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  • The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI
  • Jussi Parikka (bio)
The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI by John Johnston. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2008. 494 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-10126-4.

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John Johnston’s Allure of Machinic Life deals with the post–World War II culture of cybernetics and reterritorialization of intelligence and life to machines. An emphasis on the crucial contexts of cybernetics, artificial intelligence and artificial life has been suggested by several writers when considering the shifting categories of life, the living and technological objects. What Johnston brings into the soup is a historically concise and in general detailed explication of the new “computational assemblage” of the Western world.

The concept of “computational assemblage” is what defines Johnston’s approach. With that notion Johnston is able to dig both into the material layers of computational devices that process information and into the discourses that place, distribute and evaluate the functions, purposes and significance of the machines. This double nature of his method allows a combination that, as Johnston acknowledges, is familiar to scholars in the Deleuzian camp, but also resonates with some of the “materialist media theory” that comes from Germany—with Friedrich Kittler as one of its best-known representatives. Yet The Allure of Machinic Life is not a mere application of theoretical ideas but a real, strong articulation of the emergence of a new intimacy of biology and technology that—with a nod toward Gilbert Simondon—is the world of technical objects embedded in quasi-biological dynamics.

Indeed, the meticulous attention Johnston pays in almost a breathtaking manner to developments in cybernetics, neuroscience, mathematics, cognitive science and of course artificial intelligence and life is what distinguishes his work from past cyber theorists. He clearly adopts some of the themes and agenda from various earlier writers that have tried to make sense of the conflation of the biological and the technological but in a way that makes this research stand out.

The book is divided into three parts: (1) From cybernetics to machinic philosophy, (2) machinic life and (3) machinic intelligence. The first section outlines not only how cybernetics actually introduced not a disembodied notion of information and life but a new “complexity of machines.” By reading, for example, W. Grey Walter and Ross Ashby, Johnston frames what I would call the “cybernetic zoology” of various machines and the like that act as the crucial objects and systems for thinking—here, the link to later designs by Rodney Brooks is made evident, as is how the archaeology of emergent systems cannot ignore, for example, Walter’s toaster-like tortoise machines. This section, like the rest of the book, is a restless one (but in a positive sense of the word) and refuses to stay occupied within one discipline. Johnston for example maps the interface of cybernetics with psychoanalysis—again, a connection that has been discussed in the past years but, I would claim, never in such a comprehensive manner. Sections 2 and 3 point toward, among other things, the archaeologies of recent notions of emergence, swarms and self-organization even if they do not touch much on pre–World War II developments—only a reference to William Wheeler, but nothing on, for example, C. Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent Evolution (1923). For mapping of the discourses of ALife and new AI since 1970s or so, Johnston is, however, unbeatable. As it progresses, the book becomes a huge mesh of links between contemporary philosophy, biological theories such as Neodarwinism and theories of self-organization and the [End Page 78] concrete technological systems through which various ideas were relayed. Indeed, it offers insights into the redefinition of life in informational systems but never suggesting this as a simple fall into immateriality; instead, what the book maps are the new materialist constellations that also force media theory to rethink its premises regarding the ontology of technical media.

As a dip into the history of science, Johnston adopts a nice methodological point of view that does not prioritize either the objects or the discourses but looks...

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