When I speak, I rely on the English subject and predicate to make a daily prayer to relative and intrinsic separation. This grammatical structure was first conjured centuries ago by the Peripatetic school using Aristotelian logic. Today, when I intake phenomena and push air through my mouth to crudely fit what I sense into the same old syntax and metaphors, I reflow the past into the present, sending a constant perturbation in our meaning systems. When enough of us do this, we aggregate these values into our Reality––amplifying the boundary conditions of things and beings while placing everything in a Patritus, Bruno, Gassendi, or Newtonian infinite three-dimensional void.
The post-human frameworks often taught as the theoretical basis for contemporary artists’ education differ in their analogies but are similar in their proposal to decenter the human in an attempt to reconcile the displacement of 17th-century Enlightenment-era metaphysics by 20th-century systems science. When I tried to use these theories to create sensorial experiences, I found them fraught. Popular post-humanism frameworks, at their core, propose similar relational ontologies based on systems science. Differences arise when theorists fractalize it through the lenses of their adopted scientific disciplines. This includes Karen Barad’s intra-action from the discipline of physics, Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis and symbiogenesis from biology, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory from sociology.
Although beneficial to helping understand phenomena through network topologies––both epistemologically and pedagogically––the recent “Ontological Turn” in academia still relies on the traditional Kantian subject-object dualism with the Newtonian void assumed by the dominant Western dialectical logic and egocentric spatial frames of reference (FoR) to sense: make sense without placing sense.1 Academia is populated by researchers who build their methodologies and findings from their native egocentric FoR. Hence the popular terms human and nonhuman, and more recently, in an attempt to correct the latter, the human and the more-than-human world, in which the egocentric “I” still stands stubbornly firm as the central point or datum in our FoR.2 Researchers in the field of psycholinguistics tries to alleviate this phenomenon. They have identified three FoRs, intrinsic or egocentric, relative or allocentric, and absolute, which geocentric falls under. Now, we will transverse across them.
Life is characterized by complex adaptive systems recursively interconnecting outwardly and internally across their porous boundaries to maintain autopoiesis, communicate, navigate, learn, and adapt. In a critique of arborescent knowledge topology for its linear and hierarchical structures, like the phylogenetic tree and database structures, Deleuze and Guattari, influenced by Bateson’s biocybernetics, praised the rhizome and its many deterritorialized lines of flight. But the rhizome once thought to be emancipatory, is now commonplace in our networked culture.3 It surges through all parts of our lives, separating and moving us along from app services and bureaucratic state systems to planetary-scale infrastructures. It even leads some to drive into rivers and deserts towards their untimely GPS deaths, though, in his defense, Claude Shannon, whose information theory underlies modern communication systems, did say his information theory was never made to account for analog code, context, or meaning––only signal strength in relation to noise and distance.
As arborescent knowledge structures underpin our contemporary networks, nesting allocentric network topologies into higher orders and composing them into new relationships can help us navigate the current cybernetic circularity. By embracing these new topologies of understanding, we can transcend our existing horizons and their limiting manifestations, including the rhizome, knowledge graphs, PageRank, and nearest neighbor algorithms. Holonic knowledge structures view parts and wholes as interdependent relations persistent across multiple space and time scales, known as heterarchy, enabling us to leverage and traverse our network collections. They assist us in making sense of the multiscalar processes underlying the phenomena we experience while highlighting our methodological limitations and biases. With them, we could dwell longer in pre-ontology or meontology, and interact with and be with phenomena a bit longer than a particular model. When transformed into a socio-technical communication and knowledge structure, the substrate with contextual data ontologies can bring what Nishida Kitarō called worlds-in-world or multiple worlds on Earth, also known as a pluriverse. Before we can do that, we will need a method to locate and embody topos or place.
Ecological gardens, and the ecosystems they mimic, are a bridge from our semiotic world to the logic and attitude of atmosphere, the recursive processes of evolution, the interdependent organization of multi-species, and the rhythms of metastability in non-equilibrium dynamics within a world of complexity. Living beings at this scale resonate with our most fundamental being—within the evolutionarily older parts of ourselves—still unconsciously tied to the ebbs and flows of nature or persistent ancient networks of relations. These are the cells that constitute our bodies and, with our medulla oblongata, are responsible for unconscious processing. They regulate our lungs easily and without self-reflection, allowing us to continuously breathe oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere and expel carbon dioxide to be taken up by our symbionts, the vegetal beings.
Over the years, I have designed and implemented several large-scale agroforestry systems. I think of them as a puzzle made of semiotic, abiotic or non-cellular, and biotic or cellular parts existing in space and occupying sequentially expanding timescales—throughout the day, months, seasons, and years—transforming with ecological succession. The system is latent with its own potential aggregation. Its beingness depends on the amplification, or dampening, of various recursive relationships that stabilize internally and externally to the system’s porous boundaries within the larger enfolding system. I hold this interdependence and dynamism as I arrange relationships to capture maximal energy inputs from the sun, wind, rainfall, biomass, as well as the behavior of animals, insects, fungi, bacteria, and minerals. I circulate and recirculate the exergy as it degrades and transforms through the parts in the network that compose the system. I aim to make the agroforestry system autopoietic, or able to continuously generate relationships, internally and externally, to its porous boundaries and in symbiosis with its environing biosphere.
Out of the different frameworks inspired by information network theories, both biocybernetic and organicism variant, biosemiotics feels closer to the multiscalar environ-logic embodied by these ecological gardens. Biosemiotics is the interpretation of scientific biology through semiotics. It was developed with C.S. Peirce’s materialist triadic semiotics and categories, Jakob von Uexküll’s biological theories, and Gregory Bateson’s biocybernetic theory of mind. It was further developed by molecular biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer.4,5,6 In biosemiotics, all living systems, including cells, bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and even ecological systems, are in the process of semiosis—converting physical signals into signs—inside themselves (innenwelt) and outside themselves (umwelt). Information is seen as the mass of immaterial relations arising from material structures. It exists as a process within Peirce’s triadic sign relations––sign, object, interpretant––and needs an interpreter with cognition or qualities of mind to receive and interpret it. Peirce’s sign systems correlate to his phenomenological categories: firstness, secondness, and thirdness.
Biosemiotics’ interdependent relationality reminds me of the logic and mental models I use to design large-scale forests. It treats biological systems as digital and analog coded information networks in holarchies within heterarchical formations. Thinking and feeling beings navigate through continuous transduction and creative engagement within and across scales while shaping and being shaped by the terrain, including other agents. Each foundational emergent layer consists of their own logic and semiotics, from intercellular signaling processes to animal display, human language, and culture. Within the layers’ porous semiotic and biological boundaries, every living thing, alive with meaning and intention, is interlinked in highly organized formations through semiosis and information. As such, biosemiotics can serve as a materialist, non-positivist bridge from our naturalist and multiculturalist world to a relational and constructivist one attuned to the simultaneous multiscalar processes underlying phenomena we can sense.
A biological agent navigates the terrain and their relationships to others near their umwelten to survive and thrive. Over time, the agent forms a communion with others and their habitat. Their procedural behaviors become habitual and instinctual, allowing them to conserve energy while existing within their niche. Algorithms and AI unleashed by their corporate creators meet and influence us as we navigate, obtain, and send information on the Internet. Their systems enable and amplify selected agents’ behavior. Under the mimicry of infinite selections, our degrees of freedom are limited to sets favored by the companies and the employees who create them. Unaware and lacking semiosis to sense the recommendation engine as a manipulation mechanism, we can’t self-correct, and our being diverted towards new behaviors that solidify into habits and beliefs with daily use.
Through my work helping to reveal the data infrastructures and practices of large Internet companies, I’ve seen firsthand how corporate algorithms are superseding human agency and creating partitioned egocentric echo chambers. Platforms with Internet network dominance choose to amplify emotional content—often extremist views and propaganda—in exchange for engagement, influence, behavioral and personal data, and money.7 It’s a common misconception to think your data is valuable. In actuality, the value is that it enables corporations to manipulate your behavior with others like you (as defined by the corporation and the biases of the people they employ) at scale, leading to the frequent global disruption that occurs faster than we can comprehend or respond to collectively.8
The technology that enframes us, network structures, and our ecological thinking can be traced back to cybernetics, the “science of command and control,” a technoscientific way of producing knowledge through circular relations instead of separation. It arose at the end of WWII to connect and make sense of a world with increasing global interconnectivity amid human organization on a scale never seen before; entities like the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Since then, these technical information systems have grown to a planetary scale, and their emergent structures have strong downward causation: the semiotic, cognitive, social, biotic, and abiotic are entangled. They are increasing their interoperation and signal speed, aggregating towards the speed of thought. These macro systems are deeply embedded and efficient at squeezing the last exergy from non-existent ecological relations, violently forcing clumsy interconnections into the world that spill, exhaust, combust, burn out, and die. Corporations with Internet network dominance keep their technical data infrastructures veiled from scrutiny to prolong exposure and evade responsibility for the negative social effects and eventual system collapse they knowingly create.
Humans, like all beings, evolved in an ecological niche that influenced our morphogenesis, giving us specific physiological sensors and structures, which have become increasingly extended through cyborgian means. Umwelts are interconnected through semiosis, forming constellations of semiotics, interconnecting into the semiosphere. Our culture and language create a common ground in which information can be shared and a Reality grown.9 We can never really experience an objective phenomenal world—just a refraction of it through our bodies and socio-cultural conditions. Our bodies didn’t evolve with senses to take in absolute values or pure sensation.10 Therefore, we must be aware that our sensing is bound to material and immaterial environs so that we may transcend and transverse them, overcoming our predicate enfolded in what Nishida calls the logic of place. We can use Nishida’s absolute framework with a geocentric FoR to adaptively expand the notion of self, others, worlds, and Earth.
Although it is more comprehensive, biosemiotics, like other information network-based theories, still rely on nodes and vectors to build the whole. Suppose you add an English speaker’s default egocentric FoR. In this case, what we experience is without place and is instead relative to our perspective and situation within the network. Orientation and direction are made relative to the self. Projective arrays, expressed as left and right, are sent out from our bodies. Our frame and sense of space move with us when we move as if what we walk past ceases to exist. The past is behind us, and the future lies just a step ahead of us, spatially and metaphorically.
How do we think of unities when we can no longer think of them as composed of individuals or when we relate to the world from an individualistic relative FoR? Psycholinguistic studies propose that a culture’s dominant spatial frames of reference, expressed in language, are situated at the societal level but seep into all other levels of non-verbal coding. An ecosystem or any other phenomenon viewed from an egocentric perspective is more personal, experiential, and localized, no matter what relational metaphor is theorized and “understood” or “kept in mind.” We will always default to being a node in a network floating in a void. The degree of the embodiment is dependent on sociocultural factors facing a particular individual. We will focus our attention on this layer of flexibility between the dominant system and its agents.
If we step out of the network enclosure into one with more degrees of freedom, we will be assisted with the absolute FoR, a fixed, external point of reference based on sociocultural importance, e.g., cardinal direction or cosmology. When we enlarge our de facto coordination system and spatial thinking from the relative egocentric to the absolute geocentric, we move from being the center of the universe and sensing as nodes in a network to carrying the Earth everywhere we go. Our spatial datum moves from the “I,” where what we sense diverges into subject and object––me and the other, outside or inside—to the environment. Relationality does not emit from me or me in relation to you as it did before but instead comes from a fixed agreed upon macro-system, like the Earth or a mental model of the Internet. My feedback closure expands from an operationally closed monologue to incorporate the other in a dialogue enveloped in a predicate—closure is only reached with the other and place. An absolute FoR roots us with our senses in consensual coordinates.
The Balinese can switch across all three spatial frames: intrinsic, relative, and absolute, which geocentric falls under. The introduction of the Indonesian language is thought to have given them the lexicon for left and right and the egocentric FoR. The frame is used by the Balinese in everyday activities but only when it’s concerning the speaker’s body. Geocentric frames, which the Balinese have a clear predilection for, are still preferred when one is trying to converse politely with others. Putting oneself at the center of a conversation, instead of within the larger social and environmental context, is considered too individualistic and extremely rude.11
In cultures with multiple spatial frames, a person can switch their datum point depending on the situation: the body and eating, navigating a room in a house, building a house in your neighborhood, or orienting the body in an inauspicious direction. Anchoring our dominant datum to an environ like Earth creates the ground for a contextual and interlinked scaffolding of worlds and consciousness. The Western world is unique in its reliance on egocentric spatial processing. European countries have an unusually high concentration of egocentric FoRs. About a third of all human cultures, from Mesoamerica to Nepal, do not utilize egocentric spatial processing but default to a geocentric frame of reference. Most Western children have the reverse spatial frame development from children raised in these aforementioned cultures. People who use culturally relevant fixed bearings, such as cardinal directions, send arrays across an agreed-upon set axis agnostic to the observer’s location.
Inside rooms with no environmental reference points, for example, in the wilderness or unfamiliar locations, people who carry the Earth with them wherever they go will orient themselves in cardinal directions and root themselves and other objects on Earth. Within a house, they’ll rely on cardinal directions to move a glass of water on a table, bringing the macro-scale into the micro and the outside into the inside. Whatever deterrents psycholinguistic scientists have used in their studies––humans with predominant geocentric spatial reference frames like the Guugu Yimithirr and Hai—were remarkable in knowing where they were on Earth at all times.
In reaction to the limitations of Neo-Kantian philosophy, Nishida Kitarō, a prominent philosopher in Meji-era Japan, created an organicism and a modern Indigenous philosophy based around a priori knowledge production and place. He called them pure experience and basho, often translated as topos or place. He believed Western concepts of individualization, true Reality, knowledge production, and dialectical thinking were insufficient to sense multiscalar natural phenomena leading to large-scale societal problems.
Nishida attempted to resolve these issues by uniting logic and body and then tethered this joint entity to place. By doing so, Basho helps us climb out of the Boolean void and away from the alienating either/or towards a place of compresence. Understanding their differences will never be enough, though. Nishida believed Western ideas and values were constantly reinforced by the subject and predicate structure common in Indo-European languages. We must therefore create new languages and mental scaffoldings, hence the need for the geocentric FoR, which roots us in an embodied frame where predicate-value logic can occur.
Throughout his career, Nishida scaled his concepts to increasingly higher levels of organization: from individual sensing, or pure experience, to the socio-cultural, with the logic of place or basho, then the transcendental predicate and absolute nothingness. After the First World War, when Nishida realized technology would make nations occupy a more compact international space, he applied his concept of basho to planetary-scale governance to create worlds-in-world. He believed each country had to be given space to realize its historical world, even if nested under a higher level order. He warned the Japanese imperialist government that if countries, including Japan, continued to uphold Euro-American governance systems and their notion of national self-determination—whether Communist or Imperialist—they would continue to cause wars. He was proven right by the outbreak of World War Two.
In this historically tumultuous time, another proposition emerged to establish and stabilize global order—the one we live with today. Bateson believed cybernetics was a reaction and a solution to the breakdown of trust due to poor communication starting with deception at the Treaty of Versailles. He thought cybernetics would be a potential recursive pharmakon. Latent within it was the ability to do more harm than good. It was simultaneously the cure and poison to itself and others. He warned explicitly of the cybernetic manifestations of game theory. He foresaw a world of computers automating government information-gathering and decision-making, eventually making geopolitics into a game of increasingly higher levels of circular causality.
By the late ’60s, Margaret Mead and Heinz Von Foerster noticed the dangers of growing cybernetic systems in society. Mead was alarmed by how quickly the Soviet Union had adopted cybernetic systems in a failed attempt to control everything within its borders and influence things outside of it. She also noticed the increasing automation of social institutions and saw how they made societies less governable. They created second-order cybernetics to make scientists aware of the consequences of observing, intervening, and deploying their scientific methods and scalable technological systems into society and onto others. It was a step away from objectivity and an attempt to hold scientists responsible and accountable.
Second-order cybernetics was not widely adopted in formal science (more so in the social sciences), but their creators’ fears and warnings proved true. Cybernetics led to our global information and communication system. It is growing and amplifying alongside the very problems it was created to rectify. Today, individuals and organizations, including political operatives, pay to access corporations’ network infrastructures and their constantly roving digital agents created to manipulate our behavior and attitudes. They successfully get our engagement to create organization and systemic destabilization through desire and deceit. They input their intent till it outputs the desired attitude at scale. If we don’t overcome our datum of “I” and egocentric dualistic thinking as nodal beings, the manifestation of every system created will always have this “ontology of the enemy” nuclei.12 In this network floating in the Newtonian void, the other can never really be known. They can be interconnected, but we can never truly be interdependent.
Under the shade of tree canopies, a ghost flower (Monotropa uniflora) grows on the dark forest floor. The parasitic flower, semi-translucent and glowing bone white, does not generate food from sunlight like other plants, green from chlorophyll. Instead, the ghost flower utilizes an underground mycelium network to extract nutrients from its photosynthesizing tree hosts without giving back to them. The flower, in a monologue, does not incorporate their enveloping environment into its logic or computation. Like us, they only need a suitable network to access a host or, in our case, resources to survive. In deep shade, ghost flowers face down, growing away from the sun.
If nature is infinitesimally nested, the predicate forms our boundaries and dictates the forces we can sense.13 No matter its initial topology, any new significant technical substrate created from the current dominant power will initially offer hope in its new pathways that create more pathways. The agents and creators will affect these forking paths dictated by their first distinction. The paths will eventually interconnect and settle into layers of relationships. Eventually, the agents’ choices dampen free diffusion and amplify a rigid, positive feedback loop leading to a loss of diversity while increasing polarization.
Our egocentric frame, with its propositional dialectical logic, forms the basis of our first distinction. It lies dormant but gradually leads us into its generative entrenchment—an ouroboros generating another ouroboros to consume the whole. This system, with its parasitic worldview and the nested human agents with different degrees of agency––some more responsible than others––only grows into contracting itself until collapse or a new faster technical substrate takes over and gives us access to new resources or hosts, then restarting and returning us yet again to the conditions we are in today. Without a predicate-value in our dominant modality, we will never reach metastability with our environment or each other.
Second-order cybernetics attempted to overcome dialectical thinking and paradox, specifically Russell’s theory of type, by incorporating the observer as a self-reference within their observation. Considering the body, not just the mind or cognitivism, Nishida has a similar recursive circuit but routes it into a formalized abstract environ, his logic of place. It is the common ground we collectively create that creates. If we bring our awareness here, it reflects back at us.
The frog sitting by the pond is made of cells and molecules, but the frog is not the subject. The context setting Reality is—splash! The observer self-mirrors their consciousness onto everything. Their consciousness reflects and expresses itself in what they objectify, determining the subject. The phenomenon we are calling “frog,” in turn, sits in it. Nishida wants to focus our attention away from the intentional object and pierce through our mirror-world filled with readily appearing subjects. With the development of new languages and an axis in a geocentric FoR, we can reorient ourselves to sense and make sense of the material and immaterial with the predicate-value. Nishida looks for ontological primacy in what becomes the predicate but never the grammatical subject, thereby letting the epistemological define the ontological. His means for transcendence is adaptation through constantly shifting and expanding questioning and learning of frames and levels.
Across the technology industry, iterative development—including kanban, lean, and agile—has become the standard methodology to develop usable products for companies to persist. Hirotaka Takeuchi, a professor of management at Harvard Business School, and Ikujiro Nonaka, an organizational theorist, trace these iterative development origins to Nishida’s pure experience within the logic of place. They explain the formation of tacit and iterative knowledge production as the force behind Japanese companies’ success over Western companies starting after the post-War period and exploding in the 1980s.14 Japanese companies invented new development processes under the force of globalization that were eventually adopted by companies worldwide, displacing the previously dominant Fordism, Taylorism, and waterfall methodologies.
Workers who utilize pure experience operate autonomously and a priori without knowledge of a setting. They self-organize based on internal and external feedback in a dynamic order to make sense of and navigate unstable and non-deductive environments. This way, they incrementally create fitness between products, users, and their environment. The employees have unknowingly practiced Nishida’s pure experience, the individual level of his framework.15 Nishida’s predicate framework has proven to help entities—albeit multinational technology corporations—make sense of, navigate and survive the global complexity created by cybernetics causality. Instead of capitalist technologies, companies, and products, could we apply the same frameworks to ourselves and adopt Nishida’s higher-level worlds-in-world to navigate our socio-technical-ecological crisis and help humans survive with our humanity intact?
Just as a geocentric spatial reference frame centers around the Earth as a fixed point, Nishida’s logic of place emphasizes the significance of a particular socio-cultural grounding in shaping our understanding of the world. His logic of place also contains the absolute nothingness, a level that resets any enclosure. Like the geocentric, the absolute nothingness is an absolute FoR but one with no immediate categorizations, freeing one to temporarily sense through a priori, giving more time to the moment, and allowing us to be with the convergence of phenomena.
Nishida’s logic of place grafted onto geocentric FoRs roots us all in a physical and logical world where predicate-value is in our spatial and logical datum. Together, the logic of place and a geocentric FoR forms a human embodied and cognitive interface between the material and immaterial tether to foundational enveloping forces. The composite framework accounts for downward and upward causation with network topologies. It equips us to easily transverse frames and scales, discover foundational causation, and perhaps even alleviate complementarity. Earth transforms from an endless abstract space to a place. From this embodied perspective, the material and immaterial can be sensed as a complex system of interacting components, including living organisms, physical elements, and processes at various scales on Earth, occurring with or without “I.” This place holds our proposition––it is where we no longer understand questions, especially those “decidable unanswerable questions” or what Forester called the metaphysical postulate, as objectively true or false. Instead, we accept or reject it relative to our context rooted in community-as-Reality, and scale of analysis, always environ by Earth.
If we no longer operate in one universal world and truth or “objectivity,” then lived and action-oriented or implicit ethics become even more important as a force and choice to help regulate the macro system as a constant perturbation from the micro level.
I’ll now remind us of Heinz Von Foerster’s ethical and aesthetic imperative:
Act always so as to increase the number of choices;
If you desire to see, learn how to act.
And now, I’ll invoke a variant:
Where and when you are on Earth, engage your surroundings; both environment and community, and always choose the path that creates more path types towards the worlds you want to see.
Written on the occasion of Casey Tang’s solo exhibition To Carry the Earth at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space.
Footnotes
1J van Cleve and R.E. Frederick, The Philosophy Of Right And Left Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space, 1. ed. 1991, The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, A Series of Books in Philosophy of Science, Methodology, Epistemology, Logic, History of Science, and Related Fields (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands : Imprint: Springer, 1991).
2 The oppositional, relative, and egocentric terms “human” and “nonhuman” echo the popular late 20th-century terms “white” and “non-white.” The latter term was replaced by “citizen of color,” introduced by Martin Luther King in his speech at the 1963 March on Washington. The term eventually settled into the form we know now as a “person of color” or “POC.”
3 “I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years. But most of such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible—usually for cybernetic reasons.” – Gregory Bateson
4 Donald Favareau, Essential Readings in Biosemiotics: Anthology and Commentary (Dordrecht; New York: Springer, 2010).
5 Jesper Hoffmeyer, ed., A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics, vol. 2, Biosemiotics (Springer, 2008).
6 Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination Into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (Scranton: Univ. of Scranton Press, 2009).
7 Karen Hao, “How Facebook and Google Fund Global Misinformation,” MIT Technology Review, November 20, 2021, https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/.
8 Simon A. Levin, Helen V. Milner, and Charles Perrings, “The Dynamics of Political Polarization,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 50 (December 14, 2021): e2116950118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2116950118.
9 Heinz von Foerster, “On Constructing a Reality,” in Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York, NY: Springer New York, 2003), 211–27.
10 Donald Hoffman, “Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem,” Mind and Matter 6 (2008): 87–121.
11 Jurg Wassmann and Pierre R. Dasen, “Balinese Spatial Orientation: Some Empirical Evidence of Moderate Linguistic Relativity,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 689–711.
12 Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry, 1994, 228–66.
13 John H. Holland, Signals and Boundaries: Building Blocks for Complex Adaptive Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012), 18.
14 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, “The New New Product Development Game,” Harvard Business Review, January 1986.
15 Jeff Sutherland, the inventor of Scrum and contributor to the Agile Manifesto, cited the article “The New New Product Development Game” as a keystone in the creation of agile.
— Darrell Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi, “The Secret History of Agile Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, April 19, 2016.