Pickering: Cybneretics and the Mangle
Metadata
Title: Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask
Authors: Andrew Pickering
Publication Year: 2002
Journal: Social Studies of Science
Assigned in: cm3020 Topic 01: Genetic Algorithms
Abstract
This paper aims to enrich our understanding of the history and substance of cybernetics. It reviews the work of three British cyberneticians - W. Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask - paying attention particularly to the materiality of their practice - the strange and fascinating devices and systems that were at the heart of their work - and to the worldly projects they pursued - scientific, technological, artistic, organizational, political and spiritual. Connections are drawn between cybernetics and recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, in the hope of illuminating key features of both. The paper concludes by suggesting that the antidisciplinary impulse of contemporary science studies might find inspiration in the work of cyberneticians - that theory does not have to remain confined to the realm of theory.
Summary
The paper presents an early history of British pioneers in cybernetics. It focuses on what makes cybernetics and its history so imaginatively appealing, claiming it:
grabs on to the world differently from the classical sciences. While the latter seek to pin the world down in timeless representations, cybernetics directly thematizes the unpnredictable liveliness of the world, and processes of open-ended becoming. While classical science has thus been an epistemological project aimed explicitly at knowledge production, cybernetics is an ontological project, aimed variously at displaying, grasping, controlling, exploiting and exploring the liveliness of the world. (p. 430)
The central exmplar he latches onto is Ashby’s homeostat. A homeostat unit was an electronic device that received inputs, passed them through a coil which generated a magnetic field. The field exerted a torque on a needle or vane on top of the machine, causing it to rotate. The needle was part of the circuitry, and one end dipped into a trough of water across whic ha constant voltage was maintained. So the varying position of the needle controlled the current that flowed through the water, which then formed the output current of the homeostat unit.
Four homeostat units were interconnected via electrial feedback loops, the output of each unit was the input to three others.
The state of the homeostats could be stable where the needles all rest in the mid points of their ranges, with small fluctuations, or unstable, where they might be driven to extreme of their ranges. Each homeostat was built so that if its needle departed too much from its midpoint a relay would trip and the device would randomly reconfigure itself. Eventually the homeostat would find a stable state. This property meant the system was ultrastable.
Pickering loves the homeostat’s liveliness in reconfiguring itself, and that it has some kind of agency. He refers to the interaction of the four units as a dance of agency. Ashby saw it as an “electromechanical proto-brain”, as discussed in his book Design for a Brain.
The paper then discusses two extensions of this private, self-contained work by later cyberneticians. First Beer’s development of homeostatic approaches to human organizations and management; and Pask’s work in the arts and entertainment.
It describes Pask’s musicolour machine, which took sound input (from a human performer) and created a light show. If the performance became too repetitive, the machine would “get bored” and stop responding, encouraging the performer to try something new. In Pask’s words:
He [the performer] trained the machine, and it played a game with him. In this sense, the system acted as an extension of the performer with which he could co-operate to achieve effects that he could not achieve on his own.
It also describes a really weird exhibition called ‘colloquy of mobiles’ where male and female robots would seek each other out, the male robot would shine a light from its top half, which the female robot would try to reflect back at the male robot’s bottom half to ‘satisfy’ it, when it would go quiet and docile for a while before searching for another female. Spectators were given mirrors so they could interfere with the process.