The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 7

 

Summary of Chapter 7: Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy

In this interesting little chapter Wiener turns the cybernetic lens to organizations, particularly nation-states, to address the issues of scientific advance, and of secrecy in the name of military advantage or national security. Essentially, secrecy is the enemy of communication and progress, and is typically based on an outdated or incorrect understanding of information and how it works. The US and USSR have brought back the Machiavellian politics and subterfuge of the Italian Renaissance; however, we now have a much more sophisticated scientific understanding of communication, and we can use this to analyze the present moment and see what we could do better.

One big problem that comes under Wiener’s scrutiny is the American propensity for judging the “value” of any thing by its value on the market. This is tied also to old-fashioned ideas, such as the idea that information can be treated like private property. He starts with the example of patent law; this made sense in age when inventions were made by skilled artisans working alone, but not today. He goes into the history of the changing relationship between artisan/inventors and groups of scientists.

He describes the qualities that make a thing a good commodity:

What makes a thing a good commodity? Essentially, that it can pass from hand to hand with the substantial retention of its value, and that the pieces of this commodity should combine additively in the same way as the money paid for them. The power to conserve itself is a very convenient property for a good commodity to have. (116)

A very cybernetic definition! He notes that gold makes a good basis for currency, because it is relatively stable (take that, bitcoin!). One presumes Wiener is not a big fan of markets, because of course these can cause even the value of gold to fluctuate wildly.

Information, in contrast, makes a bad commodity because it is subject to entropy – indeed, it is the opposite of entropy: “just as en­tropy is a measure of disorder, so information is a measure of order.”

He gives an example of competing measures of value: the value of a piece of jewelry has two parts: the gold, and the "façon" or workmanship [unfortunately I can't find other internet sources using this latter term, an interesting name for the imprint of labor on an artifact]. The latter leads to artificial markets such as stamp collecting, which depend on the existence of a group of buyers, and thus is open to dramatic swings in value, because “there is no permanent common denominator of collectors' taste.” A reasonable point so far as it goes, but can't even gold swing greatly in value? or more importantly, bread? It seems to me that trying to distinguish between “stable” and “unstable” commodities based on inherent qualities (derived from the theory of information) is not going to be successful.

“The problem of the work of art as a commodity raises a large number of questions important in the theory of information” (117). He moves into a discussion of art markets, noting that “the physical possession of a work of art is neither sufficient nor necessary for the benefits of appreciation which it conveys” [this is pretty much what Lady Philosophy tells Boethius regarding beautiful natural countrysides: you don't need to possess it to enjoy it]. Reproductions can give you a lot of the experience of the originals (even more so with music) – it is interesting what Wiener might have said about Benjamin’s theory of aura, perhaps this is relatable to his information theory of art? Reproduction is good because it spreads the enjoyment, though it also undermines the value of the original, and is furthermore lossy. (Wiener’s treatment of information here could benefit from some of the insights of the Innis school regarding space-binding and time-binding media). He derides derivative and second-rate copies.

 [The cybernetic theory of information may not be so good at explaining the value of art:]

What has been said before may not be worth saying again; and the informative value of a painting or a piece of literature cannot be judged without knowing what it contains that is not easily available to the public in contemporary or earlier works. It is only independ­ent information which is even approximately additive. The derivative information of the second-rate copyist is far from independent of what has gone before. (119)

[Scarcity of information = value, here. I thought Wiener was critical of such an idea? Or maybe he is not advocating such market reductionism, just describing it. And yet he seems to be taking it for granted as an aspect of the value of information.]

… a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community's previous common stock of information. Even in the great classics of literature and art, much of the obvious informative value has gone out of them, merely by the fact that the public has become acquainted with their contents. (119)

If the value of art can be reduced to “information” in this sense (and furthermore, simply novel or new information), then schoolboys who detest Shakespeare are quite reasonable to do so (until they are trained to see beyond the expected and cliché), and artists like Picasso can be seen as a "destructive influence" because they use up the available future positions for art [based on his later discussion of science, he is perhaps seeing art history as “path-dependent” here, an interesting idea but it seems just as easy to say that explorers like Picasso spur others to innovate as well. Then again I have actually made this argument myself, that the avant-garde is really about seeking out and pre-emptively using up possible future positions, in order to sort of suck the power out of these possible futures].

An interesting disquisition on what Wiener believes that the "man in the street" thinks about "Maecenas" (an ancient Roman art collector whom, imho, the “man in the street” has almost certainly never heard of) leads into his criticism of the idea that information (including artistic value) can be stored. This in turn leads to a discussion of weaponry and military tactics, which cannot be reasonably stored (at least not in modernity) but must be updated: storage, as antithesis of the process of change, is destructive and wasteful. England and New England are given as examples of regions which are economically hampered by being over-invested in older models (because they were first to develop), while later adopters easily move ahead.

Quite apart from the difficulties of having a relatively strict industrial law and an advanced labor policy, one of the chief reasons that New England is being deserted by the textile mills is that, frankly, they prefer not to be hampered by a century of traditions. (121)

[A.E.J. Morris makes a similar argument, in his History of Urban Form, regarding the ascendancy of Birmingham over the older artisanal center of Coventry; though he then notes that "with hind sight" this resulted in Coventry being spared many of the ravages of the Industrial Revolution (Morris, p. 290).]

Thus, from cybernetic viewpoint, law, “advanced labor policy” (as in, worker’s rights and protections) and traditions are examples of “storage:” once again cybernetics takes the form of a deeply functionalist way of looking at culture. Now Braverman, who I am reading at the same time in part specifically as a contrast with Wiener, might actually agree about this storage idea; but the overall role would have to be understood within the context of struggle over who has knowledge, and whose interests technology and production serve. I am reminded also of Braverman’s observation that the theory of management could have developed differently in a society run by workers themselves, as opposed to the current society in which workers are a problem to be “managed” – the same holds true for Wiener’s cybernetics. Perhaps there could be a more subtle and complex conflict theory cybernetics, or conflict theory/agonistic view informed by the insights of cybernetics, but going beyond Wiener’s functionalist assumptions – such as that the country that will be most successful is "the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it." (122)

This, in any event, brings him back to the question of military secrecy: there is no need or use for "storing" information using secrecy.

An example of the sort of description that must have influenced Silvan Tomkins:

I repeat, to be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transi­tional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unham­pered exchange. (122)

International relations involves bluffing, similar to litigation which was discussed in a previous chapter (and bluffing and misrepresentation is a bad thing, according to Wiener). Scientific military advance ends up being a paradox:

I have already said the dissemination of any scien­tific secret whatever is merely a matter of time, that in this game a decade is a long time, and that in the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies. Thus each terrifying discovery merely increases our subjection to the need of mak­ing a new discovery. (129)

He ends with demonic images, such as summoning demons, and the "Gadarene swine" from the Bible. The link between military development and evil is two-fold, because this will increase entropy (which he has equated with evil, before), besides literally resulting in the world being blown up.

 

 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapters 5 and 6

Summary of Chapter 5: Organization as the Message

This brief chapter has as its key point the idea that what is most essential to a living organism is its pattern, which it maintains against entropy and which in theory could be sent as a message, reduplicating the entity. Various analogies from the real world of biology are listed, and sci-fi scenarios involving sending humans by telegraph are lightly explored as a “phantasy."”A comparison/contrast is made with the religious idea of a “soul,” apparently as an analogy for the “pattern” he has identified as the core of being an organism: “The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made” (101). One difference would be that there is no reason why a living, copied individual could not fork into two individuals with the same past, growing different thenceforward like cells splitting in two. [iirc there was some story, possibly a Jack Vance story, in which this was possible: though the copies that had been sent for communication purposes were made out of perishable material and did not last long; their memories somehow had to be uploaded back to the original, or they would die without the original knowing what they had experienced]. Wiener seems to imagine something more like scanning the body and destroying it as it goes, so the replica becomes the only existing version, a sort of immortality through replication idea [immortality of the pattern, that is, since wouldn’t the consciousness be destroyed each time? I’m trying to recall what Chalmers would have said: for the consciousness evoked or whatever by another copy of the same physical pattern, to be the exact same consciousness (not just a replica) would be pure dualism]. Wiener makes a silly comparison to the amount of information in an Encyclopedia Britannica, which is obviously not even comparable.

 

Summary of Chapter 6: Law and Communication

In this chapter Wiener appears to be demonstrating the application of cybernetic theory by giving a cybernetic theory of law. Basically the purpose of the law is to communicate clearly the expectations of behavior (and punishments for bad behavior) that will be enforced by the "community" or "the state" in the name of certain cultural understandings of "justice." Such an idea of justice will vary cross-culturally: Wiener provides what he understands as the Western Tradition as an example. This appears to be a very typical functionalist theory of law. How law should work is obtained rationally from the definition: it should communicate clearly. Wiener notes that this is obviously not always the case, but exactly how and why intentional ambiguities or unfairness are introduced is not something he seems ready to analyze in any depth. Instead these are accidents or from some other effect external to the purpose of the law: indeed, "noise." He notes with some apparent disdain or irony that lawyers are allowed and encouraged to introduce noise as confusion, bluffing, etc. in the courtroom – he feels this is unusual in, or rather extrinsic to the proper functioning of, a communicative system.

Within a culturally relativist framing, he describes his understanding of the dominant tradition, of Western Civilization with some influence from the East) and what it entails:

The best words to express these requirements are those of the French Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. These mean: the liberty of each human being to develop in his freedom the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him; the equality by which what is just for A and B remains just when the positions of A and B are interchanged; and a good will between man and man that knows no limits short of those of humanity itself. These great principles of justice mean and demand that no person, by virtue of the personal strength of his position, shall enforce a sharp bargain by duress. What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom. (105-6)

[Summarized: 1) this is justified solely by tradition/cultural attachment to these ideals, they are not presented as natural or eternal; 2) each human is to be free to "develop" "the full measure of the human possibilities embodied in him" [a phrasing which could be open on the one hand to de facto inequality (as different persons have different "embodied possibilities;" I was going to say "on the other hand," an expression of the unique, but the measure is still the presence of "human possibilities," so this is a humanism, not a Stirnerian unique-ism.]. 3) equivalence of subject positions (A and B can be interchanged) [here we see an example of the “as if” that assumes that persons of any race, class, gender, sexuality and so on, are interacting in a world that is already equal or “as if” equal, and their actions can be evaluated in this light]; 4) no one can exert strength or duress to get a better deal; 5) a community or state enforces this, and can use force, but only in a way that avoids "unnecessary infringement of freedom," i.e., a subtractive view of "freedom" which in fact takes the existence of state power and “duress” for granted.]

[There is also clearly a limitation to the functionalism of the cybernetic theory of law, as presented in this chapter. It is presumed that since law should be clearly communicated/ing, by definition, then any examples of ambiguity must be explained away as aberrant and to be improved on. The interpretation of such ambiguity as intentional and exploitative is not seen as an inherent or essential aspect of the law as an expression of power or domination, but only accidental and peripheral to the true workings of law in the system.]

The Human Use of Human Beings, Preface and Chapter 1

 

Wiener, Norbert. (1989 [1950]). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. London: Free Association Books.

[I had planned to read Simondon's Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, but learned that that book was written in response (in part) to this one, so I decided to read this one first. My impression was that this was a restatement of his cybernetic theory from his original book, for a broader general audience; however, this book does not seem to give a very deep understanding of cybernetics, imho. Instead, Wiener expounds some of the basic concepts and ideas of cybernetics, and then applies them to different scenarios and contexts in a large number of short chapters, with widely varying degrees of success.]

Summary of Preface and Chapter 1

Preface:

Wiener notes the influence of earlier thinkers, such as Gibbs, who had moved physics away from the stable Newtonian model, to one that is all about contingency. This (rather than, or rather moreso than quantum physics per se, as in many other accounts), is, according to Wiener, the big difference between modern (20th century) physics and math, and earlier. One big surprise is Wiener’s equation of entropy with evil – though he means evil in a “negative” Augustinian model, rather than a “positive” Manichaean model.

 

Chapter 1 summary:

Wiener reiterates his definition of cybernetics as the theory of messages, and discusses the close relationship he sees between communication and control. He defines concepts such as messages, information, feedback. These are all significant for his theory in which what moves or flows is “information” (not labor, heat, energy, etc.). He explores analogies between living beings and various levels of automata. His primary point seems to be that more recent (in his day) automata, which use feedback and memory, are increasingly similar in operation or design or whatever to living beings. For instance, old-school automata such as clockwork figures on a music box have "prearranged behavior" while humans and animals have "contingent behavior" (22); automata are now increasingly capable of such contingent behavior, and complex actions; increasingly they also “act on the external world by
means of messages.”

[The idea of command-as-communication clearly obscures labor – indeed, don't I in fact transform my environment through labor more than by "command?" This is the perspective of the noble or manager – commands are imagined as having direct effects, instead of being mediated by work, etc. It seems awkward to think of, for instance, digging a ditch as an act of issuing “commands” to the shovel, the dirt, etc. Nevertheless it would be interesting to see this in relation to a thermodynamic theory of labor as energy.]

[I'm wondering how Wiener will treat the difference between mediated and unmediated, or differently mediated, actions. When I turn the knob on the sink to turn on the water, I am not "communicating" in the sense of sending a message which turns into an abstraction along the way, then decoded (this seems implicit in the concept of "message" and the way in which entropy/noise is treated in relation to it). Certainly you could say that the movement of my hand "communicates" a motion to the knob, which communicates that to the internal mechanism (and this motion is transformed mechanically, or can be), but there seems to be a massive difference in the two forms of "communication" (I don't know whether Wiener will recognize this, ignore it, or conflate the two).] [The answer is: he will phrase the difference as a matter of complexity and the possibility for contingent responses involving feedback.]

To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society. (18)

[Here the conflation of communication and control (from merely asserting a relation or similarity, to taking it for granted in the repetition of “communication and control” as a black-boxed pair) feels a bit ominous here, as we move to the assertion that control belongs "to the essence of man's inner life".]

It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feed­back. (26)

 Both have sensors; for both the incoming messages "are not taken neat" but are transformed through the apparatus [this seems to be his version of my question as to whether the input is abstracted or not]. Anyway information takes a new form available to use by the system (27).