Notes on Method

The Fabulous Loop de Loop is built from these elements:

THE FABULOUS LOOP de LOOP

The Fabulous Loop de Loop comprises nineteen chapters. Each chapter examines attempts – from the 1870s to the 1970s – to narrate a new system of knowledge in which the discourse of energy is replaced by the discourse of information. Central to cybernetics was a reassessment of how change and adaptation occur across a wide variety of disciplines such as physics, biology, evolution and ecology. This re-evaluation also reached deep into the humanities, making claims on the discourses of anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and sociology.

I use the term “a” cybernetic discourse to make clear that The Fabulous Loop de Loop describes the site of an epistemological struggle. The term “cybernetics” is far from stable. In The Fabulous Loop de Loop we will see how different thinkers draw on different elements of the past to establish new foundations and project into different imagined futures.

The Fabulous Loop de Loop explores this contested space through seven “feedback machines”. Each machine expresses negative entropy – in so far as they take information from their environment in order to adjust and adapt. The examination of these machines leads us to texts by writers who struggle with the implications of this epistemological shift (from the speculative theories of Samuel Butler, through the “new” psychanalysis of Jacques Lacan, to the countercultures of William Burroughs and video activists Radical Software). Throughout the loop de loop, the polymath Gregory Bateson serves as our guide, as he negotiates the shift from the “outmoded epistemology” in which the nineteenth century energy model reaches the point of exhaustion, toward an “ecology of mind” in which individual choice provides “the difference that makes a difference”..

A PARALLEL TEXT

A Parallel Text runs throughout the The Fabulous Loop de Loop. The text helps situate the The Fabulous Loop de Loop within a broader historical and critical context. The Parallel Text comprises annotations, essays, commentary, synopses, reflections, notes on methodology and extracts of other texts which have a direct relation to The Fabulous Loop de Loop.

Links to A Parallel Text are provided in the margins of The Fabulous Loop de Loop.

A BRIEF RECAP

At key points throughout the text A Brief Recap is provided. These serve to remind or inform the reader of what preceded the current chapter.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

An outline to the chapters is provided here Chapter Outline

INTRODUCTION

This text provides an overall context in which the chapters can be understood. [link]

THE CHAPTERS – THE MACHINES

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