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The Fabulous Loop de Loop
The cybernetic discourse as read through seven feedback machines
A project by Steve Rushton
SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION (NOT YET PUBLIC)
Contents
Introduction: The Foundations of Cybernetic Discourse
THE GOVERNOR
Samuel Butler – The Vapour Engine
Edward Craik – A (Proto) Cybernetic Explanation
Gregory Bateson – From Schizmogenesis to Feedback
M. SPECULARIX (The Cybernetic Tortoise)
W. Grey Walter – The Body in Pieces
Jacques Lacan – The Tortoise and Homeostasis
Gregory Bateson – Bateson’s Negentropic Discourse Matrix
SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot)
Warren S. McCulloch and Jacques Lacan – Play Like an Idiot
Jacques Lacan – Lacan Builds a Circuit: Cybernetics and the Unconscious
THE STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIAL (The Anthropometre)
Alfred Korzybski and Gregory Bateson – Why “The Map is NOT the Territory”
THE ELECTROPSYCOMETER (The E-Meter)
Alfred Korzybski and William Burroughs – Time-Binding and Time-Scrambling
THE HOMEOSTAT
W. Ross Ashby and Gregory Bateson – Steps Towards a (Media) Ecology
THE PORTAPAK: SONY VIDEOROVER DV-2400 (1967)
Radical Software, Guerrilla Television and Gregory Bateson – The Fabulous Loop de Loop
CONCLUSION
This has been the Fabulous Loop de Loop.
So, we end where we began, with Gregory Bateson invoking the wisdom of Samuel Butler. Butler had the foresight to recognise that the adaptability and flexibility of governor on a steam engine followed the same principle as the adaptability of evolution, they were both self-regulating systems which carried news of change through the system and adapted to that change. It was Butler who intuited that the line between the organism and its environment was arbitrary and that the essentialist notion of the “self” was a self-serving illusion. Butler recognised a wholistic system regulated by “vibrations”– messages of difference sent through the system to allow change and adaptation and ensure constancy.
As the loop de loops to the end of the 1960s many of Butler’s intuitions have been confirmed by the cybernetic revolution that proceeded it and knowledge of the fabulous loop de loop had transformed culture (art incorporated self-reflexivity as the grounds of art, ecology and media were structured alike).
Bateson, even at the end of his life, was still invoking Butler’s visions, weaving them into the cybernetic innovations of Norbert Wiener and Warren McCulloch (both enthusiastic loop de loopers). He synthesised and recontextualised their thoughts to deliver the message that humans are threatening the very diversity and flexibility that has allowed them to prosper.
To survive we must acknowledge that we do not think the way we think we think; we must find our place in the ecology of mind which extends beyond the individual and into the environment and into the organisms and machines that surround us.
This escape is possible, but by no means certain and because the loop de loop is a negative feedback loop, we do not end where we started, things have change and adapted along the way. We can acknowledge our place in the ecology of mind (which is the privilege of the loop de loop) or we can carry on regardless. If we do the latter, this might be our last loop de loop…
THE ANNOTATION
(An ongoing annotated bibliography)
The Annotation runs as a parallel text alongside The Fabulous Loop de Loop.