Self-reference is a concept that involves referring to oneself or one's own attributes, characteristics, or actions. It can occur in language, logic, mathematics, philosophy, and other fields.
In natural or formal languages, self-reference occurs when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/ ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist, and literary critic. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical works feature bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. Beckett is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century, credited with transforming modern theatre. As a major figure of Irish literature, he is best known for his tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot (1953). For his foundational contribution to both literature and theatre, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
During his early career, Beckett worked as a literary critic and commentator, and in 1930 he took up a role as a lecturer in Dublin. He wrote his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932, which influenced many of his later works, but it was not published until after his death. Around this time, Beckett also began studying artistic expressions and art history, particularly of paintings displayed at the National Gallery of Ireland. He maintained a close friendship with Irish writer James Joyce throughout his life, and cited him as a major inspiration for his works. As a resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English, sometimes under the pseudonym Andrew Belis. His later literary works, especially his plays, became increasingly austere and minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. During the Second World War, Beckett became a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.
The 1990s (often referred and shortened to as "the '90s" or "the Nineties") was the decade that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999. Known as the "post-Cold War decade", the 1990s were culturally imagined as the period from the Revolutions of 1989 until the September 11 attacks in 2001. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of Russia's status as a superpower, the end of a multipolar world, and the rise of anti-Western sentiment. China was still recovering from a politically and economically turbulent period. This allowed the US to emerge as the world's sole superpower, creating relative peace and prosperity for many western countries. During this decade, the world population grew from 5.3 to 6.1 billion.
The decade saw greater attention to multiculturalism and advance of alternative media. Public education about safe sex curbed HIV in developed countries. Generation X bonded over musical tastes. Humor in television and film was marked by ironic self-references mixed with popular culture references. Alternative music movements like grunge, reggaeton, Eurodance, K-pop, and hip-hop, became popular, aided by the rise in satellite and cable television, and the internet. New music genres such as drum and bass, post-rock, happy hardcore, denpa, and trance emerged. Video game popularity exploded due to the development of CD-ROM supported 3D computer graphics on platforms such as Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and PCs.
Confessional writing is a literary style and genre that developed in American writing schools following the Second World War. A prominent mode of confessional writing is confessional poetry, which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Confessional writing is often historically associated with Postmodernism due to the features which the modes share: including self-performativity and self-reflexivity; discussions of culturally taboo subjects; and the literary influences of personal conflict and historical trauma. Confessional writing also has historical origins in Catholic confessional practices. As such, confessional writing is congruent with psychoanalytic literary criticism. Confessional writing is also a form of life writing, especially through the autobiography form.
Confessional writing usually involves the disclosure of personal revelations and secrets, often in first-person, non-fiction forms such as diaries and memoirs. Confessional writing often employs colloquial speech and direct language to invoke an immediacy between reader and author. Confessional writers also use this direct language to radically reduce the distance between the speaker-persona of a text and the writer's personal voice. Confessional writing can also be fictive, such as in the hybrid form of the roman à clef.
Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is a personality disorder characterized by paranoia, and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. People with this disorder may be hypersensitive, easily insulted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases. They are eager observers and they often think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, potentially not appreciating other interpretations or evidence.
They tend to be guarded and suspicious and have quite constricted emotional lives. Their reduced capacity for meaningful emotional involvement and the general pattern of isolated withdrawal often lend a quality of loneliness to their life experience. People with PPD may have a tendency to bear grudges, suspiciousness, tendency to interpret others' actions as hostile, persistent tendency to self-reference, or a tenacious sense of personal right. Patients with this disorder can also have significant comorbidity with other personality disorders, such as schizotypal, schizoid, narcissistic, avoidant, and borderline.
Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".
The concept of second-order cybernetics is closely allied to radical constructivism, which was developed around the same time by Ernst von Glasersfeld. While it is sometimes considered a break from the earlier concerns of cybernetics, there is much continuity with previous work and it can be thought of as a distinct tradition within cybernetics, with origins in issues evident during the Macy conferences in which cybernetics was initially developed. Its concerns include autonomy, epistemology, ethics, language, reflexivity, self-consistency, self-referentiality, and self-organizing capabilities of Complex Systems, such as in Complexity Theory (extenuating to the field of Complexity Economics). It has been characterised as cybernetics where "circularity is taken seriously".