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that cybernetics was not simply and straightforwardly antirepresentational.
Representational models of a firm's economic environment, for example,
were a key part of Beer's viable system model (VSM) of the organization. Once
one sees that, the clean split I have made between cybernetics and modern
science threatens to blur, but I think it is worth maintaining. On the one
hand, I want to note that many cybernetic projects did not have this represen-
tational aspect. The great advantage that Beer saw in biological computing
was that it was immediately performative, involving no detours through the
space of representation. On the other hand, when representations did appear
in cybernetic projects, as in the VSM, they figured as immediately geared into
performance, as revisable guides to future performance rather than as ends
in themselves. Beer valued knowledge, but he was also intensely suspicious
of it—especially of our tendency to mistake representations for the world,
and to cling to specific representations at the expense of performance. We
might thus think of cybernetics as staging for us a
performative epistemology
,
directly engaged with its performative ontology—a vision of knowledge as
part of
performance rather than as an external controller of it. This is also, as
it happens, the appreciation of knowledge that I documented and argued for
in
The Mangle
.
Now that we have these two philosophical terms on the table—ontology and
epistemology—I can say more about my own role in this history. In chapter 1
I said that anyone can have their own history of cybernetics, and this one is
mine. I picked the cast of characters and which aspects of their work to dwell
upon. But beyond that, the emphasis on ontology is more mine than the cy-
berneticians'. It is the best way I have found to grasp what is most unfamiliar
and valuable about cybernetics, but the fact is that the word “ontology” does
not figure prominently in the cybernetic literature. What I call the cybernetic
ontology tends to be simply taken for granted in the literature or not labeled
as such, while “epistemology” is often explicitly discussed and has come in-
creasingly to the fore over time. Contemporary cyberneticians usually make
a distinction between “first-order” cybernetics (Walter and Ashby, say) and
“second-order” cybernetics (Bateson, Beer, and Pask), which is often phrased
as the difference between the cybernetics of “observed” and “observing”
systems, respectively. Second-order cybernetics, that is, seeks to recognize
that the scientific observer is part of the system to be studied, and this in turn
leads to a recognition that the observer is
situated
and sees the world from a
certain perspective, rather than achieving a detached and omniscient “view
