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What else can one do after a journey like that but look back and look
forward?
Themes from the history of Cybernetics
At different times I have imagined two different ways of organizing this topic.
The one I chose was a sequential exploration of the work of named individu-
als. Perhaps it had to be that way. The most important context for understand-
ing the work of any individual is what they did before. If you want to get the
hang of DAMS, it helps to have the homeostat fresh in your mind; if you
want to understand the Fun Palace, start with Musicolour. But there is this
other way. I could have arranged the material thematically and looked at how
various cybernetic projects bore on each theme—and we can review some of
these themes now, briefly, as another way of remembering the trip.
O N T O L O G Y
Ontology is the major cross-cutting theme I announced in advance and that I
have pursued pretty conscientiously as we went along, so I will not dwell on it
at any length. But there are things to say. Another working title for the topic
was
Performance
.
The discovery of pragmatist philosophy was a major turning point in my
intellectual life. Reading William James's
Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth
(1978 [1907, 1909]) in 1985 suddenly offered me a way seeing knowledge as
situated (rather than transcendentally true) while continuing to take it seri-
ously (and not as epiphenomenal froth).
1
It sometimes seems that everywhere
I have gone since then, even in this topic, James was there irst. And yet there
is something frustrating about the pragmatist tradition. It displaces many of
the standard philosophical problematics in valuable ways, but it remains rep-
resentationalist, epistemological, largely centered on knowledge. The prag-
matist insists that knowledge has to be understood in relation to practice, but
practice always features as something ancillary, to be wheeled on as needed
to combat epistemological arguments from other schools of philosophy. You
can read the pragmatists forever without learning much about practice and
performance apart from a few armchair examples. It is as if knowledge re-
mains the luminous sun around which these little planets called “practice”
and “performance” revolve.
2
In retrospect, then, I can see much of my own work as an exploration of
this neglected side of pragmatism, an inquiry into practice
in its own right
,
