All in one digital capture systems like DevonThink are a hoarder’s wet dream. They allow the user to capture, tag and organise any scrap of potential information they think may one day be important, hence hoarding. The problem however, is that even if a user is good at organising their information, there needs to be a path, even a potential one, to follow, and allow meaning to arise.

The age we currently inhabit is called the ‘Information’ Age, which reflects the importance we now all put on ‘information’. I should clarify that by ‘ we all’ I mean people inhabiting a ‘western’ tradition. Information is not meaning, or so the saying goes. And no I’m not commenting on whether it’s true or not, not yet anyway.

- Reading and marking relevant sections in a book is easy. Transcription is is hard, and a long business. Of  course there are ways around this such as OCR, scanning books into selectable text for those who didn’t know, and is something I have been doing small scale. However, the bulk of books I need are locked away in the British Library and in the reading ways there is no way of making copies except by using the extortionate photo-copiers which really isn’t a solution, so its back to long hand transcription for me.

- Getting ill never helps anything, and, while i don’t like to get too personal here, I have been slowed, quite a bit, by being ill. There was the cold/flu that muddled all thinking and coherency, and then there were the, unrelated, physical problems that make impossible to work. The physical stuff I’ve been dealing with for a few years now, but it can still strike and stop productivity dead. I’ve been told by a few people that it’s good I want to write and research, it means I can circumvent the need to be physical, which of course, to me, is stupid. My point is simply that being ill can stop things happening, which is what happened this last week.

- With the week geared towards transcription there was not really any ‘new’ and exciting things to be learned. Except of course finally realising that Norbert Wiener’s life was pretty awful, first his parents and then his wife. I’m sure I don’t have the full picture, but even a diminished amount of what I’ve learned would still lead me the same conclusion: Norbert Wiener was a true, polymathic genius, John Nash called him America’s home grown answer to John von Neumann, yet, at the same time Wiener was tortured in an all together way to Nash.

- week three also saw me begin to realise, more fully, the impact that Anglo-American, analytic, philosophy had on the founders of cybernetics. I mean, Wiener studied with Bertrand Russell for a year in Cambridge after receiving his PhD. Warren McCulloch was inspired by Russell and his ‘what is it to know a number..’. Walter Pitts sent a letter of criticism about Russells philosophy to Russell who invited him to come and study with him, Pitts couldn’t he was fifteen and wasn’t at university. Pitts also wrote a critical letter to Carnap who was at the university of Chicago and this time Pitts did actually go and study with Carnap, dealing with the foundations of logic. A teenager with a master.

- Right now it is easy to see how mathematicians and scientists would have read and been drawn to analytic philosophy, especially as philosophy, and science, was  much more integrated into the wider world.

- I also began to see similarities between feedback loops and hermanetic cricles.

- This last week also saw me become aware of Egle Rindzeviciute whose book Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy: Cybernetics and Governance in Lithuania after World War II I have not read the entirety of, but, what I have read is fascinating, especially as I have so little knowledge of the Soviet Union, and cybernetics outside America. Right at the beginning is this lovely quote:

“I began my journey into ordering in cultural policy. Why were some objects listed as governable by the Ministry of Culture and others not? How could such different objects possibly be labelled with one term (“culture”) and accommodated in one administrative structure? What kind of governmental rationales and techniques made that list possible? Indeed, the fact that I ended up sitting with this list was a consequence of one question: What does it mean to govern and what makes culture governable? “

You Should Read: Peter Galison’s The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision

What can I say, this past week saw the British Library open up its secrets to me, and they are lovely secrets. I know some people who don’t like the exterior of the British Library and love the interior, but I really like both outside and inside. The reading rooms are spacious, cool and feel like a place I want to research and be scholarly. My only niggle is naming, and so to some separating, the reading rooms into Humanities 1 & 2, and Science 1 & 2. I’d prefer a different naming scheme but that’s me.

Some of the material for my cybernetics research is out of print and not held by many libraries, which makes the British library a perfect place for me to get hold of what I need. The man who registered me at the library read my letter of reference, which I needed to join, and was instantly fascinated, he even asked if I had a bibliography which he could check on the catalogue for me. It was quite a personable way to join a library, which I have noticed seems to reflect the majority of the staff in the library.

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak is a book which shows the power and structure of Cybernetics as a universal language for understanding control and communication within human, animals and machines. The book takes the line that Cybernetics is far more than a science or field of inquiry.

I have also been digging into the relationship between Norbert Wiener and Bertrand Russell, the former studied with the latter in Cambridge after receiving his PhD. Forty years later Wiener wrote in his ‘Cybernetics’ that ”I am myself a former student of Russell, and owe much to his influence.”

And now for ann interesting coincidence: I wrote a piece on this here blog about disunified research, and it briefly discussed hybrid thinking and new knowledge, it also quickly covered the idea of a ‘pidgin’ language within any research cluster, especially the very new in terms of knowledge being produced. At the same time, or several hours later, depending on how you view such things, I was working my way through ‘From Newspeak to Cyberspeak’ by Slava Gerovitch as part of my cybernetc research and what I quickly came across was the idea that the Soviet Union deliberately used a form of Newspeak to delineate the ’soviet’ from everybody else. . I don’t think in terms of Godly, or Fately, synchronicity, but I can see how we connect and give meaning to things, again this is something I cover in my thesis and so there will be more thoughts on this in later weeks, socio-cultural pattern recogntion is quickly becoming my craft, whether by choice or not.

I went off track there. What I meant to say is that in separate spheres of my thinking this week the spectre of language and what it means turned up. This is not to reduce the importance of either but remark upon a coincidence and what light it sheds on my week.

You Should Read: From Newspeak to Cyberspeak by Slava Gerovitch – Cybernetics is the reason I read this but it is so much more. The picture of Soviet science it paints is fascinating and enlightening. It removes the iron curtain of ignorance from my eyes.

Hope you all have a good Week

More future of dead things:

Both Grinding and Environmental Graffiti highlight the work of Brian Dettmer who has turned the ‘dead technology’ of cassette tapes into skeletal creatures, two examples of which are above and below.

Environmental Graffiti says:

“The shells of cassette tapes make up the bones of life-sized human skeletons and animal skulls – so the new creations appear more lifeless than the media from which they are formed.”

Yet, I cannot see the work as lifeless. If anything, Dettmer’s work anthropomorphises the dead cassettes into something more readily identifiable and emotional. By creating skeletons we see analogue music turning into fossils of the passed.

While some bibliophiles may roar in outrage, Dettmer has also worked his magic with books. Again from Environmental Graffiti:

“After first sealing the book, he carves into it, removing content wielding instruments such as a scalpel and tweezers, to reveal fragmented images and words. In this way, the book – often old and hardback – is excavated till it becomes a complex 3D sculpture, at once splitting from and retaining remnants of its original meaning. (my italics)”

I mentioned that I like new things, and one of them is actually ‘dead objects’. Or, the ‘Autopsies Project‘  which is, as Haidy L Geismar says on the Material World blog,:

“The Autopsies Project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media – the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example – the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought the phasing out of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to “modern life.” The project brings together a team of postgraduate students and full-time lecturers, from several humanities and social science disciplines to reflect on the ends of objects, raising questions of modernity, obsolescence, memory, collecting and recording.”

The Autopsies obituaries section, and the website itself, is really rather interesting, for example one of the posts is about ‘Matches‘, you know, those phospherous headed sticks that you use to light things. Below is an abstract:

“On consideration, I decided they may in fact be the ultimate in dead objects, for their useful working lives are so short they are pretty much dead on arrival. They are struck, they burst into momentary flame and then are consigned to ashtray, bin, or pavement. On a wider scale, matches have been traditionally shunned in favour of the mechanical lighter which is refuelled and re-used.”

I urge you to check out the website if only to wonder in awe at what is being covered. I’ll even post the address again: The Autopsies Project. Go Now

ground up knowledge sharing

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how knowledge is created and shared, in fact my current thesis is about how this happens within archaeology, and I hope to take it further. I am currently investigating a ‘disunified’ approach to knowledge production and meaning, an approach which is heavily influenced by the ‘disunity of science thesis’ and it is from this work that I will draw an example.

The ‘Monte Carlod Method’ stemmed from the research into the creation of the Thermonuclear bomb in America, specifically the use of computer simulation in the research. What quickly became apparent during the research was that not everybody was using the simulators in the same way or for the same thing. The researchers did all however, use the computer simulators. The way the researchers used the computers it really was a version of virtual reality, the aim being to reconstruct real world conditions that weren’t possible or safe to at the time. Which leads into how the Monte Carlo research is an example of ‘disunified’ science.

The striking feature of inter-disciplinary research is the hybridisation of skill sets and knowledge which lead to a synthesis of new knowledge and new skill sets that straddle two or more disciplinary fields. Trading zones do not require such hybridisation. It is the phenomena and how to study it that locates a new trading zone, or research group. Therefore researchers may only focus on one facet of work within one methodology. This ability can lead to multi-vocality – an integral constituent of a trading zone. It was not necessary for everybody involved in the Monte Carlo experiments to have the same skills. This meant that some researchers could focus on the game-theory aspect, or convergence problems, while others focused on particular problems or methods, and other researchers yet exploited basic results (Galison 1996: 153).

This then means that not everybody has to share the same thoughts, and feelings about a specific study, discipline or discourse. People may disagree on a word to describe a set of phenomena, but they don’t disagree about the phenomena itself, or its importance, although it is entirely possible that they’ll disagree about the actual, specific importance. What usually happens is that a ‘pidgin’ language will grow up around the researchers, which is intrinsically linked to their group, and often meaningless to anyone outside it.

Book Mentioned: Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics

Credit(s)/Acknowledgment(s): I’ve posted this after talking to Matt Webb about some of these ideas which got me thinking, and made me spray my thoughts out here.

My week in Review

I have something of a fixation for the new. This cybernetics research is new, it is interesting and, I can feel it, important. And it is all these things because the researches of Norbert  Wiener, Gregory Bateson and others did away with the old and using the concepts embedded within Cybernetics as their guiding light they created a new world. The plethora of new ideas, technologies and understandings to come out of this time have fueled the world ever since. To understand why this period is so important to the world we live in now is necessary to find out what happened and why during the 1940’s and 1950’s. I cannot help but want to dive down and bring this history to light, to share it with the rest of the world.

This last week has seen me on a diminished research timeframe due to other factors in life. Nontheless, I started digging into the wealth of data that surrounds Nobert Wiener, not only the father of Cybernetics, but also one of America’s, and the worlds, greatest polymaths whose insights went far outside that of mathematics. The image that is coming out is one of a man for who the beauty of pure mathematics wasn’t enough, and any thing Wiener touched turned into a beautiful example of applied, practical, meaningful mathematics.

I also dug into Gregory Bateson. Now I’m an anthropologist but I have never come across the name Gregory Bateson before now, not even as the husband of Margaret Mead, who in anthropology circles is a very famous, and now controversial, name. However, beginning to sift the data surrounding Bateson reveals an original inter-disciplinary mind who saw the importance of explicating the ‘Cybernetic Explanation’ in terms of humanity and the world in which they lived.

You Should Read:

Dark Hero of the Information Age By Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman – A deep, Humanising  biography about Norbert Wiener. This book makes the great mathematician not simply a set of equations.

‘Cybernetic Explanation’ in Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson – This piece lays out, explicitly, the direction Bateson comes to Cybernetics and humanity, and what it means to him. I was going to say ‘Cybernetics and Anthropology’, but it isn’t that simple with Bateson.

Ocmpoma has posted a link to an article called ‘Systemics and Cybernetics in a Historical Perspective‘ which has the following, very interesting, abstract:

“Systemics and cybernetics can be viewed as a metalanguage of concepts and models

for transdisciplinarian use, still now evolving and far from being stabilized. This is the

result of a slow process of accretion through inclusion and interconnection of many

notions, which came and are still coming from very different disciplines. The process

started more than a century ago, but has gathered momentum since 1948 through the

pioneering work of Wiener, von Neumann, von Bertalanffy, von Förster and Ashby,

among many others. This paper tries to retrace the history of the accretion process and

to show that our systemic and cybernetic language is an evolving conceptual network.

This is of course only a first and quite incomplete attempt, merely destined to give the

‘feel’ of the process. Systemic concepts and models are underlined in order to enhance

the perception of the process, as well as its systemic significance”

****

Also:

Mash has a post detailing ‘The Cybernetic Explanation” which includes the following section which details reversing entropy:

“

1. Systematic local reversal of entropy is caused by systematic feedback.
2. Systematic feedback is caused by directed behavior.
3. Directed behavior is caused by a Turing machine or the equivalent.
4. There exist Turing machines.
5. Therefore there may exist systematic local reversals of entropy.

Shorter version: life is a computation.

But the explanation is actually broader than life. It begins with a fundamental relationship between feedback and entropy. And this makes sense, because feedback can be seen as a way to reverse the arrow of time in a limited but real sense.”

Mash’s post also ends on the following:

“if you are a cybernetic materialist, naturally there is life, and life reflecting on life” which is one thought to end my weekend.