SKETCHES OF ANOTHER FUTURE - The Cybernetic Brain - page 390

Sketches of another future
Spiegel : And what takes the place of philosophy now?
Heidegger : Cybernetics.
MarTin heiDeGGer, “only a god can save us” (1981) 4
So what? What can this story do for us now? Why describe a historical study
as sketches of another future?
The simple answer is that the topic is an attempt to rescue cybernetics
from the margins and to launder it into mainstream discourse, to make it
more widely available. The other future I have in mind is “another future” for
people who have not yet stumbled into this area, and for a world that seems
to me presently dominated by a modern ontology and all that goes with it. By
rehearsing the history of cybernetics and reading it in terms of a nonmodern
ontology of unknowability and becoming, I have tried to convey my convic-
tion that there is another way of understanding our being in the world, that it
makes sense, and that grasping that other way can make a difference in how
we go on. My idea for the future is not that we should all go out tomorrow
and build robot tortoises or management consultancies based on the VSM
(though it might be time to have another go at the Fun Palace). My hope is
that these scenes from the history of cybernetics can function as open-ended
models for future practice, and that they can help to make an endless and
quite unpredictable list of future projects imaginable.
Why should we care about this? This takes us back to my thoughts at the
beginning about the hegemony of modernity, as I defined it, over our works
and our imaginations. It would be surprising if modernity were not hege-
monic: almost all of the educational systems of the West, schools and univer-
sities, are organized around the modern ontology of knowability—the idea
that the world is finitely knowable—and, indeed, around an aim of transmit-
ting positive knowledge. One cannot get through a conventional education
without getting the impression that knowledge is the thing. I know of no sub-
jects or topics that are taught otherwise. And part of the business of conjuring
up another future is, then, to suggest that this is not necessarily a desirable
situation. I can think of three ways to argue this. 5
The first is simple and relatively contentless. Variety is good: it is what helps
us to adapt to a future that is certainly unknown. Better to be able to grasp our
being in the world in two ways—nonmodern as well as modern—rather than
one. It would be nice to have available ways of thinking and acting that stage