Is Oedipus Online?: Siting Freud after Freud (Short Circuits) by Jerry Aline Flieger

Author:Jerry Aline Flieger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-06T20:50:00+00:00

ro. Network, Knot

Network. A collection of nodes, V, sometimes called vertices, plus a collection of arcs, which are directed from one node to another.

-Free Online Dictionary of Computing

If we want to locate a very clear instance of a rhizomatic meshwork engaged in bundling and dispatch, we need only think of the Internet, woven from linked site clusters, and conveying information in packets sent by the best available route.

Similarly, the emergence from the concept of circuitry to the concept of network-from loop to mesh-is reflected in the historical development of cybernetics systems theory. As N. Katherine Hayles explains, the first wave of cybernetics in the 196os was concerned with feedback loops ("endogenously stable circuits," as De Landa puts it). A thermostat is one such simple looping system, designed to self-regulate in a "feedback loop" (adjusting the heat up or down as the temperature in the room rises or falls).

The second wave of cybernetics beginning in the 1970s, according to Hayles, brought reflexivity into the process: the system is not only self-regulating, but self-organizing, like cellular division in a bioorganism, or a "wizard" in a computer program that installs and then runs it. The current third wave of cybernetics (emergence) involves networks; it is no longer self-contained, but is part of a reactive and interactive system. Today systems not only self-organize and self-regulate, but actually evolve in response to environmental factors. (Both biological evolution and self-programming artificial intelligence are examples of "emergent" functions, as are human civilizations.) Emergence may eventually produce intelligence or even consciousness as the organism (or program) replicates itself. Today's Al programs sometimes even teach their functions to other emergent systems. (This is the most promising avenue for robotics, where electronic creatures learn as they go. In a documentary on the Science Channel, an inventor left a room filled with mechanical spiders, unable to walk-when he returned, they were marching single file. They learn by trial and error.)

Drawing on Deleuzian theory, Manuel De Landa makes a crucial observation: he points out that in systems theory, "emergence" must be an effect of a difference in energy level, causing a hook-up with other systems, a meshwork:

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