After dualism

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 distinct ontological orders. In contrast, I explore various projects of ‘ontological theatre’—projects that variously thematise nondualist engagements and stage them in a variety of fields including brain science, the science of complex systems, psychiatry, management, politics, spirituality, the arts, music, architecture, and so on. The examples are largely drawn from the history of cybernetics, and locate the engagements in question as constituted in reciprocal becomings in time