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tities subject to given forces and causes. The homeostat instead staged a vision
of fluid, ever-changing entities engaged in trial-and-error search processes.
And a point to note now is that such processes are intrinsically temporal . Ad-
aptation happens, if it happens at all, in time, as the upshot of a temporally
extended process, trying this, then that, and so on. This is the sense in which
the homeostat adumbrates, at least, an ontology of becoming in which nothing
present in advance determines what entities will turn out to be in the future.
This is another angle from which we can appreciate the nonmodernity of cy-
bernetics. Third, we could notice that the brain/world symmetry of Ashby's
setups in fact problematized their specific reference to the brain. We can ex-
plore Ashby's response to this later, but to put the point positively I could say
now that this symmetry indexes the potential generality of the homeostat as
ontological theater. If the phototropism and object avoidance of the tortoise
tied the tortoise to a certain sort of brainlike sensing entity, very little tied the
homeostat to the brain (or any other specific sort of entity). A multihomeostat
configuration could easily be regarded as a model of a world built from any
kind of performatively responsive entities, possibly including brains but possi-
bly also not. Here, at the level of ontological theater, we again find cybernetics
about to overflow its banks.
So much for the general ontological significance of the homeostat. As in the
previous chapter, however, we should confront the point that Ashby, like
Walter, aimed at a distinctly modern understanding of the brain: neither of
them was content to leave the brain untouched as one of Beer's exceedingly
complex systems; both of them wanted to open up the Black Box and grasp the
brain's inner workings. Ashby's argument was that the homeostat was a posi-
tive contribution to knowledge of how the performative brain adapts. What
should we make of that? As before, the answer depends upon the angle from
which one looks. From one angle, Ashby's argument was certainly correct: it
makes sense to see the homeostat's adaptive structure as a model for how the
brain works. From another angle, however, we can see how, even as modern
science, the homeostat throws us back into the world of exceedingly complex
systems rather than allowing us to escape from it.
The first point to note is, again, that Ashby's science had a rather different
quality from that of the classical modern sciences. It was another instance
of explanation by articulation of parts (chap. 2): if you put together some
valves and relays and uniselectors this way, then the whole assemblage can
adapt performatively. Ashby's science thus again thematized performance, at
 
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