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difference —that the strangeness of specific cybernetic projects hangs together
with the strangeness of its ontology. 1
A good place to start is with Bruno Latour's (1993) schematic but insight-
ful story of modernity. His argument is that modernity is coextensive with a
certain dualism of people and things; that key features of the modern West can
be traced back to dichotomous patterns of thought which are now institution-
alized in our schools and universities. The natural sciences speak of a world of
things (such as chemical elements and quarks) from which people are absent,
while the social sciences speak of a distinctly human realm in which objects, if
not entirely absent, are at least marginalized (one speaks of the “meaning” of
“quarks” rather than quarks in themselves). Our key institutions for the pro-
duction and transmission of knowledge thus stage for us a dualist ontology:
they teach us how to think of the world that way, and also provide us with the
resources for acting as if the world were that way. 2
Against this backdrop, cybernetics inevitably appears odd and nonmodern ,
to use Latour's word. At the most obvious level, synthetic brains—machines
like the tortoise and the homeostat—threaten the modern boundary between
mind and matter, creating a breach in which engineering, say, can spill over
into psychology, and vice versa. Cybernetics thus stages for us a nonmodern
ontology in which people and things are not so different after all. The subtitle
of Wiener's foundational topic, Control and Communication in the Animal and
the Machine , already moves in this direction, and much of the fascination with
cybernetics derives from this challenge to modernity. In the academic world, it
is precisely scholars who feel the shortcomings of the modern disciplines who
are attracted most to the image of the “cyborg”—the cybernetic organism—
as a nonmodern unit of analysis (with Haraway 1985 as a key text).
This nonmodern, nondualist quality of cybernetics will be evident in the
pages to follow, but it is not the only aspect of the unfamiliarity of cybernetic
ontology that we need to pay attention to. Another comes under the heading
of time and temporality. One could crudely say that the modern sciences are
sciences of pushes and pulls: something already identifiably present causes
things to happen this way or that in the natural or social world. Less crudely,
perhaps, the ambition is one of prediction —the achievement of general knowl-
edge that will enable us to calculate (or, retrospectively, explain) why things
in the world go this way or that. As we will see, however, the cybernetic vision
was not one of pushes and pulls; it was, instead, of forward-looking search.
What determined the behavior of a tortoise when set down in the world was
not any presently existing cause; it was whatever the tortoise found there. So
cybernetics stages for us a vision not of a world characterized by graspable
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