The new discipline of cybernetics expanded exponentially in the period 1943–70. Unlike traditional scientific disciplines, its practitioners claimed (to varying degrees) that they were producing a new universal science. This paper anatomizes the claim to universality, details some rhetorical strategies used to support that claim, and examines some practical consequences for the general economy of the sciences argued by cyberneticians. It concludes by characterizing cybernetic strategies in terms of a form complementary to the obligatory passage point – the ‘distributed passage point’.

Cyborgs – cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines – have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched and built cyborgs. I then use that history of cyborgs as a basis for reinterpreting the history of cybernetics by critiquing cyborg studies that give a teleological account of cybernetics, and histories of cybernetics that view it as a unitary discipline. I argue that cyborgs were a minor research area in cybernetics, usually classified under the heading of `medical cybernetics’, in the USA and Britain from the publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics in 1948 to the decline of cybernetics among mainstream scientists in the 1960s. During that period, cyberneticians held multiple interpretations of their field. Most of the research on cybernetics focused on the analogy between humans and machines – the main research method of cybernetics – not the fusion of humans and machines, the domain of cyborgs. Although many cyberneticians in the USA and Britain viewed cybernetics as a `universal discipline’, they created contested, area-specific interpretations of their field under the metadiscourse of cybernetics.

Key words: bionics, cold war, cybernetics, cyborgs, Norbert Wiener, scientific discourse

This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians – W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask – paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice – the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work – and to the worldly projects they pursued – scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians – that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory.

Key words: artificial intelligence, cyberarts, posthumanism, robots, science & technology studies, self-organization

It is usually assumed that the ‘social construction’ metaphor has one key meaning that is well understood across social studies of science. But a look at some of the texts that were, and are, central to introducing and defining `social construction’ in science studies shows that there are widely varying uses of the metaphor: processes of construction differ with the types of objects that can be constructed. This paper identifies four prominent interpretations that have led to interesting insights and discussions. Though these different social constructions have generally been fused together in science studies, they are easily separable, and should be separated, since they are not equally tenable. In particular, `neo-Kantian’ or `idealist’ constructivism has weak arguments supporting it and, contrary to the standard rhetoric, is the least important of these different constructivisms to most of the actual work done in social studies of science.