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storage of “a parcel in a cloakroom” or as a “path of facilitation through phase
space.” The other went like this (1962a, 220-21):
The big electronic machines . . . are preoccupied with digital access. Now why
is this? It is always possible, given an output channel which you can it on some-
where, to say what is happening just there, and to get an enormous printout.
Now we [Beer and Pask] are not concerned with digital access, but with out-
comes. Why do we pay so much money to make it [digital output] available? In
the sort of machines that Gordon and I have been concerned with, you cannot
get at the intermediate answer. If you take out [one?] of Gordon's dishes of col-
loid, you may be effectively inverting a matrix of the order 20,000. The cost of
the computer is perhaps 10 cents. The only trouble is you do not know what the
answer is. Now this sounds absurdly naïve, but it is not, you know, because you
do not want the answer. What you do want is to use this answer. So why ever
digitise it?
We are back to the notion of representation as a detour away from perfor-
mance. Digital computing, in this sense, is an enormous detour away from its
object—the functioning of a factory for example—into and through a world
of symbols. In the previous chapter we discussed the discovery at Kingsley
Hall and Archway that this detour could be drastically shortened or even done
away with in therapeutic practice. But Beer started from this realization: in a
world of exceedingly complex systems, for which any representation can only
be provisional, performance is what we need to care about. The important
thing is that the firm adapts to its ever-changing environment, not that we
find the right representation of either entity. As ontological theater, then,
Beer and Pask's biological computers stage this performative ontology vividly
for us, dispensing entirely with representation, both exemplifying an ontology
of sheer performance and indicating how one might go on in computing if
one took it seriously. I could note here that this concern for performance and
a suspicion of representation per se is a theme that ran through all of Beer's
work. 13
There is second and related sense of a detour that also deserves attention
here. As Beer put it (1962a, 209, 215), “As a constructor of machines man has
become accustomed to regard his materials as inert lumps of matter which
have to be fashioned and assembled to make a useful system. He does not
normally think first of materials as having an intrinsically high variety which
has to be constrained. . . . [But] we do not want a lot of bits and pieces which
we have got to put together. Because once we settle for [that], we have got to
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