Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Temporality, Storage, and Interactivity in Cybernetics

In his memoir Ex-Prodigy, the MIT professor and cybernetics researcher Norbert Wiener once wrote: "I longed to be a naturalist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive engineers. I was only dimly aware of the way in which the age of the naturalist and explorer was running out, leaving the mere tasks of gleaning to the next generation."¹ Developing this theme, he would later write: "even in zoology and botany, it was diagrams of complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization which excited my interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery."² In a series of popular books and technical manifestos, Wiener would go on to interrogate this "problem" that complexity posed. Written in a reflective moment after World War II, his comments sought to mark the passing of one age to another—the end of "exploration," and the emergence of another type of "organization."

This was no small claim. When situated within the context of Wiener's other works about communications theory and computing, this seemingly minute comment about personal memory gestured to a fervent hope: that an epistemic transformation involving the relations between temporality, representation, and perception was in process. Wiener indicated a desire to see an older archival order, adjoined to modern interests in taxonomy and ontology, rendered obsolete by another mode of thought invested in prediction, self-referentiality, and communication.

Wiener dreamed of a world where there is no "unknown" left to discover, only an accumulation of records that must be recombined, analyzed, and processed. He argued that in observing too closely and documenting too "meticulously" one is unable to deduce patterns—to produce, in his words, a "flow of ideas." He wrote that "if he [a student] decides to take notes at all, he has already destroyed much of his ability to grasp the argument in flight, and at the end of the course has nothing but a mass of illegible scribble . . . it is far better to give up the idea of taking notes and to organize in his mind the material as it comes to him from the speaker."³ Ex-Prodigy's obsessive implication was this gap between thought and action, and not, as the autobiographical genre might lead us to expect, the need to document or account for past experiences. This subtle shift of emphasis away from concerns with documentary and personal experience opens a site to excavate the historical reformulation of relations between representation, memory, and communication.

I wish to take up this turn away from an "external" world and the devolution inward, in this case to the very self, as a starting point to consider the relationship between the archive and the interface in digital systems. What might we make of this move from a concern with recording an external, perhaps "natural," world in its entirety, to an obsession with processing the already recorded traces of memory? How do we wish to frame this shift to forms of representation whose reference is reflexive rather than indexical? Wiener was not naïvely recounting his failures in finding adventure; rather, he was articulating an aspiration for forms of technology—both of thought and of machine, or perhaps of thought as a machine—that had not yet come into being when he spoke. In his work, and in that of his many compatriots in the arts and sciences of the time,⁴ we hear similar statements that voiced a not-yet-realized aspiration to transform a world of ontology, description, and materiality to one of communication, prediction, and virtuality.⁵

But if Wiener attempted to propagate the "new," it came into being only through the memory traces of the old. It was by way of Freud, the exemplar of a previous century's sciences, that Wiener implied the impossibility of describing a world in its totality, of ever rendering "reality" legible. Instead, he argued, we are faced with an "incomplete determinism," an operative lack that cannot enter description, but can produce something else—a self-referential and probabilistic form of thought:

One interesting change...