IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 37

KEYNOTE

Andrew Pickering

The Next Macy Conference:
A New Interdisciplinary
Synthesis
he postwar period
was one of intense
interdisciplinary ferment, nowhere more
so than at the famous
Macy conferences on circular causal
and feedback mechanisms held in
New York between 1946 and 1953.
Interdisciplinarity is back in vogue
and many recall the Macys wistfully. But there are different kinds of
interdisciplinarity. We usually think
of adding up existing disciplinary
perspectives: economists, social scientists, and engineers, say, need to
get together to address this problem
or that. The Macys were more radical. The disciplines gathered there
under the aegis of cybernetics as
the common project and currency
of exchange, and cybernetics was
widely understood as a new paradigm, importantly different from
the classical sciences. At the Macy
meetings, engineers, anthropologists, and mathematicians understood themselves as doing the same
sort of thing as each other, while,
at the same time, their shared paradigm set them apart from their mainstream colleagues.

The descendants of cybernetics
which all the other sciences could
are doing well today under other
be subsumed; or it was the science
names, in fields ranging from
of feedback and control; or the scirobotics and complexity theory to
ence of information flows; or the
architecture and design, psychiscience of systems that include the
atry and the arts. But they have
observer. Cybernetics was all of
lost touch with one another and
these, I suppose, but these stories
it is important to ask why. What
have lost their urgency since the
held the Macy attendees together,
1970s. They no longer function to
what gave them a sense of combind together ground-level technical
mon purpose, was not the details
practices across the disciplines.
of individual projects. It
was an over-arching conception of what the world
is like, how we should
understand it, and how we
Cybernetics was a universal
should act in it. This worldview or ontology is what
language in which all the other
marked cybernetics out
sciences could be subsumed.
as a new paradigm. That
worldview has since faded,
and its loss has been at
the heart of the disintegration of Macy-style interdisciplinary
My argument is, then, that we
synthesis. This is what we need
need something new to talk about
to understand.
- a new articulation of the cyberWhat was the cybernetic worldnetic worldview - if we want to
view; how did it differ from that of
revive its intense and integrative
the classical sciences? In fact, sevinterdisciplinarity, and if we want to
eral different versions of the story
foreground its paradigmatic otherflourished and generated great
ness. As I explained in my book,
excitement, sometimes indepenThe Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of
dently, sometimes together. CyberAnother Future, my money is on
netics was a universal language in
restarting the conversation around

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461193
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

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