CYBERNETICS

CYBERNETICS

ANNOTATING– Wiener, N., Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. 1948

Wiener: “I think that I can claim credit for transferring the whole theory of the servomechanism bodily to communication engineering”

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 1948 publication Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. The term allowed Wiener to construct a narrative which periodized the development of mans’ relationship with the machine and, more particularly, situate the feedback mechanism as central to it. (Here Wiener draws on Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1934) which made a similar periodisation of technology and human development). This periodization takes us from the Greek steersman, whose body was in concord with the machine he steers to safety, to the socially integrated servomechanisms of the 20th 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); and finally our own age of communication and control (the age of the servomechanism).

In Wiener’s periodization, we see the increased sophistication of machines (automata) where in each successive age the machine assumes a greater role in social life – for instance the clock regulates our relationship to time; 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, the ‘servomechanism’, makes the most radical change in this ongoing 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 &c), 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. 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 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” .

The principle of cybernetics itself provided “a system of analogies across many disciplines which absorbed cybernetics’ name as a prerequisite for access to its vocabulary and methodology.” Such analogies (which in popular discourse re-echo the link between the brain and the computer or the body and the machine ) serve to construct a cybernetic frame of focalization.

For David Tomas, the triumph of cybernetics was its ability to redefine the concept of “life itself in order to bring it in line with a cybernetic automaton’s operational characteristics.”

Wiener’s next great contribution to the establishment of the paradigm of cybernetics was to describe the body as a ‘communications network’ (breaking with any essentialist notions of identity and extending the 19th century notion of the engineered body). The successful operation of the communications network is, according to Wiener, dependent of the “accurate reproduction of a signal.” Man, in Wiener’s scheme, has become a communications machine exchanging information with his environment.