The Reproduction of Authority: Cybernetics and Institutional Power at the Australian National University

When I received a scholarship to study cybernetics at the Australian National University, I imagined that somebody had recognised something intellectually unique and consequential in me. After more than four decades of independent study, I believed I had finally found a place where my ideas might receive the intellectual engagement, encouragement and practical support necessary to develop them further. The School of Cybernetics presented itself as a welcoming community concerned with humanity, creativity, diversity and the possibilities of thinking differently. It seemed a place of considerable promise. I was sufficiently gullible to mistake institutional recognition for intellectual engagement. These are not necessarily the same thing.

I enjoyed the Master of Applied Cybernetics. Much of the material revisited subjects I had studied before, while other parts offered something new. My experience changed profoundly when I entered doctoral research. I brought an extensive body of work concerning the generative logic of relations, differences, delays and absences, grounded in mathematics, logic and complex systems science. Its implications extend across language, cognition, communication, technology and institutional organisation. Following two strokes, I had needed to teach myself to read again. I was determined to continue my intellectual life and contribute something worthwhile. I wanted rigorous engagement and the assistance necessary to develop the work. Instead, I encountered resistance, marginalisation and, on occasions, what I experienced as ridicule.

Cultural anthropology has substantial connections with cybernetics, and the School’s emphasis on culture, social relations and emancipation has legitimate foundations. But cybernetics is a considerably broader discipline, concerned with organisation, communication, regulation and the dynamics of complex systems across many domains. The School had become, in practice, much closer to a school of cultural anthropology than a school of cybernetics. Its intellectual orientation was so firmly established that other approaches struggled to find a place. Intellectual diversity was welcome within the boundaries of an existing program, rather than as an opportunity to reconsider those boundaries. I had been invited to think differently, but discovered that thinking differently was apparently expected to remain within remarkably familiar limits.

One encounter illustrated the difficulty. While discussing complex systems, I observed that sophisticated forms of organisation need not possess a central controller. In that sense, their organisation is effectively anarchic. The word anarchy appeared to cause considerable discomfort in a senior member of staff. Yet this was not a political provocation. It was an observation about distributed organisation, entirely appropriate to cybernetics. On another occasion, I described the effort involved in relearning to read after my strokes to a staff member whose background, as I understood it, involved neuroscience. That conversation also seemed to produce discomfort rather than engagement. I cannot know what either person was thinking. What struck me was the apparent difficulty of accommodating unfamiliar ideas and experiences within an institution ostensibly devoted to understanding difference.

The School possessed considerable expertise. That is precisely what made my experience so disappointing. Its public language emphasised inclusion, humanity and intellectual openness, while its operative arrangements appeared considerably less accommodating. I was not prepared to remain silent about intellectual disagreements or confine my research to boundaries that made little sense to me. I had understood independent thinking to be part of the invitation. Instead, my willingness to question established assumptions seemed to make me increasingly unwelcome. The familiar instruction to stay in one’s lane was never far from the experience, although the discipline itself was supposedly concerned with understanding the connections between lanes.

A small incident revealed another dimension of the problem. As I recall it, another School concerned with matters of considerable national importance sought doctoral researchers for a forum and requested information about their academic grades. Grades have their uses, but they are an impoverished measure of what somebody might contribute to serious intellectual discussion. The request suggested that participants were being understood through conventional academic credentials rather than the substance of their research. It also raised questions about how effectively the School of Cybernetics was communicating the intellectual capacities of its researchers. A discipline concerned with communication and complex systems ought to recognise the difference between a convenient institutional measure and the capabilities it supposedly represents.

These experiences concern more than individual conduct. Institutions reproduce themselves through patterns of communication, professional incentives and established expectations. Familiar ideas circulate readily, acquire authority through repetition and progressively define what counts as legitimate inquiry. Unfamiliar propositions encounter resistance before their substance is examined. Meaning emerges through differences, delays and recurring patterns of interpretation. Institutions establish their own rhythms of recognition, rewarding what resonates with their existing organisation while filtering out what falls beyond it. No conspiracy is required. The machinery reproduces itself through ordinary participation.

Universities are not separate from the economic and political systems surrounding them. They reproduce their dependencies, incentives and arrangements of authority. Commercialisation intensifies these tendencies by rewarding activities whose value can already be expressed through established institutional priorities. Yet much of what humanity has not discovered lies outside those boundaries. An institution can become increasingly accomplished at securing its own future while diminishing its capacity to recognise unfamiliar possibilities. The School became, in my experience, an unwitting participant in the reproduction of precisely the institutional power that cybernetics ought to help us understand.

I have experienced exclusion through prolonged unemployment and, more recently, disability. I entered doctoral research determined to continue despite those circumstances. I was not seeking special intellectual treatment, nor did I expect my ideas to be accepted without criticism. I expected them to be examined, challenged and supported in their development. Instead, I experienced persistent resistance and a conspicuous absence of meaningful assistance. I cannot know every consideration that shaped my treatment, and others will have experienced the School differently. But the cumulative effect was unmistakable to me. The period following my master’s degree remains among the most distressing experiences of my intellectual life.

I do not want the School diminished or dismantled. I want it to fulfil the promise of its discipline, and I still want to contribute to that possibility. My research concerns precisely the logical and mathematical conditions through which systems organise themselves, reproduce their identities and constrain their futures. The irony is that I arrived with ideas about these processes and encountered an organisation seemingly unwilling to examine their operation within itself. I thought they were going to help me. Instead, I increasingly came to believe that they were too occupied with reproducing their own institutional identity to recognise what I had brought.

The School is a microcosm of a much larger problem. Across universities, government, industry and public life, institutions reproduce the arrangements that sustain their authority while excluding unfamiliar possibilities that might help them change. Their success becomes measured by their capacity to perpetuate themselves rather than by what they contribute to the world beyond their walls. The School of Cybernetics was a promising idea, and I still believe it could become something considerably more consequential. Its difficulty is also ours: we have become remarkably accomplished at maintaining systems whose limitations we can no longer afford to ignore.