IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 38

a vision of the world built out of
what the cybernetician Stafford
Beer called "exceedingly complex
systems" - systems that we can
never hope to understand fully,
not least because they are always
evolving and becoming something
new. The guiding theme would be a
vision of the world as unknowable
in just this sense, integrally coupled
with a concern for practical ways of

Phrases like "fiddling while
Rome burns" come to mind.

continually exploring the unknown
and adapting to it.
It is not hard to comprehend
the cybernetics of the Macys and
its descendants under this banner of unknowability, and it marks
very clearly a fundamental, even
shocking, divergence from the
assumption of knowability built into
modern science and engineering.
Of course, admitting one is traveling in a different direction from
Newton, Bohr, and Einstein is perhaps not a great career move in
the 21st century, and this might
explain why neo-cyberneticians are
reluctant to look up from their lab
benches and laptops to see what
the others are up to. But phrases

like "fiddling while Rome burns"
come to mind. Maybe we need to
think about why we might need a
different sort of worldview.
Two is better than one. The aim
of the Macys was not to exterminate modern science but to set
alongside it another way of understanding the world, one centered
on unknowability instead of knowability. If we could reproduce
this doubling of perspectives, we could come at
this problem or that from
two angles rather than
our usual one. And, very
i mp o r t a n t l y, d i f fe r e n t
patterns of action hang
together with different patterns of understanding.
If the world is knowable,
command and control follow. We
can and should bend the natural and social worlds to our will.
Sometimes this works; increasingly, it seems to me, it doesn't.
The refractoriness of the environment (think of global warming) and
other people (the wars and insurgencies across the Islamic world
that also haunt the West) become
more evident every day. So then,
to have available some alternative
way of grasping and acting in the
world might be prudent. And this
is what a reinvigorated cybernetics would promise: to bring the
surprising liveliness of the world
into focus, and to exemplify concrete ways of finding out what it

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

has to offer us and how we might
latch onto it. Under this banner, a
new Macy conference might bring
together practitioners of adaptive
environmental management, bioroboticists, radical psychiatrists,
constructors of dynamic and interactive artworks and, well, scholars like me. Together, we could
engage in the shared pursuit of
alternatives to fragile and perilous
attempts at domination.
Grace vs coercion. That is my
idea. It might not be a great career
move for any of us, but I would like
to reconvene the Macy conferences
with unknowability as the over-arching bridge. Intellectually, socially,
politically, we need to explore this
conception and the real-world projects it brings into alignment. Career
patterns can change too.

Author Information
Andrew Pickering is Professor of
Sociology and Philosophy, University
of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes
Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ U.K. Email:
A.R.Pickering@exeter.ac.uk. Website: http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.
uk/sociology/staff/pickering/.

Acknowledgment
This article is based on
address delivered at the
Conference on Norbert
the 21st Century (21CW)
MA, June 24-26, 2014.

∕

september 2015

a Keynote
IEEE 2014
Wiener in
in Boston,

http://socialsciences.exeter.ac

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