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cybernetics, we can also see it from the opposite angle: as ontology in action,
as playing out for us and exemplifying the sorts of project in many fields that
might go with an ontology of performance and unknowability.
We have also examined the sort of performative epistemology that Ashby
developed in relation to his brain research, and I emphasized the gearing of
knowledge into performance that defined this. Here I also ventured into cri-
tique, arguing that we need not, and should not, accept all of the ontologi-
cal and epistemological visions that Ashby staged for us. Especially, I argued
against his insistence on the fixity of goals and his idea that performance and
representation inhabit a given space of possibilities from which selections are
made.
At the level of substance, we have seen that Ashby, like Walter, aimed at
a modern science of the brain—at opening up the Black Box. And we have
seen that he succeeded in this: the homeostat can indeed be counted as a
model of the sort of adaptive processes that might happen in the brain. But
the hybridity of Ashby's cybernetics, like Walter's, is again evident. In their
mode of adaptation, Ashby's electromechanical assemblages themselves had,
as their necessary counterpart, an unknowable world to which they adapted
performatively. As ontological theater, his brain models inescapably return us
to a picture of engagement with the unknown.
Furthermore, we have seen that that Ashby's cybernetics never quite
achieved the form of a classically modern science. His scientific models were
revealing from one angle, but opaque from another. To know how they were
built did not carry with it a predictive understanding of what they would do.
The only way to find out was to run them and see (finding out whether mul-
tihomeostat arrays with fixed internal settings would be stable or not, finding
out what DAMS would do). This was the cybernetic discovery of complex-
ity within a different set of projects from Walter's: the discovery that beyond
some level of complexity, machines (and mathematical models) can them-
selves become mini-Black Boxes, which we can take as ontological icons,
themselves models of the stuff from which the world is built. It was in this
context that Ashby articulated a distinctively cybernetic philosophy of evo-
lutionary design—design in medias res—very different from the blueprint
attitude of modern engineering design, the stance of a detached observer who
commands matter via a detour through knowledge.
Finally, the chapter thus far also explored the social basis of Ashby's cy-
bernetics. Like Walter's, Ashby's distinctively cybernetic work was nomadic,
finding a home in transitory institutions like the Ratio Club, the Macy and
Namur conferences, and the Biological Computer Laboratory, where Ashby
