WIENER’S-CYBERNETIC-EPISTEMOLOGY

Wiener: “….feedback, the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of the common reflex, or it may be higher order feedback, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of behavior. Such a policy-feedback may, and often does, appear to be what we know under one aspect as a conditioned reflex, and under another as learning”

Since the 1940s Norbert Wiener had made a number of claims which narrativise the principles of cybernetics as an eternal, general principle of organisation. Although having its basis in the ancient Greek kybernetes (steersman – the Latin derivation of which is ‘governor’) the word ‘cybernetics’ is essentially a neologism, introduced in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948).

The term allowed Wiener to construct a narrative which periodized the development of the human relationship with the machine, and situate the feedback mechanism as central to it. This periodization takes us from the Greek steersman, whose body was in concord with the boat as they steer to safety, navigating the treacherous rocks and tides of his island, to the socially integrated servomechanisms of the twentieth century. This narrative begins in the ‘mythic Golemic age’ (a time outside of time attesting to mans’ desire to animate the inanimate); this was followed by the age of clocks; then the age of steam, which was governed by the governor, a mechanism that regulated the input (the flow of energy for instance) of the machine and stopped it overloading; and finally our own age of communication and control, the age of the servomechanism, these are machines that regulate the whole environment (the household central heating thermostat is a good example of this type of device).

In Wiener’s periodization, we see the increased sophistication of feedback mechanisms (automata) as in each successive age the machine assumes a greater role in social life. For instance the clock regulates our relationship to time and labour; in the steam age the governor engages the human body in a series of interactions between factory-based machines. It is in the age of communication and control that the development of a new form of feedback device makes the most radical change in this on-going relationship between man and machine. Servomechanisms: “…thermostats, automatic gyro-compass ship-steering systems, self propelled missiles – especially such as seek their target – anti aircraft fire-control systems, automatically oil-cranking stills, ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like” differ from earlier feedback devices – they are not just confined to particular spheres of human existence (the workplace, the public square etc.), but rather the very principle of the servomechanism allows for machines which regulate the entire human environment, which interact not only with human beings in this shared environment but also with each other (this notion of extension and amplification of human possibilities by technological devices would have a great influence of the media theory of Marshal McLuhan). The servomechanism goes beyond the industrial space and permeates the space of the social. Wiener: “….feedback, the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of the common reflex, or it may be higher order feedback, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of behaviour. Such a policy-feedback may, and often does, appear to be what we know under one aspect as a conditioned reflex, and under another as learning”.

Wiener: “Thus as far back as [1943], the group of scientists about Dr. Rosenblueth and myself had already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems cantering about communication, control and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or living tissue. On the other hand we were seriously hampered by the lack of unity of the literature concerning these problems, and the absence of any common terminology or even a single name for the field.”

Wiener is perfectly transparent about the fact that the term cybernetics was coined in order to give assistance to the lack of “a common terminology” to a wide range of practices.