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return to the protean quality of cybernetics. Kauffman was clearly working in
the same space as Ashby and Alexander—his basic problematic was much the
same as theirs. But while their topic was the brain (as specified by Ashby) or
architecture (as specified by Alexander), it was genes and cells and theoretical
biology when specified by Kauffman.
Second, I want to comment on Kauffman's random networks, not as mod-
els of cells, but as ontological theater more generally. I argued before that
tortoises, homeostats, and DAMS can, within certain limitations, be seen as
electromechanical models that summon up for us the cybernetic ontology
more broadly—machines whose aggregate performance is impenetrable. As
discussed, Kauffman's idealized gene networks displayed the same character,
but as emerging within a formal mathematical system rather than a mate-
rial one. Now I want to note that as world models Kauffman's networks can
also further enrich our ontological imaginations in important ways. On the
one hand, these networks were livelier than, especially, Ashby's machines.
Walter sometimes referred to the homeostat as Machina sopora —the sleeping
machine. Its goal was to become quiescent; it changed state only when dis-
turbed from outside. Kauffman's nets, in contrast, had their own endogenous
dynamics, continually running through their cycles whether perturbed from
the outside or not. On the other hand, these nets stage for us an image of sys-
tems with which we can genuinely interact, but not in the mode of command
and control. The perturbations that Kauffman injected into their cycling dis-
turbed the systems but did not serve to direct them into any other particular
cycles.
This idea of systems that are not just performative and inscrutable but also
dynamic and resistant to direction helps, I think, to give more substance to
Beer's notion of “exceedingly complex systems” as the referent of cybernet-
ics. The elaborations of cybernetics discussed in the following chapters circle
around the problematic of getting along with systems fitting that general de-
scription, and Kauffman's nets can serve as an example of the kinds of things
they are. 68
My last thought on Kauffman returns to the social basis of cybernetics. To
emphasize the odd and improvised character of this, in the previous chapter
(note 31) I listed the range of diverse academic and nonacademic affiliations of
the participants at the first Namur conference. Kauffman's CV compresses the
whole range and more into a single career. With BAs from Dartmouth College
and Oxford University, he qualified as a doctor at the University of California,
San Francisco, in 1968, while first writing up the findings discussed above as
a visitor at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics in 1967. He was then
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