Andrew Pickering is an international leader in the field of science and technology studies. His book, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010) analyses cybernetics as a distinctive form of life spanning brain science, psychiatry, robotics, the theory of complex systems, management, politics, the arts, education, and spirituality. He argues that cybernetics offers a promising alternative to currently hegemonic cultural formations.
His latest book, Acting with the World: Agency in the Anthropocene (2025), extends the cybernetic analysis to our relations with nature and the environment.
Here Professor Pickering discusses with Maitreyabandhu about what he calls 'the dance of agency', a new paradigm in which we learn to act with the world rather than on it. As he writes, 'The world can always surprise us. No one knows in advance how it will respond to our actions... Dances of agency take shape in real time.'
Introducing PhilosophyEAST
The exploration of ‘views’ (drishti in Sanskrit) has always been an essential part of the Buddhist tradition. PhilosophyEAST is a series of events exploring ideas and views that have a bearing on the dharma-life. Whilst not all the views of our guests necessarily express Buddhist values, our intention is to explore where contemporary thought and ideas have some degree of coincidence with the Buddhist vision.
