Heinz von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster's outstanding contribution to cybernetics was to consider the subject in its own terms, ie as a cybernetic system itself, subject to the insights, analyses and critiques that cybernetics had already discovered. In so doing he took the discoveries of cybernetics seriously and to an extreme in a manner than no one else had done previously. He also provided a model for the investigation of all systems in which the examiner (the observer) and the examination are part of that system, such a social systems and design.1 He referred to this cybernetics as the »cybernetics of cybernetics,« or »secondorder cybernetics.« Heinz von Foerster's examination of cybernetics in cybernetic terms can be dated, officially, to this description, published in the mid 1970s: »first-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observed systems, second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observing systems.« But long before this he had investigated related notions, particularly self-organisation. And before that, even, as editor of the proceedings of the Macy Conferences, he made sure that cybernetics (which he identified as the subject of the conferences) was intimately allied with the notion of circular causality that was in the title of all the conferences.2 He also gave the title and theme to Margaret Mead's paper »The Cybernetics of Cybernetics.« in which she argued that cybernetics (in the form of the fledgling American Society for Cybernetics) ought to manage itself according to cybernetic principles. Indeed, it is this notion of circular causality, and the formal circularity that it presumes, which is at the heart of cybernetics (as von Foerster's friend Gordon Pask showed in his early cybernetic self-adaptive machines). To recognise this is just another route by which to move towards von Foerster's achievement. In terms of cybernetics itself, the precedence of the (organisationally) circular unifies a plethora of new formulations of which perhaps the most famous are Maturana, Varela and Uribe's notion of »Autopoiesis,« since extended by these authors into the more general concept of »organisational closure« and much borrowed and generalised in its application by others; and Rask's »Conversation Theory,« the model of active and creative dialogical systems.