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.
This essay explores the history of Stafford Beer’s work in management cybernetics, from his early conception and simulation of an adaptive automatic factory and associated experimentation in biological computing up to his development of the Viable System Model of complex organizations and its implementation in Chile. The essay also briefly pursues Beer into the arenas of politics and spirituality. The aim throughout is to show that all Beer’s projects can be understood as specific instantiations and workings out of a cybernetic ontology of unknowability and becoming: a stance that recognizes that the world can always surprise us and that we can never dominate it through knowledge. The thrust of Beer’s work was thus to construct information systems that can adapt performatively to environments they cannot fully control.
Pickering A. (2007) Ontological Theatre Gordon Pask, Cybernetics, and the Arts. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 14(4): 43–57. https://cepa.info/3331
This essay explores the possibility of an ontological rather than epistemological understanding of cybernetics. My argument is that cybernetics embodies a nonmodern ontology, a vision of the world as built from lively, dynamic systems in performative interaction with one another – in contrast to the ontology of the modern sciences: an asymmetric picture of human agents linked to a passive and static world through the medium of representation. To put some flesh on this idea, I review Gordon Pask’s work in the theatre, the arts and architecture. I argue that his projects function as ontological theatre in a double sense. On the one hand, they stage specific examples of a nonmodern ontology more generally, on the other, they are examples of how one might go on in the world if one espoused that ontology. This review encourages an appreciation of cybernetics as a multidimensional form of life.
Pickering A. (2009) Psychiatry, synthetic brains and cybernetics in the work of W. Ross Ashby. International Journal of General Systems 38(2): 213–230. https://cepa.info/4129
This essay focuses on the historical development of W. Ross Ashby’s work up to the late 1950s. Two key landmarks are Ashby’s most famous machine, the homeostat, and the book in which it featured, Design for a Brain. The essay explores constitutive connections between Ashby’s cybernetics and his professional interest in psychiatry and the brain, his quest to build a synthetic brain and the DAMS project, and his subsequent development of cybernetics as a general theory of machines.