DIALOGICS, CYBERNETICS & POST-HUMANIST COMMUNICATION THEROY

Leonard C. Hawes

University of Utah

DIALOGICS, CYBERNETICS & POST-HUMANIST COMMUNICATION THEORY

Abstract

This essay theorizes dialogic communication as discursive systems comprising cybernetic minds of
autonomous bodies, each with partial consciousness. Autonomous bodies are organisms and
machines that communicate (i.e., produce and record) in the spaces between subjectivity and
consciousness. Cybernetic minds are the structured couplings, the creative circles, the circuitries
and feedback loops, that animate the articulated bodies of cybernetic minds. The production of
subjectivity situates agency; partial consciousness is the articulation of this situated agency with
embodied experience. Insofar as consciousness is both embodied and partial, and insofar as
subjectivity is both fluid and situational, autonomous mediate consciousness and subjectivity.
Identities, both claimed and assigned, are names for subjects. As bodies communicate from the
spaces between subjectivity and consciousness, rather than from the positions of objectivity and
truth, the possibility of dialogue emerges, a possibility of communication that moves beyond the
dialectics of representation and reference to the dialogics of reflexivity and implicativity. These
shifts in generic modes of communication are nonlinear, impermanent and unstable, and constitute a
qualitative shift from a materialist to a cybernetic epistemology. Cybernetic mind, then, manifests as
the production of subjectivities through the circuitries of self-reflexive partial consciousness
-immanent communicative praxis.

DIALOGICS, CYBERNETICS & POST-HUMANIST COMMUNICATION THEORY

From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,
about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about
the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another
perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not
afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities
and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once
because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point.

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 154

Obviously, nothing is a foregone conclusion -- and nothing that could be done in this domain could
ever substitute for innovative social practices. The only point I am making is that, unlike other
revolutions of subjective emancipation -- Spartacus and other slave rebellions, peasant revolts
during the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and so on -individual and
social practices for the selfvalorization and self-organization of subjectivity are now within our
reach and, perhaps for the first time in history, have the potential to lead to something more
enduring than mad and ephemeral spontaneous outpourings -- in other words, to lead to a
fundamental repositioning of human beings in relation to both their machinic and natural
environments (which, at any rate, now tend to coincide).

Felix Guattari, Incorporations, 22

Overview

Communication theory often leaves unexamined the crucial distinctions between dialectics and
dialogics as speech genres -- as modes of conscious awareness, material practices and informational
distinctions. To address this confusion, I review several leading positions in what is coming to be
known as post-humanist theory. The opening move articulates cybernetic theory, critical theory,
dialogism and cyborgology. One of the leading criticisms of cybernetics and cognitive science has
been its neglect of power. This can be traced back to Bateson's split with Haley with regard to
whether power is a necessary element in second-order cybernetic theorizing, particularly in relation
to family systems and brief therapy. Given the work of Luhmann on self-referential systems, as well
as some of the post-humanist theorizing, I explore several ways of incorporating issues of both
power and control by re-reading selected works of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari.
Specifically, how is it possible to theorize living and social systems so as to embrace both, as well
as theorizing vulnerability and growth, without positing restrictively narrow psychologized
humans? I suggest in this essay that by distinguishing between dialectics and dialogics as modes of
communication -- what Bakhtin calls speech genres -- and by articulating cyborgology with second-
order cybernetics and cognitive science, it's possible to begin developing a post-humanist theory of
communication that extends the reach and depth of our understanding of dialogue. To this end, I
sketch a theory of communication that makes conceptual and practical sense of some of the
distinctive features of dialectics and dialogics as distinguishable modes of communication. It is a
critical, theoretical and practical inquiry into how dialectically organized communication can
reproduce itself dialogically. Its generative question: Is it possible -- and if so, how -- to facilitate
the genetic reproduction of communication from one way of talking and thinking -- one speech
genre -- to another? In daily conversations, differences between dialectics and dialogics are
negotiated moment to moment. These speech genres produce themselves as different ways of
talking, thinking, writing and listening; they allow for experience to transform itself and mean
differently; and they are self-produced conversationally. The communicative experience of moving
from dialectics to dialogics is characterized variously, at times in transformational terms, other
times as insight, tragedy, revelation, alignment and chaos. In this essay, I rely on second-order
cybernetics and dialogism as conceptual resources for theorizing how dialectically produced speech
genres can reproduce dialogically, even if only temporarily. The praxiological question is how
multi-party conversations can shift from self-defensive, self-justificatory, argumentative, discourses
organized in terms of either/or logics, into self-reflexive, self-implicative, other-wise discourses
organized in terms of both/and logics. The piece of this larger project I attend to here is a theoretical
discussion of conversations as selfproducing dialogic systems.

I understand dialogue as a medium in and through which irresolvable tensions between intervention
and interpellation (i.e., when and if to enter into conversation, when and how to listen to being
called into it, and what to say upon entry) are negotiated in a wide variety of ways. This amounts to
thinking about conversation in terms of post-humanist, nonlinear, self-producing systems. If that's
granted, then what are the communicative practices that produce moments of possibility for
dialectical communication to reproduce itself as dialogical communication? What are some of the
conversational trajectories that lead away from the inevitabilities of either/or monologics of self-
justification and self-defense, toward the possibilities of both/and dialogics of self-reflexivity and
self-implication? If dialogue is thought to be radically inclusive, the practical interests are in
listening to and transcribing radically other voices of communication systems. My objective is to
find ways of including more living systems in social systems, to find different ways of with
particular configurations of differences. The epistemological and ontological consequences are as
exciting as they are controversial. I begin with a discussion of cybernetic epistemology and then
listen to some of the different post-humanist voices; the next step will be to think through some
theoretical definitions. Finally, I'll theorize social forces along Nietzschean, Foucauldian, Deleuze-
Guattarian lines.

Issues of Cybernetic Epistemology

Keeney (1983), in his discussion of cybernetic epistemology, traces cybernetics from

the Gnostic gospels through William Blake, Lewis Carroll and Samuel Butler.
Bateson (1972) dates it from 1946-47 and identifies it in the aggregate of ideas
referred to as cybernetics, communication theory, information theory, and systems
theory; he credits Bertalanffy, Wiener, von Neumann, Shannon and Craik with these
separate developments working in different intellectual centers during World War 11.
Papert (1965) marks the publication, in 1943, of Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow's
paper on the concept of "purpose," and McCulloch and Pitts' paper, "A Logical
Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," as the birth of explicit
cybernetics (p. xv). Heims (1977) later characterized this epistemological shift by
reference back to these early essays: "Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow had, in
effect, announced a new paradigm in science, according to which one seeks an
overarching theory to include machines and organisms; the theory would clearly
involve the ideas of information, control and feedback. (p. 143)

What has marked cybernetic theory and research as epistemologically separate and distinct from
materialist epistemologies is, in Papert's words, the "recognition that the laws governing the
embodiment of mind should be sought among the laws governing information rather than energy or
matter" (p. xvi). Currently, this theorizing of machines and organisms -- under the sign of
cyborgology -- has taken on critical-theorical as well as political-economic accents. This has created
a theoretical impasse around the issues of power and control. Traditionally, cybernetics dissolved
the materialist concetpion of power by redrawing the paradigm at the level of pattern, form,
structure and organization instead of remaining at the epistemological level of events, agents, cause
and effect. This dilemma has been revived and has become part of a larger post-humanist debate,
particularly in Haraway's work on the cyborg myth, and in Deleuze and Guattari's work on
capitalism and schizophrenia. I want to review several pivotal issues that inform this post-humanist
turn in order to theorize communication within that debate and thereby reframe the problematics of
power and control. I do this by invoking Bateson, Bakhtin, Lhumann, Nietzsche, Foucault, and
Deleuze and Guattari as cybernetic narratives that suggest a radically different communication
praxis -- a praxis of dialogics grounded in a cybernetic epistemology.

Voices of Post-Humanism

In the first volume of a two volume issue of Cultural Critique, on the politics of systems and
environments, Cary Wolfe (1995) characterizes his project as "the articulation of a post-humanist
theoretical framework for a politics and ethics not grounded in the Enlightenment ideal of 'Man'. "
He credits Donna Haraway with arguing most convincingly that "our current moment is
irredeemably post-humanist because of the boundary breakdowns between animal and human,
organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical" (p.36).

Bruno Latour (1993) acknowledges that post-humanist theory cannot proceed simply by
historicizing the human. Instead, he argues, "we first have to relocate the human, to which
humanism does not render sufficient justice" (p. 136). And in this project of relocation, historical
and dialectical means of situating the human are not enough." (p. 34) I am proposing here to think
through some of the dialogical practices of re-locating and resituating the human that augment
extant historical and dialectical methods. I do that by theorizing dialogue in post-humanist terms.
Dialogic practices are discursive ways of relocating humans from the center, not to the margins, but
to a place among radically different others. From a cybernetic perspective, dialogical
communication is a recursive network rather than a layered pyramid. Dialogue has the potential to
relocate agency, reconfigure experience, and refocus point of view, making conditions possible for
cybernetic minds to both re-structure and re-organize themselves.

Insofar as second-order cybernetics implicates the observer in the observed, all description is self-
referential discourse. A materialist epistemology of objectivity presupposes an obeserver to be
separate and independent of the observed; a cybernetic epistemology of self-implication,
alternatively, presupposes that "objectivity" is erroneous and illusory. Instead of objectivity and
subjectivity, the question becomes one of ethics, a question that leads to examining the ways in
which any observer is implicated in the act of observing. In short, this epistemological shift
constitutes a change from a preoccupation with control and objectivity to a decidedly pariticipatory,
ethical perspective. It constitutes a paradigmatic change from objectivity to responsibility. Wolfe
highlights its political tenor:

"Even within the Marxist tradition, a number of theorists have recognized that
Marxism's liberation of "the total life of the individual" (to borrow Marx's pahrase
from The German Ideology) is purchased at the expense of its brutal objectification
of nature and the non human -- a dynamic deeply symptomatic, in turn, of its
Enlightenment inheritance that imagines that man-the-producer liberates himself
insofar as he fully exploits and raises himself above that object and resource called
'nature'. Indeed, the imperative of post-humanist critique may be seen from this
vantage -- and is seen by thinkers like Haraway -- as of a piece with larger
liberationist political projects that have historically had to battle against the stratetgic
deployment of humanist discourse against other human beings for the purposes of
oppression" (p.36).

Insofar as "the political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once. . .," I hear it also as a call
for understanding communication across seemingly incomprehensible differences, both
organizational and structural. How is it possible to initiate communication that creates possibilities
for listening and inquiring? How is is possible to practice dialogue that involves autonomous
bodies, organizationally closed yet structurally open discourses, radically differentiated
interlocutors whose conscious awareness is partial and whose subjectivity is fluid? Competing
interests and positions make volatile differences potentially lethal. Consequently, communication, to
be dialogical, must incorporate both differences within boundaries as well as differences across
boundaries. If the post-humanist imperative is "to see from both perspectives," then it surely means
to listen across perspectives, as well; to listen for as well as to radically different subjectivities. To
explore how the relations of recursive networks -- cybernetic minds -- can be lived, it's imperative
to move beyond liberal humanist constitutions and to rethink the possibilities of politics as both
dialogics and dialectics. Here is Wolfe on this point:

In light of the post-humanist imperative I have been invoking thus far, systems
theory has much to offer as a general epistemological system. Unlike feminist
philosophy of science, it does not cling to debilitating representationalist notions.
And unlike Enlightenment humanism in general, its formal descriptions of complex,
recursive, autopoietic systems are not grounded in the dichotomoy of human and
nonhuman. Indeed, in the post-humanist context I have sketched above, the signal
virtue of systems theory, as Dietrich Schwanitz puts it, is that it has "progressively
undermined the royal prerogative of the human subject to assume the exclusive and
privileged title of self-referentiality (in the sense of recursive knowledge about
knowledge)"(267) Hence, systems theory promises a much more powerful and
coherent way to describe the complex intermeshed network of relations between
systems and their specific environments of whatever type, be they human, animal,
 ecological, technological, or (as is increasingly the case) all of these.(p. 47)
(emphasis added)

Katherine Hayles (1995) argues for a narrative complement to the application of cybernetic
theorizing in the post-humanist debates:

Another way to organize this material, I suggest, is narrative. The co-existence of

narrative with system can be seen in Luhmann's account of the creation of a system,
for his account is, of course, itself a narrative. Its very presence suggests that systems
theory needs narrative as a suppplement, just as much, perhaps, as narrative needs at
least an implicit system to generate itself. Narrative reveals what systems theory
occludes; systems theory articulates what narrative struggles to see" (p.73).
(empahsis added)

Of course, much depends on which stories we tell, which ones we believe, if, indeed, we believe
any of them. Which of our stories actualize which of our realities? What does it mean to "know our
stories?" And who is the "we" and the "our" of these questions? What does self-reflexive, self-
implicative knowledge and practice entail?

Relocating human subjects amounts rewriting hegemony; it's a massive critical-theoretical

investment in (hoped for) transformation. And yet to relocate human subjects and subjectivity is to
undertake just such a project; it entails redrawing systems, redesigning them, making different
distinctions, creating other worlds for their designers/prisoners, paying attention differently, and
making different senses. I want to theorize social structures, cultural formations, and historical
processes through the self-conscious, self-referential, self-implicative experience of embodied
subjects, as well as to theorize experience through social structures and cultural formations. I want
to move from the bottom-up as well as from the top-down, from structures out to organizations as
well as from organizations in to structures. Such incorporations also require reintroducing agency
into our theoretical discussions. This entails theorizing communication as unevenly organized
cybernetic minds, driven by political instabilities of differences and identities, and organized -- at
least initially -- dialectically. The overarching questions I address ask about the conditions of
possibility for dialectically organized communication to become other-wise, to become dialogical.

Dialogue is possible to the extent that a communication system is capable of and willing -- is of a
mind -- to make distinctions, to interiorize and incorporate those distinctions, creating spaces for
subjects, fluid subjectivity and partial consciousness to be embodied. Dialogics produces the
subjective possibilities for interlocutors to be both self-reflexive and self-implicative. For this to
occur, however, dialogical communication must be closed organizationally yet open structurally. As
communicative boundaries are drawn and redrawn, subjects take on structural shapes from within
closed organizational forms. This autopoietic process allows for the possibility of both self-
reflexivity and self-implication. Oscillating between dialectical and dialogical speech genres
presupposes a wisdom gained from experience. It's a process of becoming other-wise, a mode of
mindfull/awareness.

Working Definitions

Autonomous Bodies. As a living system, a biological body is autonomous; its boundary is

unbroken, it's a system defined by organizational closure, even though its internal structure is open
to information and variability within the parameters of its extemal organizational closure. This
means that a body is an organizationally closed system whose nervous system is closed, and at the
same time it is structurally open to perturbations by conditions that impact it from outside. Keeney
characterizes Maturana and Varela's research on percpetion and the nervous system as follows:
 ... perception is not determined by an outside environment, but is a product of the
internal nervous system. Although external events can trigger the whole nervous
system to act, the products of perception are internally generated. (emphasis added)

Maturana and Varela describe their insight similarly:

One had to close off the nervous system to account for its operation and . . .
perception should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality, but rather as the
specification of one, because no distinction was possible between perception and
hallucination in the operation of the nervous system as a closed network. (p.xv)
(emphasis added)

They develop an analogy that's worth quoting here in its entirety:

Imagine a person who has always lived in a submarine. He has never left it and has
been trained how to handle it. Now, we are standing on the shore and see the
submarine gracefully surfacing. We then get on the radio and tell the navigator
inside: "Congratulations! You avoided the reefs and surfaced beautifully. You really
know how to handle a submarine." The navigator in the submarine, however, is
perplexed: "What's this about reefs and surfacing? All I did was push some levers
and turn knobs and make certain relationships between indicators as I operated the
levers and knobs. It was all done in a prescribed sequence which I'm used to. I didn't
do any special maneuver, and on top of that, you talk to me about a submarine. You
must be kidding!"

All that exists for the man inside the submarine are indicator readings, their
transitions, and ways of obtaining specific relations between them. It is only for us
on the outside, who see how relations change between the submarine and its
environment, that the submarine's behavior exists and that it appears more or less
adequate according to the consequences involved. If we are to maintain logical
accounting, we must not confuse the operation of the submarine itself and its
dynamics of different states with its movements and changing positions in the
environment. The dynamics of the submarine's different states, with its navigator
who does not know the outside world, never occurs in an operation with
representations of the world that the outside observer sees: it involves neither
"beaches" nor "reefs" nor "surface" but only correlations between indicators within
certain limits. Entities such as beaches, reefs, or surfaces are valid only for an
outside observer, not for the submarine or for the navigator who functions as a
component of it.' (emphasis added)

Alternatively stated, the bodies of objects, machines and organisms are radically other to and for
each other. I cannot be both inside and outside the submarine simultaneously; you operate your
body from your inside (i.e., my outside) and I observe your body from my inside (i.e., your
outisde). Animals, machines, organic and inorganic objects are the more obvious examples of
radical others. My claim here is that communication, rather than presupposing something like
"shared understanding" or "common ground" or "consensus," actually must construct
correspondences across the boundaries that separate the autonomous bodies radically other to one
another.

Bakhtin's thinking on creative understanding is crucial at this point of the discussion. He argues that
a necessary part of the process of understanding is the possibility of seeing the world through the
eyes of an other; but to stop at that point would result only in duplication and repetition and would
add nothing new or creative.
 In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to
be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding -- in time, in space,
in culture. . . . Our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people,
because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. (p.7)
(emphasis added)

This is the same point Maturana and Varela are making with their submarine analogy. The result is
not some merging or blending; each body remains an open and differentiated totality, although both
are changed and the change is indirect -- mediated change.

Embodied Experience & Situated Subjectivities. The autonomous bodies of living systems,
however, are not isolated bodies, either from one another or from the spaces separating them. The
body, as Deleuze thinks it, is an intersectional surface between internal biological forces and
external social forces. It is not as if the external environment has no impact on the centrality of
autonomous nervous systems. Rather, the environment perturbs these autonomous bodies, and such
perturbations affect the entire autonomous nervous system, but not directly. Once perturbed, a
central nervous system structurally influences itself self-referentially in ways that can't be predicted
on the basis of the environmental perturbation alone. For examples, consider bodies that have been
categorized as catatonic, schizophrenic, autistic, psychotic and hallucinogenic. Bodies are living
systems whose central nervous systems are internally structured in ways that can't be read directly
from the outside, from making various kinds of contact with the surface boundaries of those bodies.
Correspondences and correlations, assumptively based, are the communicative relations of
dialogism.

What I'm calling situated subjectivites, Bakhtin refers to as specular subjects, by which he means a
self derived from other. The situated subjectivity of communication is a specular subject, a self that
is radically other-wise. Bakhtin's contention is that speakers configure their utterances according to
the object of discourse -- what they're talking about -- and their immediate addressee -- whom they
are speaking to -- as well as to an image by means of which they model their belief that they will be
understood. He contends that such a belief is the a priori of all speech:

The author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher
superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just and responsive understanding is
presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time. (p.xviii)

Bakhtin dissolves binary oppositions into relations whose structures are tertiary; the utterance, then,
is a drama in which these three characters participate -- a speaker, an addressee, and a
superaddressee.

Utterances in conversation are bounded by changes in speakers. For Bakhtin, an utterance is the
simultaneity of what is actually said and what is assumed but unspoken.

. . . the individual and subjective are both grounded . . . by the social and objective.
What I know, see, want, love, recognize, and so on, cannot be assumed. Only what
all of us speakers know, see, love, recognize -- only those points on which we are all
united can become the assumed part of an utterance. . . . Assumed value judgements
are therefore not indivudal emotions but regular and essential social acts. Individual
emotions can come into play only as overtones accompanying the basic tone of
social evalutaion. "I" can realize itself verbally only on the basis of "we." These
assumed values go so deep that they are virtually flesh of the flesh of utterances.
They constitute an assumptive world whose contours represent the outside limit of
reality for those within its sphere. When a value judgement ceases to be automatic,
when it needs to be explained or rationalized, its basis in the society has already
begun to crumble." (p.207)"(emphasis added).
Unlike sentences, which are the funadmaental units of language, utterances can be as brief as a
barely audible vocalization and as fleeting as a glance, or as sustained as a novel. What sets off one
utterance from another is change in the embodied voice of the speaker. Selves, then, are
assemblages of voices of others, material collection nodes or loci for inscribing and recording
others' voices and their utterances. Bakhtin insists that utterances are not stand-alone entities; they
are reciprocally implicated and mutually reflect one another, which are the determinations of their
character.

Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of

the given sphere (understand "response" here in its broadest sense.) Each utterance
refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on others, presupposes them to be known
and somehow takes them into account.(p.91)

If and when an utterance is "removed" from its prior context -- the context in which it was utterred
by an other -- and is reported (i.e., quoted, paraphrased, or otherwise reproduced) in some
intonational pattern and in accord with a current speaker's speech plan, it becomes part of an other
context, part of an other utterance. Very similar appropriational work -- similar to this
reporter/reported speech work of utterances -- takes place with the observer/observed distinction in
second-order cybernetics.

As such, then, utterances are specifically positioned within a domain and a

movement of conversational discourse. The positioning of each utterances can be
determined only by correlating it with other positioned utterances. In this way, the
speaker of each utterance is positioned discursively in that particular performative
moment and is brimming with potential responsive reactions to other prior and
subsequent utterances in that communicative domain. Each individual utterance is a
link in the chain of speech communication. It has clear-cut boundaries that are
determined by the change of speech subjects (speakers), but within these boundaries
the utterance, like Leibniz's monad, reflects the speech process, other's utterances,
and above all, preceding links in the chain (sometimes close and sometimes -- in
areas of cultural communication -- very distant.) (p.93)

It is the allusion to other utterances that gives conversation its dialogical character. This is so
insofar as utterances are constructed always in anticipation of some kind of response from an other.
Bakhtin puts it this way:

When constructing my utterance, I try actively to determine the response. Moreover,

I try to act in accordance with the response I anticipate, so this anticipated response,
in turn, exerts an active influence on my utterance. (p.95)

In effect, I set up the self-fulfilling nature of my world by trying actively to determine the response,
and perhaps denying or not recognizing my active determination of the other's response. I do what I
can to ensure what my uttterance's response will be. Bakhtin calls this property of an utterance its
addressivity. Addressivity is the quality of turning to someone with one's utterance; Bakhtin claims
it as a constitutive feature of an utterance. Compared to an utterance, a sentence -- as a signifying
unit of language -- lacks this directedness quality. Sentences belong to nobody in particular and are
addressed to nobody in particular. One consequence is the possibility, if not inevitability, of my
addressee not being the person to whom I am speaking. The addressivity of the utterance and the
addressee may be unconsciously mismatched. For example, experientially, I may be having a
conversation with my father as a small boy even though, in outsider observable fact, my adult body
is addressing my supervisor.

Dialogical relations become dialectical relations when authors are detached from their utterances.
Insofar as a change of functions effects a change of boundaries, and as the functions of my
utterances change, so, too, do my boundaries -- my "senses" of self. Bakhtin maintains that we quite
literally enact cultural values in and through our speech, which scripts our place in relation to the
places of listeners in the social scenario. In this respect, conversational discourse does not reflect a
situation, as a mirror does an object, but rather conversational discourse is the situation in which
speaker and addressee find themselves.

For Volosinov, an utterance always is a form of struggle; it is always between self and other and, as
such, constitutes the primal working of self-identification. In Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, he
models the process of identity formation as the opposite of Freud's. Rather than moving from an
infant's complete ego, through repression to a socialized self, for Volosinov the process moves from
nonself, through the learning of different discourses, to a self that is an open totality of its discursive
practices. The transformation of the given world into a world I set myself turns the relationship
between my body and other objects around me into a temporal relationship, one that otherwise is
merely spatial. In Clark and Holquist's terms, "The merely physical world is an 'axiological desert.'
The acting out of human projects turns the desert of space into a garden of time."(p. 75)

Partial Consciousnesses. In Freudianism, Volosinov develops the idea of self-awareness; he

maintains that self-awareness is always verbal, it's a matter of formulating suitable utterances in the
service of gauging one's self over against some complex of social norms. This is strikingly similar
to Bakhtin's thinking on the relation between utterance and individuality. Bakhtin argues that the
better our facility and competency with respect to speech genres, the more adeptly and subtly we
reveal our individuality in and through them. Speech genres have normative, political, ideological
import; they are not created by an individual speaker but rather are there for selection and in that
way are "given" to a speaker. The contrasts between Freud's thinking and Volosinov's are
instructive. For Bakhtin, self is radically other. Becoming aware of self -- becoming partially
conscious -- I see myself through the eyes, and from the perspective, of an other. For Freud, self is
suppressed in the service of the social whereas for Bakhtin, self is a function of the social. For
Freud, the more of the other, the less of the self whereas for Bakhtin, the more of the other the more
of the self. For Bakhtin, otherness is the ground of all existence; dialogue is the primal structure of
any particular existence, which represents a constant exchange between what is already and what is
not yet."(Clark & Holquist, 65). Consciousness is what registers and shapes these transformations.

Vygotsky's model of how children come to language and thinking from consciousness reinforces
much of Bakhtin's work on this matter. Between three and seven, children go through what Piaget
later would call egocentric speech, speech in which children seem to be talking to themselves -- a
thinking aloud process. Socialized speech, Piaget's next stage of language development, children
learn speech acts such as requests, threats, criticisms and questions; language is used in exhcange
with other children and adults. Vygotsky called this transition a movement from consciousness to
thought. In Bakhtin's thinking, it is a transition from external to internal speech:

Vygotsky's view that "higher mental functions appear on the inter-psychological

plane before they appear on the intra-psychological plane" was his way of expressing
Bakhtin's fundamental principle that the setf is not a completely internal but rather a
boundary phenomenon, which enjoys "extraterritorial status" since it is "a social
entity that penetrates inside the organism of the individual person.(p. 230) (emphasis
added)

Such a dialgocial self is never, and can never be, whole insofar as it exists only in and through
dialogue. In fact, Bakhtin is quite opposed to a longing for wholeness, as Clark and Holquist point
out:

Bakhtin is utterly opposed to the Romantic longing for wholeness, that homesickness
which produced the German vision of an ancient Greek Gemeinschaft from which all
subsequent history has been a falling away.(p.65)
Rather than the wholeness of Gemeinschaft, Baktin celebrates alterity. It is only in and through
other that I can come to author and know my self. The implication, then, is that subjects can never
achieve a full, unitary, complete identity.

Responding to the environment, being able to answer it, is life itself. Whatever
engenders a particular response of the organism in a specific situation . . . is the
center of its life. This is what, at a higher level of complexity, in human beings, is
called the self. . . . The distinctiveness of each response is the specific form of that
person's answerability. (p. 67)

The chain of these responses is what constitutes a person's life. This is a useful way of
understanding Bakhtin's claim that there is no alibi for being; the ways in which we respond are
neither more nor less than the ways we take responsibility for ourselves.

Self creates itself in crafting an architectonic relation between the unique locus of
life activity which the individual human organism constitutes, and the constantly
changing natural and cultural environment which surrounds it.(p.68)

What Bakhtin celebrates as alterity, other philosophers from Marx to Sartre bemoan as alienation.
Bakhtin's theorization of other and otherness is predicated on the insight he refers to as the surplus
of seeing, which in effect states that the concept of other depends on recognizing the blindness to
"all that" which enables us to see "this."(p.70)

From the unique place I occupy in existence, there are things only I can see. The
distinctive slice of the world that only I perceive is a "surplus of seeing," where
excess is defined relative to the place all others have of that world shaped
exclusively by me.(p.71)

The implication of this surplus of seeing is that my consciousness of myself is always and
fundamentally incomplete. I do not come to have a growing awareness of something I and others
call my self; rather, I am always not yet, never completed, always living in an absolute future. In
this sense, the self is a project or an activity that I can never complete. As Clark and Holquist put it,
"I answer the present by projecting a future. My self then performs itself as a denial of any
categories powerful enough to comprehend it." (p. 72) In short, "I cannot see the self that is my
own, so I must try to prerceive it in the other's eyes. " (p. 73) And, I would add, to hear it in others
voices. Others, of course, can and do complete us as selves, as we do them; that is because the self
is "the main character who is on a different plane from all the other characters I imagine. "(p.71) In
effect, I am inside my submarine, which I don't see as a submarine because of the blind spot of my
surplus of seeing, and outside yours, which I do see as a submarine, as a result of my surplus of
seeing.

Fluid Discourses. Bakhtin makes the argument that given the enormous array of everyday genres
of speech communication, it has been only rhetoric and literature that have been studied in any
detail and with any critical and theoretical precision. His point is that it is from the enormous array
of primary speech genres that secondary rhetorical and literary genres derive their meaning and
significance. Primary genres define permissable forms of daily expression; examples of secondary
genres -- literary, legal, scientific, journalistic, etc. -- are derivative. In these respects, what Foucault
and others have come to call discursive formations, Bakhtin is calling speech genres. Unlike
Saussure, who maintains that individual speakers have considerable freedom -- almost an arbitrary
freedom in combining forms of language -- with regard to parole, Bakhtin contends that the basic
unit of speech practice is an utterance, which is an individual practice. Nevertheless, each domain of
language-use is characterized by its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These forms of
combinations of forms are what Bakhtin calls speech genres." And in cybernetic terms, speech
genres are autopoietic social systems, systems of interaction that produce their own modes of
production and reproduction. The practical upshot, according to Bahktin, is that we cannot avoid
being generic.

Conversational discourse can be theorized as what Bakhtin refers to as a differentiated open unity.
In short, an utterance is revealed in the differentiated unity of the conversation in which it is
utterred, but it cannot be closed off -- contained and hermetically sealed -- in a conversation. In
cybernetic terms, a conversation is a speech genre characterized by organizational closure yet open
to structural variation and differentiation. The inherent instability of conversational structures is that
there is always the open possibility and potential for any particular conversational structure to
disrupt and change its generic structre such that monological modes of conversation may become
dialogical modes. The possibility, of course, also exists for discursive chaos and anarchy; hence the
centirpetal pressures -- the organizational pressures -- to contain the structural variations within the
limits of given parameters, such that structural changes can be organizationally controlled and
contained. Clark and Holquist contend that for Bakhtin, it is in the drama of actual conversational
situations that the Kantian catetgories, which orgnaize the world, are realized (pp.204-5). And
intonation is the way in which the general categories of space and time are transformed into the
specific conversational interpretations of reality. Their analogue is the ways rules of a game are
translated into particular applications when the game is actually played. In this way, categories of
rank and degrees of intimacy between speakers get transformed into specific configurations when
they are particularized in the sound patterns of actual utterances (p.205). This insight works well up
against some of Gendlin's work on the "step" nature of focusing, how it emerges from silence and
( ... ). As an utterance comes into being, as it is intoned in step-function, it takes place in time.
Status and intimacy come to be played out in the vocalization of an utterance coming into being.

Cybernetic Minds. For Bakhtin, language is part and parecel of untidy history and the
unpredictabilities of individual life, rather than being timeless and logical. But this distinction
between linguistic systems and speech performances is also a crucial distinction between mind and
matter. For Bateson, the most interesting, if incomplete, scientific discovery of the twentieth century
is the discovery of the nature of mind. Bateson reads Critique of Judgement for Kant's theorization
of aesthetic judgement residing, essentially, in the selection rather than the discovery of facts, and
Seven Sermons to the Dead for Jung's distinction between pleroma and creatura -- the two worlds of
understanding. In the former, there are only forces and impacts whereas in the latter there is
difference. The association Bateson makes is that pleroma is the world of the hard sciences whereas
creatura is the world of communication and organization. Difference doesn't exist as a thing, but
rather as an idea, hence: "Tbe world of creatura is that world of explanation in which effects are
brought about by ideas, essentially by differences." By combining these insights of Kant and Jung,
Bateson's philosophy claims an indefinite number of differences, only a few of which make
significant differences. In short, the unit of information is difference, and this insight is the
epistemological foundation for information theory.

The whole energy structure of the pleroma -- the forces and impacts of the hard
sciences -- have flown out the window, so far as explanation within creatura is
concerned. After all, zero differs from one, and zero therefore can be a cause, which
is not admissible in hard science. The letter which you did not write can precipitate
an angry reply, because zero can be one-half of the necessary bit of information.
Even sameness can be a cause, because sameness differs from difference. (p.481)

The implication of Bateson's insight that is pivotal to this essay is that both organisms and machines
are capable of storing energy. Both have circuit structures that enbable energy expenditure to be an
inverse function of energy input. This set of ideas, coming together in the last half of the twentieth
century, Bateson contends, has given us a radically new and different way of thinking about what a
mind is. He lists four characteristics of this cybernetic conception of mind:

(1) The system shall operate with and upon differences.

 (2) The system shall consist of closed loops or networks of pathways along which
differences and transforms of differences shall be transmitted. (What is transmitted
on a neuron is not an impulse, it is news of a difference.)

(3) Many events within the system shall be energized by the respondent part rather
than by impact from the triggering part.

(4) The system shall show self-correctiveness in the direction of homeostasis and/or
in the direction of runaway. Self-correctiveness implies trial and effor(p.482).

For Bateson, then, these minimal characteristics of mind exist, or are generated, whenever and
wherever the appropriate circuit structure of causal loops exists; it's an inevitable function of
complexity. This means, of course, that mind occurs many other places besides inside the heads of
organisms or inside the configurations of machines.

For Bateson, if self-correctiveness is a criterion of thought or mental process, then there is thought
going on inside the autonomous organism that maintains crucial internal variables. And a computer,
in controlling its internal temperature, for example, is doing simple thinking within its autonomous
body. But for Bateson, what thinks and engages in trial and error is organism plus computer plus
environment; the distinctions separating organism from computer from environment are arbitrary,
artificial, fictitious lines. The profundity of Bateson's theory and philosophy is that in challenging
Darwin's nineteenth century notion of the unit of survival -- the family line, or the species or
subspecies -- the unit of survival becomes, rather, organism plus environment plus the interaction
between organism and environment. In short, "the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be
identical with the unit o mind."(p.483) Theorizing dialogical communication genres inclusive of
machines, organisms and environments turns out to be pivotal to evolutionary survival, an insight
that certainly is not new but has been forbodingly difficult up to now. For Bakhtin, the systematicity
of language is to speech as the materiality of world is to mind. The location of their articulation --
i.e., language: speech:: world: mind -- as well as the forces that fuse them is what Bakhtin calls an
utterance. Bakhtin was influenced by Einstein's theorizing of the physical universe. In arguing for
what he called the law of placement -- which stated that, "what I see is governed by the place from
which I see it"(Clark and Holquist, 69) -- Bakahtin was trying to do for conscious mind what
Einstein was searching for with respect to the physical universe. Both Bakhtin and Einstein spent
much of their lives tyring to theorize simultaneity; in effect, how can different spaces have the same
time.(p.70) Insofar as there is no such thing as a fixed interval of time independent of the system to
which it refers, then there is no actual simultaneity. There are only systems of reference by which
two different events can be brought into a conceptual unity. For Bakhtin, the system of reference
that created the effect of simultaneity was to be found in the mechanics of self/other
transformations, specifically the law of placement. The practical and theoretical consequence is that
although we are in the same event, that event is different for both of us. The phenomenological
implication is that insofar as the place each of us occupies is unique, both the things I cannot see
and the things I can see are distinctive to and help to constitute my self.(Clark and Holquist, p.70)

Hearing, as Bakhtin understands it, is a dichotic process: the right ear corresponds to the left
hemisphere of the brain and is adept at recognizing sounds peculiar to human speech; the left ear
corresponds to the right hemisphere, which discriminates all sounds other than speech. He goes on
to argue that, given the physiology and biology of the brain, the constant mediation between self
and other is the mechanism by which we conceptualize and control, at the level of mind, dualities
which are present in biology at the level of the brain. (Clark and holquist, p. 73) Consciousness,
then, is joined to existence outside itself through actions and practices.

Autopoiesis and Conversation. I want to make a distinction, similar to Niklas Luhmann's, between
living systems (e.g., cells, brains, organisms, etc.) and social systems (e.g., societies, organizations,
interactions, etc.). Here's Luhmann's thinking:
 The concept of autopoietic closure itself requires this theoretical decision. It leads to
a sharp distinction between meaning and life as different kinds of autopoietic
organization, and meaning-using systems again have to be distinguished according to
whether they use consciousness or communication as a mode of meaning-based
reproduction. (p. 2)

Luhmann's argument is that autopoietic systems are not only self-organizing systems, but self-
referential as well. That means that autopoietic systems not only produce and change their own
structures, but they also produce other components. "Thus, everything that is used as a unity by the
system is produced as a unit by the system itself. This applies to elements, processes, boundaries,
and other structures and, last but not least, to the unity of the system itself." (p. 3) Whereas
autonomous bodies are living biological systems, the social organization of those biological bodies
are social systems -- nonliving systems -- that use communication as their mode of autopoietic
reproduction. The biological concept of autopoiesis, as an analogue, is crucial to the project of
theorizing dialogical communication as self-producing systems. Communication produces itself in
the processes of its production. In this respect, autopoiesis and structuration are analogous.
Dialogue is a particular realization of autopoiesis. Think of dialogue as a communication system
whose production organizes spaces for selves to be voiced in the processes of incorporating the
outside, the other, the environment. Dialogical communication is open to interiorizing -- taking-in,
listening to -- feedback from outside, and enfolding those inside/outside distinctions into the
system's self-producing processes. It's a parasitic process of sorts, feeding on distinctions (i.e.,
spaces) between inside and outside. Krippendorff, addressing this feature of autopoiesis, claims
that, "A biological organism is organizationally closed in the sense that the locus of control over the
processes of interaction constituting the organism is housed inside the organism and stems from the
process of interaction itself." I re-write that sentence, using instead a discursive example: "A
dialogue is organizationally closed in the sense that the locus of control over the processes of
interlocution constituting it is housed inside the system and stems from the process of dialogue
itsetf "

The concept autopoiesis was coined in the early 1970s when Humberto Maturana was collaborating
with Francisco Varela. Both biologists, they had been using the expression "circular organization" to
convey the central feature of the organization of living systems. But "circular organization" and
"self-referentiality," as conceptual expressions, proved to be too clumsy for properties that were
actually much closer to autonomy. Maturana tells the story of how he came to the word autopoiesis.
Jose Bulnes, a colleague of Maturana's, was at work on an essay on Don Quixote de la Mancha, in
which he was analyzing Don Quixote's dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis,
action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production). Maturana said he realized the power of
the word poiesis for the first time, and coined the word autopoiesis to refer to the dynamics of the
autonomy proper to living systems, systems that reproduce themselves.

Cary Wolfe sees the distinction between organization and structure as pivotal to an understanding of
autopoiesis:

The key distinction for the theory of autopoiesis (or 'self-production') as articulated
by Maturana and Varela -- the distinction that . . . allows its decisive conceptual
innovation, its account of systems that are both open and closed -- is the distinction
between 'organization' and 'structure.' . . . . As they explain it, [o]rganization denotes
those relations that must exist among the components for it to be a member of a
specific class'; it is that which 'signifies those relations that must be present in order
for something to exist.' Structure, on the other hand, 'denotes the components and
relations that actually constitute a particular unity and make its organization
real.'(Tree of Knowledge, pp.46-7) (Cary Wolfe, p. 52)
Conversation, I contend, can be theorized as self-producing social systems with several constitutive
features; autonomy, self-maintenance of boundaries, individuality, and self-referentiality, among
them. Krippendorff writes:

. . . autopoietic organizations are constitutionally self-referential not hierarchical,

which is to say that the forms of these organizations are not subordinate to anything
other than themselves and are in this sense radically indigenous. "(p. 198)

As such, conversations are organizationally closed yet structurally open autonomous systems of
discourse that are self-referential. Notice that a turn-taking system is closed organizationally yet
open to information, making conversation an autopoietic system. The simplest systematics of turn-
taking constitute the organization of this particular structure, or performance, or production. Within
the frame -- the organization -- of the simplest systmatics, there are an indefinite number of possible
structural and post-structural productions and performances. Production and performance may
correspond in important ways here to organization and structure.

A dialectical conversation that is structurally open to the possibility of an organizational

transformation to conversational dialogue is not so much open to its environmen -- its context -- as
it is capable of interiorizing and incorporating the distinctions between its self and its environment
as information integral to its self-production. Rather than assuming that a conversation's context is
somehow independent of, external to, or outside itself, assume instead that conversations are
organizationally closed in ways that incorporate context. The production of dialogue problematizes,
but does not erase, the distinction between conversation and chaos, redrawing boundaries, and
thereby framing a post-humanist epistemology and ontology of self-referencial autopoietic systems,
which is inclusive of living systems, psychic systems, and social systems.

What, more precisely, are the theoretical and practical points of articulation between conversational
monologue and dialogical conversation, as speech genres, as different modes of being in the world?
Obviously, both conversational monologue and dialogical conversation can be thought of as turn-
taking systems capable of accommodating an indefinitely large number of voices
(interlocutors/authors). Some, perhaps most, conversations are dialectical systems, systems whose
organization is bipolar, dialectical and monological. The praxiological questions all have to do with
the conditions of possibility for dialectical systems to interiorize and incorporate themselves, and at
the same time to observe and listen to self in the process of doing so, to be observed and listened to
as well as observing and listening, simultaneously. The experience produced is knowing; realizing
this knowing in the moment, and then sharing and commenting on it, is self-referential, self-
reflexive and self-implicative communicative praxis. What emerges is an increasingly dialogical
conversation, communication transforming from dialectics to dialogics. Agency shifts in ways that
allow selves to transform from self-representational to self-referential modes of consciousness. The
status of the ego in these two modes is quite different. Self-representational consciousness is
structured dialectically. Self-referential and self-reflexive consciousness is a dialogic speech genre.
Dialogue is both self-reflexive and self-reflective, both self-representational and self-implicative.
Dialogics is more concerned with imagination, inquiry and learning than it is with proof and
justification. There are fewer positions that seem to need defending, so the communication can be
more self-reflexive and less self-defensive. In terms of Marx's thinking, use value corresponds to
dialgoue and to diversity; exchange value corresponds to monologue and to commonality. The
theoretical and practical value of knowing how to move between these very different modes of
consciousness -- these two very different epistemologies and ontologies -- is inestimable. The
project I'm working on is to find ways of moving between oppositional and suppositional
discourses, to build conversational bridges between the two at the joints of their articualtions.

Agency is crucial to such a project. How is it possible for agency to alternate between these two
distinctly different yet interdependent speech genres, with their radically different communicative
practices and consequences? What are the conversational practices that generate dialogue? Where
do such practices fit, both practically and theoretically? How are they deployed? With what
consequences? Dialogue is a system of practices for foregrounding and then relativising agency.
The foregrounding of self is dialectical; relativizing it is dialogical. When self-positionality is
relativised, a diversity of interests can be voiced, and interlocutors listen more and talk less. When a
self voices interests, it is in uttterances that ask and inform, more than tell and demand. In several of
its forms, listening is an ethical practice, spiritual in the sense of ethos; a listening carefully, as
Bakhtin puts it. It is a listening to engage in different understandings, not a listening to resist and
oppose them. One chooses to listen, to be present. To be willing to venture outside, into the
unknown of other, to(ward) an other, is to stand-under, to understand, to under-study an other. It is a
power of knowing, and understanding rather than an overstating.

On Meaning, Experience, and Information. Let me say a few words about the relations between
meaning, experience and information. In doing so, I will be relying heavily on Niklas Luhmann's
theotization of meaning in his ambitious undertaldng of radically re-thinking sociology.6' For
Luhmann, meaning exceeds the parameters of experience insofar as meaning presents more than
what is actually experienced; it presents both what is directly experienced as well as an excess. This
excess of meaning occurs within an individual life of consciousness, which in turn is situated in a
world of multiple and pluralistic systems. This life of consciousness is a process the contents of
which are actualized in perception and thought, and, as a consequence, those contents are
everchanging from moment to moment.

For Luhmann, then, "Meaning functions here as a selection rule, and not -- or only secondarily, viz.
with the help of language -- as an actual content arising or appearing in consciousness." (30)
Experience is continuous rather than discrete, analogue rather than digital, non-linear rather than
linear; and in this ongoing flow of experience "reports about the world are constantly crossing the
threshold of consciousness," both from outside the living consciousness as well as from inside, from
memory.(30) Such reports are consciously interpreted as meanings selected from other possibilities,
other meanings. Meaning and information are not at all the same things; the information value of
meaning lies in its selectivity from among other meanings; thus, information "always involves some
element of surprise."(31) The information value of meaning, in other words, informs "through the
more or less surprising details or deviations in what had been expected."(31) An utterance, on being
repeated, loses its information but not its meaning.

"Expefience (Erfahrung) is surprising information that is structurally relevant and

leads to a restructuring of the meaningful premises of experience processing within
both concrete and abstract (depending on the circumstances) functional contexts."(3
1)

Communication, for Luhmann, is not a matter of transferring meaning or information, or anything

else, for that matter, but "is a shared actualization of meaning that is able to inform at least one of
the participants."(32) What remains identical, on such a view, is not the meaning of something
transferred but rather "a common underlying meaning structure that allows the reciprocal regulation
of surprises."(32) Ultimately for Luhmann, "communication takes place in all situations where one
willingly or unwillingly allows another access to the meaning of his (sic) experience."(32)

Social Forces and Cyborgology

Nietzsche and Genealogy. Missing in second-order cybernetic, autopoietic and complexity

theorizing is a carefully thought out theory of power as an essential feature and attribute of systems
and their environments. Control and feedback, of course, are the watchwords of cybernetic theory,
which is still referred to as the science of control mechanisms and their processes. My argument
here is that unless power and control are distinguished and formulated as both complementary and
symmetrical sets of relations, second-order cybernetics risks enacting the fascistic dark side
scenario Donna Haraway sketches in the quotation from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, quoted at
the outset of this essay. Central to much of what follows -- and interwoven so thoroughly as to be
considered their infrastructural fabric -- is a fundamental distinction between power and control.
This distinction is so frequently muddled and confused that both terms are mistaken either as
synonyms or as polar opposites. I reconsider Nietzsche's work on genealogy, the philosophy of
nature, the will to power, the eternal return, and the being of becoming, relying heavily on the
insights Deleuze (1983) and Bogue (1989) furnish in their critical commentaries on Nietzsche.
These philosophies, their distinctions and articulations, are crucial in distinguishing between power
and control. Those differences make possible a more productive reading of both Luhmann's theory
of self-referential systems and Foucault's construction of power/knowledge.

Deleuze reads Nietzsche's thought as "an effort to complete the task of a critical philosophy only
imperfectly begun by Kant." (p. 16) Nietzsche indicts Kant for excluding values from his critique,
and proposes to make values the center of what he (Nietzsche) called a new, genealogical
philosophy. Accordingly, values stem from ways of being, or alternatively, modes of existence.
Ways of being, according to Nietzsche, are either noble or base, high or low; noble ways of being
are active and affirmative whereas base ways of being are reactive and negative. The origin of
values is marked by the difference between these two ways of being.

Making affirmative differences is the way of being of a master; a slave's way of being makes
negative differences. Another way of making the distinction between master and slave as ways of
being is to recognize that the initial act of a master is an affimnative evaluation, an affirmation of
difference. A slave's initial act is a reaction, a negative evaluation, a negation and denial of
difference. A master, in effect, says: "I am good, therefore he is good and bad." A slave says: "He is
bad (i.e., not good), therefore I am good (i.e., not not-good). This distinction is crucial for properly
theorizing self-relfexivity and self-implication as Nietzsche informs our understanding of second-
order cybernetics. Nietzsche's master often is understood to be someone who has mastered
projection and transference, domination and control. I want to mark this potential confusion and to
stay away from any liberal-humanist platitudes that run something like: "There is a bit of good in all
of us," the implication being that that's true even of the worst of us, which, of course, is never one's
self and always other. The important point here is knowing how to tell the difference between good
and bad. And that difference, for Nietzsche, is the origin of value. For Nietzsche, a slave posits a
non-ego and then opposes himself or herself to that non-ego as a way of positing self as ego. It may
be helpful at this point to juxtapose a slave's double negation as a way of conceiving a self (other is
master and therefore not good, therefore I am not not-good) with Bakhtin's other as the relational
necessity for the specular subject to come into being. The journey to other and then returning to
self, for Bakhtin, is affmning and active, as long as the self maintains outsidedness, difference from
other. What for Bakhtin is losing one's self in the identification with the other may be one source of
stupidity; never making the journey to other and judging other as bad, as the initial move, may be
another source of stupidity. The difference that makes an active, affmning difference, is to approach
other and return to outsidedenss, which is the place of a master --outside, decentered, autonomous
and interdependent in a cybernetic mind of present-ifted others, both masters and slaves. The point
here is not tolerance, an abhorrent liberal-humanist idea that Bateson identifies and denounces as
patronizing in his metalogues, but rather engagement from the outside. This may be one way of
distinguishing between involvement without investment, holding without clutching, passion without
consumption -- a master's touch.

A slave assumes that a master seeks his or her recognition and confirmation through a slave as a
representation of his or her power. But for Nietzsche, a slave desires power; it's a reactive force that
needs confirmation, which can never be anything other than the illusion of power. A master
inevitably is scorned when this illusion becomes evident to a slave. A master, on the other hand,
does not search for the representation of his or her power, but rather assumes that the affirmation of
power is in its exercise. A master's difference from a slave is thereby affmned rather than negated.
It's the affirmation of affirmation. Another verb for affirm is accept -- acknowledge. Do I accept or
deny my differences and answerability? Do I affirm/deny that which is? Do I even know what is, or
am I already so entangled in denial that I cannot/do not, or simply am not willing to know the
difference? A master makes distinctions through difference and affirmation whereas a slave makes
distinctions through contradiction and negation. (p. 17)

Any evaluation of values necessarily involves interpretation as well, insofar as the values of a way
of being permeate all things and thereby give all things their meaning. The implication here is that
the details, the micropractices and their microphysics, have embedded in them the values that come
to take identifiable forms as ways of being and modes of existence. Mastery is in the details of
things, in the particularities and the uniquenesses. The meaning or sense of something is a function
of "the force which appropriates the thing, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is
expressed in it."(p. 17) The concept of force, which also translates as strength, figures prominently
in Nietzsche's philosophy of nature, which I'll discuss in a later section. Philosophy of nature is
integral to Nietzsche's genealogical philosophy. A phenomenon is "a sign, a symptom which finds
its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a
semiology."(p. 17) The explicate and implicate orders of David Bohm's theorizing come to mind
here. That which is explicit is the sign, the symptom of the force, the way of life, the mode of
existence, in which it is caught up. And we are left with the semiological project of reading the
signs, of diagnosing the symptoms. Here is an instance -- a sign -- of both Nietzsche's and
Foucault's use of medicine and diagnostics as an analogue for philosophy. Nietzsche's (in)famous
critical question is: "Who makes the meaning?" Good and bad have no inherent meaning; they are
but symptoms of a way of life, a mode of existence. Only by dramatizing the words, by which
Nietzsche means, in effect, putting them in the mouth of a master or a slave, can their sense, their
meaning, be ascertained. For Bakhtin, this is a matter of studying utterances in their dialogical
contextuality. Dramatizing is apprehending the living, protean, unfinalizability of dialgoue. It is
only in context that the meaning or sense of utterances can be determined. In this manner, every
evaluation expresses a way of life, and every interpretation is the symptom of a mode of existence.

Nietzsche's goal, according to Deleuze, is to articulate an affirmative and an active thought, one that
will counteract the negative and reactive thought that has dominated Western philosophy from its
inception. This active evaluation involves both the creation of affirmative values and the affirmative
destruction of negative values. Nietzsche strives to be an affirmative philosopher, one who is both
an interpreter-physician, who reads symptoms and prescribes cures, and an evaluator-artist, who
destroys negative values and creates new ones. Both Nietzsche and Foucault characterize
philosophy, at times, as much like the practice of medicine; first, diagnose by paying genealogical
attention to erudite knowledges and local memories, and then intervene. It strikes me that a master
teacher could be both an interpreter-physician and an evaluator-artist. At first glance, it may appear
that a master teacher doesn't prescribe cures and doesn't evaluate values. But on closer inspection, it
becomes apparent that one is consciously aware of that fact. A master teacher reads signs/symptoms
and produces, or at least arranges and perhaps composes, the lessons, exercises and processes that
create new experience/value. What Nietzsche finds missing in Kant's critique of reason is a
genealogy of reason, a critical analysis of the genesis of reason itself, of the will that hides and
expresses itself in reason.(p. 18) Nietzsche's indictment of Kant is that he extended a very old
conception of critique to its limit. This conception theorizes critique as a force brought to bear on all
claims to knowledge and truth; but that's where Kant stops. Nietzsche extends the critique to
knowledge and truth themselves, and he does so by dramatizing the questions of truth: "Who is
seeking truth?" and "What does the one who seeks the truth want?" p. 18)

Nietzsche claims that, above all, the seeker of truth wants to be right, wants not to be wrong or
fooled. Here's how the seeker of truth reasons: (1) The world is deceptive and misleading, a world
of appearances, so I will oppose that world to another world, a world beyond, a true world; (2)
beneath this speculative opposition of this-world/other-world is a moral opposition: good
knowledge/false life; (3) this moral opposition is only a symptom of a will to correct life, to turn life
against life and make life somehow conform to knowledge. Ultimately, this will to correct life is a
nihilistic will, for the man or woman of truth wants life to become as reactive and vengeful as he or
she is; to turn on itself and annihilate itself. (p. 18) The man or woman of truth wants to be "right"
in order to control life and others, which never works and always produces anger and spite that gets
projected onto all that surrounds him or her. The seeker of truth lives in a world of scarcity; there is
not enough truth, knowlege, control, money, power (confused here with control), and from scarcity,
that's all that can be produced. The seeker of truth is a slave to righteous blindness and cannot see
that "you can't get there -- to power, to abundance -- from here." Nietzsche proposes to replace this
nihilistic will to truth with an affinnative will to falsehood, an artistic will that would turn a will to
deception into a creative will, a will to power. This closely resembles a pedagogical principle,
which states that I would be better off most of the time being wrong about what I insist on being
right about. What I insist on being right about are usually my beliefs about my own limitations. In
Nietzschean language, I am captured by and caught up in a reactive force that turns back on itself,
that stops short of going to the limit of its power. It is governed by fear and by obsessions with
denying my fear. A thought informed by such a will would not oppose knowledge to life, would not
confine life to the narrow bounds of rational knowledge and then measure knowledge by the
reduced standard of a reactive life.(p. 19) Rather, in such a thought, life would become the active
force of thought, and thought would become the affirmative power of life. Thinking would then
mean discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life.

According to Deleuze, this Nietzschean way of thinking entails a new concept of thought. Such
thought would not be assessed in terms of truth, but rather in terms of meaning and value, the high
and low, the noble and base. The enemy of such thought would not be error but stupidity, a base
way of thinking and being. And such thought would not rely on method, which is designed to
protect thought from error, but rather on the violence of forces that take hold of thought. The force
of thinking must throw it into a becoming-active.(p. 19) For Nietzsche, thought is always
interpretation and evaluation, and it is either noble or base, depending on the forces that seize hold
of it. It occurs to me that Nietzsche is formalistic in several important ways here. What would a
more dialogical Nietzsche look like in several crucial places? For example, if the noble/base
opposition were not either/or but were both/and ... and, then thought could remain "always
interpretation and evaluation, and it is both noble and base, depending on the forces that seize hold
of it. I am aware of Nietzsche's contempt for dialectics. But Gareth Morgan, in Images of
Organizations, argues that Nietzsche says at one point that his work is available for all manner of
contradictory uses. Morgan then proceeds to use that as a justification for using Foucault's work in
all manner of contradictory ways. Does that extend itself to dialectizing Nietzsche in places?
Deleuze considers Nietzsche to be an exemplar of the active philosopher, a physician who deciphers
symptoms of reaction and negativity, and an artist who creates a new image of thought and invents
new forms for its articulations. The return of interpretation and evaluation is what Nietzsche calls
the eternal return, and that which interprets and evaluates is the will to power.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Nature. The will to power is not some kind of conscious agency
separable from the actions it motivates. Nietzsche argues that such a conception of will is generated
by the linguistic distinction between subject and verb, as if subject is an autonomous actor separate
from its actions.(p.20) And clearly will is not to be confused with desire; the former is a source of
affirmation and the latter is a reactive negation. Put another way, the desire for power is the image a
slave fashions of the will to power. The weak, the impotent, the slave, longs for power to negate the
power of the strong, the potent, the master. The strong merely exercise power, never desire it.

According to Nietzsche, our's is a world of becoming, of constant flux and change in which no
entities preserve a stable identity, and nature is an interrelated multiplicity of forces all of which are
either dominant or dominated. A body is articulated by this relation between dominant and
dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body -- biochemical bodies, social
bodies, political bodies. In a body, the superior or dominant forces are active and the inferior or
dominated forces are reactive.(p.20) We know little about force and the body because we generally
form our knowledge on the evidence of consciousness, and consciousness is itself only a symptom
of the presence of reactive forces. For Nietzsche, consciousness is never self-consciousness, but is,
rather, consciousness of an ego in relation to a self, which is not itself conscious. Consciousness
inevitably views the body from its reactive perspective and misunderstands the nature of active
forces, without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. For Nietzsche, a true science
must be a science of activity, of what is necessarily unconscious. Such a science will explore the
power of transformation, the Dionysian power, which is the primary definition of activity. (p.21)
Deleuze finds the key to this science of activity in Nietzsche's philosophy of dynamic relations of
forces.

What keeps tugging at the edges of my reading of Deleuze's Nietzsche and philosophy is that force
can also be translated as strength. Given this, it shifts for me how dominant and dominated get read.
To what extent does it make sense to read will as intention, and then to read both strength and
intention as processes rather than entities. Given any two forces in a relation, one will be dominant
and the other dominated, and each will have a specific quality -- active or reactive -- determined by
that relationship. For Nietzsche, an active force commands, appropriates, and imposes forms on
reactive forces. Active forces also "go to the limit of their powers" whereas reactive forces limit
themselves as well as the active forces with which they are in relation. Recall. that for Nietzsche, a
reactive force tends to negate that which differs from it whereas an active force affirms its
difference from other forces. For Deleuze, "the measure of forces and their qualification depend in
no way on absolute quantity, but relative effectuation," and that "the least strong is as strong as the
strong if it goes to the limit."(p. 2 1)

The Will to Power. This characterization of quantities and qualities of force alone is not sufficient
to distinguish Nietzschean force from the mechanistic force of the then conventional physics.
Consequently, the concept of force still needs to be completed by an inner will, which Nietzsche
designates as the will to power. The will to power is internal to force but not reducible to it. Said
another way, without the concept of the will to power, forces remain indeterminate.(p. 22) Nietzsche
warns us against confusing will to power either with a universal will, which it is not, or with an
individual, psychological will, which it is not. The will to power is unitary, but it's a unity that is
affirmed of multiplicity. Affirmation and negation extend beyond action and reaction because they
are the immediate qualities of becoming. In other words, affirmation is not action, but rather the
power of becoming-active. Likewise, negation is not simple reaction, but rather the power of
becoming-reactive.

The will to power is the power of becoming that plays through forces, differentiating them and
linking them both spatially and temporally. This will to power manifests itself as a "capacity for
being affected." Vulnerability, which is one way of interpreting this capacity for being affected,
closely resembles the Spinozist doctrine that a body's force is a function of the number of ways in
which it can be affected, and further, that a body's capacity for being affected is an expression of its
power. In this fashion, power is the capability of being affected; furthermore, this power of being
affected does not signify passivity, but affectivity, sensibility, sensation. The traditional notion of
forces needs to be supplemented not only with something like a will or inner center that determines
relations between forces, but also with senses -- sensation-feelings that allow forces to perceive
each other and be affected by each other.(p.23) So the formulation, to this point, looks like: (1)
dominant and dominating quantities of force; (2) active and reactive qualities of force; (3)
affirmative and negative will to power -- affectivity; and (4) senses, or sensation-feelings that
enable the forces to perceive each other. The sensibility or affectivity of force is the manifestation of
the will to power, and the more a will to power, the greater the power of being affected that is
manifested in force.

The will to power, then, is the genealogical element of force that establishes differential relations of
quantities of force, from which issues the qualities of each force, whether active or reactive. In
short, the will to power is that concept which makes possible a theory of nature as relations of
forces. These forces are dynamic (i.e., they are becoming-active or becoming-reactive), determined
in quality (i.e., the genealogical element of force), and entail the mutual effect of each force on the
other (i.e., the affectivity of force). The will to power is also that which interprets and evaluates,
that which seizes thought and determines whether it will be active or reactive, affirmative or
negative. In these ways of being, the will to power involves a feeling of power, and all affectivity,
sensation and emotion derive from it. The problem of interpretation is to estimate the quality of
force that gives meaning to a phenomenon or event, and from that to measure the relation of the
forces that are present. The problem of evaluation is to determine the will to power, which gives
value to a thing. And both interpretation and evaluation are themselves functions of the will to
power. The will to power is the source of meaning and value, and hence, the will to power is
creative and giving. It does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire; above all, it does not
desire power. It gives.(p.24) This account of the will to power places it very close to the most
provocative contempormy thinking about empowerment, an admittedly messy and often poorly
thought out discussion.

The Eternal Return. Nietzsche regards the history of the West as the triumph of reactive forces
and the negative will to power, which he calls the triumph of nihilism. The crucial problem for
Nietzsche is to determine how reactive forces conquer active forces, and to discover the means
whereby nihilism may be overcome and the affmnative will to power given expression. As opposed
to negation, affirmation is light and irresponsible; it is freedom from reactive forces rather than an
acceptance of them by taking them on. The important distinction here is between engaging and
reacting, involving and investing. Engaging, as with involving, is playing passionately, being lost in
the play, giving one's self to the play, surrendering without giving up or taking on. Reacting, as with
investing, is making it personal, performing well, making it mean one's ego, winning and losing,
and losing from the outset by never giving up. Deleuze claims that the only means to true
affirmation is the eternal return, which must be interpreted as a physical doctrine, an ethical
doctrine, and a doctrine of selective ontology.(p. 27)

In Ecce homo, Nietzsche says that the idea of the eternal return is, "the highest formula of
affirmation that is at all attainable;" it is pivotal in Thus spoke Zarathustra (p. 295) The eternal
return, argues Deleuze, is not for Nietzsche a cyclical theory of history. Nietzsche is extremely
critical of Platonic notions of unity and ideality, such as the One, the Same, and the Whole. The
eternal return is not a cyclical hypothesis that posits the return of or to the Same. There is a relation,
for Nietzsche, between this confusion and several grammatical properties of language. Insofar as
subjects are entities and separated off from verbs, we speak of actors as entities separated off from
actions, and we think of a world of stable, reified entities separated from events that are passing,
and, once passed, those event-processes are transformed into event-entities that are historically
stable, reified things in the world. In Twilight of the idols, Nietzsche writes that reason,

sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego as being,
in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things
- - only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is
projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows,
and is a derivative of, the concept of ego.(p. 483)

Whereas Plato valorizes the Ideal realm as the realm of true knowledge, of the selfsame, of that
which does not change, Nietzsche sees his work as reversing Platonism by crediting our
phenomenal world of flux, change and becoming.

As a philosophy of the affirmation of becoming, and as the highest affirmation, the eternal return is
a returning not to being and identity, but rather to becoming and difference. But what does it mean
to eternally return to becoming and difference? In what senses is such movement a returning? In
Philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks, Nietzsche writes that Heraclitus thought the world a
place of "play as artists and children engage in it," a world of "coming-to-be and passing away."(pp.
62, 67) There are two moments in such play -- the play of affirmation, of affirmative force, and the
moment of absorption, the moment of reflection. These two moments provide a way of coming to
terms with the eternal return. Bogue writes:

One first participates in becoming and thereby affirms it; then one recognizes that all
moments of the world are moments of becoming, that the very being of the world is
becoming, and one affirms the fact that every instant is the return or coming anew of
becoming.(p. 29)

In this way, according to Deleuze, returning is the being of becoming itself, being which affirms
itself in becoming.

This world of becoming is in flux and of multiplicity, a world of chance, chaos and complexity. To
affirm forces and to push power to is limits is, as Nietzsche says, to "play dice with gods at the
gods' table, the earth."(p. 341) The two moments of this game of dice with gods are the moment
when the dice are thrown and the moment they land, thereby establishing a specific combination.
The affirmation of becoming affirms both of these moments; it's the affirmation of all possible
combinations and the affirmation of a necessary outcome. Deleuze says that man is in general a bad
player who wants a large number of throws to get what he wants. A good player affirms all chance
in a single throw, accepting each outcome as the desired outcome; she or he affirms both chance and
necessity. (Sartre, in a similar mood, says that freedom is what we do with what is done to us.)
Chance and necessity surface as problems only through the reactive desires to either control chance
and/or escape necessity. Nietzsche's formula for greatness in a human being is an active love of fate
that forces one to will whatever happens as the necessary manifestation of chance.(258)

The Being of Becoming. Now let's turn to the relation between the will to power and the eternal
return. For Deleuze, "the eternal return is the synthesis which has as its principle the will to
power."(p. 30) It turns on a reconceptualization of time: (1) the present moment is a moment of
becoming; (2) The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come; thus, (3) the present
moment is the past-becoming-present and the present-becoming-future. Bogue summarizes:

The coexistence of past and future within the present moment thus forms a synthesis
of past, present, and future, and founds the relationship of the various moments of
time to one another. If one considers the multiple entities of the cosmos at two
contiguous moments, one must say that the diversity of the first moment and the
reproduction of diversity in the second moment (or the difference of the first and its
repetition in the second) are included or synthesized within the same moment of
becoming.(p. 30)

In accord with the concept of becoming, every moment of becoming is simultaneously coextensive
with the successive moment of becoming. That the "second moment" is in this fashion always
already included within the "first moment," such that the second moment's "coming again" or
"return" is always and already within the first moment, is Nietzsche's revelation of the nature of
becoming, of the being of becoming. For Deleuze, the eternal return is "a synthesis of time and its
dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being
which is affmned in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation."(p. 30) The will to power is the
differential element which puts forces in relation, and the eternal return is the affirmation of
difference in the guise of multiplicity, becoming, and chance.(p. 30). "For multiplicity is the
difference of one thing from another, becoming is difference from self, and chance is difference
'between all' or distributive difference."(p. 30)

This conception of the eternal return as the synthesis of forces that affirms becoming, multiplicity,
and chance, Deleuze calls the physical doctrine of the eternal return. But the eternal return is also an
ethical doctrine, which provides a preliminary means for man, the essentially reactive animal, to
transform himself or herself and engender within himself or herself the affmnative will to power.
The ethical doctrine of the eternal return may be formulated as the Nietzschean counterpart to the
Kantian categorical imperative.(P. 31) As an ethical doctrine, the eternal return functions as a
selective principle that issues in a practical rule: whatever you will, will it in such a way that you
also will its eternal return. (p. 31) A second selection, a selection of being rather than thought, is
needed to usher in full affmnation. It is in this aspect of itself that the eternal return functions as
selective ontology. Here's how it works, according to Deleuze. The eternal return teaches us that
becoming-reactive has no being; it produces becoming-active by reproducing becoming. What's
entailed in that claim is the following interpretation. Active forces, in going to the limit of their
capabilities, transcend all constraints, including those of their own identity. Active forces impose
forms on other forces, but they also change form themselves; they are forces of metamorphosis and
transformation, which shape other forces and simultaneously "become-other" themselves. In this
sense, active forces alone affirm becoming, and since the world is a world of becoming, active
forces alone have true being. Only extreme forms return -- those which go to the end of their power,
transforming themselves and passing one into the other. Thus, the eternal return, as physical
doctrine, affirms the being of becoming, but as selective ontology, it affirms this being of becoming
as the self-affirming of becoming-active.(p. 32)

For Nietzsche, genealogy is the art of making difference and marking distinction and as such is the
active force of transformation. Difference is force, and force is the active. The reactive is inferior
force insofar as it reacts to and works against the force of discontinuity, rupture and fragmentation.
Identity, in its presentation of itself as unitary and seamless, works at denying difference articulated
in discontinuity, and insofar as the reactive force is generative of unitary discourses of identities, the
reactive reduces discourses to representations of identities. The work of genealogy is to articulate
differences, to mark distinctions that have been inverted into reactive identities, to activate reactive
forces in and through the analysis of differential forces. From this perspective, Derrida's
deconstructionist writings, Foucault's genealogical projects, and Mao Tsetung's dialectical
materialism can be read, at least in part, as extentions of Nietzsche's critical philosophy. And that
returns us to selfreferential autopoietic systems.

On Self-Reflexivity and Self-Implication

The intellectual challenge, here, is to think dialogically, in thirds, rather than dialectically, in haves.
One of the ways possibility is produced as thirds is through self-implication and self-reflexivity.
Making one's center of consciousness about one's selves is one way to move from the possibilities
and dilemmas of narcissism, self-reference, and conversational dialectics to the possibilities and
dilemmas of self-implication, self-reflexivity, and diological conversation. Varela et al. want to get
there through Buddhism. There are many ways, most of them are still undocumented. Listening to
the voices of selves in one's own tape-recorded conversation with important and significant others is
the way I have been studying the articulations of the two.

Classroom discourse includes writing inside as well as outside of class, reading one's own writing
aloud and alone into a tape recorder, listening to that recording, reading one's own writing silently
for one's self so that by the time one is ready to tape record a conversation, one is already on one's
way, unevenly, to dialogue. Authors are speaking and listening more self-reflexively, and so
oftentimes have already experienced a change or shift in agency, from self-defensiveness to self-
reflexiveness. That's a pivotal transition. Traditionally, rhetoric is, by its very dialectical nature, self-
defensive. It positions rather than interests self and other. Interests are qualitatively different from
positions; the former are nonlinear, fluid, temporary whereas the latter are linear, fixed, and
permanent. The analytical and theoretical challenges are to devise other ways, untried ways of
conversing, unfamiliar ways.
Theorizing dialogue as an autopoietic system that incorporates contexts and thereby reincorporates
and reproduces its selves, produces an understanding inside itself, from a self-implicative position,
rather than from outside itself, from an observer's or listener's position. Dialogue is not closed
organizationally, but it is closed structurally, in terms of the burgeoning relations among their
utterances. These relations among utterances that produce selves, author utterances. The
organizational closing off, the punctuating, of signs produces meanings that are, for all practical
purposes, authored by selves whose speaking and listening is this very closing off. Dialogue is a
discursive medium of and for closing off meanings of selves as identities -- i.e., partial [w]holes.
The circularity and autonomy of self-reference draws and redraws dialogical boundaries and its
utterable selves.

The purpose of dialogue, autopoietically speaking, is to reproduce themselves. Theorized as

autopoietic systems of discourse, a dialogue's incorporation of context is an interiorizing of
differences that reproduce senses of self and other. In such a fashion, dialogues reproduce
imaginings of social realities that are self-descriptions of autonomous, circular self-referentiality.
Self and other are autonomously dialogical subject-positions and, in line with Bakhtin's discussion
of the excess of seeing, a dialogue's projected reflection is necessarily different from the standpoint
of each subject-position. Hence, self and other are radically dia/logical; dialogue is a divided
medium -- double voiced -- and efforts to deny a conversation's dialogism distort and constrain the
possibilities of and for producing autonomous, circular, self-reflexive and self-implicative
discourse. From an outside standpoint, a dialogue is closed from the inside with respect to its other,
its outside, and its context. From an inside standpoint, a dialogue is making sense of its context as
integral and presupposed features of its organization. The implication worth underscoring here is
that a dialogue's articulations with contexts are determined internally. Subjects are accountable --
Bakhtin's term is answerable or responsive -- for their relations with their context.

Dialogical causality is non-linear. With respect to the unfolding and the enfolding of a universe of
discourse and mutual causality, the political and critical implication is to pay close and careful
attention to details. Competent performance, in this sense, is attending to immediately local details,
the smallest of differences. Such details constitute the incremental differences that drive the positive
and negative feedback loops of mutual causality. It is these feedback loops that set in motion the
conditions of possibility for transformations in systems of discourse, transformations brought about
as conversation approaches dialogue. No single microscopic difference directly causes macroscopic
changes that transform an entire discursive system. No single conversational structure directly
causes generic changes. Incremental differences can be attended to locally, and such differences can
be registered and accommodated more easily than can macroscopic differences that are supposed to
be administered centrally, somehow. Such large-scale change initiatives are bound to fail insofar as
those macroscopic changes are produced a differential step at a time, and each incremental step is a
microscopic increment that in itself sets off reverberations throughout the entire system of
discourse.

The prescription to think globally and to act locally makes sense both theoretically and practically,
given this line of thinking; the implication is to attend to as broad a context as possible inasmuch as
there is no unarticulated or disarticulated outside -- no downwind. A dialogue's context is implicit
(i.e., it is implicated) in, enfolded into the system of discourse as that system of discourse explicates
and inscribes the dialogical subjects. It's an interconnected whole that is, in the Bakhtinian sense, an
open totality. A system of discourse is a multiplicity of different voices whose selves as subjects are
always already unfinished and unfinalizable. It's a total system, and, unlike Kant and his systemic
philosopher forefathers, the system is partial, not closed-off from difference as information, even
though it is closed organizationally. Those dialogical closures are temporary and in flux; it's a
fluctuation of boundaries that temporarily close off dialogue to enable self-relfexivity. Dialogical
boundaries are defined and transgressed, drawn and erased, set and moved, materialized and
dernaterialized, reconstructed and deconstructed, time and time again.
If there are no axiological but only praxiolocial differences between microscopic and macroscopic
details, the local and the global, then ethics consist in taking accountable, responsive care of the
immediately local conditions and ready-to-hand circumstances. Assume for a moment that there are
no big and little issues, details or errors; then attending to each incremental difference is crucial.
Ignoring the implications of incremental differences until there is a transformation -- Marxists call
them "totality shifts," a transformation from quantity to quality -- leads to consequences that are
undeniable. That's when analysts begin looking for large unitary causes that correspond in scale to
the now apparent and dramatic consequences. But it has been the accumulated consequences of
multiple incremental differences -- and the mutually causal loops that have been influenced in ways
that have restructured an entire system -- that have collectively produced what appears to be a
revolution or transformation.

This line of thinking has historical implications as well. History can be theorized as the written
record of the explicate order. The explicate order, the exterior, is enfolded in the implicate order.
History collapses under the weight of depth and duration metaphors; its hierarchies of control
transform into networks of surveillance, mutually causal circuits of positive and negative feedback
loops. Everything being implicit in the explicit, here and now, has radical implications for the
experience of subjectivity. Cultural life is archetectonic in the sense that the implicate order is, in
effect, explicating itself. The presupposition is that what unfolds into the explicate order of things
was always already enfolded in the implicate order.

It may make very little sense to theorize the organizing relations of a dialogue in terms of causality
at all. There are no independent patterns of causation. Instead, entire networks of relations
constitute autopoietic, self-referential patterns of coherence. It was Gregory Bateson who theorized
that wholes, not fragmented parts and pieces, evolve as complete fields of relations that are
mutually determining and determined. These wholes --what Maturana and Varela call organization,
and what Bakhtin calls aesthetic consummation -- are characterizable in terms of a logic that is
autonomous, circular and self-referential -- dia/logic. What from an external standpoint appears to
be a dialogue taking place in a context, is from an internal standpoint a network of narratives
unfolding. Organization is a term Maturana and Varela use to signify relations between components,
whether those relations are static or dynamic, that make a composite unity a unity of a particular
kind. Structure, on the other hand, signifies the actual components and the actual relations between
them that at any given moment realize a particular composite unity as a concrete static or dynamic
entity in the space that its components define.

Given that dialogue produces identities, and given that contextual relations are determined
internally rather than externally, transformational change is possible when conversations change
organizationally. It also implies that changes in structure do not necessarily affect a dialogue,
inasmuch as structure consists in the utterances themselves whereas organization consists in the
relations among utterances and the subject-positions they produce. Change in dialogue occurs from
internal variations, chance interactions and random connections; it is from this randomness that
order and autopoiesis emerge. Random internal variation produces the moments of possibility that
give rise to the development of selves and their identities. The implications for theory and practice
are provocative -- to understand a dialogue I must understand my self insofar as my understanding
of my context is always a self-referential, dialogic projection. And dialogue can explore possible
identities and the conditions under which selves can be realized. Such dialogues develop a kind of
systemic widsdom, reminiscent in some ways of Bateson's Steps to an ecology of mind.

On Dialogue, Autopoiesis and Transformation

Transformation, "change radical enough to so dramatically restructure any system -- political, legal,
or social -- that the identity of the system is itself altered, in the frame of second-order cybernetics,
and more recently cognitive science, is the perpetual enacting of context to preserve a historical
sense of closure; i.e., identity. It's not necessarily a
question of survival of the fittest, adaptation to the inevitable, capitulation to the dominant,
collusion with the enemy, or the compromise of identity. This set of concerns can be framed instead
as transformation, of going beyond the present material and spiritual conditions of existence.
Context is projected as the external, the other, the marginal, the boundaries (i.e., limits) of the
known. And these projected, enacted contexts are within each interlocutor's

experience. Selves are interconnected with and integral to contexts by means of circuits of
structured relations that are both self-referential and self-producing. The illusion is that the lines
leading away from one's body and its experience are straight lines that terminate out there, in and on
the other. That's so, as far as it goes. Those lines are self-referential; they refer back to one's body;
they are feedback loops -- nonlinear lines, so to speak. They reference one's body and its experience
of it's self -- hence, self-referentiality rather than narcissism. Denying self-referentiality is a pretext,
or perhaps simply a pretense, for denying answerability and accountability for being implicated in
life, for being interconnected with partial totality. Bakhtin would say it's a pretense to claim that
there is some kind of alibi for living.

Theorizing enacted environments as the projection of the subject within the real, material
circumstances of his/her life, also accounts for the experience of transformation as a recognition of
prior conditions having been illusory -- "the present conditions are the real ones, the conditions that
have been in place all along if only I had been able to, been wise enough, to recognize them as
such." There is a material reality that is also organized autopoietically and into which I am enfolded.
This material reality -- including most imminently the bodies of others, to which I attribute
identities and subjectivities -- is already interpenetrated with my interpretations and evaluations of
what it is, how it works, how it came to be, and what is to be done with it, and to it. The solutions of
the boundaries between my self as a subject and all that is not me, all that is other, all that is out
there, can never be resolved, once and for all. When boundaries between self and other do resolve
with some clarity, the intrigues of curiosity, imagination and critique transgress those boundaries, go
beyond them, become more than or other than them. And so the unfinalizable processes of self-
production, identity formation, and transformation are nonlinear, self-referential, and self-
implicative.

I frame everyday conversations as texts to be read critically as dialogues for the purposes of
theorizing alternative ways to engage or not, intervene, resist or remain silent, not only for purposes
of resistance and opposition, but also for purposes of reconstruction and transformation. A primary
concern of such critical-theoretical work is to demonstrate first, how the political-experiential
dynamics of ideologies naturalize themselves dialogically; and second, how the political-ideological
dynamics and forces of dialogue manage to hide out in the open. All that is ordinarily unspoken; it
remains so for as long as conversation discourses are disengaged critically.

The critical study of dialogue calls these discursive practices into question. The point of it all is to
produce and change conversations, to alter discursive practices in ways that multiply qualitatively
different choices and possibilities. As ideological codes, conversation (tran)scripts are signs left
behind, traces to be accounted for, guides to be followed and known. The microphysics of power
are exercised in, and evidenced discursively as, the micropractices of conversing. Critically
attending to reconstructed, rehearsed and reporformed conversations is one of the ways to go about
this work. More immediately intense is the work of conversational guerrillas, who enter ongoing
conversations with political objectives and agendas. Making reflexive comments in a moment,
calling assumptions into question, engaging at the level of self-reflexivity, this is where
conversation guerrillas work, in the immediacy of present moments of everyday life.

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Endnotes