ONTOLOGICAL THEATER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 19

causes, but rather of one in which reality is always “in the making,” to borrow
a phrase from William James.
We could say, then, that the ontology of cybernetics was nonmodern in
two ways: in its refusal of a dualist split between people and things, and in an
evolutionary, rather than causal and calculable, grasp of temporal process.
But we can go still further into this question of ontology. My own curios-
ity about such matters grew out of my topic The Mangle of Practice (1995).
The analysis of scientific practice that I developed there itself pointed to the
strange ontological features just mentioned: I argued that we needed a non-
dualist analysis of scientific practice (“posthumanist” was the word I used);
that the picture should be a forward-looking evolutionary one (“temporal
emergence”); and that, in fact, one should understand these two features
as constitutively intertwined: the reciprocal coupling of people and things
happens in time, in a process that I called, for want of a better word, “man-
gling.” But upstream of those ideas, so to speak, was a contrast between what
I called the representational and performative idioms for thinking about sci-
ence. The former understands science as, above all, a body of representations
of reality, while the latter, for which I argued in The Mangle , suggests that
we should start from an understanding of science as a mode of performative
engagement with the world. Developing this thought will help us see more
clearly how cybernetics departed from the modern sciences. 3
what is being suggested nOw is nOt that black bOxes behave sOmewhat
like real Objects but that the real Objects are in fact all black
bOxes, and that we have in fact been Operating with black bOxes all
Our lives.
Ross Ashby, an introDuction to cyBernetics (1956, 110)
Ross Ashby devoted the longest chapter of his 1956 textbook, An Introduction
to Cybernetics , to “the Black Box” (chap. 6), on which he had this to say (86):
“The problem of the Black Box arose in electrical engineering. The engineer
is given a sealed box that has terminals for input, to which he may bring any
voltages, shocks, or other disturbances, he pleases, and terminals for output
from which he may observe what he can.” The Black Box was a key concept
in the early development of cybernetics, and much of what I need to say
here can be articulated in relation to it. The first point to note is that Ashby
emphasized the ubiquity of such entities. This passage continues with a list