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have a blueprint. We have got to design the damn thing; and that is just what
we do not want to do.” The echoes of Ashby on DAMS and the blueprint at-
titude are clear. We are back to the contrasting conceptions of design that go
with the modern ontology of knowable systems and the cybernetic ontology
of unknowable ones. Within the frame of modern science and engineering,
design entails figuring out what needs to be done to achieve some result and
then arranging “inert lumps of matter” to achieve those specifications. Digital
computers depend on this sort of design, specifying material configurations
right down to the molecular level of chemical elements on silicon chips. Beer's
idea instead was, as we have seen, to find lively (not inert) chunks of matter
and to try to enroll their agency directly into his projects. This gets us back
to the discussion of the hylozoist quality of biofeedback music (chap. 3) and
the idea that it's all there already in nature (as in the extraction of music from
the material brain). We could say that the modern stance on design has no
faith in matter and relies upon human representations and agency to achieve
its effects. The cybernetic ontology, as Beer staged it, entailed a faith in the
agency of matter: whatever ends we aim at, some chunk of nature probably
already exists that can help us along the way. We don't need these long detours
through modern design. We can explore Beer's hylozoism further later in the
chapter in a broader discussion of his spirituality.
There is, of course, yet a third sense of detour that comes to mind here. The
mastery of matter, from the molecular level upward, required to build a digital
computer has been painstakingly acquired over centuries of technscientific
effort. Beer's argument was, in effect, that perhaps we didn't need to make
the trek. Just to be able to suggest that is another striking manifestation of the
difference that ontology makes.
Now, Heidegger. It makes sense to see modern computer engineering as
operating in the mode of enframing. It is not that semiconductor engineers,
for example, have actually achieved some magical mastery over matter. For
all their representational knowledge, they remain, like the rest of us, in me-
dias res, obliged to struggle with the performance of obstinate stuff (Lécuyer
and Brock 2006). Nevertheless, a successful chip is one that fits in with our
preconceived plans: the chip either manipulates binary variables in a regular
fashion, or it does not—in which case it is junk. Bending matter to our will
like that is just what Heidegger meant by enframing. And then we can begin,
at least, to see that the cybernetic ontology in this instance has more in com-
mon with a stance of revealing. Beer wanted to find out what the world—as-
semblages of mice,
Daphnia
, his local pond—could offer us. Against this, one
might argue that Beer had some definite end in view: a replacement for the
