"Neocybernetics and Narrative" opens a new chapter in Bruce
Clarke's project of rethinking narrative and media through systems
theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media,
significations, and the social, this study demonstrates
second-order systems theory's potential to provide fresh insights
into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative
theory.
A pioneer of systems narratology, Clarke offers readers a
synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by
biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by
cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas
Luhmann's social systems theory. From this foundation, he
interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique
of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of
cognition. Clarke's purview includes examinations of novels ("Mrs.
Dalloway" and "Mind of My Mind"), movies ("Avatar," "Memento," and
"Eternal""Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"), and even "Aramis," Bruno
Latour's idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated
subway.
Clarke declares the era of the cyborg to have ended, laid to
rest as the ontology of technical objects is brought into
differential coordination with operations of living, psychic, and
social systems. The second-order discourse of cognition
destabilizes the usual sense of cognition as conscious awareness,
revealing the possibility of nonconscious and nonhuman forms of
sentience.
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