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The brain, one might say, could not contain cybernetics; cybernetics spilled
out all over the disciplinary and professional map. It was a strongly interdis-
ciplinary field, or, better, an antidisciplinary one: it did not aggregate disci-
plinary perspectives; it rode roughshod over disciplinary boundaries—which
also contributes to its glamour. Bateson and Laing, as I said, went beyond the
narrow focus of cybernetics on the biological brain to a wider focus on intrin-
sically social selves, and if we add in Beer and Pask the picture gets still richer.
On the one hand, these two second-generation cyberneticians followed Ashby
and Walter in the pursuit of material models of the adaptive brain, but in ex-
tremely original ways. Beer's experiments with
Daphnia
and ponds and Pask's
with electrochemical “threads” were precisely attempts to “grow” adaptive
brains—nondigital and nonrepresentational, biological or quasi-biological
computers. This is some of the most striking and visionary work I have come
across in the history of science and engineering. On the other hand, much
of Beer and Pask's work can be seen as extending the achievements of the
first generation, especially Ashby's, into new spaces, while echoing the social
concerns of Bateson and Laing beyond the realm of psychiatry. Beer drew
heavily upon Ashby's work on the homeostat (as well as upon contemporary
neurophysiology) in developing his “management cybernetics” in the late
1950s, which later evolved into his viable system model of social organiza-
tions and his “team syntegrity” approach to collective decision making. Beer
also extended his cybernetics beyond organizations into politics, up to the
level of world politics, and even into the spiritual domain, entirely beyond the
mundane world. Pask's elaboration of cybernetics started in the world of en-
tertainment with the Musicolour machine and ran, in one direction, into the
development of cybernetic trainers and teaching machines and, in another,
into robot artworks, interactive theater, and adaptive architecture.
The world of cybernetics was, then, very rich. Cybernetic practices and
artifacts first emerged as brain science and psychiatry, but quickly and dis-
tinctively spread to all the fields I have just mentioned (and more): robotics,
engineering, a science of general systems with applications in many fields,
biological computing, management, politics, spirituality (if that is a field),
entertainment, the arts, theater and architecture (music, too), education.
Unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific
academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is
better seen as
a form of life
, a way of going on in the world, even an attitude,
that can be, and was, instantiated both within and beyond academic depart-
ments, mental institutions, businesses, political organizations, churches, con-
cert halls, theaters, and art museums. This is to put the case positively. But
