Hugo Sir R., (2024). “Power of fictions. Ancestral etiologies and political imagination in the ADHD hunter hypothesis”. ASAP/15 Conference: Not a Luxury (New York, EEUU, 17-19 October). “Methodologies of Excess: Practices of Imagination, Fiction, and Contagion in the Southern Cone” Panel.

I titled this talk using the word ‘exceedingly,’ echoing Stafford Beer, a key figure in the CYBERSYN/SYNCO socialist Chilean cybernetic Project, who described cybernetics as not only the science of control but, as Andrew Pickering phrased it, ‘The Science of the Unknowable.’ Beer, also known in the 1950s as ‘the father of managerial cybernetics,’ defined a realm where systems—like the Economy, the Firm, and the Brain—are so complex that we cannot fully know them, and must assume this in order to orient their processes. I won’t be able to explore all the political implications of Beer’s approach here, but I want to offer two points to hopefully enrich the panel discussion. First, while I suspect Beer’s choice of examples, I admire the gesture of recognizing something so ‘exceedingly’ complex that we must step back and avoid imposing our own terms. I bring this to help us engage with the scientific etiological hypothesis I’ll share shortly. Second, I encountered this pre-SYNCO version of Beer while researching the genealogical roots of ADHD.