Talk:Introduction: The Foundations of a Cybernetic Discourse

“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

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Cybernetics, the “science of feedback” was practiced and theorised in several research cultures, to begin with principally for the U. S. military from the 1940s, and later in a wide variety of contexts. After World War II, cybernetic ideas impacted society on all levels, politically, culturally, militarily, scientifically, even as its institutional presence dissipated at the end of the 1960s.

Cybernetics, in its contemporary sense, came into existence when the traditional notion of feedback loops, which has its origins in engineering (as performed by Ktesibios’ water clock or Watt’s steam engine) was bound to the modern concept of information – that the “signal” within a message represents the measure of order and the “noise” was a measure of disorder.

The word "Kubernetes" is ancient Greek, and the source of the word “steersman”. The “father of cybernetics”, Norbert Wiener, resuscitated the term in the mid-twentieth century to describe how iterative feedback could guide ordered action. The third century Neoplatonist, Plotinus had invoked the term in a negative sense. In Plotinus’ interpretation, the steersman should not be so preoccupied with worldly events, should they be distracted from higher thoughts from which these events originate. The emphasis of this text – and that of the cyberneticians of the second half of the twentieth century – is precisely opposite: it is through engagement with the material specifics of the world that one can develop a clearer understanding of it.

Intro oraginal

Gregory Bateson’s collection of essays and lectures, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (StEM) begins with a series of “metalogues”. These are dialogues between a father and his young daughter in which the father explains the principles of communication and organisation. To the contemporary reader their tone is a little cutesy and more than a little patrician. However, the texts serve as an excellent introduction to the themes which dominated Bateson’s work – and which dominate The Fabulous Loop de Loop.

The first metalogue is entitled “Why do things get in a muddle?” and explains the principle of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that organised entities will run to disorder and dissipation over time. Things get in a muddle because of entropy. The notion of entropy was central to Bateson’s thinking and his reading of it was specifically cybernetic.

Cybernetics (“the science of feedback”) seemed to resolve the curious issue that however much things tend to get in a muddle, they also (in the natural world and in human society) tend toward organisation and order.

Norbert Wiener, who coined the neologism “cybernetics”, adopted the term, “negentropy” (or negative entropy), to account for the way in which systems and organisms establish and retain their organisation despite the ever-present effects of entropy. The concept of negative entropy resolves the problematic issue of how, in a universe which is prone to the forces of disorganisation, systems and organisms actually stabilise, become more complex and reproduce.

The principle of negative entropy was the unifying element in Gregory Bateson’s output from the 1940s to the 1970s, incorporating anthropology, aesthetics, psychiatry, evolution, biology, and ecology. The order to be found in all these disparate fields is neg-entropic insofar as information cycling within a negative feedback loop establishes homeostasis and affords its adaptation. This is the case regardless of whether that system or organism is biological, psychic, social, or mechanical. For Bateson a coherent wholistic world view (meta-theory) is dependent on negative entropy as the central organising principle.

MACY CONFERENCES 1948-1953

Norbert Wiener, in Cybernetics (1948) provided a precise relation for entropy and information, in the sense that units of information (Binary units or bits) within a message can be measured against noise (which is the measure of entropy in the message): “Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.”

In Wiener’s equation for negentropy, the second law of thermodynamics still holds, systems will always run to disorganisation, but negentropy allows for a decrease in the rate of dissipation. This is because knowledge of order (information) is fed back through the system which allows the system to conserve order.

NEGENTROPY–NEGATIVE ENTROPY

In this sense, negentropy represents a localised reversal of time’s arrow. It is possible, stated Wiener “to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example are less illuminating than great poems.”

Organisms carry news of order back through the system. Human beings, for instance, have maintained, and even increased, the level of organisation, which, as with all negentropic (information) systems, allows an enclave of order within a general stream of increasing chaos; and, furthermore, as the father explains in the first metalogue in Bateson's book, your muddle might be my order.

If entropy framed the understanding of the central scientific and social issues of the nineteenth century – powering its steam engines, spinning its mills – organising its discourse of economies of energy; negentropy recognises the relationship between information and energy that frames the current age of communication – the discourse of ecologies of information.

Wiener’s theory of negentropy provides a solution to a conundrum which had plagued evolutionary theory throughout the nineteenth century: how in an entropic universe could order be established and maintained and how can it increase in complexity? Wiener’s equation for negentropy accommodated biological order within a general field of physical flux because it provided the context for self-organisation and adaptation.

In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson translates Wiener’s idea as follows:

“The technical term ‘information’ may be succinctly defined as any difference which makes a difference in some later event. This definition is fundamental for all analysis of cybernetic systems and organization. The definition links such analysis to the rest of science, where the causes of events are commonly not differences but forces, impacts, and the like. The link is classically exemplified by the heat engine, where available energy (i.e., negative entropy) is a function of a difference between two temperatures. In this classical instance, “information” and “negative entropy” overlap.”

The world understood as a series of differences, as opposed to a series of forces, proposes a new materialism. Bateson builds his argument of the difference that makes a difference to argue the relation between negative entropy and conscious purpose.

Bateson: “Wiener points out that the whole range of entropy phenomena is inevitably related to the fact of our knowing or not knowing what state the system is in. If nobody knows how the cards lie in the pack, it is to all intents and purposes a shuffled pack. Indeed, this ignorance is all that can be achieved by shuffling.”

Negentropy now enters the realm of culture, as human beings interfere with the randomising machinations of the entropic universe. Humans systematically set out to “trick” the second law of thermodynamics – organising against the relentless forces of improbability. Bateson next argues that because choice is bound to order, in seeking information humans also seek values. Bateson describes a man who “for his breakfast,[...] achieves an arrangement of bacon and eggs, side by side, upon a plate; and in achieving this improbability he is aided by other men who will sort out the appropriate pigs in some distant market and interfere with the natural juxtaposition of hens and eggs.”

Here Bateson extends the individual choice to a larger ecology of choices: man + environment. The prosaic example of a man choosing his breakfast makes the key relation between negative entropy and Bateson’s ecology of mind which will underlie the Fabulous Loop de Loop. For Gregory Bateson human decision-making serves as “Maxwell’s demon”, bringing order to an entropic system.

Both Bateson and Wiener are sensitive to the fact that the term "negentropy" is open to misinterpretation. Negentropy does not violate the second law of thermodynamics and create "order out of chaos". The term is only useful when understood as synonymous with information. It must be stressed again that negentropy represents a localised reversal of time’s arrow. It is useful in explaining how information distributes energy within a system. Bateson makes this distinction clear in his essay in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization,

“Ecology has currently two faces to it: the face which is called bioenergetics—the economics of energy and materials within a coral reef, a red-wood forest, or a city—and, second, an economics of information, of entropy, negentropy, etc. These two do not fit together very well precisely because the units are differently bounded in the two sorts of ecology. In bioenergetics it is natural and appropriate to think of units bounded at the cell membrane, or at the skin; or of units composed of sets of conspecific individuals. These boundaries are then the frontiers at which measurements can be made to determine the additive-subtractive budget of energy for the given unit. In contrast, informational or entropic ecology deals with the budgeting of pathways and of probability. The resulting budgets are fractionating (not subtractive). The boundaries must enclose, not cut, the relevant pathways.
Moreover, the very meaning of "survival" becomes different when we stop talking about the survival of something bounded by the skin and start to think of the survival of the system of ideas in circuit. The contents of the skin are randomized at death and the pathways within the skin are randomized. But the ideas, under further transformation, may go on out in the world in books or works of art. Socrates as a bioenergetic individual is dead. But much of him still lives as a component in the contemporary ecology of ideas.”

ENTROPY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

It became apparent to many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century that the dominant model of entropy was inadequate for the innovative theories of the era. The theory of evolution and natural selection – theories of homeostasis; genetics, mathematics, semantics and theories of the human psyche – all struggled to accommodate the second law of thermodynamics.

GENERAL SYSTEMS

The theorisation of (negative) entropy in the era of cybernetics required the production of new knowledge, but it also required a reordering of existing knowledge. The janus face, which sees the possibilities of the future folded into the past, is therefore central to this text. I will emphasise how the moment of the Macy conferences on cybernetics invited a re-consideration of how thinkers prior to that "cybernetic moment" sought to establish a new horizon of possibility.

As I follow this track, I will depart from the emphasis taken in recent analysis of this discourse. This understands the period of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1945-52) as a moment when a “new universalism” was established (Bowker); it is the moment when we began to learn how we became post-human (Hayles) and when the foundation of a new discourse network for the twenty-first century was established (Kittler), a discourse which was established on “the ontology of the enemy” (Galison).

I do not detract from the claims made by these writers, cybernetics has had a profound effect on contemporary culture. My own emphasis will be that the key thinkers of the new epistemology of cybernetics – Wiener, McCulloch and Bateson among them – were avid narrators of the development of their emerging science in a lineage of anti-cartesian, non-thomian thinking which was already well established in the centuries before. In this sense, I read them as discourse theorists who argued the stake of past and present knowledge.

In that vein I emphasise that the discourse of experimental psychology (neurophysiology), which had developed since the beginning of the twentieth-century, was central to the discourse of cybernetics as it developed in the 1940s. Many of the cyberneticians were leading brain researchers before and after the war. In the case of Kenneth Craik, Ross Ashby and Grey Walter, the cybernetic “thinking machines” they created arose directly from their brain research. The new technologies of scanning devices and predictive servomechanisms, which had researched for the war effort, when added to the repertoire of brain experimentation developed in the 1920s and 30s, produced new models of behaviour and new perspectives on the relationship between machine and the organism.

The British cyberneticians Ross Ashby, Edward Craik and Grey Walter, and the American cyberneticians Lawrence Kubie and Warren McCulloch were well established in the discourse of experimental psychology, which developed clear arguments of how mind is constituted – from an “anti-cartesian”, “non-thomian” perspective (which is to say, they refused an essentialisation of “self”). The new affordance of servo-machines within this established discourse allowed for the extension of experimental psychology into first-order cybernetics. The meeting of experimental psychology and war-time research produced a new formal theory of feedback and control technologies which begged fundamental questions about the nature of organism and its relation to environment, and about the nature of mind.

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”.

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 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 to name a few– and reframes their work in the light of the cybernetic explanation provided by 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.

READING MACHINES

A recurring feature within the Fabulous Loop de Loop is a close reading of machines which were produced within a particular discourse of cybernetics. 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 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

– 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.

LOOP DE...

This text describes a loop de loop. If we return to the beginning we already see, in Samuel Butler’s Notebooks and Evolution Old and New, a description of the function of negative entropy avant-cybernetics. Butler describes how the unconscious functions of the body and mind – as the organs form themselves through the course of evolution and as they function involuntarily – establish the conditions for conscious thought. Butler argues (in terms we would today recognise as cybernetic) that we recognise purpose at a relatively late stage in the process, and only at the point where it becomes conscious human purpose. Humans disallow the “habits” of this biological formation and fail to recognise the continuity between matter and mind, seeking instead to divide mind from the processes from which it emerges. Butler’s materialist conception of the continuity of mind was extended into the twentieth century – with an increasingly precise articulation – by the thinkers including Wiener, Korzybski, Craik, McCulloch, and Bateson. In The Fabulous Loop de Loop I will trace the passage from an energetic discourse toward a discourse of information.

BIBLIOGRAPHY–FABULOUS LOOP DE LOOP

Conclusion: The Last Loop de Loop? ←

→ Notes on Method

Notes and feedback

March 13 2021

Thanks so much for offering to take a look at my text:

The Fabulous Loop de Loop. A cybernetic discourse as read through seven feedback machines. A project by Steve Rushton

Readers’ protocol

Please spend 2.5 hours looking through the wiki.

https://hub.xpub.nl/fabulousloopdeloop/index.php/Main_Page

At this point I need to know if it makes sense as a project. I am taking nothing for granted, I would like to know what you think the project is and how you navigate it (what kind of reader does this text produce?).

Please give written feedback of no more than 500 words

I hold your opinion very highly and value your insights. Please be as direct with me as possible about the text. Please signal any structural problems you find and I'f be happy to get general notes on style. I am invested in improving it and need an honest opinion.

The “chapter outline” and “users’ guide” might be good ways into the central issues driving Floop

Here: https://hub.xpub.nl/fabulousloopdeloop/index.php/Chapter_Outline

outlines the "story"

and here

https://hub.xpub.nl/fabulousloopdeloop/index.php/User_Guide:_The_Fabulous_Loop_de_Loop

I discuss my methodology

I won’t catalogue the list of things I intend to correct. Suffice to say, the citations [references] need a lot of work. The Bibliography is here:

https://hub.xpub.nl/fabulousloopdeloop/index.php/BIBLIOGRAPHY–FABULOUS_LOOP_DE_LOOP

My best wishes

Steve

FEEDBACK:

SOL: The fabulous loop de loop -  Feedback notes, 

Hi Steve, Thank you for inviting me to be a reader on this project, I am delighted to be along for the ride, and enjoyed the reading. I followed your time guidelines of 2.5 hours, broken down as follows. 0.5 hours reading the chapter outline and the user guide. 2 hours reading the chapters and navigating the site as a general user. I am going to break my feedback down into the following categories, which are a bit baggy and overlapping but hopefully make it clearer to read… I am a bit of a Wiki Naif, I don’t have much experience with them, so perhaps some of these issues are not complex for more accustomed users, I image issues of navigation and layout will be less of an issue, but hopefully this helps give feedback more as I experiences it as a general reader. This feedback is going to sound a bit tough as I am focussing on points of friction I encountered while reading. Overall, particularly in the main body text the user experience of the site is fluid, the text style is clear and consistent, and the reading experience is good. Where I try to be specific but will probably get wordy below is in trying to articulate difficulties or suggestions about navigation, particularly in how the User Guide, Introduction, and Chapter Outlines relate to the body of the text.

SITE: Navigation Parallel Texts Layout Design 
TEXT: Specific page-by-page points Style Coherency Content 

ERRORS: I was not reading for spellings, fragmentation or typos, but where a few jumped out at me I will try and locate them in a page to edit, if this is something that is helpful. I don’t expect this to be comprehensive and I assume you’ll pass this through a copy checker anyway. I’ll try to interpret my own notes for placement and list by Page, and surrounding text. This may be easier if I had edit privileges, but then I may be wrongly reading something as a spelling error in places anyway. I’ll try to put them at the bottom of a segment of text referring to a specific page. But my note keeping wasn’t the best. 

SITE: Navigation by section: 

CHAPTER OUTLINES Chapters (?) On the whole, as a reading experience I found that I didn’t use the index/menu much except to reference where I was. I clicked through page to page at the bottom of each chapter. That said however I think there is a bit of irregularity in how terminology is used for describing chapters and…. Sections? Books? This also is a bit confusing, especially in the chapter guide where you refer in some segments to “the chapter” and in some to “this chapter”. By this I mean, is “the Governor” a chapter? Or another designation? Is “the Vapour Engine” a chapter? My reading is that the Vapour Engine is a chapter, and they are within the… Section? Of the Governor? I may be missing something here, but I found it a bit unclear when using the chapter outline whether each piece was describing the whole section of the smaller piece (again, e.g. describing “the governor” or describing “the vapour engine. There is a bit of irregularity about this across the site I think. Chapter Outline navigations - in reference to my confusion about what is a chapter - perhaps a style difference on the page, such as indenting the sub-sections, as they are in the menu with the arrow, will help to clarify the status and structure of the sections? I wonder about a structure image - like the Haekel tree diagram, that differentiates by trunk, branch, and leaf, or something to help visualise this? Using the main page I think the introduction to cybernetic discourse should be the first Link on the home page. I also think the chapter outlines should be here. For the more naive reader there is terminology that the introduction lays out well and clearly without which the chapters are a bit harder. I didn’t read the introduction until after the first chapter and I regret this. Parallel Texts. I could not work out if I was meant to be able to navigate the parallel texts or if they only exist in direct reference to the main body text. It would be nice to have a map or a nest structure visible when in a parallel text page that shows its place. e.g. at the top “the governor>vibrations>dynamic psychology…. 

I wanted to be able to access these texts on their own but did not seem to be able to. Navigating back from parallel texts - two points. 1. Is it possible to float the back-link so it stays visible in place on the right when you scroll down the page? 2. this is perhaps minor and complex to code, but I found it weirdly disorientating that when you link back to the main text the page adjusts so the parallel text link is at the top and the text continues from that point. This is perhaps a result of me reading the text quite quickly for this process, and but I would find it much easier if, when going back to the main text, the page adjusted so the parallel text link appeared about half way down the page and I could re-situate myself in the main text. I needed to read the Introduction before the chapter outline in order to understand some terminology, but that wasn’t the way round they appear on the menu - also I think that the Introduction and the chapter outline should be represented on the home page, along with the main sections (repeating this point in navigation and text) 

NEXT CHAPTER BUTTON: I mostly navigated through the text with the next and previous buttons. It felt like a more familiar web and reading movement that way. I think that it would be helpful for this to reflect the structure seen in the side bar menu a bit more. So that when you get to the end of a section, if possible, it would lead to the front page for the next section. So that it goes cybernetics - dynamic psychology -> M. SPECULARIX And so then you affirm the structure of the project. Moving through the texts this way is fluid, and an enjoyable read, but I would like to be presented with the section front pages within that to situate myself as reader. 

GENERAL NAVIGATION THOUGHTS / recap On the whole when reading the navigation is fluid page to page. I think some clarification of the status of chapters and sections would be helpful. Being led to the introduction first is necessary. This should be on the home page and above the user guide and chapter outline in the side bar. Being able to see and navigate the structure of the parallel texts would be good Returning from parallel texts would be more natural (for me) if a. The back-link floats with you down the page b. The return point puts you back with the parallel page link half way down the page when you return to the main text. Actually this point about the return point being in the middle of the page is relevant for footnote returns also. DESIGN I have few pointers on the design. I think that readability is good, the principal issues are design/ navigation choices about floating elements or fixed elements for navigation. It may be that coding these so apparently similar but functionally different elements is a pain - i.e. having one rule for the parallel text connection as fixed to the main text and a different rule for the return link. Layout General layout is clear and helps in reading. I like being able to reference the menu structure on the left while reading, even if I am not really using it. 

TEXT: Here BOLD ITALICS are page names, italics are sections within that page. I read through the body text, navigating by the next page links at the footer turned out to be the more natural way I moved through it. I obviously didn’t finish the whole thing in the requested time - I read the first section - the Governor and the first chapter of section two, along with the parallel texts from that. I needed to read the Introduction before the chapter outline in order to understand some terminology, but that wasn’t the way round they appear on the menu - also I think that the Introduction and the chapter outline should be represented on the home page, along with the main sections (repeating this point in navigation and text) 

CHAPTER OUTLINE I think there were a couple of fluctuations in style here that are maybe a result of academic and non-academic translation but which I found a bit confusing. Mostly these involve three things. 

1. Moving between active and passive voice - the first example of this is in the opening segment here “The Fabulous Loop de Loop examines how Butler's premise extends into the twentieth century.” I thought this was a bit unclear, as it follows the introduction of ideas and named outputs by other people, and it is unclear whether you are referring to “the fabulous L de L” as an already existing thing in the world (which you later introduce), created by someone else or this very project that we are in. It may be that placing this as the bottom after “across natural and social sciences” would make it clearer that is it a lead into the project that I am reading. Or it may be that using active voice, as in “In the FLDL, we examine how….” 

2. You then later describe yourself as writer doing things actively, but use both “we” and “I” - as in we will read, and I establish. I think this may be a matter of bringing things across from academic text, but it would be nice if it was standardised. 

3. It is not clear in this whether you are making the division between chapters, you sometimes refer to a chapter as ‘the chapter, and sometimes as this chapter, and while its possible to work it out, it makes it a bit unclear whether the overall section - such as the governor - is the chapter, or the individual page. The vapour engine As you’ve introduce Butler, then called him by Butler already, reintroducing as Samuel Butler seemed odd, perhaps - this may be because I was using the text not as intended. I read this page through as a single text - in effect a synopsis of the project as a whole. 

In Butlers 2 issues, I would list the issues then put your own work after them. i.e. have a+b then 

“The key concern of Butler, which is evident across the texts we will discuss in this chapter, is the evolution of consciousness. In opposition to the idealism of the time, Butler argued, mind and matter are indivisible”

This is a style formatting thing that recurs through this page, that its not completely standardised how you are referring to people (obviously made complex by there being family relations in there also). Sometimes first and second name, sometimes only first name, sometimes only surname. 

USER GUIDE Methodology This is a style choice I’m pointing at and I completely welcome the point being denied. You choose to lead by negatively determining what method you are not using. I propose that it may be clearer to positively describe what method you did use. Thats all. Spelling. You spell Terrane instead of terrain I think. 

INTRODUCTION Spelling: As I follow this track, I will depart form - should be from I think (I appreciate the use of train themed metaphor here)

THE VAPOUR ENGINE ERRORS: > “My emphasis” on quote which contains no emphasis > Gregories father (see chapter *) - no chapter link VIBRATIONS This is a content question. I was thinking through this about blind spots - how the apprehended variation in the moth is a visual system, and how this variation is articulated in a specific moment, when eugenics are part of the discourse, in relation to human / western culture and racialised subjectivities. By this I mean, I think its an interesting spot to reflect on how specialisation, capability, and variation are being pathologised in tandem with cybernetic and codifying propositions.