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of physics, and my conviction is that the cybernetic ontology is illuminating
across the board. But while it is true that the work of my cyberneticians span
off in all sorts of directions—robots and gadgets run through all of the pre-
ceding chapters (except chap. 5); Ashby regarded his formal cybernetics as a
theory of all possible machines, which could be equated with all (or almost
all) of nature; cellular automata have appeared here and there; Ashby wor-
shipped time; Beer worshipped matter and wrote hylozoist poems about the
Irish Sea—still, a certain asymmetry remains. If a performative notion of the
brain implies a space for curiosity that can lead into the field of altered states
of consciousness, one can imagine a similar trajectory leading to a fascina-
tion with altered states of matter, especially for a hylozoist like Beer. I think
here of a tradition of research into the self-organizing properties of complex
inorganic and biological systems that came to life in the 1980s, the same pe-
riod that saw the resurgence of Walterian robotics (and neural networks in
computing)—research that focused on, for example, the emergence of struc-
ture in convection flows (Bénard cells), the uncanny quasi-organic dynamic
patterns associated with the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction in chemistry, the
tendency of slime molds to morph from unicellular entities into aggregate
superorganisms and go marching off. I would have enjoyed the opportunity to
tie these examples into our story, but the occasion did not arise. I once asked
Stafford Beer about this line of research into complexity; he replied that the
physicists and mathematicians were “re-inventing the wheel.” For once, I
think he was wrong.
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T H E S O C I A L B A S I S
The social basis of cybernetics is another topic I have discussed systematically
in each chapter. What we found throughout are the marks of a continual so-
cial marginality of cybernetics: its hobbyist origins outside any institutional
frame, its early flourishing in tenuous and ad hoc organizations like dining
clubs and conference series, its continual welling-up outside established
institutions and its lack of dependable support from them. We could think
about this marginality more constructively as the search for an institutional
home for cybernetics: individual cyberneticians often found visiting and
part-time positions in universities (with Ashby at the BCL in Illinois, and the
Brunel Cybernetics Department as exceptions that proved the rule, but only
for a time: neither unit has lasted to the present); other cyberneticians lodged
themselves in the world of business and industry (Beer and Pask as consul-
