Explores the cultural legacy of cybernetics and neocybernetics (the cybernetics of cybernetics) that offers new insight on the role of the human in an era of the posthuman.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Neocybernetic Emergence / Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N26. Hansen 1
Interview with Heinz von Foerster / Interviewer: Bruce Clarke 26
Heinz von Foerster's Demons: The Emergence of Second-Order Systems Theory / Bruce Clarke 34
The Early Days of Autopoiesis / Francisco J. Varela 62
Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology / Evan Tompson 77
Beyond Autopoiesis: Inflections of Emergence and Politics in Francisco Varela / John Protevi 94
System-Environment Hybrids / Mark B. N. Hansen 113
Self-Organization and Autopoiesis / Niklas Luhmann 143
Space is the Place: The Laws of Form and Social Systems / Michael Schiltz 157
Improvisation: Form and Event—A Spencer-Brownian Calculation / Edgar Landgraf 179
Communication versus Communion in Modern Psychic Systems: Maturana, Lohmann, and Cognitive Neurology / Linda Brigham 205
Meaning as Event-Machine, or Systems Theory and "The Reconstruction of Deconstruction": Derrida and Luhmann / Cary Wolfe 220
Complex Visuality: The Radical Middleground / Ira Livingston 246
Bibliography 263
Contributors 279
Index 281

Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds.