The Post-Cybernetic Organisation, Part III: The Dissolution of Orders

Why adding further orders of cybernetics, a third, a fourth and beyond, cannot solve the observer problem. Counting orders presupposes the very external standpoint that including the observer was meant to dissolve: each new order reinstates the outside it set out to overcome. The way out lies in a different ontology, one in which observer and observed stand in a chiasmic relation that is reversible rather than nested. The paper moves in five steps. It traces what first- and second-order cybernetics achieved, and the assumptions that survived von Foerster's constructivism and Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis. It maps eleven seams where the mechanistic paradigm meets phenomena it cannot hold, across physics, mathematics, cognitive science and computation, and shows that they converge on one crack. Through Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of flesh and chiasm it derives six requirements for a post-cybernetic account: ecstatic temporality, metabolic transformation, autopoietic closure, embodied situatedness, field integration and constitutive finitude. It examines what each level of mathematics, from set theory to the higher categories, requires and what these phenomena refuse it. And it examines its own reception, stating what the resistance to the argument does and does not show, and what would count against the position. This is the third paper of The Post-Cybernetic Organisation. It supplies the ontology beneath From Cybernetics to Chiasm to Category and The Thermodynamics of Organisational Extraction, and opens the ground on which The Membrane Architecture builds. The Post-Cybernetic Organisation:I. From Cybernetics to Chiasm to CategoryII. The Thermodynamics of Organisational ExtractionIII. The Dissolution of OrdersIV. The Membrane Architecture