The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  What else can one do after a journey like that but look back and look forward?

  Themes from the History of Cybernetics

  At different times I have imagined two different ways of organizing this book. The one I chose was a sequential exploration of the work of named individuals. Perhaps it had to be that way. The most important context for understanding the work of any individual is what they did before. If you want to get the hang of DAMS, it helps to have the homeostat fresh in your mind; if you want to understand the Fun Palace, start with Musicolour. But there is this other way. I could have arranged the material thematically and looked at how various cybernetic projects bore on each theme—and we can review some of these themes now, briefly, as another way of remembering the trip.

  ontology

  Ontology is the major cross-cutting theme I announced in advance and that I have pursued pretty conscientiously as we went along, so I will not dwell on it at any length. But there are things to say. Another working title for the book was Performance.

  The discovery of pragmatist philosophy was a major turning point in my intellectual life. Reading William James's Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (1978 [1907, 1909]) in 1985 suddenly offered me a way seeing knowledge as situated (rather than transcendentally true) while continuing to take it seriously (and not as epiphenomenal froth).1 It sometimes seems that everywhere I have gone since then, even in this book, James was there first. And yet there is something frustrating about the pragmatist tradition. It displaces many of the standard philosophical problematics in valuable ways, but it remains representationalist, epistemological, largely centered on knowledge. The pragmatist insists that knowledge has to be understood in relation to practice, but practice always features as something ancillary, to be wheeled on as needed to combat epistemological arguments from other schools of philosophy. You can read the pragmatists forever without learning much about practice and performance apart from a few armchair examples. It is as if knowledge remains the luminous sun around which these little planets called "practice" and "performance" revolve.2

  In retrospect, then, I can see much of my own work as an exploration of this neglected side of pragmatism, an inquiry into practice in its own right, without a pregiven presumption that the end of inquiry has to be an argument about knowledge. And, to put it simply, the upshot for me was a gestalt switch into what I call the performative idiom. The argument of The Mangle of Practice was that if there is a sun around which all else revolves, it is performance, not knowledge—knowledge is a planet or maybe a comet that sometimes participates in the dynamics of practice and sometimes does not, and the discovery, for me, was that practice has its own structure that one can explore and talk about—as a dance of agency, for example.

  The modern sciences background their own practice, organizing it around a telos of knowledge production and then construing it retrospectively in terms of that knowledge (a tale of errors dispelled). We have seen that cybernetics was not like that. Cybernetics was about systems—human, nonhuman, or both—that staged their own performative dances of agency, that fore-grounded performance rather than treating it as some forgettable background to knowledge. This is the primary sense in which one can read cybernetics as ontological theater—as forcibly reminding us of the domain of practice and performance and bringing that to the fore. As showing us, in a fascinating range of instances, that performance is not necessarily about knowledge, and that when knowledge comes into the picture it is as part of performance.

  Beyond that, cybernetics helps us think further about the nature of practice and performance. The key idea in grasping many of the examples we have explored is Beer's notion of an "exceedingly complex system"—meaning a system with its own inner dynamics, with which we can interact, but which we can never exhaustively know, which can always surprise us. A world built from exceedingly complex systems would necessarily be one within which being would always center on performative dances of agency and findingsout, where neither knowledge nor anything else would constitute a still, reliable center. This, I think, is our world. It is certainly the world of science as I described it in The Mangle. Again, cybernetics dramatizes this vision for us, and in at least two ways. On the one hand, the cyberneticians built machines and systems that interacted with and adapted to the world as an exceedingly complex system, in a list running from the tortoise and the homeostat up to biological computers, the VSM, Musicolour, and the Fun Palace. These examples can help bring home to us what unknowability can mean (as well as "performance"). They also demonstrate that a recognition that we live in a world of exceedingly complex systems does not imply paralysis, that we can, in fact, go on in a constructive and creative fashion in a world of exceedingly complex systems. On the other hand, the history of cybernetics offers us many simple "toy" examples of exceedingly complex systems. The tortoise, the homeostat, DAMS, cellular automata, Musicolour can all function as ontological icons—inscrutable Black Boxes in their performance, even though one can, in fact, open these boxes and understand them at the level of parts. My argument was that if we look through the end of the telescope that picks out performance, then these can all function as instructive examples of what the world in general is like (though from the other end they look like modern science and engineering and conjure up an ontology of knowability and control).

  design

  A distinctive notion of design has surfaced from time to time on our journey: Ashby on DAMS and the explorer who finds Lake Chad but no longer knows where he is, Beer on biological computers and the entrainment rather than deliberate reconfiguration of materials, Frazer and Pask building performatively inscrutable cellular automata into their architectural design systems, Eno and music. I have always thought of design along the lines of rational planning—the formulation of a goal and then some sort of intellectual calculation of how to achieve it. Cybernetics, in contrast, points us to a notion of design in the thick of things, plunged into a lively world that we cannot control and that will always surprise us (back to ontology). No doubt real designers have always found themselves in medias res, continually coping with the emergent exigencies of their projects. What interests me is that cybernetics serves both to foreground these exigencies (rather than treating them as unfortunate side effects) and to make a virtue of them, to enjoy them!). Ashby came to see an evolutionary approach to design—continually taking stock and exploring possibilities—as integral to the development of truly complex systems like DAMS. Beer's idea was that there is completely another way to the construction of performative computing elements: finding some material with the appropriate liveliness rather than laboriously engineering dead matter. Eno, Frazer, and Pask wantedto see where their uncontrollable CAs would take them—what sort of a trip that would be. Throughout the book I have tried to show that ontology makes a difference, but most of my examples have concerned specific systems or artifacts; here we can see that it makes a difference more generally, now in an overall stance toward design.

  power

  Following this line of thought takes us to another theme that has run through the book: power. Throughout, and especially in the later chapters, I have sought to address the critique of cybernetics as a science of control. To do so, I have have found it useful to distinguish two senses of "control." The critics' sense, I think, is that of a hierarchical, linear "command and control," of a power that flows in just one direction in the form of instructions for action (from one group of people to another, or, less conventionally, from humans to matter). I have been at pains to show that the cybernetic sense of "control" was not like that. 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. Even in its most asymmetric early moments, cybernetics never imagined that the classical mode of control was in fact possible. Ashby's appalling notion of blitz therapy did not envisage any determinate result; its only as
piration was an open-ended homeostat-like reconfiguration of the mentally ill, perhaps in a beneficial direction, but usually not. Even there the fantasy of command and control was absent, and this in a principled, not incidental, way. But from chapter 5 onward we have been especially concerned with what I called the symmetric fork in the road, the branch of later cybernetics that imagined a world in which adaptation goes both ways—in psychiatry, between doctor and patient, as at Kingsley Hall, but in many other realms too.

  The appeal of this symmetric branch of cybernetics is that it both adumbrates and argues for a performative form of democracy, within social organizations, between social organizations, and even between people and things. This is just the recognition that we are always in medias res put another way. But we can take the thought one stage further by referring, as I have, to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and his contrast between enframing and revealing. Heidegger's idea was that modernity is characterized by a stance of enframing—the stance of command and control that goes along with an ontology of knowability, and that assumes we can obtain determinate results from our initiatives in the human and material worlds. Everything I know about the history of science and technology tells me that this assumption is a mistake (though a productive one in certain circumstances); what I have learned from Heidegger and cybernetics is to see it as a sad one. It closes us off from what the world has to offer; in the mode of enframing, the unexpected appears with a negative sign in front of it, as a nuisance to be got around. The stance of revealing, in contrast, is open to the world and expects novelty, for better or for worse, and is ready to seize on the former. And what I take the history of cybernetics to show is that such words are not empty philosophical pieties. It is possible to develop rich and substantial ways of going on in the world in the mode of revealing. The tortoise, the homeostat, Kingsley Hall, the viable system model, syntegration, Musicolour, the Fun Palace—these are all revealing machines that in one way or another explore their worlds for what they have to give.

  the arts

  We have explored the origins of cybernetics in science, as a science of the brain and psychiatry, but we have also seen how quickly it spilled over into all sorts of fields—robotics, complexity theory, management, politics, education, and so on. Some of these only came to the fore in specific chapters, but others appeared in several. One theme that has arisen in most concerns intersections (or fusions) of cybernetics and the arts: the Dream Machine, brainwave music, Brian Eno's music (and even Jimi Hendrix and feedback), architecture (the detailed tuning of parts in Christopher Alexander's work; the adaptive architecture of Archigram, Price, and Pask; aesthetically potent design environments), synesthesia and Musicolour, interactive theater, robotic and interactive sculpture (the Colloquy of Mobiles). The Dream Machine and brainwave music can be postponed for a moment, but the other artworks just mentioned all serve to dramatize the basic ontology of cybernetics beyond the world of science and help us grasp it. In doing so, they also echo the other themes just mentioned: an experimental approach to design as a process of revealing rather than enframing, a leveling of power relations between artists and audiences, a blurring of modern social roles. At the same time, we should recall the oddity of many of these artworks. Again and again, the question that has come up is: is it art? Does the Dream Machine count as visual art? Does brainwave music or Eno's music count as music? Did the Fun Palace count as architecture? What could Pask sell Musicolour as? The clash between these odd artifacts and modern classifications points to the more general theme of this book: that ontology makes a difference, in both practices and products.

  selves

  Another cross-cutting theme that surfaced especially in chapters 3, 5, and 6 has to do with, variously, the brain and the self, in ways that I tried to catch up in a contrast between modern and nonmodern apprehensions. The modern take on the brain can be exemplified by work in traditional AI (and its counterparts in the cognitive sciences more broadly): an image of the brain as, centrally, an organ of representation, calculation, and planning. The modern apprehension of the self I take to resonate with this: an idea of the self as a bounded locus of agency, again centering on representation, calculation, planning, and will. I have not sought to delineate the modern self at all sharply (imagine a race of accountants), but it is clear, I think, that the cybernetic take on the brain and the self was very different. Cybernetics began by imagining the brain (and later the self) as performative, and, as I said, it is possible to be curious about the performative brain in ways that hardly arise within the modern perspective. Right from the start, Grey Walter was interested in madness, epilepsy, visions, yogic feats, and nirvana—topics that escape from modern discourse, or at most appear as regrettable deviations from the norm. We could say that cybernetics had a more capacious appreciation of the possibilities of brains and selves than modern discourse sanctions—an openended vision of what people are like and can be, in contrast to the narrowly conceived field of the modern self.

  From a cybernetic standpoint, there is always something more to be found out in exploration of the brain and the self. Hence the trajectory that led from flickering stroboscopes via dynamic visions to Gysin's Dream Machines, and another trajectory in the same line of descent leading to EEG biofeedback and brainwave music. In the same vein, Bateson and Laing (and Huxley) pointed to the possibility of the dissolution of the modern self and related that both to schizophrenia and to Buddhist enlightenment. Madness as not only a sad aberration to be stamped out by electroshock or drugs, but perhaps an opening, too—an opening seized upon by the sixties, with its "explorations of consciousness" but also long central to Eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions, as taken up in these pages and integrated with cybernetics by Stafford Beer (and others).

  I have found Foucault's notion of technologies of the self useful here. Foucault used it to point to strategies deployed in the construction of varieties of the modern (in my sense) self—freestanding and self-controlled centers of will and calculation—technologies of self-enframing. In the history of cybernetics, we can apply the phrase quite literally, but now in reference to technologies ranging from flicker to meditation that somehow elicit and explore other states beyond the range of the modern, selves that are out of control, techniques that might even dissolve the modern self. Technologies of the self as technologies of self-revealing.

  spirituality

  From nonstandard selves one can drift almost continuously into a discussion of nonmodern spirituality, but a few more specific points are worth making. When I began writing this book, my interest in the spiritual realm was close to nonexistent. A compulsory school indoctrination into the worldview of the Church of England had left me with the conviction that even geography, my worst subject, had more going for it. But I was struck to find my cyberneticians dragging me back into this realm in ways that I found challenging. Walter, Ashby, Bateson, Laing, and Beer all, though in different ways, registered spiritual interests and connections (and I suspect there is more to be said about Pask than I have so far discovered). So what is it with cybernetics and spirituality, especially Eastern spirituality? My qualifications to speak in this area remain tenuous but, with that caveat in mind, here is a list of affinities (which I cannot quite make into a unity, though they all hang together with a performative understanding of the brain and the self):

  (1) As just discussed, a cybernetic curiosity about the performative brain leads naturally to an interest in the sorts of strange performances and altered states characteristic of yogic traditions. (2) The performative brain is necessarily a relational brain that responds to its context, including technologies of the self that can evoke and respond to novel performances. We have seen that some of these technologies were distinctly Western (flicker, LSD), but many again made a direct connection to the East: meditation, yoga, diet, tantric exercises as practiced by Wizard Prang. (3) Cybernetic models of the brain, and understandings of the self, point immediately to a decentering of the mind and the s
elf. From the tortoise and the homeostat onward, the cybernetic preoccupation with adaptation has continuously eroded the modern understanding of the bounded, self-contained, and self-moving individual. Instead, one has the image of the brain and the self as constitutively bound up with the world and engaged in processes of coupled becomings. And this image is not far from the ontology of Buddhism, say, with its emphasis on undoing the modern self for the sake of an awareness of being, instead, part of a larger whole ("yoga means union"). (4) A corollary of the cybernetic epistemology with its insistence that articulated knowledge is part of performance rather than its container is, I think, a hylozoist wonder at the performativity of matter and the fact that such performativity always overflows our representational abilities. I remain unsure about the spiritual lineage of hylozoism, but we have seen how Beer aligned it first with the Christian tradition and later with Eastern philosophy and spirituality.