Luhmann famously had it that society is not composed of individual humans. Rather, humans are composed, internally, of three separate, valid systems: life, language, and even the nervous system. What makes these systems valid, for Luhmann, is that they are autopoietic- fully able to reproduce themselves by reproducing their parts, from out of their own dynamics. Such systems are operationally closed: neurons aren't activated by words, but by each other, and DNA requires no words to make proteins. In any case, humans don't appear to count as a valid, autopoietic systems in themselves. If humans are not a system in the sociological systems- theoretic proper, what are they? This paper begins from the premise that we are not autopoietic, that we have no basic part which constitutes our internal dynamics. Instead, we appear to be substrates, or assemblages, for the communications of different systems. Yet we are not simply this locus; rather, I argue we are a "triggering board,"  a "computational device" for networked decision-making. But what does such a theory mean for our identity, and what does it mean for our efficacy in the social sphere? Such a theory redraws the boundaries of what humans are and this redraws our agency. This paper, pace Luhmann, ask how it is that we are lodged in society, but as cybernetic selves. It uses assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennet), theory of the cyborg, and early cybernetic thinkers like Norbert Weiner to redefine the human-environment relation, and thus the concept of the human itself. Ultimately, what is traced is a move from autonomous human subjectivity, to something mechanistic - even machinic in the subject (the system) - and back again, ironically, toward a heightened sense of agency. My paper briefly highlights the historical trajectory of this posthumanist concept of networked, machinic agency by simultaneously tracing the conceptual movement from German Idealist notions of freedom at the onset of capitalist industrialization, to the WW II-era cybernetic revolution of Norbert Weiner, Heinz Von Foerster, and later, Maturana and Varela, etc., and on to the post-war, posthumanist, and late capitalist discovery of subjectivity as effected by surveillance. The paper ends by describing and speculating on the stakes of the interplay between liberal humanist concepts of human agency and the new forms it takes through the internet and media, surveillance technologies, and new cybernetic networks out there and in our everyday technologies.

The ‘Human-in-the-Loop’  has emerged as a controversial figure for thinking the place of human agency and intentionality within automated systems. From its origins in cybernetic schematisations of the ‘man-in-the-middle’ through its subsequent theorisation in ergonomics and human factors research, the human-in-the-loop has more recently emerged within European jurisprudence as a ‘brake’ against ‘run away’ automation, especially in the provision of state welfare services. In this talk I draw from the tradition of Francophone work studies to consider the utility of ‘catachresis’ as a frame for rethinking the ambiguities of the human-in-the-loop, and its potentials for deliberation about and through automated technologies. ‘Catachresis’ is a term drawn from linguistics to describe the ‘misuse’ of language, especially the use of a word beyond or outside the lines of established categorical boundaries. In Francophone work science the term has been used catachrestically to describe the ‘misuse’ of the technologies of the modern workplace, whether in a way that enables the workforce to overcome unforeseen obstacles, or which reveals the ingenuity of the worker in their capacity to creatively reimagine the work process. The development of ‘catachresis’ as a frame for work science was coincident with the emergence of post-structuralist accounts of language as itself inherently catachrestic – as a process of working through the displacement of a fixed and determinable signifier. As large language models come to enter and perhaps remake the field of automated governance and production, the question of the catachrestic nature of the human-in-the-loop becomes newly relevant as a way of thinking the potential for interpreting and intervening in the field of automation as a component of social life.

I propose to model the beginning of my discussion on Georg Simmel’s short essay ‘How Is Society Possible?’ (itself a riff on Kant’s ‘How Is Nature Possible?’), before going on to think in terms of François Laruelle’s concept of nonphilosophy, adapted to nonpoetics. 

 

Can poetry be thought of in terms of texts that are structured like a society? Words, forms, technologies, tones, styles, conventions of production, are just some of the components of a poetic text, all of which must be taken into account by the writer (in a sense I am aligned with Foucault’s notion of the author function: i.e. in seeing the writer as just one of these, however significant).  

 

Thus establishing an initial basis for discussion, I will go on to outline a theory of nonpoetics, and make some gesture to what this implies or means in terms of composition, and reading, in the contemporary.

 

The position of nonphilosophy is that philosophy – regardless of type – assumes an a priori decision of some kind of splitting (eg between presence and difference, in Derrida), as a basis for further dialectical elucidation. Nonphilosophy is interested in avoiding this paradigm, and in creating philosophically uninterpretable theorems. 

 

My concept of nonpoetics, then, is not a rejection of a particular type, or types, of poetics (as considered by Carla Benedetti), but rather a rejection of the presumed relation between the poet and their poetic materials, and the metaphors associated with making (and crafting).  

 

Etymologically, it is a rejection of the Greek basis of the word poem: i.e. ‘poiesis’, as one meaning making, for other linguistic options, such as the Latin-derived ‘verse’, related to ‘turn’. It considers the human writer as a vector, or as a component in an assemblage, which produces (or directs) the poem as language speaking through the keyboard, and as reconstitutions of reading. That is, that poems are as much written by the technologies involved – not just keyboards and computer programs, but also books and other language sources. It gestures towards a posthuman theory of writing, but of one that has always been present in some sense: the historicised posthuman as writer of verse.