FEEDBACK AND CYBERNETICS: REIMAGING THE BODY IN THE AGE OF THE CYBORG

David Tomas

Words have frightening power. Colin Cherry

The cyborg or "cybernetic organism" represents a radical vision of what it means to be human in the western world in the late the twentieth century. 1 Although the word has an official history that dates from 1964, when it was coined to describe a special union of human organism and machine system, over the last decade it has gained a certain notoriety in both popular film culture and specialized academic circles. A cursory inventory of recent cyborg images include those presented in popular science fiction films such as the Terminator series (1984, 1991), the Robocop series (1987, 1 990), and the British cult classic Hardware ( 1990). While these films present images of a variety of powerful cyborgs that operate in dystopic futuristic military/industrial worlds, more benign protocyborg models of a less imaginary but no less militarized form are to be found prefigured in the kinds of revisions of masculinity that were explored, in the case of

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on "Body Images, Language & Physical Boundaries," University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, in July 1993.

53 54 David Tomas the American space programme's shift in emphasis from test pilot to astronaut, in Tom Wolfe's 1980 bestseller The Right Stuff, and the film of the same name. On the other hand, alternative cyborg forms have been explored, from a more cloistered academic viewpoint, in "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, " 2 Donna Haraway's seminal 1985 meditation on oppositional uses of the cyborg concept. Although the success of cyborg-based films and the influence of Haraway's cyborg manifesto suggest that the word "cyborg" functioned, in one form or another, in the 1980s as a keyword in Raymond William's sense of "significant binding words in certain activities and their interpretation" as well as "significant, indicative words in certain forms of thought" 3 there were a number of other words that paved the way for its particular hybrid mode of reimaging the human body under the sign of the machine. These words, some of which have existed for decades, others for a number of centuries, include "automaton," "automation" and "automatic," "android," and "robot;" while others like "bionic" appeared at about the same time cyborg was coined. Lately we have been introduced to another word, cyberspace, also known as virtual reality, which has also begun to circulate in popular discourses on the future of the human body, often in the company of the word "cyborg" or its images. Whether in the guise of "cyberspace," a word first coined by William Gibson in his award winning science

2 "A Manifesto For Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 80 (1985) 65-107. Reprinted as Chapter 8 in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

3 For an extended discussion of this practice see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Flamingo, 1983) 15, 22-25. Feedback and Cybernetics 55 fiction novel Neuromancer ( 1984), or in the form of "virtual reality," the idea of a new mode of articulating and, indeed, of reimaging the human body has been explored in novels, including Gibson's own Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive ( 1988), films (such as Brainstorm ( 1983) and Lawnmower Man (1992), as well as in a host of academic and popular texts. 4 It is not hard to imagine, therefore, that words such as automaton, automation, automatic, android, robot, bionic, cyborg, and cyberspace might constitute a Williamsian "cluster" of keywords inasmuch as they form a "set of ... interrelated words and references" 5 that plot an ever-changing threshold in the history of the human body between conceptions of the organic and inorganic, the body and technology, the human and non-human. The appearance of each word and idea seems to mark a new threshold in the perception and social construction of the human body. Beyond these thresholds, there existed and exists other histories of the body, of the human, indeed of humanness and humanity itself. But the words I have just mentioned plot

4 A recent sampling would include the 1991 collection of texts in Catherine Richards, Mary Anne Moser, and Neil Tenhaaf, eds., Bioapparatus (Banff: The Banff Centre for the Arts); Ann Lasko-Harvill, "Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality," Discourse 14, no.2 (1992): 221-34; Anne Balsamo "The Virtual Body in Cyberspace," Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (1993): 119-39; Allucquere Roseanne Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures," in Michael Benedikt, ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 81-118; Stone, "Virtual Systems," in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, eds., Incorporations, Zone 6 (New York: Zone, 1993), 609-21. Balsamo, "The Virtual Body," 135, note 13, contains a list of recent publications in the popular press devoted to virtual reality.

5Williams, Keywords, 22. 56 David Tomas the possibi/ity,6 the dream one might say, of the creation of a completely new kind of human body which might exist beyond the boundaries of flesh, blood, and bone. Indeed, this body's new location can perhaps be discerned in the effects of a simple yet profound reversal in the traditional relations between the human organism and machines. Instead of treating an organism as a machine, the latter can now "be considered as organs of the human species. " 7 There are two principal ways to explore this dream of a new kind of body in the late-twentieth century. The first is through the word cybernetics which was coined in 1947. The human body's reconceptualization can, in this case, be traced through the reasons for the choice of this particular word, its attributed meaning(s), and, finally, its evocative power(s) as an analogical tool. However, in order to appreciate the radical nature of cybernetic's propositions concerning the human body/machine interface, one must situate it in the context of an earlier word, the word automaton, which had previously served as the principal locale for western speculations on the human organism/machine interface. Hence, I will begin with a brief discussion of this word and the domain to which it serves as the key. The second way to explore the human body's reconceptualization is to trace cybernetics' subsequent history and in particular its impact on how researchers reimaged the human/machine interface in the early 1960s when term cyborg was introduced. From there, one can trace the reverberations of cybernetic's initial impact as word and "universal" discipline to the mid-to-late 1980s and

6 1n this connection, I stress my use of the word "possibility" since at each stage exclusions are as important as inclusions in the ongoing construction of actual and possible histories.

7Georges Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism," in Crary and Kwinter, Incorporations (1993): 55; emphasis in the original. Feedback and Cybernetics 57

Haraway's socialist-feminist oppositional cyborg. 8 Finally, there is the question of virtual reality technology or cyberspace which must be addressed, however briefly, since it represents the most recent and perhaps quintessential of cyborg interfaces between organic (human) and machine systems. The route that I propose to follow is, however, a tentative and exploratory one inasmuch as I will not attempt to address the nuances of a each word's particular "networks of usage, reference, and perspective" 9 in any detail. Instead, I propose to examine how cybernetic and cyborg and the new discipline of cybernetics were able to facilitate a new synthesis between the world of the human organism and the world of machines. In particular, I will focus on the concept of feedback which I will suggest has functioned, in the case of cybernetics, to bind time and space according to a new chronotopic logic which, insofar as it was also imbedded in cybernetic's semantic logic, could pave the way for, and can therefore also account for the development or manufacture of a new kind of post-organic body: virtual reality's digital body.

Preamble to a Cybernetic Cluster: The Automaton

Until the nineteenth century, one of the most powerful metaphors to mediate between the natural world, the human body, and the world of machines was the automaton. Recent historians of technology have suggested that it operated as a central metaphor in the development of western modernity in the sense that it functioned, in one guise or another (copies of human and animal forms, clocks and watches, automatic

8 Geof Bowker, "How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-70," Social Studies in Science 23 ( 1993): 107-26.

9 Williams, Keywords, 23. 58 David Tomas machinery), as a bridging term between conceptual domains. 10 The clock, in particular, because of its ordered and apparently self-regulated internal mechanism which effectively linked celestial and terrestrial events, provided an ideal model of an automaton as well as serving as an apt metaphor to link philosophical traditions, concepts of the natural world (including new ways of picturing the human body's internal organization and mimicking its moving parts), new concepts of social order, new understandings of the idea of system and types of political systems, as well as mechanical practices (clock and instrument making) .11 Indeed, automata in the form of clocks12 could have provided one of the key transitional metaphors between the premodern and modern worlds since they served as the model for an order and rationality that was seen to extend from the cosmos, through the time of day and night, to the

10Derek J De Solla Price, "Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy," Technology and Culture 5 ( 1964): 9-23; Silvio A Bedini, "The Role of Automata in the History of Technology," Technology and Culture 5 ( 1964): 24-42; Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Jean­ Claude Beaune, "The Classical Age of Automata: An Impressionistic Survey from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century," in Michael Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, (New York: Zone, 1989): 431-80.

11 Price, "Automata and the Origins," 9-23; Mayr, Authority.

120tto Mayr notes that clock automata fell into two categories: "astronomical clocks that attempted to reproduce, as comprehensively and precisely as possible, the motions of the heavenly bodies and figure clocks that imitated, often accompanied by mechanical music, the actions of living beings." Mayr, Authority, 21, emphases in the original. Feedback and Cybernetics 59 internal architecture of organic bodies. Moreover, they could, in their capacity to demonstrate "how magical effects could be achieved by clever rr.achinery of metal and wood," also influence or even change "the mental habits of their viewers" and in doing so they would have served as "mediators between the worlds of magic and rationality." 13 And as Otto Mayr goes on to suggest, it is perhaps through this kind of gradual process of mediation that people might have "learned how to account for unfamiliar phenomena;" instead of "resorting to the supernatural ... they learned how to connect causes and effects into extensive, characteristically linear cause-and-effect chains." In functioning as mediators "clocks, in short, helped to teach Europeans how to think "mechanically." The clock could, by serving as a means to coordinate "the activities of increasingly complex communities" and by serving as a clear mechanical representation of the known universe, also function as a "repository of information, a teaching tool, an astrological accessory" and perhaps also as an astronomical instrument. Finally, a clock, in the guise of an automaton, could provide entertainment as repository of supernatural effects. 14 However, clocks could accomplish much more since they mapped the world by reducing time to space, cosmic patterns to the motions of mechanical models, and the rhythms of day and night to the movement of a hand over the surface of a dial, while, on the other hand, their mechanical structures provided "a living "encyclopedia" of the different mechanical pieces and of the machine parts available at the time. " 15 Mayr was, therefore, no doubt right to suggest that "the mechanical clock was a creative achievement of high intellectual rank" and, moreover, that "nothing of comparable ingenuity had ever been invented before, and up to the advent of the steam engine, it

13Mayr, Authority, 26.

141bid., 16.

158eaune, "The Classical Age of Automata," 435. 60 David Tomas remained Europe's intellectually most demanding mechanism. " 16 On the other hand, the clock metaphor appears to have suffered different political fates in continental Europe and England. While this instrument served as a convenient model for hierarchic systems of authority in Europe, by the eighteenth century it was increasingly superseded in England by a series of other more abstract concepts such as "balance of power," "checks and balances," "balanced government," "balance of trade" which embodied, in one way or another, the notion of a self-regulating system. Mayr traced these concepts' fate in politics, economics, liberal conceptions of order, and finally, in relation to practical technology. While he had no hesitation in claiming that "the authoritarian conception of order was directly and patently shaped by society's experience with the mechanical clock, " 17 he was more cautious in ascribing a similar role to self-regulating systems or "feedback mechanisms" since he could not find a direct metaphoric link between a quintessential symbol of a self-regulating system, the steam engine governor, and "literary-philosophical uses of the concept of self-regulation" in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 18 Consequently, he was careful to not to impute a direct connection between the concept of a self- regulating system, which he considered to be "a subtle and abstract notion," 19 and more concrete embodiments of the principle of self-regulation: feedback mechanisms. He did, however, venture so far as to note that their introduction was "in curious agreement with the other results of this study" which led him to propose that "the acceptance of self-regulation into technology was closely contemporaneous with its introduction into social, political,

16Mayr, Authority, 27.

171bid., 197.

181bid., 195.

19lbid., 155. Feedback and Cybernetics 61 and economic thought." And he concluded that "the role of Britain was as prominent in the one process as in the other. " 20 The automaton as model for political systems of authority, as ideal working representation of the organic architecture of living systems, indeed, the automaton as mechanical interface and mechanized metaphor for European systems of authority, organic and cosmic architectures seems to have been eclipsed in the nineteenth century in favour of more abstract and invisible notions of self-regulation which appeared in tandem with the Industrial Revolution. However, one has only to turn to automaton's etymological roots and from there to the concept of automation to trace its influence in another more powerful and less obviously anthropomorphic direction. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, Andrew Ure published his authoritative Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines (1839). It contained an extensive five page entry on "Automaton" most of which was taken up by detailed descriptions of the mechanics of particular automata. However, his introductory comments revealed a subtle yet important shift in automata's meaning - a shift which can be traced directly to the impact of the Industrial Revolution and its organization of machine systems:

In the etymological sense, this word (self-working) signifies every mechanical construction which, by virtue of a latent intrinsic force, not obvious to common eyes, can carry on, for some time, certain movements more or less resembling the results of animal exertion, with-out the aid of external impulse. In this respect, all kinds of clocks and watches, planetariums, common and smoke jacks, with a vast number of the machines now employed in our cotton, silk, flax, and wool factories, as well as in our dyeing and calico printing works, may be denominated automatic.

20Mayr, Authority, 195. 62 David Tomas

In contrast to these less obvious, if more pervasive, manifestations of "self-working" systems, Ure described another more popular form for such a system in "that class of mechanical artifices in which the purposely concealed power is made to imitate the arbitrary or voluntary motions of living beings." He noted that such artifices, when in human form, were "sometimes styled Androides, from the Greek term, like a man. " 21 Later in his entry, Ure made an interesting observation in connection with these anthropomorphized autonoma: "Very complete automata have not been made of late years, because they are very expensive; and by soon satisfying curiosity, they cease to interest" and he continued, "ingenious mechanicians find themselves better rewarded by directing their talents to the self-acting machinery of modern manufactures. " 22 However, the full meaning of this shift in focus from automata to automatic machinery must be sought else-where, in his previous entry on Automatic.

AUTOMATIC, a term which I have employed to designate such economic arts as are carried on by self-acting machinery. The word "manufacture," in its etymological sense, means any system, or objects of industry, executed by the hands; but in the vicissitudes of language, it has now come to signify every extensive product of art which is made by machinery, with little or no aid of the human hand, so that the most perfect manufacture is that which dispenses entirely with manual labour. It is in our modern cotton and flax mills that automatic operations are displayed to the most advantage; for there the elemental powers have been made to animate millions of complex organs, infusing into

21 Andrew Ure, A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines: Containing a Clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, & Long mans, 1839), 77.

221bid. Feedback and Cybernetics 63

forms of wood, iron, and brass, an intelligent agency. 23

Ure went on to argue that "the constant aim and effect of these automatic improvements in the arts are philanthropic, as they tend to relieve the workman either from niceties of adjustment, which exhaust his mind and fatigue his eyes, or from the painful repetition of effort, which distort and wear out his frame." Indeed, the advantages of this process of automatization was two-fold since he also noted:

How vastly conducive to the commercial greatness of a nation, and the comforts of mankind, human industry can become, when no longer proportioned in its results to muscular effort, which is by its nature fitful and capricious, but when made to consist in the task of guiding the work of mechanical fingers and arms regularly impelled, with equal precision and velocity, by some indefatigable physical agent, is apparent to every visitor of our cotton, flax, silk, wool, and machine factories. " 24

Ure's description of the substitution of human motive force with mechanical force, his anthropomorphization of self-acting machinery, and his framing of these changes in terms of regularity, precision, and velocity, registers a profound shift in the notion of the automaton. If the "fitful and capricious" power of the human body was replaced "by some indefatigable physical agent" which was endowed with an intelligence then where was the location for its regulatory power to be found? Until the late-eighteenth century the automaton's influence in important sectors of society was prodigious in the sense that it linked clocks, astronomical models or planetary machines, philosophical traditions such as

23Ure, A Dictionary, 76.

241bid. 64 David Tomas mechanism or mechanicism,25 social models in the form of concepts of authority and order, and political systems such as liberalism under one all- encompassing metaphor, the clock mechanism, or the more abstract but closely related idea of a self-regulating system. With the introduction of the steam engine in the late-eighteenth century, the automaton appears to have taken a different but nevertheless highly visible, if remarkably abstract, form. As Ure suggests, it came to be embodied in the process of automation itself especially in connection with new factory-based forms of production. Ure's identification of a new form of collective intelligence is of considerable interest, given his subsequent statement about the desirability of assimilating "ingenious mechanicians" into the domain of modern "self-acting machinery," for, ultimately, it took a new conception of the natural world and a new science to understand automation and automatic machinery's fundamental properties and these developments led, through a somewhat different route, to a radically new kind of automaton which owed as much of its existence to automatic machinery as it did to esoteric laws of nature. That automaton was, of course, the cybernetic organism. The route to the cybernetic organism was inaugurated through a transformation in the automaton which tied in with Ure's notion of industrial automation and Charles Babbage's famous computing machine on the one hand, and the steam engine and nineteenth-century concepts of energy on the other hand. Arnson Rabinbach has pointed to the automaton's role in an important nineteenth-century reconceptualization of the body "as a thermodynamic machine." "Especially striking," in this connection, "is that work became a universal concept, the conversion of energy into use." Indeed, Rabinbach argues, "thermodynamics decisively altered the concept of labor, at once modernizing it according to the precepts of industrial technology and

25Price, "Automata and the Origins," 10. Feedback and Cybernetics 65 naturalizing it in accord with new laws of physics. "26 In doing so, it also "transformed the image of the body into that of a working machine, distinct from the animal and human machines envisioned by Hobbes and Descartes." 27 At the core of this new image was the first law of thermodynamics which linked natural and social worlds together under the common principle of the conservation of energy. Whereas the "automony" of a classical automaton was always subject to the paradoxical necessity of the intervention of an external agent (God, the watchmaker etc.), the new automaton was conceived as a "motor ... regulated by internal, dynamic principles, converting fuel into heat, and heat into mechanical work. " 28 This distinction was replicated in the perceived differences between the older and newer forms of automaton. On the one hand, the classical automaton was a machine which could more or less function as a "showcase for the analogic thinking of the (classical) age"; and on the other hand, as Ure was at pains to point out, newer automata were conceived as forms of self-acting machinery that functioned according to "some indefatigable physical agent" whose actions were synonymous with those of industrial manufacture and a fundamental law of nature. If the clock had previously served to link cosmos to human body according to a series of mechanical analogies, then thermodynamics, in the form of the steam engine, eclipsed its powers of synthesis. In its place, one finds a universal steam engine whose powers of synthesis resided in the fact that it could be used to connect body and cosmos in

26Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 46 - 4 7.

271bid., 51.

281bid. 66 David Tomas

"a single and unbroken chain of energy. " 29 This synthesis was, moreover, powerful enough to impregnate the lacuna of "life" which had plagued the classic automaton with a new indestructible motive force. Indeed, organic and inorganic could now be linked by energy and work (labour power) in a common universe which was conceived as "a vast productive machine," a "theoretical "automata" ... modeled on a single powerful dynamo," powered by a steam engine, which could compensate for "the dream of perpetual motion by eliminating its raison d'etre. " 30 By 1900, the dynamo had become, for some, "a symbol of infinity," of "ultimate energy," while the steam engine had receded into "a dirty engine-house. " 31 One working model of the cosmos was thus replaced by another as "the metaphor of the machine underwent a change from that of a clockwork composed of diverse parts to that of a modern motor modeled on a steam engine or electric-powered technology. " 32 A new world-view was unveiled, "a new order of modernity" appeared as a Newtonian universe of "fixed mechanical relations" was supplanted by a thermodynamic universe. On the other hand, it was precisely this metaphor, as opposed to the "machine itself - the automata - [which was) anthropomorphized" as all energy was subsumed under the form of "labor power. " 33

29Rabinbach, Human Motor, 52.

301bid., 59.

31 Henry Adams, "The Dynamo and the Virgin," in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston and New York: Riverside Press, 1927), 380.

32 Rabinbach, Human Motor, 66.

331bid., 61, 62. Feedback and Cybernetics 67

Early definitions34 suggest that an automaton was

34See, for example the following selection of early English language definitions: 1676: Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary Autome, - maton, an instrument moving of itself. 1708: John Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum Automaton, (in mechan.) - an Engine or Instrument that goes by a Vice, Spring, Screw, or Weight; any piece of Art that seems to move of itself; as a clock, watch, & c. 1728: N. Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (third edition) Automaton (Automate F. a self-moving Instrument; as a clock, Watch, & c. Automatous Self-moving, or that which seems to Automatical have a Motion within itself 1757: James Buchanan, Linguae Britannicae Vera Pronunciatio Automaton, such instruments as seem to have self motion, as a clock, & c. 1775: Thomas Spence, The Grand Repsotory of the English Language Automaton, a machine that hath the power of motion within itself; a clock or watch 1791: John Walker, A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary Automaton, A machine that hath the power of motion within itself. Automatous, Having in itself the power of motion. 1812: James Barclay, A Complete and Universal Dictionary of the English Language Automaton, (from autos himself, and maomai to be excited, Gr.) in mechanics, an engine which has the principle of motion in itself. Automatous (automatos, Gr.) that has the power of motion in itself. Androides, an automaton, or the figure of a man, which by virute of certain springs, performs the actions of a man. The word is compounded of aner, a man, and eidos from Gr.). 68 David Tomas considered to be a principle (of self-motion) as well as a physical thing. When it took a distinctly anthropomorphic shape, the automaton was subsumed in the subcategory of android or, later, in the category of robot. On the other hand, when it became generalized in terms of a whole system of production composed of "self-acting" or "self-working" 35 machine complexes, the perfect embodiment of a notion of self-regulation is to be found in the steam engine's governor. At a more concrete, but no less significant, level, clocks and automatic machinery provided the living metaphors, in different epochs, for new concepts of order and relationships between bodies and, in the case of automatic machinery, they also became the visual embodiment of a new metaphor of work and energy: "the human motor." 36 Michel Serres' argument concerning Turner and thermodynamics is also applicable to the new nineteenth­ century automata, in the sense that the shift from classic automata (both clocks and androids) to automatic machinery represented a move from "geometry to matter[,]

1828: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language Automaton In the plural automata. A machine that hath the power of motion within itself. 1832: Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language Automaton - A machine that hath the power of motion within itself, and which stands in need of no foreign assistance. Autonomous - Having in itself the power of motion ie. clocks, "or autonomous organs" 1844: Charles Richardson, Richardson's New English Dictionary Automaton That which has the power of spontaneous motion.

35Ure, A Dictionary, 76-77.

36Rabinbach, Human Motor. Feedback and Cybernetics 69 representation to work. " 37 One can also trace the effect of this shift in an automaton's mode of production. Historians of technology have noted the connection between automata, the crafts of clockmaker and instrument maker, and the role of the latter in providing the technical skill that was necessary to produce the kinds of tools and machines upon which the Industrial Revolution was founded.38 Hence it is not surprising that in place of an individual craft-based object, the product of the combined arts of the clockmaker and instrument maker, one finds an automaton which is on the same footing as other manufactured products - which, in fact, was the precondition for their manufacture. Perhaps one of the clearest affirmations of this new relationship is to be found in the words of Harry Domain, General Manager of Rossum's Universal Robots in Karel Capek's classic 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots): "to manufacture artificial workers is the same thing as to manufacture motors. " 39 However, this transformation also engendered a new condition of instability since it introduced the concept of entropy into the physical and social worlds: "as entropy revealed the loss of energy involved in any transfer of force, so fatigue revealed the loss of energy in the conversion of Kraft (or energy) to socially useful production." However, since "energy was the transcendental, 'objective force' in

37 Michel Serres, "Turner Translates Carnot," in Josue V Harari and David F Bell, eds., Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), 62.

38Price, "Automata and the Origins," 19; Bedini, "The Role of Automata," 32.

39Kari Capek, R. U.R. and the Insect Play by the Brothers Capek, trans. Paul Seiver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 9. This play first introduced the word robot, from robotit, to drudge, into the English language in 1923. Capek's robots were perhaps the first embodiment of the classic mimetic automaton conceived as pure labour power. 70 David Tomas nature, fatigue became the objective nemesis of a society founded on labor power. " 40 Thus, fatigue became the primary social measure of this universal instability and, as such, the principal criterion of distinction between the human motor and machines, human work and machine work. Hence, from this vantage point, it is perhaps not surprising that the twentieth century should be haunted to the extent that it is by the figures of robots, androids, and cyborgs, figures whose super-humanness is defined precisely by their ability to transcend the human body's natural limitations from within its immediate frame of reference. If one were to speculate as to the form that a key symbol for Ure's "indefatigable physical agent" might take in its capacity to represent the transformation of organic fatigue into perpetual energy, could it not be found in the simple shape of a steam engine's governor? For the body's new form, the question of the nineteenth-century automaton's motive power, its automony, can also be articulated in terms of this control mechanism a mechanism which functioned as the self-regulating intelligence of the Industrial Revolution since it was, in its various forms, the prime method of controlling the speed of steam engines, the principal instruments for the replacement of human labour. In other words, the rapidly rotating weights which were conspicuously mounted over a steam engine were at once specific control mechanisms and prominent visual signs of an abstract principle, self-regulation, which invisibly linked science, economics, and politics, as well as mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, and electrical systems in technology. 41 In addition, the steam engine's governor served as the visual proof that the world of industry had successfully harnessed a thermodynamic universe. It was, as such, a worthy successor to early modern clocks, both from the point of view of its powers, symbolic density, relative ubiquity and, most importantly, its functions of temporal

40Rabinbach, Human Motor, 68.

41 0tto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 2. Feedback and Cybernetics 71 control - although, of course, it was positioned differently in the social fabric of a given culture inasmuch as it was absorbed into an industrial landscape composed of prime movers and factory systems.

Identity into Pattern: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, and the Twentieth Century Automaton

Jean-Claude Beaune provides a useful overview of different phases in the development of classical automata. The first phase in Beaune's periodization is represented by the mythical automaton which "maintains a relationship with the cosmos, with the totality of things;" the second by the mechanistic automaton which represents "an attempt to dissect and copy the human body and the body of other living creatures;" the third phase by the mechanical automaton which "groups together concentrations of machines, workshops and factories, in accordance with very inflexible rules;" the fourth by the cybernetic and computing automaton with its links to "neomachines endowed with at least a semiautonomous intelligence or the ability to adapt, making it equivalent to a new kind of living creature;" and, finally, the fifth phase is represented by synthetic "live matter. "42 Beaune' s periodization is shared by one of the founding figures of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, whose own historical overview is, however, structured somewhat differently since it highlights motive force as opposed to cultural/mechanical interfaces. Thus, according to Wiener, the age of clocks (clockwork) was followed by the age of the steam engine ("a glorified heat engine") which was then succeeded by the age of communications and control whose modus operandi was marked by a shift from power engineering to communications engineering, from, in other words, an "economy of energy"

42Beaune, "The Classical Age," 433-434, emphasis in the original. 72 David Tomas to an economy rooted in "the accurate reproduction of a signal. "43 For Wiener, writing in the late 1940s, the "newer study of automata, whether in metal or in the flesh, [was] a branch of communication engineering, and its cardinal notions [were] those of message, amount of disturbance or 'noise' .. . quantity of information, coding technique, and so on." He went on to argue, "in such a theory, we deal with automata effectively coupled to the external world, not merely by their energy flow, their metabolism, but also by a flow of impressions, of incoming messages, and of the actions of outgoing messages. " 44 This new way of conceiving of automata was, in theory and practice, governed, as in the case of the steam-engine, by feedback mechanisms, but in this case they took a different form - the servomechanism - which became the new model for this new stage in the history of automata, much as the clock and steam-engine had served as key models for earlier stages. 45 The difference between servomechanisms and the earlier clock or steam engine models did not reside in their operational logic, since the steam engine was also governed by a feedback mechanism, but rather in their ability to penetrate, through a wide variety of forms, the social as

43Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948), 50-51.

44lbid., 54.

45 "The present age is as truly the age of servo­ mechanisms as the nineteenth century was the age of the steam engine or the eighteenth century the age of the clock." Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 55. A servo­ mechanism is a form of automatic feedback control system "in which the motion of an output member . . . is constrained to follow closely the motion of an input member, and in which power amplification is incorporated;" Arthur Porter, Cybernetics Simplified (London: The English Universities Press, 1969), 55. Feedback and Cybernetics 7 3 opposed to the industrial fabric of a nation. Instead of being limited to prime movers such as steam engines, the new servomechanisms were designed for a wide range of applications. These included "thermostats, automatic gyro-compass ship-steering systems, self-propelled missiles - especially such as seek their target - anti-aircraft fire-control systems, automatically controlled oil-cracking stills, ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like. " 46 Although Wiener conceded that "they had begun to be used long before the war - indeed, the very old steam-engine governor belongs among them," he nevertheless pointed out that "the great mechanization of the second world war brought them into their own, and" he prophisized, "the need of handling the extremely dangerous energy of the atom will probably bring them to a still higher point of development. 47 Thus, what feedback and other inventions such as the vacuum tube "made possible [was] not the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms, but a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type." Wiener went on to argue that such developments, in conjunction with a "new theoretical treatment of communication, which takes full cognizance of the possibilities of communication between machine and machine . . . now renders possible the new automatic age. n48 Most importantly, however, cybernetics proposed a completely new vision of the human body, its relationship to the organic world, and the world of machines; and it did so by simultaneously redefining the nature of the machine itself since machines were now able to actually communicate between themselves. A new set of analogies was not only establishing connections through a series of formal correspondences between the human body conceived as a

46Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 55.

471bid.

48Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 153. 74 David Tomas nervous system and the machine conceived as a communicating organism, but it was also automatically linking machine to machine by way of a common communications language. As usual, Wiener gives us a good picture of the power and austere elegance of cybernetic's logic of analogies and its new brand of anthropomorphism when he argued:

While it is impossible to make any universal statements concerning life-imitating automata in a field which is growing as rapidly as that of automatization, there are some general features of these machines as they actually exist that I should like to emphasize. One is that they are machines to perform some definite-task or tasks, and therefore must possess effector organs (analogous to arms and legs in human beings) with which such tasks can be performed. The second point is that they must be en rapport with the outer world by sense organs, such as photoelectric cells and thermometers, which not only tell them what the existing circumstances are, but enable them to record the performance or nonperformance of their own tasks. This last function ... is called feedback, the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of the common reflex, or it may be a higher order feedback, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of behavior. Such a policy-feedback may, and often does, appear to be what we know under one aspect as a conditioned reflex, and under another as learning.

For all these forms of behavior, and particularly for the more complicated ones, we must have the central decision organs which determine what the machine is to do next on the basis of information fed back to it, Feedback and Cybernetics 75

which it stores by means analogous to the memory of a living organism.49

Wiener's cybernetic automaton was, therefore, con­ ceived as an active, hierarchically governed self-regulated and goal-oriented machine which was bound through a particular time/space logic - the adjustment of future conduct through a comparative assessment of past actions - to its environment. Ure's "indefatigable physical agent" had finally been given intelligent expression through a logical and practical set of formal correspondences. These correspondences were used to redefine the problem of life itself in order to bring it in line with the new concept of a cybernetic automaton, and as Wiener had already noted in its connection:

Now that certain analogies of behavior are being observed between the machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic and we are at liberty to answer it one way or another as best suits our convenience. If we wish to use the word "life" to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy, we are at liberty to do so. However, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena which have only the shadiest resemblance to life as we ordinarily know it. 50

Instead, Wiener championed a different and far more radical point of view when he argued that it was "best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as 'life,' 'soul,' 'vitalism,' and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings

49Wiener, Human Use, 32-33.

501bid., 32. 76 David Tomas

in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase." 51 However, the claim to have side-stepped the thorny issue of "life" went well beyond the abstract level at which it was proposed since it implied a new systemic model for the structure of organisms that was in keeping with a demise, in the twentieth century, of a simple mechanistic or taxanomic view of plant or animal organization. In their place, an organism was to be conceived, in the words of one historian, as "a multilevel system of elaborate complexity, buffered in several dimensions so as to maintain its metabolic stability in the face of changes in its environment, and equipped with a repertoire of behaviours to ensure necessary intake of energy, materials, etc." Hence, organisms were structured according to "sophisticated systems of control" with their brains serving as a "top-level co-ordinator." 52 The model of an organism conceived as a nest of control mechanisms was also embraced by cyberneticians. 53 In fact, one might argue that cybernetics operationalized the question of "life" by displacing the concept of organism from biology to engineering and thus effectively transforming it into a hardware problem. Hence, the distance between organic bodies and the world of machines was bridged by a powerful set of analogies which, in turn, engendered a new "organic" concept of the automaton. This automaton was "effectively coupled to the external world, not merely by [its] energy flow, [its] metabolism, but also by a flow of impressions, of incoming messages, and of the actions of outgoing messages;" and, moreover, "the organs by which impressions are received are the equivalents of the human and animal sense-organs. " 54 Thus, according to Wiener,

51 Wiener, Human Use, 32.

52Vernon Pratt, Thinking Machines: The Evolution of Artifical Intelligence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 180.

531bid., 190, 194-96.

54Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 54. Feedback and Cybernetics 77 there existed a functional equivalence, indeed a functional gateway, between organic and machine systems at the level of their sense-organs. Yet another way of grasping the importance of this mutation in the hur,,an organism/machine/automaton relationship is through the fundamental shift in the concept of time that it implied. For example, after noting that "the relation of these mechanisms [the new automata] to time demands careful study," Wiener continued:

It is clear of course that the relation input-output is a consecutive one in time, and involves a definite past-future order. What is perhaps not so clear is that the theory of the sensitive automata is a statistical one. We are scarcely ever interested in the performance of a communication-engineering machine for a single input. To function adequately it must give a satisfactory performance for a whole class of inputs, and this means a statistically satisfactory performance for the class of input which it is statistically expected to receive. Thus its theory belongs to the Gibbsian statistical mechanics rather than to the classical Newtonian mechanics. 55

These observations provided the basis for an important clarification of the relationship between living organisms and the new automatons: "the modern automaton exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism; and hence there is no reason in Bergson's considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type." 56

55Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 55.

561bid., 56. Hence, according to Wiener: "Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism; but as we have said this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of view which has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new mechanics is fully as mechanistic as the old. Whether we 78 David Tomas

As this passage suggests, it was no longer a question of machines functioning as organisms or of organisms func­ tioning as machines. Instead, the machine and organism were to be considered as two parallel states or stages of a common exercise in negentropy. The power of analogy had, in other words, reduced the concept of life to an epiphenomena! effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (negentropy) and, on the other hand, to a common sensory and space/time continuum. More specifically, cybernetics' analogical power was based on the realization that the efficacy of formal analogies resided in one's point of view in regard to mechanical structure. In the words of Colin Cherry, another leading figure in the field of communications theory, "early invention was greatly hampered by [an] inability to disassociate mechanical structure from animal form. " 57 Thus, in the case of the brain, for example, Cherry pointed out, "it is not the machine which is mechanistically analogous to the brain but rather the operation of the machine plus the instructions fed into it." What was at issue, as he noted with approval in connection with Wiener's use of analogies, was a fundamental distinction between mimetic and functional 58 analogies - a distinction which had been sharpened when the "newer study of automata" had been reduced to a

should call the new point of view materialistic is largely a question of words: the ascendancy of matter characterizes a phase of nineteenth-century physics far more than the present age, and 'materialism' has come to be but little more than a loose synonym for 'mechanism.' In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions."

57Colin Cherry, On Human Communication: A Review, A Survey, and A Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 59.

581bid., 57-58, emphasis in the original. Feedback and Cybernetics 79

"branch of communications engineering." 59 Hence, Cherry's objections to popular extensions of the brain/computer analogy with their propensity to encourage "animistic" models and his charges that they obscured and simplified the working of the brain to the extent of generating pseudo-questions such as "can a machine think?" 60 was the product of a particular disciplinary perspective which sought to cleanse scientific practice of anthropomorphic residues. In fact, by the late 1940s confusions arising from competing images of the human body as thinking organism were effectively exorcised through an anti-mimetic shift in the history of automata. Perhaps cybernetics' greatest achievement in this direction was to consummate the transformation which the Industrial Revolution had inaugurated in the case of automatic machinery. The cybernetic automaton was not a mimetic automaton but a functional automaton whose embodiment went well beyond

59Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics," Scientific American 179 (1948): p. 15.

60 As Colin noted, it was not a question of anim1st1c thinking so much as a confusion between "two sides of" a Cartesian mind/body dualism: "Such pseudo-questions can be formed by taking terms from the two sides of this Cartesian dualism - words like machine come from an external-world language, proper for the discussion of overt behavior, physics, physiology, et cetera; and words like think are proper to discussion of cognitive matters. Rather than speak of two worlds, it helps clarify the issue to speak of two languages. Sometimes it is convenient to formulate propositions in one language and sometimes in another. This is not to say that distinguishing between two types of language (overt and cognitive) solves philosophical problems necessarily; rather it helps to clarify argument and avoid pseudo-questions." Cherry, On Human Communication, 246; emphasis in the original. For a discussion of various limitations of the "brain as machine" analogy see ibid., 300-304. 80 David Tomas prime movers and factories to infiltrate into the sinews of the most humble piece of technology which could accommodate a servomechanism. Previously, mimetic automata had provided a bridge for reflection on the nature of the human organism and its identity as a social, political, and cultural being. With the appearance of the cybernetic automaton, the question of identity was tied to the fate of organic nature. In the case of Capek's pre-cybernetic robots, for example, identity was ultimately predicated on modes of representation, on factory marks, colour, and language. In short, it was a question of National & Ethnic Robots. 61 Cybernetics, on the other hand, proposed a radically different solution to the fundamental nature of the human automaton by proposing that its Being be reduced to an organizational pattern whose operational logic might also extend to other organisms and types of machine systems. As Wiener emphasized at the beginning of his penultimate chapter on "Organization as the Message" in The Human Use of Human Beings:

The metaphor to which I devote this chapter is one in which the organism is seen as message. Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.62

Machine and human organism exhibited the signs of life insofar as each managed to increase their level of organization. The process of functional equivalence or analogy would know no bounds since it too was defined in terms of an abstraction: organization (feedback) and pattern

61 Capek, R.U.R., 57.

62Wiener, The Human Use, 95. Feedback and Cybernetics 81

(negentropy) . As an introductory text on cybernetics would later claim: "Feedback is Universal. "63 It was a short step from invoking a functional analogy between machine and human organism to Marshall McLuhan's influential notion of technology being "an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies" which result in "new ratios or equilibriums among the other organs and extensions of the body. " 64 Since it was clearly based on a cybernetic model, McLuhan's notion was a belated acknowledgement of the fact that the human body had already been irrevocably transformed in the context of cybernetics. Even McLuhan's evocation of an extended nervous system65 retains a metaphoric resonance which is lacking in the cybernetic concept of organism as "local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy. " 66 Hence, it is no wonder that by the time these ideas had reached a wider public through McLuhan's writings, consciousness had taken the radical form of a ratio between the senses.67 Wiener's first book, Cybernetic: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, had been published in 1948, and his popular account of cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings, in 1950. These books had already proposed to a general public that the human body be radically reimaged, its identity to become

63Porter, Cybernetics Simplified, 8.

64Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964), 54.

651bid., 64.

66Wiener, The Human Use, 95.

67McLuhan, Understanding Media, 67. 82 David Tomas an organizational singularity and its intelligence simply a pattern amongst many such patterns. 68

Cybernetics: A Word to Bind Space and Time

Communications theory can provide one answer to the question of how words bind space and time in the service of new conceptions of the human and human body. In the first place, it can do so inasmuch as it suggests that human organisms (and human organisms and machine systems) are bound together through an exchange of "signals in time, such as speech or music; and ... signals in space, like print, stone inscriptions, punched cards, and pictures. " 69 But words, written and spoken, can bind time and space, human bodies and machines in other ways. They can, for example, operate on bodies and machines through an etymological dimension which links past and present according to a temporality that has been grounded in a physical (spatial) context through a word's physical and operational uses. In fact, the word "cybernetics" provides a good example of how this dimension can function as a powerful passageway between radically different images of the human organism. The word "cybernetics" was coined in 1947 to describe a union within a common organization of space and time, of disparate fields of technical and scientific investigation - communications theory, control theory, and statistical mechanics - according to a set of disciplinary objectives. Its myth of origins was presented in a famous passage in Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine:

Thus as far back as four years ago [19431, the group of scientists about Dr Rosenblueth and myself had

68 " It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity" Wiener, The Human Use, 96.

69Cherry, On Human Communication, 125; emphases in the original. Feedback and Cybernetics 83

already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems centring about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue. On the other hand, we were seriously hampered by the lack of unity of the literature concerning these problems, and by the absence of any common terminology, or even of a single name for the field. After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should: and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek KUPepvf/Tf]) or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feed-back mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of KuPepvf/Tf}), We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best developed forms of feed-back mechanisms. 70

While Wiener acknowledged that "the term cybernetics does not date further back than the summer of 194 7," he argued that "we shall find it convenient to use in referring to earlier epochs of the development of the field. " 71

70Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 19; emphases in the original.

71 1bid., 19. Although the word had an earlier historical currency, since the word "cybernetique" was used by the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere in 1843 to denote a "science of government" (Ampere, Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, ou exposition analytique d'une classification 84 David Tomas

What Wiener presented in this celebrated passage was the root image of a new universal science whose underlying hierarchy could impose conceptual unity, under the authority of a clear sense of disciplinary identity, on a disparate body of knowledge, texts, and terminology. In the authoritative opening words of Wiener's 1948 Scientific American article on cybernetics: "Cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field in science. " 72 In the first place, Wiener acknowledged a prior awareness of the existence of a common set of problems (communications, control, and statistical mechanics) which were seen as binding two different fields of knowledge: machine systems and living tissue. Secondly, he pointed to the conditions for the formation of an adequate interdisciplinary field to address these problems in a coherent manner. This field, he argued, should consist of a common textual frame (a common body of texts); a common terminological frame of reference; and finally a unique name to unify the field in terms of a common genealogy (Maxwell) and metaphor (the feedback mechanism and its more common image of the steersman). In the third place, Wiener noted that the word's and interdiscipline's time frames were modern, since their original figure was Maxwell, and he pointed, in addition, to an equally common spatial frame which was Western and, moreover, North American. 73 Inasmuch as "cybernetics" was coined to encompass such diverse interdisciplinary facets, its position at the apex of a new science of control and communication was clearly

nature/le de toutes /es connaissances humaines (Paris: Bachelier, 1843), 140-41), Wiener's reintroduction of the term stands as the origin for its contemporary use.

72Wiener, "Cybernetics," 14.

73 "1 am writing this book primarily for Americans in whose environment questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American criterion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market" Wiener, The Human Use, 113. Feedback and Cybernetics 85 the result of a carefully orchestrated etymological exercise. "Cybernetics" was conceived as the embodiment of a coherent notion of space and time, knowledge, and disciplinary identity. It embodied these characteristics insofar as it encompassed a past history, rendered coherent a given set of problems and interrelationships, and projected a future path of development (by way of its etymological roots in the Greek steersman), a path which was ultimately articulated by feedback and its ability to "adjust future conduct by past performance. " 74

74Wiener, The Human Use, 33. See also 26-27: "It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communications machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus." Wiener went on to note that "not only is this complex of behavior ... ignored by the average man, ... [but it] does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself." Communication was thus conceived from a cybernetic point of view to be "the cement which binds" society's "fabric together." 86 David Tomas

But words can also operate in a different register beyond a particular threshold of comprehension, a threshold bridged by such practices as are embodied in Williams's keywords. Words can not only bind or divide, they can reveal a whole parallel world which gives sense to their roles and functions of binding space and time. In the case of cybernetics, this other world was created in a two-fold manner. In the first place, cybernetics' ascribed meaning and etymology could function as both map and vehicle to reproduce and propagate a new interdisciplinary science's universalist world view. Hence twenty years after the publication of Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, one finds on the contents page of a 1 968 special issue of Studio International devoted to the exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, a simple and elegant definition of Wiener's interdisciplinary science: Cybernetic - "adj. of cybernetics - a science of control and communication in complex electronic machines like computers and the human nervous system." It was a definition which, it was later acknowledged was derived from the subtitle to Wiener's first book on cybernetics.75 Both word and definition served as convenient introductions to a new point of view whose all-encompassing powers of vision were displayed for all to see in an exhibition and catalogue, the culminations of a three year project, which encompassed "computers, cybernetics, electronics, music, art, poetry, machines, as well as the problem of how to present this hybrid mixture." The project also chronicled the effects of opening the domain of art to other practices and pract1t1oners such as those of the "engineer, mathematician, or architect" whose products were no longer distinguishable on individual disciplinary grounds.76 The exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" was, as such, a worthy offspring of a cybernetic world-view.

75Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 9.

761bid., 5.

A Feedback and Cybernetics 87

The definition, however, can also be viewed as functioning from a slightly different perspective. If the exhibition and its catalogue succeeded in their attempts to "present an area of activity which manifests artists' involvement with science, and the scientists' involvement with the arts"; and if they succeeded in showing "the links between the random systems employed by artists, composers and poets, and those involved with the making and the use of cybernetic devices, " 77 then they did so under the auspice of a definition which was resolutely binary in its spatial and temporal logics. Not only were control and communication linked to computers and the human nervous system according to a doubly articulated binary logic, but the set of relationships was presented in a form that mirrored, in a universalist and transhistorical manner, the articulated point of view first presented in the subtitle of Wiener's 1948 book on cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (my emphases). In other words, while the definition bound together the separate spaces of computer and human nervous system, it also bound a 1968 British art exhibition to a 1948 founding text on cybernetics in a manner that suggests the presence of a ghostly feedback loop and this in spite of conceptual transformations produced by cybernetics' migration across geographical boundaries.78 Thus a Wienerian cybernetics' authoritative orig1nary presence in the context of an important British art exhibition suggests a continuing ability to unlock, as if by magic, a universal logic and almost mythic

77 Jasia Reichardt, "Introduction," Studio International 177 (1968): 5.

78As Cherry has noted, for example, "the word 'cybernetics' is little used in Britain, but rather the term 'control systems' is employed," while "the French often use 'la cybernetique' to correspond with 'information theory' in Britain," which, in turn, "is unfortunately used elsewhere synonymously with communication theory," the latter being sometimes referred to, in France, by the word "cybernetics." See Cherry, On Human Communication, 58, 217. 88 David Tomas originary space composed of multiple, dualistically structured dimensions. The second way that a word might reveal a whole parallel world which can given sense to its role and function of binding space and time is through an interconnected series of analogies and metaphors which are authorized in its name. In this case, the word operates at a distance, so to speak, as in the case of Wiener's metaphor of the organism as message79 or his exploration of the functional analogy between "automatic machines and ... the human nervous system" 80 which were authorized by a founding name and the conceptual domain and interdisciplinary practice to which it referred. Inasmuch as cybernetics was conceived as an interdisciplinary practice which linked a past (Maxwell) to a future, articulated through the fictive actions of a steersman (Wiener's phantom double?) whose operating logic was that of a feedback mechanism, and insofar as cybernetics linked systems of control and communications in animals and machines according to the same logic and practice, it set the stage for a process of remapping and reimaging the boundaries of the human body. A series of correspondences, analogies, and metaphors were used to bridge different domains of knowledge according to a new universal world-view or a "new economy of the sciences" whose apex was no longer to be found, as in the past, in physics. 81 New terms of reference such as

79Wiener, The Human Use, 95.

80Wiener, "Cybernetics," 14.

81 For a detailed discussion of the strategies underlying cybernetics's universalism see Geof Bowker, "How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-70," Social Studies 23 (1993): 117-19. Bowker's excellent discussion does not, however, focus on the universalist semantics of the word "cybernetics" itself. For a discussion of cybernetics, its cluster of metaphors and powers of synthesis see Steve Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Post-War America: The Cybernetics Group, - Feedback and Cybernetics 89 feedback, message, and noise functioned to reduce heterogeneous fields such as telephone engineering and the body's nervous system, the analogue computer and the human brain to a common viewpoint originating in control and communications theory and their engineering practices. As one commentator later noted: "the ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism. " 82 On the other hand, there was no obvious guarantee that the adoption of a given metaphor or analogy would automatically lead to a revolution in human thought and perception. If feedback and information could provide a common frame of reference then this correspondence might have been achieved through a radical and ultimately damaging simplification of existing complexities. As Herbert A Simon pointed out, "metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial. " 83 Moreover, as Cherry suggested in his critique of the brain/computer analogy and similar kinds of analogies, their fruitful use was determined by an appropriate focus and threshold of visionalization. 84 An analogy or metaphor that was pushed too far could prove to be as damaging as a false or superficial analogy. The binding powers of metaphors and analogies could, as these criticisms suggest, work in both directions. They could create fields for investigation or they could just as easily curb investigation through seduction, the spells cast by simple,

1946-53 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 248-72.

82 Herbert A Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981 ), 194.

83lbid., 193.

84Cherry, On Human Communication, 301-304. 90 David Tomas clear and elegant images or relationships, as in the case of the computer as mind/mind as computer analogy.85 By opening up a whole range of investigations under its semantic auspice, cybernetics not only functioned as a keyword, in Williams sense of the term, but it also served through its time/space organization as a chronotope86 for

85 See, for example, the following: "It is well known that between the most complex activities of the human brain and the operations of a simple adding machine there is a wide area where brain and machine overlap. In their more elaborate forms, modern computing machines are capable of memory, association, choice and many other brain functions. Indeed, the experts have gone so far in the elaboration of such machines that we can say the human brain behaves very much like the machines. The construction of more and more complex mechanisms actually is bringing us closer to an understanding of how the brain itself operates. Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 14." The key to this analogy was, as Cherry noted, its articulation in terms of functional or operational analogies. Cherry, On Human Communication, 57-58, 61. For a critique of other more extensive kinds of computer/brain analogies see Ibid., 301 -304.

861n his celebrated essay 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel' Mikhail Bakhtin proposed that similar processes of time/space binding, in the case of the novel, be identified by the word chronotope. In his words, "we will give the name chronotope (literally, 'time space') to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature." See M M Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist, ed. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. While he noted that the chronotope existed in other areas of culture he did n.ot pursue its investigation in these domains. Instead, he suggested that "in the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole," and continued: Feedback and Cybernetics 91 the interface between the human body and world of machines. The traffic of ideas across this interface was facilitated by a vocabulary or cluster of interrelated terms, definitions, and conceptual domains such as feedback, homeostasis, message, and information. For example, if homeostasis regulated an inner cybernetic environment, then feedback regulated the relationship between "inner" and "outer" environments87 according to information which was itself conceived as simply "a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it;"88 and, moreover, it did so according a clear temporal structure: future - > past - > future. Thus, if, as Weiner observed, "where a man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point

"Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history." Ibid. While Bakhtin remained sensitive to the metaphoric uses of the mathematical concept of space-time in the case of literary chronotopes ["The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely)" Ibid.], in the 1973 conclusion to his extensive study he argued for its extension well beyond literary boundaries and concluded: "For us the following is important: whatever these meaning turn out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us (a hieroglyph, a mathematical formula, a verbal or linguistic expression, a sketch, etc.). Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought is impossible. Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope." Ibid., 258.

87Simon, Sciences, 9.

88Wiener, The Human Use, 17. 92 David Tomas his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended, " 89 then the word "cybernetics" not only extended Wiener's presence as (co-)founder of this new field but, more importantly, it extended the word's temporal logic (through the principle of feedback) as well as its system of analogies across the many disciplines which absorbed cybernetics' methodology, vocabulary, and name. In this sense, as one historian has recently pointed out, "cybernetics could operate either as the primary discipline, directing others on their search for truth, or as a discipline providing analytic tools indispensable to the development and progress of others." 90 Moreover, as cybernetics extended its temporal pattern, it extended its powers over diverse fields or adherents in such a way as to bind them in a common perceptual space since perception was, in cybernetic terms, simply a condition of active feedback91 and feedback was what allowed cybernetics as a discipline to survive in the world of ideas. Thus, in a specific Williamsian sense, the word cybernetics encapsulated the special transformations it was created to describe; and, of course, included amongst these was a new model of the human organism and its identity.

89Wiener, The Human Use, 97.

90Bowker, "How to be Universal," 122.

91 "The control of a machine [or organism since these modes of organization were by analogy interchangeable terms] on the basis of its actual performance [feedback] ... involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors - that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy." See Wiener, The Human Use, 24-25. Feedback and Cybernetics 93

From Cybernetic Automaton to Cyborg: Shifting Thresholds in the Human/Machine Interface

If, as we have seen, Wiener could argue in a 1948 Scientific American article, "cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field in science, " 92 then this was because of its power and particularity which resided in its range and depth of interpretation. For the word, and the science to which it referred, interfaced the human mind, the human body, and the world of automatic machines in terms of a common theory covering "control and communication in machines and in living organisms. " 93 Again, as we have also seen, the root metaphor for this enterprise was the feedback mechanism which instituted a traffic in ideas between the domain of communications theory, with its concrete parallel world of mechanical or electronic switches and circuits, and the human body's neural pathways, and ultimately, its brain. This model allowed technology to enter the living human body through its nervous system and reimage it in terms of a history of automata. Conversely, feedback allowed for an even more radical process of reimaging since it pointed to the electrical and, ultimately, electronic collectivization of the human body a collectivization that would reach its most popular expression in McLuhan's global village and its information-based consciousness. Access to this other mode of reimaging the body was provided by the "ubiquity of feedback" - a ubiquity that signified that "interaction [was) everywhere." This ubiquity promoted a shifting of "attention away from an individualism that had highlighted [a) noncircular cause-and-effect [world-view] and from the individual person - as if he or she could be independent of others and even independent of chance events occurring in the environment. " 94 Translated into Mcluhanesque terms,

92Wiener, "Cybernetics," 14.

93 1bid., 14.

94Heims, Constructing, 271-72. 94 David Tomas feedback was a privileged gateway to a collective electric global consciousness because it marked "the end of the lineality that came into the Western world with the alphabet and the continuous forms of Euclidean space. " 95 It was according to such a logic and world-view that cybernetics and its attendant vocabulary was able to disseminate the image of a new kind of body to a wider disciplinary field and, further, to a non-specialized general public. Wiener was not only cognizant of the linkage between cybernetics and new models of the human body, but he was clearly aware of cybernetics' position in a history of the automaton. In fact, as previously noted, he had provided a clear and simple chronology which culminated, naturally enough, in his new science of cybernetics. This chronology is worth resurrecting for its periodization was also based on a history of the body. On the one hand, therefore, Wiener presented a history of automata which was divided into four stages: a mythic Golemic age; the age of clocks (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); the age of steam, originator of the governor mechanism itself (late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); and, finally, the age of communication and control. He noted, on the other hand, that these stages generated four models of the human body: the body as a malleable, magical, clay figure; the body as a clockwork mechanism; the body as a "glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the human muscles;" and, most recently, the body as an electronic system. 96 Wiener's two-fold periodization is significant because it reveals an awareness, by one of the principal founders of cybernetics, of important disciplinary phases in the history of the western body. Its importance resides, moreover, in the fact that it draws attention to parallel phases in the body's functional reimaging as a fundamental element in a machine universe. While the nineteenth century was characterized by an engineered body, a body considered "to be a branch of

95Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 64, 307, 311.

96Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control, 51 . Feedback and Cybernetics 95 power engineering," a model whose influence had extended well into the twentieth century, Wiener argued "we are now coming to realize that the body is very far from a conservative system, and that the power available to it is much less limited than was formerly believed." In place of a nineteenth century model, he noted that "we are beginning to see that such important elements as the neurones - the units of the nervous complex of our bodies - do their work under much the same conditions as vacuum tubes, their relatively small power being supplied from outside by the body's circulation, and that the bookkeeping which is most essential to describe their function is not one of energy." In its place, cybernetics proposed that the body be conceived as a communications network whose successful operation was based on "the accurate reproduction of a signal. " 97 The informational dimensions of this new body reached mystic proportions in McLuhan's question concerning a possibility that a "current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information" might "make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness." 98 In 1962, two years before the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan's influential introduction to the post-war world of Western media, and fourteen years after the introduction of the word "cybernetics," two American scientists introduced an important corruption of that word. They did so in order to identify a new kind of human/machine interface, a new kind of organism, which, since that time, has had a powerful hold on the way the body is imaged and constructed at the outer limits of western science, technology, and industry, as well as at the outer limits of its military and aerospace industries. Moreover, this organism's fundamental impact on the construction of a Western Imaginary can, one suspects, be traced to the fact that it reintroduces mimesis into the history of automata.

97Wiener, "Cybernetics," 15.

98McLuhan, Understanding Media, 67. 96 David Tomas

The neologism "cyborg" (from cybernetic organism) was proposed by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in 1960 to describe "self-regulating man-machine systems" and in particular an "exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously. " 99 The technical density of the definition was a function of its proposed sphere of operations: the application of cybernetic controls theory to the problems of space travel as they impinged on the neurophysiology of the human body. In fact, a special kind of "artifact organism" - the cyborg - was posited as a solution to the question of "the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. " 10° For these researchers, alteration of the body's ecology was to be effected primarily by way of sophisticated instrumental control systems and pharmaceuticals. Thus, "the purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems" was, according to these early pioneers, "to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems [as the body's "autonomous homeostatic controls"] are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel. " 101 And as the references to "his" and "man" indicate, this problematic was gender specific. If Wiener's automaton was still considered to be a creation in the image of the human organism, albeit through functional as opposed to a mimetic proximity, then the operations of the Clynes/Kline automaton were, to all intents and purposes, predicated on an increasingly transparent interface between human and machine systems. As Clynes subsequently pointed out in a Foreward to Cyborg - Evolution of the Superman, a popular account of the cyborg phenomenon published by Daniel S Halacy in 1965: "a new frontier is opening which ... is not merely space, but more

99Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline, "Cyborgs and Space," Astronautics (September 1960), 27.

1001bid., 26.

101 Clynes and Kline, "Cyborgs and Space," 27. Feedback and Cybernetics 9 7 profoundly the relationship of 'inner space' to 'outer space' - a bridge being built between mind and matter, beginning in our time and extending into the future." Later, he argued, the cyborg was more flexible than the human organism because it was not bound throughout a lifetime by heredity. Indeed, the cyborg was a reversible entity precisely because it was "man-machine combination." This reversibility, combined with the fact that "man-made devices" could "be incorporated into the [human body's] feedback chains," produced a stage of evolution that was participatory. Hence, if Ure's automatic machines held the promise of another form of human intelligence, then cybernetics redefined that intelligence in such a way that the Clynes/Kline cyborg could become its most perfect embodiment: "a new and, he hopes, better being. " 102 Thus, the Clynes/Kline cyborg represented a different solution to the one that was envisioned by the early cyberneticians while nevertheless adopting cybernetics' fundamental principles, in particular feedback and homeostasis. In its most extreme form, the earlier organism 103 became pure information "human information" - nothing more than a given "pattern maintained by . . . homeostasis, which [was] the touchstone of [al personal identity" to be transmitted as a message because it was in the first place a message. 104 In 1985 "cyborg" was appropriated precisely as a consequence of its polysemic resonances by a socialist-feminist historian of biology, Donna Haraway. It was used in this case for a different social purpose, "rhetorical strategy and ... political method." For Haraway the cyborg was not only a "hybrid of machine and organism," it was also a "creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." Within a new semantic context provided by

102Daniel S Halacy, Cyborg - Evolution of the Superman (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 7-8.

103Wiener, The Human Use, 104.

1041bid., 96. 98 David Tomas socialist-feminist discourses on the gendered body, she argued that this word could function as "a fiction mapping .. . social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. " 105 In contrast to the Clynes/Kline cyborg which was conceived to be "superman" capable of surviving hostile non-earth environments, Haraway's cyborg was a product of late-capitalist earth. If it was conceived to transgress the social/symbolic boundaries between human and animal, animal-human (organism) and machine, and the physical and non-physical, 106 then it was a transgression that was negotiated in terms of science fiction and the everyday worlds of post-colonial multi-national capitalism. It was, as such, later considered to function as if it were the product of a post-colonial and postmodern world. Hence, as one cultural theorist noted, "transgressed boundaries, in fact, define the cyborg, making it the consummate postmodern concept" or conversely "uncertainty is a central characteristic of postmodernism and the essence of the cyborg." 107 Moreover, and notwithstanding its gender specificity in popular 1980s films such as the RoboCop and Terminator series, the cyborg was conceived, insofar as it was a product of feminist science fiction, by Haraway to be "a creature in a post-gender world;" and inasmuch as it was conceived as a social and political mentor, it was pictured as "oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" in the sense that it was "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity." It was in these multiple senses that Haraway suggested that cyborg "is our ontology; it gives us our politics." Moreover, it was a politics which, in

105Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 149-150.

1061bid., 151-53.

107Claudia Springer, "The Pleasure of the Interface," Screen (1991): 306, 310. Feedback and Cybernetics 99 its process of semantic rearticulation, clearly acknowledged the cyborg's military/industrial origins.108 If the word "cybernetics" was an offspring of military research coupled with a specific post-war interdisciplinary university-based research program, 109 then the word "cyborg" exhibited a similar genealogy with, however, a different inflection since it was the hybrid product of the United States space program and a medical research laboratory (both Clynes and Kline were at the time ( 1960) researchers at Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg, New York). On the other hand, Haraway's socialist-feminist cyborg was the joint creation of mid-1980s political activism and academic radicalism. In fact, while the body's physiological ecology or "the body-environment problem" 110 determined its early semantic field, Haraway's academic socialist-feminist background was the determining factor in the articulation of her post-gendered oppositional cyborg. In both cases, however, the cyborg brings us face to face with the results of a major process of reconceptualization in the domain of automata, a reconceptualization, as Clynes suggested in 1965, that inaugurated an uncertain future for the human body. A hardware-based cyborg integrates or interfaces, in its most extreme and evocative form, a human body with a pure technological environment (machine elements, electronic components, advanced imaging systems). Clearly, under such circumstances, technology becomes the determining factor in the definition of the body's physical rearticulation, the material foundations for its sense of performed identity. Although traditional domains of bodily differences, such as those that are subsumed under the rubrics of ethnicity and gender, are still operating in the case of popular cyborg

108Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," 150-52.

109See Heims, Constructing; and Bowker, "How to be Universal."

11 °Clynes and Kline, "Cyborgs and Space," 26. 100 David Tomas imagery, 111 one can imagine, as Haraway has done, that these differences might eventually be eclipsed by a technologically-based system of similarities and differences. Instead of describing this body primarily in terms of age, ethnicity or gender, or even in hybrid post-ethnic or gendered terms, a more accurate description is perhaps to be obtained by treating a reimaged cyborg body as a technological entity that can best be described in terms of a system of technicity 112 whose operating criteria are speed, manoeuvrability, and force and whose participatory logic is rooted in a trinity of cybernetic adaptability: communication, information, and feedback.

Virtual Reality and the Cyborg as Pure Data Construct

Wiener's evocation of the human body conceived as pure information brings to mind virtual reality technology with its promise of a common global digital space - a kind of second atmosphere, whether one models it after McLuhan's extended consciousness whose embodiment was to be found in the "spiritual form of information, " 113 or William Gibson's often quoted definition of cyberspace the "consensual hallucination" experienced by "billions" of computer operators. 114 The bridge of cybernetics and its information paradigm links the worlds of cyborgs and virtual reality. In doing so it also serves as a juncture that marks an important division or, more accurately, a branching in the history of automata. One path from this juncture leads into outer space, while the

111 Springer, "The Pleasure of the Interface."

112David Tomas, "The Technophilic Body: On Technicity in William Gibson's Cyborg Culture," New Formations 8 (1989).

113Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 67.

114William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51. Feedback and Cybernetics 101 other route leads into a kind of meta-atmosphere composed of a pure electronic information. The human body is, in this latter context, treated as an inconsequently historical residue, a kind of chimera, or puppet, 115 an automatonic image which is subject to almost infinite manipulation.116 For it appears that "the possibilities of virtual realities ... are as limitless as the possibilities of reality" - a distinction and conjunction which is founded on this technology's potential power to provide a "doorway to other worlds" which is based on a "human interface that disappears." 117 It is in the context of this seamless boundary between the body and technology that we now return to the figure of the automaton and note, as one researcher has recently pointed out, that "the craftsman of the last century shaping the motion of the elaborate clockwork characters by painstakingly filing cams is much like the programmer iterating toward an algorithm for animating computer graphic human motion, or defining plastic deformations of facial expression." 118 As this correspondence suggests, virtual reality is, in fact, a manifestation of a cyberneticians ultimate dream: a pure information space which can be populated by

115Randal Walser, "The Emerging Technology of Cyber­ space," in S K Helsel and J Paris Roth, eds., Virtual Reality: Theory, Practice, and Promise (Westport and London: Meckler, 1991 ).

116 "The basic job of cyberspace technology, besides simulating a world, is to supply a tight feedback loop between patron and puppet, to give the patron the illusion of being literally embodied by the puppet (i.e., the puppet gives the patron a virtual body, and the patron gives the puppet a personality)." Ibid., 35.

117Scott S Fisher, "Virtual Environments: Personal Simulations and Telepresence," in Helsel and Roth, Virtual Reality, 109.

118Lasko-Harvill, "Identity and Mask," 226. 102 David Tomas a host of pure cybernetic automatons or, in more precise non-anthropomorphic terms, data constructs. If the Clynes/Kline cyborg offered a participatory solution to the problem of survival in hostile environments, then it did so through a radical fusion of the human/machine interface as first proposed in the context of classical mimetic automata. The astronaut/cyborg and its subsequent popular offspring were conceived as post-Industrial Revolution androids which embodied the power of prime movers coupled with sophisticated sensory and control systems. These hardware-based cyborgs fused android form, robot power, and cybernetic intelligence into organisms which were designed to withstand extremely hostile environments. At one point in The Human Use of Human Beings, for example, Wiener had suggested that "we have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. " 119 In retrospect, it is easy to see that the Clynes/Kline cyborg was a hardware based solution to this kind of problem. While the first cyborg was initially designed for space travel, modification and adaption could take as many forms as were needed for the conquering and colonization of non- or anti-human en­ vironments. Perhaps conquest provides the most appropriate frame of reference through which to view the cyborg's most recent computer-based transformations since its new form is the product of a special problem in human adaption: namely, how to exist in an environment that consists of pure information. The answer is, as Wiener first pointed out, provided by cybernetics: one transforms the human organism into a pattern of pure digital information so that it might exist in an environment that is composed and oxygenated by digitalized information. Adaption is, as a result, perfect and complete since organism and environment are conceived in similar terms. This most extreme of all cybernetic visions, a final and radical solution to the problem of environmental mutations and ensuing adaption, provides a kind of "terminal" answer to the question of the direction of the

119Wiener, The Human Use, 46. Feedback and Cybernetics 103 human organism's "evolution" in the late twentieth century. Insofar as "the interface between the user and the computer . . . [is) the last frontier in computer design, "120 then this interface is also the last frontier in the design of human beings and the key to the diversity of cybernetic patterns that can colonize and populate virtual reality in the name of one of western modernity's root metaphors - feedback and in the name of one of its keywords: cybernetics.

12°Foley, "Interfaces," 127.