Literate Technologies: Language, Cognition, Technicity by Armand Louis

Author:Armand, Louis [Armand, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Litteraria Pragensia
Published: 2013-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Language & the Cybernetic Mind

Cybernetics, the science of systems of control and communications in animals and machines, is founded—as the etymology of the term readily implies—upon a concept of navigation, of steering a path through shifting terrains, of reading the signs. In the cybernetic view, everything in the world of experience is relational, and terms like mind, language and meaning are taken as fundamentally descriptive of the underlying structural dynamics by which our experience of the world is realised. This view, which is discursive in essence, thus defines the “real”—or phenomena (percepts, events, data, injunctions, descriptions, etc.)—as series of integrated, recursive, differential “systems.” It is one of the basic premises of cybernetics, however, that when we speak of systems we are in fact using a metaphor for what remains, in effect, a type of epistemology (and that different systems represent differing, and often incompatible, epistemologies) such that at no point are descriptions of the real exempt from the self-validating character of all epistemologies. The concern of cybernetics, then, is not with the presumed substance of any particular “system,” but with the structurality of systems in general, and above all the structurality of differential relations between and across systems—which is also to say, between and across different epistemologies.

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In a lecture presented in August 1968 to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, Gregory Bateson traced the modern conception of cybernetics back to the “Copernican Revolution” of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (1809) and the founding of comparative psychology. [165] Lamarck’s signal achievement, according to Bateson, had been in overturning the order of the great chain of being (organised downwards from cosmic “mind” to “base matter”) such that mind itself suddenly became regarded as something requiring explanation in terms of material processes—in other words, that matter is integral to what mind is —and that “mental processes must always have physical representation.” Hence, “the complexity of the nervous system,” for example, is said to be “related to the complexity of mind,” [166] the latter thus seen to be “conditioned” by the former.

Whatever the limitations of Lamarck’s evolutionary principles (based upon environmental adaptation and inherited characteristics), the implications of this overturning of the existing causal schema continues to place in question such epistemological dichotomies as mind-body and the assumptions of unilateral causation—and this applies equally to the Aristotelean vitalism that had, in one form or another, characterised the notion of a cosmic mind “by endowing living systems with a non-material purposeful driving component that attained expression through the realisation of their forms.” [167] Based upon material heterogeneity, the Lamarckian concept of mind thus suggests a “pattern of relationships”—from the complex to the trivial—as both structuring and determinate of the “mental” nature of substance . This prompts Bateson to ask, what sort of complexity entails mind ?

One of the consequences of Lamarck’s epistemology of living systems is that, rather than considering the world and its constituents as being organised according to a hypotactic code of descent from the highest to the lowest, mind to matter, we

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