Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
without a pregiven presumption that the end of inquiry has to be an argument
about knowledge. And, to put it simply, the upshot for me was a gestalt switch
into what I call the performative idiom. The argument of
The Mangle of Prac-
tice
was that if there is a sun around which all else revolves, it is performance,
not knowledge—knowledge is a planet or maybe a comet that sometimes par-
ticipates in the dynamics of practice and sometimes does not, and the discov-
ery, for me, was that practice has its own structure that one can explore and
talk about—as a dance of agency, for example.
The modern sciences background their own practice, organizing it around
a telos of knowledge production and then construing it retrospectively in
terms of that knowledge (a tale of errors dispelled). We have seen that cyber-
netics was not like that. Cybernetics was about systems—human, nonhuman,
or both—that staged their own performative dances of agency, that fore-
grounded performance rather than treating it as some forgettable background
to knowledge. This is the primary sense in which one can read cybernetics as
ontological theater—as forcibly reminding us of the domain of practice and
performance and bringing that to the fore. As showing us, in a fascinating
range of instances, that performance is not necessarily about knowledge, and
that when knowledge comes into the picture it is as
part of
performance.
Beyond that, cybernetics helps us think further about the nature of prac-
tice and performance. The key idea in grasping many of the examples we have
explored is Beer's notion of an “exceedingly complex system”—meaning a
system with its own inner dynamics, with which we can interact, but which
we can never exhaustively know, which can always surprise us. A world built
from exceedingly complex systems would necessarily be one within which
being would always center on performative dances of agency and findings-
out, where neither knowledge nor anything else would constitute a still, reli-
able center. This, I think, is our world. It is certainly the world of science as
I described it in
The Mangle
. Again, cybernetics dramatizes this vision for us,
and in at least two ways. On the one hand, the cyberneticians built machines
and systems that interacted with and adapted to the world as an exceedingly
complex system, in a list running from the tortoise and the homeostat up to
biological computers, the VSM, Musicolour, and the Fun Palace. These ex-
amples can help bring home to us what unknowability can mean (as well as
“performance”). They also demonstrate that a recognition that we live in a
world of exceedingly complex systems does not imply paralysis, that we can,
in fact,
go on
in a constructive and creative fashion in a world of exceedingly
complex systems. On the other hand, the history of cybernetics offers us many
simple “toy” examples of exceedingly complex systems. The tortoise, the
