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with the problem of “how to bring the sciences into democracy” (the subtitle
of Latour's topic)—of how, literally or metaphorically, to bring scientists, poli-
ticians, and citizens together on a single and level playing field, on which the
expertise and interests of none of these groups necessarily trumps that of the
others.
I admire this line of thought. If translated into novel social arrangements,
it might well make the world less risky, less grim and fearful. The vision may
even be coming true: scientists and politicians are meeting collectively in
conferences on global warming, for example. And yet it is hard to get excited
about it, so much remains unchanged. In this explicitly representationalist
approach to the dark side of modernity, modern science and engineering re-
main hegemonic; Latour's ambition is simply to slow down the hectic pace of
modernity, to give us some democratic breathing space before we rush into
the next high-modernist adventure.
7
And, to get back to our topic, this, for
me, is where the “political” appeal of cybernetic resides, precisely in that it
promises more than a
rearrangement
of the world we already have. It offers
a constructive alternative to modernity. It thematizes attractive possibilities
for
acting
differently
—in all of the fields we have talked about and indefinitely
many more—as well as thinking and arranging political debate differently.
This is my third reason—specific to our historical conjuncture—for being in-
terested in cybernetics as a challenge to the hegemony of modernity.
8
hoW rare it is to encounter advice about the Future Which
beginS
From
a premise oF incomplete knoWledge.
JaMeS SCoTT,
Seeing like a STaTe
(1998, 343)
What might it mean to challenge the hegemony of modernity? At the ground
level, I have in mind both an ability to recognize cybernetic projects and to
read their moral as ontological theater and a multiplication of such projects—
a “quantitative” challenge, one might say. But just where does this hegemony
reside? In one sense, it resides in our imaginations; there is something natural
about Scott's high-modernist schemes to dominate the world; we might worry
about their specifics, but we tend not to see that there is anything generically
problematic about this sort of activity. But there is another side to this, which
I think of in terms of “echoing back.” We are not simply taught at school to
find the modern ontology natural; the “made world” of modernity continually
echoes this ontology back to us and reinforces it. I grew up in a factory town
