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Title: African Influences in Cybernetics
Author: Ron Eglash, 1995
African Influences in Cybernetics
Ron Eglash
The problems of natural/artificial dualisms encountered by cyborgs are similar
to those which plague activists and theorists in the long historical battles
against racism. Primitivist racism operates by making non-western culture
too concrete, and thus "closer to nature" – not really a culture
at all, but rather beings of uncontrolled emotion and direct bodily sensation,
rooted in an edenic ecology. Orientalist racism operates by making non-western
culture too abstract, and thus "arabesque" – not really a "natural"
human, but one devoid of emotion, caring only for money and an inscrutable
spiritual transcendence. Racism on the African continent – tending towards
Orientalism in the north, and Primitivism in the south – precludes any
simple opposition that a category like "African cybernetics" might
hold. An anti-racist characterization of African influences in cybernetics
must be situated in ways which do not merely reverse or refute its claims,
but address its historical construction. Opposition to racism has often been
composed through two totalizing, essentialist strategies: sameness and difference.
For example, Mudimbe (1988) demonstrates how the category of a singular "African
philosophy" has been primarily an invention of difference, having its
creation in the play between "the beautiful myths of the 'savage mind'
and the African ideological strategies of otherness." In contrast, structuralists
such as Levi-Strauss have attempted to prove that African conceptual systems
are fundamentally the same as those of Europeans (both having their basis
in arbitrary symbol systems). The problem of these unitary assessments of
epistemological status is made particularly clear by the contradictions in
the philosophic approach of Sandra Harding, where African conceptual views
were at first characterized as he holistic opposite of Western reductionism
(Harding 1989), and then soon after as having exactly he same analytic approach
as Western science (Harding 1990). As Mudimbe notes, neither sameness nor
difference will suffice.
This critique indicates that the analysis of interactions between cybernetic
theory and the African diaspora should not be limited to a purely epistemological
perspective. At the same time, however, socially grounded analyses of science
have all too often presented a kind of "Realpolitik" approach to
the social construction of cybernetics, one in which the science of computation
and control systems is merely a thin disguise for methods of social domination
and control (e.g., Lilienteld 1974). Here any subaltern identity (female,
non-white, working class, etc.) appears only as yet another powerless victim,
and typically one for whom a previously natural existence is endangered by
the intrusion of artifice. Thus the focus of this essay on African contributions
to cybernetics is not an attempt to overlook the brutal tragedies enacted
by that science, but rather to underscore the multifaceted aspects of its
history, and thus possibilities for resistance and reconfigurations. By moving
between questions of epistemological structure and social constructions of
science, this essay will suggest some possible origins of cybernetic theory
in African culture, ways that Black people have negotiated the rise of cybernetic
technology in the West, and he confluence at these histories in the lived
experience of the African diaspora.
Information and Representation in Cybernetics
Cybernetic theory is based on two dimensions of communication systems. One
is the information structure, the other the physical representation of that
information. The most fundamental characteristic of an information structure
is its computational complexity, which is a measure of its capacity for
recursion (i.e., self-reference, reflexivity). This mathematical result
agrees nicely with our intuition about the crucial role of reflexive awareness
in our own "information structure." The most fundamental characteristic
of a representational system is the analog-digital distinction. Digital representation
requires a code table (the dictionary, Morse code, the genetic code, etc.)
based on physically arbitrary symbols (text, numbers, flag colors, etc.).
Saussure postulated this characteristic when he spoke of the "arbitrariness
of the linguistic signifier." Analog representation is based on a proportionality
between physical changes in a signal and changes in the information it represents
(e.g., waveforms, images, vocal intonation). For example, as my excitement
increases, so does the loudness of my voice. While digital systems use grammars,
syntax, and other relations of symbolic logic, analog systems are based on
physical dynamics – the realm of feedback, hysteresis, and resonance.
This dichotomy is fundamental to current cybernetic debates concerning, for
example, which type of representation is used by neurons in the human brain,
or the type recommended for artificial brains.
In the first years of American cybernetics, analog and digital systems were
seen as epistemologically equivalent, both considered capable of complex kinds
of representation (cf. Rubinoff 1953). But by the early 1960s a political
dualism was coupled to this representation dichotomy The "counterculture"
radicals of the cybernetics community – Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson,
Hazel Henderson, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Boulding, Barry Commoner, Margaret
Mead, among others – made the erroneous claim that analog systems were
more concrete, more "real" or "natural," and therefore
(according to this romantic cybernetics) ethically superior. In social domains,
this converged with Rousseau's legacy of the moral superiority of oral over
literate cultures (1). Thus, for example, McLuhan (1966) writes:
It was a considerable revelation when writing come to detribalize and to individualize
man. Cybernation seems to be taking us out of the visual world of classified
data back into the tribal world of integral patterns and corporate awareness
(McLuhan 1966, p 102).
For African-Americans this meant a debilitating valorization. They could use
this ethical claim to combat some racism, but only in terms of identifying
as unconscious, innocent natives in a lost past. Thus African modes of representation
in the use of sculpture, movement and rhythm were often abandoned to modernist
claims that Africa was the culture of non-representation, the culture of the
Real. By the 1970s, widespread epistemological critiques of realism –
noting that it is representation that allows self-consciousness and intentionality
– resulted in interpretations which limited cultural analysis to arbitrary
signifiers. African dance, for example, would be a set of movement symbols,
not a waveform.
Subsequently, African cultural analysis became split between those who retained
the modernist trope of African identity grounded in naturalist realism (recognizing
analog systems but refusing to see them as representation), versus those who
adopted to postmodern trope of textual metaphor (which avoids primitivism
at the expense of abandoning recognition of analog systems) – reggae
versus rap (2).
Postmodern cybernetics, however, has shown that analog systems are capable
of the flexible representation required to perform complex (Turing Machine-equivalent)
computations, as demonstrated in both theory and experiment (Wolfram 1984,
Touretzky 1986, Rubel 1989, Blum, Shub and Smale 1989). In particular, a new
appreciation for analog systems was fundamental to the rise of fractal geometry,
nonlinear dynamics, and other branches of chaos theory (Gleick 1987, see also
Dewdney 1985, Pagels 1988). By viewing physical systems as forms of computation,
rather than merely inert structures, researchers became open to the possibility
of having infinite variation in deterministic physical dynamics . Analog systems
can achieve the same levels of recursive computaions as digital systems; the
two are epistemological equals.
In other words, the appeal to digital systems in African culture may well
have been a necessary antidote to the skewed social portrait of it, but it
is not the only recourse for combating ethnocentric epistemological claims.
African cultures pave indeed developed systems of analog representation which
are capable of the ,complexities of recursion, and there are indications that
this indigenous technology has been in conversation with cybernetic concepts
in the west.
Africa in the origins of the cybernetics
The use of African material culture as a form of analog representation is
particularly vivid in cases of recursive information flow. In African architecture,
recursive scaling – that is fractal geometry – can be seen in a
variety of forms. In North Africa it is associated with the feedback of he
"arabesque" artistic form, particularly in the branches of branches
forming city streets. In Central Africa it can be seen in additive rectangular
wall formations, and in West Africa we we circular swirls of circular houses
and granaries. This is not limited to a visual argument; the fractal structure
of African settlement patterns has been confirmed by computational analysis
of digitized photos in Eglash and Broadwell (1989).
Recursive scaling in Egyptian temples can be viewed as a formalized version
of the fractal architecture found elsewhere in Africa, and is most significant
in is use of the Filbonacci sequence (Badawy 1965; see Petruso 1985 for additional
Egyptian use of the sequence). The sequence is named for Leonardo Fibonacci
(ca. 1175-1250), who is also associated with an unusual example of recursive
architecture in Europe (Schroeder 1991, p 85). The Fibonacci sequence was
one of the first mathematical models for biological growth patterns, and inspired
Alan Turing and other important figures in the history of computational morphogenesis.
Since Fibonacci was sent to North Africa as a boy and devoted his years there
to mathematics education (Gies and Gies 1969), it is possible hat It seminal
example of recursive scaling is of African origin.
Benoit Mandelbrot, the "father of fractal geometry," reports that
his invention is the result of combining the abstract mathematics of Georg
Cantor with the empirical studies of H. E. Hurst. Cantor was a nineteenth-century
Rosicrucian mystic, who often combined his mathematics with his religious
belief. His cousin Moritz Cantor was a famous scholar in the geometry of Egyptian
art and architecture. Given these facts, and the similarity of this first
European fractal to the Egyptian architectural structure symbolizing creation
(the lotus), an Egyptian origin is likely here as well. H.E. Hunt also has
Egyptian connections, as will be discussed shortly.
Goldsmith (1981) reports golem legends going back to the fourth century B.C.E.,
and describes their continuing popularity in Jewish legend. Norbert Weiner
the Jewish dean of analog cybernetics was quite influenced by this concept
of information embedded in physical dynamics (Heims 1984, Eglash 1992). He
made several references to the golern in his writing, and reported that even
as a child he was fascinated by the idea of making a doll come alive. His
religious identity was closely tied to gashmuit. the informal, physical
(and traditionally female) side of Judaism, and he was particularly proud
of his ancestry to famed Egyptian physician Moses Maimonides.
In addition to spatial analog representation many African societies have developed
techniques for the analog representation of time-varying systems, including
transformation into frequency or phase-domain representation. We see animist
energy flow, drawn by a Bambara seer for the author, visualized as a sort
wave emanating from a sacrificial egg. The dashed lines inside the figure
are a digital code symbolizing good fortune. Undulatory schemes in Egyptian
art (Badawy 1959) show an understanding of motion as a rhythmic time series,
and the transformation of time-series to a frequency-domain representation
can be seen in African conceptualizations of circular time. The extreme in
African time-series analysis is he search for patterns in the Nile floods.
The most recent data set, taken once a year for 15 centuries, became the basis
for the work of H.E. Hunt mentioned previously. A British civil servant, Hurst
spent 62 years in Egypt, and finally deduced a scaling law, based on this
time-series, which Mandelbrot used to bring Cantor's abstract set theory into
empirical practice.
The most common frequency analysis used by Weiner and others in modern cybernetics
is the Fourier transform. Fourier began his work with an analysis of Descartes'
equations; he did not leave this static framework until his expedition to
Egypt in 1798, where he analyzed the geometry of Egyptian architecture. It
was here that he devised the basis for the Fourier transform. A comparison
of Fourier's visualizations of convergence of a sequence with a diagram of
Egyptian architecture (which, because of the Fibonacci sequence, also shows
convergence to a limit), suggests that the African concept of recursive structure
and dynamic form may have contributed to this analysis as well.
African influence in American cybernetics
Related to these systems of analog recursion are studies on computational
self-reference; these too have possible African influences For example, Seymour
Papert, a white computer scientist who championed hierarchical non-recursive
computing in the 1960s, made a dramatic conversion to tralized computation
following his U.N. work in Africa in the mid-70s. Another white engineer,
N. Negroponte, developed his conceptions for self-organized computing following
his study of "vernacular architecture," most of which was African.
Earl Jones, one of the first African-American computer engineers, was in innovator
in decentralized data distribution.
Analog computing networks have become increasingly important in the post-modern
phase of American cybernetics, where they are no longer a stronghold of holistic
hippy science, but rather a promising (and well-funded) area of research for
the military and industry (Eglash 1990. 1992). African influences in American
science date back to the contributions in biological knowledge and metalwork
by slaves; the biological (especially botanical) is particularly significant
for cybernetics due to its involvement in models of information coding. While
romantic accounts of cultural difference would use botanical expertise to
emphasize the "naturalness" of African traditions, this is certainly
not the only interpretation. George Washington Carver, for example, declared
that not only did God create the Kingdom of Plants and the Kingdom of Animals,
but that He also had a "Kingdom of the Synthetic." This spiritual
legitimation of be artficial fits well into the African traditions of analog
representation discussed previously.
A direct line for African influences in analog cybernetics can be seen in
the work of E. E. Just, who used music as both a conceptual model for decentralized
biological morphogenesis, and as a cultural basis for understanding his African
heritage (Manning 1983, pp. 203, 261). Just's work, particularly that on information
encoded in non-symbolic representation (based in part on Just's rebellion
against the position that the only intracellular information is that of a
"master code" in the cell nucleus), was taken up by Ross G. Henderson,
an important influence in the General Systems Theory (GST) community (Haraway
1976), which in turn influenced the origins of cybernetics through studies
of aggregate self-organizing phenomena and positive feedback loops.
As previously noted, the GST and related cybernetics community took a romanticist
turn in the 1960s, which resulted in a disabling of the analog conception
by Realism (cf. Varela's account of the "normpresentationist point of
view" developed in the 1960s with McCulloch, Maturana, and others(Varcia
1987, pp. 48-491)). What little involvement the Black community had in the
cybernetics movement was, however, often opposed to this romantic tendency.
For example, at the first Cybercultural Research conference in 1966, James
Boggs, a Black political activist, suggested that the "new cybercultural
society" would not be alienating to Blacks because (unlike whites) they
could draw on a labor history in which their dual identity as both biological
automatic machines and the makers/users of machines were deeply imbricated
with their cultural identity (Boggs 1966, p. 172). Black identification with
categories of the artificial are here political, but converge with the same
conceptions that informed Carver and others; concepts that parallel he animist
legitimations of the artificial in Africa.
The lived experience of African-Americans' interactions between these African
diasporic innovations and their survival of American racism is particularly
apparent in me work of African-American women. As Nakano Glenn (1992) argues
for the case of service workers, gender and race cannot be reduced to "additive
oppressions," and must be seen as the site of an interlocking or relational
dynamic. For example, bob the traditional work of African women (Hay and Sticher
1984) and specific labor locations for women of an ethnicities in America
have contributed to the frequency of their involvement in biomedically related
fields. From 1876 to 1969, over half of the Black women science Ph. D.s have
been in bio-sciences (Jay 1971), and the Black women inventor, Clara Fry,
specialized in health-care tools (james 1989, p. 80). The most relevant example
in cybernetics is the work of Patricia Cowings, who makes cyborgs for NASA.
In an interview in this volume, Cowings discusses her use of analog biofeedback
as a method for reducing motion sickness in space, and notes several complex
interactions between her identity as a Black woman and her successful career
in cybernetics. Yet she has distanced herself from any simple mimesis of "African
culture" in her construction of cybernetics. The contributions of African-American
women to what has become modern cybernetics should be seen as a form of resistance
that cannot be reduced to either the restoration of tradition or a relocation
to universalism.
Black cybernetics in the postmodern era
The rejection of cybernetic romanticism by radical African-Americans was no
longer necessary by the mid-70s, when youth sub-culture had turned from hippy
naturalism to the urban affinity of punk-rock and hip-hop (Hall 1980, Hebdige
1987, hooks 1990). Thus the popular rap group Digital Underground displays
an apprecation of cybernetics which is politically oppositional but no longer
primitivist or naturalizing. While the impact of new cybernetic technologies
on African-American communities has been part of a long history of labor displacement
(Jones 1985, Hacker 1979), environmental racism, and other subjugations, here
we can also see some hints for the appropriation of technology in new configurations.
For example, the famous "scratch" sound in hip-hop came about when
the normally silent back-cue of the dee-jay's turntable was amplified and
moved in time to the beat, thus changing a passive reproduction into an active
synthetic instrument; turning tables on the turntable.
To what extent is this subcultural cybernetics merely "bricolage"
– reassembling available components for a practical goal – and what
extent is it a deeper understanding of abstract principles? First, we should
note that "official" cybernetics is both; it used pre-existing abstract
principles – feedback, information theory, etc. – for practical
application in a new assemblage. Indeed, the divisions between bricolage and
science in general are far more permeable than we had been led to believe.
This point has been admirably made in Sherry Turkle's study of bricolage programming
styles in the hacker community, where she also notes that the interaction
between popular culture and the scientific community is an active source of
ideas in both directions.
Let us pursue this question a bit further. Setting aside both the definition
of cybernetic and its interaction with popular culture, what kinds of technological
capability does the vernacular cybernetics of the African-American community
represent? One clear illustration can be fond in the striking utilization
of the analog/digital dualism for the production of musical signifiers in
the divisions between reggae and rap music. As previously noted reggae is
more aligned with he naturalizing trope modernity, and rap with the artificial
affinities of the postmodern. In reggae we see the language of analog representation.
"Rastaman Vibration" lets us "tune into de riddem;" we
become resonant nodes linked by the waveforms of a polyphonic beat. In rap
music it is digital communication that signifies cultural identity. Natural
harmonies are broken up by arbitrary soundbites and vocal collage, and the
melody is subordinated to a newly spliced code; a mutant reprogramming of
the social software.
From the viewpoint of cultural studies, the utilization of the analog/digital
division in reggae vs. rap does indeed count as a technological capability.
But would it also count from the view of a cybernetics engineer? The use of
the scratch sound mentioned cadet is associated with the birth of Rap, but
phonograph records are analog devices. Similarly, reggae makes use of an army
of both analog and digital audio equipment. Isn't the use of technological
language by African diasporic subcultures merely linguistic play? The answer
is no. Despite (in fact because of) the wide assortment of apparatus, rap
and reggae artists have created a technology for signal processing that would
indeed meet the specificities of current cybernetics engineering. The evidence
for this begins in the work of Richard Voss, who first measured the fractal
dimension for various types of acoustic communication in 1977. Voss discovered
that the physical arbitrariness of digital signifiers meant that the waveforms
of digital commutation were a succession of fairly random signals, overall
creating a "white-noise spectrum." In analog waveforms, on he other
hand, long-term changes in information were reflected in long-term signal
changes. Since there were similar information changes on many scales, the
result was a fractal structure, a "1/F noise spectrum," in the case
of analog communication. Thus the waveform created by pitch changes in speech,
which are primarily due to the phonetic differences between words, tends toward
a white-noise spectrum, while the pitch signal of music shows the fractal
structure of analog representation.
Voss (1988) later showed that this relationship held for all types of music,
both instrumental and vocal, with samples ranging from Indian ragas to Russian
folksongs. My own studies (Eglash 1993) show that while reggae music also
has this fractal structure, rap is the only music (aside from avant-garde
experiments such as those of John Cage) which violates this rule. The reason
for his is the intentional violation of analog representation by digital coding,
a violation that invokes rap artists' oppositional stance, but also offers
a positive outlookin the possibilities for their cybernetic innovation. Moreover,
the rap-reggae fusions that are now becoming increasingly popular (e.g. ragamuffin)
have characteristics which indicate that their signals are likely to avenge
a fractal dimension value half-way between the two. This precision of control
over an abstract cybernetic principle indicates that it is not simply a matter
of the adaption of terminology; African diasporic identity is expressed in
these examples through a conscious manipulation of complex signal characteristics.
Applications to science education
One might think that such rich vernacular cybernetics would be an obvious
resource for improving science education, but such opportunities have been
ignored. For exampie, The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported
in Anderson (1989) suggests that Black high-school students have cultural
barriers to their participation in science, based on studies which supposedly
indicate "fewer science-related experiences" (p. 45). But the examples
of such experiences – planting a seed, watching an egg hatch – are
primarily naturalistic; the artificial realms of video games and audio technology,
which are surely "science-related," are completely excluded. Even
more disturbing is the claim of "cultural barriers" based on reports
that "a substantial portion of Blacks did not have confidence in the
ability of science to solve most or some of our problems" and that they
were "less convinced of the benefits of science to society." Here
a potential route to involving Black youth in science education – by
recognizing their critique as an intelligent understanding of science history
– is instead dismissed as ignorance.
Similarly, an ideology of individualism is persistently portrayed as a neutral,
universal characteristic of scientific style and rational thought (e.g., Pearson
1985, p. 174) which African-Americans must adopt. But like the turn to collective
computation in cybernetics, collective scientific production can often be
a robust path to success. Both this obligatory individualism, and the previously
noted naturalistic assumptions, operate the NAEP's report that African-American
youth "did not believe so strongly as their national peers that individuals'
actions can make a difference in solving societal problems." Reluctance
toward "using an economy can separating trash for recycling, or turning
off lights" are symptoms of this pathology (p. 48). A better understanding
of African-American cultural connections to science would suggest that such
individualistic approaches are neither universal nor uniquely beneficial.
Conclusion
In summary :the history of African interactions with cybernetics does not
revolve around a single essence. It includes white engineers bringing ideas
from Africa and Black engineers who make no claims about inspiration from
any ethnic tradition. A portrait of the multivariate dynamics between the
African diaspora and the information sciences – from the celebration
of popular culture to the struggle of minority scientists – must be brought
together with an understanding of the lived experience of people, from a multiplicity
of ethnic configurations, who have found themselves fused, networked and oddly
interfaced in the evolution of cyborg society.