Ben Sweeting

In this talk, I return to one of the most influential moments in the development of cybernetics: Margaret Mead’s 1967 address to the inaugural meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), when Mead suggested that ASC should apply the ideas with which it was concerned to the formation of the society itself. Mead’s address has been returned to in a number of ways in subsequent decades as a touchstone for recursivity and reflexivity in cybernetics. Mead’s provocation was itself a kind of return (i.e., recursion), on Mead’s own part, to an attempt some years earlier to introduce the same idea to another society and, also, to correspondence between Mead and Gregory Bateson about planning organizations in relation to their purposes. Here, I return once more to Mead’s proposal, this time in the context of the Systemic Design Association (SDA) and the Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD) symposia. I explore the original context of Mead’s address, how its ideas have been reinterpreted and developed by others, and how the combinations of these multiple acts of recursion (about recursion) are relevant to systemic design, and to the SDA and RSD, today.

Acknowledgement

This presentation draws in part on archival work supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/X002535/1] in a project funded jointly with the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Indicative references

1. Brand, S., Bateson, G., & Mead, M. (1976). For God’s sake, Margaret: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. CoEvolutionary Quarterly, 10, 32-44.
2. Bunnell, P. (2017). Reflections on learning as designing. Kybernetes, 46(9), 1486-1498. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-11-2016-0308  
3. Glanville, R. (2011). Introduction: A conference doing the cybernetics of cybernetics. Kybernetes, 40(7/8), 952-963. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684921111160197  
4. Krippendorff, K. (2008). Cybernetics’s Reflexive turns. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 15(3-4), 173-184.
5. Mead, M. (1968). The cybernetics of cybernetics. In H. von Foerster, J. D. White, L. J. Peterson, & J. K. Russell (Eds.), Purposive Systems (pp. 1-11). Spartan Books.
6. Steier, F. (1991). Research and reflexivity. Sage.
7. Sweeting, B. & Sutherland, S.  (2022). Possibilities and practices for systemic design: Questions for the next decade of Relating Systems Thinking and Design. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design, RSD11. Article 002. https://rsdsymposium.org/questions-for-systemic-design/
8. Von Foerster, H. (1979). Cybernetics of cybernetics. In K. Krippendorff (Ed.), Communication and Control in Society (pp. 5-8). Gordon and Breach.
9. Von Foerster, H. (1991). Through the eyes of the other. In F. Steier (Ed.), Research and reflexivity (pp. 63-75). Sage.

Venue: Oslo, Norway

Date: October 12–26, 2024