Andrew Pickering

University of Exeter | UoE ·  College of Social Sciences and International Studies

The first part of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. The second part explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concer...

The invitation to write for this issue sent me back to Stanislaw Lem's masterpiece, Solaris. I first read the book many years ago, and I still remember being struck by its strangeness-somehow it seemed different from all the other science fiction I knew. On a second reading, the source of the book's strangeness became clearer. Though nothing in the...

Cybernetics and alien intelligence. Stanislaw Lem's Solaris and Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask's biological computing project.

In this paper I contrast two systematically different patterns of acting in the world via the concepts of enframing and poiesis. Enframing is the usual stance of dualistic domination that we can associate with the Anthropocene, and I focus here on the contrast class, poiesis. To bring out its key features I discuss a form of natural farming develop...

Part I of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. Part II explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concerns via a discuss...

This essay discusses the macrodynamics of cultural change. Drawing on the history of science, I offer an analysis of revolutionary transformation in terms of the waxing and waning of traditions of practice, in which marginal traditions become mainstream and vice versa. I apply this model to the Anthropocene, identifying dualist traditions of master...

Integral to modernity is a familiar dualism: humans are different in kind from nonhumans and are in control. The Anthropocene undermines this picture and brings home instead a nonmodern, nondualist, reciprocal and emergent coupling of humans and nonhumans. I review artworks that stage such couplings, works that we can think of as ontological theatr...

This talk runs through some thoughts on human and nonhuman agency in improvisation in science and the arts. While improvisation is inherent in being, we also need to think about what is not improvisation—what structures improvisation from within and without. Science. Improvisation as integral to research: the open-ended extension of culture. Struc...

I review the history of cybernetic art with examples. Headings include Agency Realism, Emergence and Control, Feedback Art, Adaptive Art, Art as Interface, Happenings, Technologies of the Self.

The interactions between artistic, technical, scientific, living, and nonliving things have inspired new artistic approaches. The contributors to this volume either relate to theoretical discourses raised by artworks, show how young artists today approach cultural issues, or develop situations of living together with other species. All the contribu...

Could we couple ourselves into the world differently; could we act differently to attenuate the darkside of our presence here on earth? The answer is yes, and my example is ‘natural farming’ as developed by Masanobu Fukuoka in Japan.

My goal is explore a way of thinking about the internet of things (IoT) which derives from my work in science and technology studies (STS) and the history of cybernetics.

This Common Knowledge guest column concerns performance, understood in its simple ur-sense of “doing things” in the world. It continues the author's analysis, in his book The Mangle of Practice (1995), of cultural evolution as a “dance of agency”: a performative, decentered, and emergent back-and-forth between a multiplicity of actors, variously hu...

In this article I discuss different scientific and non-modern worlds as they appear in a performative (rather than representational) idiom, situating my analysis in relation to the recent ontological turns in science and technology studies (STS) and anthropology. I propose an ontology of decentered becoming that can help us take seriously the multi...

This article reviews developments in cybernetics from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the most radical threads, those that foreground key questions of agency, performance, and emergence. It explores cybernetic intersections with fields including science and technology studies, brain science, psychiatry and antipsychiatry, biological computing...

Reports on the significance of the Macy Conferences in the field of cybernetics. These were a series of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York from 1941 through 1960. 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 instea...

This essay reviews the English translation of Stanislaw Lem’s book on the philosophy of technology, Summa Technologiae, first published in Polish in 1961. The Summa is a distinctive work of scientific futurology, and the review explores connections between Lem’s thought and the cybernetics of Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, including Le...

Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local. We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientis...

My topic is materiality and how ideas on materiality from my field — science and technology studies (STS) — might cross over into management and organization studies. ‘Sociomateriality’ (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) is already an important topic in management and organizations, but I will try to widen the frame. We can start with technologies of the s...

This essay examines the notion of ‘robustness’ from the perspective developed in my book, The Mangle of Practice. The central concept is that of an emergent and decentred dance of agency between scientists and the material world—nature, instruments, machines. The novel argument here is that in science such dances have the telos of extinguishing the...

This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or...

This book brings together sixteen of the world’s foremost thinkers on the prospects of a radical reshaping of human nature through biotechnologies and artificial intelligence. The often heated debate about transhumanism is an extremely fruitful field for philosophical and theological inquiry. The last hundred years of human evolution have seen rema...

Prepared for discussion at a conference sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation on Challenges to Dominant Modes of Knowledge: Dualism, SUNY Binghamton, 3-4 November 2006. This talk concerns issues of time and dualism in academic theory and the real world. The dualism in question concerns people and things and the habit of thinking of them as distinc...

Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross A...

This essay explores the politics of theory and how theoretical analysis in science and technology studies might inform real-world conduct. I focus on objects and projects that can serve as ‘ontological theatre’ for a nonmodern perspective – that both evoke and act out the ontology that I associate with my analysis of ‘the mangle of practice’. These...

The history of British cybernetics offers us a different form of science and engineering, one that does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge. I want to say that one can distinguish two different paradigms in the history of science and technology: the one that Heidegger despised, which we could call the Modern paradigm, and another, cyberne...

References and Further Reading

This essay focuses on the historical development of W. Ross Ashby's work up to the late 1950s. Two key landmarks are Ashby's most famous machine, the homeostat, and the book in which it featured, Design for a Brain. The essay explores constitutive connections between Ashby's cybernetics and his professional interest in psychiatry and the brain, his...

Research in science studies supports a vision of the world as an endlessly lively and emergent place. This essay briefly notes a range of philosophical and scientific positions that elaborate cognate ontologies, but I dwell at greater length on a variety of objects and practices that, in contrast to the modern sciences, thematise, foreground and st...

Nuclear Rites:. Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xviii. 351 pp., figures, notes, bibliography, index.

This essay explores the possibility of an ontological rather than epistemological understanding of cybernetics. My argument is that cybernetics embodies a nonmodern ontology, a vision of the world as built from lively, dynamic systems in performative interaction with one another -- in contrast to the ontology of the modern sciences: an asymmetric p...

Chapter to be included in a forthcoming book: ‘New Ontologies,’ in A. Pickering and K. Guzik (eds), 'The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming', Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming. In The Mangle of Practice (1995) I argued for a specific ontological vision of the world and of our place in it, a vision in which both the human...

Technology and Culture 47.3 (2006) 661-663 The 1960s went away and now they're coming back. "Archigram is a marvelously fitting choice for a Royal Gold Medal" (p. 1) read the citation in 2002 when the Royal Institute of British Architects gave its major prize to a group that had once defied all its conventions. Archigram was a band of radical Briti...

Ethics & the Environment 10.2 (2005) 29-43 My idea in this essay is to talk about how some recent developments in my field—science and technology studies—might pass over into environmental studies. In particular, I want to talk about a certain posthumanist perspective, as I call it, on the relation between people and things, because I think that it...

Perspectives on Science 13.3 (2005) 416-425 I need to respond to two aspects of Jonathan Harwood's critique (this volume) of my paper "Decentering Sociology: Synthetic Dyes and Social Theory" (SDST hereafter): first, that the position I articulate there is no different from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and second, somewhat paradoxic...

This essay addresses the difficulties that sociology as a discipline continues to experience in grasping the relations between technology, science and the social. I argue that these difficulties stem from a resolute centering of sociology on the social, which follows a generically Durkheimian blueprint. I elaborate a response to these difficulties...

This paper explores the history of Stafford Beer's work in management cybernetics, from his early conception and simulation of an adaptive automatic factory and associated experimentation in biological computing, through the development of the Viable System Model and the Team Syntegrity technique for discussion and planning. It also pursues Beer in...

Daniel Breslau's essay opens up a valuable space in seeking to align the sociologically impure objects explored in science studies with the practice of a pure sociology. I challenge Breslau's conclusion that the latter can swallow the former and proceed with business as usual. Contrary to Breslau, I argue that confronting head-on the impure objects...

This paper was written for a colloquium held at the Centre Koyr in Paris in May 2000, and it will appear in French translation in A. Dahan and D. Pestre (eds), La reconfiguration des sciences pour l'action dans les annes 1950 (Paris: Presses de l'EHESS). Various versions of it have been presented at seminars at Northwestern University, Johns Hopkin...

This essay discusses the ways in which Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has influenced my own work in science studies over the past twenty years or so. It offers a critical but constructive appraisal and development of some of Kuhn's key claims and insights.

In the mid-1970s, Barry Barnes and David Bloor (at Edinburgh University), along with Harry Collins, who was then at the University of Bath, were leading lights in the development of what became known as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). If Barnes and Bloor were the theorists of the movement, then it was Collins who pioneered the empirica...

Detailed studies have recently drawn attention to the ‘posthuman’ intertwining of human and nonhuman agency in scientific practice. This essay indicates how such insights might be extended into a posthumanist analysis of macrosocial order and change. Examples considered include the new ‘industrial consciousness’ of the 19th century, the founding of...

Technology and Culture 41.2 (2000) 392-395 Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, by Stefan Helmreich. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xii+314; illustrations, notes/references, bibliography, index. $29.95. Historians of material technology will not find a lot to get their teeth into in these two boo...

This text offers an understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical and engineering practice, and the production of scientific knowledge. The author presents an approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into account the number of factors - social, technological, conceptual and natural - that interact to affect the cr...

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

This ambitious book by one of the most original and provocative thinkers in science studies offers a sophisticated new understanding of the nature of scientific, mathematical, and engineering practice and the production of scientific knowledge. Andrew Pickering offers a new approach to the unpredictable nature of change in science, taking into acco...

The Second World War was a watershed in history in many ways. I focus on the World War II discontinuity as it relates to the intersection of scientific and military enterprise. I am interested in how we should conceptualize that intersection and in offering a preliminary tracing of the “World War II regime” that has grown out of it—a regime that in...

Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994) 257-258 Bruno Latour's Science in Action (1987) was the most important book on science, technology and their intertwining with society published in the 1980s. Latour argued that by following scientists and engineers around one could see that science, technology, and society were continually coproduced in a process of...

Some difficult but important issues have arisen in recent social studies of science concerning temporally emergent phenomena and the decentering of the human subject in scientific practice. This essay seeks a constructive clarification of the issues, and links them together, by delineating and exemplifying a view of science as a field of emergent h...

Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice—the work of doing science—and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and...

Preface Introduction. The Dilemma of Science Policy Part One. "Pure Science" and the Baconian Critique 1. The Cosmos as Construct 2. Baconian Caveats, Royalist Compromise 3. The Devalorization of Being 4. Secondary Qualities and Subjective Value Part Two. The Politics of Neutrality in German Social Theory 5. The German University and the Research I...

Developments in elementary-particle theory in the post-World War II era point to a novel instance of the Forman thesis, with an ironic twist. In his well-known paper on ‘Weimar culture, causality, and quantum theory, 1918–1927’, Forman argued that the admission of acausality and indeterminism into theoretical physics — a key step in the formulation...

Large-scale collaborative projects between experimental high-energy physicists have produced sociological problems that will need thought to resolve.