, structural coupling, and resonance, Brooks grounds his approach in 'situatedness' and 'embodiment.' In place of a centrally controlled hierarchy of connected systems, Brooks uses what he calls a "subsumption architecture": Brooks' robots are built in layers consisting of simple machines that are minimally interconnected; each layer is independent of any above it and each is engaged directly with the world. Crucial here is that—similar to Luhmannian closed systems—each layer controls its own pattern of sensors and actuators. What the robots do is inseparable from the details and constraints of their construction, thus ensuring that their own physicality—not the predetermined plan of a second-order observer—governs whatever symbolic meaning is to be attributed to their activity. Instead of a pre-given plan relating to a representation of an oversimplified environment, a situated machine or agent must use its immersion in the here and now and its changing perceptions as the basis of its response.[1] To be sure, Brooks' insectoids are not yet self-generating autopoietic systems, but they call into question the opposed binarisms of real versus artificial or natural versus machine intelligence in a manner that forces us to go way beyond dualism.
The point is not, as the two cultures model would suggest, to make humanists computer-literate and to teach scientists poetics. Instead, as the work of Luhmann and Brooks demonstrates, reaching beyond dualism can create a far more productive configuration of systems theory, computer science, and (auto)poetics.
Tim Lenoir
Stanford, March 11, 1994
[1] As extreme skier Glenn Plake says, "When I feel like I'm skiing bad, I follow someone who's 40 down the mountain."