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from nowhere.” Situated knowledge is a puzzling and difficult concept, and
hence follows an intensified interest in the problematic of knowledge and
epistemology.
What should I say about this? First, I take the cybernetic emphasis on epis-
temology to be a symptom of the dominance of specifically epistemological
inquiry in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century,
associated with the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities and social
sciences, a dualist insistence that while we have access to our own words,
language, and representations, we have no access to things in themselves.
Cybernetics thus grew up in a world where epistemology was the thing, and
ontology talk was verboten. Second, my own field, science studies, grew in
that same matrix, but my own research in science studies has convinced me
that we need to undo the linguistic turn and all its works. The shift from a
representational to a performative idiom for thinking about science, and from
epistemology alone to ontology as well, is the best way I have found to get to
grips with the problematic of situated knowledge (and much else).
So I think that second-order cybernetics has talked itself into a corner in
its intensiied emphasis on epistemology, and this topic could therefore be
read as an attempt to talk my way out of the trap. Again, of course, the “so
what?” question comes up. Words are cheap; what does it matter if I use the
word “ontology” more than the cyberneticians? Actually—though it is not
my reason for writing the topic—something might be at stake. Like ontol-
ogy itself, ontology talk might make a difference. How one conceives a field
hangs together with its research agendas. To see cybernetics as being primar-
ily about epistemology is to invite endless agonizing about the observer's per-
sonal responsibility for his or her knowledge claims. Fine. But the other side
of this is the disappearance of the performative materiality of the field. All of
those wonderful machines, instruments, and artifacts get marginalized if one
takes cybernetics to be primarily about knowledge and the situatedness of the
observer. Tortoises, homeostats, biological computers, Musicolour machines,
adaptive architecture—all of these are just history as far as second-order cy-
bernetics is concerned. We used to do things like that in our youth; now we
do serious epistemology.
Evidently, I think this position is a mistake. I am interested in cybernetics
as the field that brought nonmodern ontology down to earth, and played it
out and staged it for us in real projects. I think we need more of this kind of
thing, not less. I did not make the history up; I don't have enough imagination;
it has taken me years to find it out and struggle with it. But the chapters that
