I
The history of domination is a series of master-fictions. Contrary to what is believed by most social theorists, the contemporary master-fiction is no longer the liberal hypothesis, but rather the cybernetic hypothesis.
Catholicism
1618-1648 Thirty Years War: the beginning of the skepticisms regarding the individual and society, from which the cybernetic hypothesis later arose
The Liberal Hypothesis
The Liberal Hypothesis, opposed to the religious principles of the times, was first expressed by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees on the first day of the 18th century and later influenced Adam Smith:
Prosperity, the social order, and politics depends on the pursuit by each individual of his own interests. Private vices are the guarantees of the common good.
The liberal hypothesis assumes the metaphysics of the subject, the idea of the individual, and the idea of the society.
The “humanist pathos” proliferated since the 1940s is an attempt to keep the liberal hypothesis alive by extending it to every situation.
Period of Crisis of the Liberal Hypothesis
- 1914, WWI began: end of the idea of the individual and the metaphysics of the subject
- 1917, the Bolshevik “revolution”: historical contention of the liberal hypothesis
- 1940, WWII: totalitarian self destruction brought the end of the idea of society.
Bloom and totalitarianism were the limit experiences of modernity.
Problem: The crisis of presence and the forces of decomposition destabilized the idea of social totality and society.
Question: How will society be defended?
The desire for totality was not nostalgic at this point, but forward-thinking and productive. In so far as the desire was for totality, it was related to the Holisms of mysticism, Durkheim, functionalists, and Marxists.
Goals: Modernity (whether conceived as liberalism, or as totalitarianism, or as a regime of disciplinary powers) must be contained and suppressed by cybernetics. Escape routes that were left open by the liberal frameworks of norms, apparatuses, and natural laws — in other words, anomalous permutations that could not be anticipated by the liberal framework — must be contained by cybernetics.
The cybernetic gesture is the negation of everything that escapes regulation. In other words, the cybernetic project is the establishment of a true totality.
The Cybernetic Hypothesis
“Cybernetics” comes from the Greek word kubernesis, which means “piloting”.
Principles of the Cybernetic Hypothesis:
- Biological, physical, and social behaviors are something integrally programmed and reprogrammable.
- Individual behavior is piloted by the need for the survival of the system that makes it possible.
- Cybernetics is animated by an offensive conception of politics.
- Cybernetics integrates both normalization and regulation, which previously developed alone.
- Cybernetics operates through both “techniques of separation” or the “police of qualities“, and “techniques of totalization” or “the social production of society“.
Foucault’s alternative genealogy of Cybernetics:
- Found in the Hellenistic model of governance, contained within the figure of the Prince; based on (1) healing, (2) governance of others, and (3) governance of the self.
- During the 16th century, these principles were split.
- At the end of the 20th century, piloting became the basic metaphor for all human activity.
The Cybernetic Hypothesis as a master-fiction is best expressed in Deutsch’s 1953 The Nerves of Government:
- Sovereign power is obsolete.
- Government consists in the rational coordination of flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body.
- The following are therefore required:
- System of information capturers
- Systems of information handling
- Proximity to every living community
- Communications is therefore the source and destination of all power. [This is the establishment of a complete circuit — in other words, the end of politics.]
Cybernetics is therefore oriented against all that exists, all that lives, and all that is lasting.
II
context: cybernetics’ sites of emergence
The period between the Great Wars was characterized by the metaphysical problem of creating order out of disorder.
How could law be re-established after chaos? How could the certain be re-established after the probable?
Cybernetics is the answer to several different forms of the problem of uncertainty which arose during the 20th century:
- (19th century) controversy between mechanist and organicist visions of the future
- (first half of 20th century) Collapse of the scientific edifice built of Newtonian determinism
- (WWII) How could the head of the social body be saved in the case of [nuclear] catastrophe?
- (WWII) Military strategists could establish the position of enemy planes, but could not anticipate the behavior of enemy planes.
- (WWII) The world was struck by a “Great Fear” of the destruction of the world and of the destruction of the species.
- (1930s) The project of establishing a logical basis of mathematics and the project of unifying the sciences seemed doomed to incompletion.
- (1931) Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems
- with the help of Heisenberg, more than a century of positivist justifications had collapsed
- Von Neumann’s assertion that the logical crisis of mathematics is evidence of the mark of imperfection of all human creations
cybernetic solutions
- The cybernetic approach to the above problems is best exemplified by Norbert Weiner’s solution to the problem (4) of not only establishing the positions of enemy planes but also anticipating their behaviors. Norbert Weiner: How to master uncertainty? = How to control systems?
- The problem of uncertainty is a problem of information.
- Consider the object and subject of knowledge as parts of a whole, i.e. of a system. The problem of uncertainty in terms of information is therefore a problem of a gap of information between effective and desired behaviors.
- Controlling a system requires the institution of optimum circulation of information, i.e. feed-back or retro-action.
- The control of a system requires the institution of optimum communication between relevant parties.
- Mastering uncertainty is therefore a problem of effectively representing and memorizing the past.
- The controversy between mechanistic and organicist visions of the future (problem 1) is resolved by the functionalist analogy between living organisms and machines, equivocated as systems.
- Cybernetics turned out to be the best expression of the unity of the sciences (problem 5). This unity is the basis for the method of “verification” proper to the cybernetic “hypothesis”, i.e. the mutual affirmation of theory and technology.
- (technology) 1943 Manhattan Project: simultaneous development of the atomic bomb and the modern computer
- (theory) Von Neumann united cybernetics and computer science
- (theory) analogy between descriptive categories of machines, living organisms, and Weiner’s categories
- (theory/technology) The instrument of cybernetics is the Model, the visual form of reasoning, and the correspondent declaration that everything can and should be modeled.
- (theory/technology) 1948 Weiner’s Thermodynamics: compared the effect of time on an energy system to the effect of time on an information system.
- (theory) 1950s-1980s “Systems” metaphor, referring to the nervous system, transformed into “Networks” metaphor, referring to the neuronal network.
- (theory) “Cybernetics is the assimilation of the totality of the phenomena that exist into brain phenomena… The mind is posited as alpha and omega of the world.”
- (theory) Unity of life, language, and thought
- (technology) 1960s Hebert Simons’ “thinking automaton” handled information to solve any problem
- (technology) 1972 invention of General Problem Solver (GPS)
the cybernetician’s project
Upon understanding everything as systems, the cybernetician encounters the omnipresent problem of entropy.
“A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect. There is a degradation of its energy to the energy that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way that information degrades as it is circulated around.”
Cybernetics is therefore oriented against the decomposition of life, the disequilibrium of the economy, and the dissolution of social bonds.
The cybernetician’s project is to “fight entropy threatening living beings, machines, and societies, to create the experimental conditions necessary for a permanent revitalization, endlessly restoring the integrity of the whole.”
the relationship between cybernetics and capitalism
After the end of the 1960s, this “second cybernetics” is no longer a mere laboratory experiment, but a social experiment.”
The goal of cybernetics is to construct a stabilized animal society.
Assumptions/implications of the cybernetic metaphysic:
- beings operate automatically
- negation of the individual
- society is understood as a plural individual
The organic composite provides the biological model for the teleology of capital.
III
For cybernetics, it is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the present.
from liberalism to neoliberalism; from political economy to information economy
Liberal utilitarianism, the framework of classical political economy, posits the individual as a rational economic actor.
Cybernetics privileges not the static order of classical-liberal frameworks, but a dynamic self-organization aimed at the equilibrium of the social totality.
crisis of homo economicus and classical political economy
The individual cannot function fully rationally, however, without full knowledge of his activity.
1929 – 1945: questions of anticipation, forecasting
The collapse of Smith’s economics was analogous to Newtonian physics.
1944: Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Game Theory
“The first socio-cyberneticians showed that homo economicus could only exist on the condition that there would be a total transparency of his preferences, regarding himself and others.”
Marx, “The true law of political economy is chance.”
The crisis of 20th century capitalism was a crisis of the laws of classical political economy — this is the increasing problem of information.
Against the liberal homo economicus, Van Hayek posited his theory of spontaneous mechanisms coordinating individual choices.
sociocybernetics
Goal: Invent regulation that leaves behind macroinstitutions of the state, relying instead on micromechanisms — dispositifs. This type of regulation aims toward a decentralized re-establishment of balance.
Principles:
- The fundamental law of cybernetics is that growth and control develop in inverse proportion to one another.
- concentrate on social feedback
- accept everything as constitutive of the social totality
- understand all movement as “circular causality”
- the double-bind, where contradiction and nonadaptation merge
diffuse “second cybernetics”
After the 1960s, the word “cybernetics” has continued to disappear in favor of ‘hybrid’ words. This phenomenon represents a hesitation toward theoretical unification in favor of practical unification — the institution of an “autonomous nervous system” composed of apparatuses, oriented against the ever-present threat of the disintegration of the social totality.
The crisis of the rational economic actor was resolved by grafting economic activity onto the cybernetic promise of balancing systems.
Economics thus lost its autonomy and was instrumentalized for the cybernetic project. Economics was focused on optimal market allocation of information rather than wealth.
“The market is but the instrument of a perfect coordination of players thanks to which the social totality can find a durable equilibrium. Capitalism thus becomes unquestionable, insofar as it is presented as the best possible means of producing social self-regulation.”
[We should note here that the breakdown of macroinstitutions corresponds directly to the increasing demands for self-regulation. In other places, these shifts are described in terms of the passage from “disciplinary society” to the “society of control.”]
a new politics of the subject
The cybernetic individual is nothing more than a “feedback locus”. To achieve optimum circulation of information, the individual must become the best possible conductor of social communication — in other words, the subject must be “hollowed out.”
“It’s no longer a question of removing the subject, from the traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended, but of reconstructing the social bonds by depriving the subject of all substance.”
Principles: communication and transparency
translating puissance 