Thinking

<img src="https://press.uchicago.edu/.imaging/mte/ucp/medium/dam/ucp/books/jacket/978/02/26/32/9780226321462.jpg/jcr:content/9780226321462.jpg"> I took Gender, Texts and Technology as an elective for my master’s degree. My favorite book in the course was N. Katherine Hayles ’<a href="https://archive.org/stream/HowWeBecamePosthuman/Hayles%20N%20Katherine%20-%20How%20We%20Became%20Posthuman.%20Virtual%20Bodies%20in%20Cybernetics%20Literature%20and%20Informatics_djvu.txt" style="color: white;">//How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics//</a> . When I read about the arguments about cybernetics that happened during the Macy Conferences, how the field was conceptualized in the aftermath of World War 2, the influence of munitions in Norbert Weiner’s ideas about information and a black box, and the separation of information from materiality, I thought: “this was a culturally traumatic time - [["How were cybernetics influenced by that trauma?]] [["Is the separation of information from the body, as we have in our information society, a trauma response carried on through mechanical artifacts?”]]

Bessel van der Kolk, in his book //The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma// discusses how trauma creates disconnection between the mind and the body which can create and perpetuate [[feedback loops]] that separate cognition from the body. Neurological feedback loops prioritize prediction and control over being alert and aware of the body. It reinforces dissociation since the mind "loops" internally instead of engaging with reality. This createsa a separation between cogniton and somatic experience which can leave traumatized individuals stuck in repetitive, abstracted thought processes. What did [[Hayles, cybernetics, and feedback loops]] have to say about this?

Just some quotes to help my thinking, if that's okay. I really love Hayles... pg 26: "As I work with the text-as-flickering-image, I instantiate within my body the habitual patterns of movement that make pattern and randomness mre real, more relevand, and more powerful than presence and absence. "The tehnologies of virtual reality, with their potential for full-body mediation, further illustrate the phenomena that foregrounded pattern and randomness and make presenece and absence seem irrelevant. "//Already an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, virtual reality puts the user's sensory system into a direct feedback loop with a copmuter//" My thinking is, again, kind of convoluded here. questions I have about trauma:(cycling-link: bind $favorite, "Scientists", "discourse at the time", "cybernetics and trauma-related dissociation", "or is digital space also valuable for healing or connection?") So many questions, back to Hayles and the [[start->Start]]

Feedback loops are interesting to Donna Haraway. In her essay <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fictionnownarrativemediaandtheoryinthe21stcentury/manifestly_haraway_----_a_cyborg_manifesto_science_technology_and_socialist-feminism_in_the_....pdf">A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century</a> she talked about the disruption of fixed categories due to blurred boundaries between technological imagination and lived experience. To Haraway, there are transgressed boundaries between humans and machines. I wonder, is the state of the cyborg, where we have created fusions with technology in disembodied feedback loops akin to the [[traumatized]] feedback loops van der Kolk explained?

Sherry Turkle has written a lot about what our relationship with the computer has done to our sense of self. This is like what Haraway talked about with our blurred boundaries, as well as what Hayles talked about with the posthuman separation of information and the body. Hayles even used some of Turkle's work in //How We Became Posthuman//. In her book <a href="https://www.sherryturkle.com">//The-Second-Self//</a> ,Turkle investigates the computer "not as a tool, but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world." Is this a kind of feedback loop, like van der Kolk described, that keeps [[cognition outside of embodiment? ]] Again, I wonder, is disembodiment in digital environments, where human cognition is in a feedback loop with machines and digital spaces, analogous to a state of trauma? How are states of trauma healed?

On page 36 of //How We Became Posthuman// Hayles wrote: "The contrast between the body's limitations and cyberspace's power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence. As long as the pattern endures, one has attained a kind of immortality - an implication that Hans Moravec makes explicit in <a href="https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Mind_Children"> //Mind Children.//</a> . Such views are authorized by cultural conditions that make physicality seem a better state to be from than to inhabit. In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation, and time-release environmental poisons, it is comforting to think that physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational patterns in a mulitdimensional [[computer space..." ]]

"...a cyberspace body, like a cyberspace landscape, is immune to blight and corruption." This reminds me of a traumatized brain that is in feedback loops that move cognition from embodiment, which is complex, can be traumatized, and may be in need of healing. Still thinking through this. back to... [[start->Start]]

My thoughts on this are all over the place. Hayles said during the Macy Conferences, the idea that information was separate from the body was an argument that persisted over others, such as those that evaluated analog technologies that required some kind of embodimenet. Information separated from embodiment determined about what cybernetics would become. Information is input that goes through a system and is released as output, which is a feedback loop. But why did information have to be separate from materiality? One reason is because in war time, which is a time of societal trauma, information is key to making strategies for survival. Information goes faster when it is mechanized and disembodied. Information separated from the body reminds me of feedback loops in a traumatized brain. 1. What might [[traumatized societies]] look like? 2. How would they manifest in individuals? 3. How might societal trauma manifest? hierarchies of power, the mind in a state of trauma

I wonderd about how to operationalize societal trauma and started digging around. The first book I found was Adam Lerner's <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/from-the-ashes-of-history-collective-trauma-and-the-making-of-international-politics-by-adam-b-lerner-new-york-oxford-university-press-2022-272p-9900-cloth-2995-paper/B62E00B7BC306BE33A3D394F660F6A35">//From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the Making of International Politics//</a> Lerner argues that collective trauma shapes the understanding of the self and of others and that characterizes the relationships between international leaders' primary actors, "as well as the logic informing these actors' interactions" (pg 11) I wondered, besides conceptualizing cybernetics during and after a world war, were there other systems of societal trauma that influenced Wiener? Again, what are [[systems of trauma in society?]]

I have thought of this one for a long time, even since my undergrad. As I struggled with the existential question "why is there evil in the world?", I stumbled across German psychologist Alice Miller. She tells of her research into why the German people supported Hitler and how he rose to power in her book //For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence//. Miller argued that rampant child abuse, and even the holocaust, were based on generations of what she called "poisonous pedagogy." She said the "central mechanism of corrosive child-rearing pratices lies in the way children are induced to split off good and bad objects and to rely on projection as the major defense mechansims, which later permits these children, as adults, to act out the same cruelties they experienced as well as the rage such <a href="https://academic.oup.com/sw/article-abstract/29/4/412/1941459" target=blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> cruelties generated</a> I could see the relationship between Germany and trauma, but what [[other systems]] were in place to accept and conceptualized the separation of information from the body in cybernetics?

I am a big fan of Riane Eisler, particularly her book <a href="https://centerforpartnership.org/resources/books/the-chalice-and-the-blade-our-history-our-future" style="color: blue;">//The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future// </a> .She is another scholar who studied Hitler's Germany during and after WW2. Her research took her to ancient societies that had different approaches to power distribution. One was a partnership society, one was a dominator society. Partnership societies did not have strict gender categories of power; women and men worked together for the benefit of the group. Rather than dominator-style power structures, which are explified in patriarchal structures, there was nurturing. Nurture meant all worked together in partnership to raise children, create economic stability, and prioritize the well-being of the society Dominator societies, which are patriarchal, organize power in hierarchies of domination, where one group is in power over others. How did the patriarchal nature of Western societies inform the conceptualization of cybernetics? this is a hanging question, so back to the [[start->Start]]