Chris:
<snip>
Aside from expressing an interest, with Maturana you are buying into a
formal theory of reproduction...
<snip>
I am using, as I would see it, the idea of systems that are only partially
closed to contest closure on the one hand ('It's an elephant, stupid!'; I'd
suggested that might be a risk reintroduced by some proponents of cognitive
metaphor theory) and something damnably close to _complete openness_ on the
other (latish Fish, for example, in the case of reader response theory).
I suspect you're charging me with an appeal to biologism similar to what I'd
described as Derrida's appeal to 'botanomy'. And perhaps, since I lumped in
Latour and Giddens along with Maturana, I can't complain; nor can I avoid
it altogether. More especially since Varela regarded applying autopoiesis
to, say, social institutions as distinctly ill advised, a category error. So
clearly there is a problem.
And yet it is Maturana & Varela who themselves move the conversation forward
onto language, via *co-ontogeny* and *consensual domains*. Living,
topologically bounded systems (ie: you & I) rub along together and through
our interaction constitute a third system which in turn acts upon each of
us individually. However, the neurobiological background is important:
cognition is denucleated, removed from the abstract and made firmly,
materially part of bodily behaviour. A case of this might be the ways by
which we reconstruct the sounds and rhythms of something we read. There are
(biological) constraints on the sorts of rhythm we can construe in the first
place. But regularly construing certain sorts of rhythm (out of what we
find) will make us more (physically) apt to construe those rhythms again,
and more quickly, in the future.
<snip>
... which is tricky in the breaks and the linkages with hylomorphism...
<snip>
I don't see Maturana's circularity (I think you called it 'equilibrium' in a
recent post) as any particular problem but rather something with which the
example I gave originally, now rephrased, that performatives bear upon
conventions which bear upon performatives..., offers a reasonable fit. If I
follow you correctly, you want to ask pointed questions about the ontic
substrate for such chicken-and-egg reformings whereas I see it as an
observer problem, a matter of (Brentano-style) intention more than anything
else. And that, I think, is also Maturana's view; though for him it forms a
backdrop to a radical constructivist position with which I wouldn't agree.
Applied to social constructivism, a similar anxiety might express itself as
follows: 'OK. So we're (partly) socially constructed, but what formed the
society which constructed the very first *us*?' The answer, on a theoretical
level, might be that society was the emergent system formed by *our*
interaction and that, in turn, acted on us. So that we are, in effect, our
own unintended consequences. On a more practical level, since we do now have
both, the objects of any discussion of, say, how an emergent style of poetry
hardens into a genre and influences the production of future poetry are
unlikely to disappear.
<snip>
See http://archonic.net
<snip>
Alas the URL you recommended seemed to be unavailable and Google's cache
kept freezing my computer.
CW
_________________________________________________
'Over-simplification, the occupational disease of philosophers
if not their occupation' (J L Austin)
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