By Mark Enslin
The School for Designing a Society co-hosted the 2007 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics, from March 30th to April 1st. Unlike its other professional meetings, which typically are hosted at universities or chain hotels, this was in the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center in downtown Urbana. The UC-IMC is also an arts and community center: it houses various projects, and offers the challenge of distinguishing and connecting idiosyncratic shared spaces, which for this meeting I preferred to the challenge of drawing distinctions and establishing connections in generic spaces poised to erase them.
The theme of the conference, “Constructivism, Design, Cybernetics: Radical, Social, 2nd Order”, was deliberately formulated to encourage the creation of a three-way bridge spanning the thought and practice of:
- radical constructivism – that the reality we describe and perceive arises from our manner of living as perceivers and describers;
- social (architectural, artistic) design – deliberate and improvised actions and structures that define and perturb what we call the social (aesthetic), and what we distinguish as their consequences;
- (second-order) cybernetics – an interdisciplinary weave of intellectual pathways connecting feedback, circular causality, self-organization, self-reference, cybernetics of cybernetics, taking ourselves into account.
There were performances, presentations, demonstrations, and conversations. Once and future participants in SDAS, from Montreal, Richmond, Urbana, Vancouver, Baltimore, Northampton, Minneapolis, Olympia, the Hudson Valley presented, performed and manifested their presence. There was a full-length play reflecting on pictures on stage, on writing plays, on 16 Republican senators barely visible in the smoke-filled room, 
all delivered by a single actor in an easy chair, in words constructing that which was reflected on. There was a lecture on the history of the screw, with chorus, would-be director, and heckler. There was a report on how working in a community theater could lead to questioning of assumptions about where the self and volition begins and ends. Susan Parenti presented a position paper which reformulates the problems of U.S. Health Care system as a design project.
‘Radical’ clashed with ‘moderate’. A connection between the terms of a circular description of life from Humberto Maturana’s autopoeisis and the discourse of power and privilege was offered. The US health care system, the criminal justice system, ecosystems, systems of organized violence brushed up against cybernetic descriptions of system. Socio-linguistics of cell phones and of expertise were staged and questioned. A house theater showed how mouth sounds make a world, walk us through that world, and present and make choices when that construction talks back.
Judy Lombardi gave two presentations with titles named after Herbert Brün’s ideas: (1) Violence is a Message, and (2) Floating Hierarchies. She supplemented her talks with video clips of Herbert Brün and Humberto Maturana. The following clip is presented with her permission.
1994 – Herbert Brün clip (8 minutes)
Video credit: Judy Lombardi, LCSW-C, Ph.D.
Video -WMV | 
Video -QT | 
Video part 1 | Video part 2 -Java
Exerpt from the video of Herbert Brün
“If you investigate the sentence structure of our daily discourse, including the media and also our own domestic talk, including sentences said repeatedly in situations of schools, teaching, and so forth, you’ll find that every time the term “peace” is mentioned it’s a kind of a consequence. You have to do something so that there be peace. Or you better do that otherwise there won’t be peace. So peace is described as something that has to be acheived, which you have to find, which you have to make.”
“Imagine we would say the same thing about hunger. What do you do in order to have hunger? Do you try to acheive hunger, or do you feed? People who aren’t fed will never be hungry again. In order to have hungry people, you have to give them food. If we could declare “peace” to be one of the needs … it would give us a different english language. We would understand, for instance, that we need peace, and since we need peace we have to meet it with our conflicts. We have to meet it with our differences. Not so that there be war but so that the need for peace be satisfied. So peace is not to ward off conlflicts and to avoid all controversy and confrontation. To the contrary: we have to learn language … which does not assume peace to be a reward, but as a condition for conflict. That is, the desirability of conflict has to be celebrated so that it can meet peace.”
-Herbert Brün
