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yoga, walking cities.
15
All of these might be of a piece with the utter sobriety of
Ashby's phase-space diagrams and calculations of time to equilibrium. From
this perspective, too, this topic has been an attempt to counteract a narrowing
of our imaginations—of what there is in the world, what we are like, what we
can be, and what we can do.
Where
might an alternative to modernity flourish? Obviously, in our imagi-
nations and in the projects that go with a nonmodern imagining. This topic
certainly aspires to contribute to that. But I want to return to the question
of the social basis one last time. Where, institutionally, might cybernetics
and its ilk grow in the future? I have two different but compatible thoughts
on this. First, one cannot help but be struck by the social marginality of cy-
bernetics throughout its history, and this has led me to an interest in new
institutions, however marginal themselves, that have emerged as a social
basis for cybernetics in recent decades. The cybernetic equivalents of schools
and universities have turned out to be places like Wolfram Research, the
Santa Fe Institute, the Planetary Collegium, and the Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie, with Kingsley Hall, the Anti-University of London, and
the sixties counterculture as short-lived models for something more radical,
and New Age as a massive but somehow walled-off contemporary presence.
However ephemeral these institutions have been or might prove to be, for
most of the time I have been writing this topic I have thought of them—or
nonstandard institutions like them—as the future home of cybernetics. I have
referred to this possibility from time to time as a parallel social universe—an
institutional space where cybernetics might reproduce itself and grow, quite
apart from the usual modern instutions of cultural production and transmis-
sion—much as Trocchi imagined his sigma project in the sixties.
From that perspective, one aim of this topic has been to incorporate this
other social world into the overall picture of the nonmodern assemblage I
have been trying to put together. Just as I have been trying to show that the
cybernetic ontology and cybernetic projects and objects make sense and are
worth taking seriously, so my suggestion is that we should take seriously the
sometimes odd institutions which have from time to time supported them. I
would like to launder these institutions into mainstream discourse and con-
sciousness as well as more specific aspects of cybernetics. The other future
I am trying to imagine has this odd social aspect too; the growth of this par-
allel social world might indeed be an important aspect of the challenge to
modernity.
