The Cybernetics of Beauty

Bostonians who tuned their TVs to WGBH at 7:30 PM on Friday evenings in the late 1960s and across the 1970s would find a small handful of adults and children, visibly diverse and dressed in everything from street clothes to sweatsuits, cheerfully exercising on the PBS affiliate’s colorful soundstage. Their leader in approachable, broadcast physical culture was the leotard-clad Maggie Lettvin, who guided her charges through glute bridges, crab walks, and towel-assisted yoga poses. But Lettvin was from a different lineage than early exercise gurus like Jack LaLanne. She was the wife of the cybernetician Jerome Lettvin and a physical education instructor at MIT, and her program bears the stamp of this close contact between cybernetics and physical culture, promising to equip viewers with the tools they would need to “improve and maintain their own Beautiful Machines.”

Historians have often situated cybernetics as a mid-century science of information processing, feedback, and control. It has been characterized as eliding the body in service of a disembodied, technological intelligence that too often serves a violent “informatics of domination.” This paper explores a softer, fleshier side of cybernetics, focusing on cases from the 1960s and 1970s, from Ida Rolf’s bodywork paradigm to Lettvin’s The Beautiful Machine. It draws on an archive of audiovisual material, exercise paraphernalia, and correspondence to unearth the overlooked ways that cybernetics entered American mass physical culture, where it gave rise to what Marcel Mauss called new “techniques of the body.” It argues that figures like Rolf and Lettvin, often neglected in favor of their male colleagues and counterparts from cognitive and computer science, should be reconsidered as cyberneticians and media theorists in their own right, creating a functional media theory of the body, enacted on the body: a cybernetics of beauty.