Cybernetics and Society - 1 November 2016 - The Liberal Effect: System-Cybernetic Governmentality during the Cold War

Dr Bernard Geoghagen (Media, Coventry) Discussant: Dr Christopher Ball (Anthropology, Notre Dame) Abstract How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family members encode and decode informational streams in feedback loops that promote the stability (or “homeostasis”) of the individual as well as the group. Mental illness, in this account, sprang from atypical coding patterns. This talk examines how technical affordances of mid-twentieth century “new media” such as experimental film and information theory facilitated this production of cybernetic families.

Speaker: Dr. Seb Franklin, English (King's College London) Discussant: Nathaniel Zetter, English (Cambridge) Abtract In January 1951, R. S. Hunt--a British technical editor and former chemist without any university degree or diploma--sent a manuscript titled "Two Kinds of Work" to the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who did not read it. Hunt's manuscript promises to "put metaphysics within the scope of physics." And it claims to do so by making "such quantities as beauty, virtue and happiness," as well as all manual and intellectual labor tasks, intelligible as electronic circuits. In other words, Hunt's text anticipates the wildest fantasies of digital culture and the concepts of affective and immaterial labour associated with post-Fordism. "Two Kinds of Work" is centred on a concept that Hunt names "G-energy." This force, Hunt argues, "defies the second law of thermodynamics" by moving material systems from less to more probable states. In other words, it represents all processes that give form or pattern. The 'discovery' of G-energy, Hunt insists, necessitates a radical new ontology; humans, nonhuman animals, machines, materials, and concepts all hold and transmit G-energy, and are thus connected in networks of exchange. Hunt's formulation predicts the current methodological formations of matter and bodies as vital networks. But crucially, Hunt's underlying motivations are not philosophical but economic: G-energy is for him the essence of value, a 'natural' phenomenon that is represented by money. It is what employers are really paying for when they think they are paying for time. By reading "Two Kinds of Work" in the light of current theoretical concerns, this talk identifies historical and conceptual connections between theories of digitality and value. Bio: Seb Franklin is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature in the Department of English at King's College London, where he co-convenes the MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. He is the author of Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (MIT Press, 2015). His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Camera Obscura, Cultural Politics, Grey Room, Novel, andWorld Picture.

Professor Ronald Kline, STS (Cornell) Discussant: Dr Richard Staley (HPS, Cambridge) Abstract This seminar will focus on two works in progress: "Why the Disunity of Cybernetics Matters to the History of the Human Sciences in the United States, 1940-1980" (which is an extension of research in Professor Kline's book book Cybernetics Moment); and "Inventing an Analog Past and a Digital Future in Computing" (which is a draft of a chapter on a book in progress on the history of digitalization). The seminar will tie these two papers together under the rubric of “disunity of science” in order to argue that the multiple interpretations of cybernetics and the term “digital” are important to understanding their past (and present and future). The paper on cybernetics discusses disunity in regard to first-order cybernetics (in the work of such figures as Karl Deutsch in political science, George Miller in psychology and Herbert Simon in management science) and the revision of the field known as second-order cybernetics (in the work of Gregory Bateson in anthropology, who crossed this boundary.) The second paper discusses why the venerable words analog and digital were appropriated by computer builders in the 1940s, what alternatives were proposed, how they became paired keywords, why closure occurred so quickly in the U.S., the different ways in which digital and analog engineering cultures interpreted the terms. The paper also speculates on the reasons why the concerns raised at the 1950 Macy conference — that the terms were vague and that analog was not the logical opposite of digital — were ignored.

Professor Sonja M. Amadae (University of Helsinki and MIT) Discussant: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, University of Cambridge) Abstract This paper focuses on game theory and its application to the nuclear security dilemma to argue that game theory’s mindless strategic rationality, not coincidentally, is profoundly entangled with the strategic posture it recommends. Nuclear strategy is ostensibly more effective the less intelligible it is to observers because deterrent threats achieve credibility at the price of absurdly endangering constituents with apocalyptic terror. Far from the popular conception of either the public or journalistic authors, the nuclear strategy sanctioned by game theory is not Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), but rather NUTS, Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection. Whereas MAD is structured to symmetrically hold nuclear weapons in reserve to bi-laterally counter a nuclear attack, NUTS develops asymmetric advantage based on coercive bargaining, threatening to be the first to introduce nuclear warheads into conflict, and preparing to achieve escalation dominance at all levels of engagement. The mindless quality of game theory is useful in nuclear security because by its internal logic, credible deterrence depends on preparing and intending to wage an omniscidal nuclear war by deploying an arsenal of up to 7000 warheads with the destructive capacity to destroy life on earth multiple times over. Thus, the fact that strategic rationality jettisons intelligibility, or understanding of the problem it aims to solve, enables it to rationalize mobilizing and maintaining a surfeit of material resources to extinguish all humanity within weeks, if not hours. Finally, this essay explores how this alienating logic of unintentional, and not necessarily intelligible, choice informing nuclear deterrence has been elevated into the standard understanding of instrumental rationality. This now informs modeling and decision-making spanning from non-human actors to individuals’ choices and collective action, including the exercise of national sovereignty.

Egle Rindzeviciute (Lecturer, Kingston University London) Discussant: Franziska Exeler (University of Cambridge) Cybernetics and systems analysis – both important contributors to our contemporary information architecture – have been the subjects of highly critical historical analyses. Scholars such as Peter Galison, S. Amadae and Paul Edwards argue that the techno-sciences of cybernetics were instrumental in the development of Cold War military-industrial operations and influenced high modernist fantasies of top-down control. Yet, in her fascinating new book, The Power of Systems, Dr. Egle Rindzeviciute examines a little known period of Soviet-American cooperation to argue for an alternative political history – one that asserts an anti-totalitarian character to the development of systems and policy sciences during the late Cold War. Focusing her study on the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, Dr. Rindzeviciute’s work explores a rare zone of freedom, communication and negotiation. Her research demonstrates how computer modeling, cybernetics and systems analysis challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

Professor Andrew Pickering (Emeritus Professor in Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter) Discussant: Professor Simon Schaffer (Professor of History of Science, University of Cambridge) What if the unknowable was not simply a blank to be filled or a defect to be rectified, but instead, an inescapable facet of everyday existence, which continually regenerates itself as we attempt to know and interact with the world? In these papers, Professor Andrew Pickering demonstrates how cybernetics — the mid-century science of feedback and control — embraced the unknowable by substituting older ideas of scientific certainty with a new cybernetic ontology, which embraced processes of adaptation and becoming. Professor Pickering’s papers will explore the activities of Stafford Beer (1926-2002), the theorist of management cybernetics whose work extended from simulations of automatic factories to economic planning to team-based management solutions development. Beer’s efforts revolved around the construction of management systems that would performatively adapt to environments that they could not fully control. In keeping with the mercurial nature of cybernetic thought, such systems are highly suggestive in a political sense, encouraging us to think beyond the limiting conventions of electoral representation to imagine alternative frameworks for decision-making — ones that allow for a more successful realisation of our democratic aspirations.