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variables” in such a society would be those that measure the “comfort” of the
individual. . . . It is obvious that the original objection was largely due to a belief
that the planner must understand every detail of what he plans, & that there-
fore the Plan must be as finite as the intelligence of the Planner. This of course
is not so. Using the principles of the multistable system it should be possible to
develop, though not to understand, a Plan that is far superior to anything that
any individual can devise. Coupled with this is the new possibility that it can be
self
-correcting.
Summary
: Society.
Here we see the usual emphasis on performativity as prior to representation,
even in planning—“though not to understand”—and temporal emergence,
but expressed now in a much more socially symmetric idiom than Ashby's re-
marks on warfare and psychiatry. Now planners do not dictate to the planned
how their lives will develop; instead planners and planned are envisaged as
more or less equivalent parts of a single multistable system, entangled with
one another in feedback loops from which transformations of the plan con-
tinually emerge. The image is the same as the vision of evolutionary design
that Ashby articulated in relation to DAMS, transferred from the world of ma-
chines to that of people—now social designs and plans are to be understood
not as given from the start and imposed on their object but as growing in the
thick of things.
This is just one entry in Ashby's journal. He never systematically developed
a cybernetic sociology. I mention it now because these remarks can serve as
an antidote to the idea that Ashby's only vision of society was warfare, and,
more important, because here he crudely sketches out a symmetric cybernetic
vision of society that we shall see elaborated in all sorts of ways in the follow-
ing chapters.
In conclusion, however, we can note that all traces of hierarchy were hardly
purged from Ashby's thinking. The sentences that I skipped above contain
his reflections on just how “the people” should make themselves felt in the
feedback loops that pass through them. “The 'comfort' of the individual . . .
can easily be measured. One simply makes a rule that every protest or appeal
must be accompanied by a sum of money, & the rule is that the more you pay
the more effective will your appeal be. You can have a sixpenny appeal which
w
ill adjust trivialities up to a hundred-pound appeal that will move moun-
tains.” This from a medical professional with a weakness for fast sports cars
in a class-ridden society recovering from the devastations of war. It would be
nice to think he was joking.
