MACY CONFERENCES 1948-1953

Introduction: The Foundations of Cybernetic Discourse

After WWII Gregory Bateson was a central figure in realising the Macy Conferences on cybernetics. On Bateson's insistence the Macy Meetings would follow the model of the Macy foundation sponsored meeting convened in 1942, in which Bateson became aware of the radical implications of Wiener et al's Behaviour, Teleology and Purpose (which would be published in 1943). It was on the insistence of Bateson and his ex-wife, the anthropologist Margaret Mede, that the human sciences were included within its remit of subsequent conferences (the Macy Conferences on cybernetics 1946-53). Inviting specialists from the natural and social sciences and encouraging an interdiciplinarity which had been a feature of war time research cultures. EXTRACT:
|...| Stewart Brand, “For God’s Sake, Margaret”. CoEvolutionary Quarterly, June 1976, Issue

Margaret Mead, speaking in 1976, about the first Macy Conference formally dealing with the subject of ‘feedback’ stated:

“[in 1945] there wasn’t even any usable terminology. At first we called the thing ‘feedback,’ and the models that we were presented with at that point were the guided missile, target-seeking…[principles]” […] “There were three groups of people, there were the mathematicians and physicists - people trained in the physical sciences, who were very, very precise in what they wanted to think about. There was a small group of us, anthropologists and psychiatrists, who were trained to know enough about psychology in groups so we knew what was happening and could use it, and disallow it. And then there were two or three gossips in the middle, who were very simple people who had a lot of loose intuition and no discipline to what they were doing. In a sense it was the most interesting conference I’ve ever been in, because nobody knew how to manage this thing yet…”