Cybernetic Sense

Abstract

The cybernetic reformulation of cognition and perception is interrogated through the work of mathematician Norbert Wiener and psychiatrist Warren McCulloch. In this history lies a genealogy of our contemporary attitudes to ubiquitous computing and the interface. The work of these two men demonstrates highly dissonant understandings of human perception and cognition. On the one hand, both men believed that cybernetics and, by extension, computational technology, possessed a normative prosthetic capacity. Deeply attuned to ideas of human limits and disabilities, cyberneticians envisioned perception and cognition in normative terms still deeply inflected by older modern ideas about the human subject from psychology and pathology. On the other hand, Wiener and McCulloch's concerns with process and probability produced an autonomous form of sense no longer linked to limits. For both men, process was a concrete entity in the world, and splits between materiality and abstraction did not hold. Cyberneticians thus struggled between ideal concepts of how human bodies and minds worked, and their own theories that made humans but one part of a system of equivalencies with machines and other entities. This tension between envisioning sensory infrastructures as subjective and mimetically prosthetic or networked and autonomous continues to serve as the infrastructure for our contemporary drive to increase media penetration and ubiquity; forcing an endless effort to augment a human sensorium normatively understood as lagging behind an information network now lent lively autonomy and infinite capacities to process data.