Cybernetic Self and Self-Observation in Email

摘要

Cybernetics provides one fundamental understanding of the way the self is marked and observed. Second-order cybernetics, complemented with the theory of the form of law and autopoiesis, is used in this paper by arguing that the self is the creation of making distinction, which is human performance; and that the self is observed by others as well as self-referentially observed by the self. Concepts of orienting behavior and externalization of knowledge are used while a section is devoted to an understanding of performance. Humans' marking over email is a corpus that shows how the self-observation of self is actually possible.