Another theme which feels important to me in Pickering’s superb The Cybernetic Brain is the ontological gap between entities and interaction. If we imagine the world as composed of discrete entities with defined characteristics, it invites an approach to knowledge in which we merely place them into a taxonomy in a manner which leaves them in principle knowable in full.
If I understand the cybernetic impulse correctly, it rests on the aforementioned ontological gap. Even if we learn stuff through this approach, it tells us little about the interaction of these entities and obscures much that is important about the world in which this interaction occurs. What matters is how these discrete elements enter into interaction with each other, in a manner which is inherently unpredictable and cannot be discerned through the decompositional and representational approach to knowledge previously described. This is why we should start with the performance i.e. the reality of their interaction.
It’s possible I’m translating this too much into the conceptual idiom of morphogenetic theory and perhaps missing something of cybernetics in the process. But I’m finding it a stimulating activity nonetheless, something which I think the cyberneticians would have approved of.
Mark Carrigan 