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Abstract
Between 1946 and 1953, leading scientists met in New York in the context of the so-called Macy conferences, often linked to the emergence of cybernetics. They hankered for a new vision of mind and society. The traumatism of WW2 was implicit but omnipresent, and the Cold War was beginning. Macy key tools and concepts about information, the value of information, and computer artefacts have finally produced a new world, in particular an organisational world, which is far removed from their original dreams. Organisational members are now involved in difficult situations in terms of organising, that is, new modes of performativity which are difficult to comprehend and deal with; a transformation of meaning and knowledge in collective activity; and a threat to well-being and happiness as mental activities, cognition and bodies are increasingly disconnected. We use the Macy conferences as an entry point to reflect on the ‘longue durée’ evolution of the material underpinnings of information and their relationship with organising. We first explore the new conceptualisations at the core of the Macy conferences, information, value of information, and computer artefacts. We then put the Macy conferences into a socio-historical perspective by means of two theoretical approaches, iconographical and semiotic; this involves a historical comparison between the ‘screen-images’ or our Information Age and the ‘object-images’ of medieval cathedrals. We show that there are important disruptions in organising grounded in a new semiosis, which emerged over the longue durée of collective activity, and was articulated further during the Macy conferences. We describe this long-term evolution as the post-Macy paradox.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 We will use the notion of organising in the pragmatist sense of Lorino, Tricard and Clot (Citation2011, 775): ‘Organizing will be viewed here as a collective activity, i.e. the permanent collective effort to transform the world and at the same time interpret this effort reflexively.’
2 The Macy conferences themselves are not a brutal, single, turning point in the conceptualisation of meaning and information. Many other events before and after have contributed to a standardisation of writing and knowing, the architecture of computers and the cybernetic turn (see also Pickering Citation2002, Citation2010). Nonetheless, the Macy conferences epitomise and make visible a long-term move which has accelerated during the post-WW2 period and may accelerate further.
3 Semiosis relates to any form of activity or process that involves signs (Peirce Citation1978), including the production of meaning.
4 Furthermore, the design of new media such as wearable sensors inside clothes through which body movements provide information and sometimes energy to the medium, or artefacts enabling geo-localisation, tactile navigation, anthropomorphised interactions, and so on creates ‘screen-images’ which encounter an individual's body.
5 Organisations are themselves represented, visualised, and performed as ‘entities’, for instance, with logos, organisational charts, rules and business processes, standards, targets, budgets, dashboards, material, and immaterial spaces…
6 That is, the body assemblages as experienced by an individual through everyday activities.
7 Most elements used in this section are based on these three key (rare) references about the event. Heims provides an historical account of the event, putting it into the perspective of WW2 and the Cold War; Dupuy focuses on the cognitive and epistemological implications of the conference, whereas Hayles emphasises the literary stance and underlying metaphors conveyed by Macy. We also used some archives available on the Cybernetic Society website (http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm), in particular, information about each conference and their proceedings.
8 First designed as an analogy to the human mind, whereas later the human mind was thought about as an electronic brain (Dupuy Citation1994). Another paradox? In any case, this inversion favoured the legitimate structuring of human thought and experience through the new logical automata (all the more human-compatible as they were supposed to be inspired by the human way of thinking).
9 See also Pickering (Citation2002) who analyses cybernetics as pursuing scientific, technological but also artistic, organizational, political, and spiritual worldly projects.
10 In addition, the Macy conferences will be an opportunity to discuss the meaning of information compared to that of energy and entropy (Hayles Citation1999).
11 In terms of the activities related to the exchange:
When is a question meaningless? Some people would argue that a question is meaningless unless one has some physical way of verifying the answer to it (…). At the other extreme are those who would admit any question to be meaningful if people in fact ask it. (MacKay Citation1969, 36–37).
12 Although the Latin etymology of ‘sign’ is the notion of ‘miracle’…
13 The personal world through the generation and interpretation of signs and messages; the material world in that signs are physically embodied; and the social world in that the connotative aspects of sign systems are social (Mingers and Willcocks Citation2014, 48).
14 At this stage, we use the term ‘delegation’ more as a metaphor (see Dourish and Mazmanian Citation2013) than the concept of delegation as used in actor network theory (ANT) (see, e.g., Ribes et al. Citation2013). Moral delegation corresponds to the expectation that a mere material artefact will convey a norm for social interactions, a regulation (de Vaujany et al. Citation2015). Cognitive delegation corresponds to the expectation that a material artefact will structure individual or collective modes of cognition. From an ANT viewpoint (Latour Citation2005), Macy could be described more as a long-term prescriptive assemblage, and an evolving network including first some academics, the US army, the electronic brain, diodes, tubes, the Nazi, the Soviet, to a more recent assemblage including consumers, major global companies, financial markets, major global states, terrorists, tactile systems, mobile systems, protocols, and infrastructures.