Communication without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) originated at a moment of limitless optimism for a “new lingua franca” where a “universal language of information, feedback, and homeostasis” would lead to a capacity to “model all organisms from the level of the cell to that of society” (Kline, 2020: 13). It would be difficult to find another meeting with quite the same scope and soaring ambitions. Including the physical sciences, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology alongside anthropology, the Macy conferences seemed to herald a new era where experts could speak to each other with a common language that would underwrite post-war technocratic dreams. And, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson hoped, anthropology would prove key to the development of that language.

In this, the Macy conferences could be seen as an obdurate failure. In anthropology, at least, cybernetics fizzled out by the 1970s. Not even the post-human turn that began in the 1980s seems to have revived the project that Mead and Bateson began in these conferences. Not just “cybernetics” as a term, but the dreams of anthropological cybernetics seemed to have disappeared. And since the conferences ended, the sciences and (other) social sciences have continued apace without much need for our anthropological contributions.

On the other hand, there’s ample evidence that the Macy Conferences succeeded all too well. The technologies that currently dominate our world—the algorithms, the AI models, the networks—all have at least some of their origins with Macy conferences participants: game theory (John von Neumann), neural nets and circular causality (Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenbluth and Julian Bigelow) and information as the ratio of signal-to-noise (Claude Shannon). As Hayles laments in “How We Became Posthuman,” the Macy conferences helped usher in a world where everything—including our subjectivity—could be reduced to flows of fungible information, information that can be commodified and manipulated. From this perspective, the Macy conferences were a first salvo in what Haraway would call the “Informatics of Domination,” (Haraway, 1991), in which, as Bateson later suggested, “control” was elevated over “communication” (Bateson, 1991).

Of course, it would a mistake to view this hegemony as inevitable, and many scholars in recent decades have elaborated on alternatives. Second-order cybernetics, for example, (re)introduced subjectivity into the information equation in the question of the observer (Maturana and Varela 1980), while others (like N. Katharine Hayles and Andrew Pickering) have looked to models of embodiment, practice and performance that were also implicit in the physicality of interaction and apparatus (Hayles, 1999; Pickering, 2010).

But what has been the anthropological contribution to all of this debate? Has there been a similarly recuperative moment in the field? This is, I think a fair question: Mead and Bateson were present at every conference. Reading through the (admittedly incomplete) transcripts, it is hard not to notice that the anthropologists were especially loquacious. They brought with them many insights, perhaps none so frequent as what we might call the “anthropological exception”: counterexamples from the anthropological record puncturing the universalist pretensions of the Macy conferees. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s sweeping generalities: “If you look at some other cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias, 2016: 426).

The anthropological exception is the twentieth century inversion of the anthropological universal—that nineteenth century rhetorical tool that allowed Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and others to build gigantic abstractions like “animism” or “barbarism” out of decontextualized and more-than-occasionally inaccurate “facts” collected by legions of travelers, missionaries and colonial officials. There are many examples of the anthropology of exception – the critique implicit in the culture and personality school of the early twentieth century depends upon it, although the genre arguably crystallized with Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, where he argues that the Oedipus complex is not universal (Malinowski, 1927). This would not exorcise universalism from anthropology, but it would, at least, help to undermine the hierarchies underwriting anthropology as a colonial machine.

The Macy transcripts are filled with examples drawn from Mead’s and Bateson’s fieldwork—exceptions to the “rules” adduced by Macy conferees. But do they make any difference? In the example above, Kubie is hardly disarmed by Mead, and soldiers on in his inexplicitly Freudian way. And looking back, it is hard to see the anthropological dimensions of our world of networked communication and machine learning that are the two of the legacies of the conferences. So what was the anthropological contribution?

We could call the anthropological contribution “misunderstanding”—hardly a term with positive connotations, and one seemingly at odds with the point of an academic conference. The Macy conferences were intended to erect the scaffolding of a universalist science of cybernetics, one that would cut across disciplinary silos. And, yet, Macy conferees reported many misunderstandings. For example, Mead and Bateson critiqued their colleague in a 1976 interview with Stewart Brand: “So we used the model, ‘feedback,’ and Kurt Lewin—who didn’t understand any known human language, but always had to reduce them to concepts—he went away with the idea of feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and told them later what had happened [  . . . ] So the word ‘feedback’ got introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conferences where it’s been ever since” (Brand, 1976: 3).

This is something other than a garden variety misunderstanding. We might instead say that the anthropological contribution had to do with the idea of difference, as in the following example: in the 1950 meeting, J.C.R. Licklider (who would later be one of the architects of ARPANET) delivered a paper entitled “The Manner in Which and the Extent to Which Speech Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” It is really a paper on sound engineering, full of graphs showing frequency and clipping. It is just the sort of materialism that Shannon engages in his work—albeit in an even drier tone. Mead, however, re-frames Licklider’s presentation in terms of human communication across different languages, and the other conferees enthusiastically add their own anecdotes amidst Mead’s topical hijacking. Mead interjects: “I should like to get back to the question: Is this a translation or isn’t it? What is translation?” (237). While this wasn’t really Licklider’s question at all, Mead plunges ahead. It is, she concludes, “a question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however, would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one person is not translation for another” (237). Mead has, in the end, taken things rather far from Licklider’s materialist and quantitative starting point into an interesting meditation on the cultural politics of translation.

The pragmatic effect of Mead’s comments will be familiar to people who have attended academic conferences: the questions that are really comments, the endless self-aggrandizement and digression. Even if we are generous, it would be difficult to see Mead’s comments as helping to elaborate on Licklider’s work; in fact, they seem to accomplish exactly the opposite, jumping the rails entirely to something else, and leading conferees into anecdotes about their own foreign travel that hardly do much to cement the science of cybernetics. But what if the point of the exercise (at least as Mead and Bateson saw it) wasn’t to arrive at a consensus?

The second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation he called “The Colloquy of Mobiles,” consisting of hanging, robotic machines that would rotate towards each other in response to sequences of lights and sounds.

Together, these cybernetic agents produced complex behavior, but what made the installation even more complex was the human component. Pask intended for people to interact with the robots and participants and generate their own patterns using small mirrors to interact with the Mobile. The question here: Is the “communication” between the machines the same as the communication between people? The mobiles, Pask concede, “cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask, 1971, quoted in Pickering, 2010: 359-360). Humans and machines are interacting, but not “sharing” a communicative system from machine to human. Here, Pask encourages human participants to productively “misunderstand” or inject their own meaning into what his Mobiles are up to and strive to build patterns “pleasing” to them. The mobile is not “communicating”; lights would be discharged when capacitors reached a certain level, mobiles would discharge a light, which would be “answered” by a sound. As a cybernetic apparatus, Pask’s Colloquy was interesting, but as a piece of art it invited multiple levels of anthropomorphic interaction, including eliciting affective response in human participants. The point, here, was not to understand the servo-mechanisms, but to interact with the device.

Was the purpose of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics to reduce everything to information and feedback? Or was it to create a forum for people and ideas to interact without reduction to a single set of terms? For Mead, Licklider’s paper is an opportunity to interject notes on language and translation; it starts her down a chain of anthropological examples, rather than, say, reducing anthropological linguistics to acoustics.

Gregory Bateson’s 1970 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture elaborates on his celebrated definition of information:

In fact, what we mean by information–the elementary unit of information–is a difference which makes a difference, and is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continuously transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We might even say that the question is already implicit in them (Bateson, 1972: 459).

The sense here (which, perhaps, takes some inspiration from the work of Humberto Maturana, in his co-authored paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al, 1959)), is that the “differences” in the pathway are already there—internally produced even though the stimuli might be initially external. Applied to cybernetics itself, it means interacting across different disciplines, not to unite, but to stimulate differences that, perhaps were already there. Differences without generating differences within. As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world one cannot push around in that way” (Pickering, 2010: 383).

Here, the anthropological contribution is difference itself, anthropological examples that lead conferees outside the closed loop of cybernetic interpretation into other frames: the generation of more difference. If we return to Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” then anthropology’s contribution lay almost entirely on the “communication” side (Wiener, 1948). More than that, it’s a refractory communication that escapes the boundaries of the topic and extends—through difference—into something else entirely. To be fair, that seems to be the most successful part of the conference: it continued over almost a decade without, perhaps, ever building consensus on anything.

Yes, one legacy of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics has been the domination of life by “code,” and the reduction of action, cognition and life itself to flows of information (Geoghegan, 2023). But it is not the only legacy. Another is the capacity to interact across differences in a way that is generative of more difference. It is, I am suggesting, the anthropological imperative—one that remains an unacknowledged contribution of anthropology, and one that presents an increasingly necessary alternative to the constantly expanding empire of the informatics of domination.

At present, we are again assailed by a nightmarish, cybernetic future where tasks that we have classified as definitively human—art, poetry, literature, music—are produced by generative AI models. We are encouraged to understand these outputs as the same as our human work, and that we are little better, in other words, than the stochastic machines that threaten jobs and educational assessment. In this, generative AI is heir to the insights of the Macy conferences, and, like them, leads to a series of invidious comparisons between the human and the machine. But perhaps an anthropology might shift the discourse into something else entirely—to refuse to see AI as a human simulacrum. Can we change the subject? Hijack this deterministic discourse onto another register altogether?

References

Bateson, Gregory. A Sacred Unity. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Brand, Stewart. “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976): 32-44.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katharine. How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kilne, Ronald. “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1 (2020): 12-35. 

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927.

Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. Autopoesis and Cognition. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

Pias, Claus, ed. Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. New York: diaphanes, 2016.

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1948.