Cybernetic Model and Feedback Circle
To critically engage with Luhmam’s cybernetic phenomenology, it is important to examine a cybernetic model. The Greek kybernetes (steersman) is coined to invent a special name for cybernetics, which is defined as the science of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.” (Nobert Wiener, Cybernetics, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1948).
Cybernetics is concerned with patterns of communication in closed loops and networks, developing concepts of feedback and self-regulation, then self-organization.
It is worthwhile to acknowledge that the new concepts of message, control, and feedback imply patterns of nonmaterial organization or entities, which are crucial in comprehending a scientific description of life in terms of patterns of communication and control. (Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 96).
The cybernetics turns to the mental side to create a science of mind, focusing on patterns common to animals and machines (computer brain). A concept of feedback in mechanistic model of living systems has been fused into information theory and communication theory, which were significant in cultural anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.
In the circular causality of a feedback loop, the first link (input) or initial cause propagates around the links of the loop, thus each element is causally connected has an effect on the next (modifying and conveying information). The last feeds the effect back (output) to the first element, resulting in self-regulation of the entire system. In the circular process of feedback occurs “the control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance.” (Ibid., 24)
Information from the initial stage is conveyed to the next stage, which produces the outcome of any activity of response to its source through the second order observation. A conceptual framework of circular feedback loop, as seen in the metaphor of the steersman, entails modification or correction of the boat’s deviation through counter steering to keep on course based on continual feedback.
The homeostasis, characteristic of all living systems, is influenced and led at the edge of disorder through other perturbation, which is a permanent structural change or mutation in the network.
(Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
In this cybernetic-catalytic framework, it is important to further the interdisciplinary study of the structure of complex systems in dealing with control mechanism, communication process, and feedback principles to understand the functions and processes of systems, effective organizations, and self-governance. This cybernetic epistemology is concerned with information process in living organisms and systems (digital, mechanical or biological), which flow and stream in all media from stars to brains.
A study of systems and processes focuses how they interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves through self-organization, while no requiring outside intervention, because feedback and controls of mechanism are embedded with self-regulating governor device.
By doing so, evolution of living organisms is in the systems of feedback not merely adaptive to environment in Darwinian gradualism, but the environment itself is shaped and influenced by a network of living systems. New forms of life are created through permanent symbiotic arrangements with formerly independent organisms toward higher organism—an aspect of symbiotic alliance (in the case of mitochondria) and collaboration in networking.
This epistemic stance dethrones a theory of social Darwinism, which is based on competition and survival of the fittest in brutal nature: “nature, red in tooth and claw” (Alfred Tennyson).
Proleptic Life-world and Cybernetic Phenomenology
I incorporate a cybernetic framework of dissipative structure in complex systems of living organisms into a proleptic notion of life-world and a systems method (in the revision of Max Weber’s sociology of religion).
Luhmann develops a general theory of systems sociology, which is based on complex interacting elements in the autopoietic system dissolving the structure of life-world into a process of network.
In fact, Maturana and Varela remain restrained whether an autopoietic reality of all living systems would be able to be a defining role in the larger systems (the organisms, societies, and ecosystems). “What we can say is that [multicellular systems] have operational closure in their organization: their identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not leave the network. But regarding the explicit form of that organization, we shall not speak further.”
(Maturana and Varela, The Tree of knowledge, 89).
Unlike Maturana, however, Varela advocates for a broader concept of organizational closure as applicable to social system, though process of production is specified at the very core of autopoiesis within the biological network. (Varela, “Describing the Logic of the Living, in Zeleny (ed.), Autopoiesis, 36-48).
Luhmann reconstructs the concept of autopoiesis in his description of social systems theory in terms of communication and observation with emphasis on operational closure. He makes a radical shift in social theory grounded in a network of communications, de-ontologizing the human subject. His approach can hardly be underestimated in a creative synthesis between a biological theory of living organism and social systems communication (Luhmann, “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems,” in Luhmann, Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
For Luhmann, the world makes sense, as being observed by systemic operations. The systems determine the sense the world makes—and thereby its reality. In continual operations of observation a reality is constructed. The observer cannot exist other than as an observer in a crow’s nest in warning of problems and risk in society.
In Luhmann’s theory, a turn occurs from universal reason in philosophical enlightenment to functional reason in metabiology, which is in a cybernetic way described as basic phenomenon of the self-maintenance of self-relating systems (Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 372).
Nonetheless, Luhmann does not discard the place of self-critical reason. He defines self-critical reason as ironical reason, which can be seen in the reason of the “gypsies who constantly vagabond around Europe.” (Luhmann, Die neuzeitliche Wissenschaften und die Phänomenologie, 45-6).
It refers to the role of a “gypsy of reason” which locates Luhmann within a camp of postmodern condition. Luhmann still maintains postmodern logic of functional differentiation in terms of the meta- or supertheory, which is to be universally applicable to globalized modern society. There can be no final unity that eventually does away with difference. The second-order observation is also the case with deconstruction in terms of Hegel’s logic of negation. At the level of second-order observing, everything becomes contingent, while including the second-order observing itself.
For cybernetic phenomenology Luhmann utilizes the connection between operation, double reference (self-reference/other-reference), temporality, oscillation or sense, horizon and life-world—all from systems theory communication. Indeed, sense has no reference to a subject, a sense-constituting agency (noesis), but it is a sufficiently formalized and differentiated concept of sense in connection with social systems of communication as cognitive function (observation, sense making, or irritating/irritated). (Luhmann, Social Systems. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 69).
A human subject is like an observer in a crow’s nest, but sense or meaning is based on the selective relationship between system and world. Our minds and communications operate within a sense-horizon like a ship operates within the horizon of sea. The ship continuously relocates itself within a horizon through its motion, as the horizon changes with it. The horizon—the ship’s environment—is a direct product of the ship’s own operations (Moeller, Luhmann Explained From Souls to Systems, 66).
This position can be elaborated in the cybernetic model of circular causality underlying the feedback loop in dealing with the behavior of living organism in terms of human experience in steering a boat or observer in the crow’s nest.
In effect, a cybernetic position does not necessarily contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, a rigorous science. Experience is attention intentionally directed upon ideal objects (unities of sense or meaning) in the stream of internal time. This immanent process has suspense on naturally taken-for-granted attitudes toward the externally existing world (bracketed in an act of phenomenological reduction). Human consciousness correlates with systems of meaning, which is under the structure of life-world constraining psychical experience.
This stance integrates operational closure into the process of understanding related to the structure of meaning through adumbration and expansion of the horizon intentionalities. All our theoretical, practical, and even scientific themes lie always within the coherence of the life-horizon world, universal life-world a priori, within which we (natural scientist included) are conscious of objects or things.