'''Introduction and Chapter Outline'''

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THE FABULOUS LOOP DE LOOP

The cybernetic discourse as read through seven feedback machines

A project by Steve Rushton

Samael Butler’s Darwin Among the Machines (1863) anticipates a now familiar science fiction narrative. Butler supposed that in the near future machines would evolve in the same way that organisms do, to the point where humans would be enslaved by their superior machine-masters. In the text Butler recognised that the discourse of evolution and the discourse of the self-correcting steam engine (regulated by the governor) were inextricably bound. The principle which affords the self-correction of a species within an environment, and the self-correction of the governor within a “vapour engine” were the same, Butler realised. In the cybernetic era, almost one hundred years later, the principle regulating both would be understood as negative entropy (negentropy) which would make a link between energy and information. The understanding that the entropic forces of the universe are frequently stalled or reversed called for a re-evaluation of a number of disciplines across the natural and social sciences. This passage of the cybernetic model of negative entropy will be charted by six feedback machines which serve as agents in extending the discourse of cybernetics across a number of different scientific, social and cultural domains.

1) The Vapour Engine, regulated by the governor. This self-regulating machine becomes the exemplar of the broad principles of cybernetics and binds the discourse of evolution to the discourse of the machine.

2) Grey Walter’s M. Specularix (the cybernetic tortoise) was built in the late 1940s. It performed as a model for the cybernetic conception of neural activity;

3) Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger’s SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot) was developed by at the Bell Labs in the early 1950s. The machine was able to play a human at the game of “ones and twos” and is regarded as one of the first “thinking machines”;

4) Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential (Anthropometre) (1924) was a “plastic diagram” which, in Korzybski’s theory of General Semantics, modelled the relation between an object-event and the human nervous system. The machine as a technology of self-reflexivity was later adopted, for different purposes, by Gregory Bateson and William Burroughs.

5) The E-Meter (Electropsycometer) was used in Scientology auditing sessions. The E-Meter served as a psychological feedback mechanism, regulating the actions and re-actions if the user. For William Burroughs, a Scientologist and media activist, this machine has a strong performative potential which. along with a series of other media apparatus, had the power to reshape reality.

6) The Homeostat was developed by Ross Ashby. It explores the degree of self-organization afforded within a complex system. The machine allows for changes to its ultrastable state by adjusting the variables (demonstrating Ashby’s law of requisite variety)

7) The Sony Videorover II AV-3400 (Portapak). Used within the counterculture of the 1960s as an agent of bio-feedback therapy. The video system became an operational model on which visions of an ecologically sustainable society could be mapped on to a utopian media ecology.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

THE GOVERNOR

SAMUAL BUTLER – VAPOUR ENGINE

Samual Butler understood that when the "vapour engine" regulated by a governor, arrived there was suddenly a new way to understand evolution. This brought the discourse of the machine and the discourse of the organism together. Gregory Bateson (a keen reader of Butler) understood this to be the instrument that would bring the natural and social sciences into the same epistemological space. Butler further recognised that the machine-organism debate demanded scrutiny of two issues:

(a) the relation between organism and machine centred on the issue of design and purpose. Butler held that conscious purpose itself evolved from a series on non-conscious actions that came into consciousness. The key concern of Butler, which is evident across the texts we will discuss in this chapter, is the evolution of consciousness. In opposition to the idealism of the time, Butler argued, mind and matter are indivisible

(b) the transmission of information down generations affords adaptation and consolidates order.

SAMUAL BUTLER – VIBRATIONS

Samuel Butler’s proto-cybernetic speculation provided a model for “the father of modern genetics” William Bateson. William Bateson sought to navigate energetic problematics by allowing that genetic information is cycled through an organism ¬– consolidating order within a larger system. In Problems of Genetics 38 (1913) William Bateson attempts to account for variation without an adequately theorised notion of negative entropy. William’s son, the polymath Gregory Bateson, extended the ideas of the elder Bateson (and re-purposed the writings of Samuel Butler) to develop an ecology of mind which was wholly cybernetic.

EDWARD CRAIK – A PROTO CYBERNETIC EXPLANATION

The war-time technologies of scanning devices and predictive servomechanisms, when added to the repertoire of neurophysiological experimentation, afforded the production of new models of the machine-organism. These included the “thinking machines” discussed throughout this text: William Ross Ashby’s Homeostat, William Grey Walter’s Tortoise, Norbert Wiener’s Moth-Bedbug and Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger’s SEquence Extrapolating Robot (SEER) Central to this conception of order and adaptation was a new definition of purpose, in which information cycles within a system to consolidate order and afford greater adaptation (negentropy).

The discourse of neurophysiology, which was practiced by cyberneticians who also worked in the war effort – including Grey Walter, Edward Craik, Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch – is central to the discourse of cybernetics. The argument that mind is constituted through a series of iterative, non-conscious actions was far advanced within the research cultures of experimental psychology long before it established an alliance with the burgeoning discipline of control and communications. A well-established “experimental epistemology” (to use Warren McCulloch’s term) had been practiced in the fields of neurological and brain research from the turn of the century. The meeting of the discourse of neurophysiology and that of war-time research produced a new formal theory of feedback and control technologies – cybernetics Edward Craik was a British experimental psychologist who died in 1945 at the age of 32 (just on the cusp of “the cybernetic moment”). Craik, in The Nature of Explanation (1943), argues for an anti-cartesian, non-vitalistic “hylozoism” – which is to say that mind is a function of matter rather than an essence opposing matter. For Craik, consciousness is delimited by the material constraints of the nervous system. Central to Craik’s thought is the idea of the mind modelling reality, which works “in the same way as the process it parallels”; thought, in the action of modelling reality, does not copy reality because “our internal model of reality can predict events which have not occurred” This predictive ability is “down hill” all the way. It is negentropic, because it saves energy which can be used to consolidate order within the system as the information cycles within an iterative circuit.

GREGORY BATESON - FROM SCHIZMOGENESIS TO FEEDBACK

Gregory Bateson was able to reformulate his earlier theory of schismogenesis (1935) after his introduction to cybernetics in the 1940s. After this point Bateson diagnosed the conflicts and divisions that occur in social groups which he termed schismogenesis as “positive feedback” and is able to explain the resolution of such conflicts in terms of “negative feedback”. From this point Bateson is able to frame past thought in terms informed by negentropy (this included a reassessment of Samuel Butler, Korzybski’s general semantics, his father’s insights into genetics). At this point in Bateson’s career negentropy becomes the organising principle which regulates a number of social, ecological and cultural systems, a post-cybernetic epistemology.

GREGORY BATESON, WARREN S. McCULLOCH & LAWRENCE KUBIE – THREE CYBERNETICIANS' DISCOURSE ON FREUD'S DYNAMIC PSYCHOLOGY

In the early 1950s Gregory Bateson considered the implications of the epistemological shift occasioned by cybernetics to the field of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. His book Communication: The Social Matrix of Society (1951) (co-authored with psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch) gives an account of this. In the tradition of Butler, Bateson presented a conception of the human subject in which mind is co-extensive with system. Bateson presents an anti-Cartesian, hylozoist, view in which mind and matter are indivisible. This conception of psychiatry and psychoanalysis allowed Bateson to mount a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis on the basis of Freud’s outdated understanding of the distribution of energy within the psychic field, which for Fraud followed a thermodynamic pattern (psychic energy). I will bring into the argument two texts by cyberneticians who contributed to the discourse of Dynamic Psychology in relation to emerging concepts of information. Warren S. McCulloch’s “The Past of a Delusion” (1951) represents the assassination of Freud’s energetics, from the perspective of a pioneer in both neurophysiology and the emerging cybernetic epistemology. The second paper is a more nuanced assessment of Freudian dynamics. Lawrence S. Kubie’s “The Fallacious Use of Quantitative Concepts in Dynamic Psychology” (1947) cautions against understanding Freudian dynamics as anything more than a loose metaphor – and as an increasingly less helpful metaphor as the age of cybernetics progressed.

M. SPECULARIX (The Cybernetic Tortoise)

GREY WALTER – M. SPECULARIX – A BODY IN PIECES

Following the advice of Edward Craik, Grey Walter builds a servo-machine (the tortoise) which combines the scansion of a WWII anti-fire system and the principles of neurophysiology. The way in which the cybernetic tortoise orientates its environment is recursive, an action is dependent on cycling information which influences subsequent action. The machine does this by scanning, which orders the organism’s relation to space and time. Such behaviour is an expression of negentropy “What the nervous system receives from the sense organs is information about difference – about ratios between stimuli” wrote Walter.40

JACQUES LACAN – THE TORTOISE AND HOMEOSTASIS

A little after the publication of Gregory Bateson & Jurgen Ruesch’s Communication: The Social Matrix of Society – as the cybernetic critique of Freudian dynamic psychology was developed – Jacques Lacan conducted his own re-evaluation of Freudian dynamic psychology. In line with those in the mainstream of cybernetics (and resonating with Samuel Butler’s own discourse analysis) Lacan identifies a shift from the discourse of knowledge to the discourse of the machine. This re-evaluation has its origins in a renewed understanding of homeostasis in relation to new theories of information and control. Indeed, Seminar II can be read as the scrutiny of a discourse network as a dominant set of technical standards undergo a transformation. Lacan outlines the dialectic as follows:

(a.) We see the discourse of knowledge (characterised by the era of Hegel)

(b.) superseded by the discourse of the machine at the point where the discourse of entropy comes into being – this is embodied in the technical apparatus of the steam engine.

(c.) the discourse of negentropy, in the era of cybernetics, in turn challenges a number of models based on heat transference and displacement (such as Freud’s dynamic psychology) – this is embodied in the technical apparatus of the servomechanism

(d.) at this point the discourse of the machine takes its place at the centre of human subjectivity. Man is spoken by language, which moves in a circuit of communication exterior to the subject ¬– this is the language of the machine. For both Bateson and Lacan the role of negentropy allows for a new conception of self in relation to system. The differences and similarities of approach will be discussed in chapters six and seven.

GREGORY BATESON – BATESON'S NEGETROPIC DISCOURSE MATRIX

We return to Bateson’s Communication: and the Social Matrix of Psychiatry and consider Bateson’s “epistemological graph” which charts the shift following the advent of cybernetics toward

(a) “greater gestalten”,

(b) a move to understanding problems in human understanding as predicated on recently coined communication and information theories and

(c) a more complex understanding of order and system which replaces the Newtonian epistemology of cause and effect. Although Bateson advocates new approaches he is again reliant on established practices which anticipated the implications of negentropy.

SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot)

WARREN S. McCULLOCH AND JACQUES LACAN – PLAY LIKE AN IDIOT

The SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot) was developed by Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger at the Bell Labs in the early 1950s. Its aim was to outplay a human in the game of matching pennies (ones and twos / odds and evens). Lacan’s understanding of finite state automata (such as SEER) allowed him to theorize that simple information machines were structured similarly to simple languages with limited functions (recording their activities with a series of pluses and minuses); that the syntax of a finite-state automata was descriptive of the symbolic order.

Here we revisit the ideas of McCulloch and Pitts whose concept of neural feedback systems which links the biological function of thinking with the function of mechanical computation.

In Seminar II, Lacan analyses Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter, in which the game of ones and twos features: “The human subject doesn't foment this game, he takes his place in it, and plays the role of the little pluses and minuses in it. He is himself an element in this chain which, as soon as it is unwound, organises itself in accordance with laws. Hence the subject is always on several levels, caught up in crisscrossing networks.”42

JACQUES LACAN – LACAN BUILDS A CIRCUIT: CYBERNETICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Three elements of Lacan’s cybernetic discourse emerge in this chapter:

(a) that the introduction of the symbolic into the domain of the real produces a circuit between signs, things and subjects

(b) Lacan stresses the centrality of probability; the precedents for this, the “conjectural sciences” of the 1600s which studied ratios of difference and

(c) simple choice establishes a difference which establishes and consolidates order.

The chapter concludes with a comparison between Lacan and Bateson's approach to psychoanalysis. Lacan sought to rehabilitate Freud in the cybernetic era whilst Bateson sought to dismiss Freudianism and other “introspective”, “epistemologically outmoded” methods of psychoanalysis. But, in their approach to psychoanalysis and psychiatry via cybernetics Bateson and Lacan also share a lot in common. Both attempt to bring the psychic apparatus in line with the technical standards of the day; both recognise Freud’s model of the human psyche as conditioned by a nineteenth-century emphasis on entropy (the postponement and inhibition of discharge); both recognise the stochastic nature of language; that language is exterior to and constitutive of the subject; both recognise regulation of system relies on the cycling of information through the circuit; that the subject is constituted within the threshold of restraints; both see organism and servomechanism as having a homological relation to each other – they have the same structure, they organise in the same way. Their respective ideas of the “subject” are also remarkably similar.

THE STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL (The Anthropometre)

COUNT ALFRED KORZYBSKI – THE STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL

Korzybski’s Structural Differential (Anthropometre) (1924) is a “plastic diagram” and thought experiment which, in Korzybski’s theory of General Semantics, modelled the relation between an object-event and the human nervous system. The core ideas developed by Polish mathematician Count Alfred Korzybski were used by Gregory Bateson and William S. Burroughs to articulate their own theories of communication. As readers of Korzybski, Burroughs and Bateson grappled with the implications of Korzybski’s time binding theory and the implications of confusing different levels of abstraction. While Burroughs sought to scramble and wilfully hack the mechanisms of time binding, Bateson adopted aspects of the theory to conduct his own assault on the “errors of occidental epistemology”.43

Bateson adapted Korzybski’s term “the map is not the territory” to illustrate his own theory of communication and ecology. Both Korzybski and Bateson held that the distortions arising from category confusion was at the root of a general epistemological crisis.

THE ELECTROPSYCOMETER (The E-Meter)

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS – THE ELECTROPSYCOMETER (The E-Meter)

The E-Meter (Electropsycometer) was used in scientology auditing sessions. The E-Meter was ostensibly a polygraph which registers a subject’s reaction to a series of questions; the galvanic charge produced by each response is picked up by two metal cans held by the subject. The occult narrative of scientology sits in isomorphic relation to Burroughs’ text The Electronic Revolution, in this chapter I establish a relation between the E-meter, the Structural Differential and the tape recorder. When it was first developed, The Structural Differential used a Pavlovian technique of stimulus-response to help schizophrenics understand different levels of abstraction. In The Electronic Revolution Burroughs advocates the use of the tape recorder as a form of radical software which confuses levels of abstraction, as a means of unbinding the subject from time. As a piece of tactical media The Electronic Revolution flings Dianetics and General Semantics into an unexpected alliance.

In line with Lacan and Bateson, it is at the level of syntax that the bedrock of consciousness is formed.44 For Burroughs the control system of language can be subverted, in the first instance, by media tactics which scramble the code of language that anchors humans to permanent identity.

THE HOMEOSTAT

ECOLOGICAL MODELS – GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY– CREATIVE EVOLUTION – BIOSPHERE AND NOOSPHERE

We will consider various ecological models and consider how Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic ecology is best suited to translation into the philosophy of emergent media ecologies.

THE PORTAPAK: SONY VIDEOROVER DV-2400 (1967)

RADICAL SOFTWARE – THE FABULOUS LOOP DE LOOP

Video artist Roy Skodnick: “Anyone who happened to get hold of a portable video system at the time immediately overloaded on circuits, playback, feedback and fabulous loop de loop”

The term ‘media ecology’ was developed in the pages of Radical Software in the early 1970s. Gregory Bateson's ideas were seminal to the development of the discourse of video art and video activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When artistic practice and discourse adopted ideas of self-reflexivity and radical mediality it was largely because of the influence Bateson.45 The magazine Radical Software provided a forum for discussion, the decimation of information and the formulation of media theory as well as a platform for established writers and theorists. At the same time these groups adopted technologies of bio-feedback which proposed new systems of social organisation. This chapter will examine the impact of Bateson’s ecological theory on the emergent media ecology of the late 1960s.

This text has three parts:

The first part PREFIGURING A CYBERNETIC EPISTEMOLOGY will examine instances in which thinkers in the nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth century recognised the necessity to think beyond the limitations of entropy.

The second part THE SOCIAL MATRIX AND THE DE-CENTERED SELF (chapters five-seven)is concerned with how thinkers came to terms with the implications of negentropy (negative entropy) in the cybernetic era and how these new insights necessitated a re-organisation of knowledge across a diverse field.

The third part THE FANTASTIC LOOP DE LOOP (chapters eight -twelve) considers how the negentropic model translated across ecological and media theory and practice at the end of the 1960s.

INTRODUCTION

“I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years. But most of such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible—usually for cybernetic reasons. Cybernetics has integrity within itself, to help us to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin.”

— Gregory Bateson, From Versailles to Cybernetics (1966)

Gregory Bateson’s collection of essays and lectures, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (StEM) begins with a series of “metalogues”. These are dialogues between a father and his young daughter in which the father explains the principles of communication and organisation. 1 To the contemporary reader their tone is a little cutesy and more than a little patrician. However, the texts serve as an excellent introduction to the themes which dominated Bateson’s work – and which dominate this text. The first metalogue is entitled “Why do things get in a muddle?” and explains the principle of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that organised entities will run to disorder and dissipation over time. Things get in a muddle because of entropy. The notion of entropy was central to Bateson’s thinking and his reading of it was specifically cybernetic. Cybernetics (“the science of feedback”) seemed to resolve the curious issue that however much things tend to get in a muddle, they also (in the natural world and in human society) tend toward organisation and order. Norbert Wiener, who coined the neologism “cybernetics”, adopted the term, “negentropy” (or negative entropy),2 to account for the way in which systems and organisms establish and retain their organisation despite the ever-present effects of entropy. Negentropy resolves the problematic issue of how, in a universe which is prone to the forces of disorganisation, systems and organisms actually stabilise, become more complex and reproduce. This figure of (negative) entropy was the unifying element in Gregory Bateson’s output from the 1940s to the 1970s, incorporating anthropology, aesthetics, psychiatry, evolution, biology and ecology. The order to be found in all these disparate fields is negentropic insofar as information cycling within a negative feedback loop establishes homeostasis and affords its adaptation. This is the case regardless of whether that system or organism is biological, psychic, social or mechanical. For Bateson a coherent wholistic world view (meta-theory), is dependent on negentropy as the central organising principle.

Norbert Wiener, in Cybernetics (1948) provided a precise relation for entropy and information, in the sense that units of information (Binary units or bits) within a message can be measured against noise (which is the measure of entropy in the message): “Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.”5

In Wiener’s conception of negentropy, the second law of thermodynamics still holds, systems will always run to disorganisation, but negentropy allows for a decrease in the rate of dissipation. This is because knowledge of order is fed back through the system which allows the system to conserve order. In this sense, negentropy represents a localised reversal of time’s arrow. It is possible, stated Wiener “to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example are less illuminating than great poems.” 6

Organism carries news of order back through the system. Human beings, for instance, have maintained, and even increased, the level of organisation, which, as with all negentropic systems, allows an enclave of order within a general stream of increasing chaos7; and, furthermore, as the father explains in the first metalogue, your muddle might be my order.8

If entropy framed the understanding of the central scientific and social issues of the nineteenth century – powering its steam engines, spinning its mills – organising its discourse of economies of energy; negentropy recognises the relationship between information and energy that frames the current age of communication – the discourse of ecologies of information (media ecologies). Wiener’s theory of negentropy provides a solution to a conundrum which had plagued evolutionary theory throughout the nineteenth century: how in an entropic universe could order be established and maintained and how can it increase in complexity? Wiener’s equation for negentropy accommodated biological order within a general field of physical flux because it provided the context for self-organisation and adaptation. 9

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson translates Wiener’s idea as follows:

“The technical term ‘information’ may be succinctly defined as any difference which makes a difference in some later event. This definition is fundamental for all analysis of cybernetic systems and organization. The definition links such analysis to the rest of science, where the causes of events are commonly not differences but forces, impacts, and the like. The link is classically exemplified by the heat engine, where available energy (i.e., negative entropy) is a function of a difference between two temperatures. In this classical instance, "information" and "negative entropy" overlap.” 10

The world understood as a series of differences, as opposed to a series of forces, proposes a new materialism. Bateson builds his argument of the difference that makes a difference to argue the relation between negentropy and conscious purpose.

Bateson: “Wiener points out that the whole range of entropy phenomena is inevitably related to the fact of our knowing or not knowing what state the system is in. If nobody knows how the cards lie in the pack, it is to all intents and purposes a shuffled pack. Indeed, this ignorance is all that can be achieved by shuffling.” Negentropy now enters the realm of culture, as human beings contently interfere with the randomising machinations of the entropic universe. Humans systematically set out to “trick” the second law of thermodynamics – organising against the relentless forces of improbability. Bateson next argues that because choice is bound to order, in seeking information humans also seek values. Bateson describes a man who “for his breakfast,[...] achieves an arrangement of bacon and eggs, side by side, upon a plate; and in achieving this improbability he is aided by other men who will sort out the appropriate pigs in some distant market and interfere with the natural juxtaposition of hens and eggs.”11

Here Bateson extends the individual choice to a larger ecology of choices: man + environment. This prosaic example of a man choosing his breakfast makes the key relation between negentropy and Bateson’s ecology of mind which underlies this text. For Gregory Bateson human decision-making serves as “Maxwell’s demon”, bringing order to an entropic system.

Entropy and its discontents

It became apparent to many thinkers, at the turn of the nineteenth century, that the dominant model of entropy was inadequate for the innovative theories of the era. The theory of evolution and natural selection – theories of homeostasis; genetics, mathematics, semantics and theories of the human psyche – all struggled to accommodate the second law of thermodynamics. The theorisation of negentropy in the era of cybernetics required the production of new knowledge, but it also required a reordering of existing knowledge. The janus face, which sees the possibilities of the future folded into the past, is therefore central to this text. I will emphasise how the moment of the Macy conferences on cybernetics invited a re-consideration of how thinkers prior to the cybernetic moment sought to establish a new horizon of possibility.

As I follow this track, I will depart form the emphasis taken in recent analysis of the cybernetic moment. This understands the period of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1945-52) as a moment when a “new universalism” was established (Bowker)13; it is the moment when we began to learn how we became post-human (Hayles),14 and when the foundation of a new discourse network for the twenty-first century was established (Kittler), a discourse which was established on “the ontology of the enemy” (Galison).15 I do not detract from the claims made by these writers, cybernetics has had a profound effect on contemporary culture. My own emphasis will be that the key thinkers of the new epistemology of cybernetics – Wiener, McCulloch and Bateson among them – were avid narrators of the development of their emerging science in a lineage of anti-cartesian, non-thomian thinking which was well established in the centuries before. In this sense, cyberneticians were epistemologists who by reframing the past established the stakes of a new discourse of negentropy;16 they were discourse theorists who argue the stake of past and present knowledge.

In that vein I emphasise that the discourse of experimental psychology, which had developed since the beginning of the twentieth-centaury, was central to the discourse of cybernetics as it developed in the 1940s. Many of the cyberneticians who worked in the war effort were also leading brain researchers before and after the war. In the case of Edward Craik, Ross Ashby and Grey Walter, the cybernetic “thinking machines” they created arose directly from their brain research.17 The new technologies of scanning devices and predictive servomechanisms, which they had researched for the war effort, when added to the repertoire of brain experimentation developed in the 1920s and 30s, produced new models of behaviour and new perspectives on the relationship between machine and the organism. The British cyberneticians Ross Ashby, Edward Craik and Grey Walter, and the American cyberneticians Lawrence Kubie and Warren McCulloch were well established in the discourse of experimental psychology, which developed clear arguments of how mind is constituted – from an “anti-cartesian”, “non-thomian” perspective (which is to say, they refused an essentialisation of “self”). The introduction of servo-machines into this established discourse allowed for the extension of experimental psychology into first-order cybernetics. The meeting of experimental psychology and war-time research produced a new formal theory of feedback and control technologies which begged fundamental questions about the nature of organism and its relation to environment.

At the heart of the cybernetic discourse of the 1940s and 1950s is the idea of machine-organism equivalence, which had also been at the heart of neurophysiological research in the preceding decades. This is the notion that a machine – to the extent that it modelled an organism, to the extent it could order its environment – could “think” “learn” and “adapt”.

Gregory Bateson plays a key role in extending this discourse still further. Bateson was born into a world where the entropic universe was passing into a new universe of information and communication. The development of his cybernetic epistemology leaves clear traces of this transition: he draws on visionary figures who intuited the new order – Samual Butler, Clark Maxwell and his father William Bateson to name a few– and reframes their work in the light of the cybernetic explanation provided by Kenneth Craik, Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, McCulloch and Wiener. As much as these writers were concerned with how the world works and how mind and the human brain function, they also acknowledged the pressing need to reframe the nineteenth-century thermodynamic discourse from the new perspectives provided by cybernetics.

READING MACHINES

A recurring feature within this text will be a close reading of machines which were produced within the discourse of cybernetics. I will make a close reading of two types of machine which bare a close relation The first category of machines which I will read closely in this text are machines which express negative entropy : these include Grey Walter’s Tortoise, Norbert Wiener’s Bedbug and Ross Ashby’s Homeostat. Such machines organise information, and in their inter-spacial and inter-subjective actions, make a performative claim on the world similar to the claim made by living organisms. These machines – referred to by their creators as “toys” and “thinking machines”– can further be understood as expressions of negentropy, rather than simply illustrations or demonstrations of the principle of negentropy. In this respect they differ from the scientific models that went before them. Scrutiny of these machine, in the metal so to speak, is in line with the experimental epistemology propounded by the subjects central to it: Ross Ashby, Craik, McCulloch, Grey Walter and Wiener, in the generation of cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s. There is a second type of machine read closely in this text. These also express negentropy, but they differ insofar as they fold human subjectivity into their apparatus. These machines include, Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential (Anthropometre); Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger’s SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot); the E-Meter (Electropsycometer) used in scientology audit; the Sony Videorover II AV-3400 (Portapak). These machines represent technologies of self through which the subject is made to adapt. All the machines in this second category require the subject to establish a relation to their environment or context, they are media for self-construction. The difference between these category of machine is subtle but significant: If the cybernetic tortoise produces a subject (other) in relation to context, the structural differential produces a subject (self) in relation to context. Having made that distinction, both categories of machine, in their relation to their environment and in relation to their subjectivity, represent a new definition of purpose.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF A CYBERNETIC EPISTOMOLOGY

PURPOSE The seminal paper by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow entitled Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1942) 18sought to provide a new definition of purpose, which is best demonstrated by the hypothetical cybernetic devices, such as those I describe in this text. These devices, which did not ‘resemble human beings’ would nevertheless exhibit complex behaviour despite being fed little information. The simplest and most clear demonstration of this claim would be realised a few years after the publication of Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, in Gray Walter's Tortoise (1948), one of the first in a menagerie of teleological mechanisms. The text, Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, distinguishes the behaviourist approach from a teleological approach (later to be termed cybernetics). Behaviourism has some relation to the teleological approach but the relation is limited. Behaviourism ignores the relation between the object and its surroundings (context), which is of central importance to the cyberneticians19. The teleological approach also differs from behaviourism in that it is goal-directed 20 Wiener et al make the distinction between purposeful machines and non-purposeful machines. “Purposeful active behaviour may be subdivided into two classes: "feed-back" (or "teleological") and "non-feed-back" (or "non-teleological")21. All feedback machines require negative feedback to operate, meaning “some signals from the goal are necessary at some time to direct the behaviour” 22 We can compare the conditions of a functioning thermostat (feedback machine) with a kitchen clock (non-feedback machine). The latter may allow exterior output (to be wound up) but outside signals do not circuit through it to modify its behaviour, as is the case with a thermostat. The clock is incapable of learning and of adapting (and in this sense it is entropic, it will always need energy from the outside to wind it up). For ‘teleological mechanisms’ 23, cause-and-effect relations are replaced by ‘circular causality’ which requires negative feedback as a regulator (Wiener will later identify negative feedback as negentropy). The senses of the organism (touch, sight and proprioception) guide a given action through constant feedback and adjustment. ‘Circular causality’ can occur in man and machine or machine and machine, but all are goal-directed and regulated within a circuit.24. Many goal-directed circular-causal activities can be understood mathematically, if not through the tractable (linear) mathematics in which A causes B. Behavour is therefore understood as systemic and probabilistic.

After the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1948, the relation between information and energy became more clearly defined – order is re-enforced as information loops through the system. In this context behaviour, thinking and mind are imminent to system – mind cannot be divorced from the material circuitry in which it is produced. This has significant implications to our conception of behaviour and requires a radical reconsideration of the concept of mind. For the cybernetic group at the Macy meetings the new conception of teleology extended the realm of exact science, revising the epistemology of modern science25, which traditionally was the study of the intrinsic way in which beings and things functioned.26 The teleological approach shifted the emphasis toward the interrelation of things and objects.

NEGENTROPY – THINKING (MACHINES)

The cybernetic epistemology makes an abiding link between stochastic systems (systems of probability) and biological systems. This position is re-enforced by a seminal paper which defined the debate on machines and organism in the post war era. A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity by Warren McCulloch and Warren Pitts (1943) argued that consciousness was synonymous with calculation.27 McCulloch – a neurophysiologist who graduated in both psychology and neurology28 – wanted to relate his findings on neural nets to the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead’s Prinicipia Mathematica.

A logical proposition is true or false. If stimulated, a nerve cell produces an electromagnetic discharge or it does not. It is an “all or none” proposition. Neurons fire on a chain and are linked in the same way logical propositions are linked. One could, therefore, view a nerve net as operating like a machine or computer. 29 Fundamentally, the McCulloch-Pitts Model provided a theoretical frame that allowed for the equivalence between mechanical and biological systems (specifically the brain) 30 allowing that both should be understood as encoding and decoding systems. Which is to say, biological organisms (including the brain) and servo-mechanisms constitute local negentropic systems.

The first, simple, cybernetic creatures – Claude Shannon’s Rat, Norbert Wiener’s Moth and Bedbug, Ross Ashby’s Homeostat, Grey Walter’s Tortoise 31 – displayed all the properties explained in Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology and accorded to the McCulloch-Pitts Model: they were self-organising, self-directing, adapting and orientated with their environment. Although their behaviour was complex – and went beyond the repertoire of stimulus and response modelled in behaviourism – it could nevertheless be located within a matrix of probability. Behaviour in both animal and machine is regulated by information flows through a circuit and both might be understood as performing computational actions (stochastic- probabilistic-statistical). As Norbert Wiener explained: “It is […] therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘vitalism’, and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase.” (1988: 32) 3233

The key notions briefly cited above – a new definition of purpose; a definition of negentropy and its relation to information; the arbitrary division between an organism and its environment; the extension of biological ecology into a general ecology – allowed Gregory Bateson to develop a coherent cybernetic epistemology.

Bateson’s mature works, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (StEM) and Mind and Nature, would be predicated on the notion of mind as co-extensive with a negentropic circuit of circular causality. Bateson found in cybernetic principles a means of giving a rigorous scientific base, and a general meta-theory, to his own earlier theoretical work.36

Notes: In Butler’s Notebooks and Evolution Old and New he describes the function of negentropy avant-cybernetics. In these texts Butler imagines the evolution of machines that are capable of self-correction. Butler describes how the unconscious functions of the body and mind – as the organs form themselves through the course of evolution and as they function involuntarily – establish the conditions for conscious thought. Butler argues (in terms we would today recognise as cybernetic) that we recognise purpose at relatively late stage in the process, only at that point does it become conscious human purpose. Humans disallow the “habits” of this biological formation and fail to recognise the continuity between matter and mind, seeking instead to divide mind from the process from which it emerges. Butler’s materialist conception of the continuity of mind was extended into the twentieth century by the thinkers we discuss in this text – including Wiener, Korzybski, Craik, McCulloch and Bateson, through whom we see an increasingly precise articulation.

At the heart of this is a cybernetic understanding that organised systems (be they mechanistic or organic) are regulated by homeostasis and that the line between environment and the organism within a given environment is arbitrary. The first part of the text establishes that this essentially cybernetic notion is inherited from thinkers – including Samual Butler, William Bateson, Arthur Korzybski –who refused to recognise an essential division between mind and matter. Cybernetics extends the logic of this and recognises an arbitrary distinction between organism and environment. Once the division between organism and system is obliterated it is possible to conceive of a “media ecology”. In the wake of cybernetics came a re-evaluation of what constitutes an ecology. Again negentropy is central to this re-evaluation. Just as cybernetics aided the theorisation of general systems theory (Bart [see chapter *]) it also afforded the conception of general ecology (Brodoti) which extends the term “ecology” into media and social systems, understanding that the central principle of information feeding through a circuit, allowing adaptation and greater complexity of organisation. This principle can be applied to any (self-organising) system.

1 They are identified within the metalogues as Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson
2 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics (1948)
3 Ronald R. Kline What Is Information Theory a Theory Of?
4 Famously, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon published their respective information-negative entropy papers in 1948. I do not intend to re-litigate the similarities and differences between Shannon and Wiener’s approach. This continues to be the source of discussion, beginning with Brillouin’s arbitration of the issue in 1951. A good account is given in Ronald R. Kline What Is Information Theory a Theory Of? And in also in Kline’s The Cybernetic Moment 
5 Wiener in Harries-Jones EU&GB 108
6 Wiener HUoHB De Capo 1954 edition 
7 Norbert Wiener Human use of Human Beings 1950
8 StEM, Why do things get in a muddle?
9 Harries-Jones EU&GB 108
10 Bateson StEM
11 Bateson StEM
12 Bernard, C. (1974) Lectures on the phenomena common to animals and plants. Trans Hoff HE, Guillemin R, Guillemin L, Springfield (IL): Charles C Thomas
13 Geof Bowker, How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies 1943-70 (1993)
14 N. K. Hayles, How We became Post Human; N. K. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
15 Johnston Allure of the Machinic; F. Kittler Discourse Networks 1800-1900
16 This is not a unique claim, see Thomas and Mendal and more recent work by Gorgosian 
17 Pickering The Mangle of Discourse and The Cybernetic Brain
18 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 (January 1943) 
19 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 (January 1943) 18
20 Heims the Cybernetic Group, 15
21 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 (January 1943) p.19
22 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 (January 1943) p.19)
23 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 p. 15
24 Heims the Cybernetic Group, 16
25 Heims CG 16 and 32
26 Cite Heims
27Barbrook Imaginary Futures, 57
28 McCulloch had studied brain activity through research on chimpanzees and monkeys, mapping the functional pathways in the cerebral cortex by administering electric shocks or strychnine to particular areas of the animals’ brains. (HEIMS)
29 Heims CG 32
30 Hayles, New Media Reader, 145-148
31 Pickering The Cybernetic Brain
32 Wiener, in Lafontaine, Matrix of French Theory, 32
33 McCulloch & Pitts saw the application of these principles to modelling the mind and brain, and to extending toward the development of a computer with consciousness. For Von Neumann this was a quantitive issue rather than a qualitative one –in time the number of switches in a machine would match the number neurons in a human brain. This was also the emphasis of psychiatrists attending the Macy conferences on Cybernetics, including Ross Ashby and Grey Walter. Bateson sought a more universal application of cybernetic ideas which could be applied to a variety of systems; biological, behavioural and the social sciences.
34P. Galison, The Ontology of The Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision; G. Bowker How to Be Universal, Some Cybernetic Strategies; F. Kittler Gramophone, Film, Typewriter
35Metaphors in Psychology
36 Haims GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS: FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERACTION TO SOCIETAL FUNCTIONS 1977
37Usage: I will use negentropy and entropy specifically and (neg)entropy when the interrelation between entropy and negentropy is discussed, as is the case with Lacan’s discussion on Freud, for instance.

381861-1926

39The 19th century energy crisis – as expressed in Bateson’s early theory of schizomogenesis and in Freud’s energy model of the psyche in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – is resolved, in part, by theories of negative entropy and homeostasis; the line between organism and environment is arbitrary; behaviour = learning; 

The homeostat is devoted to avoiding positive feedback or overrun. It is an ultrastable system that adjusts itself to any disturbance. The homeostat is an expression of negative entropy. The machine disputes the “nineteenth-century energy crisis”. This crisis was expressed in Gregory Bateson’s early theory of schismogenesis. Bateson revised the implications of the theory of schisomogenesis as his awareness of the implications of (neg)entropy increased. The same issue of entropy (how is positive feedback be regulated?) is also central to Freud’s energy model of the psyche (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). In Communication, The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1951), Bateson questions Freud’s relevance in the light of the cybernetic reevaluation of (neg)entropy.

40The living Brain 139
41 Although Lacan will invoke the cybernetic creatures built by Grey Walters and the “second guessing” robots like those built by Shannon and … these machines underline the central issue of the seminar, homeostasis. 
42 Lacan SPL (197)
43 Bateson STEM
44See previous chapters
45With other’s, including Buckmaster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan.

The title of this text, and of the last part The Fantastic Loop-de-Loop, is a phrase attributed to the video artist Frank Gillette. The term is used to describe the therapeutic practice of bio-video feedback. In the late 1960s, such media therapies encouraged participants to understand that they are part of a larger cybernetic system. The therapy can be understood as an extension of earlier therapeutic technologies, such as Korzybski’ s Structural Differential and the Galvometer (which was used in the psychoanalysis of Jung, and others, and which will be discussed in chapter twelve and thirteen). Such devices afford a high degree of reflexivity and required the user to consider their place within a larger system. The Structural Differential had the specific function of helping the user realise that human communication involves the management of different levels of abstraction (a method derived from Russell-Whitehead’s symbolic logic). This approach was applied within the realm of psychiatry and psychanalysis from the 1920s on (including by Bateson in Matrix and as the basis for his double-bind theory and family therapy).

Bio-video feedback follows that tradition of self-reflexive therapy, and as did the technologies of self that proceeded it, breaks the duality between self and environment. Such cybernetic bio-feedback devices, as used by tactical media pioneers TVTV, Ant Farm and Radical Software, propose new social-technical-media ecologies. Feedback technologies including the Porta Pak and closed-circuit TV – which promised new forms of social organisation as well as new forms of therapy – can be seen in direct relation to the post-Freudian, cybernetic theories of Bateson and Lacan and the reflexive therapies of Korzybski and Stack-Sullivan.

To conclude… such practices promised something beyond the divided or decentred self of post-Freudian post-cybernetic psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Through realigning feedback technologies with media-ecological feedback systems it offered a reunion with the continuity of nature. It offers a “place” within a wholistic ecology in which the lines between media, psychic and biological ecologies can no longer be drawn.