Work in the contemporary academy is increasingly regulated by “feedback” in the form of a series of evaluations, satisfaction surveys and progress reviews which ostensibly serve to render the institutions of knowledge production more responsive and accountable to their various stakeholders. In this way, university managements have followed a broader cultural trend, applying concepts derived from information theory and cybernetics to contemporary forms of sociality, thought and labour. But as is often the case with such transpositions, there has been relatively little critical attention to the specific technical problems and epistemic commitments which inform cybernetic conceptualisation. In this chapter, I turn to these commitments, and argue that a careful reading of cybernetic accounts of feedback equips us with critical tools we might use to question this concept’s role and applications, particularly in the context of projects to “marketise” social and subjective institutions. In disentangling positive and negative feedback—in the technical senses of these terms —and by mapping experiments with both in art, I propose a qualified concept of feedback, which might inform both contemporary accounts of agency and forms of resistant institutional praxis.