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sought to address the critique of cybernetics as a science of control. To do so,
I have have found it useful to distinguish two senses of “control.” The critics'
sense, I think, is that of a hierarchical, linear “command and control,” of a power
that flows in just one direction in the form of instructions for action (from one
group of people to another, or, less conventionally, from humans to matter). I
have been at pains to show that the cybernetic sense of “control” was not like
that. Instead, in line with its ontology of unknowability and becoming, the
cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with,
even taking advantage of and enjoying, a world that one cannot push around
in that way. Even in its most asymmetric early moments, cybernetics never
imagined that the classical mode of control was in fact possible. Ashby's ap-
palling notion of blitz therapy did not envisage any determinate result; its only
aspiration was an open-ended homeostat-like reconfiguration of the mentally
ill, perhaps in a beneficial direction, but usually not. Even there the fantasy
of command and control was absent, and this in a principled, not incidental,
way. But from chapter 5 onward we have been especially concerned with what
I called the symmetric fork in the road, the branch of later cybernetics that
imagined a world in which adaptation goes both ways—in psychiatry, between
doctor and patient, as at Kingsley Hall, but in many other realms too.
The appeal of this symmetric branch of cybernetics is that it both adum-
brates and argues for a performative form of democracy, within social organi-
zations, between social organizations, and even between people and things.
This is just the recognition that we are always in medias res put another way.
But we can take the thought one stage further by referring, as I have, to the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, and his contrast between enframing and
revealing. Heidegger's idea was that modernity is characterized by a stance
of enframing—the stance of command and control that goes along with an
ontology of knowability, and that assumes we can obtain determinate results
from our initiatives in the human and material worlds. Everything I know
about the history of science and technology tells me that this assumption is
a mistake (though a productive one in certain circumstances); what I have
learned from Heidegger and cybernetics is to see it as a sad one. It closes us off
from what the world has to offer; in the mode of enframing, the unexpected
appears with a negative sign in front of it, as a nuisance to be got around. The
stance of revealing, in contrast, is open to the world and expects novelty, for
better or for worse, and is ready to seize on the former. And what I take the
history of cybernetics to show is that such words are not empty philosophical
pieties. It is possible to develop rich and substantial ways of going on in the
world in the mode of revealing. The tortoise, the homeostat, Kingsley Hall,
