Abstract
I was taught to be critical of cybernetics, to reject Norbert Wiener’s dictum of ‘Command, Control and Communication’ as something synonymous with social engineering and structural-functionalism. Indeed, cybernetics and the systems approach was an early casualty of the poststructuralist turn with Haraway (1989: 104), for example, connecting the Macy Conferences to the growth of sociobiology and to the reproduction of androcentric discourse by other means. In his new book, The Cybernetic Brain (2010), Andrew Pickering pushes beyond this characterization.
Instead, in line with its ontology of unknowability and becoming, the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage of and enjoying, a world that one cannot push around in that way. (p. 383)
Pickering’s cybernetics is resolutely Deleuzean: emancipatory, chaotic and stochastic. Moreover, Pickering has some company here. Over the past two decades, a growing number of scholars have rediscovered (and simultaneously reconfigured) cybernetics, among them N. Katharine Hayles and a host of posthumanist theorists, including Keith Ansell-Pearson and Jussi Parikka.
But in some ways, Pickering is the more radical interpreter. Unlike scholars who find precursors for their Deleuzean lines of flight in the theoretical writings of early cyberneticists, Pickering is interested in their hands-on work – the ‘laboratory life’ of the cyberneticist, as it were. As Pickering warns, ‘All of these wonderful machines, instruments and artifacts get marginalized if one takes cybernetics to be primarily about knowledge and the situatedness of the observer’ (p. 26).
If there was one fundamental misunderstanding in (re)interpretations of cybernetics in the 1980s and 1990s, it was the assumption that the field primarily dealt with the control of flows of communication and information. In this misunderstanding, we risk missing the materialist underpinnings of the cybernetic enterprise. Cyberneticists were people who were making things, machines that moved and clacked with servos. In Pickering’s monograph, these machines receive much overdue attention, from Ashby’s fairly well-known homeostat to Pask’s fantastic (and never actually constructed) temple of cybernetic coupling, the ‘Fun Palace’.
Putting the machines front and center is important for several reasons. First, it provides insight into one of the central tenets of cybernetics: the refusal to make sharp distinctions between living and nonliving systems. The machines that cyberneticists build are not metaphors for cognition. Instead, machine feedback, chemical processes, multiagent systems and cognition all share common, performative properties as they adapt to dynamic, complex systems. In Ashby’s words, these systems of feedback and adaptation are ‘an elementary and fundamental property of all matter’ (quoted in Pickering, 2010: 146). Here, Ashby expresses an almost Bergsonian vitalism – and in doing so articulates what Pickering calls the ‘performative ontology’.
That first generation of cyberneticists worked to distance themselves from the representational–symbolic models that would, for example, hold back artificial intelligence (AI) for so many years. Second, the way that we study such performative ontologies is through ‘performative epistemologies’, the ways of knowing that Pickering finds distinctly ‘nonmodern’. Both of these performative lines of flight are, in turn, ‘performed’ in the interstitial spaces of the artifacts developed by cyberneticists (pp. 21–22).
In The Cybernetic Brain, Pickering concentrates on the lives and legacies of British cyberneticists Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask. All of them occupied problematic, and mostly liminal, positions in the academy: Ashby as a psychologist and engineer, Beer in management and politics, Laing in psychiatry (or perhaps more accurately, anti-psychiatry), Walter in neurology and robotics, while Bateson and Pask can only be classified as polymaths. Borrowing from Deleuze, Pickering describes their work as ‘nomad science’ (p. 11), nowhere more evident than in Bateson’s restless circumlocutions through a variety of institutions, including Cambridge, the Palo Alto Veteran’s Administration, the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Even Ashby, who at the height of his professional career held a professorship at the University of Illinois, can be characterized as occupying a liminal space between a dozen different academic disciplines simultaneously.
Likewise, the machines they built instantiated this same liminality, fashioned out of ‘war surplus’ from ‘old clocks and gas meters’ (p. 56) and were frequently indefinable from the perspective of ‘royal science’. Pask’s wonderful Musicolour machine, which passed musical signals through various filters to produce adaptive, dynamic patterns of light and color that would perform with a musician, is a case in point. Was it science? Entertainment? Musicology?
One could say that Musicolour was itself an undisciplined machine, incommensurable with conventional forms of entertainment, and the different modes of presentation and venue that Pask and his friends explored in the 1950s have to be seen as a form of experimentation, trying to find a Musicolour niche in the world. (p. 325)
However, this liminality positioned outside of well-defined disciplinarity was the modal experience for the cyberneticists. One of the advantages Pickering enjoys by working through archives is being able to evoke the wondrous surplus that made up the performative ontologies of cybernetics, even the ones that never amounted to more than jottings in a notebook. Cyberneticists’ machines broke with the instrumental goals of industrial science.
More than an unfortunate effect of the cyberneticist’s precarity, this is the cybernetic way of life: ‘A way of going on in the world’ (p. 9). Evoking this other way of knowing and being is what animates Pickering’s work, ultimately with the goal of catalyzing alternatives to modern ways of knowing and being. Borrowing from Latour, Pickering describes this as a nonmodern ontology and epistemology, suggesting in some ways that the cyberneticists’ refusal to engage in a mimetic economy suggests a way out of some of the moribund dichotomies of modern science.
Many of the cyberneticists’ machines have this quality of gesturing beyond modern dualisms dividing subject and object, human and nonhuman, and Pickering’s book is a worthwhile read just for his descriptions of them, particularly of devices that are less familiar than Walter’s tortoises or Ashby’s homeostat. Take, for example, Pask’s remarkable Colloquy of Mobiles installation at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in 1968. It was made up of ‘mobile, phototropic robots that in combination engaged in complex mating dances’, punctuated with lights and sounds (p. 357). While generative of all sorts of emergent behaviors, Pask also included the audience in his dynamic system; people would stay at the exhibit for hours, reflecting lights back to robots using hand-mirrors, ‘making possible a more fully open-ended range of possible performances by the human-Colloquy assemblage’ (p. 360). As Pickering concludes,
Once more, then, we can say that the Colloquy was a piece of epistemological as well as ontological theater, and again I want to note that its epistemological aspects were geared straight into the ontological ones. The various modes of signaling in the Colloquy both were precipitated by the robots’ performances and served to structure them, rather than to construct self-contained representations of the world. (pp. 360–361)
Pask gives us an ultimately nonrepresentational world, where humans and machines adapt together in performative ways without ever trying to command complete control over the other elements of the system. Instead, the humans and nonhumans in the Colloquy move with each other; as Pickering writes of Walter’s tortoises, the ‘dualist split between people and things’ is overturned (p. 42).
But I would stop short of claiming that these strange, wondrous machines escape the modern. We can see the tensions and contradictions we associate with modernity in something like Beer’s cybernetic modeling for Salvador Allende’s Chile. Project Cybersyn, as it came to be known, built upon a version of Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) for adaptively organizing Chile’s nationalizing economy. Cybersyn was an adaptive, performative plan for organizing economic production that embodied many of Beer’s insights into organizational structure. Critics were quick to lambast its perceived ‘top–down’ hierarchies, but Pickering rightly presents a more nuanced view of the project:
Though critics seem to have read Cybersyn as implementing a classic ‘command and control’ form of organization, with a unilinear flow of orders descending from on high, in this they were wrong. Beer did not think of viable systems in that way. This was precisely the significance of the adaptive couplings that pervaded the VSM, especially the couplings between the various levels. (pp. 266–267)
At the same time, it is hard to look at the Star Trek–like operations room for Project Cybersyn and not think of Wiener’s ‘command and control’. It was a system for a centralized economy after all, very much modeled on Beer’s experiences with the British Army, and leading to an interest in Operations Research and ultimately to his management model. However, when we ultimately judge Beer’s work, it would be hard to think of a more central tension in modernity than that between vertical and horizontal organizational forms.
And, yet, there is something in Beer’s model of coupled feedback loops linking every stage of production and consumption, something potentially disruptive and transformative that gestures to alternative forms of modernity. While Pickering readily demonstrates that cybernetics is alive and well in places, such as the Santa Fe Institute, the Planetary Collegium and the Anti-University of London (p. 400), there are many other possibilities for cybernetic futures built upon our performative engagements with the world. There is a utopian, Bloch-ian excess in cybernetics that always overflows any instrumental container to suggest other ways of knowing and being. This excess gestures toward unfathomable, extraordinary black boxes of phenomena and experience. Pickering finds intimations of these phenomena and experiences in the mercurial encounters cyberneticists had with New Age beliefs and practices.
These evocations might be the most important insight I take away from Pickering’s text. The tendency in many of the contemporary redeployments of cybernetics is to consign cyberneticists’ more ludic flights into Buddhism, yoga, and 1960s psychedelia to an epiphenomenon of the times. But what if these were really central to cybernetic futures? In the last years of his life, Beer (and Bateson) turned to Eastern traditions – in ways that were entirely consistent with their cybernetic epistemologies. In particular, Beer’s (2003[1989]) set of parables, Chronicles of the Wizard Prang, grapples with a spiritual world that is also another black box to cybernetic inquiry (p. 290). Should we take these notes on tantric yoga, or alternately, Bateson’s final days at the San Francisco Zen Center, more seriously as ultimately pushing cybernetics past the boundaries of science as modernist practice into something else?
Here, Pickering shares with the cyberneticists he chronicles the bravery and vision to explore and imagine a cybernetics of the future that extends in different directions than, perhaps, Walter or Ashby ever imagined. But to appropriate cybernetics and make it speak to us today in the language of nomad science is not an example of hermeneutic violence; it is just the latest adaptation to a world of extremely complex and dynamic systems.