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Cybernetics

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From Pickering, A., 2015. Cybernetics. In: James D. Wright (editor-in-chief),


International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol
5. Oxford: Elsevier. pp. 645–650.
ISBN: 9780080970868
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Elsevier
Author's personal copy

Cybernetics
Andrew Pickering, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

This article reviews developments in cybernetics from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the most radical threads, those
that foreground key questions of agency, performance, and emergence. It explores cybernetic intersections with fields
including science and technology studies, brain science, psychiatry and antipsychiatry, biological computing, management,
the environment, the arts, architecture, nonmodern spirituality, and the counterculture of the 1960s. It concludes with
a discussion of the politics of cybernetics.

After a long prehistory spanning many fields, cybernetics was something new. The job of cybernetics is not, therefore, to
born in the early 1940s, around the time of World War II and produce articulated knowledge of specific entities, but rather
officially named by Norbert Wiener in 1948 in his famous somehow to conceptualize aspects of the world as built from
book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal ultimately unknowable elements, and to explore ways of acting
and the Machine. Often identified with the Macy conferences accordingly. Three characteristic features stand out.
held in the United States between 1946 and 1953, cybernetics
1. The cybernetic vision centers on agency and performance –
also flourished in Britain (Pickering, 2010a), Europe, and the
in the sense of worldly actions – rather than on intentions
Soviet Union. Its visibility peaked in the 1960s to be followed
and knowledge. The world is a place of action and reaction
by a gradual decline, and the word ‘cybernetics’ largely fell out
among a multiplicity of elements.
of use – except as the root of words like ‘cyberspace’ and
2. Agency is emergent in a brutal sense: we cannot know in
‘cyborg’ – though lines of recognizably cybernetic work have
advance how any entity will act when placed in a novel
propagated forward to the present, often under other names
situation.
(Pickering, 2010a). In the third millennium, however, cyber-
3. The analysis is decentered: in the play of performative action
netics is enjoying a renaissance in the social sciences, as well as
and interaction none of the elements acts as a still,
the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts.
controlling (and explanatory) center. Everything is at stake
Cybernetics has always been a hard field to pin down.
and liable to transformation in ‘dances of agency’
Wiener presented it a synthesis of work in digital computing,
(Pickering, 1995). As far as the social sciences are concerned,
information theory, and feedback control. As such, it repre-
this speaks of a ‘posthumanist’ decentering of the analysis,
sented a new kind of science, devoted to immaterial elements
an acknowledgment that we ourselves are transformed and
such as ‘bits’ of information rather than the material substances
become something new in our traffic with people and
that define traditional sciences like physics, chemistry, and
things.
biology. Again, in contrast to the traditional organization of
knowledge, cybernetics was strongly interdisciplinary. The Performance, emergence, and decentering of the human:
Macy conferences brought anthropologists, sociologists, these topics are central to cybernetics but marginalized at best
psychologists, and psychiatrists together with natural scientists, in modern thought. We can therefore see cybernetics as
mathematicians, and engineers, and claims were made for instantiating a nonmodern paradigm, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense,
cybernetics as a universal superscience capable of accommo- radically disjoint from the Enlightenment disciplines. This, in
dating all of the disciplines (Bowker, 1993). turn, explains the resurgence of cybernetics in the new
millennium, as indexing a growing conviction that we need to
explore the world from new angles. We can now examine some
Nonmodern Ontology of the important threads of the cybernetic paradigm.

The distinctiveness of cybernetics can be expressed in different


ways. The most productive and radical, followed here, is in Science and Technology Studies
terms of ontology, its vision of what the world is like. The
ontology of the modern sciences is that of a world of fixed and Though its debts to cybernetics are obscure and sometimes
specificable entities in fixed and specifiable relations to one amount to a rediscovery of cybernetic insights, the post-
another, and the job of the sciences is to generate knowledge humanist wing of science and technology studies (STS) has
about these entities (quarks, genes, social interests, molecular worked out a cybernetic analysis close to the heartland of the
structures, and dark matter). The ontology of cybernetics is traditional social sciences. The actor-network theory approach
different and in that sense ‘nonmodern’ (Latour, 1993). associated with the work of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and
Stafford Beer (1959: 18) described cybernetics as the science of John Law (Latour, 1987, 2005); Donna Haraway’s (1991,
‘exceedingly complex systems,’ meaning systems we can never 2008) nonessentialist ‘cyborg’ reconceptualization of the unit
fully grasp conceptually and that are always becoming of analysis and her parallel analysis of relations between

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.85005-9 645

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 645–650
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646 Cybernetics

humans and animals; Katherine Hayles’ (1999) discussion of contradictory communication much like a combination of
embodiment and disembodiment; and Andrew Pickering’s homeostats unsuccessfully hunting for equilibrium. And he
analysis of the history of science as a ‘mangle of practice’ understood the interplay of sufferer and psychiatrist as
(Pickering, 1995; Pickering and Guzik, 2008) all share a symmetric and open-ended process of reciprocal adaptation
a cybernetic vision of the world as a place of decentered and (Bateson et al., 1956). This view was put into practice by R.D.
emergent performative becomings. Posthumanist STS grew out Laing and colleagues at Kingsley Hall in London in the
of detailed studies of laboratory practice to encompass, for second half of the 1960s. Kingsley Hall was a centerpiece of
example, macrotransformations of science, technology, and the antipsychiatry movement, a commune in which the sane
society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has and the mad lived together in nonhierarchical relationships,
articulated principled arguments against the presuppositions of with the object of sustaining sufferers through their ‘inner
traditional social theory (Pickering, 2010b). voyages’ and, at the same time, helping the sane to become
Work in STS has increasingly resonated across the social new sorts of selves (Pickering, 2010a).
sciences and humanities, informing important developments At the opposite extreme from madness, the early cyberne-
in sociology, anthropology, geography, politics, literary studies, ticians were interested in altered states and ecstasy. Walter
and studies of management and organizations. Philosophical (1953) included within his overall cybernetic framework
inspiration has been sought from pragmatism, especially the states such as dreams, visions, telepathy, the achievement of
writings of William James, from continental philosophy, nirvana, and the uncanny performances of Eastern yogis, such
including Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin as suspending the heartbeat and the breath. He also experi-
Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze, and even from premodern mented on the brain, using a strobe light to induce symptoms
traditions, such as Taoism, which likewise envision the world of epilepsy and discovering in the late 1940s that strobes also
as a place of endless decentered flows and becomings induce visions of dynamic geometrical patterns. This work on
(Pickering, 2013). In contemporary philosophy, much the madness and altered states points to a cybernetic image of the
same ontology is elaborated in works often referred to as the self more encompassing than the rational and controlled image
‘new vitalism’ and ‘speculative realism,’ such as those of Karen assumed and reproduced by AI and the modern social sciences,
Barad, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Brian Massumi, and in turn leads in the direction of nonmodern and non-
and Isabelle Stengers. Western understandings of consciousness and spirituality,
which share with cybernetics a decentered posthumanist
ontology. A common fascination with altered states,
The Brain explorations of consciousness and Eastern philosophy and
spirituality also constituted an important axis of intersection
The original referent of cybernetics was the brain, but the brain between cybernetics and the counterculture of the 1960s.
understood as primarily a performative rather than cognitive Ashby and Walter built machines to emulate the adaptive
organ (Pickering, 2010a). While postwar research in artificial brain. In their biological computing project of the late 1950s
intelligence (AI) sought to emulate conscious reasoning and early 1960s, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask tried instead to
processes, cybernetics instead understood the brain as use naturally occurring adaptive systems as substitutes for
embedded in worldly actions and in preconscious processes of human brains, attempting to find ways to use pond ecosystems,
performative adaptation to the unknown (for example, for example, to replace human managers in factories. The
homeostatic processes such as maintaining blood temperature nonmodernity of this project is clear: instead of purposeful and
constant in differing environments). While AI had centered on protracted design, it rested on a hylozoist conviction that
computer programming, cybernetic brain research typically nature is endlessly lively, and that whatever we need can
consisted in building adaptive electromechanical systems. Gray already be found there (Pickering, 2010a).
Walter’s (1953) robot ‘tortoises’ located and pursued light
sources while negotiating obstacles encountered en route. Ross
Ashby’s (1952) homeostats engaged in transformative dances Management
of agency with one another, randomly reconfiguring their inner
circuitry until they achieved collective states of dynamic equi- The biological computing project was part of the cybernetic
librium. In the 1980s, tortoise-style robotics was reinvigorated concern with theorizing and managing organizations. From the
by Rodney Brooks (1999), and this approach to situated later 1960s onward, Beer’s work in management consultancy
robotics is now a major line of research alongside work was organized around what he called the viable system model
centered on AI techniques. or VSM (Beer, 1981). Instead of incorporating real biological
Inspired by psychiatric concerns with epilepsy and madness, material into the organization, Beer’s idea was now to model
early cyberneticians were interested in the pathological as well information flows within the organization on the most adap-
as the normal brain. Walter drove his tortoises mad by tive biological system he could think of: the human brain and
contradictory conditioning and then cured them in electro- nervous system. Beer’s formal diagram of the VSM represents
mechanical ways, which he argued shed light on the efficacy of information pathways between five levels of the organization
sleep therapy, electroshock, and lobotomy, the great and modeled on their biological equivalents, running between
desperate cures of 1950s psychiatry. Gregory Bateson derived production units at level 1 and the board of directors at level 5
a very different approach to madness from Ashby’s homeostats. through various intermediary levels and the firm’s environ-
His concept of the double bind as precipitating schizophrenia ment. Much of Beer’s attention focused on level 3, which
was one of family members locked into pathological cycles of housed a set of operations research models of the organization,

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 645–650
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Cybernetics 647

and level 4, home for a big computer model of the firm’s world, put such posthumanist imaginings into practice, exploring
the wider economy. These models illustrate the place of artic- nature’s tendencies through performative experimentation
ulated knowledge in the overall cybernetic picture. Beer ‘in the wild’ – staging artificial floods on rivers, for example,
intended them to be continually revised in relation to the to learn more about how to manage ecosystems (rather than
organization’s performance, and thus as geared into practice trying to calculate their behavior in advance) – or
and performance, rather than controlling performance as in the recognizing, in a hylozoist fashion, that nature is better at
modern cognitivist picture. absorbing the shocks of flooding than engineers are at
On the model of Ashby’s homeostats, Beer insisted that containing them, as in the Room for the River project in
internal relations between levels within the organization Holland (Gunderson and Light, 2006; de Groot and
should themselves take the form of a performative dance of Lenders, 2006; Asplen, 2008; Pickering, 2013).
agency. The relation between levels was supposed to be
a process of ‘reciprocal vetoing,’ of proposal and counterpro-
posal, until some sort of equilibrium emerged that all of the Art
parties could live with. This constructive give and take contrasts
strikingly with the hierarchical command-and-control Artists are in the lead in the current cybernetic resurgence, often
structures typical of modern management. The VSM has exploring lines of work opened up in the 1960s (Gere, 2002;
many followers in management today (Espejo and Harnden, Salter, 2010). Grey Walter’s tortoises have spawned endless
1989). Its most ambitious application was to the entire variations and elaborations in robotic artwork. Made for the
Chilean economy under the socialist regime of Salvador 1968 Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London, Gordon
Allende in the early 1970s. Project Cybersyn, as it was called, Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles was an array of five adaptive robots,
went a long way in a couple of years before it was cut off by three designated male and two female, that sought to satisfy
the Pinochet coup (Beer, 1981; Medina, 2011). each other’s desires with light beams, rotating in space and
Beer also developed a structured approach to decentered communicating by sounds in pursuit of equilibrium and
decision making that he called Syntegration. Syntegration is temporary quiescence. The Colloquy was an artistic variant of
a complex process with many iterations, usually extended over a long line of adaptive teaching and learning machines built by
several days, but the basic idea is to assign participants to the Pask and his colleagues, beginning with a machine called
edges of a notional icosahedron, and to organize a series of Musicolour in the early 1950s (Pickering, 2010a). Musicolour
sequential discussions between the parties whose edges end at turned a musical performance into a light show, but the
a common vertex, alternating in steps between the vertices at the connection between sound and light was cognitively opaque to
end of each edge. In this way, arguments can progressively echo the musician. The machine adapted to each performance as it
all around the icosahedron, eventually taking an emergent form went along; thresholds for activating lights increased, and the
controlled by no one in particular. Syntegrations have been machine would eventually ‘get bored’ and cease to respond to
performed on many topics, running from the reorganization of repeated tropes, thus encouraging the performer to adapt to the
the British Operations Research (OR) Society (of which Beer machine by trying something new. In effect, each Musicolour
was President) up to Israeli–Palestinian relations and world performance was a decentered and emergent dance of agency
peace, and they continue to be held today (Beer, 1994). between the musician and the machine. The Colloquy in its turn
was a dance of agency between purely nonhuman participants.
Pask elaborated an aesthetic theory around these machines,
The Environment arguing that we enjoy and derive satisfaction from the process
of coming to terms with inscrutable systems, as long as it is
In the later years of his life, Gregory Bateson turned his possible to achieve some relationship in a finite time (Pask,
attention to the environment. Further articulating the 1971). Simon Penny’s Petit Mal, first shown in the early
concerns of the nascent environmental movement, in the 1990s, is a mobile robot that tracks the motion of humans
late 1960s he developed a cybernetic understanding of our around it and, again, lures them into open-ended dances of
relations with nature (Bateson, 1968). He argued that we agency (Penny, 2000). Ruairi Glynn’s (2008) work,
should understand nature as itself lively and emergent, as Performative Ecologies, updates Pask’s Colloquy by adding
always liable to surprise us, and that attempts to manage and learning algorithms to robots that dance with both human
reconfigure the environment should thus be expected to elicit spectators and each other (Glynn, 2008). The Pask Present
unexpected and possibly catastrophic responses – as in the exhibition in Vienna in 2008 brought together a whole range
disastrous effects of pesticides on wildlife described in of Pask-inspired artworks (Glanville and Müller, 2008).
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Bateson argued that we need On a different line of descent, Walter’s explorations of stro-
new ways of imagining nature as beyond any linear forms boscopic flicker effects crossed over into the art world in the
of control. The deep ecology movement, James Lovelock’s 1960s via the Beats. William Burroughs was a perceptive reader of
Gaia hypothesis and work in complexity theory on Walter’s Living Brain, as is clear from a reading of Naked Lunch;
environmental resilience and tipping points have continued Brion Gysin learned of flicker from him and went on to build
this reimagination up to the present (Lenton et al., 2008). flicker machines as artworks and putative replacements for TVs
All of these point to an ontological decentering of the place in the home (Geiger, 2003). The early years of the twenty-first
of humanity in nature and evoke echoes of premodern century have seen a proliferation of flicker artworks, often
ontologies, especially Taoism (Jullien, 1999). Adaptive conjoined with powerful low-frequency sounds, as both
approaches to environmental management attempt to material entities and film effects (for example, Matthijs

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 645–650
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648 Cybernetics

Munnik’s massive 2013 installation Citadels: Common Structures aim was to design a control system for the building, which
(Vimeo, 2013)). One can think of flicker art as a technology of would enable it not only to adapt to emergent patterns of use,
the nonmodern self (Foucault, 1988), continuing Walter’s but also sometimes to get bored along the lines of Musicolour,
explorations of the performative brain. Works like Chris Salter’s reconfiguring itself in unpredictable ways and thus inviting its
JND also fall into this category, though operating on different human inhabitants to find novel uses and practices (Mathews,
sensory modalities, combining tactile stimulation on the 2007). John Frazer (1995) elaborated on Pask’s approach to
margins of perception in a work that adapts to the responses of articulate an evolutionary vision of architecture, in which built
participants (another dance of agency) (Salter, 2012). structures evolve in relation to their inner and outer environ-
Another strand of contemporary cybernetic art thematizes ments. Today, adaptive and generative approaches are leading
the performative agency of nature, matter, and complex systems. themes in architectural research.
Chris Welsby’s work in experimental cinema and video since the Collectively, these works (and many more) function as
late 1960s aims in various ways to hand over control in film ontological theater. They stage aspects of the cybernetic
making to the elements: sun, wind, weather, and the motion of ontology of performative and emergent interactions among
the planet in space. His 1974 movie Seven Days is a time-lapse humans and nonhumans, and in doing so help us to grasp the
film of a Welsh landscape over a period of a week in which cybernetic vision by translating it into nonverbal and perfor-
the camera both tracks the sun and oscillates between mative forms. If orreries can function as icons of the modern
pointing at the land when the sun is out and at the sky when ontology of a regular and machinelike cosmos, interactive
the sun is obscured by clouds (Welsby, 2011). In Richard robots, flicker machines, and movies controlled by the
Brown’s work, The Electrochemical Glass, three electrodes of weather are mnemonics for a cybernetic world of endless and
copper, aluminum, and iron were sandwiched in a conducting unpredictable flows and becomings. Returning to an earlier
fluid between two glass plates and the assemblage evolved heading, we can understand these artworks as microenviron-
unpredictably over time into a continuously changing work of ments that might, in turn, help to refamiliarize us along
art as material was deposited between them. This work again Batesonian lines with nature at large and the macroenviron-
confronts us with the emergent liveliness of nature. Invoking ment, and to suggest new approaches to engaging with the
another premodern ontology, Brown (2003: 20) described this latter.
work “as a daily reflection of process, decay, transmutation
and growth; the slow changes resonating with memory and
notions of self – a form of contemplative alchemy.” Politics
Various forms of bioart directly thematize the emergent
agency of biological systems, including the high-tech and very From its beginning, cybernetics has been politically contro-
scientific work of the SymbioticA laboratory in Australia, versial. On the one hand, it has been seen as a profoundly
which aims literally to grow sculptures from living cells (Catts threatening science of technocratic control and manipulation.
and Zurr, 2002) and, at the everyday level, the ancient East The subtitle of Wiener’s Cybernetics already defined it to be the
Asian art of bonsai (both of which entail dances of agency science of “control and communication in the animal and the
between the artist and a living substrate). Ursula Damm’s machine,” and in 1950 in The Human Use of Human Beings
(2010) installation Greenhouse Converter (for online video, see Wiener himself warned of the dangers of cybernetic automa-
Damm, 2014) exemplifies the liveliness of coupled material tion. Bernard Wolfe’s science fiction novel Limbo (1952)
and biological systems. The state of a mini ecology of algae sketched a horrific picture of a cybernetic world of brain
and water fleas acts to reveal or obscure an array of light- surgery, amputations, and prosthetics. The most extended
emitting diodes (which spell out the word ‘beloved,’ recent critique is from the Tiqqun group, arguing that “Cyber-
a reference to Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbioisis). The netics is the police-like thinking of the Empire, entirely
lights change frequency to maintain a dynamic balance of fleas animated by an offensive concept of politics . Cybernetics is
and algae (and spectators can interfere with the system but not war against all that lives and all that is lasting” (Tiqqun, n.d.:
control it, by changing the gas composition of the water that 8). Against that view, Haraway (1991) opted for the figure of
flows through it). At the human end of the spectrum, Stelarc’s the cyborg, the cybernetic organism, as an icon for her
works – beginning with performances in which he was version of a nonessentialist and emergent radical socialist-
suspended in the air via hooks through his flesh, and running feminist project, and Pickering (2010a) likewise argues that
through robotic and surgical augmentations of his limbs and the history of cybernetics offers us a set of ‘sketches of
sensory systems – all thematize the performative rather than another future,’ a future radically different from and
cognitive aspects of our being and coupling into the world preferable to contemporary neoliberalism.
(Stelarc, 2007). One can understand these divergent political evaluations as
Developments in architecture have paralleled those in art. referring to different threads in the history of cybernetics and
In the 1960s, Cedric Price, as well as the British architectural the specific material exemplars from which they grew: the
collective Archigram, imagined buildings and cities that could thermostat and the homeostat, respectively. The negative
change and adapt in response to emergent developments in evaluation focuses on cybernetics as a branch of control engi-
their use and environment (rather than being designed to meet neering. Deriving from his work in World War II, Wiener’s
preconceived needs) (Sadler, 2005; Mathews, 2007). Gordon vision of cybernetics grew out of his wartime work on servo-
Pask’s first involvement with architecture came in the early mechanisms, simple feedback devices like the domestic ther-
1960s as head of the cybernetics committee involved in plan- mostat (Galison, 1994). The thermostat seeks to minimize
ning a public building in London called the Fun Palace. Pask’s deviations in some specified variable, such as the temperature

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 645–650
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Cybernetics 649

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Haraway, D., 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Heidegger’s (1977) distinctions between ‘enframing’ and
Hayles, N.K., 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
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inspired wing of cybernetics offers us examples in the
Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory.
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Relevant Websites
Pickering, A., Guzik, K. (Eds.), 2008. The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and
Becoming. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. ursuladamm.de/treibhauskonverter-venus-v/ – Damm, U., 2014. Greenhouse Converter.
Sadler, S., 2005. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture. MIT Press, (accessed 18.02.14.).
Cambridge, MA. www.ruimtevoorderivier.nl/meta-navigatie/english.aspx – Room for the River, n.d.
Salter, C., 2010. Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. MIT (accessed 18.02.14.).
Press, Cambridge, MA. vimeo.com/61338326 – Vimeo, 2013. Matthijs Munnik, Citidels: Common Structures.
Salter, C., 2012. JND: an artistic experiment in bodily experience as research. In: Live recordings from the opening of Sonic Acts 2013 in Stedilijik Museum,
Peters, D., Eckel, G., Dorschel, A. (Eds.), Bodily Expression in Electronic Music: Amsterdam, by Tanja Busking. (accessed 18.02.14.).
Perspectives on Reclaimed Performativity. Routledge, London.

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