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some alternative to modernity. I have never heard brainwave music and I have
never played with biological computers, but I would rather live in a world that
includes rather than excludes them, and one day they might be important.
The second argument has to do with the specifics of cybernetics. Cybernet-
ics, it seems to me, offers an alternative to modernity that has some particu-
larly attractive features. I summarized many of them in the preceding section;
here I would emphasize that in its symmetric version there is something in-
herently democratic about cybernetics. The cybernetic ontology, as I have said
before, necessarily implies respect for the other, not because respect is nice
but because the world is that way. The ontology itself evokes a democratic
stance. At the same time, cybernetics offers us a peculiarly and interestingly
performative take on democracy that can even extend to our relations with
matter and nature (without the descent into modernist anthropomorphism).
And beyond that, I think there is something very attractive about programs of
action that adopt the stance of revealing that I associate with cybernetics—of
openness to what the world has to offer us. Given the choice, who could possi-
bly prefer enframing to revealing? If anyone did, I would be inclined to follow
R. D. Laing and consider them mad.
These arguments are right, I believe; they are cybernetically correct; and
they are sufficient to warrant the effort I have put into these pages. But there
is a third argument, which refers not to the specifics of cybernetics but to
the modern backdrop against which cybernetics stands out. This last argu-
ment might have more force, for some readers at least, and it requires some
discussion.
rationalization means . . . the extension oF the areas oF society
subject to the criteria oF rational decision. . . . moreover, this
rationality extends only to relations oF possible technical control,
and thereFore requires a type oF action that implies domination,
Whether oF nature or society.
JürGen haberMaS,
Toward a raTional SocieTy
(1970, 81-82)
that these tragedies could be so intimately associated With optimis-
tic vieWs oF progress and rational order is in itselF a reason For
a searching diagnosis.
JaMeS SCoTT,
Seeing like a STaTe
(1998, 342)
