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that depended upon turning formless sheet metal into cars. From my earliest
childhood I was plunged into a world where human agency visibly acted on
apparently passive matter to accomplish its ends, and where any unintended
consequences of this process were hard to see and talk about. The material
form of an industrialized society in this sense echoes back the modern ontol-
ogy of a passive and defenseless nature awaiting reconfiguration by humanity.
From another angle, while writing this topic I lived in a small midwestern
town where all of the streets are laid out on a north-south, east-west grid.
To get out of town, one could drive for hours down a linear and featureless
freeway or take a plane and travel through an unmarked space in which a trip
to San Francisco differs from one to London only in terms of the number of
hours of discomfort involved. In such a geography, how else should one think
of space but as Cartesian, or time as linear and uniform?
In ways like this, the made world of modernity echoes back to us the basic
modern ontology (and vice versa, of course). This is a reason for thinking that
perhaps the Habermas-Latour approach to reining in modernity might not
be enough. It would do little, as far as I can make out, to challenge this mate-
rial reinforcement of modernity's ontological stance. Conversely, I have paid
great attention here to the made worlds of cybernetics—objects and artifacts
that can echo back to us a nonmodern instead of a modern ontology. Part of
the business of challenging modernity might entail moving these objects and
artifacts from the margins toward the center of our culture, as I have tried to
do here: multiplying them, appreciating them as ontological theater, taking
them seriously. Heidegger's desperate dream was that artists and poets might
save us from the world of enframing. My first reaction to that was incredulity,
but there might be something to it. I am impressed by the examples of cyber-
netic art, theater, music, and architecture that we have encountered on this
trip. If we could learn to see interactive robot artworks as ontological theater
instead of vaguely amusing objects at the fringes of real art, the hegemony of
modernity would indeed be challenged—which is not to say that art is enough
or, pace Heidegger, that artists are the only people we should look to.
Another question that arises here is: how far should the challenge to mo-
dernity go? What could we imagine? A complete displacement of the modern
by the nonmodern? The answer to that is no, for a couple of reasons. One goes
like this: Cybernetics has often been characterized as a science of informa-
tion, different in kind and having a different referent from the usual sciences
of matter. I know of no way of thinking about electrical power stations other
than modern physics, and no way of building and running them other than
modern civil and electrical engineering. Take away the modern elements and
