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of examples of people trying to get to grips with Black Boxes: an engineer
faced with “a secret and sealed bomb-sight” that is not working properly, a
clinician studying a brain-damaged patient; a psychologist studying a rat in a
maze. Ashby then remarks, “I need not give further examples as they are to be
found everywhere. . . . Black Box theory is, however, even wider in its appli-
cation than these professional studies,” and he gives a deliberately mundane
example: “The child who tries to open a door has to manipulate the handle
(the input) so as to produce the desired movement at the latch (the output);
and he has to learn how to control the one by the other without being able
to see the internal mechanism that links them. In our daily lives we are con-
fronted at every turn with systems whose internal mechanisms are not fully
open to inspection, and which must be treated by the methods appropriate to
the Black Box” (Ashby 1956, 86). On Ashby's account, then, Black Boxes are
a ubiquitous and even universal feature of the makeup of the world. We could
say that his cybernetics assumed and elaborated a
Black Box ontology
, and this
is what we need to explore further.
Next we can note that Black Box ontology is a performative image of the
world. A Black Box is something that
does something
, that one does something
to, and that does something back—a partner in, as I would say, a dance of agency
(Pickering 1995). Knowledge of its workings, on the other hand, is
not
intrinsic
to the conception of a Black Box—it is something that may (or may not) grow
out of our performative experience of the box. We could also note that there is
something right about this ontology. We are indeed enveloped by lively systems
that act and react to our doings, ranging from our fellow humans through plants
and animals to machines and inanimate matter, and one can readily reverse the
order of this list and say that inanimate matter is itself also enveloped by lively
systems, some human but most nonhuman. The world just is that way.
A Black Box ontology thus seems entirely reasonable. But having recog-
nized this, at least two
stances
in the world of Black Boxes, ways of going on
in the world, become apparent. One is the stance of modern science, namely,
a refusal to take Black Boxes for what they are, a determination to strip away
their casings and to understand their inner workings in a representational
fashion. All of the scientist's laws of nature aim to make this or that Black Box
(or class of Black Boxes) transparent to our understanding. This stance is so
familiar that I, at least, used to find it impossible to imagine any alternative to
it. And yet, as will become clear, from the perspective of cybernetics it can be
seen as entailing a
detour
, away from performance and through the space of
representation, which has the effect of
veiling
the world of performance from
us. The modern sciences invite us to imagine that our relation to the world
