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Ontogenetic Resilience is the Behaviour of ...

Published onJul 09, 2022
Ontogenetic Resilience is the Behaviour of ...

Ontogenetic resilience is the behaviour of poetry.

[I am going to read] ‘The Two-headed Calf,’ a poem written by Laura Gilpin, published in 1977 (Gilpin, 1977)

The Two-headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother. It is a perfect

summer evening : the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there

are twice as many stars as usual.

Cybernetics is, at its core, poetic. [This is the story we engage with today.] Cybernetics fosters inter-subjectivities. It acts to ‘integrate.’ Life is the model for cybernetics - not vice versa, and thus, within the process of making – as poiesis – we may well integrate a paradox. Like all art that takes life seriously, cybernetics is concerned with agency, and in relation to this, there is a deep concern for both the openness and resonance of form. Cybernetics cares for the fluidity of systems, and as it does care, it acts to balance or undo all actions that aim to dominate or to create fixed hierarchies [those which would require an enforcement from outside the system]. Cybernetics as ‘poiesis' cultivates the future as open. Ontogenetic resilience is the behaviour of cybernetics as ‘poiesis.' 

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