[iDC] how long is a piece of string?

[brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr]

Mark Shepard wrote:

> Brian, Katharine,
>
> Let's see how far we can spin this thread?

Sure, for me it's quite interesting. But it will take a while just to make
our terms clear to each other, I suspect, because these are complicated
issues and I am sure everyone approaches them somewhat differently.

> Clearly first-order cybernetics as exemplified by, say, the Homeostat,
follows this logic. But my understanding of how the field evolved (which is
limited, although I think Hayles (1999) provides a useful introduction) is
that second- and third-order theoreticians such as Gordon Pask sought ways
of thinking about interaction with (and through) computers that favored
"open" over "closed" systems, with outcomes that were not knowable outside
the system's performance.

Yes, these plateaus are fundamental. Most people date the second period
from Heinz von Foerster's focus on refleivity, on the observer inside the
observed system (well, Von Foerster actually coined the term "second-order
cybernetics," so that's obvious enough). The third level gets various
definitions, all having to do with change in complex systems which are
often social ones. How does a system alter its own parameters? Guattari's
late work has aspects of third-order cybernetics, by way of Varela and
Prigogine. In Chaosmosis he raises the boundary-problem of Varela's
autopoetic machines or living systems, and suggests that the
interdependency of machines, biological beings and institutions allows one
to locate assemblages. So you get third-order cybernetic sociology!

> [Pask's] Conversation Theory may be worth revisiting for a way of
thinking through how the act of story-telling–as something that unfolds
over time–produces a "shared" space "between" actors resulting in
"outcomes" to which neither can lay claim to exclusive authorship. 

This might be a good one for Katharine to look into! Seems pretty clear to
me that exclusive authorship is not exactly common in the human way of
doing things. I hope to get to Pask someday, but maybe not right away...

> The critique of encroachment of the domain of the "addressable" upon that
of the "non-addressable" is long-standing. Deleuze (1992) discusses this in
the context of the dissolution of forms of societal enclosures (Foucault),

Yes, and that critique is very timely today in the world of Web 2.0, when
the word "ontology" is used by programmers defining categories of tags for
database files! Since I tend to think in the terms of continental
philosophy, and even a little poorly digested Heidegger, I find this
semantic-web talk of "ontologies" quite shocking, a really troubling
symptom of the oblivion of being. For me, ontology remains a question to
ask about one's destinations in time, not a series of labels to be applied
toward the technical utopia of transparent communication. I mean, I'm not
against tags, but it would be a pity to arrive at a situation where you can
"find" everything, without ever knowing what you're actually looking for...

> Law (2004) shows, the messy, non-addressable aspects of the "real world"
pervade the scientific laboratory as much as they do everyday life. So I'd
think it's less a question of looking away from science to art, but
recognizing the inter-weavings of the two (among others) in the larger
frame of this thing we call life. 

That seems to be what interests the cyberneticians from Von Foerster on. It
has lead to Varela's concept of enaction, or the co-creation of observer
and observed through the construction of their relation. I've just recently
heard of that idea, and it's very interesting! Maybe related to Pask on the
conversation. But the introduction of the messier parts into cybernetics is
also the reason why the whole discourse was finally abandoned to a
more-or-less hippie counter-culture (Bateson) or it broke down into its
constitutive specialties again (neurophysiology, control engineering,
computer science, artificial intelligence). I guess the speculative and
incalculable aspects of social theory were not digestible by the scientists
and technologists (but let's not forget Stafford Beer and Cybersyn in
Allende's Chile!). The thing is, before this breakdown in the 1980s, much
of the groundwork was laid for the kind of control society that we have in
the age of Total Surveillance today. To figure out where that came from, I
am quite interested in Karl Deutsch's book, The Nerves of Government
(1963), which is the strictest, yet most sophisticated and all-embracing
sociological use of first-order cybernetic models I've yet found.

Deutsch makes the point that feedback models merely formalize a long
tradition of organizational techniques, involving an increasingly careful
discipline of information flow through hierarchically structured chains of
command. This is something you can see very clearly in James Beniger's much
later work on The Control Revolution (1986), covering problems of
information flow in corporate and military organizations up to WWII.
Beniger's book is such a great genealogy of networked organizational forms
that he doesn't even have to talk about them explicitly! The relevance is
just obvious.

Another fascinating example of an early figure who put first-order ideas to
very practical use in the management field is Jay Wright Forrester. After
working on the Whirlwind computer in the 1950s (which was part of the SAGE
ontinental air defense, and all those things that Edwards talks about in
his Closed World book), JW Forrester went on to found system dynamics,
which basically involves the modeling and computer simulation of
interconnected feedback loops in large-scale organizations: industries,
then cities, and finally the world, in the book on World Dynamics, which
led to the famous Club of Rome report on Limits to Growth in the early
1970s.

My basic idea is that the collapse of the initial cybernetic hypothesis,
then its slow reconstruction into the very complex and ultra-specialized
discourses of present-day cognitive science, has acted to cover up and
render opaque the really immense progress of the control society, some of
which I have tried to describe in my recent text entitled "Future Map: Or
How the Cyborgs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance" (that's on
my blog at brianholmes.wordpress.com, along with the outline for the
Guattari piece that Mark referred to). And this story isn't exactly over:
Check out the concept of "socio-tech" in the US government report on
Converging technologies for Improving Human Performance
(http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/1/NBIC_report.pdf). There's a
little chart on p. 159 which I find particularly impressive, a kind of
bull's eye which brings a whole range of discourses to the point of
identifying human subjects for instrumental action upon them. 

What I am really interested in developing are ways of understanding the
different moments of second- and third-order cybernetics as sites of
cultural, philosophical and scientific struggles over the definitions, uses
and limits of technologically inspired models of human behavior. It seems
obvious to me that today, as cognitive science increasingly integrates
neurophysiological research and anthropology to informatics and artificial
intelligence, and as the simpler feedback systems of first-order
cybernetics are perfected and brought up to ever-higher speeds, with
ever-deeper memory banks and ever-wider surveillance nets to fill them with
information, there is a great cultural need to relaunch the kinds of
heretical experimentation and also, explicit philosophical and
organizational antagonism toward the applications of cognitive science, a
kind of experimentation/antagonism which already marked the 60s and 70s,
but which we seem to have forgotten about today. As you can guess I want to
write something in exactly that direction, something that combines this
kind of dry and precise scientific talk that we're getting into here with
some more pointed political opposition and also some much wilder delirium!
But even more, I would like to get involved with some experimentation.

> If technology is to be the answer (and
> it may not be in this case, but Katharine, you originally frame it as
such), how we frame the question is, in fact, *the* critical question.
Asking how we might narrate the (last remaining?) spaces "in-between" (as
Ian Sinclair does in Orbital London, or J.G. Ballard does in Concrete
Island for that matter) would inevitably to lead to us down the line to yet
another mobile application designed to direct the tourist to that hidden
cafe located "off the beaten path." Perhaps "local knowledge" is best left
local?
>
> I want a SATNAV device that helps me get lost...

Really, now you're talkin' sense, imho. Read Norman Klein on the
"Electronic Baroque" (in his Vatican to Vegas book) and you'll be even more
inspired!

> So, maybe the question then (if the answer is to be technology): how do
we create technologies that work toward enhancing the serendipitous, the
unexpected, the schizogeographic,  the always already _un_known, the stuff
which elides what Brian describes as "the imposed patternings of everyday
existence in technological societies", or in plain terms, that which simply
enhances the very _process_ of living?

Well, without being too sacrilegious here on the techno-loving iDC list,
could I ask whether it might be interesting to break down or even destroy
some complex cybernetic machines? Like, for instance, the ones that
categorize us to the nth degree of ontological absurdity? The principle of
the feedback loop "is haunted by the idea of eternity," according to
Guattari in Chaosmosis. Feedback is the endless perfectioning of structure,
the eternally corrective return. Whereas actual machines, in their material
singularity, are always what breaks down, goes off track, falls
catastrophically apart, with a little help from some impish non-conformist,
some lazy maintenance-man, some treacherous spare-parts department. I'm not
so much talking about hacking and sabotage as about ideas and attitudes
that get under your skin and start fiddling with the dials on your inner
android. Does the answer always have to be correct? What about the truth of
scientific paradox? Is there a one-way ticket in life anymore? Is there a
machinic irony of the overdeveloped civilizations?

all the best, Brian




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