The Antimeme Haunting Western Philosophy
In The Antimeme is the Message of the Medium I explained the way in which certain ideas naturally resist being encoded into a given medium of communication; epistemic communities built around that medium therefore fail to appreciate the ideas which that medium cannot successfully communicate. Concisely:
The antimeme is the message of the medium, defined negatively.
We can identify what the medium is telling us by observing what it is unable to tell us.
Today I apply this insight to Western philosophy, in service of a question which I’ve been trying to answer for years on this blog: why does no one talk about cybernetics anymore? I’ve written about cybernetics many times, in The Tragedy of Stafford Beer and The Whirlpool of the Artificial, and I’m convinced that it offers essential mental tools for navigating the modern world.
But there is an obvious objection. Cybernetics was once extremely popular (Wiener’s book Cybernetics was a best-seller) — if people knew about it and it was so obviously useful, why aren’t they still using it?
One answer is that people are in fact using cybernetics all the time, in the military OODA loop, disciplines like ecology and climate science, in business operations research, and in tech operations via the agile methodology. Another answer is that cybernetics came along just a bit too early, before we had the sensors, computers and effectors for it to flourish.
There is merit to both answers, but neither explains why nobody talks about cybernetics — by which I mean, why nobody writes about cybernetics, why there are millions of Substack posts about AI compared to just a handful by people like me, Maxim Raginsky, Ben Recht, Dan Davies and Henry Farrell.1
Davies specifically notes this forgetting and re-discovering of cybernetics in a discussion about anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott, calling this cycle “intellectual carcinization – the phenomenon whereby people from other fields reinvent some of the important principles of management cybernetics simply because they’re studying the same problems and the underlying mathematical structures are there to be found.”2 But again: if the answers are there to be found, why do they keep getting forgotten from the canon of intellectual writing?
The media-theoretic/antimemetic answer is that it’s really hard to write about cybernetics; the topic resists encoding in text. It’s best understood in action, which naturally makes it difficult to mediatize. Among media modalities, the best cybernetic knowledge comes from the medium which involves action: video games. It’s hard to imagine a better introduction to cybernetics than a game of Factorio.
But video games are so successful in this by creating an artificial world with idealized ontologies and user interfaces that allow you to “feel the feedback.” For cybernetics to be applicable beyond these artificial worlds to the world most people care about, the most effective media technology remains the baroque cyclical diagram.
Cybernetics is, per Wikipedia, the study of circular causal processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a system’s actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system, influencing subsequent action. The crucial word here is processes — rather than studying static entitities, cybernetics is the study of the process by which entities change and are changed by their environment. This flies in the face of the classical ontology, which the Wiki page about process philosophy explains:
“Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied.”
The river is a classic object for process philosophy because it is not, in fact, an object. It is a process. A river cannot stand still. The molecules comprising the river are always different. “A river” is the process of objects (H20) flowing through the same location. Heraclitus says that “Everything changes and nothing remains still ... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream.”
Processes are the antimeme haunting Western philosophy — where philosophy is defined by the technology of static, linear, lengthy written text.3 Cybernetics is, put another way, the analytical study of complex processes, and thus especially difficult for this medium to encode.
The ontology implied by linear text is one of stable entities bouncing off of each other. Nouns and verbs. Fixed entities taking actions or being acted upon. Standard nouns refer to types, proper nouns refer to unique instantiations.
Imagine any popular ethical thought experiment. It involves some actor in a situation with some well-defined entities. You’re walking alongside a river, there’s a drowning child, and you are wearing a fancy suit. The ethical decision about whether to save the child hinges on how fancy your suit is, your estimate of the physiognomy of the child (he looks like he might be >95th percentile criminality :-/ ) and your monetary discount rate divided by your timeline for AI X-risk…
All of those parameters are fascinating, for a certain type of person, but before you pull out your calculators and start multiplying probabilities by consequent utiles, take a second to recall that the medium (of the thought experiment) is the message: the message is that the world consists of entities like “suits” and “rivers,” that a few sentences are sufficient to define a human’s experience of the world, and that those humans have an essentially unlimited amount of time to perform those calculations.
To me, it is time that most concretely differentiates process philosophy from classical philosophy. Despite considerable effort, I personally cannot transcend my Cartesian intellectual formation; I cannot will myself to really think of the world consisting of processes rather than substances. But I have thought about time a lot, specifically about how the scientific process is capable of studying phenomena which change slowly but not those which change quickly. The idea of a “scientific fact” implies that the thing is ontologically stable — that it’s going to stick around for a while!
Reflexively, we should consider the durability and reproducibility of the printed books and journals by which science and philosophy are communicated. These mediums are themselves ontologically stable; machine-printed texts last a long time, and even if the invidual object decays, the exact same text can be re-produced with the iron press. The “spirit” of the text is eternal, and the “body” of the book has a lifespan longer than that of the human. Books are very intuitively things, not processes, and it is natural that the world communicable through books seems to be composed of things.
Western process philosophy can reasonably be said to begin with Heraclitus, who is probably most famous for the idiom that “man cannot step into the same river twice.” This idea is central to Herclitus’ thinking; he believes the whole world to be made of flux, never being but always becoming.
Anti-ironically,4 this most famous quote of his defies our received definition of “a quote” as an exact and eternal thing. Wikipedia notes three different surviving formulations:
"On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow" – Arius Didymus, quoted in Stobaeus[at]
"We both step and do not step into the same river, we both are and are not" – Heraclitus Homericus, Homeric Allegories[au]
"It is not possible to step into the same river twice" – Plutarch, On the E at Delphi[av]
The point of the aphorism is not to memorize it or to deconstruct it, this isn’t gospel5 — the point is to think with it, so the exact text is simply less important than its capacity to be applied, to be implemented in a cognitive process. Why is Heraclitus’ process philosophy an antimeme? Well, it wasn’t at the time — he was very influential in the more dialogic, speaking-focus Anciet Greek intellectual society, including on Aristotle. His relative obscurity today reflects the fact that none of his writing exists, except in quotation from others. Remembering that an antimeme is only defined with respect to the medium in which it is encoded, “one copy of papyrus” turns everything into an antimeme eventually.
The “river” remains difficult for standard natural philosophy to absorb. Consider Hume’s billiard balls, the famous example he uses to develop the definition of causation which became central to logical positivism and the recieved understanding by practicing scientists. One billiard ball is moving, rolls into the other one; they exchange position and momentum but they are not fundamentally changed by any of this action. The heavenly orbs that served as the ideal-typical objects of Newtonian physics and consequent scientific intuitions are not changing, from the temporal perspective of the human scientist with a telescope.
Hegel is the most famous classical capital-P Philosopher who can best be characterized as doing process philosophy; fittingly, he is often derided as an obscuratinist mystic by subsequent analytical/positivist philosophers. I’m not about to change anyone’s mind about Hegel in this blog post (it’s not like I’ve managed to actually read him), but I will point to Yuk Hui’s re-reading of Hegel through the lens of cybernetics in Recursivity and Contingency and especially Machine and Sovereignty as an important influence on my thinking.6
Hui argues that the process philosophers7 were hamstrung by their geometry and the associated tools-of-thought. Pre-scientific, mystical traditions think in terms of circles, of eternal return to the present; scientific/mechanistic thinkers, and people communicating with books, are trained to think in terms of linear progress. What both camps are missing is the idea of recursion, in Hui’s framework — which I think is the same idea that Flusser anticipates in Communicology, which he calls circular progress.
Recursion is only possible if our ontology allows for change. The stability of classical ontology, like the billiard balls of linear historical progress, makes it impossible for something to go around in a circle, end up in the same place, and yet be fundamentally changed by the experience. I said earlier that video games are the best medium for understanding processes, but even better might be code: the language of the current world, in which the idea of recursion is central.
But back to the antimeme: my story is more compelling if I can identify other places where the idea of processes sprang up—and why it sprang up, where it came from, if not from the mainline tradition of Western philosophy—and then disappeared. The clearest case is Henri Bergson, who was an intellectual celebrity in the early 20th century before a rapid decrease in popularity; he was more recently rehabilitated by Deleuze, and the past twenty years has seen a strong re-appreciation for his work.
Bergson’s most famous concepts are of durée and elan vital. The former reconceptualizes time, allowing for a subjective understanding rather than the standard “clock-time”; the latter assigns agency to every living thing, an agency which implies a goal. This inverts the causality of classical physics, because the cause (the goal) is temporally after the effect (the actions the being takes to achieve their goal).
But where did Bergson get his ideas, so far from the mainstream of philosophy? From the natural sciences, specifically from the idea of evolution. First, from Herbert Spencer, and then from Charles Darwin.8 The idea that the human beings (and all living beings) are the result of some living thing changing into another thing is, obviously, a problem for classical ontology. Evolution is very much a process, even if the 19th-century theorists didn’t quite understand how it worked.
This is why evolutionary theory was such a shock to the Western intellectual tradition. If God created every being fully formed — the Medieval Great Chain of Being — then we can imagine the mechanistic theory of causality playing out and explaining everything as a cause of the first Great Effect. This is the Deism of the clockmaker God, who wound up the clock but has since let it tick according to the laws of Newtonian physics.9
Bergson was heavily criticized by mainstream philosophers at the time; his vitalism was seen as obscuritanist mysticism to analytical logicians. Wikipedia’s list of “those who explicitly criticized Bergson” reads as a who’s-who of midcentury philosophy.10 He did win the 1927 Nobel Prize….in Literature, not exactly an endorsement of analytical rigor.
Overall, Bergson-as-philosophical-antimeme can be understood by one pole of Asparouhova’s original antimeme framework: he was simply too popular, his ideas burned through the public so fast that the intellectual establishment simply derided him rather than thoughtfully engaging with or extending his work. Suzanne Guerlac makes the point:
Bergson achieved enormous popular success in this context, often due to the emotional appeal of his ideas. But he did not have the equivalent of graduate students who might have become rigorous interpreters of his thought. Thus Bergson's philosophy—in principle open and nonsystematic—was easily borrowed piecemeal and altered by enthusiastic admirers
So Bergson suffered from perhaps an excess of memetic success: he was an intellectual celebrity in his lifetime. This was exacerbated by his unusual academic position at the College de France, where he did not have PhD students but rather gave popular public lecture. Spending time lecturing certainly took time away from the further development of his thinking — his public base of support may have insulated from the need to integrate his framework with that of his critics. His work was an antimeme within the philosophical community of written books becuase it was too much of a meme in popular culture.
Alfred North Whitehead represents the opposite pole. Whitehead cites Bergson and his protégés, the American pragmatists James and Dewey, in the preface of his magnum opus. Process and Reality is one of the most respected philosophical texts of the 20th century, and the explicit modern origin of the “process philosophy” that I’ve been tracing back to Heraclitus…but, in true antimeme fashion, nobody reads it today.
I need to emphasize the ridiculousness of Whitehead’s intellectual trajectory. The man was a mathematician of the first class, writing (with his student Bertrand Russell) the Principia Mathematica, a seminal contribution to mathematical logic. In his 50s, his mathematical edge a bit blunted, he became an important university administrator and Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of London. For most academics, that’s a life sentence.
Whitehead, instead, “turned to philosophy” in his late 50s, despite no formal training on the subject. Wikipedia notes that “So impressive and different was Whitehead’s philosophy that in 1924 he was invited to join the faculty at Harvard University as a professor of philosophy at 63 years of age…This is not to say that Whitehead’s thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the Western canon”, and provides the following incredible anecdote:
Eddington was a marvellous popular lecturer who had enthralled an audience of 600 for his entire course. The same audience turned up to Whitehead’s first lecture but it was completely unintelligible, not merely to the world at large but to the elect. My father remarked to me afterwards that if he had not known Whitehead well he would have suspected that it was an imposter making it up as he went along... The audience at subsequent lectures was only about half a dozen in all.
This is the other end of the memetic spectrum: Whitehead’s process philosophy was so difficult to understand that it could never really spread at all.
I think these two poles of popularity can explain subsequent cases of process philosophy as antimeme. Norbert Wiener’s Cyberntetics was a bestseller — but it was filled, filled with mathematical jargon and equations. People might’ve bought the book, but there’s no way they fully incorporated the ideas; the meme spread too quickly to be fully integrated within intellectual culture, turning the original idea into an unrigorous caricature.
On the other pole are all sorts of cranks who have written something too involved/baroque to be picked up by other thinkers. This is a failure mode of cybernetics, when the baroque diagrams are embedded in books; they’re too hard to evaluate or use. This certainly happened to my hero Stafford Beer, who followed cybernetics all the way from the height of management consulting to a semi-mystic hylozoism, as I describe in The Tragedy of Stafford Beer.
And yet this is still happening! Internet cranks like the pseudonymous Slime Mold Time Mold are attempting to introduce “a new paradigm in psychology”: by which they mean, just do cybernetics. Other internet cranks, like myself, are saying we should just do cybernetics to understand political communication on social media, like in The YouTube Apparatus, from Cambridge University Press.
We’ll see if anything comes of it. I’m skeptical — unless the idea can be encoded in a different, more (inter)active medium.
I’d be remiss not to mention one of the more famous instances of cybernetics in Western philosophy.
In Heidegger’s final interview (conducted with the agreement that it only be published after his death) “Only a God Can Save Us,” he explains the end of philosophy:
Hiedegger: Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political science.
SPIEGEL: And what now takes the place of philosophy?
Heidegger: Cybernetics.
I’m sure there are other of us cyberneticians bloggin on here — let me know if that’s you!
Thanks to Drew Dimmery for pointing this out.
Other philosophical traditions have different ontologies and different cosmologies. I became utterly convinced of this by reading Yuk Hui’s The Question Concerning Technology in China. I also recommend his edited volume Cybernetics for the 21st Century (note the Stafford Beer diagram on the cover), particularly the chapters “A Brief History of Chinese Cybernetics” (which centers Qian Xuesen, lowkey one of the wildest guys of the 20th century) and “Life-in-formation: Cybernetics of the Heart.”
Or perhaps just “fittingly” but I’m running with the “anti” theme today.
Another aside — “gospel” in the sense of exact words being important for themselves is central to the Abrahamic religions which form the basis for Western philosophical culture. Flusser also notes that these religions “of the book” wage an explicit war against images, including forbidding images of Muhammed, the law against idolatry (as taking a physical image or statue to be God — only the text can be God!), implemented in various literal iconoclasyms.
He also lays out a useful genealogy of process philosophy which illustrates how thinkers who are usually divided into different camps are all drawing on this antimemetic tradition: Hegel, and then Bergson and Whitehead, but also the cyberneticists and then Lewis Mumford and Friedrich Hayek. This includes a curious insight that mirrors my experience, suggesting the “second dimension” of intellectual history: staunchly anti-capitalist anarchists and staunchly pro-capitalist neoliberals are both heavily interested in the technologies and institutions by which social and economic action becomes ordered. They take the problematic of economics as a process seriously, even though they have very different solutions. In another intellectual “horseshoe” example, the only thinkers who are deeply invested in materiality are far-left anthropologists and the military.
Hui prefers the term “organismic” philosophy, which is also the term used by Whitehead, as the antithesis to dominant “mechanistic” philosophy. There is much to consider here, from the way in which technology represents an externalization of humans’ organs to the etymylogical connection between “organ,” “organism,” and “organization” — but that’s outside our scope, except to endorse Hui’s claim that “we suggest that to understand the twentieth century, one cannot avoid analyzing the organismic paradigm, which has already extended to the twenty-first century.”
It’s crazy how much more famous Spencer was than Darwin during their lifetimes…and also just how recent Darwin’s fame is. “Charles Darwin” is, largely, a meme from 1990s/2000s culture wars about science and religion — even if Darwinism/evolutionary theory is not.
I’m vibe-historicizing here; a serious historian of thought would track down the actual texts written by these thinkers and cross-reference their notebooks and letters to trace the precise moment of influence.
“Those who explicitly criticized Bergson, either in published articles or in letters, included Bertrand Russell[56] George Santayana,[64] G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger,[65] Julien Benda,[66] T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis,[67] Wallace Stevens (though Stevens also praised him in his work "The Necessary Angel"),[68] Paul Valéry, André Gide, Jean Piaget,[69] Julius Evola, Emil Cioran, Marxist philosophers Theodor W. Adorno,[70] Lucio Colletti,[71] Jean-Paul Sartre,[72] and Georges Politzer,[73] György Lukács as well as Maurice Blanchot,[74] American philosophers such as Irving Babbitt, Arthur Lovejoy, Josiah Royce, The New Realists (Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, and William Pepperell Montague), The Critical Realists (Durant Drake, Roy W. Sellars, C. A. Strong, and A. K. Rogers), Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Roger Fry (see his letters), Julian Huxley (in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis) and Virginia Woolf”
Awesome post. My sense is that the cybernetic perspective fails to ever take hold because the things we’re trying to study are just really fucking complicated. You end up sounding like a madman, or gesturing toward a general vibe that readers may or may not identify with. For me, the conclusion of every analysis ends up being “this is super complicated and these complications are not widely understood or appreciated”.
Not to say one can’t go farther than that, but it’s simply really hard and takes monumental effort to either articulate the mechanistic breakdown of interacting processes, or to write about them well enough to sound intelligent.
There’s just not a lot of room in intellectual meme space to move our understanding of a complicated topic from 3% to 4%… one is always incentivized to reduce the problem to such a degree that you can say you understand 90-100%, having lost sufficient perspective to actually say anything interesting.
You’ve at least managed to articulate this phenomenon super well, as the mimetic environment of intellectualism is simply inhospitable to certain important ways of thinking.
Way to stick the landing. Your teaser got my hopes up, and you delivered. You have convinced me to stop talking about pragmatism–such an awkward term– as a source for cybernetics and talk instead about process philosophy.
Since you centered on Bergson, I have to plug Emily Herring's fantastic "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People."
Your gesture to Dewey and James (he of the stream of consciousness) leads me to recommend Charles Peirce to this genealogy. It always feels like he is on the verge of blowing up, like Bergson is lately. Thanks to how well Pierce's semiotics help make sense of generative AI, it may be happening.