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But while I have been writing this chapter, another line of thought has
come upon me. As summarized above, it is clear that many cybernetic endeav-
ors are strongly incompatible with their modern equivalents. It is indeed hard
to imagine Kingsley Hall not existing in tension with conventional psychiatry.
But just at the moment I can see no principled reason why something like
what is laid out in this topic could not be taught at schools and universities
and even feature prominently in their curricula. Let me end with this.
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It is true, I think, as I said earlier in this chapter, that Western educational
systems are strongly oriented toward the transmission of positive knowledge,
and that this hangs together with a modern ontology of knowability, control-
lability, enframability. But, oddly enough, there are few people who would
defend the proposition that this is a total description of the world. Everyone
knows that surprise is a distinguishing mark of science, and that unintended
consequences go with engineering initiatives. At the moment, however, such
knowledge is, well, marginal. It doesn't amount to much; it continually disap-
pears out of the corner of our eyes. And my suggestion is that it does not have
to be this way, even in our pedagogical institutions. We could bring unknow-
ability into focus for our children.
How? Here I think first about what I have been calling the discovery of
complexity. Cellular automata are not at all difficult to draw—by hand, never
mind with a computer—and even young children can enjoy the patterns they
make. I am sure that there are already schools that incorporate them in their
curriculum, but it seems highly likely that they do so as a subfield of mathe-
matics instruction—here is yet another branch of mathematics, in a sequence
that would include arithmetic, geometry, groups, or whatever. My suggestion
is that one could incorporate cellular automata into the curriculum differ-
ently, along the lines of how I have discussed them here, as ontological icons,
little models of a world graspable in terms of a nonmodern ontology.
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That
would be the point of learning about them in the sort of courses I am imagin-
ing. Many of the artifacts we have examined along the way would likewise be
discussable in this way at school. Gysin's Dream Machines might similarly
offer a way into thinking about the explorability (rather than the givenness)
of our perceptions and, by extension, our selves. School trips might include
going to look at interactive art in local museums, again explicitly discussed
as ontological theater, and not: here's a Rembrandt, here's a Picasso, here's a
tortoise.
Beyond that, of course, the history of cybernetics (and all that I assimilated
to it a few pages ago) offers a wonderful and teachable set of examples that
show that we are perfectly capable of going on in a world of unknowability
