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will just mention a couple. Willem de Kooning's works immediately conjure
up an ontology of decentered becoming. It is impossible to think of his rich,
thick, and smudgy paintings as having been constructed according to some
preconceived plan; one has to understand them as the joint product of a de-
centered and temporally emergent process involving a constitutive back and
forth between the artist and the paint on the canvas. Some of Max Ernst's
most haunting images began as tracings of the knots in the floorboards of his
hotel room, which we can appreciate as another example of hylozoist onto-
logical theater—another staging of the idea that it's all there already in nature,
that the modern detour through detailed design can be unnecessary and can
be curtailed in a process of finding out what works in the thick of things.
Antonin Artaud's (1993) vision of the “Theatre of Cruelty” is just the sort of
ontological theater we have been discussing here, but now instantiated liter-
ally as theater.
Moving to the sciences, we have explored some of the resonances and in-
tersections between cybernetics and contemporary work on complexity, and
I noted, at least, relations between the original cybernetic approach to un-
derstanding the brain and current work in brain science. Dating further back
into history, theories of biological evolution again confront us with a spectacle
of performative adaptation to an unknown future. The histories of these sci-
ences cannot be reduced to that of cybernetics; they, too, can be thought of as
part of the larger nonmodern assemblage that I am trying to delineate.
We should also think of engineering. In chapter 3 I explored connections
between cybernetics and current work in situated robotics as exemplified by
the work of Rodney Brooks, but I find it noteworthy that the dark side of
modernity is beginning to be recognized within the field of engineering itself,
and that new approaches are being developed there, so this might be the place
to introduce one last example.
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My example concerns the civil engineering of rivers and waterways. The
traditional approach is as usual a modern one, drawing upon science in seek-
ing to make water conform to some preconceived human plan. The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, for instance, has been fighting the Mississippi River for
150 years, seeking to contain its tendency to flood and to change direction,
all in the name of maintaining the economic health of New Orleans and the
Delta region (McPhee 1989). The devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in
2005 should give us pause about this strategy (Pickering 2008b, forthcoming),
but even before that some engineers had begun to think and act differently
(Harden 2002): “Scientists know what is ailing the great rivers of America.
They also know how to cure it. From the Columbia . . . to the Everglades . . .
