NOTES ON METHOD-LOOP DE LOOP

The Aim: Negative Entropy as a guide (or governor)
The Title: A cybernetic discourse

The Aim

My aim in The fabulous Loop de Loop is to understand a particular, limited, but nevertheless influential, research culture from the point of view of some of the writers and thinkers who were central to it. All the protagonists in The Fabulous Loop de Loop attempt to account for their own place in this discourse as it emerges around them. Each outlines their own epistemology. The Fabulous Loop de Loop aims to examine how these narratives weigh against each other, how they cross over and bump against each other. The writers I discuss also tried to draw a boundary around a discourse whilst at the same time testing the limits of that boundary. The research culture of Lacan might have understood this move as a dialectic – more contemporary minds might understand it as deconstruction.

Although I have drawn extensively from contemporary authors whilst writing the text (as is reflected in the citations and bibliography) I do not bring contemporary writers directly into the discussion in The Fabulous Loop de Loop. I also refrain from adopting a theoretical framework of a particular contemporary writer, (Hayles, Lafontaine, Liu, Pickering, Kittler, Mindell, Harroway, Heims &c…). In The fabulous Loop de Loop I take a “situated” position, by which I mean I try to understand the discourse the text is situated within as much as possible and convay my understanding to the reader. I also recognise that my own critical position is informed by a more contemporary discourse on their work and this will inevitably be reflected in the text. In previous versions of the text this “situated” approach was further complicated by a broader theoretical contextualisation which made The fabulous Loop de Loop virtually unreadable. This space on the wiki – The Annotation – hopes to make space for more contemporary reflection.

Because the contemporary discourse on cybernetics constitutes an academy in itself, which involves a great deal of detailed discourse analysis, I am developing this part of the wiki – The Annotation – to allow for a discussion of the text from a more contemporary perspective.

Negative entropy as a guide (or governor)

As a navigational tool within The Fabulous Loop de Loop I have chosen the figure of negative entropy. Common to all the protagonists in The Fabulous Loop de Loop is an understanding that the hard lines – between organism and environment, between organism and machine, between consciousness and body – begin to evaporate once one accepts the notion that “nature can pay out of its own pocket” The Fabulous Loop de Loop is an examination of how different writers come to terms with this new reality. I recognise I run the risk of flattening or over-simplifying the field – I’ll leave it to the reader to decide how successful this strategy has been.

'A cybernetic discourse (as opposed to THE cybernetic discourse)

The discourse I describe in The Fabulous Loop de Loop represents a particular, limited, but nevertheless influential, research culture. I also want to be clear that as each protagonist seeks to define their discourse they articulate the problematic central to any “discourse engineer”

I mention in the introduction that the “cybernetic moment” is a contested field. Conemporary writers give a different emphasis to the period of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-53). It is understood variously : “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” (P. Galison).”

David Mindell provides a fine example of a discourse analysis which questions the claims made by the architects of cybernetics.

In the introduction to Between Human and Machine, Mindell writes:

“During the early twentieth century, before Wiener’s formulation, American technology was already suffused with what would later be called cybernetic ideas. Several interwar engineering cultures—military gunfire control, aircraft and ship controls, communications engineering, and a nascent control theory—exemplify the convergence of communications and control that predated cybernetics. Wiener was indeed a critical player; he crystallized, articulated, and popularized this convergence, and he worked out some of its underlying mathematics, but he did not originate it.”

Ironically, one of the outcomes of the popularisation of cybernetic ideas is that it is now easier for us to understand that a discourse can never the product of a lone genius and that however much research cultures are apt to draw boundaries around their world, those boundaries remain porous and the ideas they seek to make their domain remain fluid.

NOTE: The cybernetic approach allowed for a reorganisation, rationalisation and re-contextualisation of knowledge on many levels. When Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” an array of feedback systems from the past carried particular epistemological implications. It was after Macy that the railroad and telegraph systems were reframed as part of a broader feedback and response apparatus. It was after Macy that economic, biological and social systems were scrutinised anew through a cybernetic lens. Gregory Bateson's task was to articulate the implications of this epistemological shift and to extend it across a wide range of practices; the cybernetic moment itself represented a moment of Deutero-Learning, when science became self-reflexive; when social and natural science were able to recognize each other, when art sought to understand its own process and to define that process as art itself. Taken across a broad social canvass this moment might be understood as a ‘cybernetic apparatus’ or ‘cybernetic dispositif’ to which the protagonists in this text all responded.