Kategorie: Komplexität

The history of cybernetics is thus the application of feedback mechanisms through data processing and information in their respective contexts. As a science that emerged in the post-war period, it has been categorised as a rationalisation model of technical mobilisation, with government strategy focused on ensuring security and order for the civilian population (operational research) and the promise of perpetual peace through control. Examples of this, as explained in the second part of this review, are the application of cybernetics to the one-child policy in China (Dylan Levi King), the ambivalence towards the concept of control in Soviet cybernetics (Slava Gerovitch), and the opening up of the relationship between AI and political power, which was welcomed early in Poland (Michał Krzykawski).

Yet the cybernetics of the 21st century is not the cybernetics of the post-war period, nor is it cybernetics with a K, as Claus Pias believed, whose reception in the 1970s and 1980s led to an epistemological movement called constructivism, having an enormous impact on the soft sciences and triggering an epistemic turn in philosophy. Similarly, the cybernetics of the 21st century is not the cybernetics with a C that represented an emancipatory ideal of posthumanist ideas in the context of American subcultures.
The cybernetics of the 21st century includes the historicity of cybernetics. It is not limited to a critical revision of its programme and application in different contexts. Nor is it limited to the question of the sincerity of the cybernetic programme in its application to organisational and management policy.

This work is about the present of cybernetics. The anthology Cybernetics for the 21st Century consists of 12 essays on the reconstruction of cybernetics. Its aim, to design a cybernetics for this century, has been achieved, as can be expected, because it shows the complexity of its conception and the diversity of its fields of application. This is precisely what this book is about. Even if it is almost unavoidable, especially in the practice of scientific research, to refer repeatedly to the origin from which cybernetics supposedly emerged – be this Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Andrè-Marie Amperè’s use of the term “cybernetyka” in 1834, or the Macy conferences, a reconstruction aiming to show the diversity of applications of a technical model with different objectives in different geographies. The point is not to speak of cybernetics in the singular but, rather, following Yuk Hui’s welcome term “cosmotechnics”, to bring up diversity as the locus of its singular interpretations. This is an attempt to map cybernetics.

The first part of the anthology deals with the basic ideas of cybernetics. Philosophical and epistemological disputes with cybernetic approaches are discussed. But why is cybernetics relevant today? This question already reveals the timeliness of its discourse. The extent to which this model contributes to understanding and problematising contemporary reality is part of its reconstruction. The first part analyses cybernetics as a model of thought from various perspectives. Cybernetics could be described as an epistemological model. In his book Recursivity and Contingency (Hui 2019), Yuk Hui argues that cybernetics is a reflexive philosophy of technology, since the reflexive movement of this interactive process (self-reference) takes place through communication and control loops. This thesis can be well supported by the philosophies of consciousness if the tradition anchored in philosophy around the reflexivity of consciousness confirms the foundations of cybernetics as a philosophy. Hui goes so far as to suggest that the 19th century philosophies of reflexivity provided the epistemological building blocks of the cybernetic model.

Technical reflexivity, automation, cannot be understood without the emergence of the philosophy of consciousness. To this end, this volume presents the epistemological interpretation of cybernetics. The second part of the anthology, entitled „Territories“, demonstrates that cybernetics is an applied model of thought and cognition. There are as many cyberneticists as there are places of application. „Because cybernetics could be applied in the realisation of a socialist, a communist as well as an arch-liberal management“ (Hui 2024, 14). Part 2 is devoted to reconstructing the localised history of cybernetics in Poland, Chile, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, the USA and the UK.

---

Cybernetics as a philosophical project

The topicality of cybernetics is introduced by a clear and concise statement by Hui, actually based on his proposal for this volume: “Cybernetics has been a philosophical project since the beginning” (Hui 2024, 12). He proposes two paths leading to the statement that cybernetics is a philosophical project. The positive statement inherent in this is that there were cybernetic elements in philosophy before it became a communication technology as a programme. This new epistemology, which in fact brings cybernetics to fruition through communication channels, is not new; rather, it was already present in the history of philosophy. Yet this positive assertion is argued via negationis. Hui draws upon a negative statement as an introduction to a reflection on the philosophy of cybernetics. This goes back to Martin Heidegger’s statement in the so-called interview in Der Spiegel in 1966: „Only a God can save us“. This comment was made in relation to the dissolution of philosophy into individual sciences such as psychology, political science, etc., followed by the question: „And who will take the place of philosophy?“ His answer was: „Cybernetics“ (Heidegger 1976, 212). Hui comments on this:

He [Heidegger] announced that cybernetics marked the end of Western philosophy. This assertion is dramatic but significant for reflecting not only on the history and future of philosophy, but also on the future of cybernetics. (Hui 2024, 12)

Heidegger clearly equates the end of philosophy with cybernetics. However, such a vague statement, which presupposes an eschatological view of philosophy that is not explained in this article, raises too many questions. Speaking of an end brought about by the victors and losers is, in my opinion, a repetition of the myth of control, which in most cases testifies to a convenience of thinking, an end that the victors of technological domination will have to tolerate and from which thinking must say goodbye.

The statement about the end of philosophy reveals cybernetics to be a philosophical project

The end is the completion of a beginning. Hui thus derives an even more promising approach from the end of philosophy on the basis of cybernetics: cybernetics was a philosophical project from the very beginning.

For Heidegger, the triumph of cybernetics therefore equally means the end of philosophy. In view of such end of philosophy, Heidegger calls for a thinking to come; a thinking that is able to overcome the latest and last stage of Western philosophy: cybernetics. (Hui 2024, 12)

Of course, cybernetics has displaced philosophy, as Hui points out. Cybernetics as universal reflexive thinking has displaced philosophy from its traditional place (Hörl 2008, 163-198). Michael Hagner speaks of the fourth disease of man as a consequence of the first, cosmological repression, the second, psychoanalytical, the third, anthropological, and the fourth, spiritual repression (Hagner 2008, 38). Spiritual repression, which manifests itself in various forms, such as the „objectification of drives“ through a high degree of automation of institutions (Gehlen 2004, 74-78), the „reification and objectification of certain processes that constitute the essence of man“ (Hagner 2008, 57), or the replacement of the self-reflection of consciousness by information technology, heralded the dissolution of subjective thought. For Heidegger, reflection is indeed one of the fundamental characteristics of thinking, as he shows in his essay „On the Question of the Determination of the Matter of Thinking“ (Heidegger 1984). In cybernetics, which is essentially based on circuits, Heidegger sees a technical model of reflection that can to some extent replace the formal operation of thinking. Yet here cybernetics reflects the universalism of thought and announces its end because, as its historicity shows us, it initiated its fragmentation into several approaches to thinking.

Nevertheless, when approached as a philosophical project, cybernetics has opened up new ways of thinking. Gotthard Günther’s project is the end of reflection-logical idealism and the opening, even the redemption, of Aristotelian dual-valued logic to a polycontextual multivalence (Günther 1976), a liberating ontology that was warmly welcomed by the new cybernetic thinking. In terms of the philosophical-anthropological perspective of a new philosophy, Max Bense speaks of technical being, of man as a technical being (Bense 1969). He sees it not just as a further step in the history of technology but as a meta-technology, a philosophical matter in which the foundations, objects and connections of the positive sciences, the humanities and the natural sciences, are examined. Abraham Moles speaks of cybernetics as a philosophical-aesthetic project, the emphasis on objectivity (Moles 1971). Arnold Gehlen sees feedback as the essence of the human being (Gehlen 2007). Cybernetics wants nothing more than to transfer the characteristics of this essence to technology and thus complete it. Hui locates epistemology in reflexivity, which he calls “recursivity” in his book Recursivity and Contingency. This is the reflexivity that founded philosophy as a theory of knowledge and consciousness in the first place, namely the return to the self, from whose movement the light of the mind emerges.

This volume aims to show that cybernetics is not just a control technology, but also a philosophy, and that its topicality is due to the different epistemologies of cybernetics. An epistemological reconstruction reveals the philosophy underlying cybernetics, which has made it a universal science whose legitimacy today lies exclusively in AI and technical formalism. This volume aims to reclaim the philosophy.

---

The beginning of a philosophy that became cybernetic

This volume shows the philosophical background of cybernetics not only via negationis, for example, in that an end – or a completion in the sense of Heidegger – reveals the essence of a beginning. It is precisely the completion of philosophy by cybernetics that reveals the philosophical nature of cybernetics from the very start. In this sense, the volume provides the argument, beyond the negative paths, that cybernetics is based on a philosophical project. I will consider the two paths that the volume points out, which provide good reasons for a philosophical reconstruction of cybernetics: 1) the reflexive logic of the machine, i.e. automation, responds to the transfer of the self-reflexivity of consciousness to the machine; 2) cybernetics as a project in the philosophy of technology that aims to abolish the hitherto irreconcilable views of mechanism and vitalism. Cybernetics has thus programmatically introduced the system-philosophical claim of scientific universalism.

Reflexivity and automation

Nietzsche warns that every genealogy reconstructs a history. We can even rethink and reshape the history of Western philosophy in the light of a cybernetic perspective says Brunella Antomarini (Antomarini 2024, 23). Whether we locate the beginnings of cybernetics in Plato’s metaphysics or in Leibniz’s monistic philosophy (Hui 2024, 12) depends on which story we want to tell. According to Heidegger, Plato’s metaphysics anticipates the arrival of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener sees Leibniz’s mathematics – the differential equation – as a fundamental basis for what he understands by cybernetics. As is well known, the name “cybernetics” comes from the title of Wiener’s 1948 book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This is the Greek translation of the title „On Governors“, which James Clerk Maxwell used in 1868 for an article on the mechanisms of temperature regulation. Wiener adopted the Greek word „κυβέρνησις“, which Plato used in the figurative sense of „ruler of a government“ to describe the principle of communication regulation.

We have Brunella Antomarini to thank for reconstructing cybernetics following Leibniz’s metaphysics. This is not an anachronism – of course, cybernetics was not yet possible in the 20th century – but a genealogical perspective, and it shows us another line of thought in Wiener’s cybernetics that is just as important as that of control: automation. It shows nicely how automation emerged from the Western philosophy of self-reflection, the formalisation of which we owe to Leibnizʼs metaphysics. In fact, Leibniz’s metaphysics and mathematics were fundamental contributions to Wiener’s concept of automation based on control and signal transmission: „Leibniz as the patron saint of cybernetics“ (Antomarini 2024, 23). According to Antomarini, the circular logic that cybernetics implies through the communication channels, i.e. self-regulation, self-reference, can be found in the idea of self-motion conceived by Leibniz. Self-motion is said to be driven by a force vive (Antomarini 2024, 32) based on the mechanical impact of bodies. The conservation of energy, which was physically and mathematically proven in the following century, was already secured by Leibniz in the three philosophical principles („theorem of sufficient reason“, „theorem of the identity of the indistinguishable“ and „presupposed harmony“). The self-sustaining movement follows the mechanical dream of the perpetuum mobile, the second form of which cybernetics seeks to realise with its fully automatic claims (Antomarini 2024, 35). The author points out the harbingers of cybernetics and the completion of metaphysics in Leibniz’s metaphysics, since Leibniz had already anticipated a life force that could be realised through operational differential equations.

The abolition of dualisms

The second argument in favour of a philosophical foundation for cybernetics is the abolition of the mind/matter dualism that has held together Western thought culture in every respect. Mind and matter should merge in communication circuits through information, which is neither energy nor matter, but a unit of measurement for probabilities. We have already pointed out regarding Antomarini’s contribution that Leibniz’s self-moving force was an expression of the collapse of the separation between the organic and the inorganic maintained by early modern philosophy. With the transfer of the concept of self-regulation (haemostasis) from physiology to information-based communication circuits, the bridge between the mechanistic view of the world and living systems was finally built. The first attempt to build a self-regulating machine was based on its interaction with an environment. The steam engine, an environmental machine in that it converted heat into power, held all the promise of a perpetual motion machine of the second kind. One example of the technical realisation of this promise is Carnot’s “ideal circle” but it is only with information-based control systems that the machine adapts by interacting with its environment, i.e. it stores information and learns. The machine-environment interaction occurs operationally in that the machine is embedded in an open environment – thermodynamically open – with which it is in constant exchange and to which the system adapts, changes and transforms, etc.

Rather, and above all, it is the science of organisms and their effect on the environment. This says nothing a priori about the inner nature of the organisms in question. They may be biological, mechanical or sociological. Cybernetics deliberately leaves open the question of whether the mechanism under study consists of ‚living cells‘, of a community of chemical reactions, of a group of individuals acting collectively, of interlocks or relays. (Moles 1959, 8)

Yuk Hui’s contribution does not focus on the technical-scientific revolution of a „transclassical machine“, as Max Bense calls it, but instead sees it as exemplary in the abolition of dualisms, which, as already indicated, underlie Western metaphysics. In his contribution „Environment and Machine“, he emphasises the dissolution of dualism through recursive information machines.

Cybernetics endeavours to eliminate dualism; it wants to create a connection between different orders or magnitude to what Hans Jonas describes in Phenomenon of Life, regarding cybernetics as ‘an overcoming to dualism which classical materials had left in possession by default’. (Hui 2024, 45)

In fact, the end of duality and opposites had raised hopes for all theories and epistemologies that build bridges to seek connections where there were divisions. Reconciling man as a natural and spiritual being with technology was a challenge of the anthropological philosophy of the time, a challenge that Arnold Gehlen took up. However, an abolition of dualisms requires a reconstruction of the meaning of “environment”. In his article „Environment and Machine“, he describes the unnatural interpretation of environment. Based on the idea of „homeostasis“, which cybernetics partly borrows from physiology, environment means what surrounds the machine, with which it exchanges both energy and information. Machines imitate living systems in that they transform communication systems that must adapt to the environment in order to survive, and that adapt through self-regulation. What is actually being equated is not communication systems with living systems, as the title of Wiener’s work „Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine“ suggests, but the environments. The environment of the machine is similar to the environment of the organism in that it is what surrounds the system and exchanges information. “In this sense, a cybernetic machine is no longer merely mechanistic, but rather assimilates certain behaviours of organisms” (Hui 2024, 46). The machines interact with the environment, which allows information to be generated for adaptation – learning. In this sense, a transclassical machine is closer to the behaviour of an organism than that of a machine. Both are in a thermodynamically open relationship with the environment. The environment affects the system, which responds by affecting the environment. In this feedback game, the system should regulate itself and thus adapt optimally to its environment.

The volume presents another example of the denaturalisation of the concept of the environment on the basis of cybernetics. Katherine Hayles and Dorion Sagan consider the metaphorisation of the Earth as a cybernetic entity. Lovelock and Margulis‘ Gaia theory promised a holistic view of the Earth as a symbiotic and self-regulating organic being. Margulis‘ preliminary work on endosymbiont theories of prokaryotic cells, from which he derived a new taxonomy or evolutionary tree (Margulis 1998), led to a new taxonomy and order in the morphogenesis of living organisms through biochemical processes that had less to do with the claims of a holistic and totalitarian system, and rather revealed relationships and connections where classical taxonomy maintained divisions. Gaia theory, as Bruce Clarke shows well in Neocybernetics (Clarke 2020) after Luhmann, can only be observed as a blind spot.

---

The historicity of cybernetics proves it to be an applied philosophy

The abolition of dualisms between social, biological and technical systems through communication is followed by the dream of a total operative technology that can control communication systems in general. Peter Galison’s 1992 thesis of a Big Science tells of central control technologies in connection with the establishment of totalitarian models of government, although the illusion of absolute and total, holistic and systemic control over all subsystems goes back to the scientific mobilisation of the Second World War (Galison 1992). However, the utopia of totalitarian power in the post-war period (Bowker 1999, 107-127) turns out to be a dystopia. Mathieu Tricolt’s contribution „Ontology and the Politics of Information in Early Cybernetics“ sheds light on the darker side of cybernetics. Cybernetics as a universal science served as an ideology of mobilisation. The universal claim of a science was the basis for the very skilful technique of the art of government, which was capable of creating a total and global governmentality.

The second part of the volume shows how a philosophy that invoked the overcoming of divisions and relational thinking nevertheless sought to realise totalitarian dreams of control. However, as Pickering’s contribution makes clear, the historical discourse of cybernetics has focused too much on the global technology of government and completely ignored the diversity, locality, ambiguity of control and governance, etc. (Pickering 2024, 112f.). The second part of the volume, „Territories“, which presents the real-political history of cybernetics in a variety of ways, bears witness to this. Six documented cases of application show that cybernetics is not a universal science. Cybernetics may be a map to which no territory can be assigned, but it creates the applied practice by marking places on it. There is as many cybernetics as there are applications of localisation, and as many interpretations of the term’s control, freedom, etc. as there are contexts of application. Consequently, there can be no question of global and total knowledge.

Control and freedom

Andrew Pickering is right when he says that critics have become one-sidedly fixated on the word “control” in cybernetics (Pickering 2024, 112). He implies that there are multiple interpretations of a control machine.

Cybernetics was invented in the 1940s, around the time of World War II. In 1948 Norbert Wiener defined it as the science of communication and control, describing is as a synthesis of ideas about information, digital computing and feedback. These fields have since developed in very different ways in different times and places (Pickering 2024, 111)

The application of cybernetic systems to different political, cultural and social contexts leads to different cybernetic designs. This leads to a vast ambiguity of basic concepts. For example, the term „control“ takes on its meaning in the context in which it is used. The same goes for the other side of the coin: freedom.

Let’s take the operational meaning of control that Pickering’s essay addresses. Ashby understands control as the strategy of reducing an excess of complexity. It is not about eliminating uncertainties that disrupt the system, but about reducing an excess of complexity. A self-regulating system must maintain a certain level of complexity, but an excess can destroy the system. In his essay „On Self-organising Systems and their Environments“ (1985), Heinz von Foerster poses the question: „How much perturbation can a system tolerate?“ Operationally, the relationship between control and complexity is at the heart of regulation, which promises stability and order. According to Jakob Tanner, abstract „computational models“ were responsible for coping with increasing complexity during the Cold War, but the homeostatic model was inadequate for an excess of complexity. Control is a matter of stability. How does the system maintain order? In the UK, control means conversation:

As I have said, the best we can do with such systems is to get along with them, hopefully drawing them into our activities in a non-hierarchical process which another cyberneticist, Gordon Past, suggestively called ‚conversation‘. (Pickering 2024, 113)

The stability achieved through control in favour of the community meant freedom for the Soviet Union. In her contribution, Slava Gerovitch beautifully demonstrates the ambivalence of freedom depending on where the cybernetic model of control is applied. At the same time, North American ideology equates freedom with choice. The ideology of freedom is thus embedded in control. Jérôme Bruner’s cognitive psychology places freedom of choice at the centre of a model of intelligent activity in which choice is the basis of the right choice.

Brunerʼs work showcased the ‘cognitive revolution’ in psychology, closely associated with the work of the American AI pioneers Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, who placed choice at the heart of their ‘heuristic research’ model of intellectual activity. (Gerovitch 2024, 131)

The Soviet psychologist Andrei Brushlinskii, on the other hand, does not see free choice as a prerequisite for free decision.

Extending the control strategy to civil society: policy and control

The history of the application of cybernetics is varied. It was originally conceived as a rational model of warfare. It was applied in the post-war period with the aim of modernising war strategy in the governmental system, provided that the complexity of an organisation (government) was managed. In the Cold War era, it was concluded that the scientific-technological and epistemological-cultural conditions of the Second World War had changed. Some works argue that Big Science, i.e. universal science according to Galison, emerged from the scientific mobilisation of the world war (Hacking 1986, 237-260; Heims 1980; Falison/Bruce 1992; Galison 1997). As early as 1947, Crowther and Whiddington (1993, 595-642) drew up a knowledge balance sheet according to which leadership and events did not depend on the intuitions of the “leader”. Operational research (OR) was the new war strategy of the post-war period. The development of OR and cybernetics during the Cold War was rapid and unequivocal: OR meant planning not for the stability of the respective blocs, but for ensuring economic growth in the context of a bipolar bloc constellation between a capitalist market economy and a socialist planned economy. „Both American and Soviet scientists believed in the existence of a general, universal, ahistorical mechanism of human thought“ (Gerovitch 2024, 129).

As Dylan Levi King’s A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics and Slava Gerovitch’s „Cybernetics Across Cultures“ show in detail, cybernetics became a model for the management of social systems in an increasingly complex governmentality, i.e. large populations whose behaviour had to be brought under control. The rational choice that Gerovitch speaks of is a consequence of the new rationality in post-war military strategy. Cybernetics emerged as an applied science for warfare. It attracted civilian scientists, and operational research remained in practice a strategy and method for problem-solving and decision-making. Michał Krzykawski explains how the model is used to manage organisations and social systems for civil purposes, in particular the planning strategy used to model macroeconomic processes.

Integration of cybernetics to define the economic model of distribution and plan: The relevance of Langeʼs approach to cybernetics consists in his demonstration that economic models based on cybernetic thinking can be effectively used for analyzing the dynamics of the economic processes. (Krzykawski 2024, 159f.)

The articles by Michał Krzykawski and Daisuke Harashima show how the new information processing techniques and the resulting control behaviour have been implemented in various fields of application.

---

The failure of cybernetics is partly justified

If a new volume is devoted to the reconstruction of cybernetics, it is because, in addition to the end of thinking, the end of cybernetics is also being proclaimed. Wolfgang Coy gave two reasons for this: „the breadth of its claims“ and „the narrowness of its method“ (Coy 2004, 257). The breadth of its claims refers to its claim to be a universal science. We have already emphasised that from its inception cybernetics has been hailed as a science with universal aspirations. The disappointment with cybernetics is justified, but only in part, because despite the development of a new logic for the rationalisation of war strategy and its implementation in operational research, cybernetics in particular has given rise to a new way of thinking and aesthetic expression. Warren McCulloch formulated the central questions of a 20th century teleology: „What characteristics of a machine are responsible for its telos, its purpose, its goal? And what characteristics of a machine define its purpose, goal, or telos?“ (von Foerster 1993, 122). A new teleology was born: circular teleology or the teleology of self-reference, a new causality that leads the epistemic relationship between subject/object to a total de-trivialisation. The complaint of anthropological philosophies about the objectification of thinking, which represents the last technical step in the history of mankind (Gehlen 2007), was followed by a de-trivialisation of the relationship between man and machine.

Nam June Paik’s television montages such as „Internet Dream“ are an expression of an early cybernetic aesthetic. Max Bense speaks of a technical being that leads aesthetics to futuristic positions. In his information-aesthetic programme, Abraham Moles shows how cybernetics ushered in a new epoch centred on computer simulation. An age of modelling and simulation could present the artist as a creator of new worldviews. For the humanities and aesthetics, especially architecture and design, cybernetics was undoubtedly an avant-garde. The essay by David Maulén de los Reyes demonstrates that the cyberneticisation of art in Latin America has led to a revolutionary movement in which constructivist models have brought about modernisation. However, this movement would not have been possible without the institutional cooperation between European and Latin American partners, which originated in the state art academies. As Maulén shows, the reconciliation of art with a technology that was not instrumental, but coupling and operative, produced an avant-garde in Europe. The Chinese cyberneticist Qian Xuesen „proposed a complete reorganisation of human thought that managed to integrate extrasensory perception, an alternative scientific method and a cybernetic theory of everything“ (Maulén 2024, 190).

Cybernetics as a closed model

One wonders why cybernetics failed as an avant-garde and liberating model. Why has this model, which transcended the old divisions that underpinned rationalist metaphysics, which taught relationality and environmentalism, become a model that restricts freedoms? Katherine Hayle argues in her contribution that the failure is due to the closed nature of the organisation. We already know that closure is a formal expression, the logic of circularity, according to which a system can set limits on itself that are in fact binding rather than definitive. The operation, i.e. the organisation, is closed insofar as it directs the system towards its own laws: auto-nomos. The closed nature of organisation and operation ensures the autonomy of the system. I believe, however, that while unity demonstrates autonomy, it can neither define an order nor promise its maintenance. On the contrary, closure is the core of the system’s constant differentiation and diversification. The rhizomatic hydra is the model of an operative closure that abolishes bivalent logic in favour of further differentiation in an open environment.

---

Conclusion: an eschatological view of the history of cybernetics

In the theological tradition, talk of the end of time („eschaton“) is called eschatology. As much as this term has triggered a discussion in Western philosophy of history, in which the end has been understood as a suspension, as completion, and as the discursive prelude to a revolutionary turning point in history (Taubes 1947, 106-117), the end and its discourse are beyond an apocalyptic vision. The end of thinking through cybernetics in its eschatological view shows the other side of completion: every end is followed by a new beginning. The end of universal knowledge, which triggered dualism, leaves room for reflexive, recursive, paradoxical, multivalent logical thinking. Its proponents, such as Ranulph Glanville and Gotthard Günther, have argued in favour of polycontextual multivalence, etc.

Redemption: the control of control

And so the end of thinking promises redemption (Erlösung) from trivial thinking. Second-order cybernetics could be salvation from control: as long as control can be controlled, if the observation of observation, the thinking of thinking, the way out to a critical statement, is guaranteed. In any case, in first-order cybernetics – because there is no first-order cybernetics – control, in its two forms of regulation and control, is assigned to communication. Control is through communication. Anyone who has studied communication theory knows that communication does not just mean mediation (Luhmann 1987, 193). Communication, as first formulated in Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical model of communication, is selection, choice, coding, decoding and transmission. According to Michel Serres, transmission is a transduction, i.e. the translation of one coded signal into another. What is more, the entire selection process is conditioned by the contingency of the outside, the unpredictable environment. In this sense, control means selection. This produces an ordered structure that creates a stable order through repetition, i.e. redundancy. Ordo ab Chao (Mersch 2013) can be seen as a form of control of the new power technology that brings order to the “outside” and creates stability where contingency prevails. Through communication Ordo ab Chao can also mean creating an order whose stability depends directly on non-linear processes. Communication means creating order, i.e. creating the world. In this respect, control through communication is never absolute. Second-order cybernetics, which benefits from operational closure and even constructs an entire epistemology, does not assert closure as an exclusively total form; rather, this form is always in relation to other observers who observe it and are observed at the same time. Operational closure is the basis of a control of control, a choice of choice, namely the decision, the choice of freedom, that the control can be observed. Observation as a formal expression is to be understood as any operation, including criticism. Observing control therefore means that control, in any form of order-making, is open to observation, i.e. to criticism (Saratxaga Arregi 2023).

Third-order cybernetics

Therefore, I do not believe that third-order cybernetics is necessary. As Dirk Baecker said in an interview (Baecker und Unterluggauer Ö1 16 May 20/22), the third order is contained in the second order, if we understand it as the operation of repetition and recursion of difference. However, there is already a third-order cybernetics, which is attributed to Russian cybernetics – Vladimir Lepskiy – and which focuses on the management and organisation of social agents. This is because third-order cybernetics cannot be ascribed to omniscient observers such as Google, Facebook and Amazon (Triclot 2024, 67), which are always to be observed and criticised.

---

Bibliography

• Arendt, Hannah. Vom Leben des Geistes: Das Denken, das Wollen. Pipper,1998.
• Bense, Max. Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik. Grundlegung und Anwendung in der Texttheorie. Rowohlt, 1969.
• Blumenberg, Hans. Geistesgeschichte der Technik. Suhrkamp, 2009.
• Bowker, Geoffrey, “How to be Universal: Some cybernetics Strategies 1943-70”, Social Studies of Science 23 (1999): 107-127.
• Clarke, Bruce. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End oft he Anthropocene. Minesota Press, 2020
• Coy, Wolfgang, “Zum Streit der Fakultäten: Kybernetik und Informaiton als wissenschaftliche Disziplinen.” In Cybernetics – Kybernetik II, edited by Pias, Claus. Diaphanes, 2004.
• Foerster von, Heinz. Kybern-Ethik. Merve, 1993.
• Foerster von, Heinz. “Über selbstorganisierende Systeme und ihre Umwelten”. In Sicht und Einsicht. Versuche zu einer operativen Erkenntnistheorie. Carl Auer Verlag, 2006.
• Gehlen, Arnold. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Klostermann, 2004.
• Gehlen, Arnold. Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter. Klostermann, 2007.
• Günther. Gotthard (1976). Beiträge zur Grundlegung einer operationsfähigen Dialektik. Meiner, 1976.
• Hui, Yuk (ed). Cybernetics fort he 21st Century. Vol.1: Epistemological Reconstruction. Hanart Press, 2024.
• Hui, Yuk. Recursivity and Contingency, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.
• Heidegger, Martin & Rudolf Augstein, „Nur Gott kann uns retten“, Spiegel, n.23, 31st May1976.
• Heidegger, Martin. Zur Sache nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens. Eker-Verlag, 1984.
• Hacking, Ian. “Weapons Research and the Form of Scientific Knowledege”,  Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplement 12 (1986): 237-260.
• Hagner, Michael. “Vom Aufstieg und Fall der Kybernetik als Universalwissenschaft”. In Die Transformationen des Humanen, editet by Hörl, Erich & Hagner, Michael. Suhrkamp, 2008.
• Heims, Steve. John von Neuman and Norbert Wiener. From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, M.I.T. Press, 1980.
• Hörl, Erich. “Das kybernetische Bild des Denkens”. In Die Transformationen des Humanen, editet by Hörl, Erich & Hagner, Michael. Suhrkamp, 2008.
• Margulis, Lynn. Five Kingdoms, an Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth. Freeman, 1998.
• Mersch, Dieter. Ordo ab chao. Diaphanes, 2013.
• Moles Abraham, A. “Die Kybernetik, eine Revolution in der Stille”. In Epoche Atom und Automation. Enzyklopädie des technischen Zeitalters, Genf Band VII, 1959.
• Moles, Abraham, A. Informationstheorie und ästhetische Wahrnehmung, DuMont Schauberg, 1971.
• Galison, Peter, Hevly, Bruce. Big Science. The Growth of Large Scale Research. Stanford University Press, 1929.
• Galison, Peter. Image and Logic. A Material Cultural of Microphysic. University Chicago Press, 1997.
• Luhmann, Niklas. Soziale Systeme. Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Suhrkamp, 1987.
• Saratxaga Arregi, Arantzazu (2023): “Wenn die Kontrolle hinterherkommt. Ein Essay zur Kybernetik”, Medienimpulse, 60, no.4 (2023)
• Schelsky, Helmuth. Der Mensch in der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation. Springer, 1961.
• Galison, Peter. Big Science. The Growth of Large Scale Research. University Press,1992.
• Radio interview:
• Cybernetics 3rd order. On the renaissance of a discipline, by Mariann Unterluggauer, 16-May 2022, 19:05, Ö1 https://oe1.orf.at/programm/20220516/678842/Kybernetik-3-Ordnung