MACY CONFERENCES 1948-1953

Introduction: The Foundations of a Cybernetic Discourse

In 1942, the first “Macy meeting”, (three years prior to the Macy conferences proper) was on the subject of “cerebral inhibition”, (hypnotism). At this gathering the psychologist Milton Erickson, hypnotized a Yale psychologist. During the lunch-break Gregory Bateson got into conversation with the other delegates about the thread that seemed to link Erickson’s demonstration, the diverse subjects of that meeting and a common concern of the work of many of those assembled – ‘feedback’. Namely, that the principle of feedback could be applied to any number scientific disciplines (i.e.: the social systems examined in psychology and anthropology, the dynamic system in physics and the systems of ‘call and response’ in language communication and in the field of ballistics). Also in 1942 Edwin Schrӧdinger gave his What is Life lectures which suggested that chromosomes contain the coded script of the body (a decade before being given empirical credence by Watson and Crick.
The uniqueness of the Macy gatherings was that various men and women in different fields could cross-refer their findings which effectively allowed for the construction of a new paradigm, to take elements which were methodologically related and fashion them into a coherent system.
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…”