Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg

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Citation

Tomas, David. "Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg." Body & Society 1, no. 3-4 (November 1995): 21-43.[1]

DOI: 10.1177/1357034X95001003002

Also published as a chapter in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (Sage, 1995), the book edition of this double issue of Body & Society.[2]

Description

Tomas states that the paper belongs to a longer book project on the relationship between the cyborg concept and late twentieth century imaging systems, virtual reality among them, and that its orientation is critical, aimed at current cultural practice and at oppositional practice in the arts specifically.[1]

The paper works closely with Norbert Wiener, chiefly The Human Use of Human Beings (1954). Tomas takes up Wiener's claim that the physical functioning of a living individual and the operation of newer communications machines are parallel efforts to control entropy through feedback, both equipped with sensory receptors that gather low-energy information from the world, transform it internally, and act on the outside, with the performed action rather than the intended action reported back to a central regulatory apparatus.[1] Wiener extended the same logic from individual physical response to the organic response of society, treating communication as what holds the social fabric together.[1]

What Tomas draws out of this is the consequence for the body. If identity rests on the pattern maintained by homeostasis, as Wiener held, then the boundary of the person is defined by a regulatory loop rather than by skin, and the loop can be extended into machinery without any obvious point at which the person stops.[1]

The paper also does terminological history. Tomas notes that André-Marie Ampère used cybernétique in 1843 for a science of government, and that Wiener's reintroduction of the word rather than Ampère's coinage is the origin of contemporary usage.[1] He cites Cherry on how unstable the vocabulary remained across countries, with British writers preferring control systems, and French usage of la cybernétique corresponding to what Britain called information theory.[1]

Publication history

Earlier versions were presented at a conference on Body Images, Language & Physical Boundaries at the University of Amsterdam in July 1993, and at the University of Windsor, Ontario, in November 1993.[1] A working version appeared as Tomas, David, "Cybernetics and Feedback: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg," pp. 53-103 in J. Murray, ed., Technology and Culture, Working Papers in the Humanities 2 (Windsor: Humanities Research Group / University of Windsor, 1994). The title in the earlier version reverses the two terms.[1]

Crossref records 20 citing publications, the most recent in the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference proceedings.[1]

Selected sources cited in the article

Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1954); Clynes and Kline, "Cyborgs and Space," Astronautics (1960); Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1991); McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964); Gibson, Neuromancer (1984); Halacy, Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman (1965); Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946-53 (1993); Bowker, "How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943-70" (1993); Canguilhem, "Machine and Organism" (1992); Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?" (1991); Springer, "The Pleasure of the Interface" (1991); Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (1981); Reichardt, "Cybernetic Serendipity" (1968); Čapek, R.U.R.[1]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg, Body & Society, Sage Journals.
  2. ↑ Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg, SAGE Knowledge.
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