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DRAFT

“I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years. But most of such bites out of the apple have proved to be rather indigestible—usually for cybernetic reasons. Cybernetics has integrity within itself, to help us to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin.” — Gregory Bateson, From Versailles to Cybernetics (1966)

Ashby, McCulloch, Grey Walter and Wiener, at the 1951 Paris congress on cybernetics

The Fabulous Loop de Loop examines attempts, from the 1860s to the 1970s, to narrate a new system of knowledge in which the discourse of energy is replaced by the discourse of information. In 1858 the naturalist Alfred Wallis, in correspondence with Charles Darwin, noted that the way evolution is regulated in the natural world, through adaptation to changes in the environment, was akin to the self-regulation exhibited through the governor on a steam engine. The governor is the “safety valve” within the machine that makes sure the engine does not “blow its top”. The governor ensures that information about the machine’s performance passes through the system which allows the machine to adapt to changes within that system. This process is negative feedback in essence, and it embodies a principle which today organises many aspects of our life, from the thermostat in our heating system to the behavioural checks and balances built into our Fitbit. The novelist and speculative thinker Samuel Butler (who also corresponded with Charles Darwin) built on Wallis’ observation. In 1863, Butler published a science-fiction tale, “Darwin Among the Machines”, in which machines, through the same principles of self-regulation expressed in the steam engine, evolved capabilities beyond those of their human creators. Butler was one of the first to draw an equivalence between adaptation of the machine and adaptation of an organism or ecology – this machine-organism equivalence would become central to cybernetic reasoning in the following century.

At the heart of the cybernetic discourse of the 1940s and 1950s is the idea of machine-organism equivalence, (which had also been at the heart of neurophysiological research in the preceding decades). This is the notion that a machine – to the extent that it modelled an organism, in that it could order its environment – could “think”, “learn”, and “adapt”.

In the middle of the twentieth century Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and co-organiser of the Macy conferences on cybernetics, noted that Wallis and Gibson’s observations marked the beginnings of an epistemological shift. For Bateson, from the moment when the steam engine was introduced, feedback, or negative entropy, had become the agent which explains change. In this period, Bateson stresses, the emphasis shifted toward how information passes through a system to allow stability and adaptability (homeostasis), as opposed to the nineteenth century energetic model which favoured the distribution of energy within a system (dynamic equilibrium). The distinction between these two conditions will be discussed throughout this text, but for now, I draw your attention to how Bateson, in his comparison between Wallis and Butler, drew on different elements of the past to establish new foundations for knowledge. He then projected this foundation into an imagined future in which we recognise the performative power of negative entropy (this is a self-reflexive condition Bateson called an “ecology of mind”).

Here is the top and tail of the fabulous loop de loop: it begins with an observation about the similarity between the operation of feedback machines and the operation of evolution and this loops around to a wholistic meta-theory (the ecology of mind).

I have set a similar the task for The Fabulous Loop de Loop. In this text I chart how different thinkers across the span of a century, in disparate cultural fields, draw on a discourse of cybernetics to establish new foundations for knowledge (which they then project into different imagined futures). The text aims to chart the process of adaptation a discourse undergoes in various fields over a century. [thesis here=what are you doing?]

I use the term “a” cybernetic discourse in the by-line to this text because I want to make clear that The Fabulous Loop de Loop describes the site of an epistemological struggle. The term “cybernetics” is far from stable. In The Fabulous Loop de Loop we will see how different thinkers draw on different elements of the past to establish new foundations and project into different imagined futures. The thinkers discussed in this text, are read as discourse theorists who, from their different positions, argued the stake of past and present knowledge after the emergence of feedback as a core organising principle. Floop establishes the performativity of this cybernetic discourse as it feeds information about itself into itself to allow adaptation.

SEVEN MACHINES

Central agents in this performative feedback loop are the machines these thinkers designed and wrote about. I stress that these machines were more than diagrams which describe a principle or matter of fact. In their metal, these machines make claims on the world. (Gray Walter’s cybernetic tortoise, for instance, behaved like an organism struggling to follow the light; Ross Ashby’s homeostat self-corrected like an ecological system would). Feedback machines, like organisms and ecological systems, carry news of order back through the system. In this text I examine seven such feedback machines and discuss how they served as performative agents to a cybernetic discourse as it developed from the nineteenth century into the second half of the twentieth century. This sets the ground for understanding a discourse of cybernetics as a material practice to which human and machine both make claim.

The seven machines are:

1. The Vapour Engine, regulated by the Governor. This self-regulating machine becomes the exemplar of the broad principles of cybernetics and binds the discourse of evolution to the discourse of the machine.
2. William Gray Walter’s M. Specularix (the Cybernetic Tortoise) was built in the late 1940s. It performed as a model for the cybernetic conception of neural activity;
3. Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger’s SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot) was developed at the Bell Labs in the early 1950s. The machine was able to play a human at the game of “ones and twos” and is regarded as one of the first “thinking machines”;
4. Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential (Anthropometre) (1924) was a “plastic diagram” which, in Korzybski’s theory of General Semantics, modelled the relation between an object-event and the human nervous system. The machine can be understood as a a technology of self-reflexivity.
5. The E-Meter (Electropsycometer) was used in Scientology auditing sessions. The E-Meter served as a psychological feedback mechanism, regulating the actions and re-actions of the user. For William Burroughs, a Scientologist and media activist, this machine has a strong performative potential which, along with a series of other media apparatus, had the power to reshape reality.
6. The Homeostat was developed by William Ross Ashby. It explored the degree of self-organization afforded within a complex system. The machine adapted to disturbances to its ultrastable state.
7. The Sony Videorover II AV-3400 (Portapak). Used within the counterculture of the 1960s the video system became an operational model on which visions of an ecologically sustainable society could be mapped onto a utopian media ecology.

MACHINES OF THE SELF AND THE OTHER

These machines operate at the point where neurophysiology, psychoanalysis, ecology and cybernetics find common purpose.

I will introduce a close reading of two types of feedback machine which bear a close relation.

The first type of machine are those which express negative entropy (as opposed to demonstrating or illustrating it): these include Grey Walter’s Tortoise, Norbert Wiener’s Moth-Bedbug and Ross Ashby’s Homeostat. Such machines organise information, and in their inter-spacial and inter-subjective actions, make a performative claim on the world, similar to the claim made by living organisms. These machines – referred to by their creators as “toys” and “thinking machines”– can be understood as expressions of negative entropy, rather than simply outlining the principle of negative entropy. In this respect they differ from the scientific models that went before them. Scrutiny of these machine, “in the metal” so to speak, is in line with the experimental epistemology propounded by the subjects central to this discourse: Ross Ashby, Craik, McCulloch, Grey Walter, and Wiener, in the generation of cybernetics in the 1940s and 50s.

The second type of machine I read in the Fabulous Loop de Loop, also express negative entropy, but they differ because they fold human subjectivity into their apparatus. These machines include Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential (Anthropometre); Claude Shannon & David Hagelbarger’s SEER (SEquence Extrapolating Robot); the E-Meter (Electropsycometer) used in scientology audits; the Sony Videorover II AV-3400 (Portapak). These machines represent technologies of the self through which the subject through their interaction with the machine is made to adapt. All the machines in this second category require the subject which establishes a relation to the environment or context, they are media for self-construction.

The difference between these categories of machine is subtle but significant: If Grey Walter's Tortoise produces a subject (other) in relation to context, Korzybski's Structural Differential produces a subject (self) in relation to context. Having made that distinction, both categories of machine, in their relation to their environment and in relation to their subjectivity, propose a new definition of purpose.

REDEFINING "PURPOSE" AND "THINKING"

In their seminal paper Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1942), Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow sought to provide a new definition of purpose – best demonstrated by the hypothetical cybernetic devices I describe in the Fabulous Loop de Loop. These devices, which did not ‘resemble human beings’ would nevertheless exhibit complex behaviour despite being fed little information. The simplest and clearest demonstration of this claim was realised a few years after the publication of Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, in Gray Walter's Tortoise (1948), one of the first in a menagerie of teleological mechanisms.

In Behavior, Purpose and Teleology, the behaviourist approach is distinguished from the teleological approach (later to be termed cybernetics). Behaviourism has some relation to the teleological approach but only to a limited extent. Behaviourism ignores the relation between the object and its surroundings (context), which is of central importance to the cyberneticians. The approaches also differ in that teleology is goal-directed, Wiener et al make the distinction between purposeful machines and non-purposeful machines, “Purposeful active behaviour may be subdivided into two classes: “feed-back” (or “teleological”) and “non-feed-back” (or “non-teleological”). All feedback machines require negative feedback to operate, meaning “some signals from the goal are necessary at some time to direct the behaviour” We can compare the conditions of a functioning thermostat (feedback machine) with a kitchen clock (non-feedback machine). The latter may allow exterior output (to be wound up) but outside signals do not circuit through it to modify its behaviour, as is the case with a thermostat. The clock is incapable of learning and of adapting (and in this sense it is entropic, it will always need energy from the outside to wind it up). For ‘teleological mechanisms’, cause-and-effect relations are replaced by ‘circular causality’ which requires negative feedback as a regulator (Wiener will later identify negative feedback as negentropy). The senses of the organism (touch, sight, and proprioception) guide a given action through constant feedback and adjustment. ‘Circular causality’ can occur in man and machine or machine and machine, but all are goal-directed and regulated within a circuit. Many goal-directed circular-causal activities can be understood mathematically, if not through the tractable (linear) mathematics in which A causes B. Behavour is therefore understood as systemic and probabilistic.

After the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1948, the relation between information and energy became more clearly defined – order is re-enforced as information loops through the system. In this context behaviour, thinking, and mind are imminent to system – mind cannot be divorced from the material circuitry in which it is produced. This has significant implications to our conception of behaviour and requires a radical reconsideration of the concept of mind. For the cybernetic group at the Macy meetings the new conception of teleology extended the realm of exact science, revising the epistemology of modern science, which traditionally was the study of the intrinsic way in which beings and things functioned. The teleological approach shifted the emphasis toward the interrelation of things and objects.

THINKING (MACHINES)

The cybernetic epistemology makes an abiding link between stochastic systems (systems of probability) and biological systems. This position is re-enforced by a seminal paper which defined the debate on machines and organism in the post war era. A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity by Warren McCulloch and Warren Pitts (1943) argued that consciousness was synonymous with calculation. McCulloch – a neurophysiologist who graduated in both psychology and neurology – wanted to relate his findings on neural nets to the symbolic logic of Russell and Whitehead’s Prinicipia Mathematica.

A logical proposition is true or false. If stimulated, a nerve cell produces an electromagnetic discharge or it does not. It is an “all or none” proposition. Neurons fire on a chain and are linked in the same way logical propositions are linked. One could, therefore, view a nerve net as operating like a machine or computer. Fundamentally, the McCulloch-Pitts Model provided a theoretical frame that allowed for the equivalence between mechanical and biological systems (specifically the brain) allowing that both should be understood as encoding and decoding systems. Which is to say, biological organisms (including the brain) and servo-mechanisms constitute local negentropic systems.

The first, simple, cybernetic creatures – Claude Shannon’s Rat, Norbert Wiener’s Moth-Bedbug, Ross Ashby’s Homeostat, Grey Walter’s Tortoise – displayed all the properties explained in Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology and accorded to the McCulloch-Pitts Model: they were self-organising, self-directing, adapting and orientated with their environment. Although their behaviour was complex – and went beyond the repertoire of stimulus and response modelled in behaviourism – it could nevertheless be located within a matrix of probability. Behaviour in both animal and machine is regulated by information flows through a circuit and both might be understood as performing computational actions (stochastic- probabilistic-statistical). As Norbert Wiener explained: “It is […] therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘vitalism’, and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase.” The key notions briefly cited above –

(a) a new definition of purpose;
(b) a definition of negative entropy and its relation to information;
(c) the arbitrary division between an organism and its environment;
(d) the extension of biological ecology into a general (social-media) ecology

– [unpack and give intro to Bateson.allowed Gregory Bateson to develop a coherent cybernetic epistemology. Bateson’s mature works, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (StEM) and Mind and Nature, would be predicated on the notion of mind as co-extensive with an informational circuit of circular causality. Bateson found in cybernetic principles a means of giving a rigorous scientific base, and a general meta-theory, to his own earlier theoretical work. More on Bateson’s role in this text

ANIMAL-MACHINES ENVIRONMENT MACHINES

Gregory Bateson played a key role in extending this discourse still further. Bateson was born into a world where the entropic universe was passing into a new universe of information and communication. The development of his own cybernetic epistemology leaves clear traces of this transition: he draws on visionary figures who intuited the new order – Samual Butler, Clark Maxwell, and his father William Bateson (a biologist who coined the term “genetics”) to name a few– and reframes their work in the light of the cybernetic explanation provided by the cyberneticians Craik, Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, McCulloch, and Wiener. As much as these writers were concerned with how the world works and how mind and the human brain function, they also acknowledged the pressing need to reframe the nineteenth-century thermodynamic discourse from the new perspectives provided by cybernetics. In this text Bateson will