<nettime> Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety

[Pit Schultz <pit@icf.de>]

Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Wiener and Cybernetic Anxiety

by Catherine Hayles

Of all the implications first-wave cybernetics conveyed, perhaps none was
more disturbing and potentially revolutionary than the idea that the
boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given. 
Conceptualizing control, communication and information as an integrated
system, cybernetics radically changed how boundaries were conceived. 
Gregory Bateson brought the point home when he puzzled his graduate
students with a question koan-like in its simplicity: "Is a blind man's
cane part of him?" [1] [2] The question aimed to spark a mind-shift. Most
of his students thought human boundaries are naturally defined by
epidermal surfaces. Seen from the cybernetic perspective coalescing into
awareness from during and after World War II, however, cybernetic systems
are constituted by flows of information. In this viewpoint cane and man
join in a single system, for the cane funnels to the man essential
information about his environment. Similarly for a deaf person's hearing
aid, a voice synthesizer for someone with impaired speech, and a helmet
with a voice-activated firing control for a fighter pilot. 

This list is meant to be seductive, for over the space of a comma, it
moves from modifications intended to compensate for deficiencies to
interventions designed to enhance normal functioning. Once this splice is
passed, it becomes difficult to establish conceptual limits to the
process. In "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," Donna Haraway writes about the
potential of the cyborg to disrupt traditional categories. [3] Fusing
cybernetic device and biological organism, the cyborg violates the
human/machine distinction;  replacing cognition with neural feedback, it
challenges the human-animal difference; explaining the behavior of
thermostats and people through theories of feedback, hierarchical
structure, and control, it erases the animate/inanimate distinction. In
addition to arousing anxiety, the cyborg can also spark erotic
fascination: witness the female cyborg in Blade Runner. The flip side of
the cyborg's violation of boundaries is what Haraway calls its
"pleasurably tight coupling" between parts that are not supposed to touch.
Mingling erotically-charged violations with potent new fusions, the cyborg
becomes the stage on which are performed contestations about body
boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic and cultural differences.
Especially when it operates in the realm of the Imaginary rather than
through actual physical operations (which act as a reality check on
fantasies about cyborgism), cybernetics intimates that body boundaries are
up for grabs.

As Lakoff and Johnson have shown in their study of embodied metaphors, our
images of our bodies, their limitations and possibilities, openings and
self-containments, inform how we envision the intellectual territories we
stake out and occupy. [4] When the body is revealed as a construct,
subject to radical change and redefinition, bodies of knowledge are
similarly apt to be seen as constructs, no more inevitable than the
organic form that images them. At the same time cybernetics was
reconfiguring the body as an informational system, it was also presenting
itself as a science of information that would remap intellectual terrains.
Branching out into disciplines as different as biology, psychology and
electrical engineering, it claimed to be a universal solvent that would
dissolve traditional disciplinary boundaries. [5] Wiener, the father of
cybernetics, could be supposed to endorse this imperialist ambition. Yet
contemplating the penetration of cybernetics into social and humanistic
fields, he found himself confronted with some disturbing questions. Where
should the cybernetic dissolution of boundaries stop? At what point does
the anxiety provoked by dissolution overcome the ecstasy? His writings
testify both to the exhilaration and uneasiness that cybernetics generated
when its boundary disruptions threatened to get out of hand.

They illustrate the complex dynamics that marked the construction of the
cyborg during the foundational period of the late 1040s and 1950s.

As this brief summary suggests, to engage Wiener's work is to be struck by
contradiction. Envisioning powerful new ways to equate humans and
machines, he also spoke up strongly for liberal humanistic values. A talk
given to an audience of physicians in 1954 illustrates the breadth of his
concern and ambivalence. [6] He predicted the existence of the automatic
factory, argued that electronic computers were thinking machines capable
of taking over many human decision-making processes, and cautioned that
humans must not let machines become their masters. As I indicated in
Chapter 1, the values of liberal humanism--a coherent, rational self, the
right of that self to autonomy and freedom, and a sense of agency linked
with a belief in enlightened self-interest--deeply inform Wiener's
thinking. Often these values stand him in good stead, for example when he
rejected lobotomy at a time when Lawrence Kubie, along with many others,
was endorsing it. During World War II he frantically immersed himself in
military-funded research, but after the war he announced his opposition to
nuclear weapons and from then on refused to do military research. [7] The
tension between Wiener's humanistic values and the cybernetic viewpoint is
everywhere apparent in his writing. On the one hand he used cybernetics to
create more effective killing machines (as Peter Galison has noted),
applying it self-correcting radar tuning, automated anti-aircraft fire,
torpedoes and guided missiles.  Yet he also struggled to envision the
cybernetic machine in the image of a humanistic self. Ranged alongside his
human brother (sisters rarely enter this picture), the cybernetic machine
was to be designed so it did not threaten the autonomous, self-regulating
subject of liberal humanism. On the contrary, it was to extend that self
into the realm of the machine.

But the confluence of cybernetics with liberal humanism was not to run so
smoothly. The parallel between self-regulating machinery and liberal
humanism has a history that stretches back into the eighteenth century, as
Otto Mayr demonstrates in Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in
Early Modern Europe. [8] Mayr argues that ideas about self-regulation were
instrumental in effecting a shift from the centralized authoritarian
control that characterized European political philosophy during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (especially in England, France and
Germany) to Enlightenment philosophies of democracy, decentralized
control, and liberal self-regulation. Because systems were envisioned as
self-regulating, they could be left to work on their own, from the
Invisible Hand of Adam Smith's self-regulating market to the political
philosophy of enlightened self-interest. These visions of self-regulating
economic and political systems produced a complementary notion of the
liberal self as an autonomous self-regulating subject. By mid-twentieth
century, liberal humanism, self-regulating machinery and possessive
individualism had come together in an uneasy alliance that at once helped
to create the cyborg and also undermined the foundations of liberal
subjectivity. Philip K. Dick tapped into this potential instability when
he used his fiction to pose a disturbing question: should a cybernetic
machine, sufficiently powerful in its self-regulating processes to become
fully conscious and rational, be allowed to own itself? [9] If owning
oneself was a constitutive premise for liberal humanism, the cyborg
immensely complicate that premise by its figuring of a rational
subjectivity that is always already constituted by the forces of
capitalistic markets.

The inconsistencies in liberal philosophy that Dick's fiction exposes are
also apparent in Wiener's writing: its tendency to use the plural to give
voice to a privileged few while presuming to speak for everyone; its
masking of deep structural inequalities by enfranchising some while others
remain excluded; and its implication in capitalistic imperialism. The
closest Wiener comes to a critique of these complicities is a rigid
machine he constructs in opposition to the cybernetic machine. This alien
and alienating machine is invested with qualities he wants to purge from
cybernetics, including rigidity, oppression, militaristic regulation of
thought and action, reduction of humans to ant-like elements,
manipulation, betrayal, and death. The scope of the critique is limited,
for it distances the negative values away from his projects instead of
recognizing his complicity with them. When he predicted the automatic
factory, for example, he foresaw that it would result in large-scale
economic displacements (with all the implications that would have for
working class people as autonomous independent agents), but he offered no
remedy other than the platitude that men must not let machines take over.
[10]

Wiener was not unaware of the ironies through which cybernetics would
imperil the very liberal humanistic subject whose origins are enmeshed
with self-regulating machinery. Throughout his mature writings, he
struggled to reconcile the tradition of liberalism with the new cybernetic
paradigm he was in the process of creating. When I think of him, I imagine
him laboring mightily to construct the mirror of the cyborg. He stands
proudly before this product of his reflection, urging us to look into it
so we can see ourselves as control-communication devices, differing in no
substantial regard from our mechanical brethren. Then he happens to glance
over his shoulder, sees himself as a cyborg, and makes a horrified
withdrawal. What assumptions underlie this intense ambivalence? What
threads bind them together into something we might call a world view? How
are the ambivalences negotiated, and when do they become so intense that
the only way to resolve them is to withdraw? What can these complex
negotiations tell us about he pleasures and dangers of the posthuman
subjectivity that would soon displace the liberal humanist self?

To explore these questions, we will begin with Wiener's early work on
probability. In his view, it is because the world is fundamentally
probabilistic that control is needed, for the path of future events cannot
be accurately predicted. By the same token, control cannot be static or
centralized, for then it will not be able to cope with unexpected
developments. The necessity for a flexible, self-regulating system of
control based on feedback from the system itself starts with the system
thumbing its nose at Newtonian predictability. From this, we will follow a
web of sticky connections that include a reinscription of homeostasis; a
construction of information that grows out of Wiener's deep belief in a
probabilistic universe; an interpretation of noise that links it with
entropy, degradation, and death; and, above all, an analogical mode of
thinking that moves easily across boundaries to identify (or construct) 
similarities in pattern between very different kinds of structures. As
much as anything, it was these analogical moves that helped to construct
the cyborg as Wiener envisioned it. All this from a man so uncomfortable
with his own body that he could not throw horseshoes in even approximately
the right direction and had to abandon a career in biology because he was
too clumsy to do the lab work. These physical characteristics are not, I
shall argue, entirely irrelevant to the cybernetic viewpoint Wiener was
instrumental in forging.

Of Molecules and Men: Cybernetics and Probability

Like Venus, cybernetics was born from the froth of chaos. Wiener's
important early work was done on Brownian motion, the random motion
molecules make as they collide with each other, bounce off, and collide
again, as if they were manic bumper cars. [11] Given this chaos, it is
impossible to know the microstates in enough detail to predict from the
laws of motion how individual molecules will behave. Therefore
probabilistic and statistical methods are required. (The Uncertainty
Principle introduced additional complications of a profound nature by
setting limits on how precisely positions and momenta can be known.) 
Probability calculations are facilitated if one assumes that the chaotic
motion is homogeneous, that is, the same regardless how the system is
sliced to analyze it. Thus the famous ergodic hypothesis: "an ensemble of
dynamic systems in some way traces in the course of time a distribution of
parameters which is identical with the distribution of parameters of all
systems at a given time." [12] Following Birkhoff, Wiener helped to make
this hypothesis more limited, precise, and mathematically rigorous than
had Willard Gibbs when he first conceived the idea.

Refining Gibbs' methods and ideas, Wiener saw him as a seminal figure not
only for his own work, but for all of twentieth century science. "It is .
.  . Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must
attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics," he
wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings . [13] Gibbs deserved this honor,
Wiener believed, because he realized the deeper implications of
probability theory. One explanation for this uncertainty is the limit on
knowledge articulated by the Uncertainty Principle, mentioned above. In
addition to reflecting our ignorance of microstates, uncertainty also
stems from our finitude as human beings. Thirty years before it became an
important element in chaos theory, Wiener shrewdly realized that initial
conditions can never be known exactly because physical measurements are
never completely precise. "What we have to say about a machine or other
dynamic system really concerns not what we must expect when the initial
positions and momenta are given with perfect accuracy (which never
occurs), but what we are to expect when they are given with attainable
accuracy" (p. 8). 

Related to these epistemological issues is the shift of orientation
implicit in Gibbs' approach. Rather than use probabilistic methods to
address large numbers of particles (like the bumper cars), Gibbs used
probability to consider how different initial velocities and positions
might cause a system to evolve in different ways. Thus he considered not
many sets within one world but many worlds generated from a single set, or
in Wiener's phrase, "all the worlds which are possible answers to a
limited set of questions concerning our environment" (Human Use, p. 12).
So important did Wiener consider this perspective that he argued "It is
with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics
began its development” (p. 12). To see why Wiener considered the
innovation profound, we have only to compare it with LaPlace's famous
boast that given the initial conditions, a being with enough computing
power would be able to predict a system's evolution for eternity. In this
view, the universe is completely deterministic and knowable, as precise
and predictable as a clock made by God--or what amounted to the same thing
for LaPlace, a clock governed by Newton's laws of motion. By contrast, the
probabilistic world of Gibbs and Wiener operates like a baggy pair of
pants, holding together all right but constantly rearranging itself every
time one tries to sit down. 

Already steeped in probability theory and inclined to view the world as
one evolution realized from a range of possible worlds, Wiener thought
about information in the same terms. Working more or less independently of
Leon Brillouin and Claude Shannon, he came to similar conclusions. [14] As
we saw in Chapter 3, Wiener defined information as a function of
probabilities representing a choice of one message from a range of
possible messages that might be sent. In a sense, he took Gibbs' idea and
substituted word for world. instead of one world coming into being from
among a galaxy of possible worlds, one message comes into being from a
cacophony of possible messages. When the theory worked, Wiener took it as
further confirmation that Gibbs' approach expressed something fundamental
about reality; the word and the world are both essentially probabilistic
in their natures.  This interpretation misses, however, the constructive
aspect of information theory. Far from being a passive confirmation, it
was an active extension of a probabilistic world view into the new and
powerfully synthetic realm of communication theory. We can now understand
on a deeper level Wiener's view of cybernetics as a universal theory of
knowledge. Such a universal perspective would succeed, he thought, because
it reflects the way we know the universe as finite, imperfect creatures.
Statistical and quantum mechanics deal with uncertainty on the microscale;
communication reflects and embodies it on the macroscale. Envisioning
relations on the macroscale as acts of communication was thus tantamount
to extending the reach of probability into the social world of agents and
actors.

For us in the late age of information, it may seem obvious that
communication should be understood as requiring control, and that control
should be construed as a form of communication. Underlying this
construction, however, is a complex series of events, with its own
seriated history of engineering problems, material forms, and bureaucratic
structures, that James Beniger has written about in The Control
Revolution:  Technological and Economic Origins of the Information
Society. [15] In broad outline, the forms of control moved from mechanical
(a cam directing a mechanical rod to follow a certain path) to
thermodynamic (a governor directing the action of a heat engine) to
informational (including cybernetic mechanisms of all kinds, from
computers to the hypothalamus understood in cybernetic terms). In
mechanical exchanges, determinism and predictability loom large. When the
center of interest turns to the furnace, with its fiery enactments of
Brownian motion, probability necessarily enters the picture. [16] When
information comes to the fore, probability moves from being ignorance of
microstates to becoming a fundamental attribute of the communication act.
As each new form of exchange came to the fore, the older ones did not
disappear. An automobile is essentially a heat engine, but it nevertheless
continues to use levers and rods of the kind known since the classical
era. Similarly, a computer is an information machine, but it also uses
molecular processes governed by the laws of thermodynamics. The new forms
are distinguished not by the disappearance of the old, but rather by a
shift in the control mechanisms they employ, which in turn are determined
by the kinds of exchanges the machine is understood to transact.

The move toward cybernetic control theory is itself driven by feedback
loops between theory and artifact, research and researcher. Envisioning
different kinds of exchanges demanded different kind of control
mechanisms, and constructing new control mechanisms facilitated the
construction of more exchanges in that mode. [17] The circularity between
experimenter, control mechanism, and system interface is part of the story
I want to tell. It includes not only the mechanisms of cybernetic systems
but also the mindsets of those who constructed themselves and their
machines in a cybernetic image. Wiener's assumptions, as we have seen,
were rooted in a probabilistic world view. He realized that one of the
subtle implications of this view is that messages are constituted,
measured, and communicated not as things-in-themselves, but as relational
differences between elements in a field. Communication is about relation,
not essence.

Across the range of Wiener's writing, the rhetorical trope that figures
most importantly is analogy. Understanding communication as relation
suggests a deeper reading of this figure. Analogy is not merely an
ornament of language but a powerful conceptual mode that constitutes
meaning through relation. Seen in this way, analogy is a crucial operator
in everything from Wiener's passion for mathematics to his advocacy of
"black box"  engineering and behaviorist philosophy. Indeed, it is not too
much to say that cybernetics as a discipline could not have been created
without analogy. When analogy is used to constitute agents in cybernetic
discourse, it makes an end run around questions of essence, for objects
are constructed through their relations to other objects. Writing in the
years immediately preceding and following World War II, Wiener anticipated
some aspects of post-structuralist theories. He questioned whether there
are any "essential" qualities of humans, animals and machines that exist
in themselves, apart from the web of relations that constituted them in
discursive and communicative fields. “Whatever view we have of the
`realities' underlying our introspections and experiments and mathematical
truths is quite secondary; any proposition which cannot be translated into
a statement concerning the observable is nugatory,” he wrote in 1936 in
“The Role of the Observer.” [18] Wiener also saw sense perception as
working through analogy. In his most extreme pronouncement on the matter,
he asserted that “Physics itself is merely a coherent way of describing
the readings of physical instruments” (a statement deeply regretted by his
mathematical biographer, Pesi Masani.) Among the mappings in his view of
the world-as-analogy were metaphors that overlaid mathematics onto
emotion, sense perception onto communication, and machines onto biological
organisms. These mappings throw a different light on his attempts to
reconcile cybernetics with a liberal humanistic subject. If meaning is
constituted through relation, then juxtaposing men and machines goes
beyond bringing two pre-existing objects into harmonious relation. Rather,
the analogical relation constitutes both terms through the process of
articulating their relationship. To see this meaning-making in process,
let us turn now to a consideration of analogy in Wiener's texts and
practices.

Crossing Boundaries: Everything Is an Analogy, Including This Statement

In his autobiography I am a Mathematician, Wiener tells of retreating to
the family farm for a weekend after a row with a couple of influential
Harvard mathematicians. Coming home cold and wet, he falls ill and slips
into delirium. "All through the pneumonia," he writes, "my delirium
assumed the form of a peculiar depression and worry [about the row and] .
. .  anxiety about the logical status of my mathematical work. It was
impossible for me to distinguish among my pain and difficulty in
breathing, the flapping of the window curtain, and certain as yet
unresolved parts of the [mathematical] potential problem on which I was
working." [19] Retrospectively musing on how his pain merged with external
stimuli and mental abstraction, he arrives at a key insight about his
relation to mathematics. "I cannot say merely that the pain revealed
itself as a mathematical tension, or that the mathematical tension
symbolized itself as a pain: for the two were united too closely to make
such a separation significant" (p. 85). The realization opens up for him
"the possibility that almost any experience may act as a temporary symbol
for a mathematical situation which has not yet been organized and cleared
up" (p. 86).  Identifying an unsolved scientific problem with emotional
conflict and physical pain, he becomes "more and more conscious" that for
him mathematics serves to "reduce such a discord to semipermanent and
recognizable terms" (p. 86). Once he solves the conceptual problem, its
link with a personal conflict seems to resolve that as well, allowing him
to "release it and pass on to something else" (p. 86). Mapping mathematics
onto emotional conflicts is one way, then, that Wiener used analogy. No
doubt on more complex grounds than Jacob Bronowski intended, he
enthusiastically endorsed Bronowski's suggestion that all of mathematics
is a metaphor. Mathematics, he wrote in The Human Use of Human Beings,
"which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the
most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as
well as intellectually, in terms of the success of this metaphor" (p. 95).

His identification of personal conflicts with conceptual problems was so
strong that he perceived it "driving me to mathematics," almost as if
against his will (p. 86). The coercive imagery is significant. He was the
son of a domineering father who consciously wanted to mold him into a
prodigy. Once out from under his father's tutelage, he often found it
difficult to motivate himself. Steve Heims, in his biography of Wiener,
observes that he apparently used the identification between emotional
states and mathematical problems as a spur to goad himself onward. [20]
While working on a difficult problem he would fall into a depression,
which he would deliberately exacerbate to make himself to work harder.
Relying on analogical equivalencies he set up between mathematics and
emotion, he anticipated that solving the intellectual problem would allow
him to regain psychological homeostasis. 

The flip side of drawing analogies is constructing boundaries. Analogy as
a figure draws its force from the boundaries it leap-frogs across. Without
boundaries, the links it creates would cease to have revolutionary impact. 
For Wiener, analogy and boundary work went hand in hand. In both his
professional and private life, he saw boundaries playing important roles. 
He included in his first autobiography, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and
Youth, an account of his mother's anti-Semitism and his feeling of being
unwanted and alienated from her when he discovered as a teenager that his
father's side of the family was Jewish. [21] Perhaps because of this
formative experience, the construction of inside/outside markers
characterizes of his response to many life situations. He frequently
depicts himself in his autobiographies as an outsider, standing apart from
a privileged group whose boundaries do not include him. He made it a point
to decline scientific prizes and to resign from prestigious professional
groups in which he was offered membership if he did not agree with their
goals. 

Boundaries also played important roles in his scientific work (as they do
in electrical engineering generally). The problem that engaged him when he
fell ill and felt the flapping curtain woven into the mathematics was a
boundary problem, having to do with what happens to an electrical field
around a sharp physical discontinuity. In his later work on cybernetics,
boundary formation and analogical linking collaborate to create a
discursive field in which animals, humans and machines can be treated as
equivalent cybernetic systems. The central text displaying this interplay
is the influential cybernetic manifesto that Wiener co-authored with
Julian Bigelow and Arturo Rosenblueth, "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology."
[22] Offering an agenda for the nascent field of cybernetics, it also
created a discursive style that produced the objects of its analysis.

"Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" begins by contrasting behaviorism with
functionalism. Whereas functionalism (in the authors' definition) 
foregrounds internal structure and is relatively unconcerned with the
organism's relation to the environment, behaviorism focuses on relations
between the organism and environment and is relatively unconcerned with
internal structure. In the laboratory the behaviorist approach leads to
"black box" engineering, in which one assumes that the organism is a
"black box" whose contents are unknown. Producing equivalent behavior then
counts as producing an equivalent system. The obvious justification is
that even when little or nothing is known about internal structure,
meaningful conclusions can still be drawn about behavior. Bracketing
internal structure did more than this, however. It also produced the
assertion that because humans and machines sometimes behave similarly,
they are essentially alike. Note the slippage in this passage comparing
living organisms and machines. "The methods of study for the two groups
are at present similar. Whether they should always be the same may depend
on whether or not there are one or more qualitatively distinct, unique
characteristics present in one group and absent in the other. Such
qualitative differences have not appeared so far" (p. 22). "Appeared" is
an apt choice of verb, for the behaviorist viewpoint was constructed
precisely to elide the very real differences in internal structure that
exist between organisms and machines. The analogy is produced by how the
focus of attention is constructed. The authors make a similar move when
they perform successive cuts in the kinds of behavior they find
interesting, focusing, for example, on purposeful rather than random
behavior. This series of boundary formations, they contend, "reveals that
a uniform behavioristic analysis is applicable to both machines and living
organisms, regardless of the complexity of the behavior" (p. 22). What
tends to drop from sight is the fact that the equation between organism
and machine works because it is seen from a position formulated precisely
so it will work.

Another rhetorical move is a reinscription of two important terms, purpose
and teleology. Each is carefully defined to fit the cybernetic situation. 
Purpose implies action directed toward a goal (p. 18); teleology implies a
goal achieved through negative feedback. In terms of the offered
definitions, teleological behavior means simply "behavior controlled by
negative feedback" (p. 24). But keeping a loaded term like teleology in
play is not an innocent reinscription. It carries with it the sense of
moving toward a goal meaningful to the system that pursues it, which
implies that meaning can exist for machines. It also suggests that the
behaviorist project has a cosmological dimension appropriate to the
sweeping vistas of time and space that teleology is usually taken to
imply.

The authors reinforce these implications when they point out that
teleology had fallen into scientific disrepute because it posits a "final
cause" that exists in time after the effects it is supposed to bring
about. Their version of teleology circumvents this problem; it does not
rely on Aristotelian causality of any kind, only on purposeful action
toward a goal. They suggest that the opposite of teleology is not
deterministic causality but non-teleology, that is, random behavior that
is not goal-directed. They thus shift onto new ground the centuries-old
debate between Newtonian causality and Christian teleology. The important
tension now is not between science and God, but between purpose and
randomness.  Purpose achieved through negative feedback is the way
goal-seeking devices deal with a probabilistic universe. By implication,
the proper cosmological backdrop for the workings of teleological
mechanisms is neither the cosmos infused by divine purpose imagined by
Christians or the world of infinite predictability dreamed by LaPlace, but
a Gibbesian universe of probabilistic relations and entropic decay.
Through these reinscriptions and analogical links, cybernetics becomes
philosophy by other means.

A young philosopher, Richard Taylor, took up the gauntlet thrown down in
the cybernetic manifesto. In a critique published seven years later in the
same journal, The Philosophy of Science, he sought to show that either
"purpose" had been stretched so far it could apply to any behavior, or
else it had been used to smuggle in inferences about a machine's behavior
that properly originated within a human observer. [23] He intended to
demonstrate that the rhetoric of "black box" engineering had covertly
opened the boxes and put into them qualities produced by the very analysis
that treated them as unopened black boxes.

In their rebuttal, Wiener and Rosenblueth make clear that they are
appealing to a discourse community of scientists that they deem superior
to philosophers. [24] They constitute this community by distinguishing
between verbal analysis, which they call "trivial and barren" (p. 318),
and their analysis, which is motivated by "scientific" concerns. The
implicit contrast between verbal ambiguities that might interest a
philosopher and the weighty concerns of "science" is underscored by the
contrast they draw between Taylor's "beliefs," and their repeated use of
"science" and "scientific" to describe their project (eleven times in a
short article).  Taylor had used several examples to illustrate that
"purpose," as they defined it, could be applied to non-teleological
mechanisms (a clock that breaks down at midnight on New Year's Eve, a
submarine that follows a boat to which it is attached by a cable). In
riposte, Wiener and Rosenblueth contend that these examples are easily
distinguished from true servomechanisms using negative feedback. To make
the point, however, they are necessarily led into a discussion of the
internal structures of the mechanisms--exactly the position they did not
want to take in their original article arguing for a behaviorist approach.
Their rebuttal is effective, then, only to the extent that it complements
a strict behaviorist approach with an analysis that, contra behaviorist
principles, uses differences in internal structures to sort behaviors into
different categories.

This alternating focus on behavior and internal structure is similar to
the rhetorical strategies Geof Bowker analyzes in his article showing how
cybernetics constituted itself as a universal science. [25] Bowker points
out that cybernetics positioned itself both as a meta-science and as a
tool that any other science could use. It offered a transdisciplinary
vocabulary that could be adapted for a variety of disciplinary purposes,
presenting itself in this guise as content-free, and simultaneously
offered a content-rich practice in which cybernetic mechanisms were
analyzed, modeled, and occasionally built. Operating at these two
different levels, cybernetic discourse was able to penetrate into other
disciplines while also maintaining its turf as a disciplinary paradigm.
The alternation in Wiener and Rosenblueth's rebuttal between a
structure-free and a structure-rich cybernetics produces a similar
rhetorical effect. In its structure-free guise, cybernetics links men and
machines by eliding internal structure; in its structure-rich form, it
presents information flow and negative feedback as important structural
elements. It is no accident that Warren McCulloch used a similar
rhetorical strategy in his argument with Hans Teuber, discussed in Chapter
3. Just as the alternation between content-free and content-rich
cybernetics allows a deeper penetration into disciplinary sites than would
otherwise be possible, so the alternation between behavior and structure
allowed the discourse simultaneously to assimilate biological organisms
and machines into the same category and to distinguish them from plain
vanilla mechanical systems.

In his rejoinder, Taylor missed the opportunity to point out that the
focus of Wiener and Rosenblueth's analysis alternated between behavior and
structure. [26] Instead he chose to pursue a line of questioning similar
to his original article, again trying to show that if one relies only on
external observations of behavior, "purpose" cannot be reliably
distinguished from chance or random events. In contesting for what counts
as "purpose," he wanted to deny to the behaviorist approach a distinction
crucial to generating their system (the difference between purposeful and
random behavior). He sensed that "behavior" had been defined so as to
allow intention and desire to be imputed to machines. But he let slip by
the larger point that behaviorist assumptions were used selectively to
accomplish a political agenda implicit in the way categories were
constructed. For Wiener, this agenda included constituting one category
that encompassed cybernetic machines and humans, which were put together
because they shared the ability to use probabilistic methods to control
randomness, and another category for non-cybernetic mechanical systems. 
These boundary markers implied larger assumptions about the nature of the
universe (probabilistic rather than deterministic), effective strategies
for dealing with this universe (controlling randomness through negative
feedback), and a hierarchy of systems that had moral connotations as well
as practical values (flexible systems using negative feedback were better
than mechanical devices which did not use feedback). More than the
definition of "purpose," it was these larger inscriptions that made
"Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" the founding document for cybernetics.

One of the most frequent criticism made of cybernetics during this period
was that it was not really a new science, merely an extended analogy (men
are like machines). Wiener heard the charge often enough so that he
finally felt it was time to take the cybernetic bull by the horns. In a
manuscript fragment in the MIT archives entitled "The Nature of Analogy,"
dated 1950, he offers a strong defense for analogy that moves the argument
onto new and more compelling ground. [27] Its brevity notwithstanding,
"The Nature of Analogy" is a wide-ranging meditation on what analogy means
in science, mathematics, language, and perception. It argues that those
who object to Wiener's analogical moves do so because they hold realist
assumptions which do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Cybernetics as
Wiener envisioned it is about relation, not essence. The analogical
relations it constructs are therefore not merely rhetorical figures, but
systems that generate the only kind of significance available to us as
perceiving, finite beings with no access to unmediated reality.

He begins by pointing out that language is always analogical, in the sense
that it puts forth propositions the listener must interpret from her
experience, which is never identical with the speaker's. The observation
anticipates Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse's argument that signification
occurs through category constitution, not through the communication of an
Aristotelian essence. [28] Like them, Wiener also denies that language
communicates an Aristotelian essence. The convergence points to
similarities between his definition of information and Saussure's view of
la langue, or language as a system. In both cases, communication proceeds
through selection from a field of possible alternatives rather than direct
articulation of inherent reference. Just as Saussurian linguistics is
associated with deconstructive theories that reveal the indeterminacy of
reference and expose language's inability to ground itself, so Wiener's
cybernetics sees communication as a probabilistic act in a probabilistic
universe, where initial conditions are never known exactly and messages
signify only through their relation to other messages that might that been
sent. For Wiener no less than Saussure, signification is about relation,
not about the world as a thing-in-itself. [29]

It is in this context that pattern, associated as we saw in Chapter 2 with
information, assumes paramount importance. Wiener's view of sense
perception makes the point clear. Perception does not reflect reality
directly but rather relies on transformations that preserve a pattern
across multiple sensory modalities and neural interfaces. Representation
emerges through the analogical relation of these transformations to the
original stimulus. In this respect sense perception is like mathematics
and logic, for they too "deal preeminently with pattern apart from
content"  (“Analogy,” p. 2). The behaviorist approach is well suited to
this relational epistemology because it concentrates on transmission of
patterns rather than communication of essence. Consider the anti-aircraft
predictor that Wiener developed in collaboration with Julian Bigelow
during World War II. [30] The prognosticator received tracking data as
input (for example, radar following a plane) and gave as output
predictions of where the plane would go. Statistical analysis was used to
find patterns in these data, and the data themselves were understood as
patterns analogically related to events in the world. Thus perception,
mathematics, and information all concentrate on pattern rather than
content. As data moves across various kinds of interfaces, analogical
relationships are the links that allow pattern to be preserved from one
modality to another. Analogy is thus constituted as a universal exchange
system that allows data to move across boundaries. It is the lingua franca
of a world (re)constructed through relation rather than grasped in
essence.

Border crossings accomplished through analogy include the separation
between flesh and world (sense perception), the transition between one
discipline and another (for example, moving from the physiology of living
organisms to the electrical engineering of a cybernetic machine), and the
transformation of embodied experience, noisy with error, into the clean
abstractions of mathematical pattern. Even the prostheses Wiener designed
can be understood as operating through analogy, for they transformed
information from one modality into another. [31] The "hearing glove," for
example, was an apparatus that converted sounds (auditory signals) into
touch (tactile signals) by stimulating a deaf person's fingers with
electromagnetic vibrators that were analogical transformations of sound
frequencies. For Wiener, analogy was communication, and communication was
analogy. Objecting that cybernetics is "merely an analogy" was for him
akin to saying it is "merely about how we know the world." 

The problem with this approach lies not so much in the analogical
relations Wiener constructed between living and mechanical systems, as in
his tendency to erase from view the very real differences in embodied
materiality that the analogies did not express. Confronted with two
situations, he was much more inclined to move easily and quickly to an
abstract level where similarities in patterns became evident than to
remain attentive to the particularities that made each situation unique.
No doubt his own lack of involvement in the nitty-gritty work of the lab
was a contributing factor in this elision of embodied materiality. In his
autobiography, he wrote about the impatience he felt with the exacting
procedures of the biological laboratory. "This impatience was largely the
result of my mental quickness and physical slowness. I could see the end
to be accomplished long before I could labor through the manipulative
stages that were to bring me there." [32] The problem was serious enough
to force him to give up his hope of earning a Ph.D. in biology. In his
later professional collaborations with Rosenblueth and others, he left the
lab work to them. Colleagues recall how he would wander into Rosenblueth's
laboratory when an experiment was underway, make a few notes and ask a few
questions, and retreat to his office to work out the mathematical
analogies expressing the physical situation. When Wiener and his
collaborators wrote such phrases as "We cut the attachment of the muscle,"
the plural was purely honorary, as Masani points out in his excellent
biography. [33] Other colleagues, particularly Walter Rosenblith and
Jerome Wiesner, suggested in a posthumous tribute to Wiener that his
ineptitude in the lab made him less attentive than they would have wished
to the particularities of actual neurophysiological structures. "In areas
in which Wiener's intuition was less educated than in engineering, he was
often impatient with experimental details; for example, he seemed
sometimes unwilling to learn that the brain did not behave the way he
expected it to.” [34] For Wiener, the emphasis on analogy went hand in
hand with a certain estrangement from the flesh. In this respect, the
contrast between him and McCulloch is clear. As a dedicated
experimentalist, McCulloch was sensitive in a way that Wiener was not to
the tension between the plenitude of embodiment and the sparseness of
abstraction.

As we have seen, Wiener wanted to inscribe cybernetics into a larger drama
that would reinforce the liberal humanistic subject. Given his inclination
toward a Gibbesian universe, that drama focused on probability. In
addition to operating on the microscale of subatomic particles and the
macroscale of cybernetic circuits, probability also operates on the
cosmological level of universal dissipation and decay. Linking probability
with information allowed Wiener to script the cybernetic subject into a
cosmological drama of chaos and order. It is here, on this cosmological
level, that he stages the moral distinctions between good cybernetic
systems which reinforce the autonomous liberal subject, and evil machines
which undermine or destroy the autonomy of the subject. An important
player in this titanic struggle between good and evil machines is entropy,
a protean concept with a richly complex history. Let us turn now to
consider this key actor. 

Entropy as Cultural Relay: From Heat Engines to Information

We can begin our investigation into entropy with the series of
transformations that Mark Seltzer traces in Bodies and Machines. [35]
Seltzer, concentrating on the social formations of late nineteenth-century
naturalism, finds at the heart of naturalism a double and seemingly
contradictory thrust: on the one hand "the insistence on the materiality
or physicality of persons, representations, and actions"; on the other
hand, "the insistent abstraction of persons, bodies, and motions to
models, numbers, maps, charts, and diagrammatic representations" (p. 14).
Calling the ideology that resulted from this double thrust a
"dematerialized materialism" (p. 14), Seltzer instances such phenomena as
the emergence of statistical representations for human behavior and a
renewed interest in the ergonomics of the human body. One focuses on
behavior abstracted into statistical ensembles of data, the other on the
material processes of energy consumption and dissipation. They illustrate
the construction of bodies both as material objects and as probability
distributions.

The duality Seltzer locates in late nineteenth-century culture continued
into the twentieth century with renewed force when statistical
thermodynamics merged with information theory. One of the principal sites
for this merger was cybernetics. The emphasis on pattern constructed
bodies as immaterial flows of information; the alternating emphasis on
structure recognized that these "black boxes" were heavy with materiality.
Complex couplings between the two registers worked to set up a series of
exchanges between biological organisms and machines. To see how these
couplings evolved, let us start with the exchanges that thermodynamics set
up and follow them forward into cybernetics.

The first law of thermodynamics, stating that energy is neither created or
destroyed, points to a world in which no energy is lost. The second law,
stating that entropy always tends to increase in a closed system,
forecasts a universe that is constantly winding down. This tension between
the first and second laws, stability and degradation, runs like a
leitmotif through turn-of-the-century cultural formations. According to
Seltzer the tension itself acts like a thermodynamic exchanger, allowing
incompatible terms such as production and reproduction, machines and
bodies, to be articulated together. The body is like a heat engine because
it cycles energy into different forms and degrades it in the process; the
body is not like a heat engine because it can use energy to repair itself
and to reproduce. In one sense the comparison constructs the difference
between body and machine; in another sense it acts as an exchanger that
allows bodies and heat engines to be linked together. Through such
comparisons, Seltzer argues, "what is gradually elaborated is a more or
less efficient, more or less effective system of transformations and
relays between 'opposed' and contradictory registers" (p. 41). These
ambiguous linkages were reinforced because thermodynamics itself was
perceived as operating in the two different registers of conservation and
dissipation. Thus he concludes that thermodynamics, wrapping both
conservative stability and dissipative decay within the mantle of
scientific authority, "provided a working model of a new mechanics and
biomechanics of power" (p. 41). 

Already functioning as an exchange system within the culture,
thermodynamics evolved into "dematerialized materialism" when Boltzmann
gave entropy a much more general formulation by defining it as a
probability function. In this "dematerialized" construction, entropy was
interpreted as a measure of randomness. The second law was then
re-formulated to state that closed systems tend to move from order to
randomness. Encompassing entropy's earlier definition, Boltzmann's
formulation also added something new, for it allowed entropy to be linked
with systems that had nothing to do with heat engines.

This dematerialization was carried further when entropy was connected with
information. As early as 1929, the connection was made through Leo
Szilard's interpretation of Maxwell's Demon, [36] a mythical being in a
thought experiment proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1871. The demon
gained energy by sorting molecules. Szilard and Leon Brillouin, among
others, pointed out that to sort molecules, the demon has to have
information about them. [37] The container in which the demon sits is
imagined as a “black body” (a technical term meaning that the radiation is
uniformly dispersed), so there is no way for the demon to "see" the
molecules. Brillouin calculated that the energy the demon would have to
expend to get information about the molecules is greater than what he
could gain by the sorting process. The immediate result was to rescue the
second law, which in any case was too well-established to be seriously in
doubt.  The more important implication was to suggest that entropy and
information are inversely related to each other. The more information, the
less entropy; the more entropy, the less information. Brillouin therefore
proposed that information be considered as negative entropy, or
negentropy.  Maxwell's Demon was one of the relay points through which a
relationship was established between entropy and information.

Like Brillouin and many others of his generation, Wiener accepted the idea
that entropy was the opposite of information. The inverse relation made
sense to him because he thought of information as allied with structure,
and entropy with randomness, dissipation, and death. "As entropy
increases," he wrote, "the universe, and all closed systems in the
universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to
move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of
organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to
a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs' universe order is least probable,
chaos most probable" (p. 12). In this view, life is an island of
negentropy amidst a sea of disorder. "There are local enclaves whose
direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which
there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase.
Life finds its home in some of these enclaves" (p. 12). In a related
metaphor, he envisioned a living organism as an informational system
swimming upstream against the entropic tide. 

This view of entropy makes sense when viewed in the context of
nineteenth-century thermodynamics. But it is not a necessary implication
of information as it is technically defined. Claude Shannon took the
opposite view and identified information and entropy rather than opposed
them. [38] Since the choice of sign was conventional, this formulation was
also a possibility. Heuristically, Shannon's choice was explained by
saying that the more unexpected (or random) a message is, the more
information it conveys. [39] This change in sign did not affect the
dematerialization entropy had undergone, but it did reverse its value in
more than a mathematical sense. In retrospect, identifying entropy with
information can be seen as a crucial crossing point, for it allowed
entropy to be re-conceptualized as the thermodynamic motor driving systems
to self-organization rather than the heat engine driving the world to
universal heat death. Space will not permit me to tell the story of this
reversal here, and in any event, it has been chronicled elsewhere. [40]
Suffice it to say that as a result, chaos went from being associated with
dissipation in the Victorian sense of dissolute living and reckless waste
to a newly positive sense that associated dissipation with increasing
complexity and new life.

Wiener came close to making this crossing. In one of his astonishing
analogical leaps, he saw a connection between the "light" the Demon needs
to sort the molecules and the lights plants use in photosynthesis. He
argued that in photosynthesis, plants act as if their leaves were studded
with Maxwell's Demons, all sorting molecules to allow the plant to run
uphill toward increasing complexity rather than downhill towards death. 
[41] But he did not go beyond this isolated insight to the larger
realization that large entropy production could drive systems to
increasing complexity. Finally he remains on the negative side of this
divide, seeing life and homeostasis as contrarian islands that, although
they may hold out for a while, must eventually be swamped by the entropic
tide.

So firmly rooted is Wiener in this perspective that he comes close on
several occasions to saying that entropic decay is evil. Entropy becomes
morally negative for Wiener when he sees it operating against the
differential probability distributions on which the transfer of
information depends. Recall that Gregory Bateson defined information as a
difference that makes a difference; if there is no difference, there is no
information. Since entropy tends always to increase, it will eventually
result in a universe where all distributions are in their most probable
state and universal homogeneity prevails. Imagine Dr. Zhivago sitting at
his desk in a cold, cold room, trying to telegraph a message to his
beloved Laura, while in the background Laura's theme plays and entropy
keeps relentlessly increasing. Icicles hanging from his fingers and the
telegraph key, he tries to tap out "I love you," but he is having trouble.
Not only is he freezing from heat death; he is also stymied by information
death. No matter what he taps, the messages always come out the same:
eeeeeee (or whatever letter is most common in the Russian alphabet). This
whimsical scenario illustrates why Wiener associated entropy with
oppression, rigidity, and death. Communication can be seen, he suggested,
as a game that two men (or machines) play against noise. [42] To be rigid
is inevitably to lose the game, for it consigns the players to the
mechanical repetition of messages that can only erode over time as noise
intervenes.  Only if creative play is allowed, if the mechanism can adapt
freely to changing messages, can homeostasis be maintained, even
temporarily, in the face of constant entropic pressure toward degradation.

In the "dematerialized materialism" of the battlefield where life
struggles against entropy and noise, the body ceases to be regarded
primarily as a material object and instead is seen as an informational
pattern. The struggle, then, is between strategists who try to preserve
this pattern intact, and noisy opponents (or rather, noise as an opponent)
who try to disrupt it. Wiener was one of the important voices during the
1940s and 1950s who cast the cosmological drama between cybernetic
mechanisms and noise in these terms. In The Human Use of Human Beings, he
suggests that human beings are not so much bone and blood, nerve and
synapse, as they are patterns of organization. He points out that over the
course of a lifetime the cells comprising a human being change many times
over. Identity cannot therefore consist in physical continuity. "Our
tissues change as we live:  the food we eat and the air we breathe become
flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our
flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but
whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate themselves" (p. 96). Consequently, to
understand humans it is necessary to understand how the patterns of
information they embody are created, organized, stored, and retrieved.
Once these mechanisms are understood, they can be used to create
cybernetic machines. If memory in humans is the transfer of informational
patterns from the environment to the brain, machines can be built that
will effect the same kind of transfer. Even emotions may be achievable for
machines, if feelings are considered not as "merely a useless
epiphenomenon of nervous actions" (p.  72) but as control mechanisms
governing learning. [43] Considered as informational patterns, cybernetic
machines and men can make common cause against the disruptive forces of
noise and entropy.

The picture that emerges from these conjectures shows the cybernetic
organism--human or mechanical--responding flexibly to changing situations,
learning from the past, freely adapting its behavior to meet new
circumstances, and succeeding in preserving homeostatic stability in the
midst of even radically altered environments. Nimbleness is an essential
weapon in this struggle, for to repeat mindlessly and mechanically is
inevitably to let noise win. Noise has the best chance against rote
repetition, where it goes to work at once to introduce randomness. But a
system that already behaves unpredictably cannot be so easily subverted.
If a Gibbesian universe implies eventual information death, it also
implies a universe where the best shot for success lies in flexible and
probabilistic behavior. The Greek root for cybernetics, 'steersman,' aptly
describes the cybernetic man/machine: light on his feet, sensitive to
change, himself a flow and knowing how to go with the flow.

Reinforcing the boundary work that assimilates the liberal humanistic
subject and cybernetic machine into the same privileged space are the
distinctions Wiener makes between good and bad machines. When machines are
evil in The Human Use of Human Beings, it is usually because they have
become rigid and inflexible. Whereas the cybernetic machine is ranged
alongside man as his brother and peer, metaphors that cluster around the
rigid machine depict it through tropes of domination and engulfment. The
ultimate horror is for the rigid machine to absorb the human being into
itself, co-opting the flexibility that is the human birthright. "When
human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in
their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and
rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What
is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine"
(p. 185).  Here the analogical mapping between man and machine turns
sinister, trapping man within inflexible walls that rob him of his
autonomy. The passage shows how important it is to Wiener to construct the
boundaries of the cybernetic machine so that it reinforces rather than
threatens the autonomous self. When the boundaries turn rigid or engulf
humans so they lose their agency, the machine ceases to be cybernetic and
becomes simply and oppressively mechanical.

The cosmological stage upon which the struggle between oppressive machines
and cybernetic systems unfolds is--no surprise--the Gibbesian universe
where probability reigns supreme. "The great weakness of the machine--the
weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it--is that it
cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that
characterizes the human situation" (p.181). Here the probability
differentials that make communication possible are assimilated to humans
and good machines, leaving bad machines to flounder around in
probabilities too diverse for them to assess. The rules of the contest are
laid down by the second law of thermodynamics, which allows a margin in
which cybernetic men/machines can operate because it is still cranking up
its death engine. "The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in
the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and
where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately
we have not yet reached such a state" (p.  181). When in the end the
universe ceases to manifest diverse probabilities and becomes a uniform
soup, control, communication, cybernetics--not to mention life--will
expire. In the meantime, men and cybernetic machines stand shoulder to
shoulder in building dikes that temporarily stave off the entropic tide. 

The boundary work that links cybernetic machines and humans perhaps
reaches its most complex articulation in the distinction Wiener makes
between Augustinian and Manichean opponents. At issue in this distinction
is the difference between an opponent who plays "honorably," that is, by
abiding rules that do not change, and one who tries to win by manipulating
and psyching out his opponent. The exemplar of an Augustinian opponent for
Wiener is nature. Nature--including noise--may sometimes frustrate the
scientist's attempt to control it, but it does not consciously try to
manipulate its opponent. The exemplar of the Manichean opponent is the
chess-player, including chess-playing machines. Unlike nature, the
chess-player acts deviously and, if possible, manipulatively. When the
chess player is contrasted with the scientist, it is almost always to the
chess player's detriment. In pointing out that nature does not try to
outwit the scientist, Wiener observes that having an Augustinian opponent
means the scientist has time to reflect and correct his strategy, because
no one is trying to take advantage of his mistakes. Whereas the scientist
is thus governed by his best moments, the chess player is governed by his
worst (p. 36).

Peter Galison, in "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the
Cybernetic Vision," argues that cybernetics (along with game theory and
operations research) should be called a "Manichean science.” [44] In a
fine-grained analysis of Wiener's collaboration with Julian Bigelow to
develop an anti-aircraft (AA) weapon during World War II, Galison
brilliantly shows that Wiener did not construct the enemy as a sub-human
rapacious predator, as was so often the case in war propaganda. Rather, he
constructed the enemy--for example, a fighter pilot trying to evade AA
fire--as a probabilistic system that could effectively be countered using
cybernetic modeling. Unlike other fire systems that had fixed rules
derived from probabilistic modeling, Wiener imagined a firing machine that
could evolve new rules based on prior observation--imagined, that is, a
machine that could learn. Thus the firing system would evolve to become as
Manichean as the enemy it faced. Galison argues that this strategy enabled
a series of substitutions and identifications to take place that mapped
the enemy pilot onto the servo-controller and ultimately onto the allied
war personnel behind the servo-controller. In a "Summary Report for
Demonstration," Wiener and Bigelow wrote, "We realized that the
'randomness' or irregularity of an airplane's path is introduced by the
pilot; that in attempting to force his dynamic craft to execute a useful
manoeuvere . . . the pilot behaves like a servo-mechanism “ (quoted in
Galison, p. 236). Thus cybernetics, itself constituted through analogies,
creates further analogies through theories and artifacts that splice man
to machine, German to American. Through this relay system, the enemy
becomes like us and we like him: enemy mine. If these analogical mappings
relay kept the enemy pilot being demonized, they also made the cybernetic
machine (and by extension, cybernetics itself) party to a bloody struggle
in which Manichean tactics were used by both sides to kill as many humans
as possible.

It was partly in reaction against this cooptation of cybernetics by the
military that Wiener, half a decade after the war, wrote the significantly
entitled The Human Use of Human Beings. [45] Although Wiener had done
everything in his power during the war to further cybernetics as a
“Manichean science,” his writings, especially after the war, show a deep
aversion to the manipulation that a Manichean opponent implies. From his
autobiographies, it is clear that he was hyper-sensitive to being
manipulated, perhaps with good reason. When he was first beginning to
establish himself as a mathematician, his father tried to get him to use
his contacts to advance the father's philological ideas--an instance of
manipulation that made Wiener increasingly wary of how others might try to
use his talents and influence to further their own ends. It is no accident
that he associates the manipulative chess-playing machine with the
military projects that he turned resolutely away from after atomic bombs
vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Remarking on Claude
Shannon's suggestion that chess-playing machines have military potential,
he writes, "When Mr. Shannon speaks of the development of military
tactics, he is not talking moonshine, but is discussing a most imminent
and dangerous contingency" (Human Use, p. 178). The problem, of course,
was that cybernetics adapted all too readily to Manichean tactics, making
it possible to play these deadly games even more effectively.

Wiener's war work, combined with his anti-military stance after the war,
illustrate with startling clarity how cybernetics functioned both as a
source of intense pride and intense anxiety for him. This tension, often
expressed as an anxious desire to limit the scope of cybernetics, takes a
different but related form when he considers the question of body
boundaries, always a highly charged issue. When the physical boundaries of
the human form are secure, he celebrates the flow of information through
the organism. All this changes, however, when the boundaries cease to
define an autonomous self, either through manipulation or engulfment. In
the next section, we will see how this anxiety erupts into the 1948
Cybernetics at critical points, causing him to withdraw from the more
subversive implications of the discipline he fathered. It is no accident
that erotic metaphors are used to carry the argument's thrust. Like
cybernetics, eroticism is intensely concerned with the problematics of
body boundaries. It is not for nothing that sexual orgasm is called "the
little death" or that writers from Marquis de Sade to J. G. Ballard have
obsessively associated eroticism with penetrating and opening the body. At
stake in the erotically charged discourse where Wiener considers the
pleasures and dangers of coupling between parts that are not supposed to
touch is how extensively the body of the subject may be penetrated or even
dissolved by cybernetics as a body of knowledge. It is here, as much as
anywhere, that Wiener's concern to preserve the liberal subject comes into
uneasy tension with his equally strong desire to advance the cause of
cybernetics. That resolution can be achieved only by withdrawal points
toward a future in which the cybernetic subject could finally not be
contained within the assumptions of liberal humanism. 

The Argument for Celibacy: Preserving the Boundaries of the Subject

In Cybernetics , the technical text from which The Human Use of Human
Beings was adapted, Wiener looks into the mirror of the cyborg but then
withdraws. [46] The scenarios he constructs to enact and justify this
withdrawal point suggestively to the role that erotic anxiety plays in
cybernetic narratives. In my analysis I will focus on the chapter entitled
"Information, Language, and Society." Here Wiener entertains the
possibility that cybernetics has provided a way of thinking so fertile
that it will allow the social and natural sciences to be synthesized into
one great field of inquiry. Yet he finally demurs from this palpable
object of desire. Given that he is as imperialistic as most scientists who
think they have invented a new paradigm, why does he prefer to maintain
the intellectual celibacy of his discovery? I will argue that central to
his decision is a fantasy scene that expresses and controls anxiety by
reconstituting boundaries. This fantasy gives rise to a series of encoded
metaphors that appear whenever anxiety becomes acute. The metaphors also
have literal meanings that reveal how intermingled the physical remains
with the conceptual, the erotic with the cybernetic. As gestures of
separation disconcertingly transform into couplings, the cybernetics of
the subject and the subject of cybernetics interpenetrate.

Wiener works up to the fantasy by pointing out that there are many
organizations whose parts are themselves small organizations. Hobbes's
Leviathan is a Man-State made up of men; a Portuguese man-of-war is made
up of polyps that mirror it in miniature; a man is an organism made of
cells that in some respects also function like organisms. This line of
thought leads him to ask how these "bodies politic" function. "Obviously,
the secret is in the intercommunication of its members" (p. 156). The flow
of information is thus introduced as a principle explaining how
organization occurs across multiple hierarchical levels. To illustrate, he
instances the "sexually attractive substances" that various species
secrete to insure that the sexes will be brought together (p. 156). For
example, the pheromones that guide insect reproduction are general and
omnidirectional, acting in this respect like hormones secreted within the
body. The analogy suggests that external hormones organize internal
hormones, so that a human organism becomes, in effect, a sort of permeable
membrane through which hormonal information flows. At this point we
encounter his first demurral.  "I do not care to pronounce an opinion on
this matter," he announces rather pretentiously after introducing it,
preferring to "leave it as an interesting idea" (p. 157).

I think that the idea is left because it is disturbing as well as
speculative. It implies that personal identity and autonomous will are
merely illusions that mask the cybernetic reality. If our body surfaces
are membranes through which information flows, who are we? Are we the
cells that respond to the stimuli? The larger collective whose actions are
the resultant of individual members? Or the host organism who, as Richard
Dawkins was later to claim using cybernetic arguments, engages in sex
because it is controlled by selfish genes within? [47] The choice of
examples foregrounds sexuality, but this is a kind of sex without
sexuality. Implying the deconstruction of the autonomous self as a locus
of erotic pleasure, it circumvents the assenting, demurring, intensifying,
delaying, and consummating that constitute sexual play. Confronted with
this sexless sex, Wiener's first impulse is to withdraw: coitus
interruptus. 

His second impulse is to reconstruct himself as a liberal subject through
a disguised erotic fantasy that allows him to control the flow of
information, rather than be controlled by it. Similar fantasies appear
everywhere in American literature, from Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook to
Ishmael and Queequeg. They are ubiquitous because they are about the
American values of masculine autonomy and control, about deferred intimacy
between men in a society that is homophobic, racist, and misogynist. What
is this fantasy? What else but for the American male to imagine himself
alone in the woods with an "intelligent savage," giving himself over to
the pursuits men follow when they are alone together (p. 157).

The fantasy's ostensible purpose is to show that Wiener and his savage
companion could achieve intimacy, even if they did not touch and shared no
language. Wiener imagines himself "alert to those moments when [the
savage] shows the signs of emotion or interest," noticing at these moments
what he watches (p. 157). After a time, the savage would learn to
reciprocate by "pick[ing] out the moments of my special, active
attention," thus creating between them "a language as varied in
possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to
encompass" (p. 157). Alone together in the woods, the two men construct a
world of objects through the interplay of their gazes. In the process they
also reconstitute themselves as autonomous subjects who achieve intimacy
through their voyeuristic participation in each other's emotion and
"special, active attention."  There remains of course a necessary
difference between them. Wiener can move from this fantasy to the rest of
his argument, whereas the "intelligent savage" reappears in his discourse
only when he finds it convenient to invoke him. The passage reveals in
miniature how the use of the plural by the liberal humanist subject can
appropriate the voices of subaltern others, who if they could speak for
themselves, might say something very different. 

Having reassured himself of intimacy, autonomy and control, Wiener returns
to the problem of the "body politic," concentrating on its alarming lack
of homeostasis. In contrast to the regulated, orderly exchanges between
him and his savage friend, the body politic is dominated by exchanges
between knaves and fools, with "betrayal, turncoatism, and deception" the
order of the day (p. 59). The economy of this society is clear-cut: the
fools desire, the knaves manipulate their desires. The economy is
reinforced by statisticians, sociologists, and economists who prostitute
themselves by figuring out for the knaves exactly how the calculus of
desire can be maximized. The only respite from this relentless
manipulation are small, autonomous populations. There homeostasis can
still work, whether in "highly literate communities. . . or villages of
primitive savages" (p.  160). The reappearance of the savage here is
significant, for it occurs just when anxiety about having desire
manipulated reaches its height. No doubt it has a soothing effect on
Wiener's imagination, for it reminds him that after all he need not be
manipulated.

We come now to the crux of the argument. The danger of cybernetics, from
his point of view, is that it can potentially annihilate the liberal
subject as the locus of control. On the microscale, the individual is
merely the container for still smaller units within, who dictate its
actions and desires; on the macroscale, these desires make one into a fool
to be manipulated by knaves. Under a cybernetic paradigm, these two scales
of organization would be joined to each other. What chance then for
intimate communication alone with an intelligent savage in the woods? No,
despite the "hopes which some of my friends have built for the social
efficacy of whatever new ways of thinking this book may contain," he finds
himself unable to attribute "too much value to this type of wishful
thinking" (p. 162). Ironically, expanded too far across the bodies of
disciplines, the science of control might rob its progenitor of the very
control that was no doubt for him one of its most attractive features.

Having reached this conclusion, he reenacts the anxiety that gave rise to
it through a series of interactive metaphors that connect his fantasy with
his anxiety. He claims that it is a "misunderstanding of the nature of all
scientific achievement" to suppose that "the physical and social sciences
can be joined" (p. 162). They must be kept apart, for they permit
different degrees of coupling between the scientist and the object of his
interest.  The precise sciences "achieve a sufficiently loose coupling
with the phenomena we are studying [to allow us] to give a massive total
account of this coupling" (p. 163). Erotic interest is not altogether
lacking, for "the coupling may not be loose enough for us to be able to
ignore it altogether" (p. 163). Nevertheless, the restrained science he
practices is of a different order than the social sciences, where the
coupling is much tighter and more intense. The contrast shows how central
the concept of the autonomous self is to cybernetics as Wiener envisioned
it. 

The savage makes one last appearance in Wiener's anxious consideration of
how tightly the scientist can be coupled with his object without losing
his objectivity. To illustrate the dangers of tight coupling, he observes
that primitive societies are very often changed by the anthropologists who
observe them. He makes the point specifically in terms of language, noting
that "Many a missionary has fixed his own misunderstandings of a primitive
language as law eternal in the process of reducing it to writing" (p. 63). 
In implicit contrast to this violation is the pristine intimacy he
achieved with his savage, where no misunderstandings disrupted the perfect
sympathy of their gazes.

Concluding that "We are too much in tune with the objects of our
investigations to be good probes," he counsels that cybernetics had best
be left to the physical sciences, for to carry it into the human sciences
would only build "exaggerated expectations" (p. 164). Behind this
conclusion is the prospect of an interpenetration so complete that it
would link the little units within to the larger social units without,
thereby reducing the individual to a connective membrane with no control
over his desires and no ability to derive pleasure from them. Not only
sex, but the sex organs themselves, disappear in this construction. Thus
he decides that, however tempting the prospect of penetrating the
boundaries of other disciplines might be, cybernetics is better off
remaining celibate. 

The conjunction of erotic anxiety and intellectual speculation in Wiener's
text implies that cybernetics cannot be adequately understood simply as a
theoretic and technological extension of information theory. The analogies
so important to his thought are constituted not only through similarities
between abstract forms (such as probability ratios and statistical
analysis), but also through the complex life world of embedded physicality
that natural language expresses and evokes through its metaphoric
resonances. Natural language is not extraneous to understanding the full
complexities of Wiener's thinking, as his mathematical biographer Pesi
Masani implies when he contrasts the disembodied abstractions of
mathematics with the "long-winded verbosity [of natural language], the
hallmark of bureaucratic chicanery and fake labor" (p. 21). On the
contrary, the embodied metaphors of language are crucial to understanding
the ways in which Wiener's construction of the cybernetic body and the
body of cybernetics both privilege and imperil the autonomous humanistic
subject.

Viewed in historical perspective, Wiener was not successful in containing
cybernetics within the circle of liberal humanistic assumptions. Only for
a relatively brief period in the late 1940s and 1950s could the dynamic
tension between cybernetics and the liberal subject be maintained, uneasy
and anxious as that accommodation often was for Wiener. By the 1960s, the
link between liberal humanism and self-regulation that had been forged in
the eighteenth century was already stretched thin; by the 1980s, it was
largely broken. It is to Wiener's credit that he tried to craft a version
of cybernetics that would enhance rather than subvert human freedom. But
no person, even the father of a discipline, can control single-handedly
what it signifies when it propagates through the culture by all manner of
promiscuous couplings. Even as cybernetics lost the momentum of its drive
to be a universal science, its enabling premises were mutating and
reproducing at other sites. The voices that speak the cyborg do not speak
as one, and the stories they tell are very different narratives than those
Wiener struggled to authorize.

Endnotes 


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----

Footnotes
[1] 

[2]Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1972). 

[3]Donna Haraway, "Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and
Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. 

[4]George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind:
The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987). 

[5]For an analysis of the strategies used to proclaim cybernetics a
universal science, see Geof Bowker, "How To Be Universal: Some Cybernetic
Strategies, 1943-1970," Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 107-27. 

[6]Norbert Wiener, "Men, Machines, and the World About," box 13, folder
750, Norbert Wiener Papers, Collection MC-22, Institute Archives and
Special Collections, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives,
Cambridge MA. Hereafter called NWP. Also published in Norbert Wiener:
Collected Works with Commentaries, edited by Pesi Masani, vol. IV
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 793-799. 

[7]For a study tracing Wiener's post-war views, see Steve J. Heims, John
von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of
Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980). 

[8]Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 

[9]The question is posed most powerfully in Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner
(originally published under the title Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1982; orig. pub. date 1968). 

[10]It remained for a novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, to envision the fully
implications of Wiener's cybernetic program if it were fully carried out in
Player Piano (New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Laurence, 1952). 

[11]See for example Norbert Wiener, "The Averages of an Analytical Function
and the Brownian Movement," Coll. Works I, pp. 450-455. 

[12]Norbert Wiener, "The Historical Background of Harmonic Analysis,"
American Mathematical Society Semicentennial Publications Vol. II,
"Semicentennial Addresses," American Mathematical Society, (Providence,
R.I.: 1938), pp. 513-522. 

[13]Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Anchor Books,
1954. org. pub., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 10. 

[14]Wiener of course knew Shannon; both were participants in the Macy
conferences. Although they conceived of information in similar ways, Wiener
was more inclined to see information and entropy as opposites. 

[15]James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic
Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1986). 

[16]Michel Serres brilliantly analyzes the progression from the mechanical
to the thermodynamical in "Turner Translates Carnot," Hermes: Literature,
Science, Philosophy, edited by Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 

[17]Beniger convincingly shows how technologies of speed and communication
precipitated a "crisis of control" that, once solved, initiated a new cycle
of crisis (1986). 

[18]Norbert Wiener, “The Role of the Observer,” Philosophy of Science 3
(1936): 307-319, especially p. 311. 

[19]Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956), p. 85. 

[20]Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, pp. 155-57. 

[21]Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1953). 

[22]Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior,
Purpose and Teleology," Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18-24. 

[23]Richard Taylor, "Comments on a Mechanistic Conception of
Purposefulness," Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 310-317. 

[24]Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful
Behavior," Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 318-326. 

[25]Geof Bowker, “How to Be Universal,” pp. 107-27. 

[26]Richard Taylor, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior: A Rejoinder,"
Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 327-332. 

[27]Norbert Wiener, "The Nature of Analogy," (1950), box 12, folder 655, NWP. 

[28]Michael A. Arbib and Mary B. Hesse, The Construction of Reality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 

[29]Michael J. Apter draws the comparison between Sassurian linguistics and
cybernetics in "Cybernetics: A Case Study of a Scientific Subject:
Complex," The Sociology of Science: Sociological Review Monograph No. 18,
edited by Paul Halmos (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University, 1972), pp.
93-115, especially p. 104. 

[30]I rely here on Peter Galison's detailed account of Wiener's work with
AA, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,”
Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228-266. (Galison, 1994). 

[31]Norbert Wiener, "Sound Communication with the Deaf," Coll. Works IV,
pp. 409-11. 

[32]Cited in Walter A. Rosenblith and Jerome B. Wiesner, "From Philosophy
to Mathematics to Biology: The Life Sciences and Cybernetics," "Norbert
Wiener," 3-8, especially 3. 

[33]Pesi Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964 , Vita Mathematica Series, vol.
5 (Basel: Birkhaeuser, 1989), pp. 205-06. 

[34]Rosenblith and Wiesner, p. 7. 

[35]Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 

[36]Leo Szilard, "On the Reduction of Entropy as a Thermodynamic System
Caused by Intelligent Beings," Zeitschrift für Physik 53 (1929): 840-856. 

[37]Leon Brillouin, "Maxwell's Demon Cannot Operate: Information and
Entropy, I," Journal of Applied Physics, 212 (March 1951): 334-357. Much of
this material is also available in Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information,
Computing, edited by Harvey S. Leff and Andrew F. Rex (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990). 

[38]Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of
Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949). 

[39]Warren Weaver offered this explanation in his essay interpreting
Shannon's theory in Shannon and Weaver (1949). 

[40]See N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary
Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); for a
major statement of this thesis, see Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984). 

[41]Wiener's views on photosynthesis and Maxwell's Demon are discussed by
Masani, pp. 155-56. See also Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics (Light and
Maxwell's Demon), Scientia (Italy) 87 (1952): 233-235; reprinted in Coll.
Works IV, pp. 203-05. 

[42]Michael Serres plays multiple riffs upon this idea in The Parasite,
translated by Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982). 

[43]Valentino Braitenberg delightfully explores the possibility that simple
machines can demonstrate behavioral equivalents to emotional states,
including fear, love, envy and ambition, by constructed a series of
"thought machines" (machines designed in principle but not actually built).
See Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1984). 

[44]Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” p. 232. 

[45]Despite Wiener's efforts, after World War II cybernetics became more,
not less, entangled with military projects. The close connection between
the military and cybernetics is detailed by Paul N. Edwards, The Closed
World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) and Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information
Society, edited by Les Levidow and Kevin Robins (London: Free Association
Books, 1989). 

[46]Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the
Animal and in the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961, 2nd edition; 1st
edition, 1948). 

[47]Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press,
1976). 

taken from:
http://www.english.ucla.edu/HAYLES/wiener.htm

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