{"product_id":"between-science-and-literature","title":"Between Science and Literature","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003ci\u003eBetween Literature and Science\u003c\/i\u003e follows through to its emerging 21st-century future the central insight of 20th-century literary and cultural theory: that language and culture, along with their subsystems and artifacts, are self-referential systems. The book explores the workings of self-reference (and the related performativity) in linguistic utterances and assorted texts, through examples of the more open social-discursive systems of post-structuralism and cultural studies, and into the sciences, where complex systems organized by recursive self-reference are now being embraced as an emergent paradigm. This paradigmatic convergence between the humanities and sciences is autopoetics (adapting biologist Hubert Maturana’s term for “self-making” systems), and it signals a long-term epistemological shift across the nature\/culture divide so definitive for modernity.  If cultural theory has taught us that language, because of its self-referential nature, cannot bear simple witness to the world, the new paradigmatic status of self-referential systems in the natural sciences points toward a revived kinship of language and culture with the world: language bears “witness” to the world.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe main movement of the book is through a series of model explications and analyses, operational definitions of concepts and terms, more extended case studies, vignettes and thought experiments designed to give the reader a feel for the concepts and how to use them, while working to expand the autopoetic internee by putting cultural self-reference in dialogue with the self-organizing systems of the sciences.  Along the way the reader is introduced to self-reference in epistemology (Foucault), sociology (Luhmann), biology (Maturana\/Varela\/Kauffman), and physics and cosmology (Smolin). Livingston works through the fundamentals of cultural, literary, and science studies and makes them comprehensible to a non-specialist audience.\u003cbr\u003e\n \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Ira Livingston","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53615925657980,"sku":"9780252072543","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780252072543_b3e5c190-e68b-41a3-9e37-50f9f4b43ee4.jpg?v=1726049464","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/between-science-and-literature","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}