Language and the Cybernetic Mind

IN THE cybernetic view, everything in the world of experience isrelational, and terms like mind, language and meaning are taken asfundamentally descriptive of the underlying structural dynamics by which our experience of the world is realized. This view, which is discur-sive in essence, thus defines the ‘real ’ – or phenomena (percepts, events, data, injunctions, descriptions, etc.) – as series of integrated, recursive, differential ‘systems’. It is one of the basic premises of cybernetics, however, that when we speak of systems we are in fact using a metaphor for what remains, in effect, a type of epistemology (and that different systems repre-sent differing, and often incompatible, epistemologies) such that at no point are descriptions of the real exempt from the self-validating character of all epistemologies. The concern of cybernetics, then, is not with the presumed substance of any particular ‘system’, but with the structurality of systems in general, and above all the structurality of differential relations between and across systems – which is also to say, between and across different episte-mologies. It is the objective of this article first to examine the assumptions of structurality upon which cybernetic (and proto-cybernetic) research into what can be broadly described as semiotic systems devolves, and how this research points beyond a strictly anthropological conception of ‘mind’, by way of an analysis of structural mechanics and dynamic systems, towards a general ‘signifying materiality ’ as the basis of what is called agency or consciousness. I In a lecture presented in August 1968 to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation, Gregory Bateson traced the modern conception of cybernetics back to the ‘Copernican Revolution ’ of Lamarck’s Philosophi