The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  Beyond these specifics, what interests me most in this connection is how thoroughly cybernetics elided the modern dichotomy of science and religion. Since the nineteenth century, in the West at least, a sort of precarious settlement has been reached, in which science and religion relate to two disparate realms of existence, each empowered to speak of topics in its own territory but not the other's. Again, cybernetics was not like that. As we saw in most detail in Beer's work, his science (cybernetics) and spirituality were of a piece, shading into one another without any gap or transition. I talked about the "earthy" quality of this sort of spirituality; one could just as well speak of the "elevated" quality of the science (I made up the phrase "spiritual engineering"). One could say much the same about Ashby's brief foray into the spiritual realm ("I am now . . . a Time-worshipper"). Aldous Huxley and his scientific contacts (Osmond and Smythies) stand as a beautiful example of how to think about an immanent rather than transcendent dimension of the spirit. Those of us who grew up in the Church of England (and, no doubt, other more dogmatic churches) find this a difficult position to even imagine—how can you have a religion without a transcendent God?—but, as I said, it might be worth the effort, a conceptual and spiritual breather from current agonizing about the relation between Christianity and Islam, modern science and fundamentalist Christianity.

  the sixties

  The sixties—in particular, the sixties of the counterculture—have skipped in and out of these chapters, too. Substantively, in the recent history of the West, the sixties were the decade when the preoccupations of cybernetics with performative experimentation came closest to popular culture—iconically in the countercultural fascination with "explorations of consciousness," but also in sixties experimentation with new identities and art forms, new forms of social and sexual arrangements, and even with new relations to matter and technology: Hendrix abusing his guitar and overloading the amps again. My suggestion is that the many crossovers from cybernetics into the world of the counterculture index a shared nonmodern ontology. Both the sixties and cybernetics can be understood as nonmodern ontological theater, nonmodern ontology in action. If cybernetics began as a science of psychiatry, it became, in its symmetric version, the science of the sixties.

  altered states

  There are some places I wanted to go that cybernetics did not take me. My interest in cybernetics as ontology grew out of my earlier work in the history of physics, and my conviction is that the cybernetic ontology is illuminating across the board. But while it is true that the work of my cyberneticians span off in all sorts of directions—robots and gadgets run through all of the preceding chapters (except chap. 5); Ashby regarded his formal cybernetics as a theory of all possible machines, which could be equated with all (or almost all) of nature; cellular automata have appeared here and there; Ashby worshipped time; Beer worshipped matter and wrote hylozoist poems about the Irish Sea—still, a certain asymmetry remains. If a performative notion of the brain implies a space for curiosity that can lead into the field of altered states of consciousness, one can imagine a similar trajectory leading to a fascination with altered states of matter, especially for a hylozoist like Beer. I think here of a tradition of research into the self-organizing properties of complex inorganic and biological systems that came to life in the 1980s, the same period that saw the resurgence of Walterian robotics (and neural networks in computing)—research that focused on, for example, the emergence of structure in convection flows (Bénard cells), the uncanny quasi-organic dynamic patterns associated with the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction in chemistry, the tendency of slime molds to morph from unicellular entities into aggregate superorganisms and go marching off. I would have enjoyed the opportunity to tie these examples into our story, but the occasion did not arise. I once asked Stafford Beer about this line of research into complexity; he replied that the physicists and mathematicians were "re-inventing the wheel." For once, I think he was wrong.3

  the social basis

  The social basis of cybernetics is another topic I have discussed systematically in each chapter. What we found throughout are the marks of a continual social marginality of cybernetics: its hobbyist origins outside any institutional frame, its early flourishing in tenuous and ad hoc organizations like dining clubs and conference series, its continual welling-up outside established institutions and its lack of dependable support from them. We could think about this marginality more constructively as the search for an institutional home for cybernetics: individual cyberneticians often found visiting and part-time positions in universities (with Ashby at the BCL in Illinois, and the Brunel Cybernetics Department as exceptions that proved the rule, but only for a time: neither unit has lasted to the present); other cyberneticians lodged themselves in the world of business and industry (Beer and Pask as consul tants; Kauffman at Bios, temporarily at least; Wolfram at Wolfram Research). We have also come across the emergence of novel institutions, from the Santa Fe Institute to the Planetary Collegium and, more radically, Kingsley Hall, the Archway communities, and the antiuniversity, with Alexander Trocchi's sigma project as a sort of overarching blueprint and vision. More generally, the counterculture, while it lasted, offered a much more supportive environment to cybernetics than did the organs of the state.

  I am left with an image of the social basis of cybernetics as not just marginal but evanescent, always threatening to wink out of existence, always in need of re-creation. At times, I am inclined to see an arrow of change here, moving toward more substantial and resilient social structures as the years have gone by—an image of the emergence of a parallel social universe, as I called it, that maps only poorly and partially onto the institutional structures of modernity. At other times I wonder if the Santa Fe Institute and the Planetary Collegium will last any longer than Kingsley Hall and the BCL.

  There are several ways to think about this marginality. Their descendants often blame the founders of cybernetics for caring more about themselves than the institutional future of the field, and there is something to that, though one would have to exonerate Stafford Beer (and Heinz von Foerster) on this score. But we should also think not about individuals and their personalities, but about the connections between sociology and ontology. At the simplest level, a metaphor of attraction and repulsion comes to mind. From the start, the cyberneticians were in the same ontological space as one another, and much more attracted to each other's thought and practice than that of their colleagues in their home departments and institutions, and no doubt the inverse was equally true. More materially, within the grid of institutionalized practice, doing cybernetics required different facilities and resources from conventional equivalents—building little robots as a way of doing psychiatric theory, growing biological computers as the cutting edge of management. At the limit, one finds not only incompatibility but material, practical, and theoretical collisions, battles, and warfare. Here I think especially of Villa 21 and Kingsley Hall from chapter 5: "antipsychiatry" as not just different from conventional psychiatry but institutionally incompatible with it, unable to coexist with mainstream practices within a single institution, and theoretically intensely critical of them. Here, above all, is where we find Deleuze and Guattari's notion of nomad science being staged before our eyes—and the nomads eventually driven off. We can return to the question of the social basis in the next section.

  Sketches of Another Future

  Spiegel:And what takes the place of philosophy now?

  Heidegger:Cybernetics.

  MARTIN HEIDEGGER,"ONLY A GOD CAN SAVE US" (1981)4

  So what? What can this story do for us now? Why describe a historical study as sketches of another future?

  The simple answer is that the book is an attempt to rescue cybernetics from the margins and to launder it into mainstream discourse, to make it more widely available. The other future I have in mind is "another future" for people who have not yet stumbled into this area, and for a world that seems to me presently dominated by a modern ontology
and all that goes with it. By rehearsing the history of cybernetics and reading it in terms of a nonmodern ontology of unknowability and becoming, I have tried to convey my conviction that there is another way of understanding our being in the world, that it makes sense, and that grasping that other way can make a difference in how we go on. My idea for the future is not that we should all go out tomorrow and build robot tortoises or management consultancies based on the VSM (though it might be time to have another go at the Fun Palace). My hope is that these scenes from the history of cybernetics can function as open-ended models for future practice, and that they can help to make an endless and quite unpredictable list of future projects imaginable.

  Why should we care about this? This takes us back to my thoughts at the beginning about the hegemony of modernity, as I defined it, over our works and our imaginations. It would be surprising if modernity were not hegemonic: almost all of the educational systems of the West, schools and universities, are organized around the modern ontology of knowability—the idea that the world is finitely knowable—and, indeed, around an aim of transmitting positive knowledge. One cannot get through a conventional education without getting the impression that knowledge is the thing. I know of no subjects or topics that are taught otherwise. And part of the business of conjuring up another future is, then, to suggest that this is not necessarily a desirable situation. I can think of three ways to argue this. 5

  The first is simple and relatively contentless. Variety is good: it is what helps us to adapt to a future that is certainly unknown. Better to be able to grasp our being in the world in two ways—nonmodern as well as modern—rather than one. It would be nice to have available ways of thinking and acting that stage some alternative to modernity. I have never heard brainwave music and I have never played with biological computers, but I would rather live in a world that includes rather than excludes them, and one day they might be important.

  The second argument has to do with the specifics of cybernetics. Cybernetics, it seems to me, offers an alternative to modernity that has some particularly attractive features. I summarized many of them in the preceding section; here I would emphasize that in its symmetric version there is something inherently democratic about cybernetics. The cybernetic ontology, as I have said before, necessarily implies respect for the other, not because respect is nice but because the world is that way. The ontology itself evokes a democratic stance. At the same time, cybernetics offers us a peculiarly and interestingly performative take on democracy that can even extend to our relations with matter and nature (without the descent into modernist anthropomorphism). And beyond that, I think there is something very attractive about programs of action that adopt the stance of revealing that I associate with cybernetics—of openness to what the world has to offer us. Given the choice, who could possibly prefer enframing to revealing? If anyone did, I would be inclined to follow R. D. Laing and consider them mad.

  These arguments are right, I believe; they are cybernetically correct; and they are sufficient to warrant the effort I have put into these pages. But there is a third argument, which refers not to the specifics of cybernetics but to the modern backdrop against which cybernetics stands out. This last argument might have more force, for some readers at least, and it requires some discussion.

  _ _ _ _ _

  RATIONALIZATION MEANS . . . THE EXTENSION OF THE AREAS OF SOCIETY SUBJECT TO THE CRITERIA OF RATIONAL DECISION. . . . MOREOVER, THIS RATIONALITY EXTENDS ONLY TO RELATIONS OF POSSIBLE TECHNICAL CONTROL, AND THEREFORE REQUIRES A TYPE OF ACTION THAT IMPLIES DOMINATION, WHETHER OF NATURE OR SOCIETY.

  JÜRGEN HABERMAS,TOWARD A RATIONAL SOCIETY (1970, 81–82)

  THAT THESE TRAGEDIES COULD BE SO INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED WITH OPTIMISTIC VIEWS OF PROGRESS AND RATIONAL ORDER IS IN ITSELF A REASON FOR A SEARCHING DIAGNOSIS.

  JAMES SCOTT,SEEING LIKE A STATE (1998, 342)

  NOW PEOPLE JUST GET UGLIER AND I HAVE NO SENSE OF TIME.

  BOB DYLAN,"MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN" (1966)

  What's wrong with modernity? Perhaps nothing, but perhaps there is. Martin Heidegger (1976 [1954]) equated modern engineering, and modern science behind it, with enframing and a reduction of the world and ourselves to "standing reserve." Jürgen Habermas (1970) worried about a rationalization of the lifeworld, an inherently political reconstruction of selves and society via scientific planning that derives its insidious force from the fact that it can find no representation in orthodox political discourse. More materially, Bruno Latour (2004) suggests that modernity (as I have defined it, following him) is coming back to haunt us. Its dark side shows up in the "unintended consequences" of modern projects of enframing, often in the form of ecological crises. A couple of centuries of industrialization and global warming would be a stock example. More generally, James Scott's (1998) catalog of projects that he calls "high modernist"—schemes that aim at the rational reconstruction of large swathes of the material and social worlds—reminds us of their often catastrophic consequences: famine as another side of the scientific reform of agriculture, for instance.6 I think of murder, mayhem, and torture as another side of the imposition of "democracy" and "American values" on Iraq.

  If one shares this diagnosis, what might be done? The obvious tactic is resistance—the enormous and so far successful opposition to genetically modified organisms in Europe, for instance. But we can note that this tactic is necessarily a negative one; it aims to contain the excesses of modernity, but only by shifting the balance, recalibrating our ambitions without changing their character. Arguments about global warming remain within the orbit of the modern ontology; they themselves depend on scientific computer simulations which aim to know the future and hence bend it to our will. This sort of opposition is immensely important, I think, but in its negativity it also contributes to the grimness of what Ulrich Beck (1992) famously called the "risk society," a society characterized by fear—of what science and engineering will bring us next.

  And this, of course, gets us back to the question of alternatives. Is there something else that we can do beyond gritting our teeth? Heidegger just wanted to get rid of modernity, looking back to ancient Greece as a time when enframing was not hegemonic, while admitting that we can never get back there and concluding that "only a god can save us" (1981). More constructively, there is a line of thought running from Habermas to Latour that grapples with the problem of "how to bring the sciences into democracy" (the subtitle of Latour's book)—of how, literally or metaphorically, to bring scientists, politicians, and citizens together on a single and level playing field, on which the expertise and interests of none of these groups necessarily trumps that of the others.

  I admire this line of thought. If translated into novel social arrangements, it might well make the world less risky, less grim and fearful. The vision may even be coming true: scientists and politicians are meeting collectively in conferences on global warming, for example. And yet it is hard to get excited about it, so much remains unchanged. In this explicitly representationalist approach to the dark side of modernity, modern science and engineering remain hegemonic; Latour's ambition is simply to slow down the hectic pace of modernity, to give us some democratic breathing space before we rush into the next high-modernist adventure.7And, to get back to our topic, this, for me, is where the "political" appeal of cybernetic resides, precisely in that it promises more than a rearrangementof the world we already have. It offers a constructive alternative to modernity. It thematizes attractive possibilities for acting differently—in all of the fields we have talked about and indefinitely many more—as well as thinking and arranging political debate differently. This is my third reason—specific to our historical conjuncture—for being interested in cybernetics as a challenge to the hegemony of modernity.8

  _ _ _ _ _

  HOW RARE IT IS TO ENCOUNTER ADVICE ABOUT THE FUTURE WHICH BEGINS FROM A PREMISE OF INCOMPLETE KNOWLEDGE.

  JAMES SCOTT,SEEING LIKE A STATE (1998, 343)

  What might it mean to challenge
the hegemony of modernity? At the ground level, I have in mind both an ability to recognize cybernetic projects and to read their moral as ontological theater and a multiplication of such projects— a "quantitative" challenge, one might say. But just where does this hegemony reside? In one sense, it resides in our imaginations; there is something natural about Scott's high-modernist schemes to dominate the world; we might worry about their specifics, but we tend not to see that there is anything generically problematic about this sort of activity. But there is another side to this, which I think of in terms of "echoing back." We are not simply taught at school to find the modern ontology natural; the "made world" of modernity continually echoes this ontology back to us and reinforces it. I grew up in a factory town that depended upon turning formless sheet metal into cars. From my earliest childhood I was plunged into a world where human agency visibly acted on apparently passive matter to accomplish its ends, and where any unintended consequences of this process were hard to see and talk about. The material form of an industrialized society in this sense echoes back the modern ontology of a passive and defenseless nature awaiting reconfiguration by humanity. From another angle, while writing this book I lived in a small midwestern town where all of the streets are laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. To get out of town, one could drive for hours down a linear and featureless freeway or take a plane and travel through an unmarked space in which a trip to San Francisco differs from one to London only in terms of the number of hours of discomfort involved. In such a geography, how else should one think of space but as Cartesian, or time as linear and uniform?