I just mention it because I have a strong suspicion that there is a large gulf between the legitimizing force of a label like “Cybernetics” (both for china in the 1970s and for Greenhalgh in anthropology today) and the actual practices of population control as they played out. Another interesting comparison here is Fred Turner’s book From Counter-culture to Cyberculture which also makes the claim of a transfer of cybernetics–in this case from Norbert Weiner to the planning department of Royal Dutch Shell around the 1973 oil crisis via Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth catalog. But it’s eminently clear that it wasn’t any actual set of practices that was transferred so much as a kind of systems-ecology-scenario-seeing mantra that fit in with Brand’s worldview. Whatever cybernetics is doing in that case (and maybe in the population case) it isn’t at the level of practices but at the level of justifications and ideological argument…

This is indeed very interesting, and it seems like it can be an anchor point to discuss what happens to biopolitics in the second half of the twentieth century. In a way, it relates back to our discussion at Berkeley this January on how different is vital systems from the 19th century problematization of life and emergence of biopower. One question that I find interesting is what happens to the conceptualization of ‘population’ once you can map this object with new and novel techniques in the 20th century with the help of computers. Along with simulation models, network analysis seems to be one of the candidates for doing this (indeed some of Columbia sociology’s Peter Bearman’s work on transmission of sexually transmitted disease is one interesting example. As a student of Harrison White, who brought network analysis from micro-physics to sociology, Bearman ends up conceptualizing population as a system in the form of a complex and dynamic network.) I believe such a conceptualization is light years away from the early population experts such as Malthus. Can we say that today population is conceptualized as a vital system? If so, how do we know it is one? This seems to be a question that is homologous to thinking the economy as a vital system.

I also agree with Stephen’s point about the obsoleteness of the human-machine distinction. It is fascinating how a generation of historians of science have been obsessed with automation and have argued in a similar vein along Greenhalgh that this was a suspicious and potentially evil conspiracy of the military industrial complex. see Galison, Hughes, Mirowski; especially Paul Edwards’ Closed Worlds is big on this narrative of the fantasy of automation. I would actually argue that the attempts at automation resulted in an unexpected way leading to the autonomy of the human in an ironical way. Both Galison’s piece on the anti-aircraft gunners and Hacking’s discussion of Pierce indicate that these techniques brought into light how Newtonian deterministic mechanics were fundamentally faulty in their deep ontological assumptions about the state of nature. What both Pierce and the cybernaticians of Galison discovered was an irreducible ‘error’ in the way in which things are supposed to be working: the processes they were trying to model and solve turned out to be fundamentally probabilistic. You could only know where the pilot will be in the next move up to a certain degree of certainty and probability. Same was true with Pierce’s pendulums.

What I find really surprising is how much a figure such as Hayek is standing on top of this seemingly non-related genealogy. As I had mentioned in a previous response to an entry, Hayek’s conceptualization of the market was fundamentally based on ideas revolved around cybernetics and feedback loops. This was how he had responded to Oskar Lange, soviet reform communist, in the famous calculation debate of the 30s. In a recent correspondence with Stephen, we realized that this profound level in his argument was not noticed until the mid-80s. Even the bourgeois economists had thought that there was no difference between the argumentation and style of reasoning between Hayek and von Misses against the soviet economists who were favoring ‘rational’ centrally planned economy. They thought even Hayek had argued from moral principles and not based on rational reasoning. Whereas Hayek’s reasoning was deeply saturated around cybernetics principles; interestingly enough his interlocutor Lange had invented a new schema for economic planning called ‘economic cybernetics’. He thought he could could plan a mixed economy on the bases of electrical engineering models. Then, it should not be surprising that economics today turned into a science of decision making, as our ideas around decision seems to be the products of these unexpected experiments with systems and the failure of deterministic mechanisms of Newtonian Physics. After all, it is not so hard to see the affinity between von Neumann (game theory & optimization), Dantzig (linear programming) and Hayek (markets) as they all seem to be standing on a common ground and sharing something common that I am not sure we come to understand well yet. At least, we cannot really tell what the new figure (will) looks like.

In this respect, I share the same conclusions as you do: that these names, cybernetics, operations research, industrial engineering, systems analysis etc… do not have much meaning in themselves. Rather as Stephen and I have recently discussed they are the elements of a new logic and style of reasoning that is being assembled in response to new set of problems that were either inconceivable, and therefore unnoticed, before or could not pass the threshold of problematization.

I think there is also much to be discussed on the topic of statistics and probability. Maybe starting from Hacking’s work on statistics and probability would be a good idea. I think Stephen’s Enacting Catastrophe is a very promising start in terms of translating Hacking’s history of ideas (even though he says it is archeology, I am not so convinced yet) into a type of analysis that goes beyond the history of ideas (be it archeology, genealogy or problematization).

I agree with everything you say, particularly concerning the question of whether cybernetics, or systems theory, or whatever it is that we are calling that set of techniques that came out of World War II and the early post-War period can be associated with “human” or “inhuman” systems. Of course, it is not right to say that they were initially used to model systems that were only machinic. They were used, in part, to model human-machine interactions in systems. The point is moreover that human-machine distinction, with systems theory, becomes obsolete. This is a point that Donna Haraway made a long time ago.

There is another point here that Onur and I have been talking about quite a bit, namely the question of whether “probability and statistics” should be associated with knowledge of “the social” and its distinctive form form of analyzing an archive of past events. What I try to indicate in “Enacting Catastrophe” — and what Onur and I have discussed in a number of other contexts — is that this kind of archival statistics and the probability claims it entails really just constitute a special case but absolutely not a paradigmatic case of how it is that statistics can be used to made probabilistic statements. Part of what is interesting about systems theory is that it does, in fact, use statistics and very much dependson probabilistic statements, it is just that these statements do not always (often do not) use analysis of an archive of past events. So, for example, one pervasive use of Monte Carlo techniques is to “simulate” an archive — to create a whole series of possible worlds — and then to conduct statistical analysis on that simulated archive, and to derive probability statements on the basis of it. This became standard in catastrophe modeling, for example, in the middle 1980s.

Maybe Onur can weigh in on this as well.