Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
artists, and everyone else, I think) continually construct new ones and see
how they play out. This is also a cybernetic image of epistemology—but one
that emphasizes creativity and the appearance of genuine novelty in the world
(both human and nonhuman) that the homeostat cannot model. The homeo-
stat can only offer us selection and combinatorics. I have already discussed the
homeostat's virtues as ontological theater at length; here my suggestion is that
we should not follow it into the details of Ashby's epistemology.
58
I want to end this chapter by moving beyond Ashby's work, so here I should
offer a summary of what has been a long discussion. What was this chapter
about?
One concern was historical. Continuing the discussion of Walter's work,
I have tried to show that psychiatry, understood as the overall problematic of
understanding and treating mental illness, was both a surface of emergence
and a surface of return for Ashby's cybernetics. In important ways, his cyber-
netics can be seen to have grown out of his professional concerns with mental
illness, and though the development of Ashby's hobby had its own dynamics
and grew in other directions, too, he was interested, at least until the late
1950s, in seeing how it might feed back into psychiatry. At the same time, we
have explored some of the axes along which Ashby's cybernetics went beyond
the brain and invaded other fields: from a certain style of adaptive engineer-
ing (the homeostat, DAMS) to a general analysis of machines and a theory
of everything, exemplified in Ashby's discussions of autopilots, economics,
chemistry, evolutionary biology, war, planning, and epistemology. Ashby even
articulated a form of spirituality appropriate to his cybernetics: “I am now . . .
a Time-worshipper.” In this way, the chapter continues the task of mapping
out the multiplicity of cybernetics.
Another concern of the chapter has been ontological. I have argued that we
can see the homeostat, and especially the multihomeostat setups that Ashby
worked with, as ontological theater—as a model for a more general state of
affairs: a world of dynamic entities evolving in performative (rather than rep-
resentational) interaction with one another. Like the tortoise, the homeostat
searched its world and reacted to what it found there. Unlike the tortoise's,
the homeostat's world was as lively as the machine itself, simulated in a sym-
metric fashion by more homeostats. This symmetry, and the vision of a lively
and dynamic world that goes with it, was Ashby's great contribution to the
early development of cybernetics, and we will see it further elaborated as we
go on. Conversely, once we have grasped the ontological import of Ashby's
