Ways of Cybernetic Thinking

Abstract: Cataloging cybernetic thinking shows how the space between what one might think of as "pure" cybernetic application and the study of cybernetics offers a useful path toward understanding how literary studies can engage with cybernetics as a philosophical and intellectual model. This vertical approach folds metadiscourses into more direct engagements with cybernetic ideas and problems and resists the drive for a conceptually and technically unified theory of cybernetic thinking in favor of a multidimensional approach to literary cybernetics. This essay outlines four ways of thinking that have shaped work in literary studies and cybernetics: 1) the analysis of the historical field of cybernetics, 2) transhistorical approaches to cybernetics, 3) the study of cybernetic concepts, methods, and vocabulary, and 4) a focus on epistemologies of failure.