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entire task of cybernetics was to figure out how to get along in a world that
was not enframable, that could not be subjugated to human designs—how
to build machines and construct systems that could adapt performatively to
whatever happened to come their way. A key aspect of many of the examples
we will examine was that of open-ended search—of systems that would ex-
plore their world to see what it had to offer, good and bad. This, to borrow an-
other word from Heidegger, is a stance of revealing rather than enframing—of
openness to possibility, rather than a closed determination to achieve some
preconceived object, come what may (though obviously this assertion will
need to be nuanced as we go along). This is the ontological sense in which cy-
bernetics appears as one of Deleuze and Guattari's nomad sciences that upset
established orders.
One theme that will emerge from the chapter on Ashby onward, for ex-
ample, is that of a distinctly cybernetic notion of design , very different from
that more familiar in modern science and engineering. If our usual notion
of design entails the formulation of a plan which is then imposed upon mat-
ter, the cybernetic approach entailed instead a continuing interaction with
materials, human and nonhuman, to explore what might be achieved—what
one might call an evolutionary approach to design, that necessarily entailed a
degree of respect for the other.
Readers can decide for themselves, but my feeling is, therefore, that the cri-
tique of cybernetics that centers on the word “control” is importantly misdi-
rected. British cybernetics was not a scientized adjunct of Big Brother. In fact,
as I said, the critique might be better redirected toward modernity rather than
cybernetics, and this brings us to the question of ontological politics. The period
in which I have been writing this topic has not been a happy one, and the future
looks increasingly grim. In our dealings with nature, 150 years of the enfram-
ing of the Mississippi by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to a (tempo-
rary) end in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina, the flooding of New Orleans, many
deaths, massive destruction of property, and the displacement of hundreds
of thousands of people. 12 In our dealings with each other, the United States's
attempt to enframe Iraq—the installation of “freedom and democracy”—
became another continuing disaster of murder, mayhem, and torture.
In one of his last public appearances, Stafford Beer (2004 [2001], 853) ar-
gued, “Last month [September 2001], the tragic events in New York, as cyber-
netically interpreted, look quite different from the interpretation supplied by
world leaders—and therefore the strategies now pursued are quite mistaken
in cybernetic eyes.” Perhaps we have gone a bit overboard with the modern
idea that we can understand and enframe the world. Perhaps we could do with
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