Gregory Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management (London: English Universities Press, 1959).
Bateson, “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 439.
Gregory Bateson, “The Roots of Ecological Crisis,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1972).
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
Andrew Pickering, “In Our Place: Performance, Dualism, and Islands of Stability,” Common Knowledge 23, no. 3 (2017): 381–95.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 1986).
For a recent exemplification of this point, see the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore harbor when it was struck by the enormous container ship, Dali on March 26, 2024: “Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse: What we know about ship and bridge,” BBC News, March 27, 2024, ➝.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (London: Routledge, 1977).
These examples are all discussed at greater length in Andrew Pickering, Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene (Duke University Press, 2025).
“Glen Canyon Dam High Flow Experimental Release,” United States Bureau of Reclamation,” 2019, ➝.
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Andrew Pickering The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Personal communication from Peter Robinson, March 1, 2024.
Kai Lee, Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1991), 58.
Stafford Beer, “The Aborting Corporate Plan: A Cybernetic Account of the Interface between Planning and Action,” in Perspectives of Planning: Proceedings of the OECD Working Symposium on Long-Range Forecasting and Planning, Bellagio, Italy, ed. Erich Jantsch (OECD Publications, 1969).
François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
