The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  52. Another circle closes here. Latour andWeibel (2002, 2005) have recently organized two exhibitions at the ZKM which attempted, like this book, to bring science studies, engineering, art, and politics together in new ways: "Iconoclash: Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art" in 2002, and "Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy" in 2005. The latter included a recreation of Stafford Beer's control room for the Cybersyn project in Chile (overseen by EdenMedina), and the opening sentences of the online description of the exhibition are eerily Paskian: "As soon as you enter the show, you feel that something odd is happening: lights, sound and labels seem to react to your presence as a visitor in some invisible and yet palpable manner. You have just encountered the atmospheric conditions of democracy. Soon you will discover that the whole space of the show is embedded in the PHANTOM PUBLIC, a work of art that aims to lend a different, emotional colour to political involvement and political envelopment": www.ensmp.fr/~latour/expositions/002_parliament. html (accessed 3 March 2005).

  53. In London, Ascott also taught Pete Townshend of The Who; his contact with Eno dated to the midsixties, when he had moved to Ipswich: Gere (2002, 94). Irish (2004) discusses the work and career of Stephen Willats, another cybernetic artist and student of the lived environment (see, for example, Willats 1976). In the early 1960s Willats was a student at Ealing, where he was taught by Ascott (Stephens and Stout 2004, 111), and he was associated later in the sixties with System Research. Since 1965 he has been editor and publisher of the unfortunately titled Control Magazine.A glance at its contents reveals that "control" here should be read in the Paskian sense of "conversation" and not in the authoritarian sense beloved of the critics of cybernetics (more on this below re-architecture).

  54. www.planetary-collegium.net/about/ (accessed 3March 2005). Besides Ascott himself, Brian Eno and Ranulph Glanville appear on the collegium's list of supervisors and advisers. Centered on the University of Plymouth in England, and with "nodes" in Zurich, Milan, and Beijing, the collegium echoes the transinstitutional constitution of early cybernetics (chap. 3), but now as a possibly enduring basis for graduate training and advanced research. The Arts, Computation, and Engineering graduate program at U.C. Irvine (n. 50 above) is an attempt to reconfigure the inner structure of the university as a social basis for cybernetic art (broadly construed).

  55. Sadler (2005) is a detailed and beautifully illustrated history of Archigram.

  56. Gilles Evain (Ivan Chtcheglov), quoted in Heynen (1999, 152). Heynen discusses Constant's New Babylon project as one of the most worked out visions of Situationist adaptive architecture. Behind much of this imagining of architecture as a technology of the self lay "the leisure problem," as it was known in Britain in the 1960s (chap. 6, n. 8). Many people took the leisure problem seriously, and the Situationist dream was that it presented a revolutionary opportunity for a new kind of people to emerge. An excellent source of information on Situationism is the Situationist International online website: www .cddc.vt.edu/sionline/index.html. Marcus (1989) is a beautiful account of the Situationists (and much else). On the connection between Situationism and antipsychiatry, again mediated by Alexander Trocchi (below), see chap. 5, n. 58.

  57. Mathews (2007) is the key source on the history of the Fun Palace. Mathews (2007, 274, app. C) lists twenty-six members of the Cybernettics Subcommittee: among those one might recognize, besides Littlewood and Price, are Roy Ascott, Stafford Beer, Tom Driberg (MP), Dennis Gabor, Frank George, Reginald Goldacre, Richard Gregory, A. R. Jonckheere (Pask's supervisor in his London PhD research), Brian Lewis, RobinMcKinnon-Wood and his wife, and Ian Mikardo (MP). Several members of the subcommittee were important in the subsequent creation of the Open University, and one wonders if these connections were important to Pask's affiliation to the OU (discussed above).

  58. Pask's (1964a) proposal for a cybernetic theater does not mention the Fun Palace.

  59. As a member of the Cybernetics Subcommittee, Roy Ascott proposed a "Pillar of Information" for the Fun Palace, an electronic kiosk that would respond to queries in an adaptive fashion: "Based on patterns of user interaction, the Pillar of Information would gradually develop an extensive network of cognitive associations and slippages as a kind of non-hierarchical information map, both allowing and provoking further inquiry beyond the user's initial query" (Mathews 2007, 119).

  60. At the reactive level, "the Cybernetics Subcommittee . . . outlined plans to use the latest computerized punch card system to track and allot resources for various activities." But beyond that, the committee also noted that the list of activities and zones could never be complete because "the variety of activities could never be entirely forecast" (Mathews 2007, 116, 118).

  61. I thank Howard Shubert and Anne-Marie Sigouin at the Collection Centre d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, for providing me with a copy of the Cybernetics Subcommittee minutes from which fig. 7.23 is taken and permission to reproduce the figure. This figure has been reproduced at least twice before, in Lobsinger (2000, 131, fig. 5.8) and Mathews (2007, 120). Lobsinger labels it "diagram for a cybernetics theater," but this is a mistake. I return to Lobsinger and Mathews's commentary on the figure below. The Cybernetics Subcommittee "also suggested methods of identity-shifting and role-playing. . . . Roy Ascott proposed an 'identity bar' which would dispense paper clothing, enabling people to try on different and unfamiliar social personae or even gender roles" (Mathews 2007, 118).

  62. Mathews (2007, chap. 4) explores many of these difficulties, including, for example, a shift in the pattern of local government from the London County Council to the Greater London Council engineered by the Conservative government at a key moment in 1964.

  63. Mathews (2007) offers much documentation of these kinds of fears circling around the Fun Palace. Littlewood (2001, 761) later wrote: "Alas, for those of us who had given our lives to an idea, the powers that be wouldn't let us have the land for the new Vauxhall Gardens—any land! A bowdlerized version of the structure was erected in Paris but, without activists skilled in managing such activities, as we had foreseen, it became merely a rather pleasant empty space" (Littlewood 2001, 761). This watered-down and flexible but noninteractive version of the Fun Palace lives on as Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Pompidou Centre, which "would have been inconceivable without the Fun Palace" (Melvin 2003). (Piano was awarded the highest architectural honor, the Pritzker Prize, in 1998; Rogers the same in 2007: Pogrebin 2007.)Mathews (2007, 232–35) also notes a connection between another of Cedric Price's unbuilt sixties projects, the Potteries Thinkbelt (an adaptive university on wheels, running on disused railway lines in the north of England) and Rem Koolhaas and Bernhard Tschumi's Parc de la Villette.

  64. The architect George Baird "stated that Price's refusal to provide 'visually recognizable symbols of identity, place, and activity' and his reduction of architecture to a machine for 'life-conditioning' displayed a gross misconception of architecture's place in human experience. For Baird, Price's architectureas-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as 'a coffee-vending machine' " (Lobsinger 2000, 126, 134).

  65. Thus, the Cybernetics Subcommittee minutes to whichMathews refers, drafted by Pask himself, speak of maintaining "the environment of the individual varied or novel enough to sustain his interest and attention but not so varied that it is unintelligible" (Pask 1965, 7), of a "consensus of opinion . . . in favour of a Fun Palace which stimulated people to think for themselves and to engage in creative activities [and] strong resistance to the view that the Fun Palace should have a specifically educational function" (10), of a pilot project as "possibly modified by the community" (11), and of there being "many legitimate objectives for we do not know, at the outset, the character of Fun" (14). "In a conventional or arbitrary concatenation these facilities [fixed ones, like cinemas and restaurants] appear as objects that satisfy a need. In a Fun Palace they function as operations that catalyse further activity, in particular and according to the defined objectives
[of?] participant, co-operative and creative activity" (17). "Mr Pinker also warned against the dangers of moralising, It was not the function of the Fun Palace to turn out a 'Participant-Citizen,' or to give them spiritual uplift. Its job, vis-à-vis the external environment was simply to open up new vistas" (17–18). Pask presented fig. 7.23 as his summary of the committee's deliberations along these lines and added, "If you find this picture confusing, please neglect it" (1).

  66. The critique does appear to propagate by repetition (rather than, for instance, reflective thought) and to have an oddly ritualized quality. Mathews's 2007 version is isomorphous to Lobsinger's from 2000 (whichMathews cites), both taking off from fig. 7.23 and saying much the same things. Lobsinger remarks, "At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to produce happiness, one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain," and goes on to cite Alvin Toffler's much-read Future Shockfrom 1970: "Toffler himself cites the Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience, the built environment." This is itself a revealingly misleading gloss on what Toffler says about the Fun Palace (Toffler 1970, 54–57)—and actually the central problematic of Future Shockis a supremely cybernetic one: adaptation to an unknown future; we might also note that Toffler later wrote the foreword for the English translation of Prigogine and Stenger's Order out of Chaos(Toffler 1984)—but, anyway, half a page later Lobsinger's essay ends on an approving if not very precise note with "In the 1960s, as today, the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over architecture as built form" (134). It might help to note that Lobsinger also invokes Deleuze on forms of social control that go beyond familiar disciplinary mechanisms. This line of argument might be productive in thinking about some of Pask's teaching machines. SAKI aimed at entraining people in the world of typing in a way that went beyond simple punishments and rewards, as did the later pedagogical machines, and we could certainly ask ourselves whether we are in favor of developing new ways of teaching people to type. But the difference between those machines and the Musicolour–Fun Palace line is that the former had extrinsically defined goals while the latter did not.

  67. John Frazer (interview, London, 3 September 2004). Pask's public talks at the AA were popular cultural events, and both Jasia Reichardt and Yolanda Sonnabend told me that they would go along to the AA whenever Pask was speaking there (interviews, London, 21 and 22 February 2002). Pask also taught workshops at the AA in a series organized by his student Ranulph Glanville. One of the first people to invite Pask to speak at the AA was Peter Cook, around 1965, for an "event day" at which interesting people from outside the world of architecture presented their work (John Frazer, interview, 3 September 2004).

  68. For a collection of drawings and illustrations of the Generator project, including photographs of the prototype control system, see Riley et al. (2002). I am very grateful toMollyWright Steenson for sharing her extensive knowledge of the Generator project with me (telephone conversation, 2 February 2007).

  69. John Frazer, interview, London, 3 September 2004. John Frazer studied at the AA from 1963 to 1969, and "right from the outset Gordon Pask was a source of inspiration and soon became directly involved" (Frazer 2001, 641). Frazer also taught at the AA from 1973 to 1977 and 1987 to 1996. A couple of the threads of our story converge on Frazer: as mentioned in chapter 3, at an impressionable age in the early 1950s he encountered GreyWalter's tortoises at the Radio Show in Earls Court, London, and subsequently tried to build one; and he worked on cellular automata while at Cambridge (1969–73) at much the same time as John Conway was developing the Game of Life. Both men used the Atlas Titan computer at Cambridge, desirable for its graphics display, but they worked on different shifts at night (Frazer, interview, 3 September 2004). I am grateful to John Frazer for our conversation and the provision of biographical information.

  70. For an extended account, see Frazer (1995), which includes a foreword written by Pask and a 1990 photograph of Pask with the "Universal Constructor" (p. 7).

  71. For an early discussion of the MIT Architecture Machine, see Negroponte (1969), who cites Warren McCulloch and Pask. See also Negroponte (1970, 1975); the latter discusses work at MIT between 1968 and 1972 and includes a twenty-six-page introduction written by Pask. For later developments at MIT, see Brand (1987). Ranulph Glanville points out that a drawing board is "a conversational mirror (for the designer) and a source of idea theft in the studio. It's not nearly so static/passive as you think!" (email, 18 Aug 2005). This echoes Pask's thought that any competent work of art is an aesthetically potent environment. But still, a drawing board does not thematize and foreground possibilities for dynamic interaction in the same way as the systems discussed in the text. Frazer's critique (1995, 60) of CAD exactly parallels Beer's of conventional uses of information systems—here, as introducing new technology but leaving existing design practices unchanged.

  72. Brand (1994) is a very nice study of how conventional buildings actually evolve over time despite being set in bricks and mortar and concludes with ideas on adaptive architecture. Again, the distinctly cybernetic take on this was to thematize evolution in both the design process and its products.

  73. The installation was called Seek;the show was Software, Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, curated by Jack Burnham (Gere 2002, 107).

  Notes to Chapter 8

  1. I thank Leo Marx and Philip Fisher for talking me into reading James. More recently, I thank Michael Friedman for a pointed question about the relation between my work and pragmatism.

  2. The words "practice" and "performance" point in the same direction, though in different ways. "Practice" refers to human activity in the world, while "performance" is the "doing" of any entity or system, human or nonhuman. "Practice" is thus a subset of "performance." In The Mangle of PracticeI focused on the relation between the practice of scientists and the performance of machines and instruments. In this book I have paid little attention to the practice of cyberneticians (in the sense of analyzing the day-by-day construction of tortoises or DAMS, say), though I have no doubt that it looks just like the practice of the physicists discussed in The Mangle.I have focused instead on the performance of the machines and systems they built.

  3. The classic popular introduction to this line of research is Prigogine and Stengers (1984); see also Pickering (2005a). In philosophy, a hylozoist fascination with striking self-organizing properties of matter runs through Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and continues in the work ofManuel DeLanda—for example, the series of columns "Matter Matters," beginning with DeLanda (2005) (also DeLanda 2002). I thank DeLanda for very illuminating conversations and correspondence (and arguments). One might also think here of the emergent beauty of fractal mathematics (Mandelbrot 1983). Beer incorporated fractal imagery in some of his paintings, and Walter's novel (1956a) includes a fractal (avant la lettre)time machine, but there is little beyond that that could figure in our history.

  4. I cannot resist reproducing this quotation, though it does not mean what I would like. Heidegger thought of cybernetics as a universal science that could embrace and unify all the other sciences, thus displacing philosophy from one of its traditional roles, and hence his attempted reformulation of the "end of philosophy" in Heidegger (1976). For a historical account of cybernetics as a universal science, see Bowker (1993). Evidently that is not the version of cybernetics that emerges from the history of British cybernetics. It would be nice to know what Heidegger would have made of the story told here; Carol Steiner (2008) stages a fictional conversation between the great philosopher and myself!

  5. The question (put to me most forcefully by Ezekiel Flannery) of who the "we" is in this paragraph and below arises here. I am content to leave this open: readers can decide for themselves whether they are in or out. "We" certainly includes an earlier me (before writing The Mangle of Practiceand beginning the research for this book), and, f
aute de mieux, I takemyself to be representative in the relevant respects of, at least, the contemporaryWest. From another angle, there are many religions that take for granted nonmodern ontologies, but I don't imagine that many Buddhists, say, often find themselves talking a lot about robotics or cellular automata. They, too, might find the history of cybernetics striking; they, too, could be part of this "we."

  6. Scott's examples of high-modernist projects include scientific forestry, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, "villagisation" in Tanzania, Lenin's conception of the Bolshevik Revolution, city planning, and Le Corbusier's design for Brazilia. I thank David Perkins for referring me to Scott's book.

  7. Latour's political message is that we need to thinkdifferently about science, technology, and society: "We have simply to ratifywhat we have always done, provided we reconsiderour past, provided that we understandretrospectively to what extent we have never been modern, and provided that we rejoin the two halves of the symbolbroken by Hobbes and Boyle as a sign of recognition. Half of our politics is constructed in science and technology. The other half of Nature is constructed in societies. Let us patch the two back together, and the political task can begin again. Is it asking too little simply to ratify in public what is already happening?" (Latour 1993, 144; emphases added). I discuss Latour's conservatism further in Pickering (2009).

  8. Neither Heidegger nor Latour addresses the possibility of different sorts of practice in science and engineering (and beyond). Habermas (1970, 87–88) considers the possibility (which he associates with Marcuse), but only to reject it: "Technological development lends itself to being interpreted as though the human species had taken the elementary components of the behavioral system of purposive-rational action, which is primarily rooted in the human organism, and projected them one after another onto the plane of technical instruments. . . .At first the functions of the motor apparatus (hands and legs) were augmented and replaced, followed by energy production (of the human body), the functions of the sensory apparatus (eyes, ears, and skin), and finally the governing center (the brain). Technological development thus follows a logic that corresponds to . . . the structure of work.Realizing this, it is impossible to envisage how, as long as the organization of human nature does not change . . , we could renounce technology, more particularly ourtechnology, in favour of a qualitatively different one. . . . The idea of a New Science will not stand up to logical scrutiny any more than that of a New Technology, if indeed science is to retain the meaning of modern science inherently oriented to possible technical control. For this function, as for scientific-technological progress in general, there is no more 'humane' substitute." From the present perspective this is a circular argument; my argument is that things look different if one takes the adaptive rather than the laboring body as a point of departure in thinking about what science and technology might be. J. Scott (1998) offers metis—local, situated knowledge grounded in experience—as an antidote to scientific high modernism. This is an interesting proposal but leaves little if any space for the experimental stance that I associate with cybernetics.