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from another angle, we should note the continuing
marginality
of cybernetics
to established institutions.
I am struck, first, by the profound amateurism of British cybernetics. Key
contributions often had an almost hobbyist character: Walter built his first
tortoises at home in his spare time; so did Ashby his homeostat (at least, in the
apocryphal version of the story); likewise Beer and Pask's experimentation
with biological and chemical computers; Bateson never in his life had a steady
job; Laing's experiments in psychiatry took place beyond the established
institutional framework. Cybernetics welled up outside the usual channels,
and it found little support within those channels. One might have expected
the universities to be the natural home for such a field, and, indeed, Beer and
Pask did hold a variety of part-time academic positions, but only a handful
of academic units devoted to the production and transmission of cybernetic
knowledge appeared in the West, and then only over finite time spans. One
thinks principally of Warren McCulloch's group at MIT's Research Laboratory
of Electronics (1952-69), Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Labora-
tory at the University of Illinois (1958-75) (where Ashby was a professor for
the ten years before his retirement), and, in Britain, the Cybernetics Depart-
ment at Brunel (1969-85).
5
(Interestingly, various versions of cybernetics
were institutionalized in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. To follow that would
take us too far afield, but see Gerovitch 2002.)
Conferences and less formal gatherings instead constituted scholarly cen-
ters of gravity for the field: the Macy conferences in the United States; the
Ratio Club, a self-selected dining club, in Britain (1949-58); and in Europe
a series of international conferences held at Namur in Belgium from 1958
onward. Our cyberneticians were thus left to improvise opportunistically a
social basis for their work. After graduating from Cambridge in 1952, Pask, for
example, set up his own research and consulting company, System Research,
and looked for contracts wherever he could find them; in 1970 Beer gave up
a successful career in management to become an independent consultant.
And along with this instability of the social basis of cybernetics went a very
chancy mode of transmission and elaboration of the field. Thus, quasi-popular
topics were very important to the propagation of cybernetics in way that one
does not find in better-established fields. Norbert Wiener's
Cybernetics
(1948)
was enormously important in crystallizing the existence of cybernetics as a
field and in giving definition to the ambitions of its readers. Grey Walter's
