GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 59

ity. Bates described its proposed membership as “half primarily physiologists
though with 'electrical leanings' and half communication theory and ex-radar
folk with biological leanings” and, later, to Turing, as “half biologists—(mostly
neurophysiologists) and half engineers and mathematicians,” while remark-
ing to himself that the club was “incomplete—no sociologists, northeners,
professors” (Clark 2002, 78-80). 29 But beyond that, Ratio was interinstitu-
tional, as one might say. It did not simply elide disciplinary boundaries within
the university; it brought together representatives from different sorts of in-
stitutions: people from the universities, but also medical men and physiolo-
gists based in hospitals and research institutes, including Walter and Ashby,
and workers in government laboratories (Albert Uttley at the Telecommuni-
cations Research Establishment, the TRE). 30 The Ratio Club was the center of
gravity for work in cybernetics in Britain from 1949 to the mid-1950s, and it
existed transversely , or orthogonally, to the usual institutions for the produc-
tion of knowledge, cutting across not just academic disciplinary boundaries,
but also across the usual institutional classifications, too. And this transversal-
ity continued to be a conspicuous feature of British and European cybernetics
after the demise of Ratio, when the series of Namur conferences became the
key institutional venue from 1956 onward. 31
Two observations follow. First, ontology and sociology were entangled here.
This transverse crystallization had the character of a purification that was at
once social and ontological. From the side of traditional fields of practice, it
would be a mistake to think that an interest in the adaptive brain was actively
excluded. But the formation of first the Ratio Club and then the Namur con-
ference series attests to a perceived marginality of the cyberneticians in their
own fields, and a perceived closeness to workers in other fields with similar
interests. From the other side, the shared interest in the adaptive brain came
to center precisely on transverse institutions like the Ratio Club. Ratio—
rather than their home disciplines and institutions—was where people like
Walter found an active and engaged audience for their cybernetics. And, as
we will see later, much of the propagation of cybernetics up the present has
continued to be located in such strange antidisciplinary and interinstitutional
spaces, even as the range of cybernetics has gone far beyond the brain.
My second observation is this. The Ratio Club and its successor institutions
were undoubtedly successful in maintaining the postwar cybernetic ferment,
but they were conspicuously lacking in the means of social reproduction.
The Ratio Club had no mechanism for training students: a dining club does
not grant PhD's. Among our cyberneticians, only Stafford Beer in the second
generation seems to have taken this problem seriously, but we can note now