Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Hilton, Craig

96
Figure 1: Billy Apple, Navigation Map: Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma, lambda print  
(image courtesy of the artist; cartography by Sam Davenport). 
Hilton – Branding – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
97
CRAIG HILTON
Branding Artists and Scientists
in which Billy Apple’s Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma 
2006, installed at te tuhi/the mark, Manukau City, is discussed.
Hilton – Branding – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
PeRSPeCTIve
So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.  
(Genesis 20:2)
Lesser black-backed gulls cannot interbreed with herring gulls in Britain. However, they are 
able to mate with their neighbouring continental black-backed gulls and these gulls with their 
neighbours and so on and so forth. This interbreeding continues to connect populations of 
gulls around the North Pole via Siberia to North America and back again to Britain. According 
to taxonomic rules these birds should then share the same name and species allocation. 
However, this reasoning collapses when one notices the end of this ring of interbreeding black-
backed gulls is in fact the herring gull. This herring gull while sharing the same geography 
cannot interbreed with the original black-backed gull. If the individual gull populations around 
the North Pole are looked at closely, it would be observed that these black-backed gulls appear 
less and less like the original black-backed gull and become more and more like a herring 
gull the closer the gull population gets to Britain from the west. 
The concept of species attempts not only to categorise (essentially for our convenience) but 
also to describe function (genetic identity). Evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, and science 
historian, Ernst Mayr defined species as “groups of interbreeding natural populations that 
are reproductively isolated from other such groups.”1 When two organisms breed within a 
species, their combined genetic material passes to their offspring. As a result genes are 
constantly shuffled around individuals belonging to the same species. It is this shared gene 
pool that gives the species its specific identity. By contrast, and by definition, genes are not 
transferred to other species hence we observe inter-species morphological differences. 
However, this concept can only approximately describe the complexity that is hidden within 
and between populations of organisms. The discovery of ring species such as the Larus 
gulls described above, (the Californian Ensatina salamanders or the Himalayan Greenish 
Warblers) challenges the reductionist notion of species. The allocation of species designations 
98 Hilton – Branding – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
exemplifies a kind of pragmatic (rather than positivist) reductionism that is common in biology 
and other sciences.
Historically the study of complex biological systems has (at least initially) necessitated the need 
to apply reductionist methods in an attempt to incrementally approximate an understanding 
of the whole. The reductionist (determinist, materialist) approaches that science (and its 
method) uses to gather knowledge, attracts criticism from those who reject disembodied 
views of the world and the positivist claim that authentic knowledge can only be derived 
through scientific method, i.e. knowledge that is testable. Modernism, which has been seen to 
embrace rather than question science, has been painted with the same brush. Both science 
and modernism are seen to be bourgeois, Eurocentric, and worse still – optimistic. However, 
reductionism is not unique to science. Indeed the methods of science are not unique to 
scientists. Otherwise all, but scientists, would repetitively dine at restaurants that served 
disagreeable food. Scientific method is not even particularly unique to humans: the common 
fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster learns, by experimentation, to find food and avoid danger 
2 as do many other species.
In March 1993, Apple was a passenger aboard the Chiricana, a refrigerated 
cargo vessel transporting a cargo of high quality squash from New Zealand to 
Japan. The Chiricana made a detour from its predetermined course in an attempt 
to avoid an encounter with 9301 Irma, the rapidly escalating storm that was 
deemed to be approaching typhoon proportions. [Billy Apple’s] work documents 
and encodes into art the sequence of events that took place a day out of Napier 
and finished a day before arrival into Osaka. Data generated by ship and storm 
has been collected from the ship’s log book and satellite forecasting by Apple, 
then schematised into the visual, aural and moving image components of this 
installation.3
Naming and measuring is commonplace in all fields and peripheral fields of science, including 
meteorology, cartography, and navigation. These rituals are also performed in museums, 
galleries, encyclopaedias, and cabinets. In music, notes are assigned to certain tones. 
Time is also labelled, numbered and ordered. Of course the world is not discontinuously 
distributed. Forcing the world into qualitative classes may be more an art than a science but 
it seems to be a habit of both disciplines. Intermediates are avoided for aesthetic, not just 
pragmatic reasons. An ocean might have little useful information or visual interest until it is 
superimposed with lines and numbers dividing its otherwise fluid surface. Rules are made, 
lines drawn, and labels are assigned. A certain pleasure can be experienced in the act of 
naming and measuring. Ordering matter in space and time helps make sense of an otherwise 
chaotic and unnerving universe. By cataloguing experience, it can be understood and from 
that, it is commonly agreed among us as to what that experience was.
Artists, although less restricted than scientists, also source and appropriate before ordering, 
arranging and installing their material. In Billy Apple’s work, clean categorical distinctions 
are generally hard to maintain. In particular, art, design and marketing are no longer 
discrete, generating a degree of discomfort for those who hold dear one or other of these 
distinctions. Art, science and technology are often intermingled. When humans adapt to, and 
99
even manufacture their own environments, distinctions between organism and environment 
become less well defined. In the act of branding himself Billy Apple, the separation between 
artist and art is lost.
In Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma, Billy Apple first appropriates methodology and then orders 
according to a mixture of set rules and rules of his own invention. In the act of drawing and 
redrawing lines, he also blurs these boundaries. Any distinction between art and cartography 
or meteorology become disturbed. In this way the continuum begins to manifest itself again in 
our consciousness. Data sourced from navigational, oceanographic and meteorological charts 
are reordered, renamed and reinstalled on gallery walls and floors. Here, this act of ordering 
becomes part of the human continuum. This is further emphasised by the re-emergence of 
STS 9301 Irma as four different manifestations 4-7 to date.
Recently in biology, advances in technology have allowed the development of more holistic 
approaches where large amounts of data can be acquired and analysed as a whole in order 
to better understand complex systems. The recognition that reductionist approaches tend 
to fail, because of complexity and redundancy inherent in any biological system, has led to 
the development of fields such as systems biology and bioinformatics making genome-level 
analysis possible. Prior to these developments, biologists concentrated on single genes and 
proteins, knowing these to be important initial steps in understanding the overall life process. 
This simple, linear approach to experimentation might give observers the impression that 
scientists are not concerned with the bigger picture.
The big picture, however, can reveal limits of human perception even with all its technological 
augmentation. Journalist John Horgan and some other observers of science postulate that 
science is reaching the end of its ability to make new discoveries. Horgan discussing what 
he calls “ironic science” pointed out that many new theories, particularly in physics, cannot 
possibly be verified by experiment. 8 
Some of the most prominent scientists in the world traffic in hypotheses that are 
remarkably postmodern in character. I like to call this type of theorizing ironic 
science. The concept of irony is central to that wellspring of postmodernism, 
literary criticism...The job of a literary critic is...not to pin down the true meaning 
of the text – an impossible task – but to invent new meanings, ones that 
challenge received wisdom and provoke further dialogue. Similarly, ironic science 
advances hypotheses that, while often profound, should not be considered 
literally true.9
If we are truly cognisant of the futility of science to achieve anything but a rough (but useful, 
nevertheless) approximation of the world, perhaps the tower of Babel need not be struck down. 
Could it not just stand forever reaching for an infinite and impossibly complex sky? On the 
ground, the alternative as we know is a lot of anxious postmodern babbling. An evolutionary 
biologist would say that we only know what we need to know. We are animals, designed by 
natural selection, not for discovering the deep truths of the universe, but for survival and 
breeding. Earthworms with their limited perceptual apparatus move away from unfavourable 
and towards favourable situations. They are negatively photo-taxic, and so avoid light where 
hungry birds may see them, and move towards where they might find food. They live in a world 
Hilton – Branding – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
100
where to survive they only need to understand simple stimuli, and so have simple knowledge. 
But perhaps they wonder about more complex things just as we wonder. Seeking more 
knowledge, we build towers, telescopes, and particle accelerators and discover the limits of 
our perceptual abilities. Peering from below into higher dimensions we see mere diagrams, 
projections and shadows. However, they are interesting and sometimes useful diagrams, 
projections and shadows; diagrams, projections and shadows that many of us would find it 
hard to live without.
If a shadow is a two-dimensional projection of the three-dimensional world, then the three-
dimensional world as we know it is the projection of the four-dimensional universe.10
 1  Ernst Mayr, Systematics and the Origin of Species (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). 
 2 Yadin Dudai, “Properties of Learning and Memory in Drosophila melanogaster”, Journal of Comparative 
Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology, 1976, 114: 69-89.
 3 Mary Morrison (2005) at http://window.auckland.ac.nz/archive/2005/03/onsite.php as last accessed 
on 21 May 2007. 
 4 Billy Apple, Typhoon Irma 9301 (Wellington: Hamish McKay Gallery, 1998). 
 5 Billy Apple, Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma (Hamilton: Waikato Museum of Art and History, 
2002).
 6 Billy Apple, Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma (Auckland: Onsite + Online, 2005).
 7 Billy Apple. Severe Tropical Storm 9301 Irma (Manukau City: te tuhi/the mark, 2006). 
 8 John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age 
(London: Abacus, 1996). 
 9 John Horgan, “Postmodern irony may be profound, but it’s strange science”, International Herald 
Tribune, 17 July, 1996. 
 10 See Joan Prosyniuk (ed.), Modern Arts Criticism, Vol 2, Biographical and Critical Guide to Painters, 
Sculptors, Photographers and Architects from the Beginning of the Modern Era to the Present (Detroit: 
Gale Research Press, 1991). 
Craig Hilton is a New Zealand scientist, artist and educator. After completion 
of a PhD in Genetics and Biochemistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand, 
he took a position at Harvard Medical School and later at the University of 
Massachusetts as an oncologist and immunologist. He returned to New Zealand 
in 2003 and completed an MFA at the University of Auckland, Elam School of Fine 
Arts. Various international journals have published his medical research findings. 
Craig Hilton’s interests include the use of photography and other media to investigate 
the relationships between the photograph and the viewer and to explore the 
intersections and interactions between science and art, technology and biology.
Hilton – Branding – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007


English

Branding Artists and Scientists

Lonie, Bridie

 125
REVIEW
Karen Armstrong,  
A Short History of Myth; 
Margaret Atwood,  
The Penelopiad: The Myth 
of Penelope and Odysseus;
Jeannette Winterson,  
The Weight.
(Edinburgh, New York, Melbourne: 
Canongate, 2005)
By Bridie Lonie
China-Blue is a film that critiques the 
exploitation of labour in China’s blue-jeans 
factories through following a small group of 
girls as they work toward a delivery deadline.1 
The central girl in this group supports herself 
– until she becomes too tired even for that 
–  by thinking of herself as the heroine of one 
of the myths she was brought up with. She 
re-tells herself myths of strong warrior women 
and tries to make a form of play of the hard 
details of her life. In  a world where the desire 
for material objects provide the impetus for 
most of the narratives we live by – marketing, 
war, love – the word ‘myth’ might seem 
atavistic: it implies something regressive, 
counter to this age’s imagination. But of 
course it isn’t. As structuralist anthropologists 
pointed out in the 1950s , we are drawn into 
our desires and ideological positions by the 
connective tissues of cultural beliefs. This 
girl’s strategy was wise in its time. But other 
myths – presented in the forms of advertising 
– support the industry that exploits her. 
The Myths is a series of novella-sized 
rewritten myths with an introductory text 
on myth by Karen Armstrong. The following 
writers will participate in the series:  Chinua 
Achebe, A S Byatt, , David Grossman, Milton 
Hatoum, Victor Pelevin, Donna Tartt and 
Su Tong. To date two have been published, 
those by Margaret Atwood and Jeannette 
Winterson. The series has been reviewed 
wisely and wittily by Claude LaLumiere who 
likes Atwood’s take, dislikes Winterson’s 
and argues that Armstrong’s biases are (in 
my summary) ivory-towered, classist and 
Euramerican-centred. 2 
Armstrong’s previous works engaged with 
the histories of different world religions and 
her concern is with the myth as explanatory 
text. She cites the work of Karl Jaspers, who  
proposed a historical sequence that moved 
from creation myth to myths which dealt 
with increasing civilisation and the need 
for codes of behaviour, the “Axial Age” to 
the “Post-Axial” period, in which mythic and 
historical characters met in the figures of 
the Abrahamic religions. She characterises 
today’s thought as based on “logos”; a 
desire for a pragmatic truth and logic which 
alienates myth. She conveys clearly and 
swiftly a movement from stories which deal 
with relations between humans and animals, 
land, food and death to those which consider 
– and are increasingly implicated in – the 
power structures of the societies which live 
by them. Myths provide those structures with 
their motivational force. The movement from 
pantheons of gods to monotheistic religions 
is explained. Her discussion ends with the 
novel positioned as today’s primary form of 
mythic communication. 
Perhaps the novel is the primary form in which 
mythic narratives are written but it is certainly 
not the primary form in which they occur. 
Visual forms have to a large extent overtaken 
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
 126
the written work, though the latter remains 
significant with regard to mythic narrative. 
Visual reworkings of mythic structures 
include most digital games, in which a hero 
tracks through various kinds of dangers and 
is pursued by various kinds of opponents. 
Film, television, reality television, computer 
games – they all operate using the kinds of 
standard tropes familiar in mythic forms. They 
are also very frequently explicitly referenced 
as tales of origin from any number of cultures 
finding themselves on screen. And histories 
such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses – wherein 
animals and humans morph into one another 
– remain useful for screenwriters. What the 
written text does is to enable the reader to 
populate the images presented with their 
own imagined forms, bringing the unfamiliar 
to the familiar. 
Characteristic of play in film, television, reality 
television and computer games is the use 
of a persona or avatar and their movement 
into a story line. Discussions of narrative 
concerning issues such as metaphor and 
desire in contemporary writing on these 
media  suggest that there are templates or 
programmes for stories that succeed. Cultural  
narratives have – for example – tended to be 
aligned to religion, with love and war coming 
soon after. Armstrong explains this sequence 
clearly and it could be seen as encapsualated 
in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (frequently 
re-translated and filmed). However, these 
are virtually ignored as they do not deal 
explicitly, or in the correct time-frame, with 
a re-thinking of religion; instead they recall 
earlier histories, rewriting in themselves what 
were already archaic oral traditions. 
Margaret Attwood’s Penelopiad retells the 
story of Odysseus from his wife’s position. 
Odysseus went to war for ten years and then 
spent ten years on his return in punishment 
for his role in the siege of Troy and for tricks he 
played on the progeny of the gods.  Today it is 
customary to describe ‘Homer’ as a composite 
character. However, the two texts  attributed to 
his name are consistently concerned with the 
driving force of events and the interventions 
of the gods in them. They convey the idea 
of actions and consequences through the 
delineation of typological characters, whose 
chief attributes become in a way their entire 
character. Odysseus is cunning, Penelope 
is faithful. His heroes’ concerns are equally 
generic: love, war, fighting for one’s home, 
exile and return. Events are described with 
a focused realism that explains the stories’ 
durability.  The characters are placed against 
clearly described situations, with details of 
land and harvest, war technologies, and 
navigation. 
Not surprisingly, Margaret Attwood rewrites 
the story of Penelope from a woman’s point of 
view. After her death, Penelope speaks from 
Hades where the shades of the protagonists 
are visible and occasionally communicative. 
She describes her birth as the child of a naiad, 
and her father’s attempt upon her life, based 
on a misreading of a prophecy around the 
weaving of a shroud. Then there is the long 
wait for her husband’s return, her strategies 
for putting off the suitors who would claim her 
inheritance and her life among the women in 
the women’s quarters. Attwood focuses her 
text on the horrific incident of the hanging 
of twelve handmaidens on her husband’s 
return, killed at the same time as Odysseus 
had the unwanted suitors who had used her 
wealth for years killed.What did this horrific 
incident, clearly described but with scant 
comment, mean in the wider context of the 
myth? 
Homer describes in unpleasant detail how 
Telemachus, their son, loops these women 
up on a single chord and hangs them, their 
feet twitching. Attwood’s slightly dry analytical 
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
 127
style is appropriate: Penelope’s grief at the 
hanging of the maids is a sentence long, 
her grief real but her next action being her 
real concern. The maids never achieve 
individuality, but are moved to the function 
of the chorus line, which offers alternative 
readings. Were the maids the witnesses 
of Penelope’s unfaithfulness or were they 
the victims of her calculated but necessary 
strategies of deception? Attwood’s text also 
acknowledges the argument that the story 
holds within its weave the destruction of the 
matriarchal religions, and that the twelve 
maidens were Penelope’s priestesses. The 
myth’s strength: its vivacity and in some 
ways its very ambiguity, allow a new reading 
that makes it relevant for today’s concern 
with motivation and with the complexities of 
women’s ambiguous relations with their roles 
within marriage. 
Taking a different approach, Jeannette 
Winterson risks the exploration of the 
subjective voice, that very element which 
tends to take a narrative too close to the 
individual response to function as a generic 
or universal tale. Atlas holds up the world, 
but Herakles needs him to pick the golden 
apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, 
and he escapes once, but is tricked into 
assuming the burden again. The rewriting 
explores the gradual lightening of that burden 
in the context of the exploration of space: 
emotional, metaphorical and actual. Unlike 
Attwood, Winterson allows herself to move 
into the introspective, analytical narrative 
voice that is almost entirely absent from 
what is usually characterised as ‘myth’. I liked 
this, though Claude Lalumiere found it self-
indulgent.3  However, as Winterson engages 
with relations between people; the ethics of 
using animals for experimentation; and the 
ways in which scientific description can also 
be understood imaginatively, her concern 
with different kinds of moralities and with 
re-inventions of world-views do partake of 
the qualities of myth. 
Karen Armstrong’s position is astonishing in 
its lack of acknowledgment of the persistence 
of the mythic in the world of the media. 
The startling thing about stories is their 
recognisability and the listener’s ability 
to insert her/himself into them, through 
what was in childhood called ‘play’ and 
what adults call ‘culture’. That is what 
the young protagonist of China-Blue was 
doing as she worked to sustain her spirit 
through identification with the persona of 
a young warrior who supports her parents. 
Unfortunately, it is what most advertisers 
also do when they ask us to identify with the 
beautiful home-maker, the warrior, and the 
seeker after ‘quality’. 
 1 China-Blue, directed by Micha X Peled, 
Teddy-Bear Films, 2005, see http://www.
teddybearfilms.com/ last visited on 27 
August 2006.
 2 http://www.locusmag.com/Indexes/
OnlineBkMagReviews.html last visited on 
26 August 2006.
 3 http://www.locusmag.com/Indexes/
OnlineBkMagReviews.html last visited on 
26 August 2006. 
Bridie Lonie is the Head of the School of 
Art, Otago Polytechnic/Te Kura Matatini ki 
Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. She is a 
writer and has completed a master’s project 
on theoretical frameworks for the art therapy 
encounter. 
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006


Review: Karen Armstrong, "A Short History of Myth"; Margaret Atwood, "The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus"; Jeannette Winterson, "The Weight". (Edinburgh, New York, Melbourne: Canongate, 2005)

Cubitt, Sean

 11
SEAN CUBITT
Systems: A Critical Introduction
The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy tends towards a state of rest. Water
flows downhill. Deprived of life, a human body tends towards the horizontal, and after a while
resolves into its constituent molecules. What is lost in this process is not energy itself –
which according to the First Law can neither be created nor destroyed. What is lost is
information: the information that tells cells to replicate, or humans to walk. Systems theory
was born of a realisation that entropy – the tendency of information to dissipate – is a critical
aspect of any system, from cells to galaxies, and embracing human communication, psychology
and society. Systems theoretic work extends from exobiology1  to cognitive science, and its
applications range from traffic management to minimalist composition. Its terminology has
entered everyday life: feedback loops, the double bind, signal-to-noise ratio, black box . . . And
like most systems, it has evolved.
Shannon and Weaver’s first theorisation2  was a mathematical solution to an engineering
problem: how to accommodate the massive increase in telephone traffic as the USA, post
World War II, encouraged intense suburbanisation. During the first period of systems theory,
then popularly known as cybernetics, the analysis provided by Shannon and Weaver informed
not only communications engineering but communication generally: military technologies,
psychology,3  the life sciences and sociology.4  The second phase – inaugurated by Maturana
and Varela’s autopoetic thesis5 — embraces the pioneer ecology of von Foerster6  and the
social theory of Niklas Luhmann7  and was associated with the raise of ecological thinking:
the conception of life not as a collection of organisms but as complex and mutually
interconnected processes. Some of these are biological, some meteorological, some geological,
locked into mutually integrated and ordered systems. For Maturana and Varela, individual
systems, like an individual human body, reacted to inputs from other systems – other bodies,
other environments – with a constant tendency to self-organise in the interests of maintaining
themselves. The third period began with Prigogine’s Nobel Prize-winning work in chemistry,8
the highly current variant known as chaos or complexity theory. This periodisation, derived
from N Katherine Hayles,9  suggests that the first period’s almost obsessive concern with
homeostasis – the tendency of systems to maintain themselves in a state of equilibrium –
Cubitt – Systems: A Critical Introduction – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
12 Cubitt – Systems: A Critical Introduction – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
coincides with Cold War paranoia and the desire to maintain the status quo after a half-
century of warfare. Complexity coincides with the epoch of market globalisation. Nonetheless,
systems theory is rather more than an ideological expression of an epoch.
For Shannon and Weaver,10  articulate communication lies sandwiched between randomness
and repetition. Too much of either, and the message becomes either noise or repetition. They
provided a mathematical expression based on probability: the information content of a
message could be described as a balance between zero probability (no hierarchy of likelihood
to guide the receiver) and infinite probability (any message could be entirely predicted, and
therefore contained nothing new, no information). Extended to the cosmic scale of the laws of
thermodynamics, the universe lies in an equilibrium state between boiling away into random
jostling or freezing into a crystalline lattice. Reflecting a shift from the talismanic technologies
of the past – the clock for Newtonian mechanics, the steam engine for the Victorians, and
indeed for Wiener – towards the computer and, increasingly, the global network of computers,
systems theory has by now become synonymous with human and social potential, with
ecologies and the utopian expectations of the internet. Nonetheless, like the structuralism it
inspired, systems theory has a major drawback: the difficulty it has in accounting for change.
Homeostatic and autopoetic models share the problematic of identity. A system must first
and foremost maintain itself, a problematic shared by much contemporary psychology with
its premise that mind and brain, necessarily individual, are coextensive. More social theories
of psychology, suggesting that mind might be better understood as inter- rather than intra-
personal, are characteristically more systems-oriented, for example in the social systems
theory of Luhmann11  who nonetheless insists on strong boundaries dividing such neighbouring
social systems as law, polity, economics and media, each of which interacts with the others
without, however, losing its integrity or its internally driven systemic processes.
Complexity theory seems far more suited to descriptions of dynamic systems. Yet its
enthusiastic adoption among right-wing free market ideologies suggests that its apparently
anarchistic propensities may ride closer to Stirner than to Kropotkin. On a more theoretical
plane, the emergence of order from turbulence, while offering powerful accounts of certain
physical processes, does not give a clear understanding of how, when and where boundary
states between chaos and system are formulated or crossed, for example in complexity’s
accounts of evolution. Murray Bookchin12  is not alone in questioning the prominence given to
random mutation as the key or sole motor of evolution. Nor is it entirely clear from human
history that less-organised societies always progress towards more organised forms (presuming
here that tyranny is less organised than democracy). The most highly developed and complex
participant democracies from free Barcelona of 1937 to the marae (Maori meeting places) of
Aotearoa have been meticulously destroyed or, in more systemically enlightened times, so
heavily circumscribed as to be debarred from power. Meanwhile, market capitalism is scarcely
embarrassed by its overwhelming tendency towards monopoly. Near-universal trade
agreements, technological standards, scientific and engineering principles testify to a de-
differentiating trend at least equal to the differentiating qualities of globalisation. To the extent
that information is, in Bateson’s phrase, ‘a difference that makes a difference’,13  these
 13
homogenising tendencies reduce the amount of information and therefore the level of
complexity in global systems. Posed as a systems theory of change, complexity theory thus
requires a source of new information to counterbalance and ultimately overwhelm the entropic
tendencies of globalisation. This it finds in what it perceives as the random jostling of millions
of economic acts of exchange. This random aggregation of events produces information to
the extent that minor fluctuations can bring about massive consequences, on the model of
the butterfly and the typhoon.
There are two problems with this account. Firstly, such fluctuations, which escape
measurement or prediction, are therefore by definition unknowable. It follows that no purposive
action, which definitionally is known, has the power of the unknown, the random and the
irrational. Such a belief has clear consequences for political life, and therefore also for any
definition of order. The second problem concerns this definition. Turbulence is distinguishable
from order by the excess of unpredictable and chaotic activity it names. Complexity theory
posits such chaotic states as the hinterland between lower and higher levels of order. Such
ordered states share with homeostatic systems the qualities of self-generation and self-
maintenance. This kind of order might then, for example, be expected to arise in the
contemporary movement from national to regional and global governance, in the form of
treaties, shared intelligence, mutually transparent trading and reporting practices, standards
of accounting and so on. Yet we have already seen that the construction of the global economy
– and the same can be argued of the global polity – proceeds by homogenising and de-
differentiating, and to that extent lowering the level of order in the system. Order is by nature
more predictable than chaos, but therefore events occurring in an ordered system carry a
lower quantum of information. Ironically the turbulent is unknowable even though it has more
information content because the laws of probability regulating prediction have lowered validity
in a noisy environment than in a homeostatic one. In short, complexity, like ‘the invisible hand
of the market’, surrenders the human capacity to make history, not just the conditions under
which it is made which, as Marx famously observed, we have never controlled.
The immense contributions of complexity theory to the physical sciences, to generative-
transformational linguistics, and to the philosophy of technology notwithstanding, there is a
sense in which systems theory vibrates sympathetically with the more pessimistic
postmodernisms of ‘the end’,14  with Bush and Howard’s neo-liberalism no less than Blair and
Clark’s Third Way. At the same time there is a vast amount to gain from the work of systems
theory, as long as it is understood in relationships with the other aspects of material existence.
In my own field of media studies, for example, information (as homeostasis and change,
whether entropic or emergent) exists in two modes: the codes, conventions, styles, broadly
speaking the techniques which audiences extrapolate from media; and the data audiences
feed back through the distribution chain to producers in the form of market research data
and of box office and sales returns. In the former case, information is produced in the labour
of attention paid by audiences to products; in the latter from the feedback loops in which
product is delayed or deleted differentially in different markets. In distribution, markets and
audiences are defined according to their likely consumption patterns, and market and financial
data are returned differentially to different production centres and investors. As technique,
Cubitt – Systems: A Critical Introduction – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
14
information speaks to the equilibrium of novelty and formula, as data to the preservation of
privilege, power and wealth through the management of media and financial flows. In other
words, information as technique relates to the organisation of mass and energy in media
objects; while as distribution it speaks to the organisation of exchange in space and time.
This local example helps place information in relation to the physical and dimensional aspects
of material reality. From the Second Law of Thermodynamics we know that information has
an energy cost; and from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that extracting information alters
the dimensional relations of momentum and velocity. Material reality depends on information,
but equally on space, time, mass and energy. Loose analogies with a single theme of
contemporary science are suggestive, illuminating ways of revisioning the objects of social
and human sciences, but they are neither value-free nor necessary. Deleuze and Guattari
use systems theory to generate core concepts of their political philosophy in Capitalism and
Schizophrenia,15  an indication of the philosophical imagination that systems theory can
promote. Their arguments differ strongly from those of Luhmann, insisting on the primacy of
flow over his belief in the primacy of boundaries, and so developing a theory of both political
and psychological change otherwise so difficult to produce from theories grounded in
homeostasis. At the same time, though Deleuze and Guattari were also devotees of chaos
theory, as political philosophers they are far more alert to the blockages that produce inequality,
oppression and misery than the laissez-faire complexity theories of Wired magazine’s Kevin
Kelly16  and Nicholas Negroponte.17  Joseph Stiglitz18  argues that their market model only works
if all agents are perfectly informed, a systems-theoretic response to a crisis in the system to
which too much systems theory is blind.
Lacking a dialectical or scientific theory of the relations between space and time, early versions
of systems theory and more simplistic applications of complexity theory founder on the problem
of change. Information alone is formless and immaterial: it needs dimensions and materiality.
As the most recently discovered quality of the physical universe, information is both exhilarating
and immature: a teenager, in fact. All the more reason to engage with it, but to do so with a
sense that this fiery adolescent needs to form solid relationships before it can attain its
mature potential.
1 JK Beatty, C Collins Peterson and A Chaikin (eds), The New Solar System (4th edition), (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999).
2 CE Shannon and W Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1949).
3 G Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and
Epistemology (London: Paladin, 1973).
4 N Wiener, Cybernetics or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1948); N Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (London:
Free Association Books, 1950).
5 HR Maturana and F Varela, Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, NL: D
Reidel, 1980).
6 H von Foerster, Observing Systems, (2nd edition), (Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1984).
Cubitt – Systems: A Critical Introduction – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004
 15
7 Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jnr with Dirk Baeker (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
8 I Prigogine, and I Stenghers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Flamingo,
1988).
9 NK Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
10 Shannon and Weaver, The Mathematical Theory.
11 For example, N Luhmann, Love as Passion:The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and
Doris L Jones (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986).
12 M Bookchin,The Philosophy of Social Ecology (revised), (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996).
13 Bateson, Ecology of Mind, 428.
14 See J Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996); F Fukuyama, The
End of History and The Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); P Virilio, Cybermonde: la politique du
pire, entretien avec Phillippe Petit (Paris: Textuel/Seuil, 1998).
15 G Deleuze and F Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I) (Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1972); G Deleuze and F Guattari, Mille plateaux (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie II) (Paris: Editions de
Minuit, 1980).
16 K Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: 4th Estate, 1994).
17 N Negroponte, Being Digital (London: Coronet, 1995).
18 J Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002).
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato in
New Zealand. His most recent book is The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2004). He is
currently writing a book on ecomedia, and co-editing a collection on The Lord of the
Rings movies.
Cubitt – Systems: A Critical Introduction – Junctures, 2, Jun 2004


Systems: A Critical Introduction

Araujo, Duarte

Davids, Keith

Embodied Cognition and Emergent Decision-Making in Dynamical Movement Systems

Goldstein, Ellen

 45
ELLEN GOLDSTEIN
A Ton of  Flesh
inspired by the book The Town that Lost a Ton Using the Buddy System
It began with small losses:
a pound for every cookie left uneaten,
three pounds for each meal skipped,
the slow drone of flesh draining away.
They set up a network
of informers, a buddy system
to encourage them: “You take
up too much space,
no one wants you anymore.”
And so they ate only lettuce
without dressing and sipped
laxative shakes for breakfast,
spent hours on a machine
running nowhere.
Hunger became success
as they shed hips, breasts,
and thighs like old clothes
they no longer wore.
Their husbands began to look
right through them, their children
had nothing to hold anymore.
Only their buddies could want them now.
What town can afford to lose
two thousand pounds of human flesh?
Does the town grow lean like its women?
A ghost town populated by skeletons
and the empty rattle of diet soda cans.
Ellen Goldstein has had poems published in the Southern Poetry Review, The
Formalist, and in pettycoatrelaxer.  She is an MFA candidate at Emerson College in
Boston, Massachusetts.
Goldstein – A Ton of Flesh – Junctures, 1, Dec 2003


"A Ton of Flesh"

McKinlay, Pam

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 12:island

Muller, Sandra

Survivor: Wom-po Island – A Review of Letters to the World, an Anthology of Women’s Poetry Written, Compiled, and Edited by Members of the Wom-po Listserv

Hauber, Jorg

Evaluating Advanced Video-Conferencing Interfaces for Remote Teamwork

Hokowhitu, Brendan

Voice and the Postmodern Condition

Roach, David

Eagan, Andrea

The Equivocal Definition of Indigeneity and Ambivalent Government Policy toward Self-Determination in New Zealand’s Health and Foreign Policy Apparatus

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