Conversations on Four Cybernetic Approaches to Embracing Uncertainty

Abstract

Context •In 2024, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). In more than eighty, mostly participatory, sessions, the conference stretched over five days. Under the overarching theme “Living Cybernetics Playing Language,” the conference encouraged participants to reflect on cybernetics in everyday contexts, ranging from academic research to the building of communities. This special issue of Constructivist Foundations contains four target articles that emerged from this conference, and their related discussions. > Problem • Sixty years after the foundation of the ASC, defining cybernetics is still a challenge. Diversity, one could say, has haunted cybernetics since its inception. There are many practices that refer to cybernetics in many disciplinary fields and contexts, but do these different practices share anything or do they rely on different aspects of (historical) cybernetic practices? > Method • I present the contributions to this special issue as case studies of cybernetic practice and diversity and expose them to the questions mentioned above. > Results • Cybernetic practices are as diverse in their methods as the disciplines to which they relate. And yet, as the study of the four target articles and the related commentaries show, these practices all embrace uncertainty. This embrace is the foundation for a particular technicity in which formation and reflexivity become intertwined and co-evolve. In its engagement with contemporary challenges, cybernetic technicity introduces recursive links setting relations across boundaries. Contemporary cybernetic practice, through varied approaches, is a living tradition of enacting open futures. > Implications • Cybernetic thinking does not necessarily become detectable through a common vocabulary or set of references, but rather through a particular inherent logic, which links thinking and doing in a recursive co-evolving relationship. > Constructivist content • The editorial discusses second-order approaches to cybernetics.