The Macy Conference: (1945-1960)
The Macy Conference was a series of experimental meetings held in New York during the 1940s-60s facilitating multidisciplinary exchanges concerning human-machine communication and their implications on various fields. The Macy Conference was titled: “Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems.” Norbert Wiener in particular makes claims that his theories and models would be of utility in economics and political science. Instead of giving presentations, the conference emphasis was on initiating discussion. The radically interdisciplinary meetings brought together researchers from a wide variety of fields: philosophy, neurophysiology, electrical engineering, semantics, literature, and psychology, etc with the aim to understand one another and find linking connections between their own areas of expertise. These Cybernetics meetings were to provide that framework for discussing “problems of communication” which led to the “intensive and comprehensive study of man” and the closer look at the people who studied “man.” The resulting conversations were vital but were not inclusive, only invited members of the scholarship represented fields and subfields. Its principle concept still effects the way we work today. The concept is based on the notion that collaborations between disciplines start with the search for a common language.
While the historic Macy Conference was not inclusive, nevertheless it was an important non-inclusive effort and should be mark it as such.
Since one of the most important components of the Macy Conference was its international efforts and the integration of a range of scientist’s voices from various fields, I’d like to take a moment and reveal a few blockages in the path of the natural progression in regards to its effects in Eastern Europe. I find these important if we wish to understand the unique characteristics of marginal regions/countries and their relationship to the subject of cybernetics and the concept of communication now and then.
I have no problem picturing the onset of the Macy Conference in the US or in Western Europe. However, to imagine the introduction and the rise of the concept of immateriality in the material centered Eastern Europe is a stretch. All ideologies there were reduced down to materiality. The physical labor as value was glorified. This time period is in the midst of the heavy handed state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. The physical reality of labor and physical punishments of the citizens was the material landscape of the everyday. Even the mind altering ideologies re-materialized into collective behavior such as paranoia, fear, etc. In this landscape the concept of disembodiment would have had an unlikely rise. Cybernetics therefore had a unique ground to break into the East. Ideas were held back or altered in hope to prevent weakening of the ruling regime.
The effects or state control, specific to the early usage of computers in Hungary, brought a few things to light at a recent conference titled Hungarian Artists and the Computer1 organized by the National Gallery of Hungary as a special event for the exhibit with the same title. Marton Orosz, the curator of the exhibit brought up not only the concept of information censorship, but a more fundamental issue, the absence of access, the prevention of the import of personal computers. Military applications of computers were already in place, but artists had no access to them. When artists made their way through the borders and smuggled computers back into the country the concept of state surveillance expanded the advance of technological repression. Smugglers weren’t punished by the government in this situation, counting on to lead informers to political secrets. In any case no wonder they thought of “computers as tools for democracy”1. Sugár János, a Hungarian multimedia artist recollects the first positive step towards technological reform in 1986, “by then, we were allowed to officially know about the computers, that it points us towards the future and finally we were able to propagate it without any ideological implication. To officially promote this new technology, an art exhibit was organized for the public. However, no artists in Hungary had computers (again, this is 1986). As a solution, the government allowed to furnish a room with computers and let artists into the otherwise closed military like campus at the Institute for Computer Science and Control.”2
The story here has an important thread of withholding access to information and also information generating tools. What do we think about withholding the concept of information as data.
The anti-cybernetic Soviet censure in the early days aimed to protect the reader from any new ideology and used translation as a tool to alter the meaning of new information theories.
“When it appeared in 1953, the Russian translation of the “Mathematical Theory of Communication” hardly read like the same text written in English by Claude Shannon a few years before. [1] Purged of any trace of man-machine analogies, the translation portrayed communications engineering as an ideologically neutral technical field. The Russian editor replaced Shannon’s original title with the Russian, “The Statistical Theory of Electrical Signal Transmission,” and he rid the work of the words “information,” “communication,” and “mathematical” entirely, put “entropy” in quotation marks, and substituted “data” for “information” throughout the text. The editor assured the reader (and the censor) that Shannon’s concept of “entropy” had nothing to do with physical entropy and was called such only on the basis of “purely superficial similarity of mathematical formulae.”[…]His discursive strategy was simple: to portray information theory as a purely technical tool with no connection to the ideology-laden biological and social sciences. The translation typified Soviet communications engineers’ attempts to remove ideology from their work to place emphasis on technical applications of information theory rather than its potential conceptual innovations.This translation of Shannon’s work occurred at the time of the Soviet anti-cybernetics campaign.[…]Taken on its own, however, the episode points to the charged relationship of information theory, and its cold-war cousin, cybernetics, to ideology and the social sciences in the cultural and political worlds of the 1940s and 50s. In both cases, highly technical theories put forward by mathematicians acquired ideological baggage which some took up with enthusiasm and others vehemently rejected[…]In France, commentators and scientists variously saw these new American sciences as bourgeois conjecture, full of mythology and mystification, or as exciting meta-theories capable of uniting diverse disciplines. Similarly, in Russia, an early anti-cybernetics campaign saw Shannon and Wiener’s work as embodiments of idealist, reactionary, American pseudoscience. After Stalin’s death, however, Russian scientists made a complete reversal of their attitude toward the two new sciences[…]Following initial skepticism and discussion, cybernetics was institutionalized in Europe in a way it never was in the United States.”3
cited and mentioned works:
1) HUNGARIAN ARTISTS AND THE COMPUTER
http://mng.hu/temporary_exhibitions/hungarian-artists-and-the-computer-122701
2) „Akkor már lehetett tudni, hogy a számítógép létezik és valahogy a jövő errefelé vezet, és végre ideológiamentesen lehetett valami korszerűt propagálni.”
http://artmagazin.hu/artmagazin_hirek/akkor_mar_lehetett_tudni_hogy_a_szamitogep_letezik_es_valahogy_a_jovo_errefele_vezet_es_vegre_ideologiamentesen_lehetett_valami_korszerut_propagalni..2355.html?pageid=81
3) Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France and the Soviet Union. David Mindell (MIT), Jérôme Segal (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Slava Gerovitch (Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology and the Russian Academy of Sciences) [enScience and Ideology: A Comparative History, Mark Walker (dir.), Routledge, London, 2003, pages. 66
http://www.infoamerica.org/documentos_word/shannon-wiener.htm