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earlier, as far as the future is concerned, their work should be seen as offer-
ing us a set of models that both conjure up a nonmodern ontology and invite
endless and open-ended extension. The ontological vision, and the realization
that there are real-world projects that go with it, is the important thing, not
the names and historical instances. But it might be helpful to put this another
way. I have been trying to argue that the history of cybernetics indeed con-
jures up another form of life from that of modernity, but my suggestion is not
that cybernetics was some sort of brute and isolated historical singularity. I
have, for example, talked about all sorts of antecedents from which cybernet-
ics grew, starting with work in experimental psychology that included Pavlov's
salivating dogs and phototropic “electric dogs.” But here it might be useful to
note some of the many contemporary streams of work and thought that lie
in much the same space as cybernetics even though it might not make much
historical sense to label them “cybernetic.”
In fact, I have mentioned many of these nonmodern traditions already.
In philosophy, we could think of the pragmatist tradition. William James's
idea that experience is continually “boiling over” relative to our expectations
is a beautiful way into an ontology of becoming. We could also think of the
tradition of Continental philosophy (as it is known in the United States and
Britain), including the writings of, say, Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Isabelle Stengers, with Alfred North Whitehead as an honorary Continental.
This might be the place for me to remember my own field, and to point to a
very active constellation of work in “posthumanist” science and technology
studies as discovering the nonmodern character of the temporal evolution
of modern science and engineering (Pickering 2008a).
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Going in another
direction, I have pointed to the many intersections between cybernetics and
Eastern philosophy and spirituality: shared connections with the decentering
of the self, the dance of Shiva as the dance of agency. We could also think of
the transposition of the East to the West in the shape of New Age philosophy,
with its erasure of the modern dichotomies of mind, body, and spirit. Before
New Age there was the sixties. The counterculture may no longer be with us,
but, like cybernetics, as an experimental form of life it offers us a whole range
of models for future practices that also stage an ontology of unknowability
and becoming.
The point I want to make is that cybernetics, narrowly defined as a histori-
cal entity, can be seen as part of much larger cultural assemblage. We could
continue the list of its elements into the arts. We have examined many art-
works that have been more or less explicitly associated with cybernetics, but
there is an endless list of others that are in the same ontological space, and I
