statistics - a science of the state

While I found that Hayles' text limned many of the implications of cybernetic theory's erasure of embodiment in favor of informational pattern, I think that she misses an opportunity to further intertwine the cultural, scientific, and political stakes of information theory by leaving the genealogy of statistics out of her discussion. As we've seen in both Weiner's and Hayles' writings, statistical mechanics was indispensable to the scientific production of the universe as fundamentally probabilistic. But before Gibbs could wield statistics to breach the Newtonian paradigm in physics, this science of probability was forged in service of the state (from which statistics derives its name).

While a thoroughgoing history of statistics is beyond my grasp, commentaries by Hacking ("How Do We Write the History of Statistics?") & Foucault (e.g. History of Sexuality, "The Right of Death and the Power Over Life") present some of the stakes of a new mode of scientific reasoning and its application to (or, perhaps, constitution of) a state's population

Foucault claims that the aggregation of data about individuals engenders a form of thinking about society in which the population of a state can be analyzed & targeted by power/knowledge.  This coupling of the collection of data about & the control of the population prefigures Wiener's claims about society's fundamentally informational character & first-wave cybernetics' preoccupation with homeostasis.

I contend, following Foucault, that the emphasis placed, on one hand, on the population (characteristic of biopower) & , on the other, the machine-like regimentation of individual conduct (discipline) transgresses the boundaries of the autonomous liberal subject, setting an important precedent to the cybernetic challenge to the subject of humanism. Hacking points to the rise of social laws posited as statistical by their very nature, in light of which social scientists seriously questioned the autonomy & free will available to any individual to resist these laws.

There is also a question of feedback loops in that categories of analysis (the recidivist, the homosexual, the suicide), abstracted from embodied instantiations of certain behaviors, are then available for individuals to reincorporate and/or resignify.

Hacking cites statisticians' obsession with "immoral" activity, which leads to ideas of the normal & the pathological, the norm & deviation. How might this binary interact with  pattern/randomness as presented by Hayles? 

Although these observations are somewhat scattered, I hope that they at least mark a site of exclusion in Hayles' text that we could explore further in class.