Macchine per comunicare: cibernetica, cyborg, cyberpunk Sociologia delle comunicazioni 13.4.2012

Le prospettive teoriche finora affrontate: Media, società, cultura e tecnologia (Innis, Ong, McLuhan, Adorno, Benjamin) Media, ideologia e rappresentazione (Stuart Hall, Laura Mulvey, Louis Althusser)

New media studies: Ripresa del tema dei media, società, cultura e tecnologia (Castells, Rheingold, Rifkins) Il ruolo delle tecnoscienze e il rapporto con il corpo Un nuovo genere di media: digitali, interattivi, reticolari (interfacce, ipertesti, protocolli, topologia delle reti, metadata, software studies etc) Nuovi media, economia dell’informazione e capitalismo cognitivo

Lo strumento (implica un soggetto che lo usa): es Lo strumento (implica un soggetto che lo usa): es. scalpello/scalpellino; pennello/pittore; pentola/cuoco Il meccanismo (macchina ad orologeria): movimento autonomo, meccanico, predeterminato (lineare, ripetitiva) La macchina cibernetica (macchina comunicativa): Continuum umano-macchina; interfaccia; feedback; ricorsività; non linearità; bootstrapping (apprendimento dal basso bottom up): ICT (Information and Communication Technology)

“The hand-tool needs to be moved by an external source, whereas the machine moves itself. In this sense, only machines can be automata. But there are also machines that use tools… [and] potentially humans can become tools of machines, as Aristotle pointed out…” (M. Lister et al Introduction to New Media, p. 415)

La cibernetica C3I: comunicazione, controllo, comando e informazione La rivoluzione tecnologica del secondo dopoguerra: la cibernetica come teoria dei sistemi e macchine basate sulla comunicazione (feedback) e l’informazione (codice; misura statistica dell’ordine; controllo preventivo e retroazione; Claude Shannon e la teoria dell’informazione) Le conferenze di Macy (1946-1953)

La cibernetica come una scienza inter-disciplinare che studia i sistemi naturali e artificiali in grado di auto-regolarsi attraverso lo scambio di informazioni con l’esterno (comunicazione). Le macchine cibernetiche presuppongono delle analogie formali con l’organismo (es. degli organi di senso (input/output)capaci di comunicare con l’esterno e degli organi in grado di effettuare delle azioni come risposta a tali stimoli)

“Let us consider the activity of the little figures which dance on the top of a music box. They move in accordance with a pattern, but it is a pattern which is set in advance, and in which the past activity of the figures has practically nothing to do with the pattern of their future activity. The probability that they will diverge from this pattern is nil…. The figures themselves have no trace of communication with the pre-established mechanism of the music box. They are blind, deaf, and dumb, and cannot vary their activity in the least from the conventionalized pattern.” (Norbert Wiener The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, 1950-1954, p. 21-22)

“I call to the kitten and it looks up “I call to the kitten and it looks up. I have sent it a message which it has received by its sensory organs, and which it registers in action… The kitten bats at a swinging spool. The spool swings to its left and the kitten catches it with its left paw.” (ibidem, p. 22)

Prima cibernetica (1940-1950s): sistemi omeostatici, anti-entropici, auto-regolanti: il termostato, la contraerea Seconda cibernetica (1960-1970): ecologia della mente, autopoiesi, Gaia o la terra come organismo vivente Terza cibernetica (1980-2000): Vita artificiale, fenomeni emergenti, complessità, networks, auto-organizzazione dal basso: le reti

Positive feedback, sometimes referred to as "cumulative causation", is the feedback loop system in which the system responds to perturbation in the same direction as the perturbation. In contrast, a system that responds to the perturbation in the opposite direction is called a negative feedback system. These concepts were first recognized as broadly applicable by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 work on Cybernetics.* [1] A system in equilibrium in which there is positive feedback to any change in its current state is said to be in an unstable equilibrium, whereas one with negative feedback is said to be in a stable equilibrium. The end result of a positive feedback is often amplifying and "explosive", i.e. a small perturbation results in big changes. This feedback, in turn, will drive the system further away from its original setpoint, thus amplifying the original perturbation signal, and eventually become explosive because the amplification often grows exponentially (Webster online dictionary ww.websters-online-dictionary.org)

Feedback negativo: omeostasi, autopoiesi, equilibrio (prima e seconda cibernetica) Feedback positivo: mutazione, evoluzione, catastrofe (teoria del caos, vita artificiale, teoria della complessità, evoluzionismo)

POSTUMANO La crisi del soggetto moderno (il sé autonomo fondato sulla coscienza e la ragione: Descartes, Kant etc) La crisi dell’antropocentrismo (Darwin) Le critiche della psicoanalisi (Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan); dello strutturalismo e del post-strutturalismo (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze) del femminismo (Helen Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray); Del post-colonialismo (Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha etc); Della cibernetica (Marvin Minsky, Hans Moravec, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Francis Fukuyama, Donna Haraway)

“Una cosa è certa: l’uomo non è né il più vecchio né il più costante problema posto alla conoscenza umana. Prendendo un campione cronologicamente relativamente breve dentro un’area geografica limitata – la cultura europea sin dal XVI secolo – e come dimostra l’archeologia del nostro pensiero l’uomo è un’invenzione recente e una che forse sta per finire… come un volto tracciato sulla sabbia sull’orlo del mare.” (Michel Foucault Le parole e le cose 1966)

Anni ‘80 e ‘90: La crisi del soggetto umanistico e la tecnologia cibernetica Cyborg, cyberpunk, cyberculture

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (Donna Haraway (1984) “A Cyborg Manifesto” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature p. 149 )

“Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices… Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the night mare of Taylorism seem idillyc. And modern war is a cyborg orgy….” (ibidem, p. 150)

“…’cyberpunk’… captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.” (Bruce Sterling “Preface” to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. 1986 p. xi)

“For the cyberpunks,… technology is visceral… it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.” (ibidem p. xiii) Stelarc

“Technology itself has changed “Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting woners of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.” (ibidem, p. xiii) Iphone guitar

“Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk “Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion, prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful themes of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry – techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of self.” (ibidem)

“Pre-cybernetic machines… were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous… Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that use to apply to organisms of machines” (Haraway p. 152)

“The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated “The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or tolerate us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.” (Haraway p. 180)

‘In the summer of 1996, I mer with seven young researchers at the MIT Media Lab who carried computers and radio transmitters in their backpacks and keyboards in their pockets… they called themselves ‘cyborgs’ and were always wirelessly connected to the Internet, always online, free from desks and cables… Within a decade, what had seemed alien was close to becoming everyone’s way of life, as compact smartphones replaced the cyborgs’ more elaborate accoutrements. This is the experience of living full-time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We’re all cyborgs now.’ (Sherry Turkle Alone Together, 2010)

Domande per seminario o discussione online: Perché per la cibernetica le macchine non sono né strumenti né meccanismi? In che senso si può dire che oggi siamo tutti ‘cyborg’? E’ ancora possibile sapere dove finiscono le nostre macchine e dove iniziamo noi?