--- Chris Jones <ccjones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> More importantly, perhaps, what I am trying to do by
> bringing Nick Land, the CCRU and positive
> cybernetics into contact with societies of control
> is fraught with difficulty, if not impossibility. I
> won't know unless I try.
Chris, I wonder if you've seen the stuff on
'non-linear socio-dynamics' at the marxian Red Feather
Institute
http://www.tryoung.com where they also focus
on catastrophe theory applied to 'postmodern
criminology'? Here's an excerpt from Felix Geyer's
"Sociocybernetics and the New Alienations"
http://www.tryoung.com/chaos/021alienations.htm -
Mark
"It is not amazing that first-order cybernetics was
especially interested in negative feedback loops,
rather than positive ones. When a negative feedback
loop either naturally occurs, or is constructed, the
performance or output of a system is compared with a
preset goal, and corrective action is taken whenever
there is a deviation from that goal. The thermostat of
a central heating system may serve as an example:
there is a feedback loop from the thermostat to the
heater, whenever room temperature rises above a
certain maximum, or falls below a certain minimum. It
is noteworthy that even in this simple example,
although it clearly is a control system, there is no
specific controlling agent; control is dispersed
through the system, and any part of it could be said
to control the rest of the system.
"As result of the above, first-order cybernetics?with
its engineering approach and the corresponding stress
on constructing control systems, and with its
predilection for negative rather than positive
feedback phenomena?was interested primarily in
homeostasis or equilibrium-maintenance, or at least in
restoring a system's equilibrium whenever it was
disturbed by external influences impinging on that
system.
"As is still the case in much of science, environment
mastery was an implicit goal, based on the Newtonian
conception of an in principle orderly universe:
admittedly complex, but knowable by means of a
continuing and cumulative effort to discover its basic
laws. Positive feedback loops, which cause
morphogenesis rather than homeostasis, are the motor
behind change. These creative feedback loops were paid
much less attention to. A simple example of a positive
feedback loop is cumulative interest, or to put it
more esoterically: 'the devil shits on the big heap',
recently formulated in economics11) as the law of
increasing returns".
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