The Biggest Attack on Cybernetics, Ever

[Kuja]

I’d like to discuss with CAD-Ning people an excerpt of a text written by a great American anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins (Culture and Practical Reason, 1976).

Please, take a look at the excerpt attached I’ve extracted from Google Book and turned into a JPEG.

In my opinion, it is the biggest attack on cybernetics, ever.

Sahlins' argument is (as far as I can understand it) is that cybernetics is a kind of functionalism, at the service of a materialist bourgeois.

Sahlins attacks the transference of the human mind to the nature (ecological mind), making it loses its autonomy. The anthropologist pays many tributes to the “symbolical” capacity of humankind and doesn’t want to let it go from human hands.

I think this text have to be contextualized under a Marxist light.

I’d love to hear your impressions.

Kuja

[Jonny Bradley]

Wow - i just got here, and phrases like: "cybernetics is a kind of functionalism, at the service of a materialist bourgeois" is just the sort of thing i'm, er - after (i "think")

Please explain... ;)

[Kuja]

Hi Jonny,

Thank you for your interest!

First of all, we need define what is “functionalism”. In the same book, we may find the following sentence:

“Functionalist practice, as we have seen, consists of taking the cultural properties merely as the appearance. The cultural concrete-real becomes an abstract-apparent, simply a form of behavior assumed by the more fundamental forces of economy or biology.” (Culture and Practical Reason, by Marshall Sahlins, pag. 78)

To keep up my rationale, I need quote Brian Holmes, who have written another attack on cybernetics:

“Now, at some point in the foregoing I just tossed off the term "liberal empire." It so happens I firmly believe that cybernetics, particularly in its control engineering aspect, participates deeply and intimately in a far older tradition of liberal governance, whose latest incarnation is in effect a neoliberalism whose practical, institutional contours would be unimaginable without a proliferation of cybernetically calculated feedback relations.”

See? That is the discussion I’d like to spark, although this Ning is not exactly the ideal forum for that, as we should discuss the relations between cybernetics and art.

In the end of his rant, Holmes goes condescending to New Cybernetic luminaries. In my opinion, even Wiener was not convinced that cybernetics could be misused “at the service of a materialist bourgeois." I agree with the one who commented the Holmes text, at the end of it: “Wiener's response was a very different one -- we are all ‘zombies’, so we must wait for the humans to reappear.”

[Jonny Bradley]

Hi Kuja

I was just preparing a reply to to say; DOH! I didn't actually spot the tiny attached bitmap (here) containing the text to which you were referring to when you so rapidly replied (btw; i think ning.com seems good - it's my first time)

I need time to absorb this many so long words more slowly so will try to reply later (although my gut instinct is that you toy with us! ;) - hey, i'm just the feller that solders the things together!

[Kuja]

You right! I'm a Cybernetic Elf!

[Kuja]

thank you for your remark.
Sahlins is skidding into the old gap between thought and being.
and in doing so, forgets that "constraints" also comes from culture (Moral, Law, etc.), not only from nature.