ABSTRACT
Cybernetic fiction is precisely that mode of expression most suited to reveal the essence of technology: at once quite akin to technology itself, since the texts are formed by the applications, ironic or otherwise, of algorithms borrowed from cybernetics – and at the same time, most suited to revealing the truth. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is describing the source of meaning in language in precisely those terms which oppose the cybernetic description of information delivered by a code. Even cybernetics, Michael Polanyi notes, which purports to quantify the information through which observations are communicated, must first distinguish between what is worthy of observation and what is merely random occurrence, that is between pattern and noise. Polanyi builds his argument on the nature of probabilistic statements, on which the whole of physics had been shown to rest. He evolved a coherent, carefully reasoned argument countering the mechanistic view of both the universe and science's description of that universe.
