• The Alternative Culture of Cybernetics
• Henry Sussman (bio)

Postmodern, self-reflexive texts as well as their cyberpunk spawn are well understood as fictive reworkings of cybernetic developments. Narratives of bodily transformation in the cybernetic era are often feedback loops reentering the forms of computation and communication technologies into the stories communicated.... Narrative embedding is the primary textual analog of systematic self-reference. The zigzag play and sequence of embedded and embedding narrative frames reenacts the essential paradoxicality in the operation of observing systems. Systems theory reconceives form not as the mere shape of things but as the cognitive boundaries by which thoughts and things are distinguished and observed. Embedded and embedding narrative frames assume precisely this self-referential sense of form by marking the virtual edges of narrative structures.

Beginning with his own Posthuman Metamorphosis in 2008 and a co-edited anthology, Emergence and Embodiment the following year, Bruce Clarke has furnished systems theory with a remarkably wide-reaching update, synthesis, consolidation, and reset. This with his invariable self-effacement and irony. His books and articles since that juncture have relentlessly assumed the task of lending the field a cogent voice, bearing, and positionality within the marketplace and politics of critical deliberation. Together with Clarke's 2014 Neocybernetics and Narrative, these studies embody decades of patient stake-out at systems theory's remote outposts; from the seminal post-War Macy Conferences to the 1960's counterculture of San Francisco and The Whole Earth Catalogue (1968); from the German systems and media theories of Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Luhmann to the Chilean (although Paris-marinated) biology that brought us autopoiesis; from the platform of French High Theory underwriting Michel Serres and Bruno Latour in their wild narrative argosies, to the Wiltshire, England and Amherst, Massachusetts, whence, respectively, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis issued their game-changing minority reports on the co-symbiotic partnerings deciding the fates of geosphere, biosphere, and finally, of Life itself.

Clarke's role as a purveyor of sorely needed insight and structure from one branch office of systems theory to another, as a translator, in the fullest meaning of the term, is richly evident in the above epigraph, from a chapter in Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008) entitled "Metamorphosis and Embedding." The cascading excitement in the passage takes off from a "formal correspondence between recursive forms in the operation of systems and in the structure of narratives." Clarke notes, with an exuberance carrying over from the earlier registration of the same correspondence, on the part of Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), that the recursive operations of cybernetic programs and media were always anticipated, in the annals of culture, by embedded stories-within-stories and self-generating narrative cycles, from the Arabian Nights to Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987-1989). What is distinctive about Clarke's engagement with this crucial interface are the comprehensiveness and up-to-dateness of the conceptual toolbox that he brings to bear upon it. First among equals in this theoretical kit are the Social Systems of Niklas Luhmann (1995). The self-referential capability that Clarke attributes to systems, as well as the frame by which a system delineates and sequesters itself, are part and parcel of a pitched division of labor by which, in Luhmann's account, agents, and interests precipitate themselves out of the contexts and surrounds both containing and sustaining them. Clarke's elucidation in the epigraph furnishes compelling evidence as to the full systematic pyrotechnics common to self-fashioning literature and cybernetic technology. And Clarke does not neglect to fill in a vital cognitive capability also embedded within improvisational literature as well as cyber-operations, this entering by way of the self-reference and observation with which Luhmann fits out the dynamics of social systems. The passage ends in a playful escalation of levels of storytelling; this foreshadows the choreography of leaps by which Clarke playfully alights on the dispersed ateliers of systematic sensibility in cultural elucidation.

The freshness of Clarke's critique is defined in large measure by...

• 控制论的另类文化
• 亨利·萨斯曼（生物）

后现代的，自我反省的文本以及它们的赛博朋克生成被很好地理解为对控制论发展的虚拟重制。控制论时代的身体转变叙事通常是反馈回路，使计算和通信技术的形式重新进入所传达的故事中。叙事嵌入是系统自我参照的主要文本类似物。之字形播放以及嵌入和嵌入叙事框架的顺序重新体现了观测系统运行中的本质悖论。系统理论将形式重新理解为不是单纯的事物形状，而是重新认识和观察思想和事物的认知边界。嵌入和嵌入的叙事框架通过标记叙事结构的虚拟边缘而精确地呈现出这种自我参照的形式感。

布鲁斯·克拉克（Bruce Clarke）从2008年发表自己的《人类后变态》开始，并于次年与他人合着了选集《新兴与体现》，为系统理论提供了范围广泛的更新，合成，合并和重置。这与他不变的自嘲和讽刺。从那时起，他的书籍和文章就不懈地承担着在严格审议的市场和政治中为该领域提供有说服力的声音，承受力和地位的任务。这些研究与克拉克（Clarke）的2014年《新神经网络与叙事》一书一起，体现了数十年来患者对系统理论的偏远哨所的投入。从开创性的战后梅西会议到1960年代的旧金山反文化《整个地球目录》（1968年）；从Heinz von Foerster和Niklas Luhmann的德国系统理论和媒体理论到智利（尽管经过了巴黎腌制）生物学，这给我们带来了自溶作用；从法国高级理论的承销商Michel Serres和Bruno Latour的野蛮叙事，到英国的威尔特郡和马萨诸塞州的阿默斯特，詹姆斯·洛夫洛克和林恩·马古利斯分别发表了有关改变共生关系的具有颠覆性的少数派报告伙伴关系决定了地球圈，生物圈的命运，最后决定了生命本身的命运。

克拉克从系统论的一个分支机构到另一个系统分支机构的急需的洞察力和结构的提供者，在该词的最充分意义上，作为译者的角色，在上面的题词中，从《后人类变态》（2008）的一章中就可以明显地看出来。标题为“变形和嵌入”。段落中的级联刺激源于“递归形式在系统运作和叙事结构之间的形式对应”。克拉克注意到道格拉斯·R·霍夫施塔特（Douglas R. Hofstadter）在巴赫埃德尔（Escher）巴赫（Böss）的兴致勃勃地继承了同封信件的早期注册（1979），在文化史上，总是通过嵌入的故事内故事和自我生成的叙事周期来预言控制论程序和媒体的递归操作，从《阿拉伯之夜》到明锐巴特勒的《异生三部曲》（1987-1989） ）。Clarke参与此关键界面的独特之处在于他带来的概念性工具箱的全面性和最新性。在该理论工具包中，平等优先于社会系统Niklas Luhmann（1995）。克拉克归因于系统的自我参照能力，以及系统描述和隔离自身的框架，是分工的一部分，在卢曼看来，代理人和利益使分工逐渐脱离了自我。上下文和周围环境都包含并维持着它们。克拉克在题词中的阐释提供了令人信服的证据，证明了自我塑造文学和控制论技术所共有的完整的系统烟火技术。克拉克（Clarke）也不忽略填写重要的认知能力也嵌入到即兴文献和网络运营中，这是通过自我参照和观察而进入的，卢曼以其自我适应和观察来适应社会系统的动态。这段话以讲故事的水平逐渐升级为结尾。这预示着跨越式的舞蹈编排，其中Clarke嬉戏地讲述了文化阐释中分散的系统敏感性工作室。

克拉克评论的新鲜度很大程度上取决于...