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The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, by Andrew Pickering. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 526pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780226667898.
Nowadays "cybernetics" is remembered as the paradigmatic Cold War intellectual project. Its birth is normally traced to geopolitical security issues surrounding signal detection and target accuracy in high-tech environments that are only partly known yet easily destabilized. Its aspirations were focused on the construction of a "science of science" governed by an extended version of thermodynamics that covers information exchanges in "closed" and "open" systems. Cybernetics in this sense captured the imaginations of the leading philosophical and social scientific movements of both sides of the Iron Curtain, logical positivism and dialectical materialism. Philip Mirowski and Loren Graham have been the most interesting critical historians of the respective strands. In The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering, long included among the most intellectually sophisticated and ambitious practitioners of science and technology studies, sets aside this general image-without denying its validity-to argue for the continued relevance of cybernetics to a broadly postmodern world-view.
Pickering's book is organized around the main figures of the British strand of cybernetics: the brain scientists Grey Walter and Ross Ashby, the organizational theorist Stafford Beer, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, and the intellectual all-rounder Gordon Pask. By focusing his philosophically laced social history in this way, Pickering effectively shifts...