ONTOLOGICAL THEATER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 21

is basically a cognitive one—we act in the world through our knowledge of
it—and that, conversely, the world is just such a place that can be known
through the methods and in the idiom of the modern sciences. One could
say that the modern sciences stage for us a modern ontology of the world as a
knowable and representable place. And, at the same time, the product of the
modern sciences, scientific knowledge itself, enforces this vision. Theoretical
physics tells us about the unvarying properties of hidden entities like quarks
or strings and is silent about the performances of scientists, instruments, and
nature from which such representations emerge. This is what I mean by veil-
ing: the performative aspects of our being are unrepresentable in the idiom of
the modern sciences. 4
The force of these remarks should be clearer if we turn to cybernetics.
Though I will qualify this remark below, I can say for the moment that the
hallmark of cybernetics was a refusal of the detour through knowledge—or,
to put it another way, a conviction that in important instances such a detour
would be mistaken, unnecessary, or impossible in principle. The stance of
cybernetics was a concern with performance as performance , not as a pale
shadow of representation. And to see what this means, it is perhaps simplest
to think about early cybernetic machines. One could, for example, imagine
a highly sophisticated thermostat that integrated sensor readings to form a
representation of the thermal environment and then transmitted instructions
to the heating system based upon computational transformations of that rep-
resentation (in fact, Ashby indeed imagined such a device: see chap. 4). But
my thermostat at home does no such thing. It simply reacts directly and per-
formatively to its own ambient temperature, turning the heat down if the
temperature goes up and vice versa. 5 And the same can be said about more
sophisticated cybernetic devices. The tortoises engaged directly, performa-
tively and nonrepresentationally, with the environments in which they found
themselves, and so did the homeostat. Hence the idea expressed in the previ-
ous chapter, that tortoises and homeostats modelled the performative rather
than the cognitive brain.
So what? I want to say that cybernetics drew back the veil the modern
sciences cast over the performative aspects of the world, including our own
being. Early cybernetic machines confront us, instead, with interesting and
engaged material performances that do not entail a detour through knowl-
edge. The phrase that runs through my mind at this point is ontological theater .
I want to say that cybernetics staged a nonmodern ontology for us in a double
sense. Contemplation of thermostats, tortoises, and homeostats helps us,
first, to grasp the ontological vision more generally, a vision of the world as a