Author Description

Between Literature And Science Follows Through To Its Emerging 21st-century Future The Central Insight Of 20th-century Literary And Cultural Theory: That Language And Culture, Along With Their Subsystems And Artifacts, Are Self-referential Systems. The Book Explores The Workings Of Self-reference (and The Related Performativity) In Linguistic Utterances And Assorted Texts, Through Examples Of The More Open Social-discursive Systems Of Post-structuralism And Cultural Studies, And Into The Sciences, Where Complex Systems Organized By Recursive Self-reference Are Now Being Embraced As An Emergent Paradigm. This Paradigmatic Convergence Between The Humanities And Sciences Is Autopoetics (adapting Biologist Hubert Maturana's Term For Self-making Systems), And It Signals A Long-term Epistemological Shift Across The Nature/culture Divide So Definitive For Modernity. If Cultural Theory Has Taught Us That Language, Because Of Its Self-referential Nature, Cannot Bear Simple Witness To The World, The New Paradigmatic Status Of Self-referential Systems In The Natural Sciences Points Toward A Revived Kinship Of Language And Culture With The World: Language Bears Witness To The World. The Main Movement Of The Book Is Through A Series Of Model Explications And Analyses, Operational Definitions Of Concepts And Terms, More Extended Case Studies, Vignettes And Thought Experiments Designed To Give The Reader A Feel For The Concepts And How To Use Them, While Working To Expand The Autopoetic Internee By Putting Cultural Self-reference In Dialogue With The Self-organizing Systems Of The Sciences. Along The Way The Reader Is Introduced To Self-reference In Epistemology (foucault), Sociology (luhmann), Biology (maturana/varela/kauffman), And Physics And Cosmology (smolin). Livingston Works Through The Fundamentals Of Cultural, Literary, And Science Studies And Makes Them Comprehensible To A Non-specialist Audience. The Livingthinglikeness Of Language -- Words And Things -- Thirds And Wing