Yuk Hui (ed.) Cybernetics for the 21st Century.

Yuk Hui (ed.) Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction. Hanart Press 2024.

Philosophy, Art and Technology series. Open Access: https://hanart.press/cybernetics-for-the-21st-century-vol-1/ .

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew – and yet we hardly know – and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Cybernetics Now? 

Yuk Hui

Part I: Maps

Translating Rationalism: Leibniz and Cybernetics 

Brunella Antomarini

Machine and Ecology 

Yuk Hui

Ontology and the Politics of Information in the first Cybernetics 

Mathieu Triclot

Detoxifying Cybernetics: From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond

Kathrine Hayles

James Lovelock, Gaia, and the Remembering of Biological Being 

Dorion Sagan

Part II: Territories

Cybernetics in Britain 

Andrew Pickering

Cybernetics Across Cultures: The Localization of the Universal 

Slava Gerovitch

Cybernetics, Communism, and Romanticism: Cybernetic Thinking in the Polish People’s Republic and in the Pre-Cybernetic Era  

Michał Krzykawski

A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics  

Dylan Levi King

Why Did Cybernetics Disappear from Latin America? An Incomplete Timeline 

David Maulén de los Reyes

Life-in-formation: Cybernetics of the Heart  

Daisuke Harashima