• Staying Alive:Cybernetic Persistence
• Bruce Clarke (bio)

In some recent writings I ventured to describe what I've called neocybernetic systems theory.¹ One way I've approached this description is by drawing a contrast with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, or ANT.² A sympathetic colleague remarked that if Latour could own ANT, I should lay claim to my own acronym—NST. Thus, a key difference between these theories is that ANT is built around the concept of network, whereas NST is built around the concept of system. The crucial difference between these two forms is that a network is an unbounded structure—in this respect, it offers an environment open for nodal ramification by its actors, but no internally generated dynamics of its own. In contrast, the specific systems at the fore of NST are, in my formulation, autopoietic systems. That is, they are self-producing, hence internally generated, and in key regards, autonomous, systems: that's what makes them neocybernetic. Even while such systems are open with regard to energy flow, their organizations close upon themselves in processual distinction from the environments that afford them—as in the paradigmatic case of the living cell.³

While both of these theories range well beyond literary application, the idea of literary cybernetics admirably pursued in this NLH forum necessarily turns on the fundamental category of system. And the concept of system—as abstracted from the specific range of technological, biological, psychic, and social instantiations developed in NST—is coupled to a coconstitutive metaconcept of the environment. The environments of NST are themselves potentially suffused with systems, but they are not—they are to be distinguished from—systems per se. As defined in this discourse, an environment is unbounded and, as such, too complex to be systematized. Environments are the mediums out of which systems achieve their forms, the resources from which the productive closures of systems emerge. In any event, this is the theory-form I've taken in my own work in literary cybernetics—literary NST if you will. It pivots from Heinz von Foerster's discourse of recursion and self-reference in second-order cybernetics, to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's coupling of autopoiesis and cognition, to the uptake of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form in both Varela and Niklas Luhmann's social systems [End Page 1281] theory.⁴ This cluster of work was the Stanford school in systems theory as I came upon this material at the end of the 1990s: Luhmann and Friedrich Kittler, and thus von Foerster and Claude Shannon, mediated through David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Tim Lenoir, and Stanford University Press's Writing Science series.

But cybernetics itself, as Heather Love and Lea Pao develop the topic, is larger than this particular line of elaboration. In their introduction, "Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity," Love and Pao note the robust interdisciplinary mix at the fabled Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, which ran between 1946-53, but they also observe that these gatherings were thin with regard to representatives from the arts and humanities. It would appear that the British reception of the first cybernetics, from the "Cybernetic Serendipity" of Gordon Pask to the conceptual practice of Roy Ascott, was rather more festive.⁵ Whatever the case, art historians such as Charissa Terranova have been excavating major, broadly international artistic engagements with the conceptual fecundity and liberatory potential of "fuzzy cybernetics" pretty much since its inception.⁶ And Love and Pao also note the rich roster of documentation and critical work on "concepts like recursion, self-reference, self-organization, the feedback loop, entropy, entanglement, and emergence" (3) developed over recent decades in the history of science and with the rise of scholarship in literature and science, science and technology studies (STS), and media studies.

In fact, "cybernetics" contains so many multitudes that it has become, according to Pao, a "fuzzy" concept. This is hard to deny. To begin with, it contains what is now denominated as first-order cybernetics: the classical discourse around feedback mechanisms and circular operations in biological and social systems that informed the Macy Conferences variously peopled by Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, Warren Mc-Culloch, W...

• 保持活力：控制论的持久性
• 布鲁斯·克拉克（个人简介）

在最近的一些著作中，我大胆地描述了我所说的新控制论系统理论。¹我处理这一描述的一种方法是与布鲁诺·拉图尔的行动者网络理论（ANT）进行对比。²一位富有同情心的同事评论说，如果拉图尔能够拥有 ANT，我就应该拥有我自己的缩写——NST。因此，这些理论之间的一个关键区别在于 ANT 是围绕网络的概念构建的，而 NST 是围绕系统的概念构建的。这两种形式之间的关键区别在于，网络是一种无界结构——在这方面，它提供了一个对其参与者的节点分支开放的环境，但其自身没有内部生成的动态。相比之下，在我看来，NST 前沿的特定系统是自创生系统。也就是说，它们是自我生产的，因此是内部生成的，并且在关键方面是自治的系统：这就是使它们成为新控制论的原因。即使这些系统在能量流方面是开放的，但它们的组织在与提供它们的环境的过程区别上是封闭的——就像活细胞的典型例子一样。³

虽然这两种理论的范围远远超出了文学应用，但在这个 NLH 论坛中令人钦佩地追求的文学控制论的思想必然会转向系统的基本范畴。。系统的概念——从 NST 中开发的技术、生物、心理和社会实例的特定范围中抽象出来——与环境的共构元概念耦合在一起。NST 的环境本身可能充满了系统，但它们本身并不是——它们应该与系统区分开来。正如本文所定义的，环境是无限的，因此过于复杂而无法系统化。环境是系统实现其形式的媒介，是系统产生生产性封闭的资源。无论如何，这就是我在自己的文学控制论著作中所采用的理论形式——如果你愿意的话，可以称之为文学 NST。它源自海因茨·冯·福斯特关于二阶控制论中的递归和自指的论述，Varela 和 Niklas Luhmann 的社会系统[第 1281 页]理论中的形式法则。⁴当我在 20 世纪 90 年代末接触到这些材料时，这组工作是斯坦福大学系统论学院：Luhmann 和 Friedrich Kittler，以及 von Foerster 和 Claude Shannon，通过 David Wellbery、Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht、Tim Lenoir 进行调解，和斯坦福大学出版社的写作科学系列。

但控制论本身，正如 Heather Love 和 Lea Pao 所展开的主题一样，比这个特定的阐述范围更重要。Love 和 Pao 在他们的引言《文学控制论：历史、理论、后学科》中指出，在 1946 年至 53 年间举办的著名的梅西控制论会议上，跨学科的融合十分活跃，但他们也观察到，这些聚会的内容很少关于艺术和人文领域的代表。看来，英国对第一个控制论的接受，从戈登·帕斯克的“控制论缘起”到罗伊·阿斯科特的概念实践，都相当喜庆。⁵无论如何，自“模糊控制论”诞生以来，像查丽莎·泰拉诺瓦这样的艺术史学家就一直在挖掘主要的、广泛的国际艺术活动，以及“模糊控制论”的概念丰富性和解放潜力。⁶ Love 和 Pao 还指出了近几十年来在历史上发展起来的关于“递归、自引用、自组织、反馈循环、熵、纠缠和涌现等概念”(3) 的丰富文档和批判性工作。随着文学与科学、科学与技术研究（STS）以及媒体研究领域学术的兴起。

事实上，“控制论”包含了如此多的内容，以至于鲍认为它已经成为一个“模糊”的概念。这很难否认。首先，它包含现在被称为一阶控制论的内容：关于生物和社会系统中反馈机制和循环操作的经典论述，这些论述为梅西会议提供了信息，由诺伯特·韦纳（Norbert Weiner）、克劳德·香农（Claude Shannon）、沃伦·麦卡洛克（Warren Mc-Culloch）、W ...