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that the critics would probably find congenial. And I should reemphasize that
my concern here is with the whole range of cybernetic projects. In our world,
any
form of knowledge and practice that looks remotely useful is liable to
taken up by the military and capital for their own ends, but by the end of this
topic it should be abundantly clear that military and industrial applications
come nowhere close to exhausting the range of cybernetics.
Finally, there is a critique pitched at a more general level and directed at
cybernetics' concern with “control.” From a political angle, this is the key
topic we need to think about, and also the least well understood aspect of the
branch of cybernetics that this topic is about. To get to grips with it properly
requires a discussion of the peculiar ontological vision of the world that I as-
sociate with cybernetics. This is the topic of the next chapter, at the end of
which we can return to the question of the political valence of cybernetics and
of why this topic has the subtitle it does.
The rest of the topic goes as follows: Chapter 2 is a second introductory chap-
ter, exploring the strange ontology that British cybernetics played out, and
concluding, as just mentioned, with a discussion of the way in which we can
see this ontology as political, in a very general sense.
Chapters 3-7 are the empirical heart of the topic. The chapters that make
up part 1—on Walter, Ashby, Bateson, and Laing—are centrally concerned
with the brain, the self, and psychiatry, though they shoot off in many other
directions too. Part 2 comprises chapters on Beer and Pask and the directions
in which their work carried them beyond the brain. The main concern of each
of these chapters is with the work of the named individuals, but each chapter
also includes some discusssion of related projects that serve to broaden the
ield of exploration. One rationale for this is that the topic is intended more as
an exploration of cybernetics in action than as collective biography, and I am
interested in perspicuous instances wherever I can find them. Some of these
instances serve to thicken up the connections between cybernetics and the
sixties that I talked about above. Others connect historical work in cybernet-
ics to important developments in the present in a whole variety of fields. One
object here is to answer the question: what happened to cybernetics? The
field is not much discussed these days, and the temptation is to assume that
it died of some fatal flaw. In fact, it is alive and well and living under a lot of
other names. This is important to me. My interest in cybernetics is not purely
historical. As I said, I am inclined to see the projects discussed here as models
for future practice, and, though they may be odd, it is nice to be reassured that
