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own way—is crucial. Wiener derived the word “cybernetics” from the Greek
for “steersman”; Pask once compared managing a factory with sailing a ship
(chap. 7); and the sense of sailing we will need in later chapters is just that of
participating performatively in (rather than representationally computing)
the dynamics of sails, winds, rudders, tides, waves, and what have you.
The motto of Wolfram's New Kind of Science (2002) is “extremely complex
behaviour from extremely simple systems,” and this is precisely the phrase
that goes with the earlier cybernetic discovery of complexity. Whereas the
cyberneticians built machines, Wolfram's work derives from experimenta-
tion with very simple formal mathematical systems called cellular automata
(CAs). And Wolfram's discovery has been that under the simplest of rules, the
time evolution of CAs can be ungraspably complex—the only way to know
what such a system will do is set it in motion and watch. Again we have the
idea of an unpredictable endogenous dynamics, and Wolfram's CAs can thus
also function as ontological theater for us in what follows—little models of
the fundamental entities of a cybernetic ontology. In their brute unpredict-
ability, they conjure up for us what one might call an ontology of becoming .
Much of the work to be discussed here had as its problematic questions of how
to go on in such a world.
Again, in the case of Kauffman and Wolfram, a certain ontological hybridity
is evident. In classically modern fashion, Wolfram would like to know which
CA the world is running. The recommendation here is to look through the
other end of the telescope—or pick up the other end of the stick—and focus
on the literally unpredictable properties of mathematical systems like these as
a way of imagining more generally how the world is. 11
the fact is that Our whOle cOncept Of cOntrOl is naive, primitive and
ridden with an almOst retributive idea Of causality. cOntrOl tO mOst
peOple (and what a reflectiOn this is upOn a sOphisticated sOciety!)
is a crude prOcess Of cOerciOn.
stAffoRd beeR, cyBernetics anD ManageMent (1959, 21)
mOdern science's way Of representing pursues and entraps nature as a
calculable cOherence Of fOrces. . . . physics. . . sets nature up tO
exhibit itself as a cOherence Of fOrces calculable in advance.
mARtin heideggeR, “the questiOn cOncerning technOlOgy”
(1976 [1954], 302-3)
 
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