Minding the Cybernetic Gap

Abstract

At the end of this volume Andrew Pickering admits that “this book is an attempt to rescue cybernetics from the margins and launder it into mainstream discourse” (p. 390).1 I run into this sort of rescue operation all the time in the history of economics, and have indulged in it a little bit myself, so it becomes all the more urgent for me to try and articulate why it is unlikely to work here as there. This feels imperative, because I share so many of Pickering’s enthusiasms: pragmatism and Continental philosophy, the physics of self-organization and cellular automata, the aversion to treating mathematics as mere representation, dissatisfaction with conventional histories of science, and a fascination with cybernetics. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. ii+526. $55) is not really a comprehensive history of cybernetics so much as a sequence of portraits of an admittedly counterfeit “science,” ones painted as Pickering would will us to remember it. These portraits certainly do paint a new picture: the standard portrayal is of an American enterprise dominated by military interests, arrayed around the computer and operations research, besotted with command and control, and suspended somewhere between RAND and MIT. Pickering instead gives us a six-pack of British “scientists of the adaptive brain” (p. 6) who purportedly wander everywhere but the killing fields, from Grey Walter’s “tortoises” to Ross Ashby’s “homeostats,” from Gordon Pask’s Musicolor to Stafford Beer’s Project CyberSyn (to run the Chilean economy