A Symphony Without a Conductor: Agency, Emergence, and the Transdisciplinary Legacy of Autopoiesis
Mind & Life Europe PodcastShow Notes
Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studies, and eventually, both found themselves stretching out well beyond the confines of their original dissertation topics: Bruno, as one of the world’s preeminent historians of systems thinking, second-order cybernetics, and the Gaia hypothesis; and Martin, as a scholar of emergence, jazz improvisation, neuroplasticity, metaphor, hypermedia, and even the game of chess. Both are colourful examples of the many risks and rewards of interdisciplinary praxis, and of the necessity to lay down a path in walking.
One would be hard pressed to summarise such an eclectic and far-reaching conversation. Interspersed with many a story, our conversation took us through the finer points of agency and autopoiesis, metaphor and meaning, systems theory and jazz improvisation, jagged ontologies and cognitive multiplicities, boundaries and permeability, epistemic humility and surrender. Both bring a high degree of precision to their thinking, supremely attentive to how words and concepts, meaning and cognition, are constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and co-constructed. Above all, they are excellent tour guides to the history of the enactive approach as well as its ethical potential, helping to tease out alternatives to the models of top-down control, sovereignty, and competition. Whether through jazz improvisation or the study of certain intellectual movements, they both have essential insights to offer on how to not let cooperation become co-optation, as William Irwin Thompson put it.
Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science Emeritus at Texas Tech University and a Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. His writings explore critical ecologies of narrative, systems theory, posthumanism, and Gaia theory. His most recent books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Previous monographs include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). More here: brunoclarke.net.
An independent scholar since 2002, Martin E. Rosenberg (U. Michigan 1990) wrote his dissertation on the cultural work across the arts of the scientific concept of “self-organization” or “emergence.” His article “Portals in Duchamp and Pynchon” (1994) was probably the first to explore the aesthetic and political implications of The Embodied Mind (1991). Having addressed the cognitive and scientific epistemological implications of the game of chess, he similarly addresses emergent cognitive behaviors visible in jazz improvisation, and, more generally, how environment and culture affect cognition. He has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French and Hungarian. Originally trained at the Berklee College of Music with 40 compositions to his credit, he performed until recently in the Pittsburgh area. More here: http://independent.academia.edu/martinerosenberg.
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