A Global History of Cybernetics 47
adjectival form, cybernetic, an adjunct to anything that its users see fit to
apply it. From the point of view of the central committee that organized
cybernetics institutionally, Soviet cybernetics, at the peak of its reach,
appears both comprehensive and pluralist. It was a complete mess, as
Timofeef-Ressovsky jested. In the late 1960s, the Academy of Sciences of
the USSR promoted cybernetics into an entire division, one of four divi-
sions comprising all Soviet science.^117 The remaining three (noncybernetic)
divisions—“the physico-technical and mathematical sciences, chemico-
technical and biological sciences, and social sciences”—could without
much conceptual violence be read as subfields of the Siberian-sized Soviet
cybernetic science.
The Soviets were not alone in the instinct to universalize science, although
the ideological organs of the state excelled at promoting such discourse.
The ecumenical commitment and a totalizing mission to stitch together
the mechanical, the organic, and the social often were attributed to their
foreign founder. In 1948, Wiener attempted to analogize (in the subtitle to
his 1948 Cybernetics) “the animal and the machine” and concluded with a
comment about the insufficiency of cybernetic methods for social sciences.
Nonetheless, two years later, in 1950, Wiener published a popular version
called The Human Use of Human Beings, whose subtitle belies his earlier cau-
tion: “cybernetics and society.”^118 Still, the instinct to institutionalize his
intellectual catholicity was clearly native to the Academy of Science, which
originally categorized cybernetics into eight sections, including mathemat-
ics, engineering, economics, mathematical machines, biology, linguistics,
reliability theory, and a “special” military section.^119 With Aksel’ Berg’s
sway over the Council on Cybernetics, the number of recognized subfields
then grew to envelop “geological cybernetics,” “agricultural cybernetics,”
“geographical cybernetics,” “theoretical cybernetics” (mathematics), “bio-
cybernetics” (sometimes “bionics” or biological sciences), and, the most
prominent of the Soviet cybernetic social sciences, “economic cybernetics”
(discussed in later chapters).^120
By 1967, the range of cybernetic sections enveloped information theory,
information systems, bionics, chemistry, psychology, energy systems, trans-
portation, and justice, with semiotics joining the linguistic section and
medicine uniting with biology. Sheltering a huddling crowd of unorthodox
sciences, including “non-Pavlovian physiology (‘psychological cybernet-
ics’), structural linguistics (‘cybernetic linguistics’), and new approaches
in experiment planning (‘chemical cybernetics’) and legal studies (‘legal
cybernetics’),” cybernetics in the mid-1960s grew to an almost all-encom-
passing size.