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fun to find new ways to think, and sometimes it leads somewhere (Feyerabend
1993).
2. Perhaps modern science has succeeded too well. It has become difficult
for us to recognize that much of our being does not have a cognitive and repre-
sentational aspect. I suppose I could figure out how my doorknob works, but I
don't need to. I established a satisfactory performative relation with doorknobs
long before I started trying to figure out mechanisms. A science that helped
us thematize performance as prior to representation might help us get those
aspects of our being into focus. And, of course, beyond the human realm, most
of what exists does not have the cognitive detour as an option. It would be good
to be able to think explicitly about performative relations between things, too.
3. Perhaps there would be positive fruits from this move beyond the rep-
resentationalism of modern science. In engineering, the thermostat, the tor-
toise, the homeostat, and the other nonmodern cybernetic projects we will be
looking at all point in this direction.
4. Perhaps in succeeding too well, modern science has, in effect, blinded
us to all of those aspects of the world which it fails to get much grip upon. I re-
member as a physicist trying to figure out why quarks always remained bound
to one another and reflecting at the same time that none of us could calculate
in any detail how water flowed out of a tap. Contemporary complexity theo-
rists like to argue that the methods of modern science work nicely for a finite
class of “linear” systems but fail for “nonlinear” systems—and that actually the
latter are in some sense most of the world. Stafford Beer foreshadowed this
argument in his irst topic,
Cybernetics and Management
, where he argued that
we could think of the world as built from three different kinds of entities or
systems (Beer 1959, 18). We can go into this in more detail in chapter 6, but,
briefly, Beer referred to these as “simple,” “complex,” and “exceedingly com-
plex” systems. The first two kinds, according to Beer, are in principle knowable
and predictable and thus susceptible to the methods of modern science and
engineering. Exceedingly complex systems, however, are not. They are sys-
tems that are so complex that we can never fully grasp them representationally
and that change in time, so that present knowledge is anyway no guarantee of
future behavior. Cybernetics, on Beer's definition, was the science of exceed-
ingly complex systems that modern science can never quite grasp.
I will come back repeatedly to Beer's idea of exceedingly complex systems
as we go along, and try to put more flesh on it. This is the aspect of cybernetics
that interests me most: the aspect that assumes an
ontology of unknowabil-
ity
, as one might call it, and tries to address the problematic of getting along
performatively with systems that can always surprise us (and this takes us
