The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  In ways like this, the made world of modernity echoes back to us the basic modern ontology (and vice versa, of course). This is a reason for thinking that perhaps the Habermas-Latour approach to reining in modernity might not be enough. It would do little, as far as I can make out, to challenge this material reinforcement of modernity's ontological stance. Conversely, I have paid great attention here to the made worlds of cybernetics—objects and artifacts that can echo back to us a nonmodern instead of a modern ontology. Part of the business of challenging modernity might entail moving these objects and artifacts from the margins toward the center of our culture, as I have tried to do here: multiplying them, appreciating them as ontological theater, taking them seriously. Heidegger's desperate dream was that artists and poets might save us from the world of enframing. My first reaction to that was incredulity, but there might be something to it. I am impressed by the examples of cybernetic art, theater, music, and architecture that we have encountered on this trip. If we could learn to see interactive robot artworks as ontological theater instead of vaguely amusing objects at the fringes of real art, the hegemony of modernity would indeed be challenged—which is not to say that art is enough or, pace Heidegger, that artists are the only people we should look to.

  Another question that arises here is: how far should the challenge to modernity go? What could we imagine? A complete displacement of the modern by the nonmodern? The answer to that is no, for a couple of reasons. One goes like this: Cybernetics has often been characterized as a science of information, different in kind and having a different referent from the usual sciences of matter. I know of no way of thinking about electrical power stations other than modern physics, and no way of building and running them other than modern civil and electrical engineering. Take away the modern elements and our society would quickly collapse into a species of chaos grimmer than the grey world we already live in. Of course, this book has not leaned on this conventional information-matter contrast. I have emphasized the performative aspects of cybernetics, even when representation and information have been at stake. And the discussions of hylozoism certainly open up a space in which one can entertain the possibility of somehow entraining nature differently from Heidegger's archetypal power station straddling and enframing the Rhine. Readers of science fiction may think of lighting schemes featuring luminous lichens or bacteria. We should not, however, hold our breath; we will need modern science and engineering for some time to come.

  The other reason is that I just argued that variety is good. It would be good if we could imagine the world in a nonmodern as well as a modern fashion. An extermination of modernity would be variety-reducing—that is, bad. But challenging the hegemony of modernity might also come to mean putting modernity in its place. At some sort of limit, this would mean coming to see modernity precisely as an option rather than the natural and the only possible way to go on, and a risky one at that. A nonmodern ontology would immediately and continually remind us that we never know the future and that we should always expect unexpected consequences to accompany our projects, however scientifically thought through they are. And this would imply being careful,in two senses: first, not rushing headlong into Scott's high-modernist adventures; and second, watching what happens if one does embark on such schemes—being very alert to how they are developing in practice, taking it for granted that reality will depart from expectations (for better or for worse), and being ready to shift our understandings and expectations in the light of emergent discrepancies between expectations and accomplishments.

  This, of course, restates the cybernetic epistemology that we have encountered repeatedly in the previous chapters, especially Stafford Beer's willingness to incorporate scientific models into the VSM coupled with his suspicion of them and his insistence that they continually fail and need to be revised in practice. It also returns us to the Habermas-Latour line of thought, that we need a better and continuously watchful form of democratic participation in modern science and engineering, but now as part of a broader recognition that there are other than modern ways to go on in the world and that these are options, too.9

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  Just what is it that stands between us and the deluge? Is it only cybernetics? Only the work of Walter, Ashby, Bateson, Laing, Beer, and Pask? No. As I said earlier, as far as the future is concerned, their work should be seen as offering us a set of models that both conjure up a nonmodern ontology and invite endless and open-ended extension. The ontological vision, and the realization that there are real-world projects that go with it, is the important thing, not the names and historical instances. But it might be helpful to put this another way. I have been trying to argue that the history of cybernetics indeed conjures up another form of life from that of modernity, but my suggestion is not that cybernetics was some sort of brute and isolated historical singularity. I have, for example, talked about all sorts of antecedents from which cybernetics grew, starting with work in experimental psychology that included Pavlov's salivating dogs and phototropic "electric dogs." But here it might be useful to note some of the many contemporary streams of work and thought that lie in much the same space as cybernetics even though it might not make much historical sense to label them "cybernetic."

  In fact, I have mentioned many of these nonmodern traditions already. In philosophy, we could think of the pragmatist tradition. William James's idea that experience is continually "boiling over" relative to our expectations is a beautiful way into an ontology of becoming. We could also think of the tradition of Continental philosophy (as it is known in the United States and Britain), including the writings of, say, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, and Isabelle Stengers, with Alfred North Whitehead as an honorary Continental. This might be the place for me to remember my own field, and to point to a very active constellation of work in "posthumanist" science and technology studies as discovering the nonmodern character of the temporal evolution of modern science and engineering (Pickering 2008a).10 Going in another direction, I have pointed to the many intersections between cybernetics and Eastern philosophy and spirituality: shared connections with the decentering of the self, the dance of Shiva as the dance of agency. We could also think of the transposition of the East to the West in the shape of New Age philosophy, with its erasure of the modern dichotomies of mind, body, and spirit. Before New Age there was the sixties. The counterculture may no longer be with us, but, like cybernetics, as an experimental form of life it offers us a whole range of models for future practices that also stage an ontology of unknowability and becoming.

  The point I want to make is that cybernetics, narrowly defined as a historical entity, can be seen as part of much larger cultural assemblage. We could continue the list of its elements into the arts. We have examined many artworks that have been more or less explicitly associated with cybernetics, but there is an endless list of others that are in the same ontological space, and I will just mention a couple. Willem de Kooning's works immediately conjure up an ontology of decentered becoming. It is impossible to think of his rich, thick, and smudgy paintings as having been constructed according to some preconceived plan; one has to understand them as the joint product of a decentered and temporally emergent process involving a constitutive back and forth between the artist and the paint on the canvas. Some of Max Ernst's most haunting images began as tracings of the knots in the floorboards of his hotel room, which we can appreciate as another example of hylozoist ontological theater—another staging of the idea that it's all there already in nature, that the modern detour through detailed design can be unnecessary and can be curtailed in a process of finding out what works in the thick of things. Antonin Artaud's (1993) vision of the "Theatre of Cruelty" is just the sort of ontological theater we have been discussing here, but now instantiated literally as theater.

  Moving to the sciences, we have explored some of the resonances and intersections between cybernetics and contemporary work on complexity, and I noted, at least, relations between the original cyberne
tic approach to understanding the brain and current work in brain science. Dating further back into history, theories of biological evolution again confront us with a spectacle of performative adaptation to an unknown future. The histories of these sciences cannot be reduced to that of cybernetics; they, too, can be thought of as part of the larger nonmodern assemblage that I am trying to delineate. We should also think of engineering. In chapter 3 I explored connections between cybernetics and current work in situated robotics as exemplified by the work of Rodney Brooks, but I find it noteworthy that the dark side of modernity is beginning to be recognized within the field of engineering itself, and that new approaches are being developed there, so this might be the place to introduce one last example.11

  My example concerns the civil engineering of rivers and waterways. The traditional approach is as usual a modern one, drawing upon science in seeking to make water conform to some preconceived human plan. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for instance, has been fighting the Mississippi River for 150 years, seeking to contain its tendency to flood and to change direction, all in the name of maintaining the economic health of New Orleans and the Delta region (McPhee 1989). The devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 should give us pause about this strategy (Pickering 2008b, forthcoming), but even before that some engineers had begun to think and act differently (Harden 2002): "Scientists know what is ailing the great rivers of America. They also know how to cure it. From the Columbia . . . to the Everglades . . . they have been empowered . . . to take control of ecologically imperilled rivers that have been harnessed for decades to stop floods, irrigate farms and generate power. Instead of demolishing dams, they are using them to manipulate river flows in a way that mimics the seasonal heartbeat of a natural waterway. Scientists have discovered that a spring rise and a summer ebb can give endangered fish, birds and vegetation a chance to survive in a mechanized river." Here, then, we have a recognition within science and engineering that domination and enframing is not the one best way of proceeding, that we have other options, that it can be better to go with the flow—of water, time, and the seasons. Much of the Midwest of the United States was under water a hundred years ago. It was drained and converted to farmland by straightening the rivers and digging ditches to feed them. Now there is a "movement afoot to undo some of draining's damage," damage which includes wrecking entire ecosystems and wiping out enormous populations of fish and birds. "Even letting a short section of a ditch or channelized stream 'do what occurs naturally' and not maintain it can be very beneficial to fish and other wildlife." "This is science in its infancy," a geography professor is quoted as saying. "It's a mixture of science and trial-and-error. We're good in ways we can command and control a stream. We're not good at figuring out ways to make it a complex system in which nature can function" (Pringle 2002).

  More positively, if the Army Corps of Engineers acts in a command-and-control mode, there also exists a field called adaptive environmental management which aims instead to explore and pay attention to the performative potential of rivers. Its stance toward nature, as in the above quotation, is experimental. Asplen (2008) gives the example of experimental floods staged on the Colorado River, in which scientists monitor the ecological transformations that occur when large quantities of water are released from an upstream dam—as a way of exploring the possibilities for environmental management, rather than trying simply to dictate to nature what it will look like.12 Here in the heartland of modern engineering, then, we find emerging a nonmodern stance of revealing rather than enframing, which we can assimilate to the overall nonmodern assemblage that I have been sketching out.13

  Where does this leave us? This latest list is another way of trying to foster the idea that modernity is not compulsory, that there are other ways of going on that make sense and are worth taking seriously—an attempt to put together a more encompassing gestalt than that assembled in earlier chapters, which can offer a bigger "quantitative" challenge to the hegemony of modernity (Pickering 2009). This in turn, of course, raises the question of why we should start with cybernetics in the first place? Two answers are possible. One has to do with human finitude: it would take forever to write a history of this entire assemblage; one has to start somewhere; and cybernetics seemed, and still seems to me, a perspicuous entry point. Second, I have learned something in writing this book. I did not see in advance that all these examples could be grouped into a nonmodern assemblage. This reflects my lack of imagination, but it is also a function of the relative isolation and lack of interconnection between many of the elements I have just mentioned. Buddhism is usually thought of as a philosophical and spiritual system having implications for individual practice and conduct. It is hard to imagine (though I can do it now) that it might hang together with a certain approach to engineering. De Kooning and Ernst were just painters, weren't they? What can Rodney Brooks's robots have to do with Heidegger or Deleuze?14 And Continental philosophy is just philosophy, isn't it?—words and representations (like science studies and The Mangle of Practice).

  From this perspective, the appeal of following cybernetics in action is that it enables us to see interconnections between all these traditions, fields, and projects; to pick out their common staging of an ontology of unknowabilty and becoming; and, indeed, to pick out as resources for the future the strands from these traditions that have this resonance. The history of cybernetics shows us how easy it is to get from little robots to Eastern spirituality, brainwave music, complexity theory, and the Fun Palace.

  One last remark. I have stressed the protean quality of cybernetics, the endless multiplicity of cybernetic projects, and I want to note now that the reference to multiplicity implies a recognition that these projects are not inexorably chained together. It is entirely possible, for example, to take Beer's viable system model seriously as a point of departure for thinking further about problems of social and political organization while admitting that hylozoism and tantrism are not one's cup of tea. You might think Heidegger is a load of incomprehensible rubbish and still be interested by situated robotics (and vice versa). An interest in cellular automata does not depend on fond memories of the sixties. As a challenge to the hegemony of modernity, all that is important is the idea that a nonmodern ontology is possible and can be staged in practice, not its specific historical staging in this field or that. Readers should not be put off if they dislike de Kooning or Ernst.

  I look at this the other way around. A recognition of the relation between cybernetics and current work in complexity, robotics, and the civil engineering of rivers points to a material and conceptual robustness of this entire assemblage and helps me also to take seriously the wilder projects and artifacts we have examined: flicker machines, explorations of consciousness, tantric yoga, walking cities.15 All of these might be of a piece with the utter sobriety of Ashby's phase-space diagrams and calculations of time to equilibrium. From this perspective, too, this book has been an attempt to counteract a narrowing of our imaginations—of what there is in the world, what we are like, what we can be, and what we can do.

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  Where might an alternative to modernity flourish? Obviously, in our imaginations and in the projects that go with a nonmodern imagining. This book certainly aspires to contribute to that. But I want to return to the question of the social basis one last time. Where, institutionally, might cybernetics and its ilk grow in the future? I have two different but compatible thoughts on this. First, one cannot help but be struck by the social marginality of cybernetics throughout its history, and this has led me to an interest in new institutions, however marginal themselves, that have emerged as a social basis for cybernetics in recent decades. The cybernetic equivalents of schools and universities have turned out to be places like Wolfram Research, the Santa Fe Institute, the Planetary Collegium, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, with Kingsley Hall, the Anti-University of London, and the sixties counterculture as short-lived models for something more radical, and New A
ge as a massive but somehow walled-off contemporary presence. However ephemeral these institutions have been or might prove to be, for most of the time I have been writing this book I have thought of them—or nonstandard institutions like them—as the future home of cybernetics. I have referred to this possibility from time to time as a parallel social universe—an institutional space where cybernetics might reproduce itself and grow, quite apart from the usual modern instutions of cultural production and transmission—much as Trocchi imagined his sigma project in the sixties.

  From that perspective, one aim of this book has been to incorporate this other social world into the overall picture of the nonmodern assemblage I have been trying to put together. Just as I have been trying to show that the cybernetic ontology and cybernetic projects and objects make sense and are worth taking seriously, so my suggestion is that we should take seriously the sometimes odd institutions which have from time to time supported them. I would like to launder these institutions into mainstream discourse and consciousness as well as more specific aspects of cybernetics. The other future I am trying to imagine has this odd social aspect too; the growth of this parallel social world might indeed be an important aspect of the challenge to modernity.

  But while I have been writing this chapter, another line of thought has come upon me. As summarized above, it is clear that many cybernetic endeavors are strongly incompatible with their modern equivalents. It is indeed hard to imagine Kingsley Hall not existing in tension with conventional psychiatry. But just at the moment I can see no principled reason why something like what is laid out in this book could not be taught at schools and universities and even feature prominently in their curricula. Let me end with this.16