ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Feline Organisms, Digital Computers and the Human: Cybernetics and the included Excluded

• In Event: Rewiring Humans 1: Biology, Psychotherapy, and Philosophy in the Age of Digital Computers

English Abstract

In post-war West Germany, approaches from Neurophysiology and Cybernetics not only conceptualized analogies between biological and technical pattern recognition but also reinforced these in experimental setups and technological developments. However, while the animal organism, often feline, was central to physiological knowledge production on the visual system, and the circuit, not least the computer, was central to engineering work, something was missing: the human.
The Collaborative Research Centre 50 (1969–1983) of the German Research Foundation is exemplary of such cooperative efforts. Here, researchers such as the physiologists and neurologists Otto Creutzfeldt, Wolf Singer or the engineer Gert Hauske set out to explicitly utilize the assumed proximity of neurophysiological theory and practice to information technologies. Over the course of the 1970s, psychophysical experiments on humans were increasingly integrated into the work of the research consortium. This tripartite arrangement made it possible to shift between different epistemic orders and places by including this excluded third. (Serres 1981)
Analyzing the research environment of the Collaborative Research Centre, this paper examines these dynamics of knowledge translation between the three areas. With Michel Serres’ Parasite (1981), it asks about the multifacetted relations of order and the shifts in position: Who is (when) the included excluded one? And what follows from this?

Author

• Dinah Pfau, Deutsches Museum