Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics
Samuel Gerald Collins
Towson University, USA
scollins@towson.edu
The characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings, with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has perpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as well; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson attended every meeting, and recent scholarship (e.g., Geoghegan 2023) has shown how anthropological thought contributed to the formation of our digital world through the reduction of culture and social life to codes and feedback loops. Yet there were also alternative models proposed during the Macy conferences, e.g., an embodied model of information championed by Donald MacKay (Hayles 1999). This paper looks to another alternative, one based in misunderstandings at the Macy conferences themselves. In practice and in discourse, Mead and Bateson held very different ideas about what “information” could mean—ideas diverging from the “command and control” model that would predominate. Despite those differences, though, the Macy conferees could communicate with one another and even plan projects together. This is their model of information—communication without reduction and without perfect understanding—interfacing rather than dominating. Anticipating the work of British cyberneticist Gordon Pask, this model of anthropological cybernetics opens the possibility of a communicative informatics without control, where interaction can develop without reduction and understanding without domination.
The Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) were borne on the a crest of Unity of Science discourse in the United States, and sought to bring together the social sciences with the physical and material sciences through the development of a “new lingua franca” where, as Kline writes, a “universal language of information, feedback, and homeostasis” could “model all organisms from the level of the cell to that of society” (Kline 2020: 13). The meetings were remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the active participation of the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. It was one moment where anthropologists would speak as equals to their hard science counterparts in a nationally prominent forum. That was the promise of cybernetics for anthropology–a place at the table to shape the direction of scientific and technological development in the age of American empire.
However, in all these endeavors, cybernetics failed. After percolating through multiple disciplines and through popular culture, cybernetics–perhaps, as Geoffrey Bowker has termed it, through a process of “legitimacy exchange”--lost currency as scientific discourse (Bowker 1993). By the 1980s, very little in the sciences and social sciences was being produced under the auspices of cybernetics, and most new research (along with this paper) represents historical analysis rather than new applications of, as Wiener called it, the “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine” (Wiener 1948). In anthropology, there was very little mention of cybernetic theory in anthropological work after the 1970s, even as anthropologists began to turn to considering the digital life of the cyborg.
And yet, there’s also ample evidence that cybernetics succeeded–too well, as it turns out. All of the ideas that catalyzed the Macy Conferences: game theory (von Neumann), neural nets feedback and circular causality (Wiener, Rosenbluth and Bigelow) and information as a ratio of signal to noise (Shannon)–have led to the triumph of the virtual and reduction of the world to digital flows of variously commodified information. In no small part, we can credit the Macy Conferences for a world where teaching is reduced to the digital delivery of content, a world where AI agents proliferate in our lives, threaten our careers and prompt our constant “Turing suspicions” that the people with whom we digitally interact may be artificial agents instead. As Bateson suggested later, “cybernetics” has taken on the association of “control” at the expense of communication (Bateson 1991). It has become the blueprint of our digital domination; whoever controls the information controls the world.
And it was successful in another, more covert sense. Geoghegan’s recent book, Code, eloquently follows the break-up the Macy Conferences into its constituent disciplines, with the triumph of information leading anthropologists down a road to semiotics and structuralism, while circular feedback underlies the continued popularity of Cognitive behavioral therapy (Geoghegan 2022). As a potent, generative metaphor, “code” has structured the ways we relate to the world and each other, but in ways that have ironically widened the gulf between disciplines.
There were, of course, alternatives expressed at the Macy Conferences. As many theorists (including Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, Franciso Varela and others) have noted, second order cybernetics grows out of the unanswered questions about the role of the observer in the system, while Hayles (1999) looks to Donald MacKay’s more embodied understanding of information as an anodyne to the digital’s hostility to the physical world of nature and bodies.
Yet, despite Mead’s and Bateson’s prominence in the Macy conferences and to cybernetics in general, there has been little explicitly anthropological about the ways our digital lives have developed, even as anthropology has turned to the study of those lives as objects of our research. But it’s not for lack of trying. The Macy Conferences transcripts (however spotty and incomplete) show Mead and Bateson engaging in the work of the anthropological gadfly–tempering the strident parochialism of the Macy attendees with exceptions drawn from the anthropological record. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s universalist proclamations on the role of the unconscious, “If you look at some other cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias 2016: 426). But the exception rarely derails the Mcy conferees who are, after all, busily re-mapping the world in the context of the post-War US empire. So while Mead and Bateson contributed commentary, central ideas (neural nets, information as signal) escaped the Macy conferences as universals unhindered by ethnographic exception.
Nevertheless, there are unacknowledged anthropological contributions, and this paper concerns one of them: the role of misunderstanding. At first glance, this is not a very promising alternative–it seems antithetical to the whole point of the conferences, after all. The lingua franca of circular information, circular causality and neural nets was supposed to unify knowledge by describing universal processes as characteristic of chemical reactions as they were of human culture. And yet there were many misunderstandings. For example, Ralph Gerard was, reportedly, “intensely frustrated by the perpetual tangents to tangents that developed during a meeting and the rare satisfaction of intellectual closure and completion of any line of thought or argument” (quoted in Hayles 1999: 73). For their part, Mead and Bateson pilloried the obstinacy of their fellow conferees in a 1976 interview with Steward Brand: “”So we used the mode “feedback,” and Kurt Lewin–who didn’t understand any known human language, but always had to reduce them to concepts–he went with the idea of feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and told them later what had happened [ . . . .] So the word ‘feedback’ got introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conference where it’s been ever since” (Brand 1976: 5).
This paper is concerned with something I’m calling misunderstanding - not as the failure of cybernetic communication, but as its precondition. Anthropologists play the role here of not reducing things to her underlying code, but of facilitating interaction between different ideas without introducing a third term. Perhaps re-framing is a better word? After some examples from the Macy Conferences transcripts, the paper develops an alternative model of communication resembling Andrew Pickering’s emphasis on performative ontologies. I preface this by noting that these exchanges are, in many ways, what critics of the Macy Conferences found most irritating: the digressions and non sequiturs of meetings that went frequently off the rails yet were still preserved in transcription. Or, not all: Hayles notes that Teuber blocked publishing the transcriptions of the final meeting in 1953, “noting that the discussions were too rambling and unfocused; if published, he said, they would be an embarrassment” (Hayles 1999: 76). This does not mean, however, that the other transcripts were tightly focused.
Two examples:
In the 1949 Macy Conference, Lawrence Kubie gives his paper, “The Neurotic Potential and Human Adaptation.” Later discussion prompts Kubie to ascribe neurosis to all forms of symbolic communication: “The capacity to communicate by means of language symbols, and the capacity to become neurotic are very close together” (76). Mead, in her capacity as anthropological elder, shifts the conversation to culture and learning processes: “These expectations may be different from another culture which expects another area of behavior to be subject to learning: in any given society the particular acts, the particular behavior in which conscious and therefore flexible learned behavior is to play a given role may vary” (76). Kubie seems unsure of Mead’s point, and reiterates his initial claims, but this seems to only draw out discussion to the possibility that autonomic responses could constitute an unconscious, or that societal expectations for communication constitute what we regard as neurotic. Eventually, a frustrated Kubie continues trying to wrest the conversation back from culture and statistical modeling to the primacy of the psychological. “I am puzzled here because I am not quite sure how this confusion has arisen. Let me retrace my steps for a moment” (80). A bit later, Kubie’s colleague, Henry Brosin, gives him “a chance to catch his breath”--and we can imagine, perhaps, an apoplectic moment for the orthodox Freudian (82).
Another example, following on J.C.R. Licklider’s 1950 paper, “The Manner in Which and the Extent to Which Speech and Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” Licklider’s contribution is really a paper on sound engineering–with multiple graphs illustrating sound clipping and frequency. Wiener brings up the problems of translation between human and machine: “I am considering, for example, the remote-control substations for hydraulic power, where the power dispatcher has to get messages to the machine and where the machine has to inform the power dispatcher about significant facts. Now there again you have the same translation problem. (227)
Mead, however, picks up the question in terms of human communication, and other conferees follow with their own anecdotes. Can people communicate across languages in a related family and across dialects? Her question: “I should like to get back to the question: Is this translation or isn’t it? What is translation?” (237). It is, Mead concludes, “a question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however, would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one person is not translation for another” (237). Other examples follow, turning to physiology, to psychology, to hypnosis, speech pathology, etc. Finally, with a series of anecdotes about memorizing strings of characters through song, discussion ends–some distance from the sound engineering where it began.
Discussion
Anyone who has been to an academic conference will recognize these in these transcripts characteristic verbal interactions: questions that are really comments, critiques that are little more than self-aggrandizement. What makes them different here is their relationship to the goals of the Macy Conferences. Each of the concepts that fuels these cybernetic meetings–neural nets, feedback and information–is taken up again and again by conferees, where conversation spins them into unexpected and occasionally refractory directions. Attendees are talking, but they are not moving towards a consensus. This would be a searing critique of the Macy Conferences, if, indeed, the point was to create consensus. But if achieving consensual understanding was not the point, than what was?
A later example: the second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation called the “Colloquy of Mobiles” involving five robots (two “male” and three “female”) rotating towards each other on the bases of lights and sounds. What marks this off from other cybernetic machines, though, is its performative dimension. Pask meant for humans to interact with the Colloquy. As he wrote, “the mobiles produce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interactions. They cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask 1971, quoted in Pickering 2010: 359-360). Eventually, human visitors to the Colloquy began using small mirrors to reflect lights back to robots in order to evoke a response. Not “communicating” with the machines in the sense of a shared message but interacting with the Colloquy in order to produce light and sounds that the human visitors found pleasing.
Was the purpose of the Macy Conferences to reduce the world to processes of information and circular feedback? Or were there other more interactive and less dominating alternatives?
Another moment in the conferences, this one in the wake of Bateson’s 1952 paper, “The Position of Humor in Human Communication.” By now, random asides are no strangers to these proceedings, and many of the conferees take a moment to tell their own bad jokes. John Bowman then suggests that humor could be produced in a machine using a simple circuit: “A circuit of that type may have two stable states. If it is put in any state, it will asymptotically approach one of the two stable states and stay there. On the other hand, with the same components in slightly different values of the circuit constants, it can oscillate” (548). To which Bateson replies: “I am always prepared to say that an electronic buzzer is laughing” (548).
Does Bateson mean that both circuit and the human are laughing? Is he suggesting that laughter is nothing but the oscillation of circuits? Or that it is the confusion of signals resisting homeostasis? One of the legacies of the Macy Conferences has been precisely that: the reduction of physical to the information that lies beneath. This is also, as Geoghegan notes, the underlying mechanism in the reduction of social and cultural life to its semiotic exchange. There are, however, other possibilities. What if the “laughter” in the person and the “laughter” in the circuit weren’t equivalent, after all? And what if the oscillation in the circuit was not the oscillation in the neural stimulus? What if that was just something we were calling laughter and oscillation in order to create an interactive bridge between two dissimilar systems? This is certainly more likely than Bateson becoming a reductive materialist, and moreover anticipates the work of Gordon Pask and other second-order cyberneticists.
Figure 1
(Figure 1: Shows two systems interacting without a) dominating each other; or b) being subsumed under a third term)
This sense of cybernetics acknowledges a world that is not reducible to defined quanta, yet one in which we very much need to interact in order to live. And this is the world of the Macy conferences, where conferees, perhaps, have little to show for their efforts after 10 years of meetings and endless conversations. And yet they still had those 10 years and endless conversations, despite their intractable differences between their disciplinary homes. In what Mead later summarized–rather unhelpfully– as ”microevoltuion,” “The conversation would come to an end and be resumed. There would be freedom to talk and freedom to listen, and the web of meaning would be woven as we talked, making a new pattern before our eyes” (Mead 1964: 301).
In other words, this cybernetics as a means of interaction across difference–however defined. As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world that one cannot push around in that way” (Pickering 2010: 383).
At present, we are living in just such a world, one where countless nonhuman and multiagent systems seem to go their own way despite our efforts. Those agents may be variously intelligent. With generative AI, we have agents that simulate human conversation, so it is easy for people to (mis)understand their agency. Most algorithms, however, toil in the background, running checks on our job applications, checking purchases against credit history, touching up photographs. Yet in all cases, it is not so easy to understand how multiagent systems make decisions. Large language models, for example, are unable to tell us which sources they’ve consulted in their replies, and text-to-mage generation has notoriously surreal moments. We may describe those systems according to a number of anthropomorphic metaphors, and, similarly, ascribe any number of information processing functions to ourselves in return. But, to be clear, neither of these is an accurate representation.
This is the world we live in now, but it is not a “post-human” one in the sense of a reduction of human life to manipulable flows of data. Instead, we find ourselves enmeshed in interactive systems that can’t be reduced to information quanta–even if powerful organizations strive to do so. Amidst these heterogeneous systems, communication may be an impossibility; instead, coordination may be the optimal outcome. The basis of that coordination is the questions: who defines the field for interaction? Will everything be subtended to profit? State surveillance?
On the other hand, we might strive towards making these systems explicable and more predictable, more interactive, more responsive and more grounded in the experiences of diverse communities: “Explainable artificial intelligence.” “community robotics,” community-based design. Anthropologists are uniquely poised to consider these networks of humans and non-humans as they interact together to create their world. They are also uniquely positioned to insist that non-human agents need not only serve the whims of capital, and that rejecting information as “command and control” means opening up recombinatory possibilities.
More than this, what does it mean to interact with the multiagency around us as an equal partner? What does it mean to describe the give-and-take of a horizontality in cybernetics?
References
Bateson, Gregory (1991). A Sacred Unity. NY: HarperCollins.
Bowker, Geof (1993). “How to be Universal.” Social Studies of Science 23: 107-127.
Brand, Stewart (1976). “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer): 32-44.
Hayles, N. Katharine (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kilne, Ronald (2020). “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33(1): 12-35.
Pias, Claus, ed. (2016). Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. NY: diaphanes.
Pickering, Andrew (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wiener, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.