Holmes, Hamilton...

[Kuja]

Kevin Hamilton, from University of Illinois, sent an interesting post to NEW MEDIA CURATING. Full text bellow:

The flipside of the happy accident is the situation without an apparent history or origin. As the Talking Heads song asks, "Well, how did I get here?"

I've been very interested in Brian Holmes' read of cybernetics as present and influential in the contemporary surveillance state, and in the proliferation of "liberal empire."

A quote from his thesis on this:

"The automated inspection of personal data can no longer simply be conceived as an all-seeing eye, a hidden ear, a baleful presence behind the scenes.
The myriad forms of contemporary electronic surveillance now constitute the irremediably multiple feedback loops of a cybernetic society, devoted to controlling the future. Conflict lodges within these cybernetic circles.
They knit together the actors of transnational state capitalism, in all its cultural and commercial complexity; but their distant model is Wiener's antiaircraft predictor, which programs the antagonistic eye into a docile and efficient machine. Under the auspices of a lowly servomechanism coupled into an informational loop, we glimpse the earliest stirrings of the Golem that matters to us today, in the age of data-mining and neuromarketing. And this Golem is ourselves, the cyborg populations of the computerized democracies."

from here: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/future-map/
more here: http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift/details2008ny.htm#brian
and here: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0709/msg00013.html

Brian's take, to me convincing, is that the cybernetic society has been realized at the level of neurology, perception. Sure, we're not surrounded by "machines that think" in any techno-utopian sense. Those who see A.I. as having won the funding battle over cybernetics, now moving on to realize the cybernetic vision, miss the point. Instead, humans have become "biological computers." Programmed to operate as self-organizing systems, but only within a larger system, a branded-gaia of governed desires and programmed perceptual stimuli. (Not so far from Haraway's cyborg, here either.)

By this read, one can find plenty of examples of contemporary work in New Media that ride this wave, that depend on systems of cybernetic control for their existence. One could look at some of the debates over Locative Media's dependence on cartesian space and state-sponsored technology in this light.

It's also worth pointing out about Holmes' work that he's not blaming cybernetics itself for the undesirable state of contemporary human subjectivity. He still, I think, sees some hope, some worthwhile utopias, in the threads of "second-order" or even "third-order" cybernetics, possibly lost in the current cybernetic state. I'm not sure what to think of this.
Either he's right about this - and the sort of recursive self-consciousness produced by ironic television comedy and facebook status updates misses the point of second-order cybernetics entirely - or he's wrong about this, and von Foerster's dream of a "cybernetics of cybernetics" has also found it's way, directly or indirectly, into the modern reflexive impulse.

I find such a broad frame useful for entry into specific historical analyses, digging around for understanding about the origins and effects of particular cybernetic experiments. Here at University of Illinois, one time home to Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computing Lab, plenty of artists found their way onto defense contracts in the 60's, as Heinz scrambled to fund projects any way he could. The resulting constellations of personnel, funding, produced objects and dispersed destinations, are rich for revealing how theory meets practice, and to what multiple, even contradictory ends.

I've begun exploring these as a way of understanding some of our current inescapable complicities and hoped-for alternatives. Re-building old cybernetic devices, placing conferences and papers in the context of concurrent events on campus and in the world, connecting research to teaching through comparing syllabi to technical reports, mapping the migratory paths of researchers in search of opportunity or escaping bad scenarios - that's how I'm trying to unpack the cybernetics of my home institution.

By all accounts, the war in Vietnam brough enough campus unrest that the U.S. Senate eventually restricted defense spending to university projects directly related to military operations. That's an amazing thing for this child of the 70's to think about. That's also when the complex networks of early cybernetic art research seemed to end. But what happened next? Did all those multi-year "blue sky" defense projects really just end up on an unused shelf? Where and how did private industry pick up the torch?

When I bring up all this cybernetic stuff to friends in Computer Science, I meet with yawns. When I talk about it with people in Physics, they can't believe how prescient it is. That's interesting to me as well, and worth pushing harder to get more of today's New Media cheerleaders to look at some of the old experiments, utopias, and objects. I wish I could have seen the exhibition at Laboral.
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I like the comment Mark Stahlman did about Holmes arguments:

Wiener's response was a very different one -- we are all "zombies", so we must wait for the humans to reappear.

I call it his "Genius Project." My father was working with him on this and devoted his career as a historian of ancient mathematics to studying Ptolemy.

Wiener's most important collaborator was Giorgio De Santillana. Take a look at his "Hamlet's Mill."

The problem is that without some fundamental understanding of the difference between a human and a zombie you don't know who you are playing with. It's the Blade Runner dilemma.

You are being far too generous about those you presume to be the "resisters."
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So, I believe that EVEN first order cybernetics has at least two merits:

1- It refuted linear models and was a test bed for stochastic models used to predict not one inevitable future but many possible futures;
2- The control mentioned by Wiener has more to do with "self-control" than a third party manipulation.