Chapter 2 - From observer to enactor in Cybernetic theory

Since the core hypothesis of this research is that digital interactive media could be anappropriate medium to document reality in an enactive and collaborative way, ratherthan in a single and representative way, it is important to trace back the notion ofenactive cognition to its Cybernetics roots. Therefore, this chapter analyses howCybernetics has proposed a view of the observer as in constant interaction with itsenvironment to the point that this interaction shapes and constructs a subjectivereality.

For enactive perception we are not to represent, but to act, enact, visualize,experience, take consciousness of our mental and perceptive frames. It is byperforming, acting cognitively and physically, that we give a shape to our world.Enactive perception suggests an alternative paradigm for perception which comesfrom the Constructivist1 school. ‘It considers the world as its own “representation”and perception as an embodied exploratory (enactive) process of the world mediatedby sensimotor contingencies’ (Bishop, 2005:1313).What interests me are the possibleconsequences of the constructivist and cybernetic view of the observer into the notionof interactivity and agency. Once the core concepts of enactive cognition andautopoiesis are clarified in this chapter I will turn in the following chapter to thecultural and social realm to see how such concepts have influenced in the last sixtyyears the notion of what an artefact might be and, more specifically, how they haveinfluenced documentary making. How has enactment influenced video documentarymaking so far and how could it inspire new ways of documenting reality using digitalinteractive media?

This chapter traces the evolution of the role of the observer in science and inCybernetic theory from the post war 1940’s till nowadays. Concepts of homeostasis,feed-back, circularity, autopoiesis, enactment and structural coupling will beexplained in order to trace the evolution of the observer from objective externalobserver to active enactor. The role of the observer in the artistic world, which I see asequivalent to the role of the author, could have been approached through other routesthan the cybernetic one: philosophy, literature, film or art history could all haveprovided entry points to the subject of the evolution of the author in the last century. Ido not believe than one domain of investigation is better then another, actually Iwould tend to say that it is their correlations that are interesting, but to consider themall together would be an impossible task. I am therefore choosing Cybernetics becausewhat ultimately interests me is the position of the observer in interactive

1 Constructivism is a theory describing how learning happens and suggests that learners constructknowledge out of their experiences. Normally attributed to philosopher and natural scientist Jean Piaget(1896-1980), constructivism is frequently associated with pedagogic approaches that promote learningby doing. Piaget studied the cognitive development of children. He described knowing as a quest for adynamic balance between what is familiar and what is novel. When we encounter something new, wehave to reconcile it with our previous ideas and experience, sometimes changing what we believe, ordiscarding the new information as irrelevant. For Piaget we organize our worlds by organizingourselves… and therefore our cognition is an active process. As Von Glasersfeld points out, Piaget’sthinking “concerns the experiential world of the acting organism, not any ‘external’ reality” (1990:5).Key names in constructivism are Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, Herbert Simon, Paul Watzlawick,Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Ernst von Glasersfeld.

documentaries. As I will explain later in this chapter I see in Cybernetics the origin ofa man-machine mode of interaction and the framing of what Human ComputerInteraction (HCI) is (or might aim to be). Digital interactive documentaries, the focusof this research, are digital products made using computers and they therefore dependon our understanding of HCI. Cybernetics is for me a language, and a logic, thatallows me to analyse at the same time human perception, the role of the observer (thatI will link to the role of the author) and different modes of interactivity (that I willlink to interactive documentary). The possibility to cover three aspects within a singleterminology is what makes me chose Cybernetics as my main frame of reference, butnon cybernetic authors, such as Umberto Eco and Katherine Hayles will be used whenappropriate.

Cybernetics and the “ontology of observing”

The context

Cybernetic theory started in the 1940’s in the context of the World War II (WWII).Mathematician Norbert Wiener had been working on an information system called an‘anti-aircraft predictor’, an automatic firing machine that had to calculate the shift oftrajectory of a plane so that the gun could automatically readjust its position and hitthe aircraft target. This process was only possible using a feedback mechanism: aradar had to record the path of the airplane, a machine had to calculate ‘theprobabilities of its future course based on its past behavior and convey thisinformation to a servomechanism that would correct the firing of the gun’ (Holmes,2007:2). In order to work this feedback loop had to be circular and start again andagain, constantly recalculating the distance between the trajectory of the gun and themoving plane. Trying to reduce the distance between the target and the trajectory ofthe gun is what Wiener later called a “negative feed-back loop” (1956: 252). Implicitin the anti-aircraft predictor was the notion of feed-back being possible only if linkedto a goal: to hit the target. This is how the machine could readjust itself: by constantlyseeking an equilibrium, determined by its goal.

Those assumptions were not neutral, and they had a history. As Katherine Hayles haswell documented in How we Became Posthuman, there were coming from an interestin the phenomenon of homeostasis2, the ‘ability of living organisms to maintainsteady states when they are buffeted by fickle environments’ (1999:8), that hadhaunted scientists during the first decades of the 20th century. The ability to buildmachines that would use feed-back mechanisms to reach homeostasis – and thereforepartially act as a living organism - was a novelty then, and this explains thefascination that scientists had for the thermostat3 in the 1930’s.

2 The word homeostasis was coined by American physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon in the 1920swhile he was looking for a word to describe the complex and coordinated physiological processeswhich maintain most of the steady states in the organism. A typical example of homeostasis is thetemperature readjustment that the body effects when it is too hot by the process of sweat. The livingbody is seen here as seeking for a stable temperature (its goal) and as acting via a process of negativefeed-back loop to reduce the difference between existing body temperature and ideal body temperature.3 The thermostat is also an example of homeostasis, but this time it is performed by a mechanic circuit.A temperature is set as ideal (set point). A sensor detects the temperature of the room. If the

The word cybernetics (from Greek kybernetes, or "steersman") was coined by NorbertWiener in 1947 in this context: a post-war situation where machines were for the firsttime able to perform goal oriented patterns and self-regulating themselves - actionsthat had been previously only been attributed to living organisms. Cyberneticianswould often build machines to visualize aspects of human functioning that they werestudying. This kind of learn by building attitude is a recurrent methodology incybernetic practice4 and can be in a certain way considered a precursor of computersimulation, without computer… Ross Ashby’s Homeostat is a good example of suchpraxis.

In the late 1940s English cybernetician Ross Ashby built the Homeostat5, an electricalmachine composed of 4 homeostatic units. Each unit would take an electrical input,and pass it to the next via an electric feedback loop mechanism. The needles of themachine would move reacting to the change of electrical impulses, but they wouldeventually settle to a stable state, to then be reperturbed. The Homeostat was amechanical visualization of the brain. Ashby was writing Design for a Brain6 (laterpublished in 1952) and was interested in learning and the process of stabilization ofthe brain while interacting with its environment. He was now using a machine tovisualize his own thoughts. In a classical reflexive cybernetic logic he was observinga machine that had been built following his own assumption on the way our brainfunctions. The Homeostat was goal oriented (it ultimately searched for stability) and ithad a sort of agency in the sense that it created its own stability via interaction with itsenvironment. Science historian Andrew Pickering has described the novelty of theHomeostat in the following manner: ‘it did things in the world that sprang, as it were,from inside itself, rather than having to be fully specified from outside in advance’(2002:417).

Both Ross Ashby and Norbert Wiener were interested in building homeostaticmachines that could behave independently from human input, but in order to buildthem they focused on their own knowledge of human behavior. The machine was firstinspired by their knowledge of the human, but once they were working, they helpedvisualizing behavioral processes that were not tangible before, and therefore, in asecond time, the machine became a model to understand complex human behaviors7.

temperature is below the set point it will switch on the heating system, if the temperature is higher thanthe set point it will switch off the heating system. Homeostasis is achieved by a negative feed-backloop: the thermostat constantly diminishes the gap between the actual room temperature and the wantedone.4 Other examples are Gordon Pask’s Musicolor Machine (that was inspired by synesthesia) andStafford Beer and his Whiskers (little robots that were conceived as artificial neurons).5 It is interesting to point out that the Homeostat was mainly built with war-surplus electricalequipment. Both the Homeostat and Wiener’s Anti-aircraft predictor have been built with warequipment and with similar scientific aims. A comparison between those two machines has been madeby Pickering (1998).6 In his book, Design for a Brain (1952), psychiatrist, and pioneer cybernetician, Ross Ashby describesthe brain as an “adaptative controller of behavior” (as quoted in Pickering, 2002:419). The brain, hesays, adapts and learns from the interaction with the environment, therefore we are constantly active inour environment and in our understanding of it.7 In Introduction to Cybernetics Ashby states that “Cybernetics is a “theory of machines”, but it treats,not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask “what is this thing?” but “what does it do?” (italic inoriginal,1956:1). It is precisely because materiality is irrelevant for Ashby that the parallel man-machine is possible. The link is done at the level of organization and behavior and is therefore seen as

Cybernetics and the first glimpses of the computer

It is not surprising that in the same years, more precisely in July 1945, Vannevar Bushpublished his famous article, As we May Think, in the Atlantic Monthly. This articlehas been later considered the precursor of the hyperlink and information retrieval.Vannevar Bush was working on the Memex8, a sort of mechanized private file andlibrary in the shape of a desk. Later, inspired by the Memex, a young radar technician,Doug Engelbard, began to work on what would result in the invention of ‘the mouse,the word processor, the hyperlink, and concepts of new media for which thesegroundbreaking inventions were merely enabling technologies’ (Montfort andWardrip-Fruin, 2003:35). Cybernetics and computers have a common history.

A few years later, in 1950, Turing published his famous paper Computer Machineryand Intelligence and proposed the Turing test9 to establish a machine's ability todemonstrate intelligence. The famous Turing test is an indicator of how the differencebetween machine and human starts to be crucial in post WWII Western society. Thisinterest is also the playground from which the first computers will emerge, startingfrom an emulation of machines to human processes and slowly disembodying thehuman body to the point of being seen as a machine in the 60’s (as argued byKatherine Hayles in How we Became Posthuman).

The Macy Conferences

It is in this context that the famous Macy conferences on Cybernetics started. Theywere interdisciplinary meetings held from 1946 to 1953 in New York that broughttogether a number of intellectuals including, to name a few, Norbert Wiener, John vonNeumann, Warren McCulloch, Claude Shannon, Heinz Von Foerster, W. Ross Ashby,Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. The meetings were meant to create an originalspace of debate, rather than a place of divulgation of established ideas, and thereforewere structured as informal discussions that did not necessitate the publication of apaper from their participants. Starting from a reflection on "Feedback Mechanismsand Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems"10 the firstcyberneticians, looked at feed-back loops, homeostasis, and later circularity, as an

common between living and mechanical systems. This distinction between structure and organizationwill then lead biologists Maturana and Varela to the opposite conclusion, but this is in the 1980’s,nearly thirty years after Ashbys’s writing.8 In his article Bush describes the Memex as ‘a device in which an individual stores all his books,records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceedingspeed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory’ (1945:12).9 The Turing test is described by Alan Turing ‘s 1950 paper "Computing Machinery andIntelligence".Iit proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation withone human and one machine, each of which try to appear human. All participants are placed in isolatedlocations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to havepassed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words intoaudio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen(source: Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test).10 This was the title of the first conference held at the Macy Foundation. A brief summary of eachconference is available at http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm(retrieved 18.12.08).

entry point to flag similarities and differences between living systems and machines.From its original focus on machines and animals, cybernetics quickly broadened toencompass minds (e.g. in the work of Bateson and Ashby) and social systems (e.g.Stafford Beer's management cybernetics and Niklas Luhmann work), blurring thedifference between biology and social sciences.

The emergence in the late 1950’s of the school of General Systems Theory (GST)11

influenced cybernetic thinkers and made them gradually see systems not as isolateditems but as interconnected realities. For GST a cell is not just the smallest item ofliving organisms but it is part of a series of systems that are interconnected. A cell ispart of an organic tissue that is part of an organ that is part of a body that is part of anenvironment… and so on. In a systemic logic a cell cannot be studied in isolation, thiswould be an artificial situation since the cell is always part of a context (the organ, thebody, the environment etc…). This interconnection had two main effects oncybernetics: on one side it opened up to social sciences12 what had started as amathematical and engineering approach to science and on the other side it changedthe way cyberneticians started to see the relation between the systems they wereobserving and themselves. Cyberneticians started to see themselves as part of thesystem they were observing.

[Meanwhile… in the documentary world…]

The observer in Expository documentaries

In the parallel cultural field of documentary making a similar evolution is visible.During the 1940’s documentaries were mainly broadcasted in cinemas and the firstglimpses of television in people’s houses in the 1950’s13 gave a new platform to thedocumentary genre. Most documentaries between the 1940’s and 1950’s tended to be‘expository’ ones. As we have seen in the past chapter (literature review)

11 General Systems Theory (GST) was founded in the 1960’s by Austrian biologist Ludwig vonBertalanffy. It was an attempt to ‘build a unified science by uncovering the common principles thatgovern open, evolving systems’ (Heylighen and Joslyn, 2001). GST studies systems at all levels ofgenerality, whereas Cybernetics focuses more specifically on goal-directed, functional systems whichhave some form of control relation. Although GST was originally referring to the biological andscientific realm, it has spread during and after the Second Wave of Cybernetics to other fields such associal sciences (Niklas Luhmann, Talcott Parsons, Walter Buckley etc..), economics (KennethBoulding), politics (Karl Deutsch), psychology (Gregory Bateson, Jerome Bruner, Jean Piaget,Abraham Maslow) and philosophy (Ervin Laszlo). My interest in GST lays particularly in the fact that,as Johanna Macy states, ‘in contrast to the linear paradigm that has predominated in Western culture,GST presents a mutual or reciprocal view of causality’ (1991:69). The idea of analyzing systems aswholes that are themselves part of a larger whole, and bound to it through a net of relationships andmutual causality, seems to me very applicable to media and cultural studies. It allows finding culturaltrends that permeate at different speeds in all disciplines and aspects of our life, including ourrelationship to media and documentary making.12 From the 1960’s onwards, cybernetics started to be a logic that could be applied to the study ofbiology (Maturana and Varela), cognitive science (Varela, Clark, Noe etc.) psychology (Bruner) socialsciences (Luhmann) and art (Pask, Ashby etc..).13 While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 millionby 1968. (source: http://www.tvhistory.tv/Annual_TV_Households_50-78.JPG, retrieved 19.12.08).

documentary critic Bill Nichols14 defines the ‘expository mode’ as a film that tends toconcentrate on social issues and emphasizes verbal commentary and argumentativelogic via the use of a dominant voice of the narrator (Nichols, 2001)15.

In a post-war context documentaries narratives of reconstruction would oftendominate the media, blurring the differences between news style and film genre16. Theposition of the documentary filmmaker is very argumentative in the Expository mode.The narrator affirms her point of view on a specific issue, often a social one. Her ideasare often materialized by a constant voice-over that links the shots, following aprecise storyline. The documentary is presented as an objective inquisition into anissue. The filmmaker is observing the situation and filming it at the same time. Thecamera is seen as objective. It is presented as a tool that captures a reality that isexternal to the filmmaker and that she is not influencing with the act of shooting.

Although homeostasis and feed-back loops are not present in the documentarydiscourse, the view of the observer as external and objective is similar to the positionof the first wave cybernetic observer. I am not saying here that cybernetics directlyshaped documentary making, but that there is a historical parallelism in ways ofseeing the agency of the author (filmmaker, artist, scientist…) in her field of analysis.Cybernetics is therefore not seen here as a cause, but as a possible angle of analysis,that allows me to visualize the changing relationship between the observer and herenvironment across the scientific and cultural domain of the 20th century. Indocumentary making, as in science, the position of the observer was about to changein the 1960s.

[Back to Cybernetics…]

The emergence of the observer as a key cybernetic concept

Up till the 1950’s cyberneticians had been concentrating on homeostatic processesand feed-back loops and had generally assumed that the observed was outside of thesystem being observed. Wiener’s Anti-aircraft predictor and Ashby’s Homeostat areboth seen by their authors as tools with objectively observable behaviours. Thescientist, or the viewer, is assumed to observe what is happening in front of him, in areality that is external to him. This approach has later been referred to as ‘first-wave’cybernetics (Hayles, 1999), or ‘first-order’ cybernetics (Heylighen and Joslyn, 2001).Here a system is studied as if it was a passive, objectively given "thing", that can befreely observed, manipulated, and taken apart.

14 As explained in Chapter one – where several definitions of documentary genre where given – I willmainly use in this research Bill Nichols’ terminology.15 Some of the examples that Nichols gives are The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), Spanish Earth(1937) and Triumph of the Will (1935).16 The whole neorealist film genre of the Italy of the 1950’s can be seen as an attempt to use fiction in adocumentary logic. In Ladri di biciclette (Bycicle Thief) Vittorio de Sica (1948) uses fiction to portraya depraved post-war Italy where people have to steal bicycles to survive. In Stromboli (RobertoRossellini, 1950) entire segments about fishing and an actual evacuation of the town after an eruptionof the volcano is shot as a documentary. Most villagers are played by actual people from the island, asis typical of neo-realism.

General System thinking, and several cultural shifts17, challenged this approachmaking the observer part of the system observed. In the 1960’s a clear shift ofthinking emerged, largely thanks to the work Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.Cybernetics started to question its own methodology, and the role and way offunctioning of its own subjects (the scientists). On a speech delivered to a scientificaudience18, cybernetic philosopher Heinz Von Foerster observed that “a description(of the universe) implies one who describes (observes it)” and added “what we neednow is the description of the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of theobserver” (1982: 258).

The observer and the observed system started to be seen as linked, like in GST, butalso inseparable since the result of observations would depend on their interactions.The observer too became a cybernetic system, who is trying to construct a model ofanother cybernetic system. This circularity is typical of what has been called in the1970’s Second Order, or Second Wave, Cybernetic - where cognitive processes areseen as constructing a reality via the interaction subject/environment19. The world isseen as an active creation of our cognitive processes and this is why we cannot beneutral when observing it. As Von Foerster points out in Observing Systems“Cognitive processes create descriptions of, that is information, about theenvironment. The environment contains no information. The environment is as it is”(1960:254). The environment is not given anymore, it is constructed by us.

Second Order Cybernetic theory starts from a fundamental revelation, a shift inthinking, that some have called a scientific paradigm change20: the world can be seenas series of interconnected systems in constant relation to each others. We, as living

17 We will see in the next chapter as in the 1960’s areas such as art enter in a new paradigm ofopenness. Umberto Eco has eloquently described in The Open Work (first published in 1962) how“openness” and choice have been the lay motif of the 20th century and how in the 50’s/60’s authors inall artistic disciplines (music, literature and visual art) have voluntarily searched for a maximumopenness. ‘In fact, rather than submit to the “openness” as an inescapable element of artisticinterpretation he (the author) subsumes it into a positive aspect of his production, recasting the work soas to expose it to the maximum possible “opening” ‘ (English translation, 1989:5). Openness is onlypossible if the author allows the participator to enter in the creative process. This logic of creation is aparticipatory logic rather than a representational one. A similar paradigm shift is described bytechnology historian Andrew Pickering, but this time in the scientific world. Pickering sees cyberneticsat the core of a ‘new scientific paradigm’ (2002:413). Science, he says, was passing from arepresentational ideom to a performative ideom where its role was not anymore to represent the worldand produce knowledge of it, but rather to “do things in the world- with the emergent interplay ofhuman and material agency” (2002:414). It seems to me that both in the scientific and the artisticdomain, the 1960’s represent a decisive step forward against the representational forms of the past.Obviously these trends had been evolving and feeding to each other for many years, but the new worldemerging after the WWII played as a resonance box for the cultural wish of a world that couldquestions established roles and processes.18 The speech was delivered in September 1972 at the Centre Royaumont pour une Science del’Homme, in France. An adaptation of the speech got then published in 1982 in Von Foerster’s bookObserving Systems under the title Notes to an Epistemology for Living Things.19 It is obviously very difficult to make a clear distinction between first and second wave cybernetics,particularly people such as Von Foerster, Pask, and Maturana –that are traditionally associated to“second order” cybernetics- were themselves directly involved in the development of "first order"cybernetics in the 1950's and 1960's. I would like to see those two terms as indicating an evolution inthinking rather than a clear cut change of paradigm. What is important to me is that this evolution isbased on the progressive gain of relevance of the observer as seen as in interactive relation with whatshe is observing.20 See Andrew Pickering’s Cybernetics and the Mangle (2002).

cognitive organisms, are systems ourselves. When we observe the world we areobservers observing systems that are in relation with us, and therefore our act ofobservation influences the system while at the same time the system influences us.This circularity, which is based on the fact that there is a mutual feedback loop actingbetween any subject and her environment21, is the contribution that Cybernetics hasgiven to a broader inquisition that has always existed in science: the debate about therole of the observer in science.

[Previously, in the scientific world…]

The role of the observer in science

If we zoom out of Cybernetics, and take a more historical perspective, we realize thatthe role of the observer has been debated throughout the whole history of science, andSecond Order Cybernetics have just added a layer to a long lasting debate.Particularly salient in this debate are the discussion around Heisenberg’s uncertaintyprinciple – in the context of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics inthe late 1920’s – Newton’s 1905 Relativity Theory, and Boyle’s positioning of thescientific observer as guarantor of scientific truth at the end of the 17th century. Thosethree moments in history can be seen as turning points in the more general debate ofobjectivity and knowledge, a debate that has often started in the scientific world butthat has always been interlinked with the social, philosophical and political realm.

In their book Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life,Schaffer and Shapin see the beginning of experimental science as emerging from thecontroversies between natural philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) andexperimentalist Robert Boyle (1627-1691). The controversy took place in Englandduring the early 1670s and was around the methodologies that science, then part ofnatural philosophy, should adopt to claim knowledge about natural facts. Bypublishing New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air in1660, Boyle was presenting a methodology of science that was based onexperimentation, and not on a priori reasoning or intuition. He proposed a certainnumber of conditions that could guarantee empirical truth. For Boyle an experimenthold and repeated in a public space, where multiple trustable witnesses wouldtestimony on the outcomes of the experiment was enough to prove matter of facts.Boyle ‘did not detail the steps by which he moved from matters of facts to theirexplanation’ (Schaffer and Shapin, 1985:50) as for him the cause of a fact wasirrelevant (God could have different ways to cause a fact) but what was essential wasthat the “multiplication of witnesses” (1985:57), and their concordant testimonies,was a sufficient condition to speak of scientific truth22. In other words Boyle did set a

21 As noted by Katherine Hayles in How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,Literature and Informatics (1999), First Wave Cybernetic (that started around 1940s) was moreconcerned with the study of feed-back loops internal to an observed system. It is only in the 1960’s thatthe shift to include the observer in the observed system happened. The world is an active creation ofour cognitive processes and this is why we cannot be neutral when observing it.22 Hobbes was highly skeptical of Boyle’s empirical methodology. He thought it was pointless to repeatan experiment (either it was true the first time, or it was false, in which case replication would nothelp). He saw the choice of a semi public space inhabited by specialists as dangerous (Schaffer andShapin consider that history proved Hobbes to be right: experiments lead to the practice of thelaboratory which gradually became closed to the general public – today one would need an

methodology for scientific objectivity based on the observer23. The scientist, thespecialist, becomes the objective observer and the guarantor of scientific facts. Factsare not function of human conventions (as Hobbes was a advocating) but observablerealities. This assumptions were used as a base for the empiricist and deterministscience that dominated till the beginning of the 20th century, where hypotheses andtheories had to be tested against observations of the natural world via the means ofexperiments.

The assumption of the objectivity of the scientific observer, was to be challenged twocenturies later, in 1905, by Albert Einstein’s Relativity Theory. For Einstein ‘differentobserver will order events differently in time if they move with different velocitiesrelative to the observed events’ (Capra, 1982:71). Space is not three dimensionalanymore and it is not separated from time. ‘Two events which are seen as occurringsimultaneously by one observer may occur in different temporal sequences for otherobservers’ (Capra, 1982:72). Both Newtonian concepts of absolute time and absolutespace are now linked by a subjective entity: the observer.

The active role of the observer will then be emphasized even more in the followingyears when physicists concentrated into the study of subatomic entities. By 1925Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg had laid down the basic principles of quantummechanics, and those seemed to contradict most of the ontological principles ofclassic physics24. While in classic physics ‘we can always draw a sharp distinctionbetween the state of the measuring instrument being used on a system and the state ofthe physical system itself’ (Hilgevoord, Jan and Jos Uffink, 2008:3) in quantummechanics this is not possible anymore. With his uncertainty principle, Heisenbergdemonstrated in 1927 that it is possible to measure the position, or the momentum25,of a subatomic particle such as an electron. However, it is not possible to measureboth of them at the same time, because the measuring process interferes to asubstantial degree with what is being measured. There have been diverse readings ofthe uncertainty principle. Physicists have debated to which degree it deals withmeasurement only or with the effect of observation. The nature of the observer hasalso raised concern (is it the scientist, the instrument, can it be a non-consciousobserver, can it be an electron?). But over all the uncertainty principle has

authorization to enter in a laboratory and one would need to understand the scientific jargon to makesense of the experiment). Finally Hobbes was against Boyles differentiation between cause and factsand considered that “experiments carry with them a set of theoretical assumptions embedded in theactual construction and functioning of the apparatus and that, both in principle and in practice, thoseassumptions could always be challenged” (Schaffer and Shapin, 1985:112).23 As noticed by Schaffer and Shapin, and by Donna Haraway when commenting on their book inModest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMac_Meets_OncoMouse, this observer was not anordinary observer, but a gender and race specific “gentleman-scientist” (Haraway, 1997:30) that wassupposed to be trustworthy. The assumption here is that the scientist is not culturally biased,assumption that will later be highly disputed.24 These principles are: the principle of space and time (physical objects exist separately in space andtime in such a way that they are localizable and countable, and physical processes take place in spaceand time; the principle of causality (every event has a cause); the principle of determination (everylater state of a system is uniquely determined by any earlier state); the principle of continuity (allprocesses exhibiting a difference between the initial and the final state have to go through everyintervening state); and finally the principle of the conservation of energy (the energy of a closedsystem can be transformed into various forms but is never gained, lost or destroyed) (Hilgevoord, Janand Jos Uffink, 2008:3).25 The momentum of a particle is the product of its mass and velocity.

repositioned the observer within the system observed. Through the act ofmeasurement he becomes himself a part of observed reality and this marks the end ofthe neutrality of the experimenter proposed by Boyles three centuries earlier.

It seems to me that depending on the role we give to the observer we see andcomprehend the world differently. An observer that is not believed to influence theworld she is observing can claim objectivity and detachment between the subject andthe object. Her world can therefore be explained since it is causal and determinate.This mechanistic world is the one that has been described by classic physics, up to thebeginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, an observer that acknowledges herinfluence on what she is observing has first to ponder if the effects of her observationare at all graspable and distinguishable ad then has to ponder if it is possible to predictwhat the system’s behavior would have been if the observer had not been present.This second observer is facing a world that is probabilistic and relative, a world thathas been at the centre of modern physics and quantum mechanics.

Second Order Cybernetics has always positioned itself as a multidisciplinary theory,and not as a specific hard core science. By branching in biology, psychology andsocial sciences in the early 1970’s it has brought the debate around the observeroutside of physics and philosophy. For me its contribution to such debate is aboutstepping outside of the historic relation between scientific observer and scientific truthand jumping into the realm of any cognitive being and its relation with reality. Theinsistence on subjective construction of reality, and on mutual circular feedbackbetween the organism and its environment, are the main contributions that SecondOrder Cybernetic had to offer to the historically complex question of the role of theobserver.

But one question is for me still open: what is the nature, the typology or thecomplexity of relationships that are formed between an organism and itsenvironment? In other words, how is the circular feed-back affecting the entities“organism” and “environment”? How do they shape themselves, in whichcircumstances, in which forms, or in which degree? Also, is there a logic in suchrelationship? To answer such questions Cybernetics turned to biology, and to the verysense of what it means to be alive. Biologists Maturana and Varela saw in autopoiesisthe fundamental requisite for live existance, a life that is defined and shaped by itsrelationship with its environment.

[Back to Cybernetics…]

Autopoiesis

Autopoiesis means that although the organism is distinct from its environment itconstructs itself via its interaction with it - they are therefore in a relationship ofmutual dependency. ‘Living beings’ claimed Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela‘are characterized by their autopoietic organization’ (Maturana and Varela, 1987:47)where autopoiesis26 is the process of self-making, or of auto-creation, and

26 The original definition is slightly more complex: ‘An autopoietic machine is a machine organized(defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of

organization is ‘the set of relations that must exist for the components of a system forit to be a member of a specific class’ (1987:47). In other words any living organismmaterially self-constructs itself and by doing so distinct itself from its environmentand acquires autonomy27. Autonomy does not mean that the system does not needother systems to reproduce itself, nor that it can survive alone, but that ‘it can specifyits own rules, what is proper to it’ (1987:48). This definition comes from a biologicalcontext where the idea of ‘rules’ has later been linked to DNA, mutation andadaptation28. But in Maturana and Varela’s original formulation the notion of ‘rules’and of ‘properness’ of an organism have led to some confusion. This has been seen asa weak point in Maturana and Varela’s theory: what sort of ‘rules’ are they referringto and how do they assume those rules are created? One would tend to conclude that itis the organism that creates the rule, but that would imply the capacity to selectbetween options or even just to adapt to options. Also, does the concept of ‘rule’ notassume a capacity for abstraction?

Since in their wording autopoiesis is a strictly material activity it is not clear howmuch self-making supposes, or creates, sense-making – the ability to distinguish inorder to choose29. Is autopoiesis just about creating bodies and materiality or is itmechanism at the origin of evaluation, cognition, thoughts and maybe even emotions?If autopoiesis stays at the level of strict biological organism functioning, thenautopoiesis might be useful to define biological life but it is difficult to use it tounderstand the behaviour of complex cognitive beings such as animals and humans.In this case the use that sociologist Niklas Luhmann, or phsycologist Ernst vonGlasersfeld, do of autopoieis is inadequate, since they extrapolate a strictly biologicalterm and use it in a completely different realm, in which the word might not have anyrelevance. On the other hand, if autopoiesis is seen as a process that demands a certainlevel of evaluation of the living organism to adjust to its environment, so if we readautopoiesis as the cause of our cognitive functions, then one could imagine to use it in

components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate andrealize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as aconcrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain ofits realization as such a network.’ (Maturana, Varela, 1980:78). The example that Maturana and Varelagive of an autopoietic system is the biological cell. The cell is made of various biochemicalcomponents and is organized into bounded structures such as the cell nucleus, various organelles, a cellmembrane and cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an external flow of molecules and energy,produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure thatgives rise to these components. Maturana and Varela also contrast the autopoietic system with theallopoietic system, such as a car factory. In car factory raw materials are used to generate a car (anorganized structure), but a car is something other than a factory.27 Philosopher and cognitive scientist Di Paolo points out that ‘the essential difference betweenautopoiesis and the rest of the wider class of self-organization is that what is by definition a process ofmaterial self-production must as a result generate a self-distinguishing concrete unity and not simply aphysical pattern’. Autopoiesis then makes explicit the need for an actively constructed boundary thatphysically separates metabolism from the external medium.28 See Kaufmann, Stuart (1993) Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution,Oxford University Press, Technical monograph.29 Thompson (2004) and Di Paolo (2005) see this missing link as one of the main weaknesses ofautopoiesis as originally formulated by Varela and Maturana. For them:A. self-production is a process that defines a unity and a norm: to keep the unity going and distinct;B. encounters with the external world are “evaluated” by the system (through the autopoietic achinery)as contributing or not to the maintenance of autopoiesis; consequentlyC. autopoiesis implies sense-making, an intrinsic perspective of value on the world.The crucial point here is B. and whether it can be derived from the original formulation of the theory.

other fields such as the psychology, education and sociology. After all, themechanism that allows the cell to survive and adapt to an environment can be seen atthe base of the construction of a complex organism (such as the human body andmind) and, maybe, in a complex environment (such as the social or political one).

For Maturana and Varela autopoiesis is what defines us as living organisms, but isalso what rules our relation with our environment. For me the concepts of structuralcoupling, and later of enactive perception, are all linked to the fundamentalassumption that a living organism is in relation with its environment so it becomescrucial to understand what is meant by ‘relations’, ‘interaction’ and ‘transformations’between the living organism and its environment (Maturana and Varela, 1980:78).This clarification is important because autopoiesis is not just a biological concept, it islinked to chemical self-organization, and it has been extrapolated to psychological,educational, artistic, philosophical, economical and political realms. If the livingorganism is seen as a self-organized entity in structural coupling to its environmentthen a complex system is to be seen as a set of relations, and not as a structure that canbe understood by isolating its parts. As an extension, the environment is to beunderstood as a dynamic and changing entity, since it depends on the fluctuatingchanges of dynamic systems. Economy and politics can then be seen as based on self-organized entities, art as set of relations – a point defended by Nicholas Bourriaud inRelational Aesthetics – and networked or mobile media as the tools that makes thoselinks visible and effective30.

From all the possible concepts that can be related to autopoiesis (self-organization,structure, organizational closure and structural coupling) I choose in this research toconcentrate on the notions of interaction and transformation, so in theinterdependence between the organism and its environment. What interests me inthose two notions is the vision of relationship as a transformative force that generatesdifferent logics of openness, rather than closure. My argument is that speaking ofinteraction in autopoietic terms can be very useful when studying digital mediaartefacts. More precisely, since my focus is digital interactive documentaries, Ibelieve that the relationship created between the user and the interactive documentarycould be usefully expressed in autopoietic terms. By doing this the emphasis wouldnot just be on how the user understands, and explores, the artefact (a logic that isdominant in Human Computer Interaction, since it is a science aimed at limitingincomprehensions of the user when using the machine or the interface) but on how therelationship between the user and the artefact engenders a different user and adifferent artefact. The levels and complexities of transformation that an interactivedocumentary can create by using different logics of interactivity is what interest me.A media that can be participative, situated and networked, so that has levels ofopenness and reflexivity, as the digital media is, has for me more chances to createmechanisms of mutual transformation of both the user and the artefact– not to speakof society – than a media like film or video that is physically closed31.

30 In Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, Clay Shirky gives aseries of examples of how the use of the internet and mobile phones has brought people together insocial actions.31 Film and video do not “afford” (Gibson, 1977) or do not have the “ability” (Shaw et al., 1982) tochange themselves once broadcasted or viewed. This is not to say that they do not have a social andpersonal transformative power but just that their effect is not of reflexive and circular nature – in thesense that it does not transform the artefact, the film itself, one it is finished.

But I order to use levels of autopoietic openness in the analysis of interactivedocumentaries I first need to elucidate and bypass two of the most common criticismsthat are done to the use of autopoiesis in social and cultural fields (Hayles, 1995;Zylinska, 2009): 1. autopoietic closure seems to be contradictory with change andevolution, 2. autopoiesis is a biological concept and as such should not beextrapolated to cultural realms. It would be possible to disregard such issues.Philosopher Felix Guattari has used autopoiesis without considering autopoieticclosure32, and social critic Niklas Luhmann has found a coherent way to applyautopoiesis to social phenomena33. For my part I would like to clarify the exact issuesgenerated by autopoiesis, and then try to find a route to bypass such issues that wouldfeel coherent to me.

Autopoietic closure

Maturana and Varela describe the living organism as structurally open butorganizationally closed, meaning that even if in constant relationship with itsenvironment, the organism can change its structure34 (the stuff it is made of) but notits internal organization (the relations that makes it what it is)35. Di Paolo has calledthis position an “axiom of structural determinism”: ‘changes of state in a systemalways operate in the present as a result of its current structure and are not determinedby external agents or contextual conditions’ (2005:6)36. It is difficult to see how an

32 In Machinic Heterogenesis, Felix Guattari speaks of ‘autopoietic machines’ (2001:41) deliberatelycontradicting Varela’s notion of ‘allopoietic machines’ (which produces something different thenthemselves). ‘It seems to me’ he says ‘that autopoiesis deserves to be rethought in relation to entitiesthat are evolutive and collective, and that sustain diverse kinds of relation sof alterity, rather than beingimplacably closed upon themselves. Thus institutions, like technocal machines, which in appearance,depend on allopoiesis, become ipso facto autopoietic wgen they are seen in the framework of machineorderings that they constitute along with human beings (2001:42).33 See Luhmann, Niklas (1986) ‘The Autopoiesis of social systems’, in Felix Geyer, Johannes van derZouwen, Eds., Sociocybernetic Paradoxes. Observation, Control and Evolution of Self-SteeringSystems. Sage.34 Stucture is defined, yet again, with a rather vague terminology. ‘Structure denotes the omponents andrelations that actually constitute a particular unity and makes its organisation real’ (1987:47). Todifferentiate structure from organization Maturala and Varela take the example of a toilet where the‘organisation of the system of water-regulation consists in the relation between an apparatus capable offetching the water level and another apparatus capable of stopping the inflow of water’ (1987:47). Thestructure on the other hand could be modified by changing plastic with wood without changing thetoilet organization. This example is to me particularly odd. If it is quite easy to define what does a toiletdo, what makes it a toilet and what it is made of, I find it more difficult to make those distinctions in acomplex living organism. Even if I knew what I am made of, it would be difficult to assume that anypart of my body can be changed without changing my organisation. As for defining the relationsbetween my components that make me belong to the class of human beings I would not know where tostart from… The limits between biology and philosophy seems to get thinner and thinner here…35 A clearer distinction between structure and organisation is provided by psychiatrist HumbertoMariotti. ‘Organization’ he says ‘determines the identity of a system, whereas structure determines howits parts are physically articulated. Organization identifies a system and corresponds to its generalconfiguration. Structure shows the way parts interconnect. The moment in which a system loses itsorganization corresponds to the limit of its tolerance to structural changes’ (available athttp://www.oikos.org/mariotti.htm, retrieved 15.01.09).36 For Maturana and Varela living organisms are structurally determined in the sense that they willadapt to their environment according to their structure at that precise moment. This is a dynamicprocess, as the structure changes continually (it is the organization that does not change). A cat will

organism could evolve (mentally and physically) if it is informationally closed.Katherine Hayles (1995), Joanna Zylinska (2009) and others have pointed out thecontradiction between autopoiesis and the evolution of the species in Maturana andVarela’s rethoric. In Making the Cut: The interplay of Narrative and System, or WhatSystems Theory Can’t See Katherine Hayles takes the example of the amoeba and thehuman. ‘Either an amoeba and a human have the same organization, which wouldmake them members of the same class37, in which case evolutionary lineagesdisappear because every living organism has the same organisation, or an amoeba anda human have different organisations, in which case organization –and henceautopoiesis- must not have been conserved somewhere’ (1995:92).

Strangely enough the Chilean authors were all in favor of evolution but an evolutionwith a twist, and this has probably created some confusion. Although they did notdispute the evolution of the species, they were against the classic Darwinianinterpretation of evolution as a process in which there is an environmental world towhich living beings adapt progressively, optimizing their use of it38. Influenced by asystemic view of mutual influence between systems (where one cannot be separatedfrom the other one) they could not accept the idea of a one way relation betweenspecies and their environment. What they proposed then is that ‘evolution occurs as aphenomenon of structural drift under phylogenic selection. In that phenomenon thereis no progress or optimization of the use of the environment, but only conservation ofadaptation and autopoiesis’ (1987:115). Yet again the formulation is not extremelyclear. Conservation and adaptation are dramatically different. Conservation –that hasbeen defended by Maturana and Varela, hence the ‘structural determinism’- impliesstability and closure, while adaptation –later developed by Varela- implies change andrelative opening. This could be seen as a contradiction. For Maturana and Varelaevolution (that they call Natural Drift) happens as a result of the continuous“structural coupling”39 between the organism and the environment but it is not ruledby optimization, it is ruled by autopoiesis and conservation of organization. Thisformulation of evolution does not really answer Katherine Hayles critique: how canwe come from an amoeba if we need to conserve our organization? But what is showsis Maturana and Varela’s intent at focusing on the nature and consequences of theinteractions between living organism and their environment in a systemic way (ratherthan a causal one). For them the fundamental condition of the living organism is torelate to its environment, to be structurally coupled with it, to shape and be shaped byit.

respond to a brusque sound in a cattish way, while we will react in a human way. But the reaction canthan change in time, depending on the context, but also on the changes of structure that the livingorganism has endured (i.e. diminishing of hearing or traumatic car accident…).37 Remember that organization had been defined as ‘[t]hose relations that must exist among thecomponents of a system for it to be a member of a specific class’ (Maturana and Varela, 1987:47).38 Later biologist Stuart Kaufmann (1993) has bridged the two concepts describing self-organisation aspart of natural selection.39 Structural coupling happens ‘whenever there is a history of recurrent interactions leading to thestructural congruence between two, or more, systems’ (Maturana and Varela, 1987:75). In simplerwords, with structural coupling Maturana and Varela want to describe the mutual structural changesthat various autopoietic unities encounter while interacting with each other and with the environment ina recurrent way. The example of the shoe is quite fitting: the feet can be heart by the shoe but it willalso shape the shoe (if it is good leather!). The ‘recurrent interaction’ between the two will bond themin a structural coupling where they are both shapers and shaped.

I can see, in accordance with Hayles and Zylinska, that there might be some weakpoints in the way Maturana and Varela have formulated autopoiesis, but not being abiologist myself, I will refrain from taking a clear position. For me, even if those un-clarities were to be true I do not think that they should be seen as a scientificdemonstration of the invalidity of Maturana and Varela’s theories. Furthermore,Hayles and Zylinka critique the use of autopoieis as an abstration of the culturalrealm, while I am interested in the operational and mechanical process that itdescribes. For me the main points to be challenged and looked at are the following:

1- in their original formulation autopoiesis is described as a material activity anddoes not clearly imply cognitive abilities. This makes it difficult to understandwhere our adaptative (and cognitive) functions come from40, but also it doesnot allow us to use autopoiesis outside of the biological and physiologicalrealm.

2- The terms “structure”, “organisation” and “structural coupling” being quiteloosely defined by their authors, seem to say one thing but also its opposite.For the authors structural coupling is indicative of mutual change of theorganism and the environment and it signifies change while for KatherineHayles maintaining organisation is contrary to evolution and does not allowchange.

We will see later in this chapter how those contradictions could be partially avoidedby allowing a broader field of action to autopoietic functions and by clarifying thenotion of relation in ‘structure’ and ‘organization’. For now what I would like toretain is Maturana and Varela’s emphasis in the notion of relation. Our functioningrelies on a constant relationship and interaction with the environment (which includesother living and non living entities).

The world in which we live is the world that we build out of ourperceptions, and it is our structure that enables us to have theseperceptions. So, our world is the world that we have knowledge of. If thereality that we perceive depends on our structure — which is individual —there are as many realities as perceiving people. This explains why the so-called purely objective knowledge is impossible: the observer is not apartfrom the phenomena he or she observes. (Menotti, Humberto)41

Varela points out that “you cannot just see the object as independently being ‘outthere’. The object arises because of your activity, so, in fact, you and the object areco-emergent, co-arising” (1999:73). Joanna Macy, interpreting autopoiesis andcircularity through the lenses of General System Theory notices that it leads towards anotion of experience as “linking organism and environment in a continuous chain ofevents, from which we cannot, without arbitrariness, abstract an entity called‘organism’ and another called ’environment’” (1991:111). Why is the idea ofinteractivity as ‘co-emergent’ and ‘co-arising’ important in this research? Because ifaffects the way we see the observer.

40 In his latest book, Maturana now seems to see in “love” as the origin of our humanness. SeeMaturana, Humberto (2008) The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love, Imprint Academic.41 Available at http://www.oikos.org/mariotti.htm, retrieved 15.01.09.

One of the consequences of the Chilean school is that the observer is seen asconnected and active with, and within, its environment. An observer that shapes itsenvironment with the very act of perceiving it. Even if the environment exists withoutthe presence of the subject, it only takes a specific shape and meaning in conjunctionand through the action of the cognitive subject. This vision of perception is normallyreferred to as Constructivism42 and the late work of Varela moved this vision one stepfurther by introducing the notion of “enactive cognition”. As we will see in the nextsub-chapter enaction43 supposes an observer that is an active doer. For Varela,Thompson and Rosch the consequence of structural coupling, taken at the level ofcognitive beings, is that ‘sensory and motor processes, perception and action, arefundamentally inseparable in living cognition’ (1993:173). Perception becomes an‘embodied44 action’. The observer becomes an enactor.

Since the core hypothesis of this research is that digital interactive media could be anappropriate medium to document reality in an enactive way, rather than in arepresentative one, it is important to trace back the notion of enactive cognition andof interactivity. For me the question of this research then becomes: if we are enactorsin our daily life, if we are structurally active observers, then shall we explicitly useenaction to document our own reality? My argument is that documentary making –which is one possible mediated way to document reality- has been playing withenaction since the 1960’s but that new media, because it demands interactivity, is anideal medium to push enaction one step further. In the next sub-chapter the meaningof enaction will be analysed further so that in the next chapter it will be possible tosee how enaction has been used in linear documentary making and later how it couldbe used in digital interactive documentary making.

From the observer to the inter-actor / en-actor

If one accepts the constructivist discourse then the world is seen in terms of relationsrather than substance. “Personal identity appears as emergent and contingent, definingand defined by interactions with the surrounding medium” (Joanna Macy,1991:108).If, as Von Forster had underlined, “the environment contains no information; theenvironment is as it is” (1981:263); it is our relation with the environment that allowsemergence of meaning and shape. But what is this relation? What type of rapport dowe have with the environment? What sort of dynamic does it generate? Second Ordercyberneticians (such as Maturana, Varela, Von Foerster and Von Glaserfeld) tend toqualify this relation as autopoietic and of structural coupling, but this is because theyaim at describing biological life and evolution.

My personal agenda is not to explain evolution but to find what is the core conceptbehind second order cybernetic that makes it so actual and useful as a framework in

42 See note n.1 in this chapter for a definition of Constructivism. Maturana and Varela’s contribution toconstructivism is in their study of the phenomenology of perception.43 From Varela, Thompson and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind: “the enactive approach consists of twopoints: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge fromthe recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided” (1993:173).44 Embodied refers to the fact that experience comes from the fact of having a body and that thesensory and motor processes of this body depends on ‘biological, psychological and cultural contexts’(Varela Thompson and Rosch, 1993:173).

this research. I would argue that the implicit notion behind cybernetics’ view of ourrelation with our environment is interaction. Interaction, in second wave cybernetics,becomes the fundamental and necessary condition for being, learning and evolving -as it is linked to the concept of transformation and adaptability. Interactivity becomesthe key, the moment of exchange, the place of the feed-back, the essential elementthat gives shape, and meaning, to us and to the world as we know it. It becomes theessential requisite to create difference, and therefore meaning45.

This vision of perception via interaction seems to me particularly interesting becauseit offers a third route in between subjective idealism and the classical empiricism. Thefirst was seeing external phenomena as a projection of the mind, and the secondwould see the world as the cause of our perceptions. Here the constructivist notion ofperception and learning sees knower and known as causally interconnected, andtherefore not separated. Varela, Thompson and Roch have called this position the‘middle way’ (1993:172). In The Embodied Mind, they take perception of colour as acase study proposing Embodied Action as a middle way between realism andidealism. Colour, they say, “are not ‘out there’ independent of our perceptual andcognitive capacities (…) nor ‘in here’ independent of our surrounding biological andcultural world” (1993:172). Colours are the result of how we perceive something thatis in our environment. It is the result of our two entities meeting in the middle46, orco-emerging. Varela, Thompson and Roch propose the term enaction for this vision ofperception. The enactive approach consists in bypassing the idea of perception asrepresentation (perception is neither a recovery nor a projection) and to see it as anembodied action47. The perceiver needs some sort of sensimotor48 activity to en-actthe world. For example the frog and the human will not perceive the same world. Butsince sensimotor abilities are not only linked to physical capacities but also to acultural and psycological context, then the 6 years old kid and its parents will share aworld that feels different and each living beings will perceive uniquely depending ontheir structure, organisation but also life history and cultural context49.

The point of departure for the enactive approach is the study of how the perceivercan guide his actions in his local situation. Since this local situations constantlychange the result of the perceiver’s activity, the reference point for understanding

45 I refer here to contemporary cognitive scientists such as Andy Clark, Alva Noe, Kevin O’Regan,Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosh.46 By doing this they extend a tradition of thought that can be linked to Phenomenology. Philosopherhad already positioned the organism as both initiating and shaping the environment. In The Structure ofBehaviour Merleau-Ponty claims that “the properties of the object and the intentions of the subject…are not only intermingled; they also constitute a new whole” (1963:13).47 By embodied Varela, Thompson and Rosch mean that “cognition depends upon the kinds ofexperience that come from having a body with various sensimotor capacities” (1993:173). The bodythat they are speaking of is not only made of flesh but is also embedded in a biological, psychologicaland cultural context.By action they mean to emphasize that ‘perception and action are fundamentally inseparable in livedcognition’ (1993:173).48 Sensimotor is defined by Varela, Thompson and Rosch as ‘the way in which the nervous systemlinks sensory and motor surfaces’ (1993:173).49 Enactment and embodied perception that take into account cultural and psychological context areonly possible by adopting a “wide” understanding of the process of autopoiesis. As we have seenMaturana and Varela’s original definition did not leave space to a cultural understanding of the termbut, as we will see in the next sub-chapter, Varela’s late work, and Di Paolo’s interpretation of it seemto me to get out of the biological monopoly of the autopoietic process.

perception is no longer a pregiven, perceiver-independent world but rather thesensimotor structure of the perceiver. (Varela, Thompson and Roch, 1993: 173)

Perception and cognition become impossible without interaction with theenvironment50 they also acquire a situated connotation, in the sense that they areunique to a specific moment in time and to a specific context. So, if we accept thispostulate, then what happens to our observer?

If in the first wave cybernetic the observer had become noticed, but remained externalto what she was observing, with the second wave cybernetics she had become part ofthe system itself. Answering to Von Foerster’s call for the need of “a theory of theobserver” (1982: 258) cybernetic thinking has developed, from the 1960’s till the1980’s, in several directions. Influenced by General Systems Theory interest ininterconnected systems, this evolution was trying to encapsulate the micro level of theobserver (her inner mechanisms via cognitive science and psychology) and her macrolevel (social and media mechanism via social sciences). Maturana’s structuralcoupling had evolved in enactive cognition via the work of Varela, Thompson andRoch to evolve again in Extended Mind with Clark and Chalmers51 and to bequestioned more recently by Di Paolo. One of the consequences of cybernetic’s inputin cognitive science is therefore the view of the observer as what I would call an en-actor. To observe is not to receive an external reality (Passive Perception52), but to en-act (Active Perception53) with the environment. This is an important evolution as itsees knowledge and cognition as the result of interaction but also as a flux in constantchange. In this logic “it becomes difficult to claim and impossible to prove ultimatetruth. For knowing is not only relative to the perspective of the knower, butconditioned by its past and present experiencing, and coloured by the gestalts andconstructs he imposes on perceptual data” (Macy, 1991:128). The observer has gainedan agency (the possibility to be different from the others) but also a responsibility (theconsequences of the use of this agency)54.

50 It has been argued that someone that could not move because of physical problems from birth wouldtherefore not be able to have an embodied perception, which would seem quite absurd. Varela,Thompson and Rosch’s answer to this critique is that (1) motion can be experienced via props –i.e.being pushed around in a wheelchair (2) even a paralyzed person has some sensory capacities. Theexperience of the world of such a person will entirely depend on her functioning sensory capacities.Her vision of the world will not be better or worst than the one of someone that has more mobility, itwill just be different.51 Enaction and embodied action have then been used by Clark and Chalmers to formulate the idea ofthe Extended Mind. In theirs 1998’s article The Extended Mind they claim that “beliefs can beconstituted partly by features of the environment” (1998:3). Taking the example of Otto, a man thatsuffers from Alzheimer’s disease, and that writes everything into his notebook, Clark and Chalmersclaim that the notebook becomes an extension of Otto’s mind and that his cognitive abilities are theresult of both his biological organism and his external resources (the notebook).52 Without going into the detailed history of Philosophical Realism (of which one of the most renownednames is Descartes) it suffice to say that Passive Perception generally sees perception happening withthe following sequence of events: surrounding input (senses) processing (brain) output (re-action).53 In opposition with Passive Perception, Active Perception sees a dynamic relation between sensingorganism and environment. The perceptive act is seen as a dynamic relationship between "description"(in the brain) senses surrounding. Major exponents of Active Perception are James Gibson,Richard L. Gregory, Maturana and Varela.54 In An Exposition of Constructivism: Why Some Like it Radical, Von Glasersfeld insists: ‘If the viewis adopted that “knowledge” is the conceptual means to make sense of experience, rather than a“representation” of something that is supposed to lie beyond it, this shift of perspective brings with it

Also, reality then becomes multiple, since there is no absolute truth but just singlecoherent point of views. Why is this relevant for documentary making? Because itrules out the possibility of representing reality and it invites the documentary maker toconsider points of views and plurality rather than objectivity as a key to documentreality.

The next chapter will investigate how a notion of interactivity as enactment has beenused in linear documentary filming. If the observer sees herself as storing in his tapes,or film rolls, a reality ‘out there’ then documentary making can claim to be objective,or at least observational, but if the observer becomes an enactor, then what happens todocumentary form? What type of interaction is possible while filming? How is thedocumentary affected by this shift in the role of the observer?

But before moving to documentary making an in-depth look at cybernetics blind spotsis necessary. As I said earlier there are several criticisms to autopoiesis that canobfuscate the “wide” view of constructivism that I would like to use in this research.My intent here is not to “defend” cybernetics, but to test its limits. If enactiveperception has, as any theory, its blind spots I need to assess if those are areas ofdebate or just “proofs” of theoretical invalidity. After all if I want to use cyberneticconcepts to do cultural analysis I need to assess the limits of such concepts andwhether their paradoxes disqualify the theory itself. Paradoxes, as Niklas Luhmannnotices in The Paradoxy of Observing Systems, are very interesting because theyallow us to see the limit of a logic. It is when a logic, or rhetoric, becomes paradoxalthat we can de-frame the frames of its discourse.

Blind spots and paradoxes in autopoiesis

The cybernetic notion of a system being related with other systems, and with itsenvironment, through feed-back mechanisms that would normally tend to homeostasis(stability) has clearly been very influential in the last sixty years. The nature of thoserelations though, is somehow unclear. In mathematics and physics negative feed-backwould stabilise the living, or mechanic, system while positive feed-back wouldnormally deregulate it and push it to a new state, or to destruction. In biology, wehave seen, the living metabolism has been seen by Maturana and Varela as creatinglife by creating itself, and then maintaining such life by constantly self-creating itselfvia an autopoietic process. Autopoiesis is therefore an adaptation of the concept ofcybernetic reflexivity and circular causality to the biological realm, but with a newgoal: maintaining life.

This first step (the passage from a goal of physical stability to a goal of stability inlife) is for me the first blind spot of second wave cybernetics: what should pushmatter and energy to a new state of ‘life’? Needless to say that there is no definitiveanswer to such question, but this should not disregard autopoiesis as a theory because

an important corollary: the concepts and relations in terms of which we perceive and conceive theexperiential world we live in are necessarily generated by ourselves. In this sense it is we who areresponsible for the world we are experiencing’ (1990:27).

its aim could be just to define life, and life mechanisms, without needing to establishits reasons. Although reflexivity and homeostasis were fundamental to inspire andcoin the notion of autopoieis, Maturana and Varela actually ended up disregardingsuch concepts in the sense that homeostasis, as a process aiming at stability with theexternal world, ceases to be the aim of the living organism. The new aim isconserving organization and autopoiesis. In her in depth critique of Maturana andVarela’s work, Katherine Hayles explains how Maturana and Varela were concernedwith how living organisms keep stability and they got inspired by the cybernetic ideaof systems achieving homeostasis (stability) using negative feed-back betweenthemselves and their environment. But Maturana and Varela wanted to understandhow stability of the organization is kept in a species and therefore they twisted theprocess of feed-back (that had homeostasis as its aim) and adapted it to the process ofautopoiesis (with a new goal: maintaining autopoiesis, hence maintainingorganization). In other words what they have done is to turn the external process ofhomeostasis to an internal process of autopoiesis leaving out reflexivity and circularcausality. Also, in order to do so they had to invent this notion of “organizationalclosure” of the living organism that has later proven to be extremely problematic.

The two main consequences of Maturana and Varela’s structural determinism andorganizational closure are:

1- once there is no informational feed-back between the organism and itsenvironment, and the organism is busy keeping itself stable in what it is at agiven time, then it is difficult to understand how the organism can change inany possible way: how can it move from simple (cell) to complex (organism),how can a whole species evolve, and actually how can any learning everhappen or any life decision ever be taken… This seems to shatter the wholeautopoietic concept since, as we believe, cells do move live in complexorganisms (Varela, 2002), evolution can be seen as the passage from anamoeba form to a human one (Hayles, 1995), knowledge does grows andchanges at any stage of out life (Piaget, 1955) and decisions are taken, even ifthey are radical and put the organism in peril (Zylinska, 2009).

2- structural determinism also seems to limit us to a very black and white life.Cognitive scientist Di Paolo gives a very poignant example: ‘according to theconservation (of autopoiesis) perspective, balancing at the edge of a cliff is aperfectly viable behaviour, so is falling over the edge – both are interactionsthat conserve autopoiesis. It is only crashing against the ground that is bad forthe organism’ (2005:9). Effectively nor autopoiesis nor structural couplingwith the environment, as they are formulated by Maturana and Varela, canexplain us why a normally constituted human being would normally not jumpof a cliff. There seem to be a lot of grey areas between being alive or dead thatare not explicable by autopoiesis as it was originally formulated…

One could argue that the insistence of Maturana and Varela on the concept ofconservation of organization was a little short sighted (it is actually interesting tonotice that Maturana has always had a very poor vision). I would tend to say that theneed of logical coherence in what wanted to be a scientific theory maybe overtooktheir narrative, and this had an effect on their own thinking. But one also has to putthings in context: Maturana and Varela were originally simply interested in the

biological implications of their theories and only later had to deal with thepsychological, social and political consequences of autopoiesis, for which the theorywas not built nor prepared. Varela himself, in his later work has tried to apart fromMaturana’s determinist view of life and has introduced concepts of ‘sense-making’,‘enactment’ and ‘middle way’ (Varela,1991, 1997, 2002). With those he was trying todepict a vision of the organism as totally bonded with its environment to the point thatany change in one would generate a change in the other one.

Di Paolo, a cognitive scientist, acknowledges the limits of autopoieisis originalformulation but does not want to through the baby with his water. For him autopiesisis indispensable to understand the state of metabolism – when from the flux of matterand energy emerges a level of physical organisation with its boundaries. Hereautopoiesis explains how organisation and self-making are key to create robusteness(not why but how). But autopoiesis fails in describing the process of evolution as forDi Paolo evolution implies some way to distinguish between a better and a worstsituation. Also, without such a distinguishing abilities we would all fall from cliffsand be perfectly coherently autopoietic till our consciously unexpected death (anexample used by Di Paolo in his writing). ‘For Varela’s argument to work’, says DiPaolo, ‘while remaining compatible with the theory of autopoiesis there must be someadditional element, some particular way of realizing autopoiesis that admits of gradednotions such as lacks and breakdowns and articulates in detail how signification isgenerated’ (2005:9). This element is what he calls ‘adaptivity’55. Adaptivity goes onestep beyond simple physical organisation and implies a beginning of sense-making. Italso allows causal relation (if/then) and time (before/after) that were ruled out byMaturana.

We find that sense-making in organisms needs both autopoiesis andadaptivity.Autopoiesis provides a self-distinct physical system that can be thecentre of a perspective on the world, and a self-maintained, precariousnetwork of processes that generates an either-or normative condition.Adaptivity allows the system to appreciate its encounters with respect to thiscondition, its own death, in a graded and relational manner while it is stillalive. (Di Paolo, 2005:11)

For me adaptivity opens up autopoieis by limiting it. Autopoiesis is not anymore theonly strategic activity of the organism, it becomes one of the fundamental activities ofthe living organism, but it gains in scope. Paired with adaptivity it allows theorganism to adapt while physically and structurally changing. Autopoiesis cantherefore stay as a physical and material process, as Maturana and Varela hadoriginally imagined, because it is now paired with adaptivity. Together they createand accommodate a sense-making organism that may grow (physically, mentally,emotionally and culturally) into a complex cognitive been. Evolution becomespossible… and mental evolution too. Learning becomes adapting to ever changingsituations while also changing physically. Choice becomes possible, or at least notimpossible, as a sense-making organism must have a way to evaluate and then

55 Di Paolo acknowledges that adaptivity seems to be implicit in Varela’s later work, but that it is neverformulated explicitly.

choose56. Also culture57 is not left out anymore from autopoiesis. If the livingorganism adapts to the environment by changing its behaviour, its attitude and itsmetabolism, it would seem common sense that this adaptation follows the capacities(or affordances) of the living organism itself. A single cell will react differently than awhole complex cognitive organism. A complex cognitive being will adapt to anenvironment that is perceived by her in a complex way: gifted with a culturalsituatedness, a psychological background and an emotional impact.

Although his formulation was somehow restrictive, Varela had never really intendedto lock life in a purely materialistic dimension. His own Buddhist beliefs actuallywere pushing him to have a holistic view of life and cognition where not only culture,but also emotions, had their place. In Steps to a Science of Inter-being, Varela statesthat emotions are intrinsically cognitive although they precede reason and wording.‘Cognition is enactively emergent’ (1999:76): at any instant our local components(the smallest systems within the system that is my body –so for example the neuronsthat can be influenced by emotions) give rise to an emergent mind (something that isstill an entity – whatever it is that it means to be me and not someone else), and viceversa. Emotions are part of our lived body (1999:81) and as such are at the very baseof our cognition.

Di Paolo’s insistence on adaptivity as parallel to autopoiesis seems therefore to solve,or at least limit, most of the critiques that emerged from an excessively closed view ofautopoiesis. This being said, it is the very definition of structure and organization thatseem to me to create confusion. Ultimately by looking for the answer of ‘what is itthat makes us alive’ they used, but did not answer, the question ‘what is it that makesus what we are’. By adding adaptativity to autopoiesis, as does Di Paolo, autopoiesiscan be seen more as a logic than as a dogma. Organization is not anymore animmutable entity and the question becomes ‘how far can we change and still beourselves’? Since this question is now time specific its answer will depend on its timescope. If we are speaking of millions of years, than the notion of change is on anevolutionary level, and the notion of ‘being ourselves’ is not about the similaritiesbetween amoebas and human beings but about belonging to a common history. If weare speaking of decades of years, than change is on a personal level. How can I be thesame person than that little baby that I see in a photo? Change has obviously occurred,but at what level? Probably all levels, psychical, emotional, cultural etc… Even if myDNA has not changed I am still, as a whole, a different person now than that baby,and I am changing any second. In fact change becomes not the antithesis ofautopoiesis but its corollary. The individual becomes a fluid entity (Varela, 1999)coming from the emergence of a body in a social and physical context. Her mind isnot separate but co-emergent with the world and the body around her. Her emotionsare the felt effects of an organic/lived body.

56 If it is true that as it stands now autopoiesis does not provide any insight to how one makes choices,it is also true that by introducing adaptivity the two concepts are not in opposition any more. Moreresearch in the mechanisms of choice are to be hoped.57 In A different History of Bioethics: the Cybernetic Connection, Zylinska sees culture as one ofcybernetics’ blind spots. For her cybernetic’s systemic approach seems to forget that ‘ideas and entitiessuch as ‘organism’, ‘gene’, ‘woman’, ‘animal’, and ‘machine’ always bear cultural inscriptions’(2009:59). Cybernetic discourse, she says, presents values as inherent or natural and forgets theirintrinsic fluctuations and situatedness.

If this reading of autopoiesis and embodied perception is quite radical (in the sensethat it only represents the school of enactive cognition, and not the cyberneticianschool in general) it is this reading that I would like to bring forward and to use whileanalysing documentary making in the next chapter. For me this reading of autopoiesisand cognition leads to a notion of life as full of alternatives, rather than to apredetermined compulsory pattern (that seemed to be the output of structuraldeterminism). Pshycologist Von Glasersfeld has defended constructivism by sayingthat it ‘does not suggest that we can construct anything we like, but it does claim thatwithin the constraints that limit our construction there is room for an infinity ofalternatives’ (1990:29). In the same way we all have two eyes and one mouth but noone face is the same as the next one, I see infinity of variations in what ourunderstanding of reality can be, even when we share the same language and a culturalcommon understanding of things.

One of the revolutionary aspects of the constructivist approach tocommunication, then, is that it drastically changes the concept of“understanding”.There can no longer be the claim that the meanings of words must be shared bythe users of a language because these meanings are derived from fixed, externalentities. Instead, here once more, there is at best a relation of fit. That is to say,we tend to conclude that what we have said is understood by the listener if theway he or she reacts to our utterance seems compatible with our expectations.But as we discover only too often, what seemed understanding at first,disintegrates when a seemingly unproblematic utterance leads to quiteunexpected reactions in a new situation.Understanding what other speakers mean by what they have said, therefore,cannot possibly be explained by the assumption that we have managed toreplicate in our heads the identical conceptual structures they intended to“express”. At best we may come to the conclusion that our interpretation of theirwords and sentences seems compatible with the model of their thinking andacting that we have built up in the course of our interactions with them. (VonGlasersfeld, 1988:89)

If we accept that autopoiesis, as any theory, has its limits and its own intrinsicnarrative then I believe we can still take it seriously and see it as fitting well with ageneric constructivist view of reality. The link between perception, learning,observing and situated reality that it permits makes it ideal for the study of thedocumentary form. Its range of relationships with the environment – from close,partially closed, partially opened to fully open- makes scope for a complexity ofprocesses usable in interactive documentary critique. The end of autopoiesis, thedeath of the living organism, either caused by DNA principles, by fatal encounters orby lost of function can be used to question the sometimes ephemeral life of interactivedocumentaries, especially the situated and experiential ones58.

If Maturana and Varela did commit any serious cybernetic error, or if there is anyparadox, it is in assuming that they could, as observers, observe the totality of thesystem they were into. How could they claim to understand the whole? For me the

58 I refer here to games/locative narratives such as Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, mentioned in Chapter 1,or to internet forum projects, such as Over the Hill, analysed in Chapter 3, that will inevitablydisappear once users will not be interested in contributing.

claim of “truth” in science, as in documentary, is a very dangerous claim to do - anddefinitively a non cybernetic one. There are explanations, but from there to claim thatthey are unique truths… On the other hand the effort to find a coherent explanation, aview of science, or view of reality, without claiming that it is the only possible one, isperfectly licit and actually typical of our human affordances or need to ‘relate to anexisting body of experience’ (Pask, 1968:76)… It is this whish to come to terms with,or to explain, that will lead us to the next chapter…

Summary

This chapter started with a brief history of Cybernetics. The aim was to see the role ofthe observer as the fundamental change between First and Second Order Cybernetics.While in First Order Cybernetics the observer (in this case the engineer or thescientist) is seen as independent and external to the observed system, in Second OrderCybernetics the observer is inseparable from the system observed. ‘This change ofviews explicitly focuses Second Order Cybernetics onto the explanation of cognitiveprocesses as determined by the agent-environment coupling dynamics’ (Bishop andNasuto, 2005:1311). The shift of the positioning of the observer has then been placedinto the larger context of Science history. A definition of the observer in scientificterms has helped to understand the origins, but also the pertinence, of the Cyberneticdebate around the observer.

One of the possible consequences of seeing any entity (a complex entity such as anobserver or a simple entity such as a cell) as part of a larger whole – and in ‘agent-environment coupling dynamics’ – has been the concept of autopoiesis. Firstformulated by biologists Maturana and Varela autopoiesis has become a key conceptof Second Order Cybernetics by defining the living organism as self-organized,autonomous and in constant relation (structural coupling) with its environment.Abstracting ‘life’ from the usual characteristics of “birth”, “death” and “mode ofreproduction” was perceived as liberating and revolutionary in a cultural context ofthe late 1970’s/ 980’s. This maybe explains why autopoiesis was rapidly extrapolatedfrom the biological context and used in philosophy (Deleuze, Guattari), socialsciences (Luhmann), psychology (Bruner) and cognitive science (Thompson, Rosch,Clark and Noe). This extrapolation does not go without problems. As noticed byHayles (1995) and Zylinska (2009) the original formulation of autopoietic organismas ‘organizationally closed’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980) does not seem toaccommodate the concept of change, or evolution. If autopoiesis has an internalcontradiction, then one could doubt the validity of the theory – and disregard it asusable in social and cultural contexts. Some authors, such as Deleuze, Guattari andLuhmann, have used autopoietic concepts without stopping at autopoietic closure.They have used Maturana and Varela’s ideas as inspirations for philosophical andsocial discourses. For my count, I have seen in philosopher and cognitive scientist DiPaolo a possible middle way. By adding the notion of adaptability to autopoiesis DiPaolo opens the living system to change – through the act of mutual interaction withits environment – and gets out of the autopoietic closure’s impasse.

In Autopoiesis and Cognition Maturana and Varela put particular emphasis on theconcept of “interaction”. ‘It is the circularity of its organization that makes a livingsystem a unit of interactions, and it is this circularity that it must maintain in order to

remain a living system and to retain its identity thorough different interactions’ (1980,my italics). If we step from simple to complex organisms, and we see humans asautopoietic entities with self-making, self-organizing and adaptive capacities, wesuddenly see how key the circular relation with our environment (structural coupling)becomes, since it is this relation that shapes us in our becoming. Now, our interactionwith our environment (being it cultural, physical or social) passes though our act ofperception. Perception has been defined as embodied and enacted by Varela,Thompson and Rosch (both of those concepts have been defined in this chapter). Bydoing so they put the emphasis on a dialectic vision of perception that supposes thatour materiality (embodied sensory and motor processes) our psychology and ourcultural identity are in constant inter-action between themselves. Inter-activity istherefore seen as our fundamental way of being, our way of relating and existingthrough doing.

My argument is that enactment is not only an important concept in cognitive science.It is the consequence of a vision of autopoiesis as partially opened, becauseadaptative, where relationship between the system and the environment allows changeon both sides, through positive feed-back loops. The active role of the individual inshaping herself and her reality touches everything: the role of the observer, theconcept of communication, the vision of culture, the perception of subjectivity…everything, including documentary making. I will use this notion of enactment andpositive feed-backs in the next chapter by investigating how a notion of enactiveinteractivity has been used in linear documentaries. If the observer sees herself asstoring in her tapes, or film rolls, a reality ‘out there’ then documentary making canclaim to be objective, or at least observational, but if the observer becomes an enactor,then what happens to documentary form? What type of interactions are possible whilefilming? How is the documentary affected by this shift in the role of the observer?

I will argue that a tendency to give more agency to the filmmaker has been gradual indocumentary history, but that the advent of interactive media gives more than ever thepossibility to the filmmaker to step out from her role of observer and to become anenactor, and/or a co-creator. Feed-back loops, and structural coupling will be seen asways to interact with reality while filming, and self-organisation and partially openautopoiesis as ways to participate in content generation in digital networkedinteractive documentaries. By doing so viewers (users, participants) and observers(filmmakers, authors) shift roles. They themselves become enactors, they are in-relation with the documentary maker or with the interactive documentary. They alsochange the environment - which in this case is the interactive documentary itself. Thechance to be grasped, for me, in interactive documentary is to move out from theobserver-observed relationship -afforded by a linear medium such as film or video-and to experiment with an enactor to enactor relationship – afforded by aparticipative and multidimensional medium such as the digital networked medium.