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has to do with human finitude: it would take forever to write a history of this
entire assemblage; one has to start somewhere; and cybernetics seemed, and
still seems to me, a perspicuous entry point. Second, I have learned something
in writing this topic. I did not see in advance that all these examples could be
grouped into a nonmodern assemblage. This reflects my lack of imagination,
but it is also a function of the relative isolation and lack of interconnection
between many of the elements I have just mentioned. Buddhism is usually
thought of as a philosophical and spiritual system having implications for in-
dividual practice and conduct. It is hard to imagine (though I can do it now)
that it might hang together with a certain approach to engineering. De Koon-
ing and Ernst were just painters, weren't they? What can Rodney Brooks's
robots have to do with Heidegger or Deleuze?
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And Continental philosophy
is just philosophy, isn't it?—words and representations (like science studies
and
The Mangle of Practice
).
From this perspective, the appeal of following cybernetics in action is that
it enables us to see interconnections between all these traditions, fields, and
projects; to pick out their common staging of an ontology of unknowabilty
and becoming; and, indeed, to pick out as resources for the future the strands
from these traditions that have this resonance. The history of cybernetics
shows us how easy it is to get from little robots to Eastern spirituality, brain-
wave music, complexity theory, and the Fun Palace.
One last remark. I have stressed the protean quality of cybernetics, the
endless multiplicity of cybernetic projects, and I want to note now that the
reference to multiplicity implies a recognition that these projects are not in-
exorably chained together. It is entirely possible, for example, to take Beer's vi-
able system model seriously as a point of departure for thinking further about
problems of social and political organization while admitting that hylozoism
and tantrism are not one's cup of tea. You might think Heidegger is a load of
incomprehensible rubbish and still be interested by situated robotics (and
vice versa). An interest in cellular automata does not depend on fond memo-
ries of the sixties. As a challenge to the hegemony of modernity, all that is im-
portant is the idea that a nonmodern ontology is possible and can be staged in
practice, not its specific historical staging in this field or that. Readers should
not be put off if they dislike de Kooning or Ernst.
I look at this the other way around. A recognition of the relation between
cybernetics and current work in complexity, robotics, and the civil engineer-
ing of rivers points to a material and conceptual robustness of this entire as-
semblage and helps me also to take seriously the wilder projects and artifacts
we have examined: flicker machines, explorations of consciousness, tantric
