The Anticommunication Imperative: A Tribute to Herbert Bruen

摘要

In the cybernetic tradition of Heinz von Foerster's imperatives, this paper proposes "the anticommunication imperative": If you seek the new, compose asynchronicity. I draw on narratives credited to Herbert Briin, both written and oral, that have inspired this formulation, of which the importance of anticommunication in the role the arts play in society is central. I connect Herbert's idiosyncratic approach to systems and their stages to the idea of anticommunication as essential for the retardation of their decay. I offer the idea of imperatives as one way of thinking about the design of a desirable society, that is, a network of statements that point to what is not currently the case, but which, if they were the case, would be desirable.