Abstract

Upshot: Andrew Pickering’s book traces an early history of Britain’s cybernetics. Pickering draws connections between the “brain” in its many forms - from performative organ to strange machine, to larger social developments - as adaptive systems coupled to humans and artifacts. Focusing on the work of early British cyberneticians, Pickering argues for a performative paradigm as opposed to strict representational approaches to the world, and therein locates an “ontology of cybernetics” that challenges modern modes of knowledge production and which serves as a necessary component of cybernetic projects.