Abstract
Nowadays “cybernetics” is remembered as the paradigmatic Cold War intellectual project. Its birth is normally traced to geopolitical security issues surrounding signal detection and target accuracy in high-tech environments that are only partly known yet easily destabilized. Its aspirations were focused on the construction of a “science of science” governed by an extended version of thermodynamics that covers information exchanges in “closed” and “open” systems. Cybernetics in this sense captured the imaginations of the leading philosophical and social scientific movements of both sides of the Iron Curtain, logical positivism and dialectical materialism. Philip Mirowski and Loren Graham have been the most interesting critical historians of the respective strands. In The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering, long included among the most intellectually sophisticated and ambitious practitioners of science and technology studies, sets aside this general image—without denying its validity—to argue for the continued relevance of cybernetics to a broadly postmodern world-view.
Pickering’s book is organized around the main figures of the British strand of cybernetics: the brain scientists Grey Walter and Ross Ashby, the organizational theorist Stafford Beer, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and the intellectual all-rounder Gordon Pask. By focusing his philosophically laced social history in this way, Pickering effectively shifts the field’s center of gravity from strategic operations research to a more open-ended inquiry aimed at exploring the brain’s adaptive capacities. The reader is then invited to rethink cybernetics as the consummate anti-establishment, counter-cultural science, staffed by brilliant eccentrics who were more anti- than inter-disciplinary. But Pickering wants us to do more. He wants us to see these cyberneticians as having blurred the boundaries between human, animal, and machine in ways that anticipate the “posthumanist” turn in science studies associated with Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.
Pickering is most obviously right in a “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” way. In other words, the cyberneticians certainly rejected the closed systems approach to the world associated with Newtonian mechanics that is also rejected by today’s postmodernists, indeed, often in the name of systems that demonstrate the sort of “complex” and “emergent” properties that interested the original cyberneticians. However, the cyberneticians outdid Newton in aspiring to a godlike view of the world, something that Pickering studiously avoids addressing. However, this is crucial for understanding the enthusiasm and confidence that they attached to the activity of “modelling,” taken broadly to range from engineering blueprints and computer programs to the curious customized machines that especially fascinate Pickering. The target domains of these models ranged from the internal workings of an individual brain to the entire globe, even as their creators openly admitted the models’ oversimplified and precarious natures.
Pickering’s emblematic cybernetic machine is Ashby’s “homeostat,” which Time magazine described in 1949 as the first synthetic brain. It was literally four Royal Air Force bomb control units that were designed to remain functional in the face of a wide range of external disturbances. (Pickering radically downplays the obvious military inspiration.) The homeostat had an enormous capacity for adaptive response through self-initiated reorganization, which rendered the device “ultrastable.” In other words, the homeostat would not simply do whatever it took to stay in one piece; rather, through trial-and-error it would manage to find an analogue to its old normal state. For Ashby and the other British cyberneticians, machines of this sort served as “models” for how the brain seeks equilibrium in an ever changing environment. Conversely, failure at this ongoing task suggested an understanding—and possible treatment—for people who become mentally disturbed.
At the time, observers of these developments were most struck by the very idea that the brain could be seen as an engineering project, once one accepts that the nervous system does not merely conduct electrochemical impulses but is literally an elaborate piece of electrochemical circuitry, as seemed to follow from an understanding of thermodynamics as a universal science of energy transfers. But again Pickering resists this obvious reductionist reading that led many to see cybernetics as a bigger, braver form of behaviorism that dared to open the “black box” of the brain by allowing it to dictate its own schedules of reinforcement. (Indeed, Bateson arrived at his famous concept of “deutero-learning” just this way, after observing how dolphins radically reprogrammed themselves once they had become insufficiently challenged by their trainers.) Instead Pickering prefers to imagine the performance of cybernetic machines at their limit: If maximum flexibility is required in an increasingly complex world, then such machines might through a series of stepwise adaptations turn into something else, if not completely merge into the environment as its “mind.” It is striking just how many cyberneticians headed that way over their careers, most notably—and with Pickering’s approval—Stafford Beer’s drift from management guru to Buddhist guru.
Although it is clear that I disagree with the spin that Pickering has given to the history of cybernetics (I am more of the Norbert Wiener persuasion), The Cybernetic Brain is nevertheless an exemplary work in what I have called “Tory historiography,” namely, the project of recovering forgotten futures by exploring a set of deviant trajectories, whose intellectual direction was perhaps quite clear in its day but whose full realization came to be overtaken by events. And here I would agree with Pickering that we live in a time where such histories are more than ever needed.