Abstract

My purpose is to put Brier’s cybernetics in a more integrative relation to my own theory of storytelling. The main argument I want to make is that it is time to integrate storytelling into cybersemiotics. On the one hand, cybersemiotics integrates cybernetics of von Foerster, Maturana, Varela and especially Luhmann with Peirce’s semiotics. In cybersemiotics, living organizations constitute several kinds of autopoiesis and each produces Peircean experiential social-biological interpretants as aspects of life worlds. On the other hand, storytelling also inhabits the life world ‘living story’ relations along with the culture world of retrospective narrative, and antecedent processes I call ‘antenarrative’. The few storytelling references in previous cybersemiotics publications has treated storytelling as language games with semantic content. In this chapter I want to point out ways that storytelling is sociomaterial, biological, and cybersemiotic, and not merely linguistic or cognitive.