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The components of an autopoieic system resonate off of one another, creating a continual feedback loop that allows the system to stimulate, or provoke, itself. Using the model to the left, we can imagine that Apple Computer is one component, Microsoft another, and William Gibson a third. They all exist in the same environment, which shares the same data - the data simply has to get to each of them. This flow of data, or information, between each closed component is controlled through limited interconnections between the components and what Niklas Luhmann calls resonance. |
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| Resonance is noise, or disturbance, in a system that begins to echo and feedback amongst the various components within a system. Since Luhmann's ideas on complexity state that each component, when it becomes to complex, will split into a smaller autopoieic system with its own components (and so on - smaller turtles all the way down, larger ones all the way up), the noise of resonance can start at any level of any components and work its way up or down through the system | ||||
| It's helpful to think of resonance as the ripple that is created when a pebble is tossed into a pond. Even though the pebble only connected at a single, specific point of the water, the effect is felt through-out the whole body. Of course, a single ripple forward is a narrative, and resonance does not follow a single, linear point. It is ripples merging and diverging in a complex web of threads that merge toegther into a full genealogy at certain nexus points before then splitting off into separate waves once more.
Once we realize this, we are able to ask what other ripples were creating the particular cultural resonances that existed to combine in the early 1980s. |
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