Steve Joshua Heims: The Cybernetics Group (1991)

“This is the engaging story of a moment of transformation in the human sciences, a detailed account of a remarkable group of people who met regularly from 1946 to 1953 to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years (cybernetics, information theory, computer theory) as a basis for interdisciplinary alliances. The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, as they came to be called, included such luminaries as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Kurt Lewin, F. S. C. Northrop, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie, who thought and argued together about such topics as insanity, vision, circular causality, language, the brain as a digital machine, and how to make wise decisions.

Heims, who met and talked with many of the participants, portrays them not only as thinkers but as human beings. His account examines how the conduct and content of research are shaped by the society in which it occurs and how the spirit of the times, in this case a mixture of postwar confidence and cold-war paranoia, affected the thinking of the cybernetics group. He uses the meetings to explore the strong influence elite groups can have in establishing connections and agendas for research and provides a firsthand took at the emergence of paradigms that were to become central to the new fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

In his joint biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Heims offered a challenging interpretation of the development of recent American science and technology. Here, in this group portrait of an important generation of American intellectuals, Heims extends that interpretation to a broader canvas, in the process paying special attention to the two iconoclastic figures, Warren McCulloch and Gregory Bateson, whose ideas on the nature of the mind/brain and on holism are enjoying renewal today.”

Paperback edition appeared under the title Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group (1946–1953) in 1993.

Publisher MIT Press, 1991
ISBN 0262082004, 9780262082006
xii+334 pages

Reviews: N. Katherine Hayles (Hist Human Sciences, 1992), R.V. Jones (New Scientist, 1992), Carlos A. Martínez-Vela (2001).

WorldCat

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Max Bense: aesthetica IV. Programmierung des Schönen. Allgemeine Texttheorie und Textästhetik (1960) [German]

“Max Benses informationeile Ästhetik schließt mit einer Allgemeinen Texttheorie ab, die, auf der Grundlage statistischer Untersuchungen von Fucks, Herdan, Mandelbrot u. a., als Modell der neuen statistischen Zeichen-Ästhetik aufgefaßt werden kann.

Die Allgemeine Texttheorie bezieht sich auf jede Art von Text, schließt also die ästhetische Theorie der Poesie und Prosa, aber auch der wissenschaftlichen Sprachen, Werbesprachen und abstrakten Sprachen usw. ein.

Der Begriff Text wird dabei als derjenige sprachliche Zustand aufgefaßt, der statistische bzw. informationelle, semantische bzw. ästhetische Formen meint, aus deren Materialität Poesie und Prosa im klassischen Sinne erst hervorgehen. Der Begriff Text zielt also nicht auf vorästhetische Zustände der Sprache ab, sondern auf vorpoetische und vorprosaische. Er bestimmt gewissermaßen die archaischen theoretischen Fundamente der Literatur.

Allgemeine Texttheorie umfaßt also Textstatistik, Textsemantik, Textphänomenologie und Textästhetik. Der bisher völlig unklar oder falsch verwendete Ausdruck Logik der Dichtung verschwindet zugunsten des genau formulierbaren Ausdrucks Textsemantik, der den Begriff Textlogik mit umfaßt.

Es werden also sowohl numerische wie essentielle Überlegungen zum Begriff Text angestellt.

Die Allgemeine Texttheorie erscheint als Grundlagenforschung für zukünftige Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturtheorie. Sie will exakte Mittel einführen und der beliebigen üblichen Interpretation, soweit sie nicht historische Fakten herausstellt, ein Ende bereiten.” (from the dusk jacket)

Publisher Agis, Baden-Baden and Krefeld, 1960
128 pages
via Mitchell Johnson

Commentary: Reinhard Döhl (n.d., DE).

WorldCat

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More on Bense’s aesthetics.

Bernhard Siegert: Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (2015)

“In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur.

Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from first-order to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational.

Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signal distinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic.

Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.”

Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Publisher Fordham University Press, New York, 2015
Meaning Systems series
ISBN 0823263762, 9780823263769
xiv+265 pages

Reviews: Geoghegan (Paragraph, 2014), Young (New Media & Society, 2015).
Commentary: Martin (Grey Room, 2016).

Publisher

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