The Department Down the Hallway: Werner Hamacher in the Cybernetic Age

Abstract: Werner Hamacher is duly recognized as one of the consummate and most original followers in the directions charted out by deconstruction and textual close reading à la Paul de Man. Henry Sussman, in this retrospective appreciation of Hamacher's cumulative contribution, notes a striking anomaly: While Hamacher explicitly manifested skepticism in the extreme toward anything smacking of empiricism, including computers, his intellectual journey was lit up by system-wide apprehension. This in turn forced him into an engagement with such proto-cybernetic and cybernetic phenomena as the distinction between analog and digital organizations, isomorphisms and recursions, strange loops, and autopoiesis. Particularly as these were being developed and embroidered by such fellow time-travelers as Anthony Wilden, Douglas Hofstadter, and Niklas Luhmann; and, in the footsteps of Gregory Bateson. The piece ends in an appeal for interdisciplinary synergy in an age of devastating polarization across the political spectrum and an accompanying misinformed anti-intellectual rage.