Dreams for our perceptual present: Temporality, storage, and interactivity in cybernetics

Configurations

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 283-319

  Halpern, Orit ^a  

^a New School

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 35548964351     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2007.0016     Document Type: Review

References (113)

1. Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, 3rd ed. (1953; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972), p. 63.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 130.
4. Such Statements rethinking the role of representation, memory, and perception were repeated in many fields at the time, ranging from anthropology to biology, to sociology, to computing, to architecture. For more information on the Influence and use of information theory and communication science in a variety of fields, see Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 89-99.
5. For an opposing argument on the role of information theory in the history of molecular biology, see Lily E. Kay, "Cybernetics, Information, Life: The Emergence of Scriptural Representations of Heredity," Configurations 5 (1997): 23-91;
6. idem, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
7. Keller views cybernetic and information theories as providing the possibility to view life in its complexity, while Kay argues that the notion of codes is ultimately reductive. These debates reflect and advance the larger premise of this article. On postwar attempts to build a unified theory of science, see Geof Bowker, "How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-70," Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 107-127.
8. And on the cultural impact of cybernetics, see Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996).
9. For the impact on architecture, design, and the arts, see Beatriz Colomina, "Enclosed by Images: The Eames' Multimedia Architecture," Grey Room (Winter 2001): 6-29;
10. John Harwood, "The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior," Grey Room 12 (Summer 2003): 5-31.
11. The "virtual" is used throughout this essay to denote that which does not yet exist but is being brought into being. It serves as both an operation and a field for conditions of possibility. I am not using the term, however, in the sense of a simulation or a simulacrum; the virtual cannot exist as a materialized form in the present.
12. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1954), pp. 7, 11.
13. Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics in History" [1954], in Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, ed. Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 49.
14. Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228-266.
15. Ibid.
16. The above synopsis is based on the foundational article put forth by Norbert Wiener in collaboration with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, from Harvard Medical School, in 1943: Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology," Philosophy of Science, 10 (1943): 18-24.
17. For further information and explanation about definitions of behavior, communication and purpose see: Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior," ibid., 17 (1950): 318-326,
18. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949; Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1963), pp. 8-9.
19. One of the readers of this paper insightfully noted that the conflation of making decisions, or binary choices, with the encoding of data is a remarkable action on the part of cyberneticians: it effectively evades the difference between making a decision and data storage - two activities that, as the rest of this paper will attest, are quite separate.
20. Bowker, "How to Be Universal" (above, no. 4), p. 111.
21. See also Edwards, Closed World (above, n. 4).
22. The most literal exemplar of this emergent interest in communication and its impact on social science, policy, and economics was the series of Macy Conferences on cybernetics, which were held during and after the war, in which many of the central figures in computing, wartime research, communications and systems theory, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology participated. The historian-physicist Steven Heims has argued that these conferences served as an important site in producing a vision, and a funding basis, for the postwar social sciences in the United States: Steve Joshua Heims, The Cybernetics Group 1946-1953: Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
23. For some examples of the impact of cybernetics on contemporary media and digital technologies, see Packer and Jordan,, Multimedia (above, n. 7);
24. Timothy Druckrey, ed., Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (New York: Aperture, 1996);
25. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge:, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). For an excellent summation of its broader Impact on culture and on notions of human subjectivity,
26. see Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
27. Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). David Mindell, and others, have also noted that feedback, a core aspect of the ideas of cybernetics, computing, and information theory, has numerous earlier origins. Feedback already played a role and was formalized as an engineering concept earlier in the twentieth century as an answer to problems in spreading telephony and communications. Control and homeostasis were also formulated as problem for both organisms and machines in industrial systems.
28. See James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986);
29. David Mindell, Between the Human and the Machine: Feedback, Control and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002);
30. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
31. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Ideas in Context (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
32. For an excellent summation of McCulloch's relationship to Wiener and his philosophical influences, see Michael A. Arbib, "Warren McCulloch's Search for the Logic of the Nervous System," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (2000): 193-216.
33. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), pp. 42-44.
34. See Hacking, Taming of Chance (above, n. 16).
35. Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), pp. 327-328.
36. A number of scholars have seized upon this discursive shift to information, communication, and process as signaling larger transformations in governmentality and subjectivity that identify "postmodernity"; for example, Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Incorporations (New York: Zone Books; distrib. by MIT Press, 1992);
37. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control," October no. 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7;
38. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991);
39. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
40. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986), p. 143.
41. For more about the relationships between sociobiology and information theory, particularly in relation to complex systems emerging from nonconscious and basic units, see James L. Gould, "The Dance-Language Controversy," Quarterly Review of Biology 51:2 (1976): 357-365;
42. Kay, "Cybernetics, Information, Life" (above, n. 4);
43. Lily E. Kay, The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology, Monographs on the History and Philosophy of Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
44. Adrian M. Wenner and Patrick H. Wells, Anatomy of a Controversy: The Question of a "Language" among Bees (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990);
45. Keller, Refiguring Life (above, n. 4).
46. Barthes, Rustle of Language (above, n. 22), p. 143.
47. Ibid, p. 146.
48. The film theorists Kaja Silverman and Mary Ann Doane have both argued that one of the central critiques of media in modernity has been the alienation from ideals of reality, usually encapsulated in discourses of representing and capturing the present or "experience." See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002);
49. Kaja Silverman, "The Dream of the Nineteenth Century," Camera Obscura 17: 51 (2002): 1-30.
50. Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (above, n. 20), pp. 327-328.
51. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 22 (emphasis in original).
52. Sigmund Freud, "A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad,'" in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), p. 228.
53. Mary Ann Doane, "Freud, Marey, and the Cinema," Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 315.
54. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time (above, n. 26).
55. See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990);
56. idem, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
57. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), p. 3A.
58. Early cinema actually did not have as standardized a speed for projection as even Bergson presupposed: James Card, "Silent Film Speed," Image, October 1955, pp. 55-56.
59. Bergson, Matter and Memory (above, n. 28), p. 219.
60. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 62-63.
61. Ibid., p. 61.
62. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Barbara Habberjam and Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), Deleuze explicitly argues that Bergsonian thought anticipates the later terms of the cinema, in which the apparatus, as an information system, allows a mobility of the eye and a freeing of viewpoint. This perspectival mobility recuperates Bergson's understanding of the relations between matter and memory as put forth in his previous work.
63. Arbib, "Warren McCulloch's Search" (above, n. 17), pp. 210-212;
64. Warren S. McCulloch, "How We Know Universals," Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), pp. 46-66.
65. Deleuze, Cinema 1 (above, n. 38), p. 23.
66. Ibid., pp. 58-59.
67. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p. 122.
68. Norbert Wiener, "Problems of Organization," in Collected Works (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 396-397.
69. Heims, John Von Neumann (above, n. 15), pp. 304-329.
70. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p.135.
71. Ibid., p. 124.
72. J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 47 (1959): 1940-1951.
73. Michael Arbib, Brains, Machines, and Mathematics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 32-33.
74. Robert Schwartz, Perception, Blackwell Readings in Philosophy, vol. 12 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004), p. 155.
75. For further information, see Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987);
76. Simon Ullman, "Tacit Assumptions in the Computational Study of Vision," in Representations of Vision, ed. A. Gorea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 305-317.
77. Bowker, "How to Be Universal" (above, n. 4), pp. 114-115.
78. Jonathan Crary makes this suggestion in the introduction of his work on attention: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999).
79. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p. 121.
80. Von Neumann architecture called upon ideas of memory and neural nets from McCulloch and Pitts, the same ideas that Wiener is using to build the stored program architecture. See von Neumann's initial paper on electronic computing instruments: Arthur W. Burks, Herman H. Goldstine, and John von Neumann, "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument," in Collected Works of John von Neumann, ed. A. H. Taub, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 34-79 (taken from a report to the U.S. Army Ordinance Department, 1946).
81. These ideas are substantiated in the further work of Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Gregory Bateson, and the Macy Conferences: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976);
82. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (above, n. 39);
83. Heinz Von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics: Circular Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems, Transactions of the Sixth Conference, March 24-25,1949, New York, N. Y. (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1950);
84. Heinz Von Foerster, Margaret Mead, and Hans Lukas Teuber, eds. Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems : Transactions of the Eighth Conference, March 15-16,1951, New York, N.Y. (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1952).
85. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p. 147.
86. Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology" (above, n. 10), p, 23.
87. See Wiener, Ex-prodigy (above, n. 1);
88. idem, Human Use of Human Beings (above, n. 6).
89. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), pp. 149-150.
90. Packer and Jordan, Multimedia (above, n. 7), p. 48.
91. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings (above, n. 6), pp. 7-37.
92. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p. 149.
93. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (above, n. 32), p. 3.
94. Kittler, Discourse Networks (above, n. 32).
95. Doane, "Freud, Marey, and the Cinema" (above, n. 30), p. 316.
96. Ibid. See also Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time (above, n. 26).
97. See the chapter "Feedback and Oscillation" in Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18). Also see the section "Homeostasis" in Wiener, Collected Works (above, n. 43).
98. Shannon and Weaver's work is also largely dedicated to problems of system stability and noise control: Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964).
99. Wiener, Cybernetics (above, n. 18), p. 123.
100. Ibid., p. 124.
101. McCulloch quoted in Von Foerster, Transactions of the Sixth Conference (above, n. 55), p. 163.
102. Ibid.
103. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations 40 (Fall 1992): 81-125.
104. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly, 176:1 (July 1945): 101-8.
105. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 17.
106. Ibid., p. 15.
107. Throughout this essay "realtime" should be understood as denoting a desire for immediacy in interactive exchanges, without assuming an external referent to those communicative exchanges.
108. Derrida, Archive Fever (above, n. 74), pp.19-20.
109. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicklaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 163.
110. Rosalind Morris, review of James T. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
111. Indonesia 67 (1999): 163-176, on p. 165
112. Ibid., p. 165.
113. This term and my method are clearly influenced by Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. and intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1968), pp. 253-265.