On Thursday, March 05 2009, 12:32 (-0500), t byfield wrote: > One difficulty of writing a history of cybernetics is that the problems > it explicitly poses about 'autonomy' undermine the twin ideas of author > and history. If you accept the major premises of cybernetics (even in the > bracketed form that historical craft requires), the notion of a stable > subject who acts deliberately falls apart;
...but it's one thing whether the stable subject is taken apart on the grounds of a critique of 18th/19th ideologies of genius and subjectivism by analyzing, for example, structures of human consciousness and language (as in Freud's psychoanalysis and structuralism). It's a completely different thing when the stable subject is negated from a late-Cartesian perspective of behaviorist mechanism (as in classical cybernetics). The latter denounces human - and thus also political and critical - agency, and that's a crucial difference. Again, the frequent mix-up and contamination of these two discourses in the "new media" field is unfortunate, and sometimes disturbing. -F -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
