\u00a0<\/p>\n
Communication \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Samuel Gerald Towson University, scollins@towson.edu<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Josiah Macy, However, in all And yet, there\u2019s And it was There were, of Yet, despite Nevertheless, This paper is Two examples: <\/span><\/p>\n In the 1949 Macy Another example, Mead, however, Discussion<\/span><\/p>\n Anyone who has A later example: Was the purpose Another moment in Does Bateson mean Figure 1<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (Figure 1: Shows This sense of In other words, At present, we This is the world On the other More than this, References<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Bateson, Gregory Bowker, Geof Brand, Stewart Hayles, N. Kilne, Ronald Pias, Claus, ed. Pickering, Andrew Wiener, Norbert \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics \u00a0 Samuel Gerald Collins Towson University, USA scollins@towson.edu \u00a0 \u00a0 The characteristics of our digital world\u2014algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.\u2014were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11767],"tags":[4746,3735,11591,26387,6594,31858,31859,8558],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-55730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-alternative","tag-anthropology","tag-conferences","tag-cybernetics","tag-information","tag-josiah","tag-macy","tag-models"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nwithout Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the
\nJosiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics <\/span><\/p>\n
\nCollins<\/span><\/p>\n
\nUSA<\/span><\/p>\n
\ncharacteristics of our digital world\u2014algorithms, virtual reality, AI,
\ncryptocurrency, etc.\u2014were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr.
\nConferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing
\nthe world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings,
\nwith all of the alienation and ideological work that \u201cthe digital\u201d has
\nperpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as well;
\nMargaret Mead and Gregory Bateson attended every meeting, and recent
\nscholarship (e.g., Geoghegan 2023) has shown how anthropological thought
\ncontributed to the formation of our digital world through the reduction of
\nculture and social life to codes and feedback loops. Yet there were also
\nalternative models proposed during the Macy conferences, e.g., an embodied
\nmodel of information championed by Donald MacKay (Hayles 1999). This paper
\nlooks to another alternative, one based in misunderstandings at the Macy
\nconferences themselves. In practice and in discourse, Mead and Bateson held
\nvery different ideas about what \u201cinformation\u201d could mean\u2014ideas diverging from
\nthe \u201ccommand and control\u201d model that would predominate. Despite those
\ndifferences, though, the Macy conferees could communicate with one another and
\neven plan projects together. This is their model of information\u2014communication
\nwithout reduction and without perfect understanding\u2014interfacing rather than
\ndominating. Anticipating the work of British cyberneticist Gordon Pask, this
\nmodel of anthropological cybernetics opens the possibility of a communicative
\ninformatics without control, where interaction can develop without reduction
\nand understanding without domination.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nJr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) were borne on the a crest of Unity
\nof Science discourse in the United States, and sought to bring together the
\nsocial sciences with the physical and material sciences through the development
\nof a \u201cnew lingua franca\u201d where, as Kline writes, a \u201cuniversal language of
\ninformation, feedback, and homeostasis\u201d could \u201cmodel all organisms from the
\nlevel of the cell to that of society\u201d (Kline 2020: 13). The meetings were
\nremarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the active
\nparticipation of the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. It was
\none moment where anthropologists would speak as equals to their hard science
\ncounterparts in a nationally prominent forum. That was the promise of
\ncybernetics for anthropology\u2013a place at the table to shape the direction of
\nscientific and technological development in the age of American empire. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthese endeavors, cybernetics failed. After percolating through multiple
\ndisciplines and through popular culture, cybernetics\u2013perhaps, as Geoffrey
\nBowker has termed it, through a process of \u201clegitimacy exchange\u201d–lost currency
\nas scientific discourse (Bowker 1993). By the 1980s, very little in the
\nsciences and social sciences was being produced under the auspices of
\ncybernetics, and most new research (along with this paper) represents
\nhistorical analysis rather than new applications of, as Wiener called it, the
\n\u201cthe science of control and communications in the animal and machine\u201d (Wiener
\n1948). In anthropology, there was very little mention of cybernetic theory in
\nanthropological work after the 1970s, even as anthropologists began to turn to
\nconsidering the digital life of the cyborg. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nalso ample evidence that cybernetics succeeded\u2013too well, as it turns out. All
\nof the ideas that catalyzed the Macy Conferences: game theory (von Neumann),
\nneural nets feedback and circular causality (Wiener, Rosenbluth and Bigelow)
\nand information as a ratio of signal to noise (Shannon)\u2013have led to the triumph
\nof the virtual and reduction of the world to digital flows of variously
\ncommodified information. In no small part, we can credit the Macy Conferences
\nfor a world where teaching is reduced to the digital delivery of content, a
\nworld where AI agents proliferate in our lives, threaten our careers and prompt
\nour constant\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cTuring suspicions\u201d that
\nthe people with whom we digitally interact may be artificial agents instead. As
\nBateson suggested later, \u201ccybernetics\u201d has taken on the association of
\n\u201ccontrol\u201d at the expense of communication (Bateson 1991). It has become the
\nblueprint of our digital domination; whoever controls the information controls
\nthe world. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nsuccessful in another, more covert sense. Geoghegan\u2019s recent book, Code,
\neloquently follows the break-up the Macy Conferences into its constituent
\ndisciplines, with the triumph of information leading anthropologists down a
\nroad to semiotics and structuralism, while circular feedback underlies the
\ncontinued popularity of Cognitive behavioral therapy (Geoghegan 2022). As a
\npotent, generative metaphor, \u201ccode\u201d has structured the ways we relate to the
\nworld and each other, but in ways that have ironically widened the gulf between
\ndisciplines. <\/span><\/p>\n
\ncourse, alternatives expressed at the Macy Conferences. As many theorists
\n(including Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, Franciso Varela
\nand others) have noted, second order cybernetics grows out of the unanswered
\nquestions about the role of the observer in the system, while Hayles (1999)
\nlooks to Donald MacKay\u2019s more embodied understanding of information as an
\nanodyne to the digital\u2019s hostility to the physical world of nature and bodies. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nMead\u2019s and Bateson\u2019s prominence in the Macy conferences and to cybernetics in
\ngeneral, there has been little explicitly anthropological about the ways our
\ndigital lives have developed, even as anthropology has turned to the study of
\nthose lives as objects of our research. But it\u2019s not for lack of trying. The
\nMacy Conferences transcripts (however spotty and incomplete) show Mead and
\nBateson engaging in the work of the anthropological gadfly\u2013tempering the
\nstrident parochialism of the Macy attendees with exceptions drawn from the
\nanthropological record. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie\u2019s universalist
\nproclamations on the role of the unconscious, \u201cIf you look at some other
\ncultures, you don\u2019t necessarily find that same contrast\u201d (Pias 2016: 426). But
\nthe exception rarely derails the Mcy conferees who are, after all, busily
\nre-mapping the world in the context of the post-War US empire. So while Mead
\nand Bateson contributed commentary, central ideas (neural nets, information as
\nsignal) escaped the Macy conferences as universals unhindered by ethnographic
\nexception. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthere are unacknowledged anthropological contributions, and this paper concerns
\none of them: the role of misunderstanding. At first glance, this is not a very
\npromising alternative\u2013it seems antithetical to the whole point of the
\nconferences, after all. The lingua franca of circular information, circular
\ncausality and neural nets was supposed to unify knowledge by describing
\nuniversal processes as characteristic of chemical reactions as they were of
\nhuman culture. And yet there were many misunderstandings. For example, Ralph
\nGerard was, reportedly, \u201cintensely frustrated by the perpetual tangents to
\ntangents that developed during a meeting and the rare satisfaction of
\nintellectual closure and completion of any line of thought or argument\u201d (quoted
\nin Hayles 1999: 73). For their part, Mead and Bateson pilloried the obstinacy
\nof their fellow conferees in a 1976 interview with Steward Brand: \u201c\u201dSo we used
\nthe mode \u201cfeedback,\u201d and Kurt Lewin\u2013who didn\u2019t understand any known human
\nlanguage, but always had to reduce them to concepts\u2013he went with the idea of
\nfeedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and
\ntold them later what had happened [ . . . .] So the word \u2018feedback\u2019 got
\nintroduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conference where it\u2019s
\nbeen ever since\u201d (Brand 1976: 5). <\/span><\/p>\n
\nconcerned with something I\u2019m calling misunderstanding – not as the failure of
\ncybernetic communication, but as its precondition. Anthropologists play the
\nrole here of not reducing things to her underlying code, but of facilitating
\ninteraction between different ideas without introducing a third term. Perhaps
\nre-framing is a better word? After some examples from the Macy Conferences
\ntranscripts, the paper develops an alternative model of communication
\nresembling Andrew Pickering\u2019s emphasis on performative ontologies. I preface
\nthis by noting that these exchanges are, in many ways, what critics of the Macy
\nConferences found most irritating: the digressions and non sequiturs of
\nmeetings that went frequently off the rails yet were still preserved in
\ntranscription. Or, not all: Hayles notes that Teuber blocked publishing the
\ntranscriptions of the final meeting in 1953, \u201cnoting that the discussions were
\ntoo rambling and unfocused; if published, he said, they would be an
\nembarrassment\u201d (Hayles 1999: 76). This does not mean, however, that the other
\ntranscripts were tightly focused. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nConference, Lawrence Kubie gives his paper, \u201cThe Neurotic Potential and Human
\nAdaptation.\u201d Later discussion prompts Kubie to ascribe neurosis to all forms of
\nsymbolic communication: \u201cThe capacity to communicate by means of language symbols,
\nand the capacity to become neurotic are very close together\u201d (76). Mead, in her
\ncapacity as anthropological elder, shifts the conversation to culture and
\nlearning processes: \u201cThese expectations may be different from another culture
\nwhich expects another area of behavior to be subject to learning: in any given
\nsociety the particular acts, the particular behavior in which conscious and
\ntherefore flexible learned behavior is to play a given role may vary\u201d (76).
\nKubie seems unsure of Mead\u2019s point, and reiterates his initial claims, but this
\nseems to only draw out discussion to the possibility that autonomic responses
\ncould constitute an unconscious, or that societal expectations for
\ncommunication constitute what we regard as neurotic. Eventually, a frustrated Kubie
\ncontinues trying to wrest the conversation back from culture and statistical
\nmodeling to the primacy of the psychological. \u201cI am puzzled here because I am
\nnot quite sure how this confusion has arisen. Let me retrace my steps for a
\nmoment\u201d (80). A bit later, Kubie\u2019s colleague, Henry Brosin, gives him \u201ca chance
\nto catch his breath\u201d–and we can imagine, perhaps, an apoplectic moment for the
\northodox Freudian (82). <\/span><\/p>\n
\nfollowing on J.C.R. Licklider\u2019s 1950 paper, \u201cThe Manner in Which and the Extent
\nto Which Speech and Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.\u201d Licklider\u2019s
\ncontribution is really a paper on sound engineering\u2013with multiple graphs
\nillustrating sound clipping and frequency. Wiener brings up the problems of
\ntranslation between human and machine: \u201cI\u00a0
\n<\/span>am considering, for example, the remote-control substations for
\nhydraulic power, where the power dispatcher has to get messages to the machine
\nand where the machine has to inform the power dispatcher about significant
\nfacts. Now there again you have the same translation problem. (227)<\/span><\/p>\n
\npicks up the question in terms of human communication, and other conferees
\nfollow with their own anecdotes. Can people communicate across languages in a
\nrelated family and across dialects? Her question: \u201cI should like to get back to
\nthe question: Is this translation or isn\u2019t it? What is translation?\u201d
\n(237).\u00a0 <\/span>It is, Mead concludes, \u201ca
\nquestion of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that
\nthe idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another
\nlanguage to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however,
\nwould be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one
\nperson is not translation for another\u201d (237). Other examples follow, turning to
\nphysiology, to psychology, to hypnosis, speech pathology, etc. Finally, with a
\nseries of anecdotes about memorizing strings of characters through song,
\ndiscussion ends\u2013some distance from the sound engineering where it began. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nbeen to an academic conference will recognize these in these transcripts
\ncharacteristic verbal interactions: questions that are really comments,
\ncritiques that are little more than self-aggrandizement. What makes them
\ndifferent here is their relationship to the goals of the Macy Conferences. Each
\nof the concepts that fuels these cybernetic meetings\u2013neural nets, feedback and
\ninformation\u2013is taken up again and again by conferees, where conversation spins
\nthem into unexpected and occasionally refractory directions. Attendees are
\ntalking, but they are not moving towards a consensus. This would be a searing
\ncritique of the Macy Conferences, if, indeed, the point was to create
\nconsensus. But if achieving consensual understanding was not the point, than
\nwhat was? <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation called
\nthe \u201cColloquy of Mobiles\u201d involving five robots (two \u201cmale\u201d and three \u201cfemale\u201d)
\nrotating towards each other on the bases of lights and sounds. What marks this
\noff from other cybernetic machines, though, is its performative dimension. Pask
\nmeant for humans to interact with the Colloquy. As he wrote, \u201cthe mobiles
\nproduce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interactions.
\nThey cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human
\nbeings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to
\nachieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a
\nhigher level of discourse\u201d (Pask 1971, quoted in Pickering 2010: 359-360).
\nEventually, human visitors to the Colloquy began using small mirrors to reflect
\nlights back to robots in order to evoke a response. Not \u201ccommunicating\u201d with
\nthe machines in the sense of a shared message but interacting with the Colloquy
\nin order to produce light and sounds that the human visitors found pleasing.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nof the Macy Conferences to reduce the world to processes of information and
\ncircular feedback? Or were there other more interactive and less dominating
\nalternatives? <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthe conferences, this one in the wake of Bateson\u2019s 1952 paper, \u201cThe Position of
\nHumor in Human Communication.\u201d By now, random asides are no strangers to these
\nproceedings, and many of the conferees take a moment to tell their own bad jokes.
\nJohn Bowman then suggests that humor could be produced in a machine using a
\nsimple circuit: \u201cA circuit of that type may have two stable states. If it is
\nput in any state, it will asymptotically approach one of the two stable states
\nand stay there. On the other hand, with the same components in slightly
\ndifferent values of the circuit constants, it can oscillate\u201d (548). To which
\nBateson replies: \u201cI am always prepared to say that an electronic buzzer is
\nlaughing\u201d (548).<\/span><\/p>\n
\nthat both circuit and the human are laughing? Is he suggesting that laughter is
\nnothing but the oscillation of circuits? Or that it is the confusion of signals
\nresisting homeostasis? One of the legacies of the Macy Conferences has been precisely
\nthat: the reduction of physical to the information that lies beneath. This is
\nalso, as Geoghegan notes, the underlying mechanism in the reduction of social
\nand cultural life to its semiotic exchange. There are, however, other
\npossibilities. What if the \u201claughter\u201d in the person and the \u201claughter\u201d in the
\ncircuit weren\u2019t equivalent, after all? And what if the oscillation in the
\ncircuit was not the oscillation in the neural stimulus? What if that was just
\nsomething we were calling laughter and oscillation in order to create an
\ninteractive bridge between two dissimilar systems? This is certainly more
\nlikely than Bateson becoming a reductive materialist, and moreover anticipates
\nthe work of Gordon Pask and other second-order cyberneticists. <\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/tomorrowculture.blogspot.com\/2023\/12\/file:\/\/\/C:\/Users\/scollins\/AppData\/Local\/Temp\/msohtmlclip1\/01\/clip_image002.gif\")
<\/span><\/p>\n
\ntwo systems interacting without a) dominating each other; or b) being subsumed
\nunder a third term)<\/span><\/p>\n
\ncybernetics acknowledges a world that is not reducible to defined quanta, yet
\none in which we very much need to interact in order to live. And this is the
\nworld of the Macy conferences, where conferees, perhaps, have little to show
\nfor their efforts after 10 years of meetings and endless conversations. And yet
\nthey still had those 10 years and endless conversations, despite their
\nintractable differences between their disciplinary homes. In what Mead later
\nsummarized\u2013rather unhelpfully\u2013 as \u201dmicroevoltuion,\u201d \u201cThe conversation would
\ncome to an end and be resumed. There would be freedom to talk and freedom to
\nlisten, and the web of meaning would be woven as we talked, making a new
\npattern before our eyes\u201d (Mead 1964: 301). <\/span><\/p>\n
\nthis cybernetics as a means of interaction across difference\u2013however defined.
\nAs Pickering writes, \u201cthe cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting
\nalong with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world that one
\ncannot push around in that way\u201d (Pickering 2010: 383). <\/span><\/p>\n
\nare living in just such a world, one where countless nonhuman and multiagent
\nsystems seem to go their own way despite our efforts. Those agents may be
\nvariously intelligent. With generative AI, we have agents that simulate human
\nconversation, so it is easy for people to (mis)understand their agency. Most
\nalgorithms, however, toil in the background, running checks on our job
\napplications, checking purchases against credit history, touching up
\nphotographs. Yet in all cases, it is not so easy to understand how multiagent
\nsystems make decisions. Large language models, for example, are unable to tell
\nus which sources they\u2019ve consulted in their replies, and text-to-mage
\ngeneration has notoriously surreal moments. We may describe those systems according
\nto a number of anthropomorphic metaphors, and, similarly, ascribe any number of
\ninformation processing functions to ourselves in return. But, to be clear,
\nneither of these is an accurate representation. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nwe live in now, but it is not a \u201cpost-human\u201d one in the sense of a reduction of
\nhuman life to manipulable flows of data. Instead, we find ourselves enmeshed in
\ninteractive systems that can\u2019t be reduced to information quanta\u2013even if powerful
\norganizations strive to do so. Amidst these heterogeneous systems,
\ncommunication may be an impossibility; instead, coordination may be the optimal
\noutcome. The basis of that coordination is the questions: who defines the field
\nfor interaction? Will everything be subtended to profit? State surveillance?<\/span><\/p>\n
\nhand, we might strive towards making these systems explicable and more
\npredictable, more interactive, more responsive and more grounded in the
\nexperiences of diverse communities: \u201cExplainable artificial intelligence.\u201d
\n\u201ccommunity robotics,\u201d community-based design. Anthropologists are uniquely
\npoised to consider these networks of humans and non-humans as they interact
\ntogether to create their world. They are also uniquely positioned to insist
\nthat non-human agents need not only serve the whims of capital, and that
\nrejecting information as \u201ccommand and control\u201d means opening up recombinatory
\npossibilities.<\/span><\/p>\n
\nwhat does it mean to interact with the multiagency around us as an equal
\npartner? What does it mean to describe the give-and-take of a horizontality in
\ncybernetics? <\/span><\/p>\n
\n(1991). A Sacred Unity. NY: HarperCollins.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n(1993). \u201cHow to be Universal.\u201d Social Studies of Science 23: 107-127. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n(1976). \u201cFor God\u2019s Sake, Margaret.\u201d Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer): 32-44. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nKatharine (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago
\nPress. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n(2020). \u201cHow disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human
\nsciences in the United States, 1940-80.\u201d History of the Human Sciences 33(1):
\n12-35. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n(2016). Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. NY: diaphanes.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n(2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n(1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
\nMachine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.<\/span><\/p>\n