in fighting alienation and professional dissociation; it will unite all the representatives of the creative professions in turning every sphere of human activity into something both intellectual and creative. Essentially, cybernetics has to help human beings make use of new possibilities. Just as a sledgehammer is more perfect than a fist, so an electronic computational machine is more perfect than an abacus. [...] Everyone wants to know everything, but is limited. This limitation will be defied by the machine. 54
In this quote, Shtromas makes a strong case for relating creativity to cybernetics and progress. 55 Trink nas strongly disagreed with this. For him, it was wrong to embed creativity in cybernetic methods. The cybernetic methods would produce knowledge only at the cost of leaving out too many other important things. Trink nas defended his position in a later article, a review of the book, The Philosophy of Contingency (1968, Literature and Art), by the world-famous Polish mathematician and science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem. Backing his own position with that of Lem, Trink nas argued against “cybernetic structuralists”, who were “trying to achieve only one thing in the humanities: the evasion of meaning. They never describe events or phenomena themselves, but their generators”. He further insisted that cybernetics did not “suit literary theory, first and foremost, because it specialises in transmitting and receiving information, whereas in art the most important element is artistic reception – experience. Artistic experience is not the same thing as understanding”. 56 For Trink nas, “technology” was meaningless. For example, he argued that “it is not engineering that gives meaning to life, science, machines. Cinema, radio, press, television are the pride of our epoch. This is a merit of scientists and technicians. They created those devices and mechanisms – but note – only mechanisms. Content is another matter”. 57 Thus, he contended that meaning or “content” was produced only in extra-technological spheres. From this point of view, technologies were only mechanisms, as they possessed no “content”. It could certainly be reasoned that, were the “content” to be defined in cognitive terms, then computers would be capable of producing meaning. However, Trink nas was against an exclusively cognitive definition of meaning. For him, meaning was primarily sensual, embedded in experience. By drawing strict lines between meaning and cognitivism, Trink nas did not seek to develop his own philosophy or coherent thought. Indeed, in an interview, he confessed that he preferred acting to writing. 58 By writing anticybernetic articles, he signalled the fact that he belonged to a group of under54
Aleksandras Shtromas, Roundtable “Menas, mokslas, technika,” KB 8 (1966), 3. In Soviet Russia, modelling with the help of arts was in turn criticised together with sturcturalism and Lotman’s semiotics. See M.V. Khrapchenko, “Literatura i modelirovaniie deistvitel’nosti,” in Kontekst. Literaturno-teoreticheskie issledovaniia. 1973 (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), 15, 16-17. 56 Trink nas, “S. Lemo...,” 14. 57 Trink nas, “Humanitarin ,…,” 16. 58 Interview with Jonas Trink nas, Vilnius, November 2007. 55
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