In the current issue

Conference Report
Yoel Bergman, "Thirty-Eighth Symposium of the International Committee for the History of Technology"

Essay Reviews
Simon A. Cole, "The Faces of Biometrics: Lisa S. Nelson, America Identified; Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future"

Orit Halpern, "Affective Machines: Elizabeth A. Wilson: Affect and Artificial Intelligence"

Philip Mirowski, "Minding the Cybernetic Gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain"

Megan Mullen, "Demystifying Some Momentous Changes: Richard R. John, Network Nation"

Casey O'Donnell, "On the Back of a Flying Gryphon: Soaring
Over/Through the Global Game Industry: Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire; Bonnie A. Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest; William Sims Bainbridge, The Warcraft Civilization"

Technology and Culture
January 2012

Minding the Cybernetic Gap

Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain

Philip Mirowski
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 under Allende), and from R. D. Laing's Kingsley Hall to Gregory Bateson's sensory-deprivation tanks. It is all so disparate and fizzy and sparkling that it resembles a funhouse or a "happening" of a particular vintage, one redolent of "the sixties," as the author himself admits (p. 379). At one point Pickering even suggests that British cybernetics diverged from the American version because (cue music) Brits Just Wanna Have Fun (p. 56). I could not suppress the feeling that it all might have made a better movie perhaps by Errol Morris) than a staid linear text, although conversion into hypertext might be even more appropriate. I especially enjoyed the extensive footnotes, which frequently confess that the history actually happened somewhat differently from the narrative found above the fold in the text.2 Maybe books are not altogether obsolete just yet.

These incidents encompass neither the sorts of people nor the kinds of technologies that have attracted sustained attention from subsequent computer scientists and historians of cybernetics, so the question inevitably arises, why have they not been part of the story? An unsophisticated response might be that the resulting technological artifacts never really proved to be all that useful. Pickering's answer, in contrast, indicts the malign effect of "modernity," which sometimes sounds akin to Bruno Latour's version of the term and at other times like Martin Heidegger's. I got nervous when Pickering started quoting James Scott's Seeing Like a State (1998)—for this hints that Cybernetic Brain is really about the pursuit of politics by other means, rather than cybernetics per se. As he writes:

The modern sciences background their own practice, organizing it around a telos of knowledge production, and then construing it retrospectively in terms of that knowledge (a tale of errors dispelled). We have seen cybernetics was not like that. Cybernetics was about systems—human, nonhuman, or both—that staged their own performative dances of agency, that foregrounded performance. (p. 381)

It seems that Pickering seeks to evoke what it was like to pursue scientific research that is not only devoid of deleterious tendencies (as he would have it) toward ontological reification of the phenomenon as separate and distinct from the scientist and subject to imperious manipulation of technique, but also as detached from the dead hand of the state and the top down regimentation of the academic disciplines. The irony is that he has unearthed his handful of counter-examples from the era of the cold war, precisely the period in which all the sciences were recruited to state or military purposes. Pickering repeatedly asks: Why were his protagonists so marginalized, so unable to invest their inquiries with continuity and continued development, so ill-starred in finding an institutional home?3 I should think the answer was rather obvious: insofar as they sought to buck the trend of utilitarian subordination to the dominant paymasters, to engage in the trademark 1960s pose of cheeky impertinence and revolution for the hell of it, then the imperatives of building the kind of thought collectives that could withstand the test of time would, of course, be thwarted. The notion that a few gurus (or—wait for it—entrepreneurs) could successfully maintain their playful inquiries through sheer entertainment value appears to me to border on delusional.

And, of course, they did not. Ross Ashby was funded by the air force while at the Biological Computer Lab; the ONR supported Gordon Pask for fifteen years; Stafford Beer served as an operations researcher for private firms, the military, and Chile; Gregory Bateson maintained contacts forged in the OSS during World War II. It seems that their separation from the state was less than comprehensive. To be fair, Pickering does admit as much in footnotes. What this fact does suggest, however, is that Pickering's Gang of Six does not represent such a fresh glimpse into a forgotten or neglected mode of research as he thinks. Perhaps this brand of cybernetics does live on, but only in the sphere of social theory, in ways that elude Pickering's otherwise catholic tastes.

Pickering wants to praise a version of cybernetics that has somehow abjured the will to power of much of modern science: "Throughout . . . I have sought to address the critique of cybernetics as a science of control" (pp. 382–83). But this belief in lack of control of both social and natural phenomena found fertile ground among a contemporary cadre not covered in this volume—namely, the neoliberal thought collective organized around the Mont Pèlerin Society (see Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pèlerin [2009]). If Beer sounds eerily like a slightly wackier Herbert Simon, while reading this I was struck by just how much the later thought of Friedrich Hayek depended directly on these specific cybernetic theoreticians, and especially Ashby. The stress on complexity and the inability of any individual human to really know the phenomenon with any certainty; the insistence that systems of lesser complexity are impotent to control those of greater complexity (Ashby's "law of requisite variety" [p. 147]); the existence of "a Plan far superior to anything that an individual can devise" (p. 144); the postulate of a scale-invariance of the information processor from inanimate object to brain to the marketplace; the insistence that "there is no such thing as society" through the blurring of the distinction between human and nonhuman. Thus was composed the modern neoliberal indictment of the irrationality of socialism.

The appeal to technologies of the self was something that even Foucault detected in the neoliberals in his late lectures. Beer insisted that the brain, the corporation, and the economy were all on an equal ontological footing; so too did Hayek. Pickering praises Steve Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman for pursuing their rebel science outside academia in the context of start-up firms, since cybernetics might only flourish in such "new" institutions; Hayek would enthusiastically concur. For him, scientific research was not about the production of knowledge; it was rather about the freedom of each of us to believe whatever we like in the marketplace of ideas. There is no more prominent social theorist of the "dance of agency" and "performativity" than Hayek, although subsequent Mont Pèlerin epigones come close.

Hence, I suggest that Pickering's favored form of cybernetic thought is much more pervasive than he realizes: neoliberalism is the background noise of modern culture, whether people are aware of it or not. Free to be you and me is its mantra. In a strange way, it may be that his choice to leave the computer as cultural artifact out of The Cybernetic Brain served to divert attention from the ways that cybernetics failed as academic science, but lives on as fundamental worldview. I doubt this is the sort of political takeaway Pickering had in mind; in laundering the mangle, perhaps he should mind the gap.

1. The term "launder" is undoubtedly a pun on Pickering's earlier book, The Mangle of Practice (1995), but is a bit obscure nonetheless. It may signal an intention to revise his position relative to the earlier book, in the sense that he now writes of "performativity" in lieu of "practice."
2. The editors of this journal will probably not allow me the same latitude. I especially like the way all the military connections of many of his protagonists denied in the text are admitted to have been present in the footnotes.
3. Pickering often conflates this question with one that haunts the historical literature: Was cybernetics a "real science" or not? One purpose of this review is to suggest that they must be kept separate.

Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011).

©2012 by the Society for the History of Technology.