Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
tants; Kauffman at Bios, temporarily at least; Wolfram at Wolfram Research).
We have also come across the emergence of novel institutions, from the Santa
Fe Institute to the Planetary Collegium and, more radically, Kingsley Hall,
the Archway communities, and the antiuniversity, with Alexander Trocchi's
sigma project as a sort of overarching blueprint and vision. More generally,
the counterculture, while it lasted, offered a much more supportive environ-
ment to cybernetics than did the organs of the state.
I am left with an image of the social basis of cybernetics as not just marginal
but evanescent, always threatening to wink out of existence, always in need
of re-creation. At times, I am inclined to see an arrow of change here, moving
toward more substantial and resilient social structures as the years have gone
by—an image of the emergence of a parallel social universe, as I called it, that
maps only poorly and partially onto the institutional structures of modernity.
At other times I wonder if the Santa Fe Institute and the Planetary Collegium
will last any longer than Kingsley Hall and the BCL.
There are several ways to think about this marginality. Their descendants
often blame the founders of cybernetics for caring more about themselves
than the institutional future of the field, and there is something to that, though
one would have to exonerate Stafford Beer (and Heinz von Foerster) on this
score. But we should also think not about individuals and their personalities,
but about the connections between sociology and ontology. At the simplest
level, a metaphor of attraction and repulsion comes to mind. From the start,
the cyberneticians were in the same ontological space as one another, and
much more attracted to each other's thought and practice than that of their
colleagues in their home departments and institutions, and no doubt the in-
verse was equally true. More materially, within the grid of institutionalized
practice, doing cybernetics required different facilities and resources from
conventional equivalents—building little robots as a way of doing psychiat-
ric theory, growing biological computers as the cutting edge of management.
At the limit, one finds not only incompatibility but material, practical, and
theoretical collisions, battles, and warfare. Here I think especially of Villa 21
and Kingsley Hall from chapter 5: “antipsychiatry” as not just different from
conventional psychiatry but institutionally incompatible with it, unable to
coexist with mainstream practices within a single institution, and theoreti-
cally intensely critical of them. Here, above all, is where we find Deleuze and
Guattari's notion of nomad science being staged before our eyes—and the
nomads eventually driven off. We can return to the question of the social basis
in the next section.
