The Biological Computer Lab
Posted: February 6th, 2008 | Filed under: Cybernetics on the Prairie |
I’ve been researching a history at my University that took me awhile to discover - that of Heinz Von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory. I heard of it awhile back and made note of it, but only recently found an excuse to dig in, a possible project dealing with it.
In the 60’s the BCL was a center of activity we might still identify as “countercultural.” Looking through some of their charmingly-designed student-authored publications, such as the Whole University Catalog of 1968, one sees a map of places where pot is grown in Champaign-Urbana, a flow-chart exploring how a racist school administrator might think, tips on eating for free in the city, a guide the the Invisible University of professors who care and think, photos from trips to protests on the Washington mall. One also sees the sorts of things one might see as normatively rebellious in such a publication today - a guide to area bars, a board game parodying the successful navigation of a four-year degree, lots of railing against “institutions,” photos and poetry celebrating the individual, private ephemeral moment. I’m reminded of how, through the work of Thomas Frank or Ken Keniston, much of what we later read as “radical” about the 60’s is in fact just another manifestation of modernist individualism, romanticism aimed at consumers.
Then again, there seems to be plenty about the BCL that would still seem radical today. Von Foerster’s popular seminars were like exciting forums for exploration of Big Ideas. He seems to have simply chosen areas of thought or problems and handed them over for students to wrestle with or solve for a semester, resulting in some sort of publication or group project. Examples include the Ecological Source Book, or the more famous Cybernetics of Cybernetics. There’s a lot of free-ranging going on, addressing problems from multiple angles, regardless of disciplinary context or outcome. Lots of concerns about the bad ends of modernity - overpopulation, pollution, gender and race inequality. Von Foerster seemed to have offered a sort of space of catalysis, opportunities for debate and research, into which he would insert questions, spontaneous lectures, and importantly, he would take the final responsibility for whatever the students produced, providing shelter. (As in the case of the Whole University Catalog, which apparently found Von Foerster called to Springfield to explain his actions.
The publications, from what I’ve seen so far, are lovely utopian chunks, fat and printed on crappy paper, a combination of typewriter, mimeograph, handwriting. Favorite articles and composed essays by faculty and students intermingle with collages and cartoons, maps and charts, bibliographies. They really remind me of websites, in their nonlinear pastiche structure, their collective authoring, branching thoughts and lists sometimes more intended for discovery or storage than for communication.
I first learned of Von Foerster from the German documentary The Net, a great essay that uses the Unabomber’s story as a way of exploring how post-War American science and computing spawned a wide range of influential utopian and dystopian fantasies. View the Net along with the films of Adam Curtis, Tim Shore’s excellent film Cabinet, or Alfred McCoy’s book on CIA torture research. We’re familiar with some of the Cold War “spin-offs” in popular culture - nuclear energy from nuclear weapons, space exploration from ballistics research, the internet from military communications. But what about the influence of Cold War era research into the mind, human subjectivity? Some of the same cognitive studies that confirmed hippie admonitions to “expand your mind” through taking subjective reality seriously led to the torture techniques applied at Abu-Ghraib, and the invention of LSD. They framed Silicon Valley’s earliest efforts at “thinking different” about computing in everyday life, and inspired Madison Avenue to take advertising directly to the deep brain.
This is the background I bring to researching my own university’s intriguing outpost of cybernetics and radical pedagogy, the Biological Computer Lab. The lab apparently dried up when military funding ran out and the NSF rose up instead. To my eyes, the methods and products of the BCL look to be far desirable to the state of corporate research today on this campus, but how exactly was it different, better, or worse? They seem to have actually practiced the sort of interdisciplinary research that administrators love to praise. Labor sounds to have been more equitable, with more acknowledgment of shared authorship, more integration of research and the classroom, less separation of the classroom from the world. In its explorations of cognition and philosophy of communication, the BCL sounds almost proto-postmodern, grabbing hold of subjectivity as inescapable and even worthy of praise and celebration. Von Foerster seems to long for an approach to computing or even science that is as ready to wrestle with subjectivity and ethics as any political action group. Is the BCL a rare destabilizing force in this institution’s history, a temporarily successful attempt at reform from within?
OR perhaps not. Maybe this work is a late frontier in modernity’s push to rationalize and mobilize every human capacity. The Enlightenment debated the nature of subjective and objective knowledge; perhaps Cybernetics simply accepts subjectivity, relativism even, but instrumentalizes it toward achievement of progress, social harmony. Maybe the BCL and Cyberneticians are the ancestors of Bruce Mau or Nicholas Negroponte, Neoliberalism’s technocratic visionaries.
These are the questions I bring to my sifting through the history of a lab that seems to have achieved no commemorative plaque, despite influencing fields and individuals far and wide. More reports to come.
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