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Title: The Cybernetic Hypothesis Author: Tiqqun Language: en Topics: cybernetics, technology Source: Retrieved on May 29, 2010 from http://cybernet.jottit.com/
“We can imagine a time when the machine of governance would replace —
for better or worse, who knows? — the insufficiency of the minds and
devices of politics that are customary today.”
— Father Dominique Dubarle, Le Monde, December 28^(th), 1948
“There is a striking contrast between the conceptual refinement and
dedication characterizing scientific and technical reasoning and the
summary and imprecise style that characterizes political reasoning...
One even asks oneself whether this is a kind of unsurpassable situation
marking the definitive limits of rationality, or if one may hope that
this impotence might be overcome someday and collective life be entirely
rationalized.”
— An encyclopedist cybernetician writing in the 1970s.
“There is probably no domain of man’s thinking or material activity that
cybernetics will not come to have a role in someday.”
Georges Boulanger, Dossier on Cybernetics: utopia or science of tomorrow
in the world today, 1968.
“The world circumscribing us [the “circumverse”] aims to have stable
circuits, equal cycles, the expected repetitions, and trouble-free
compatibility. It intends to eliminate all partial impulses and
immobilize bodies. Parallel to this, Borges discussed the anxiety of the
emperor who wanted to have such an exact map of the empire that he would
have to go back over his territory at all its points and bring it up to
scale, so much so that the monarch’s subjects spent as much time and
energy detailing it and maintaining it that the empire ‘itself’ fell
into ruins to the exact extent that its cartographical overview was
perfected — such is the madness of the great central Zero, its desire to
immobilize bodies that can only ever ‘be’ as representation.”
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 1973.
“They wanted an adventure, and to live it out with you. In the end all
that’s all that can be said. They believed resolutely that the future
would be modern: different, impassioning, and definitely difficult.
Peopled by cyborgs and bare handed entrepreneurs, frenzied
stock-marketeers and turbine-men. And for those that are willing to see
it, the present is already like that. They think the future will be
human, feminine even — and plural; so that everyone can really live it,
so that everyone participates in it. They are the Enlightenment men
we’ve lost, infantrymen of progress, the inhabitants of the 21^(st)
century. They fight against ignorance, injustice, poverty, and suffering
of all kinds. They go where it’s happening, where things are going on.
They don’t want to miss out on a thing. They’re humble and courageous,
at the service of interests that are far beyond them, guided by a higher
principle. They can pose problems, and they can find solutions. They’ll
have us traversing the most perilous of frontiers, they’ll reach out a
hand to pull us up onto the shore of the future. They’re History
marching forth, at least what’s left of it, because the hardest part is
over. They’re the saints and the prophets, true socialists. They’ve
known for a long while that May 1968 wasn’t a revolution. The true
revolution is the one they’re making. Now it’s just a matter of
organization and transparency, intelligence and cooperation. A vast
program! Then...”
Excuse me? What? What’d you say? What program? The worst nightmares, you
know, are often the metamorphoses of a fable, fables PEOPLE tell their
kids to put them to sleep and perfect their moral education. The new
conquerors, who we’ll call the cyberneticians, do not comprise an
organized party — which would have made our work here a lot easier — but
rather a diffuse constellation of agents, all driven, possessed, and
blinded by the same fable. These are the murderers of Time, the
crusaders of Sameness, the lovers of fatality. These are the sectarians
of order, the reason-addicts, the go-between people. The Great Legends
may indeed be dead, as the post-modern vulgate often claims, but
domination is still comprised of master-fictions. Such was the case of
the Fable of the Bees published by Bernard de Mandeville in the first
years of the 18^(th) century, which contributed so much to the founding
of political economy and to justifying the advances made by capitalism.
Prosperity, the social order, and politics no longer depended on the
catholic virtues of sacrifice but on the pursuit by each individual of
his own interests: it declared the “private vices” to be guarantees of
the “common good.” Mandeville, the “Devil-Man” as PEOPLE called him at
the time, thus founded the liberal hypothesis, as opposed to the
religious spirit of his times, a hypothesis which would later have a
great influence on Adam Smith. Though it is regularly re-invoked, in a
renovated form given it by liberalism, this fable is obsolete today. For
critical minds, it follows that it’s not worth it anymore to critique
liberalism. A new model has taken its place, the very one that hides
behind the names “internet,” “new information and communications
technology,” the “new economy,” or genetic engineering. Liberalism is
now no longer anything but a residual justification, an alibi for the
everyday crimes committed by cybernetics.
Rationalist critics of the “economic creed” or of the “neo-technological
utopia,” anthropologist critics of utilitarianism in social sciences and
the hegemony of commodity exchange, marxist critics of the “cognitive
capitalism” that oppose to it the “communism of the masses,” political
critics of a communications utopia that resuscitates the worst phantasms
of exclusion, critics of the critiques of the “new spirit of
capitalism,” or critics of the “prison State” and surveillance hiding
behind neo-liberalism — critical minds hardly appear to be very inclined
to take into account the emergence of cybernetics as a new technology of
government, which federates and associates both discipline and
bio-politics, police and advertising, its ancestors in the exercise of
domination, all too ineffective today. That is to say, cybernetics is
not, as we are supposed to believe, a separate sphere of the production
of information and communication, a virtual space superimposed on the
real world. No, it is, rather, an autonomous world of apparatuses so
blended with the capitalist project that it has become a political
project, a gigantic “abstract machine” made of binary machines run by
the Empire, a new form of political sovereignty, which must be called an
abstract machine that has made itself into a global war machine. Deleuze
and Guattari link this rupture to a new kind of appropriation of war
machines by Nation-States: “Automation, and then the automation of the
war machine, only came truly into effect after the Second World War. The
war machine, considering the new antagonisms running through it, no
longer had War as its exclusive object, but rather it began to take
charge of and make Peace, policy, and world order into its object; in
short: such is its goal. Thus we see the inversion of Clausewitz’s
formula: politics becomes the continuation of war, and peace will
release, technologically, the unlimited material process of total war.
War ceases to be the materialization of the war machine, and rather it
is the war machine that itself becomes war itself materialized.” That’s
why it’s not worth it anymore to critique the cybernetic hypothesis
either: it has to be fought and defeated. It’s just a matter of time.
The Cybernetic Hypothesis is thus a political hypothesis, a new fable
that after the second world war has definitively supplanted the liberal
hypothesis. Contrary to the latter, it proposes to conceive biological,
physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and
re-programmable. More precisely, it conceives of each individual
behavior as something “piloted,” in the last analysis, by the need for
the survival of a “system” that makes it possible, and which it must
contribute to. It is a way of thinking about balance, born in a crisis
context. Whereas 1914 sanctioned the decomposition of the
anthropological conditions for the verification of the liberal
hypothesis — the emergence of Bloom and the bankruptcy, plain to see in
flesh and bone in the trenches, of the idea of the individual and all
metaphysics of the subject — and 1917 sanctioned its historical
contestation by the Bolshevik “revolution,” 1940 on the other hand
marked the extinction of the idea of “society,” so obviously brought
about by totalitarian self-destruction. As the limit-experiences of
political modernity, Bloom and totalitarianism thus have been the most
solid refutations of the liberal hypothesis. What Foucault would later
call (in a playful tone) “the death of Mankind,” is none other than the
devastation brought about by these two kinds of skepticism, the one
directed at individuals, and the other at society, and brought about by
the Thirty Years’ War which had so effected the course of Europe and the
world in the first half of the last century. The problem posed by the
Zeitgeist of those years was once again how to “defend society” against
the forces driving it towards decomposition, how to restore the social
totality in spite of a general crisis of presence afflicting it in its
every atom. The cybernetic hypothesis corresponds, consequently, to a
desire for order and certitude, both in the natural and social sciences.
The most effective arrangement of a constellation of reactions animated
by an active desire for totality — and not just by a nostalgia for it,
as it was with the various variants of romanticism — the cybernetic
hypothesis is a relative of not only the totalitarian ideologies, but
also of all the Holisms, mysticisms, and solidarities, like those of
Durkheim, the functionalists, or the Marxists; it merely takes over from
them.
As an ethical position, the cybernetic hypothesis is the complement,
however strictly opposed to it, of the humanist pathos that has been
back in vogue since the 1940s and which is nothing more than an attempt
to act as if “Man” could still think itself intact after Auschwitz, an
attempt to restore the classical metaphysics on the subject in spite of
totalitarianism. But whereas the cybernetic hypothesis includes the
liberal hypothesis at the same time as it transcends it, humanism’s aim
is to extend the liberal hypothesis to the ever more numerous situations
that resist it: It’s the “bad faith” of someone like Sartre, to turn one
of the author’s most inoperative categories against him. The ambiguity
that constitutes modernity, seen superficially either as a disciplinary
process or as a liberal process, or as the realization of
totalitarianism or as the advent of liberalism, is contained and
suppressed in, with and by the new governance mentality emerging now,
inspired by the cybernetic hypothesis. This is but the life-sized
experimentation protocol of the Empire in formation. Its realization and
extension, with the devastating truth-effects it produces, is already
corroding all the social institutions and social relations founded by
liberalism, and transforming both the nature of capitalism and the
possibilities of its contestation. The cybernetic gesture affirms itself
in the negation of everything that escapes regulation, all the escape
routes that existence might have in the interstices of the norms and
apparatuses, all the behavioral fluctuations that do not follow, in
fine, from natural laws. Insofar as it has come to produce its own
truths, the cybernetic hypothesis is today the most consequential
anti-humanism, which pushes to maintain the general order of things, all
the while bragging that it has transcended the human.
Like any discourse, the cybernetic hypothesis could only check to verify
itself by associating the beings or ideas that reinforce it, by testing
itself through contact with them, and folding the world into its laws in
a continuous self-validation process. It’s now an ensemble of devices
aspiring to take control over all of existence and what exists. The
Greek word kubernèsis means “the act of piloting a vessel,” and in the
figurative sense, the “act of directing, governing.” In his 1981–1982
classes, Foucault insisted on working out the meaning of this category
of “piloting” in the Greek and Roman world, suggesting that it could
have a more contemporary scope to it: “the idea of piloting as an art,
as a theoretical and practical technology necessary for existence, is an
idea that I think is rather important and may eventually merit a closer
analysis; one can see at least three types of technology regularly
attached to this ‘piloting’ idea: first of all medicine; second of all,
political government; third of all self-direction and self-government.
These three activities (healing, directing others, and governing
oneself) are quite regularly attached to this image of piloting in
Greek, Hellenic and Roman literature. And I think that this ‘piloting’
image also paints a good picture of a kind of knowledge and practice
that the Greeks and Romans had a certain affinity for, for which they
attempted to establish a tekhnè (an art, a planned system of practices
connected to general principles, notions, and concepts): the Prince,
insofar as he must govern others, govern himself, heal the ills of the
city, the ills of the citizens, and his own ills; he who governs himself
as if he were governing a city, by healing his own ills; the doctor who
must give his advice not only about the ills of the body but about the
ills of individuals’ souls. And so you see you have here a whole pack of
ideas in the minds of the Greeks and Romans that have to do I think with
one and the same kind of knowledge, the same type of activity, the same
type of conjectural understanding. And I think that one could dig up the
whole history of that metaphor practically all the way up to the 16^(th)
century, when a whole new art of governing, centered around Reasons of
State, would split apart — in a radical way — self
government/medicine/government of others — not without this image of
‘piloting,’ as you well know, remaining linked to this activity, that
activity which we call the activity of government.”
What Foucault’s listeners are here supposed to know well and which he
refrains from pointing out, is that at the end of the 20^(th) century,
the image of piloting, that is, management, became the cardinal metaphor
for describing not only politics but also all human activity.
Cybernetics had become the project of unlimited rationalization. In
1953, when he published The Nerves of Government in the middle of the
development of the cybernetic hypothesis in the natural sciences, Karl
Deutsch, an American university social sciences academic, took the
political possibilities of cybernetics seriously. He recommended
abandoning the old concept that power was sovereign, which had too long
been the essence of politics. To govern would become a rational
coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate
through the social body. Three conditions would need to be met, he said:
an ensemble of capturers would have to be installed so that no
information originating from the “subjects” would be lost; information
handling by correlation and association; and a proximity to every living
community. The cybernetic modernization of power and the expired forms
of social authority thus can be seen as the visible production of what
Adam Smith called the “invisible hand,” which until then had served as
the mystical keystone of liberal experimentation. The communications
system would be the nerve system of societies, the source and
destination of all power. The cybernetic hypothesis thus expresses no
more or less than the politics of the “end of politics.” It represents
at the same time both a paradigm and a technique of government. Its
study shows that the police is not just an organ of power, but also a
way of thinking.
Cybernetics is the police-like thinking of the Empire, entirely animated
by an offensive concept of politics, both in an historical and
metaphysical sense. It is now completing its integration of the
techniques of individuation — or separation — and totalization that had
been developing separately: normalization, “anatomo-politics,” and
regulation, “bio-politics,” as Foucault calls it. I call his “techniques
of separation” the police of qualities. And, following Lukács, I call
his “techniques of totalization” the social production of society. With
cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the
production of collective totalities work together like gears to
replicate History in the form of a feigned movement of evolution. It
acts out the fantasy of a Same that always manages to integrate the
Other; as one cybernetician puts it, “all real integration is based on a
prior differentiation.” In this regard, doubtless no one could put it
better than the “automaton” Abraham Moles, cybernetics’ most zealous
French ideologue, who here expresses this unparalleled murder impulse
that drives cybernetics: “We envision that one global society, one
State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected
against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them
into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by
objectively controllable social mechanisms.” Cybernetics is war against
all that lives and all that is lasting. By studying the formation of the
cybernetic hypothesis, I hereby propose a genealogy of imperial
governance. I then counterpose other wisdom for the fight, which it
erases daily, and by which it will be defeated.
“Synthetic life is certainly one of the possible products of the
evolution of techno-bureaucratic control, in the same way as the return
of the whole planet to the inorganic level, is -rather ironically —
another of the results of that same revolution, which has to do with the
technology of control.”
James R Beniger, The Control Revolution, 1986.
Even if the origins of the Internet device are today well known, it is
not uncalled for to highlight once again their political meaning. The
Internet is a war machine invented to be like the highway system, which
was also designed by the American Army as a decentralized internal
mobilization tool. The American military wanted a device which would
preserve the command structure in case of a nuclear attack. The response
would consist in an electronic network capable of automatically retaking
control over information itself if nearly the whole of the
communications links were destroyed, thus permitting the surviving
authorities to remain in communication with one another and make
decisions. With such a device, military authority could be maintained in
the face of the worst catastrophes. The Internet is thus the result of a
nomadic transformation of military strategy. With that kind of a plan at
its roots, one might doubt the supposedly anti-authoritarian
characteristics of this device. As is the Internet, which derives from
it, cybernetics is an art of war, the objective of which is to save the
head of the social body in case of catastrophe. What stands out
historically and politically during the period between the great wars,
and which the cybernetic hypothesis was a response to, was the
metaphysical problem of creating order out of disorder. The whole of the
great scientific edifice, in terms of what it had to do with the
determinist concepts of Newton’s mechanical physics, fell apart in the
first half of the century. The sciences, at that time, were like plots
of territory torn between the neo-positivist restoration and the
probabilist revolution, and slowly inching its way towards a historical
compromise so that the law could be re-established after the chaos, the
certain re-established after the probable. Cybernetics passed through
this whole movement — which began in Vienna at the turn of the century,
and was transported to England and the United States in the 1930s and
1940s, and constructed a Second Empire of Reason where the idea of the
Subject, up to that time considered indispensable, was absent. As a kind
of knowledge, it brought together an ensemble of heterogeneous
discourses all dealing with the practical problems of mastering
uncertainty. Discourses fundamentally expressing, in the various domains
of their application, the desire for a restoration of one order, and
furthermore the maintenance thereof.
Underlying the founding of Cybernetics was a context of total war. It
would be in vain to look for some malicious purpose or the traces of a
plot: one simply finds a handful of ordinary men mobilized by America
during the Second world war. Norbert Wiener, an American savant of
Russian origin, was charged with developing, with the aid of a few
colleagues, a machine for predicting and monitoring the positions of
enemy planes so as to more effectively destroy them. It was at the time
only possible at the time to predict with certitude certain correlations
between certain airplane positions and certain airplane
behaviors/movements. The elaboration of the “Predictor,” the prediction
machine ordered from Wiener, thus required a specific method of airplane
position handling and a comprehension of how the weapon interacts with
its target. The whole history of cybernetics has aimed to do away with
the impossibility of determining at the same time the position and
behavior of bodies. Wiener’s innovation was to express the problem of
uncertainty as an information problem, within a temporal series where
certain data is already known, and others not, and to consider the
object and the subject of knowledge as a whole, as a “system.” The
solution consisted in constantly introducing into the play of the
initial data the gap seen between the desired behavior and the effective
behavior, so that they coincide when the gap closes, like the mechanism
of a thermostat. The discovery goes considerably beyond the frontiers of
the experimental sciences: controlling a system would in the end require
a circulation of information to be instituted, called feed-back, or
retro-action. The wide implications of these results for the natural and
social sciences was exposed in 1948 in Paris in a work presented under
the foreboding name of Cybernetics, which for Wiener meant the doctrine
of “control and communication between animal and machine.”
Cybernetics thus emerged as a simple, inoffensive theory of information,
a theory for handling information with no precise origin, always
potentially present in the environment around any situation. It claims
that the control of a system is obtained by establishing an optimum
degree of communication between the parties to it. This objective calls
above all for the continuous extortion of information — a process of the
separation of beings from their qualities, of the production of
differences. In other words, as it were, mastery of a uncertainty would
arise from the proper representation and memorization of the past. The
spectacular image, binary mathematical encoding — invented by Claude
Shannon in Mathematical Theory of Communication in the very same year
that the cybernetic hypothesis was first expressed — on the one hand
they’ve invented memory machines that do not alter information, and put
incredible effort into miniaturizing them (this is the determinant
strategy behind today’s nanotechnology) and on the other they conspire
to create such conditions on the collective level. Thus put into form,
information would then be directed towards the world of beings,
connecting them to one another in the same way as commodity circulation
guarantees they will be put into equivalence. Retro-action, key to the
system’s regulation, now calls for communication in the strict sense.
Cybernetics is the project of recreating the world within an infinite
feedback loop involving these two moments: representation separating,
communication connecting, the first bringing death, the second mimicking
life.
The cybernetic discourse begins by dismissing as a false problem the
controversies of the 19^(th) century that counterposed mechanist visions
to vitalist or organicist visions of the world. It postulates a
functional analogy between living organisms and machines, assimilated
into the idea of “systems.” Thus the cybernetic hypothesis justifies two
kinds of scientific and social experiments. The first essentially aimed
to turn living beings into machines, to master, program, and determine
mankind and life, society and its “future.” This gave fuel for a return
of eugenics as bionic fantasy. It seeks, scientifically, the end of
History; initially here we are dealing with the terrain of control. The
second aims to imitate the living with machines, first of all as
individuals, which has now led to the development of robots and
artificial intelligence; then as collectives — and this has given rise
to the new intense circulation of information and the setting up of
“networks.” Here we’re dealing rather with the terrain of communication.
However much they may be socially comprised of highly diversified
populations — biologists, doctors, computer scientists, neurologists,
engineers, consultants, police, ad-men, etc. — the two currents among
the cyberneticians are perfectly in harmony concerning their common
fantasy of a Universal Automaton, analogous to Hobbes’ vision of the
State in Leviathan, “the artificial man (or animal).”
The unity of cybernetic progress arises from a particular method; it has
imposed itself as the world-wide method of universal enrollment,
simultaneously a rage to experiment, and a proliferating
oversimplification. It corresponds to the explosion of applied
mathematics that arose subsequent to the despair caused by the Austrian
Kurt Godel when he demonstrated that all attempts to give a logical
foundation to mathematics and unify the sciences was doomed to
“incompleteness.” With the help of Heisenberg, more than a century of
positivist justifications had just collapsed. It was Von Neumann that
expressed to the greatest extreme this abrupt feeling that the
foundations had been annihilated. He interpreted the logical crisis of
mathematics as the mark of the unavoidable imperfection of all human
creations. And consequently he laid out a logic that could only come
from a robot! From being a pure mathematician, he made himself an agent
of scientific crossbreeding, of a general mathematization that would
allow a reconstruction from below, in practice, of the lost unity of the
sciences of which cybernetics was to be the most stable theoretical
expression. Not a demonstration, not a speech, not a book, and no place
has not since then been animated by the universal language of
explanatory diagrams, the visual form of reasoning. Cybernetics
transports the rationalization process common to bureaucracy and to
capitalism up onto the plane of total templating (modeling). Herbert
Simon, the prophet of Artificial Intelligence, took up the Von Neumann
program again in the 1960s, to build a thinking automaton. It was to be
a machine equipped with a program, called expert system, which was to be
capable of handling information so as to resolve the problems that every
particular domain of technique had to deal with, and by association, to
be able to solve all the practical problems encountered by humanity! The
General Problem Solver (GPS), created in 1972, was the model that this
universal technique that gathered together all the others, the model of
all models, the most applied intellectualism, the practical realization
of the preferred adage of the little masters without mastery, according
to which “there are no problems, there are only solutions.”
The cybernetic hypothesis progresses indistinctly as theory and
technology, the one always certifying the other. In 1943, Wiener met
John Von Neumann, who was in charge of building machines fast and
powerful enough to carry out the Manhattan Project that 15,000 scholars
and engineers, and 300,000 technicians and workers were working on,
under the direction of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer: the modern
computer and the atomic bomb, were thus born together. From the
perspective of contemporary imagining, the “communications utopia” is
thus the complementary myth to the myth of the invention of nuclear
power and weaponry: it is always a question of doing away with
being-together (the ensemble of beings) either by an excess of life or
an excess of death, either by terrestrial fusion or by cosmic suicide.
Cybernetics presents itself as the response most suited to deal with the
Great Fear of the destruction of the world and of the human species. And
Von Neumann was its double agent, the “inside outsider” par excellence.
The analogy between his descriptive categories for his machines, living
organisms, and Wiener’s categories sealed the alliance between
cybernetics and computer science. A few years would pass before
molecular biology, when decoding DNA, would in turn use that theory of
information to explain man as an individual and as a species, giving an
unequalled technical power to the experimental genetic manipulation of
human beings.
The way that the systems metaphor evolved towards the network metaphor
in social discourse between the 1950s and 1980s points towards the other
fundamental analogy constituting the cybernetic hypothesis. It also
indicates a profound transformation of the latter. Because if PEOPLE
talked about “systems,” among cyberneticians it would be by comparison
with the nervous system, and if PEOPLE talk today about the cognitive
“network” sciences, THEY are thinking about the neuronal network.
Cybernetics is the assimilation of the totality of the phenomena that
exist into brain phenomena. By posing the mind as the alpha and omega of
the world, cybernetics has guaranteed itself a place as the avant-garde
of all avant-gardes, the one that they will now all forever be running
after. It effectively implements, at the start, the identity between
life, thought, and language. This radical Monism is based on an analogy
between the notions of information and energy. Wiener introduced it by
grafting onto his discourse the discourse of 19^(th) century
thermodynamics; the operation consisted in comparing the effect of time
on an energy system with the effect of time on an information system. A
system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect:
there is a degradation of its energy to the extent that it undergoes
exchanges, in the same way as information degrades as it is circulated
around. This is what Clausius called entropy. Entropy, considered as a
natural law, is the cybernetician’s Hell. It explains the decomposition
of life, disequilibrium in economy, the dissolution of social bonds,
decadence... Initially, speculatively, cybernetics claimed that it had
thus opened up a common ground on which it would be possible to carry
out the unification of the natural and human sciences.
What would end up being called the “second cybernetics” was the superior
project of a vast experimentation on human societies:
anthropotechnology. The cybernetician’s mission is to fight the general
entropy threatening living beings, machines, and societies; that is, to
create the experimental conditions for a permanent revitalization,
endlessly restoring the integrity of the whole. “The important thing
isn’t that mankind is present, but that it exists as a living support
for technical ideas,” says Raymond Ruyer, the humanist commentator. With
the elaboration and development of cybernetics, the ideal of the
experimental sciences, already at the origins of political economy via
Newtonian physics, would once again lend a strong arm to capitalism.
Since then, the laboratory the cybernetic hypothesis carries out its
experiments in has been called “contemporary society.” After the end of
the 1960s, thanks to the techniques that it taught, this ‘second
cybernetics’ is no longer a mere laboratory hypothesis, but a social
experiment. It aims to construct what Giorgio Cesarano calls a
stabilized animal society, in which “[concerning termites, ants, and
bees] the natural presupposition is that they operate automatically, and
that the individual is negated, so the animal society as a whole
(termite colony, anthill, or beehive) is conceived of as a kind of
plural individual, the unity of which determines and is determined by
the distribution of roles and functions — all within the framework of an
‘organic composite’ where one would be hard pressed to not see a
biological model for the teleology of Capital.”
“You don’t have to be a prophet to acknowledge that the modern sciences,
in their installation within society, will not delay in being determined
and piloted by the new basic science: cybernetics. This science
corresponds to the determination of man as a being the essence of which
is activity in the social sphere. It is, in effect the theory whose
object is to take over all possible planning and organization of human
labor.”
Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought, 1966
“But cybernetics on the other hand, sees itself as forced to recognize
that a general regulation of human existence is still not achievable at
the present time. This is why mankind still has a function,
provisionally, within the universal domain of cybernetic science, as a
“factor of disturbance.” The plans and acts of men, apparently free, act
as a disturbance. But very recently, science has also taken over
possession of this field of human existence. It has taken up the
rigorously methodical exploration and planning of the possible future of
man as an active player. In so doing, it figures in all available
information about what there is about mankind that may be planned.
Martin Heidegger, The Origin of Art and the Destination of Thought, 1967
In 1946, a conference of scientists took place in New York, the
objective of which was to extend the cybernetic hypothesis to the social
sciences. The participants agreed to make a clear disqualification of
all the philistine philosophies that based themselves on the individual
or on society. Socio-Cybernetics was to concentrate on the intermediary
phenomena of social feedback, like those that the American
anthropological school believed it had found at the time between
“culture” and “personality,” to put together a characterization of the
various nations, intended for use by American soldiers. The operation
consisted in reducing dialectical thought to an observation of processes
of circular causality within what was considered a priori to be an
invariable social totality, where contradiction and non-adaptation
merged, as in the central category of cybernetic psychology: the double
bind. As a science of society, cybernetics was intended to invent a kind
of social regulation that would leave behind the macro-institutions of
State and Market, preferring to work through micro-mechanisms of control
— preferring devices. The fundamental law of socio-cybernetics is as
follows: growth and control develop in inverse proportion to each other.
It is thus easier to construct a cybernetic social order on the small
scale: “the quick re-establishment of balance requires that
inconsistencies be detected at the very location where they are
produced, and that corrective action take place in a decentralized
manner.” Under the influence of Gregory Bateson, the Von Neumann of the
social sciences, and of the American sociological tradition, obsessed by
the question of deviance (the hobo, the immigrant, the criminal, the
youth, me, you, him, etc.), socio-cybernetics was aimed, as a priority,
towards studying the individual as a feedback locus, that is, as a
“self-disciplined personality.” Bateson became the social editor in
chief of the second half of the 20^(th) century, and was involved in the
origins of the “family therapy” movement, as well as those of the “sales
techniques training” movement developed at Palo Alto. Since the
cybernetic hypothesis as a whole calls for a radically new physical
structuring of the subject, whether individual or collective, its aim is
to hollow it out. It disqualifies as a myth individual
inwardness/internal dialogue, and with it all 19^(th) century
psychology, including psychoanalysis. 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. Each person was to become a
fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication,
the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes.
The cyberneticization process thus completes the “process of
civilization,” to where bodies and their emotions are abstracted within
the system of symbols. “In this sense,” writes Lyotard, “the system
presents itself as an avant-garde machine that drags humanity along
after it, by dehumanizing it so as to rehumanize it at another level of
normative capacities. Such is the great pride of the deciders, such is
their blindness... Even any permissiveness relative to the various games
is only granted on the condition that greater performance levels will be
produced. The redefinition of the norms of life consists in an
amelioration of the skills of the system in matters of power.”
Spurred on by the Cold War and its “witch hunts,” the
socio-cyberneticians thus tirelessly hunted down the pathological
couched behind the normal, the communist sleeping in everybody. In the
1950s, to this effect, they formed the Mental Health Federation, where
an original and quasi-final solution was elaborated to the problems of
the community and of the times: “It is the ultimate goal of mental
health to help people to live with their peers in the same world... The
concept of mental health is co-extensive with international order and
the global community, which must be developed so as to make men capable
of living in peace with each other.” By rethinking mental problems and
social pathologies in terms of informatics, cybernetics gave rise to a
new politics of subjects, resting on communication and transparency to
oneself and to others. Spurred on by Bateson, Wiener in turn began
thinking about a socio-cybernetics with a scope broader than the mere
project of mental hygiene. He had no trouble affirming the defeat of the
liberal experimentation: on the market information is always impure and
imperfect because of the lying implicit in advertising and the
monopolistic concentration of the media, and because of the ignorance of
the State, which as a collective contains less information than civil
society. The extension of commodity relations, by increasing the size of
communities and feedback chains, renders distortions of communication
and problems of social control ever more probable. The past processes of
accumulation had not only destroyed the social bonds, but social order
itself appeared cybernetically impossible within capitalism. The
cybernetic hypothesis’ stroke of luck can thus be understood in light of
the crises encountered by 20^(th) century capitalism, which questioned
once again the supposed “laws” of classical political economy — and that
was where the cybernetic discourse stepped into the breach.
The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from
the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of
1929 to 1945, economists’ attention was focused on questions of
anticipation, uncertainty regarding demand, adjustments between
production and consumption, and forecasts of economic activity. Smith’s
classical economics began to give out like the other scientific
discourses directly inspired by Newton’s physics. The preponderant role
that cybernetics was to play in the economy after 1945 can be understood
in light of Marx’s intuitive observation that “in political economy the
law is determined by its contrary, that is, the absence of laws. The
true law of political economy is chance.” In order to prove that
capitalism was not a factor in entropy and social chaos, the economic
discourse gave primacy to a cybernetic redefinition psychology starting
in the 1940s. It based itself on the “game theory” model, developed by
Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. 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. In the absence of an ability to understand
the whole ensemble of the behaviors of other economic actors, the
utilitarian idea of a rationality of micro-economic choices is but a
fiction. On the impetus of Friedrich von Hayek, the utilitarian paradigm
was thus abandoned in preference to a theory of spontaneous mechanisms
coordinating individual choices, acknowledging that each agent only has
a limited understanding of the behaviors of others and of his or her own
behaviors. The response consisted in sacrificing the autonomy of
economic theory by grafting it onto the cybernetic promise of a
balancing of systems. The hybrid discourse that resulted from this,
later called “neo-liberal,” considered as a virtue the optimal market
allocation of information — and no longer that of wealth — in society.
In this sense, 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 a simple means — the best possible means — of
producing social self-regulation.
Like in 1929, the planetary movement of contestation of 1968, and,
moreover, the post-1973 crisis present for political economy once more
the problem of uncertainty, this time on an existential and political
terrain. High-flown theories abound, with the old chatterbox Edgar Morin
and “complexity” theory, and Joel de Rosnay, that eccentric simpleton,
and “society in real-time.” Ecologist philosophy as well was nourished
by this new mystique of the Great Totality. Now totality was no longer
an origin to be rediscovered, but a future to build. For cybernetics it
is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the
present. It is no longer a question of static order, but of a dynamic
self-organization. The individual is no longer credited with any power
at all: his knowledge of the world is imperfect, he doesn’t know his own
desires, he is opaque to himself, everything escapes him, as
spontaneously cooperative, naturally empathetic, and fatally in
interdependent as he his. He knows nothing of all this, but THEY know
everything about him. Here, the most advanced form of contemporary
individualism comes into being; Hayekian philosophy is grafted onto him,
for which all uncertainty, all possibilities of any event taking place
is but a temporary problem, a question of his ignorance. Converted into
an ideology, liberalism serves as a cover for a whole group of new
technical and scientific practices, a diffuse “second cybernetics,”
which deliberately erases the name it was originally baptized with.
Since the 1960s, the term cybernetics itself has faded away into hybrid
terms. The science explosion no longer permits any theoretical
unification, in effect: the unity of cybernetics now manifests itself
practically through the world itself, which it configures every day. It
is the tool by which capitalism has adjusted its capacity for
disintegration and its quest after profit to one another. A society
threatened by permanent decomposition can be all the more mastered when
an information network, an autonomous “nervous system” is in place
allowing it to be piloted, wrote the State lackeys Simon Nora and Alain
Minc, discussing the case of France in their 1978 report. What PEOPLE
call the “New Economy” today, which brings together under the same
official nomenclature of cybernetic origin the ensemble of the
transformations that the western nations have undergone in the last
thirty years, is but an ensemble of new subjugations, a new solution to
the practical problem of the social order and its future, that is: a new
politics.
Under the influence of informatization, the supply and demand adjustment
techniques originating between 1930–1970 have been purified, shortened,
and decentralized. The image of the “invisible hand” is no longer a
justificatory fiction but is now the effective principle behind the
social production of society, as it materializes within computer
procedures. The Internet simultaneously permits one to know consumer
preferences and to condition them with advertising. On another level,
all information regarding the behavior of economic agents circulates in
the form of headings managed by financial markets. Each actor in
capitalist valorization is a real-time back-up of quasi-permanent
feedback loops. On the real markets, as on the virtual markets, each
transaction now gives rise to a circulation of information concerning
the subjects and objects of the exchange that goes beyond simply fixing
the price, which has become a secondary aspect. On the one hand, people
have realized the importance of information as a factor in production
distinct from labor and capital and playing a decisive role in “growth”
in the form of knowledge, technical innovation, and distributed
capacities. On the other, the sector specializing in the production of
information has not ceased to increase in size. In light of its
reciprocal reinforcement of these two tendencies, today’s capitalism
should be called the information economy. Information has become wealth
to be extracted and accumulated, transforming capitalism into a simply
auxiliary of cybernetics. The relationship between capitalism and
cybernetics has inverted over the course of the century: whereas after
the 1929 crisis, PEOPLE built a system of information concerning
economic activity in order to serve the needs of regulation — this was
the objective of all planning — the economy after the 1973 crisis put
the social self-regulation process came to be based on the valorization
of information.
“If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical
machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that
reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and
reversible ‘humans-machines systems’ replace the old nonrecurring and
nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the
relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual
communication, and no longer on usage or action. In the organic
composition of capital, variable capital defines a regime of subjection
of the worker (human surplus value), the principal framework of which is
the business or factory. But with automation comes a progressive
increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind
of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value
becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could
also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from
machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.”
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980
“The only moment of permanence of a class as such is that which has a
consciousness of its permanence for itself: the class of managers of
capital as social machine. The consciousness that connotes is, with the
greatest coherence, that of apocalypse, of self-destruction.”
Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975
Nothing expresses the contemporary victory of cybernetics better than
the fact that value can now be extracted as information about
information. The commodity-cybernetician, or “neo-liberal” logic,
extends over all activity, including that which is still not
commodified, with an unflagging support of modern States. More
generally, the corollary to the precarization of capitalism’s objects
and subjects is a growth of circulation in information on their subject:
this is as true for unemployed workers as it is for cops. Cybernetics
consequently aims to disturb and control people in one and the same
movement. It is founded on terror, which is a factor in its evolution —
the evolution of economic growth, moral progress — because it supplies
an occasion for the production of information. The state of emergency,
which is proper to all crises, is what allows self-regulation to be
relaunched, and to maintain itself as a perpetual movement. Whereas the
scheme of classical economy where a balance of supply and demand was to
permit “growth” and thusly to permit collective well-being, it is now
“growth” which is considered an endless road towards balance. It is thus
just to critique western modernity as a “infinite mobilization” the
destination of which is “movement towards more movement.” But from a
cybernetic point of view, the self-production that equally characterizes
the State, the Market, robots, wage workers, or the jobless, is
indiscernible from the self-control that moderates and slows it down.
It comes across clearly then that cybernetics is not just one of the
various aspects of contemporary life, its neo-technological component,
for instance, but rather it is the point of departure and arrival of the
new capitalism. Cybernetic Capitalism — what does that mean? It means
that since the 1970s we’ve been dealing with an emerging social
formation that has taken over from Fordist capitalism which results from
the application of the cybernetic hypothesis to political economy.
Cybernetic capitalism develops so as to allow the social body,
devastated by Capital, to reform itself and offer itself up for one more
process of accumulation. On the one hand capitalism must grow, which
implies destruction. On the other, it needs to reconstruct the “human
community,” which implies circulation. “There is,” writes Lyotard, “two
uses for wealth, that is importance-power: a reproductive use and a
pillage use. The first is circular, global, organic; the second is
partial, death-dealing, jealous... The capitalist is a conqueror, and
the conqueror is a monster, a centaur. His front side feeds off of
reproducing the regulated system of controlled metamorphoses under the
law of the commodity-talion, and its rear side off of pillaging
overexcited energies. On the one hand, to appropriate, and thus
preserve, that is, reproduce in equivalence, reinvest; on the other to
take and destroy, steal and flee, hollowing out another space, another
time.” The crises of capitalism, as Marx saw them, always came from a
de-articulation between the time of conquest and the time of
reproduction. The function of cybernetics is to avoid crises by ensuring
the coordination between Capital’s “front side” and “rear side.” Its
development is an endogenous response to the problem posed to capitalism
— how to develop without fatal disequilibrium arising.
In the logic of Capital, the development of the piloting function, of
“control,” corresponds to the subordination of the sphere of
accumulation to the sphere of circulation. For the critique of political
economy, circulation should be no less suspect than production, in
effect. It is, as Marx knew, but a particular case of production as
considered in general. The socialization of the economy — that is, the
interdependence between capitalists and the other members of the social
body, the “human community” — the enlargement of Capital’s human base,
makes the extraction of surplus value which is at the source of profit
no longer centered around the relations of exploitation instituted by
the wage system. Valorization’s center of gravity has now moved over to
the sphere of circulation. In spite of its inability to reinforce the
conditions of exploitation, which would bring about a crisis of
consumption, capitalist accumulation can still nevertheless survive on
the condition that the production-consumption cycle is accelerated, that
is, on the condition that the production process accelerates as much as
commodity circulation does. What has been lost to the economy on the
static level can be compensated on the dynamic level. The logic of flows
is to dominate the logic of the finished product. Speed is now taking
primacy over quantity, as a factor in wealth. The hidden face of the
maintenance of accumulation is the acceleration of circulation. The
function of the control devices is thus to maximize the volume of
commodity flows by minimizing the events, obstacles, and accidents that
would slow them down. Cybernetic capitalism tends to abolish time
itself, to maximize fluid circulation to the maximum: the speed of
light. Such is already the case for certain financial transactions. The
categories of “real time,” of “just in time,” show clearly this hatred
of duration. For this very reason, time is our ally.
This propensity towards control by capitalism is not new. It is only
post-modern in the sense that post-modernity has been confused with the
latest manifestation of modernity. It is for this reason that
bureaucracy developed at the end of the 19^(th) century and computer
technology developed after the Second World War. The cybernetization of
capitalism started at the end of the 1870s with the growing control of
production, distribution, and consumption. Information regarding these
flows has since then had a central strategic importance as a condition
for valorization. The historian James Beniger states that the first
control-related problems came about when the first collisions took place
between trains, putting commodities and human lives in peril. The
signalization of the railways, travel time measurement and data
transmission devices had to be invented so as to avoid such
“catastrophes.” The telegraph, synchronized clocks, organizational
charts in large enterprises, weighing systems, roadmaps, performance
evaluation procedures, wholesalers, assembly lines, centralized
decision-making, advertising in catalogues, and mass communications
media were the devices invented during this period to respond, in all
spheres of the economic circuit, to a generalized crisis of control
connected to the acceleration of production set off by the industrial
revolution in the United States. Information and control systems thus
developed at the same time as the capitalist process of transformation
of materials was growing and spreading. A class of middlemen, which
Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of Capital, formed and grew.
After the end of the 19^(th) century, it was clear enough to PEOPLE that
expectability [had] become a source of profit as such and a source of
confidence. Fordism and Taylorism were part of this movement, as was the
development of control over the mass of consumers and over public
opinion via marketing and advertising, in charge of extorting from them
by force, and then putting to work, their “preferences,” which according
to the hypotheses of the marginalist economists, were the true source of
value. Investment in organizational or purely technical planning and
control technologies became more and more salable. After 1945,
cybernetics supplied capitalism with a new infrastructure of machines —
computers — and above all with an intellectual technology that permitted
the regulation of the circulation of flows within society, and making
those flows exclusively commodity flows.
That the economic sectors of information, communication, and control
have taken ever more of a part in the economy since the Industrial
Revolution, and that “intangible labor” has grown relative to tangible
labor, is nothing surprising or new. Today these account for the
mobilization of more than 2/3 of the workforce. But this isn’t enough to
fully define cybernetic capitalism. Because its equilibrium and the
growth depend continually on its control capacities, its nature has
changed. Insecurity, much more than rarity, is the core of the present
capitalist economy. As Wittgenstein understood by looking at the 1929
crisis — and as did Keynes in his wake — there is a strong bond between
the “state of trust” and the curbing of the marginal effectiveness of
Capital, he wrote, in chapter XII of General Theory, in February 1934 —
the economy rests definitively on the “play of language.” Markets, and
with them commodities and merchants, the sphere of circulation in
general, and, consequently, business, the sphere of production as a
place of the anticipation of coming levels of yield, do not exist
without conventions, social norms, technical norms, norms of the truth,
on a meta-level which brings bodies and things into existence as
commodities, even before they are subject to pricing. The control and
communications sectors develop because commodity valorization needs to
have a looping circulation of information parallel to the actual
circulation of commodities, the production of a collective belief that
objectivizes itself in values. In order to come about, all exchanges
require “investments of form” — information about a formulation of what
is to be exchanged — a formatting that makes it possible to put things
into equivalence even before such a putting of things into equivalence
has effectively taken place, a conditioning that is also a condition of
agreement about the market. It’s true for goods, and it’s true for
people. Perfecting the circulation of information will mean perfecting
the market as a universal instrument of coordination. Contrary to what
the liberal hypothesis had supposed, to sustain a fragile capitalism,
contracts are not sufficient unto themselves within social relations.
PEOPLE began to understand after 1929 that all contracts need to come
with controls. Cybernetics entered into the operation of capitalism with
the intention of minimizing uncertainties, incommensurability, the kinds
of anticipation problems that can interfere in any commodity
transaction. It contributes to consolidating the basis for the
installation of capitalism’s mechanisms, to oiling Capital’s abstract
machine.
With cybernetic capitalism, the political moment of political economy
subsequently dominates its economic moment. Or, as Joan Robinson
understands it looking from the perspective of economic theory, in her
comments on Keynes: “As soon as one admits the uncertainty of the
forecasts that guide economic behavior, equilibrium has no more
importance and History takes its place.” The political moment, here
understood in the broader sense of that which subjugates, that which
normalizes, that which determines what will happen by way of bodies and
can record itself in socially recognized value, what extracts form from
forms-of-life, is as essential to “growth” as it is to the reproduction
of the system: on the one hand the capture of energies, their
orientation, their crystallization, become the primary source of
valorization; on the other hand, surplus value can be extracted from any
point on the bio-political tissue on the condition that the latter
reconstitutes itself incessantly. That the ensemble of expenditures has
a tendency to morph into valorizable qualities also means that Capital
permeates all living flows: the socialization of the economy and the
anthropomorphosis of Capital are two symbiotic, indissoluble processes.
In order for these processes to be carried out, it suffices and is
necessary that all contingent action be dealt with by a combination of
surveillance and data capture devices. The former are inspired by
prison, insofar as they introduce a centralized system of panoptical
visibility. These have for a long while been monopolized by the modern
State. The latter, the data capture devices, are inspired by computer
technology, insofar as they are part of the construction of a
decentralized real-time gridding system. The common intent of these
devices is total transparency, an absolute correspondence between the
map and the territory, a will to knowledge accumulated to such degree
that it becomes a will to power. One of the advancements made by
cybernetics has consisted in enclosing its surveillance and monitoring
systems upon themselves, guaranteeing that the surveillers and the
monitorers are themselves surveilled and/or monitored, with the
development of a socialization of control which is the trademark of the
so-called “information society.” The control sector becomes autonomous
because of the need to control control, since commodity flows are
overlaid by their double, flows of information the circulation and
security of which must in turn be optimized. At the summit of this
terracing of control, state control, the police, and the law,
self-legitimating violence, and judicial authority play the role of
controllers of last resort. The surveillance one-upmanship that
characterizes “control societies” is explained in simple terms by
Deleuze, who says: “they have leaks everywhere.” This incessantly
confirms the necessity for control. “In discipline societies, one never
ceased to recommence (from school to barracks, etc...) [the disciplinary
process], whereas in control societies nothing is ever finished.”
Thus there is nothing surprising about the fact that the development of
cybernetic capitalism has been accompanied by the development of all the
forms of repression, by hyper-securitarianism. Traditional discipline,
the generalization of a state of emergency — emergenza — are
transplanted to grow inside a whole system focused on the fear of any
threat. The apparent contradiction between the reinforcement of the
repressive functions of the State and the neo-liberal economic discourse
that preaches “less State” — and permits Loïc Wacquant for instance to
go into a critique of the liberal ideology hiding the increasing “penal
State” — can only be understood in light of the cybernetic hypothesis.
Lyotard explains it: “there is, in all cybernetic systems, a unity of
reference that permits one to measure the disparity produced by the
introduction of an event within the system, and then, thanks to such
measurement, to translate that event into information to be fed into the
system; then, in sum, if it is a regulated ensemble in homeostasis, to
annul that disparity and return the system to the quantities of energy
or information that it had before... Let’s stop here a moment. We see
how the adoption of this perspective on society, that is, of the
despotic fantasies of the masters, of placing themselves at the supposed
location of the central zero, and thus of identifying themselves with
the matrix of Nothingness... must force one to extend one’s idea of
threat and thus of defense. Since what event would NOT be a threat from
this point of view? All are; indeed, because they are disturbances of a
circular nature, reproducing the same, and requiring a mobilization of
energy for purposes of appropriation and elimination. Is this too
‘abstract’? Should I give an example? It is the very project that is
being perpetrated in France on high levels, the institution of an
operational Defense of the territory, already granted an operating
Center of the army, the specific focus of which is to ward off the
‘internal’ threat, which is born within the dark recesses of the social
body, of which the “national state” claims to be the clairvoyant head:
this clairvoyance is called the national identification registry; ...
the translation of events into information for the system is called
intelligence, ... and the execution of regulatory orders and their
inscription into the “social body,” above all when the latter is racked
by some kind of intense emotion, for instance by the panicked fear which
would seize hold of it if a nuclear war were to be triggered (or if some
kind of a wave of protest, subversion, or civil desertion considered
insane were to hit) — such execution requires an assiduous and
fine-grained infiltration of the transmission channels in the social
‘flesh,’ or, as some superior officer or other put it quite marvelously,
the ‘police of spontaneous movements.’” Prison is thus at the summit of
a cascade of control devices, the guarantor of last resort that no
disturbing event will take place within the social body that would
hinder the circulation of goods and persons. The logic of cybernetics
being to replace centralized institutions and sedentary forms of control
by tracing devices and nomadic forms of control, prison, as a classical
surveillance device, is obviously to be expanded and prolonged with
monitoring devices such as the electronic bracelet, for instance. The
development of community policing in the English speaking world, of
“proximity policing” in France, also responds to a cybernetic logic
intended to ward off all events, and organize feedback. Within this
logic, then, disturbances in a given zone can be all the better
suppressed/choked off when they are absorbed/deadened by the closest
system sub-zones.
Whereas repression has, within cybernetic capitalism, the role of
warding off events, prediction is its corollary, insofar as it aims to
eliminate all uncertainty connected to all possible futures. That’s the
gamble of statistics technologies. Whereas the technologies of the
Providential State were focused on the forecasting of risks, whether
probabilized or not, the technologies of cybernetic capitalism aim to
multiply the domains of responsibility/authority. Risk-based discourse
is the motor for the deployment of the cybernetic hypothesis; it is
first distributed diffusely so as then to be internalized. Because risks
are much more accepted when those that are exposed to them have the
impression that they’ve chosen to take them on, when they feel
responsible, and most of all when they have the feeling that they
control them and are themselves the masters of such risks. But, as one
expert admits, “zero risk” is a non-existent situation: “the idea of
risk weakens causal bonds, but in so doing it does not make them
disappear. On the contrary; it multiplies them. ...To consider danger in
terms of risk is necessarily to admit that one can never absolutely
protect oneself against it: one may manage it, tame it, but never
annihilate it.” It is in its permanence in the system that risk is an
ideal tool for affirming new forms of power, to the benefit of the
growing stranglehold of devices on collectives and individuals. It
eliminates everything that is at stake in conflicts by obligatorily
bringing individuals together around the management of threats that are
supposed to concern all of them in the same way. The argument that THEY
would like to make us buy is as follows: the more security there is, the
more concomitant production of insecurity there must be. And if you
think that insecurity grows as prediction becomes more and more
infallible, you yourself must be afraid of the risks. And if you’re
afraid of the risks, if you don’t trust the system to completely control
the whole of your life, your fear risks becoming contagious and
presenting the system with a very real risk of defiance. In other words,
to fear risks is already to represent a risk for society. The imperative
of commodity circulation upon which cybernetic capitalism rests morphs
into a general phobia, a fantasy of self-destruction. The control
society is a paranoid society, which easily explains the proliferation
of conspiracy theories within it. Each individual is thus subjectivized,
within cybernetic capitalism, as a Risk Dividual, as some enemy or
another [a “whatever enemy”] of the balanced society.
It should not be surprising then that the reasoning of France’s François
Ewald or Denis Kessler, those collaborators in chief of Capital, affirms
that the Providential State, characteristic of the Fordist mode of
social regulation, by reducing social risks, has ended up taking
responsibility away from individuals. The dismantling of social
protection systems that we’ve been seeing since the start of the 1980s
thus has been an attempt to give responsibility to each person by making
everyone bear the “risks” borne by the capitalists alone towards the
whole “social body.” It is, in the final analysis, a matter of
inculcating the perspective of social reproduction in each individual,
who should expect nothing from society, but sacrifice everything to it.
The social regulation of catastrophes and the unexpected can no longer
be managed by simple social exclusion, as it was during the Middle Ages
in the time of lepers, the logic of scapegoating, containment, and
enclosure. If everybody now has to become responsible for the risks they
make society run, it’s only because they couldn’t exclude so many
anymore without the loss of a potential source of profit. Cybernetic
capitalism thus forcibly couples the socialization of the economy and
the increase of the “responsibility principle.” It produces citizens as
“Risk Dividuals” that self-neutralize, removing their own potential to
destroy order. It is thus a matter of generalizing self-control, a
disposition that favors the proliferation of devices, and ensures an
effective relay. All crises, within cybernetic capitalism, are
preparations for a reinforcement of devices. The anti-GMO protest
movement, as well as the “mad cow crisis” of these last few years in
France, have definitively permitted the institution of an unheard of
tracking of Dividuals and Things. The accrued professionalization of
control — which is, with insurance, one of the economic sectors whose
growth is guaranteed by cybernetic logic — is but the other side of the
rise of the citizen as a political subjectivity that has totally
auto-repressed the risk that he or she objectively represents. This is
how Citizen’s Watch contributes to the improvement of piloting devices.
Whereas the rise of control at the end of the 19^(th) century took place
by way of a dissolution of personalized bonds — which gave rise to
PEOPLE talking about “the disappearance of communities” — in cybernetic
capitalism it takes place by way of a new soldering of social bonds
entirely permeated by the imperative of self-piloting and of piloting
others in the service of social unity: it is the device-future of
mankind as citizens of the Empire. The present importance of these new
citizen-device systems, which hollow out the old State institutions and
drive the nebulous citizen-community, demonstrates that the great social
machine which cybernetic capitalism has to comprise cannot do without
human beings no matter how much time certain incredulous cyberneticians
have put into believing it can, as is shown in this flustered epiphany
from the middle of the 1980s:
“Systematic automation would in effect be a radical means of surpassing
the physical or mental limitations that give rise to the most common of
human errors: momentary losses of vigilance due to fatigue, stress, or
routine; a provisional incapacity to simultaneously interpret a
multitude of contradictory information, thus failing to master
situations that are too complex; euphemization of risk under pressure
from circumstances (emergencies, hierarchical pressures...); errors of
representation giving rise to an underestimation of the security of
systems that are usually highly reliable (as might be the case of a
pilot who categorically refuses to believe that one of his jet engines
is on fire). One must however ask oneself whether removing the human
beings — who are considered the weakest link in the man/machine
interface — from the circuit would not definitely risk creating new
vulnerabilities and necessarily imply the extension of those errors of
representation and losses of vigilance that are, as we have seen, the
frequent counterpart of an exaggerated feeling of security. Either way,
the debate deserves to remain open.”
It certainly does.
“The eco-society is decentralized, communitarian, and participatory.
Individual responsibility and initiative really exist in it. The
eco-society rests on the plurality of ideas about life, life styles and
behaviors in life. The consequence of this is that equality and justice
make progress. But also there is an upheaval in habits, ways of
thinking, and morals. Mankind has invented a different kind of life, in
a balanced society, having understood that maintaining a state of
balance is more of a delicate process than maintaining a state of
continual growth is. Thanks to a new vision, a new logic of
complementarity, and new values, the people of eco-society have invented
an economic doctrine, a political science, a sociology, a technology,
and a psychology of the state of controlled equilibrium.”
Joel de Rosnay, The Macroscope, 1975
“Capitalism and socialism represent two kinds of organization of the
economy, deriving from the same basic system, a system for quantifying
value added. ... Looking at it from this angle, the system called
‘socialism’ is but the corrective sub-system applied to ‘capitalism.’
One may therefore say that the most outdated capitalism is socialist in
certain ways, and that all socialism is a ‘mutation’ of capitalism,
destined to attempt to stabilize the system via redistribution — the
redistribution considered necessary to ensure the survival of all, and
to incite everyone to a broader consumption. In this sketch we call a
kind of organization of the economy that would be designed so as to
establish an acceptable balance between capitalism and socialism ‘social
capitalism.’”
Yona Friedman, Realizable Utopias, 1974.
The events of May 68 gave rise to a political reaction in all western
societies that PEOPLE hardly recall the scope of today. Capitalism was
very quickly restructured, as if an army were being put on the march to
war. The Rome Club — multinationals like Fiat, Volkswagen, and Ford —
paid sociologists and ecologists to determine what products corporations
should give up manufacturing so that the capitalist system could
function better and be reinforced. In 1972, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology issued a report commissioned by said Rome Club, called
Limits to Growth, which made a big splash because it recommended
stopping the process of capitalist accumulation, including in the
so-called developing countries. From the lofty heights of domination,
THEY demanded “zero growth” so as to preserve social relations and the
resources of the planet, introducing qualitative components into their
analysis of development, against the quantitative projections focusing
on growth, and demanding — definitively — that it be entirely redefined;
that pressure grew until it burst in the 1973 crisis. Capitalism seemed
to have made its own self-critique. But I’m only bringing up the army
and war again because the MIT report, put together by the economist
Dennis H. Meadows, was inspired by the work of a certain Jay Forrester,
who in 1952 had been assigned by the US Air Force to the task of putting
together an alert and defense system — the SAGE system — which would for
the first time coordinate radars and computers in order to detect and
prevent a possible attack on American territory by enemy rockets.
Forrester had assembled infrastructure for communications and control
between men and machines, for the first time allowing them a “real time”
interconnection. After that he had been named to the MIT school of
management, to extend his skills in matters of systems analysis to the
economic world. He applied the same principles of order and defense to
business; he then went over cities and finally the whole of the planet
with these principles, in his book World Dynamics, which ended up an
inspiration to the MIT reporters. And so, the “second cybernetics” was a
key factor in establishing the principles applied in this restructuring
of capitalism. With it, political economy became a life science. It
analyzed the world as an open system for the transformation and
circulation of energy flows and monetary flows.
In France, an ensemble of pseudo-savants — the eccentric de Rosnay and
the blathering Morin, but also the mystic Henri Atlan, Henri Laborit,
René Passet and the careerist Attali — all came together to elaborate,
in MIT’s wake, Ten Commandments for a New Economy, an “eco-socialism,”
as they called it, following a systematic, that is, cybernetic,
approach, obsessed by the “state of equilibrium” everything and
everyone. It is useful, a posteriori, when listening to today’s “left”
and the “left of the left,” to remember certain of the principles de
Rosnay posited in 1975:
multi-culturality.
the regulation loops.
decentralization.
the visionary in chief of all cyberneticians said, “all real integration
is based on prior differentiation. ...Homogeneity, mixture, syncretism:
this is entropy. Only union within diversity is creative. It increases
complexity, and brings about higher levels of organization.”
It is no longer a matter — as PEOPLE could still pretend to believe in
1972 — of questioning capitalism and its devastating effects; it is more
a question of “reorienting the economy so as to better serve human
needs, the maintenance and evolution of the social system, and the
pursuit of a real cooperation with nature all at once. The balanced
economy that characterizes eco-society is thus a ‘regulated’ economy in
the cybernetic sense of the term.” The first ideologues of cybernetic
capitalism talked about opening a community-based management of
capitalism from below, about making everyone responsible thanks to a
“collective intelligence” which would result from the progress made in
telecommunications and informatics. Without questioning either private
property or State property, THEY invite us to co-management, to a kind
of control of business by communities of wage-workers and users. The
cybernetic reformist euphoria was at such extremes in the beginning of
the 1970s that THEY could even evoke the idea of a “social capitalism”
(as if that hadn’t been what we’ve had since the 19^(th) century)
without even trembling anymore, and defend it as did the architect
ecologist and graphomaniac Yona Friedman, for instance. Thus what PEOPLE
have ended up calling “third way socialism” and its alliance with
ecology — and PEOPLE can clearly see how powerful the latter has become
politically in Europe today — was crystallized. But if one had to refer
to just one event that in those years exposed the torturous progress
towards this new alliance between socialism and liberalism in France,
not without the hope that something different would come out of it, it
would have to be the LIP affair. With those events all of socialism,
even in its most radical currents, like “council communism,” failed to
take down the liberal arrangement and, without properly suffering any
real defeat to speak of, ended up simply absorbed by cybernetic
capitalism. The recent adherence of the ecologist Cohn-Bendit — the
mild-mannered ‘leader’ of the May 68 events — to the liberal-libertarian
current is but a logical consequence of a deeper reversal of “socialist”
ideas against themselves.
The present “anti-globalization” movement and citizen protest in general
show no break with this training by pronouncements made thirty years
ago. They simply demand that it be put into place faster. Behind the
thundering counter-summits they hold, one can see the same cold vision
of society as a totality threatened by break-up, one and the same goal
of social regulation. For them it is a matter of restoring the social
coherence pulverized by the dynamics of cybernetic capitalism, and
guaranteeing, in the final analysis, everyone’s participation in the
latter. Thus it is not surprising to see the driest economism impregnate
the ranks of the citizens in such a tenacious and nauseating manner. The
citizen, dispossessed of everything, parades as an amateur expert in
social management, and conceives of the nothingness of his life as an
uninterrupted succession of “projects” to carry out: as the sociologist
Luc Boltanski remarks, with a feigned naiveté, “everything can attain to
the dignity of a project, including enterprises which may be hostile to
capitalism.” In the same way as the “self-management” device was seminal
in the reorganization of capitalism thirty years ago, citizen protest is
none other than the present instrument of the modernization of politics.
This new “process of civilization” rests on the critique of authority
developed in the 1970s, at the moment when the second cybernetics
crystallized. The critique of political representation as separate
power, already co-opted by the new Management into the economic
production sphere, is today reinvested into the political sphere.
Everywhere there is only horizontality of relations, and participation
in projects that are to replace the dusty old hierarchical and
bureaucratic authority, counter-power and decentralization that is
supposed to defeat monopolies and secrecy. Thus the chains of social
interdependence can extend and tighten, chains which are sometimes made
of surveillance, and sometimes of delegation. Integration of civil
society by the State, and integration of the State by civil society more
and more work together like gears. It is thus that the division of the
labor of population management necessary for the dynamics of cybernetic
capitalism is organized — and the affirmation of a “global citizenship”
will, predictably, put the finishing touches on it.
After the 1970s socialism was just another democratism anymore, now
completely necessary for the progress of the cybernetic hypothesis. The
ideal of direct democracy and participatory democracy must be seen as
the desire for a general expropriation by the cybernetic system of all
the information contained in its parts. The demand for transparency and
traceability is but a demand for the perfect circulation of information,
a progressivism in the logic of flux that rules cybernetic capitalism.
Between 1965 and 1970, a young German philosopher, presumed to be the
inheritor of “critical theory,” laid the foundations for the democratic
paradigm of today’s contestation by entering noisily into a number of
controversies with his elders. Habermas countered the
socio-cybernetician Niklas Luhmann, hyper-functionalist systems
theoretician, by counterposing the unpredictability of dialogue,
arguments irreducible to simple information exchanges. But it was above
all against Marcuse that this project of a generalized “ethics of
discussion” which was to become radicalized in the critique of the
democratic project of the Renaissance. Marcuse explained, commenting on
Max Weber’s observations, that “rationalization” meant that technical
reasoning, based on the principles of industrialization and capitalism,
was indissolubly political reasoning; Habermas retorted that an ensemble
of immediate intersubjective relations escaped technology-mediated
subject-object relations, and that in the end it was the former that
framed and guided the latter. In other words, in light of the
development of the cybernetic hypothesis, politics should aim to become
autonomous and to extend the sphere of discourse, to multiply democratic
arenas, to build and research a consensus which in sum would be
emancipatory by nature. Aside from the fact that he reduced the “lived
world” and “everyday life” — the whole of what escaped the control
machine, to social interactions and discourses, Habermas more profoundly
ignored the fundamental heterogeneity of forms-of-life among themselves.
In the same way as contracts, consensus is attached to the objective of
unification and pacification via the management of differences. In the
cybernetic framework, all faith in “communicational action,” all
communication that does not assume the possibility of its impossibility,
ends up serving control. This is why science and technology are not, as
the idealist Habermas thought, simply ideologies which dress the
concrete tissue of inter-subjective relations. They are “ideologies
materialized,” a cascade of devices, a concrete government-mentality
that passes through such relations. We do not want more transparency or
more democracy. There’s already enough. On the contrary — we want more
opacity and more intensity.
But we can’t be done dealing with socialism (expired now as a result of
the cybernetic hypothesis) without mentioning another voice: I want to
talk about the critique centered around man-machine relations that has
attacked what it sees as the core of the cybernetics issue by posing the
question of technology beyond technophobia — the technophobia of someone
like Theodore Kaczynski, or of Oregon’s monkey-man of letters, John
Zerzan — and technophilia, and which intended to found a new radical
ecology which would not be stupidly romantic. In the economic crisis of
the 1970s, Ivan Illich was among the first to express the hope for a
re-establishment of social practices, no longer merely through a new
relations between subjects, as Habermas had discussed, but also between
subjects and objects, via a “reappropriation of tools” and institutions,
which were to be won over to the side of general “conviviality,” a
conviviality which would be able to undermine the law of value.
Simondon, philosopher of technology, used this same reappropriation as
his vaulting stick to transcend Marx and Marxism: “work possesses the
intelligence of the elements; capital possesses the intelligence of
groups; but it is not by uniting the intelligence of elements and of
groups that one can come up with an intelligence of the intermediary and
non-mixed being that is the technological individual... The dialogue of
capital and labor is false, because it is in the past. The socialization
of the means of production cannot alone give rise to a reduction in
alienation; it can only do so if it is the prior condition for the
acquisition, on the part of the human individual, of the intelligence of
the individuated technological object. This relationship of the human
individual to the technological individual is the most difficult to form
and the most delicate.” The solution to the problem of political
economy, of capitalist alienation, and of cybernetics, was supposed to
be found in the invention of a new kind of relationship with machines, a
“technological culture” that up to now had been lacking in western
modernity. Such a doctrine justified, thirty years later, the massive
development of “citizen” teaching in science and technology. Because
living beings, contrary to the cybernetic hypothesis’ idea, are
essentially different from machines, mankind would thus have the
responsibility to represent technological objects: “mankind, as the
witness of the machines,” wrote Simondon, “is responsible for their
relationship; the individual machine represents man, but man represents
the ensemble of machines, since there is no one machine for all the
machines, whereas there can be a kind of thinking that would cover them
all.” In its present utopian form, seen in the writings of Guattari at
the end of his life, or today in the writings of Bruno Latour, this
school claimed to “make objects speak”, and to represent their norms in
the public arena through a “parliament of Things.” Eventually the
technocrats would make way for the “mechanologues,” and other
“medialogues”; it’s hard to see how these would differ from today’s
technocrats, except for that they would be even more familiar with
technological life, citizens more ideally coupled with their devices.
What the utopians pretended not to know was that the integration of
technological thinking by everybody would in no way undermine the
existing power relations. The acknowledgement of the man-machines
hybridity in social arrangements would certainly do no more than extend
the struggle for recognition and the tyranny of transparency to the
inanimate world. In this renovated political ecology, socialism and
cybernetics would attain to their point of optimal convergence: the
project of a green republic, a technological democracy — “a renovation
of democracy could have as its objective a pluralistic management of the
whole of the machinic constituents,” wrote Guattari in the last text he
ever published — the lethal vision of a definitive civil peace between
humans and non-humans.
“Just like modernization did in a prior era, today’s post-modernization
(or informatization) marks a new way of becoming human. Regarding the
production of souls, as Musil put it, one would really have to replace
the traditional technology of industrial machines with the cybernetic
intelligence of information and communications technologies. We will
need to invent what Pierre Levy has called an ‘anthropology of
cyberspace.’”
Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire, 1999.
“Communication is the fundamental ‘third way’ of imperial control...
Contemporary communications systems are not subordinate to sovereignty;
on the contrary, it is sovereignty that appears to be subordinate to
communications... Communication is the form of capitalist production in
which capital has succeeded in entirely and globally subjugating society
to its regime, suppressing all the possible ways of replacing it.”
Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire, 1999.
The cybernetic utopia has not only sucked all the blood out of socialism
and its force as an opposition by making it into a “proximity
democratism.” In the confusion-laden 1970s, it also contaminated the
most advanced Marxism, making its perspective inoffensive and untenable.
“Everywhere,” wrote Lyotard in 1979, “in every way, the Critique of
political economy and the critique of the alienated society that was its
corollary are used as elements in the programming of the system.” Faced
with the unifying cybernetic hypothesis, the abstract axioms of
potentially revolutionary antagonisms — class struggle, “human
community” (Gemeinwesen) or “social living” versus Capital, general
intellect versus the process of exploitation, “multitudes” versus
“Empire,” “creativity” or “virtuosity” versus work, “social wealth”
versus commodity value, etc. — definitively serve the political project
of a broader social integration. The critique of political economy and
ecology do not critique the economic style proper to capitalism, nor the
totalizing and systemic vision proper to cybernetics; paradoxically,
they even make them into the engines driving their emancipatory
philosophies of history. Their teleology is no longer that of the
proletariat or of nature, but that of Capital. Today their perspective
is, deeply, one of social economy, of a “solidarity economy,” of a
“transformation of the mode of production,” no longer via the
socialization or nationalization of the means of production but via a
socialization of the decisions of production. As writers like for
example Yann Moulier Boutang put it, it is in the end a matter of making
recognized the “collective social character of the creation of wealth,”
that the profession of living as a citizen be valorized. This pretend
communism is reduced to no more than an economic democratism, to a
project to reconstruct a “post-Fordist” State from below. Social
cooperation is presented as if it were a pre-ordained given, with no
ethical incommensurability and no interference in the circulation of
emotions, no community problems.
Toni Negri’s career within the Autonomia group, and the nebula of his
disciples in France and in the anglo world, show just how much Marxism
could authorize such a slippery slide towards the will to will, towards
“infinite mobilization,” sealing its unavoidable eventual defeat by the
cybernetic hypothesis. The latter has had no problem plugging itself
into the metaphysics of production that runs throughout Marxism and
which Negri pushed to the extreme by considering all affects, all
emotions, all communications — in the final analysis — as labor. From
this point of view, autopoïesis, self-production, self-organization, and
autonomy are categories which all play a homologous role in the distinct
discursive formations they emerged from. The demands inspired by this
critique of political economy, such as the demand for a guaranteed
minimum income and the demand for “citizenship papers for all” merely
attack, fundamentally, the sphere of production. If certain people among
those who today demand a guaranteed income have been able to break with
the perspective of putting everyone to work — that is, the belief in
work as a fundamental value — which formerly still had predominance in
the unemployed workers’ movements, it was only on condition —
paradoxically — that they’d be able to keep the restrictive definition
of value they had inherited, as “labor value.” Thus they were able to
ignore just how much they contributed, in the end, to the circulation of
goods and persons.
It is precisely because valorization is no longer assignable to what
takes place solely in the production sphere that we must now displace
political gestures — I’m thinking of normal union strikes, for example,
not even to mention general strikes — into the spheres of product and
information circulation. Who doesn’t understand by now that the demand
for “citizenship papers for all” — if it is satisfied — will only
contribute to a greater mobility of the labor force worldwide? Even
American liberal thinkers have understood that. As for the guaranteed
minimum income, if that were obtained, would it not simply put one more
supplementary source of income into the circuit of value? It would just
represent a formal equivalent of the system’s investment in its “human
capital” — just another loan in anticipation of future production.
Within the framework of the present restructuring of capitalism, the
demand for a guaranteed minimum income could be compared to a
neo-Keynesian proposal to relaunch “effective demand” which could serve
as a safety net for the hoped-for development of the “New Economy.” Such
reasoning is also behind the adherence of many economists to the idea of
a “universal income” or a “citizenship income.” What would justify such
a thing, even from the perspective of Negri and his faithful flock, is a
social debt contracted by capitalism towards the “multitudes.” When I
said, above, that Negri’s Marxism had in the end operated, like all
other Marxisms, on the basis of an abstract axiom concerning social
antagonism, it’s only because it has a concrete need for the fiction of
a united social body. In the days when he was most on the offense, such
as the days he spent in France during the unemployed workers’ movement
of winter 1997–1998, his perspectives were focused on laying the
foundation for a new social contract, which he’d call communist. Within
classical politics, then, Negriism was already playing the avant-garde
role of the ecologist movements.
So as to rediscover the intellectual circumstances explaining this blind
faith in the social body, seen as a possible subject and object of a
contract, as an ensemble of equivalent elements, as a homogeneous class,
as an organic body, one would need to go back to the end of the 1950s,
when the progressive decomposition of the working class in western
societies disturbed marxist theoreticians since it overturned the axiom
of class struggle. Some of them thought that they could find in Marx’s
Grundrisse a demonstration, a prefiguring of what capitalism and its
proletariat were becoming. In his fragment on machines, Marx envisaged
that when industrialization was in full swing, individual labor power
would be able to cease being the primary source of surplus value, since
“the general social understandings, knowledge” would become the most
immediate of productive powers. This kind of capitalism, which PEOPLE
call “cognitive” today, would no longer be contested by a proletariat
borne of large-scale manufacturing. Marx supposed that such contestation
would be carried out by the “social individual.” He clarified the
reasoning behind this unavoidable process of reversal: “Capital sets in
motion all the forces of science and nature; it stimulates cooperation
and social commerce so as to liberate (relatively speaking) the creation
of wealth from labor time... These are the material conditions that will
break up the foundations of capital.” The contradiction of the system,
its catastrophic antagonism, came from the fact that Capital measures
all value by labor time, while simultaneously diminishing it because of
the productivity gains granted it by automation. Capitalism is doomed,
in sum, because it demands — at the same time — more labor and less
labor. The responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s, the cycle of
struggles which in Italy lasted more than ten years, gave an unexpected
blow of the whip to this teleology. The utopia of a world where machines
would work instead of us appeared to be within reach. Creativity, the
social individual, the general intellect - student youth, cultivated
dropouts, intangible laborers, etc. — detached from the relations of
exploitation, would be the new subject of the coming communism. For
some, such as Negri or Castoriadis, but also for the situationists, this
meant that the new revolutionary subject would reappropriate its
“creativity,” or its “imagination,” which had been confiscated by labor
relations, and would make non-labor time into a new source of self and
collective emancipation. Autonomia was founded as a political movement
on the basis of such analyses.
In 1973, Lyotard, who for a long while had associated with Castoriadis
within the Socialism or Barbarism group, noted the lack of
differentiation between this new marxist, or post-marxist, discourse and
the discourse of the new political economy: “The body of machines which
you call a social subject and the universal productive force of man is
none other than the body of modern Capital. The knowledge in play within
it is in no way proper to all individuals; it is separate knowledge, a
moment in the metamorphosis of capital, obeying it as much as it governs
it at the same time.” The ethical problem that is posed by putting one’s
hopes in collective intelligence, which today is found in the utopias of
the autonomous collective use of communications networks, is as follows:
“we cannot decide that the primary role of knowledge is as an
indispensable element in the functioning of society and to act,
consequently, in place of it, if we have already decided that the latter
is itself just a big machine. Inversely, we can’t count on its critical
function and imagine that we could orient its development and spread in
such a direction if we’ve already decided that it is not an integral
whole and that it remains haunted by a principle of contestation.” By
conjugating the two nevertheless irreconcilable terms of such an
alternative, the ensemble of heterogeneous positions of which we have
found the womb in the discourse of Toni Negri and his adepts (which
represents the point of completion of the marxist tradition and its
metaphysics) is doomed to restless political wandering, in the absence
of any destination other than whatever destination domination may set
for it. The essential issue here — an issue which seduces many an
intellectual novice — is that such knowledge is never power, that this
understanding is never self-understanding, and that such intelligence
always remains separate from experience. The political trajectory of
Negriism is towards a formalization of the informal, towards rendering
the implicit explicit, making the tacit obvious, and in brief, towards
valorizing everything that is outside of value. And in effect, Yann
Moulier Boutang, Negri’s loyal dog, ended up dropping the following
tidbit in 2000, in an idiotic cocaine-addict’s unreal rasp: “capitalism,
in its new phase, or its final frontier, needs the communism of the
multitudes.” Negri’s neutral communism, the mobilization that it
stipulates, is not only compatible with cybernetic capitalism — it is
now the condition for its effectuation.
Once the propositions in the MIT Report had been fully digested, the
“growth” economists highlighted the primordial role to be played by
creativity and technological innovation — next to the factors of Labor
and Capital — in the production of surplus value. And other experts,
equally well informed, learnedly affirmed that the propensity to
innovate depended on the degree of education, training, health, of
populations — after Gary Becker, the most radical of the economicists,
PEOPLE would call this “human capital” — and on the complementarity
between economic agents (a complementarity that could be favored by
putting in place a regular circulation of information through
communications networks), as well as on the complementarity between
activity and environment, the living human being and the non-human
living thing. What explains the crisis of the 1970s is that there was a
whole cognitive and natural social base for the maintenance of
capitalism and its development which had up to that time been neglected.
Deeper still, this meant that non-labor time, the ensemble of moments
that fall outside the circuits of commodity valorization — that is,
everyday life — are also a factor in growth, and contain a potential
value insofar as they permit the maintenance of Capital’s human base.
PEOPLE, since then, have seen armies of experts recommending to
businesses that they apply cybernetic solutions to their organization of
production: the development of telecommunications, organization in
networks, “participatory” or project-based management, consumer panels,
quality controls — all these were to contribute to upping rates of
profit. For those who wanted to get out of the crisis of the 1970s
without questioning capitalism, to “relaunch growth” and not stop it up
anymore, would consequently need to work on a profound reorganization of
it, towards democratizing economic choices and giving institutional
support to non-work (life) time, like in the demand for “freeness” for
example. It is only in this way that PEOPLE can affirm, today, that the
“new spirit of capitalism” inherits the social critique of the years
1960–1970: to the exact extent that the cybernetic hypothesis inspired
the mode of social regulation that was emerging then.
It is thus hardly surprising that communications, the realization of a
common ownership of impotent knowledge that cybernetics carries out,
today authorizes the most advanced ideologues to speak of “cybernetic
communism,” as have Dan Sperber or Pierre Levy — the
cybernetician-in-chief of the French speaking world, collaborator on the
magazine Multitudes, and author of the aphorism, “cosmic and cultural
evolution culminate today in the virtual world of cyberspace.”
“Socialists and communists,” write Hardt and Negri, have for a long time
been demanding free access and control for the proletariat over the
machines and materials it uses to produce. However, in the context of
intangible and biopolitical production, this traditional demand takes on
a new aspect. Not only do the masses use machines to produce, the masses
themselves become more and more mechanical, and the means of production
more and more integrated into the bodies and minds of the masses. In
this context, reappropriation means attaining free access to (and
control over) knowledge, information, communication, and
feelings/emotions, since those are some of the primary means of
biopolitical production.” In this communism, they marvel, PEOPLE
wouldn’t share wealth, they’d share information, and everybody would be
simultaneously a producer and consumer. Everyone will become their own
“self-media”! Communism will be a communism of robots!
Whether it merely breaks with the individualist premises about economy
or whether it considers the commodity economy as a regional component of
a more general economy — which is what’s implied in all the discussions
about the notion of value, such as those carried out by the German group
Krisis, all the defenses of gift against exchange inspired by Mauss, and
‘the anti-cybernetic energetics of someone like Bataille, as well as all
the considerations on the Symbolic, whether made by Bourdieu or
Baudrillard — the critique of political economy, in fine, remains
dependent on economicism. In a health-through-activity perspective, the
absence of a workers’ movement corresponding to the revolutionary
proletariat imagined by Marx was to be dealt with by the militant labor
of organizing one. “The Party,” wrote Lyotard, “must furnish proof that
the proletariat is real and it cannot do so any more than one can
furnish proof of an ideal of thought. It can only supply its own
existence as a proof, and carry out a realistic politics. The reference
point of its discourse remains directly unpresentable, non-ostensible.
The repressed disagreement has to do with the interior of the workers’
movement, in particular with the form taken by recurring conflicts on
the organization question.” The search for a fighting class of producers
makes the Marxists the most consequential of the producers of an
integrated class. It is not an irrelevant matter, in existential and
strategic terms, to enter into political conflict rather than producing
social antagonism, to be a contradictor within the system or to be a
regulator within it, to create instead of wishing that creativity would
be freed, to desire instead of desiring desire — in brief, to fight
cybernetics, instead of being a critical cybernetician.
Full of a sad passion for one’s roots, one might seek the premises for
this alliance in historical socialism, whether in Saint-Simon’s
philosophy of networks, in Fourier’s theory of equilibrium, or in
Proudhon’s mutualism, etc. But what the socialists all have in common,
and have for two centuries, which they share with those among them who
have declared themselves to be communists, is that they fight against
only one of the effects of capitalism alone: in all its forms, socialism
fights against separation, by recreating the social bonds between
subjects, between subjects and objects, without fighting against the
totalization that makes it possible for the social to be assimilated
into a body, and the individual into a closed totality, a subject-body.
But there is also another common terrain, a mystical one, on the basis
of which the transfer of the categories of thought within socialism and
cybernetics have been able to form an alliance: that of a shameful
humanism, an uncontrolled faith in the genius of humanity. Just as it is
ridiculous to see a “collective soul” in the construction of a beehive
by the erratic behavior of bees, as the writer Maeterlinck did at the
beginning of the century from a Catholic perspective, in the same way
the maintenance of capitalism is in no way dependent upon the existence
of a collective consciousness in the “masses” lodged within the heart of
production. Under cover of the axiom of class struggle, the historical
socialist utopia, the utopia of the community, was definitively a utopia
of One promulgated by the Head on a body that couldn’t be one. All
socialism today — whether it more or less explicitly categorizes itself
as democracy-, production-, or social contract-focused — takes sides
with cybernetics. Non-citizen politics must come to terms with itself as
anti-social as much as anti-state; it must refuse to contribute to the
resolution of the “social question,” refuse the formatting of the world
as a series of problems, and reject the democratic perspective
structured by the acceptance of all of society’s requests. As for
cybernetics, it is today no more than the last possible socialism.
“Theory means getting off on immobilization... What gives you
theoreticians a hard on and puts you on the level with our gang is the
coldness of the clear and the distinct; of the distinct alone, in fact;
the opposable, because the clear is but a dubious redundancy of the
distinct, expressed via a philosophy of the subject. Stop raising the
bar, you say! Escaping pathos — that’s your pathos.”
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 1975
When you’re a writer, poet or philosopher it’s customary to talk about
the power of the Word to hinder, foil, and pierce the informational
flows of the Empire, the binary enunciation machines. You’ve heard the
eulogists of poetry clamoring that they’re the last rampart against the
barbarism of communication. Even when he identifies his position with
that of the minor literatures, the eccentrics, the “literary lunatics,”
when he hunts down the idiolects that belabor their tongues to
demonstrate what escapes the code, so as to implode the idea of
comprehension itself, to expose the fundamental misunderstanding that
defeats the tyranny of information, the author who knows himself to be
acted through, spoken through, and traveled through by burning
intensities, is for all that no less animated, when seated before his
blank page, by a prophetic concept of wording. For me, as a “receiver,”
the shock effect that certain writings have deliberately dedicated
themselves to the quest for starting in the 1960s are in this sense no
less paralyzing than the old categorical and sententious critical theory
was. Watching from my easy chair as Guyotat or Guattari get off on each
line, contorting, burping, farting, and vomiting out their
delirium-future makes me get it up, moan, and get off only very rarely;
that is, only when some desire sweeps me away to the shores of
voyeurism. Performances, surely, but performances of what? Performances
of a boarding school alchemy where the philosopher’s stone is hunted
down amid mixed sprays of ink and cum. Proclaiming intensity does not
suffice to engender the passage of intensity. As for theory and
critique, they remain cloistered in a typeface of clear and distinct
pronouncements, as transparent as the passage ought to be from “false
consciousness” to clarified consciousness.
Far from giving into some mythology of the Word or an essentialization
of meaning, Burroughs, in his Electronic Revolution proposed forms of
struggle against the controlled circulation of pronouncements, offensive
strategies of enunciation that came to light in his “mental
manipulation” operations that were inspired by his “cut-up” experiments,
a combination of pronouncements based on randomness. By proposing to
make “interference/fog” into a revolutionary weapon, he undeniably
introduced a new level of sophistication to all prior research into
offensive language. But like the situationist practice of
“detournement”/media-hijacking, which in its modus operandi is in no way
distinguishable from “recuperation”/co-optation — which explains its
spectacular fortune — “interference/fog” is merely a relative operation.
This is also true for the contemporary forms of struggle on the Internet
which are inspired by these instructions of Burroughs’: piracy, virus
propagation, spamming... all these can in fine only serve to temporarily
destabilize the operation of the communications network. But as regards
the matter we are dealing with here and now, Burroughs was forced to
agree, in terms inherited — certainly — from theories of communication
that hypostatized the issuer-receiver relationship: “it would be more
useful to try to discover how the models of exploration could be altered
so as to permit the subject to liberate his own spontaneous models.”
What’s at issue in any enunciation is not whether it’s received but
whether it can become contagious. I call insinuation — the illapsus,
according to medieval philosophy — a strategy consisting in following
the twists and turns of thought, the wandering words that win me over
while at the same time constituting the vague terrain where their
reception will establish itself. By playing on the relationship of the
sign to what it refers to, by using clichés against themselves, like in
caricatures, by letting the reader come closer, insinuation makes
possible an encounter, an intimate presence, between the subject of the
pronouncement and those who relate to the pronouncement itself. “There
are passwords hidden under slogans,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “words
that are pronounced as if in passing, components of a passage; whereas
slogans mark points of stoppage, stratified and organized compositions.”
Insinuation is the haze of theory and suits a discourse whose objective
is to permit struggles against the worship of transparency, attached at
its very roots to the cybernetic hypothesis.
That the cybernetic vision of the world is an abstract machine, a
mystical fable, a cold eloquence which continually escapes multiple
bodies, gestures, words — all this isn’t enough to conclude its
unavoidable defeat. What cybernetics needs in that regard is precisely
the same thing that maintains it: the pleasure of extreme
rationalization, the burn-scars of “tautism” [tautological autism], the
passion for reduction, the orgasm of binary flattening. Attacking the
cybernetic hypothesis — it must be repeated — doesn’t mean just
critiquing it, and counterposing a concurrent vision of the social
world; it means experimenting alongside it, actuating other protocols,
redesigning them from scratch and enjoying them. Starting in the 1950s,
the cybernetic hypothesis has been the secret fascination of a whole
generation of “critical” thinkers, from the situationists to
Castoriadis, from Lyotard to Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. One might
map their responses in this way: these first opposed it by developing
their thought process outside it, overhanging it, and these second by
thinking within the heart of it, on the one hand “a metaphysical type of
disagreement with the world, which focuses on super-terrestrial,
transcendent worlds or utopian counter-worlds” and on the other hand “a
poïetic type of disagreement with the world, which sees the path to
freedom within the Real itself,” as Peter Sloterdijk summarizes. The
success of all future revolutionary experimentation will essentially be
measured by its capacity to make this conflict obsolete. This begins
when bodies change scale, feel themselves deepen, are passed through by
molecular phenomena escaping systemic points of view, escaping
representations of their molarity, make each of their pores into a
seeing machine clinging to the temporal evolutions of things instead of
a camera, which frames, delimits, and assigns beings. In the lines that
follow I will insinuate a protocol for experimentation, in an attempt to
defeat the cybernetic hypothesis and undo the world it perseveringly
persists in constructing. But like for other erotic or strategic arts,
its use isn’t something that is decided on nor something that imposes
itself. It can only originate in something totally involuntary, which
implies, of course, a certain casual manner.
“We also lack that generosity, that indifference to fate, which, if it
doesn’t give any great joy, does give one a familiarity with the worst
of degradations, and will be granted us by the world to come.”
Roger Caillois
“The Imaginary pays an ever higher price for its strength, while from
beyond its screen the possible Real shines through. What we have today,
doubtless, is but the domination of the Imaginary, having made itself
totalitarian. But this is precisely its dialectical and ‘natural’ limit.
Either, even desire itself and its subject, the process of attaining
corporeality of the latent Gemeinwesen, will be burnt away at the final
stake, or all simulacra will be dispelled: the extreme struggle of the
species rages on against the managers of alienation and, in the bloody
sunset of all these ‘suns of the future’ a truly possible future will at
last begin to dawn. Mankind, in order to truly Be, now only needs to
make a definitive break with all ‘concrete utopias.’
Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975
All individuals, groups, all lifestyles/forms-of-life, cannot fit into
the feedback loop. There are some that are just too fragile. That
threaten to snap. And there are some that are just too strong... that
threaten to break shit.
These temporal evolutions,
as an instance of breakage,
suppose that at a given moment of lived experience, bodies go through
the acute feeling that it can all abruptly come to an end,
from one moment to the next,
that the nothingness,
that silence,
that death are suddenly within reach of bodies and gestures.
It can end.
The threat.
Defeating the process of cybernetization, toppling the empire, will take
place through opening up a breach for panic. Because the Empire is an
ensemble of devices that aim to ward off all events, a process of
control and rationalization, its fall will be perceived by its agents
and its control apparatus as the most irrational of phenomena. The lines
that follow here give a cursory view of what such a cybernetic view of
panic might be, and indicate a contrario its effective power: “panic is
thus an inefficient collective behavior because it is not properly
adapted for danger (real or supposed); it is characterized by the
regression of mentalities to an archaic, gregarious level, and gives
rise to primitive, desperate flight reactions, disordered agitation,
physical violence, and general acts of self- or hetero-aggressivity:
panic reactions show the characteristics of the collective soul in a
altered state of perception and judgment; alignment on the basis of the
most unsophisticated behaviors; suggestibility; participation in
violence without any idea of individual responsibility.”
Panic makes the cyberneticians panic. It represents absolute risk, the
permanent potential threat that the intensification of relations between
lifestyles/forms-of-life presents. Because of this, it should be made as
terrifying as the appointed cybernetician himself endeavors to show it
being: “panic is dangerous for populations; it increases the number of
victims resulting from an accident by causing inappropriate flight
reactions, which may indeed be the only real reason for deaths and
injuries; every time it’s the same scenario: acts of blind rage,
trampling, crushing...” the lie in that description of course is that it
imagines panic phenomena exclusively from a sealed environment: as a
liberation of bodies, panic self-destructs because everyone tries to get
out through an exit that’s too narrow.
But it is possible to envision that there could be, as happened in Genoa
in July 2001, panic to a degree sufficient to fuck up the cybernetic
programming and pass through various social groups/milieus, panic that
would go beyond the annihilation stage, as Canetti suggests in Mass and
Power : “If we weren’t in a theater we could all run away together like
a flock of threatened animals, and increase the energy of our escape
with our movement in the same direction. An active mass fear of this
kind is the great collective event lived by all herd animals and who
save themselves together because they are good runners.” In this sense I
see as political fact of the greatest importance the panic involving
more than a million persons that Orson Welles provoked in 1938 when he
made his announcement over the airwaves in New Jersey, at a time when
radiophonics were still in early enough a state that people gave its
broadcasts a certain truth value. Because “the more we fight for our own
lives the more it becomes obvious that we are fighting against the
others hemming us in on all sides,” and alongside an unheard of and
uncontrollable expenditure, panic also reveals the naked civil war going
on: it is “a disintegration of the mass within the mass.”
In panic situations, communities break off from the social body,
designed as a totality, and attempt to escape it. But since they are
still physically and socially captive to it, they are obliged to attack
it. Panic shows, more than any other phenomenon, the plural and
non-organic body of the species. Sloterdijk, that last man of
philosophy, extends this positive concept of panic: “from a historical
perspective, the fringe elements are probably the first to develop a non
hysterical relationship with the possible apocalypse. ...Today’s fringe
consciousness is characterize by something that might be called a
pragmatic relationship with catastrophe.” To the question: “doesn’t
civilization have as a precondition the absence or even exclusion of the
panic element, to the extent that it must be built on the basis of
expectations, repetitions, security and institutions?” Sloterdijk
counters that “it is only thanks to the proximity of panic experiences
that living civilizations are possible.” They can thus ward off the
potential catastrophes of the era by rediscovering a primordial
familiarity with them. They offer the possibility of converting these
energies into “a rational ecstasy through which the individual opens up
to the intuitive idea: ‘I am the world’.” What really busts the levees
and turns panic in into a positive potential charge, a confused
intuition (in con-fusion) of its transcendence, is that each person,
when in a panic situation, is like the living foundation of his own
crisis, instead of undergoing it like some kind of exterior
inevitability. The quest after active panic — the “panic experience of
the world” — is thus a technique for assuming the risk of disintegration
that each person represents for society, as a risk dividual. It is the
end of hope and of all concrete utopias, forming like a bridge crossing
over to a state of waiting for/expecting nothing anymore, of having
nothing more to lose. And this is a way of reintroducing — through a
particular sensibility to the possibilities of lived situations, to
their possibilities of collapse, to the extreme fragility of their
organization — a serene relationship with the flight forward movement of
cybernetic capitalism. In the twilight of nihilism, fear must become as
extravagant as hope.
Within the framework of the cybernetic hypothesis, panic is understood
as a status change in the self-regulating system. For a cybernetician,
any disorder can only come from there having been a discrepancy between
the pre-set behaviors and the real behaviors of the system’s elements. A
behavior that escapes control while remaining indifferent to the system
is called “noise,” which consequently cannot be handled by a binary
machine, reduced to a 0 or a 1. Such noises are the lines of flight, the
wanderings of desires that have still not gone back into the
valorization circuit, the non-enrolled. What we call “the Imaginary
Party” is the heterogeneous ensemble of noises which proliferate beneath
the Empire, without however reversing its unstable equilibrium, without
modifying its state, solitude for instance being the most widespread
form of these passages to the side of the Imaginary Party. Wiener, when
he laid the foundation for the cybernetic hypothesis, imagined the
existence of systems — called “closed reverberating circuits” — where
the discrepancies between the behaviors desired by the whole and the
real behaviors of those elements would proliferate. He envisaged that
these noises could then brutally increase in series, like when a
driver/pilot’s panicked reactions make him wreck his vehicle after he’s
driven onto an icy road or hit a slippery spot on the highway. The
overproduction of bad feedbacks that distort what they’re supposed to
signal and amplify what they’re supposed to contain — such situations
point the way to a pure reverberatory power. The present practice of
bombarding certain nodal points on the Internet network with information
— spamming — aims to produce such situations. All revolt under and
against Empire can only be conceived in starting to amplify such
“noises,” capable of comprising what Prigogine and Stengers — who here
call up an analogy between the physical world and the social world —
have called “bifurcation points,” critical thresholds from which a new
system status becomes possible.
The shared error of Marx and Bataille with all their categories of
“labor power” or “expenditure” was to have situated the power to
overturn the system outside of the circulation of commodity flows, in a
pre-systemic exteriority set before and after capitalism, in nature for
the one, and in a founding sacrifice for the other, which were the
springboards from which one could think through the endless
metamorphosis of the capitalist system. In issue number one of the Great
Game [Le Grand Jeu], the problem of equilibrium-rupture is posed in more
immanent, if still somewhat ambiguous, terms: “This force that exists,
cannot remain unemployed in a cosmos which is full like an egg and
within which everything acts on and reacts to everything. So then there
must be some kind of trigger or lever that will suddenly turn the course
of this current of violence in another direction. Or rather in a
parallel direction, but on another plane thanks to a sudden shift. Its
revolt must become the Invisible Revolt.” It is not simply a matter of
the “invisible insurrection of a million minds” as the celestial Trocchi
put it. The force that we call ecstatic politics does not come from any
substantial outsideness, but from the discrepancy, the small variation,
the whirling motion that, moving outward starting from the interior of
the system, push it locally to its breaking point and thus pull up in it
the intensities that still pass between the various
lifestyles/forms-of-life, in spite of the attenuation of intensities
that those lifestyles effectuate. To put it more precisely, ecstatic
politics comes from desires that exceed the flux insofar as the flux
nourishes them without their being trackable therein, where desires pass
beneath the tracking radar, and occasionally establish themselves,
instantiating themselves among lifestyles that in a given situation are
playing the role of attractors. It is known that it is in the nature of
desire to leave no trace wherever it goes. Let’s go back to that moment
when a system at equilibrium can topple: “in proximity to bifurcation
points,” write Prigogine and Stengers, “where the system has a ‘choice’
between two operating regimes/modes, and is, in proper terms, neither in
the one nor the other, deviation from the general law is total: the
fluctuations can attain to the same heights of grandeur that the average
macroscopic values can... Regions separated by macroscopic distances
correlate together: the speed of the reactions produced there regulate
one another, and local events thus reverberate through the whole system.
This is when we truly see a paradoxical state, which defies all our
‘intuition’ regarding the behavior of populations, a state where the
smallest differences, far from canceling each other out, succeed one
another and propagate incessantly. The indifferent chaos of equilibrium
is thus replaced by a creative chaos, as was evoked by the ancients, a
fecund chaos from which different structures can arise.”
It would be naive to directly deduce, in this scientific description of
the potential for disorder, a new political art. The error of the
philosophers and of all thought that deploys itself without recognizing
in itself, in its very pronouncement, what it owes to desire, is that it
situates itself artificially above the processes that it is aiming to
discuss, even when it is based on experience; something Prigogne and
Stengers are not themselves immune to, by the way. Experimentation,
which does not consist in completed experiences but in the process of
completing them, is located within fluctuation, in the heart of the
noise, lying in wait for the bifurcation. The events that take place
within the social, on a level significant enough to influence fates in
general, are comprised of more than just a simple sum of individual
behaviors. Inversely, individual behaviors can no longer have, alone, an
influence on fates in general. There remain, however, three stages,
which are really one, and which, even though they are not represented,
are felt by bodies anyway as immediately political problems: I’m talking
about the amplification of non-conforming acts, the intensification of
desires and their rhythmic accord; the arrangement of territory, even if
“fluctuations cannot invade the whole system all at once. They must
first take place within a particular region. Depending on whether this
initial region has smaller than critical dimensions or not... the
fluctuation will either regress, or, contrarily, it will invade and
overtake the whole system.” So there are three questions, then, which
require investigation in view of an offensive against the Empire: a
question of force, a question of rhythm, and a question of momentum.
“That’s what generalized programs sharpen their teeth on; on little bits
of people, on little bits of men who don��t want any program.”
Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, “Free Jazz: Out of Program, Out of
Subject, in Out Field”, 2000
“The few active rebels should have the qualities of speed and endurance,
be ubiquitous, and have independent sources of provisions.”
T.E. Lawrence, “Guerrilla” Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume X, 1926
These questions, seen from the neutralized and neutralizing perspective
of the laboratory observer or of the chat-room/salon, must be reexamined
in themselves, and tested out. Amplifying the fluctuations: what’s that
mean to me? How can deviance, mine for example, give rise to disorder?
How do we go from sparse, singular fluctuations, the discrepancies
between each individual and the norm, each person and the devices, to
futures and to destinies? How can what capitalism routs, what escapes
valorization, become a force and turn against it? Classical politics
resolved this problem with mobilization. To Mobilize meant to add, to
aggregate, to assemble, to synthesize. It meant to unify little
differences and fluctuations by subjecting them to a great crime, an
un-rectifiable injustice, that nevertheless must be rectified.
Singularities were already there. They only had to be subsumed into a
unique predicate. Energy was also already there. It just needed to be
organized. I’ll be the head, they’ll be the body. And so the
theoretician, the avant-garde, the party, have made that force operate
in the same way as capitalism did, by putting it into circulation and
control in order to seize the enemy’s heart and take power by taking off
its head, like in classical war.
The invisible revolt, the “coup-du-monde” [world coup] that Trocchi
talked about, on the contrary, plays on potential. It is invisible
because it is unpredictable in the eyes of the imperial system.
Amplified, the fluctuations relative to the imperial devices never
aggregate together. They are as heterogeneous as desires are, and can
never form a closed totality; they can’t even form into a “masses,”
which name itself is just an illusion if it doesn’t mean an
irreconcilable multiplicity of lifestyles/forms-of-life. Desires flee;
they either reach a clinamen or not, they either produce intensity or
not, and even beyond flight they continue to flee. They get restive
under any kind of representation, as bodies, class, or party. It must
thus be deduced from this that all propagation of fluctuations will also
be a propagation of civil war. Diffuse guerrilla action is the form of
struggle that will produce such invisibility in the eyes of the enemy.
The recourse to diffuse guerrilla action taken by a fraction of the
Autonomia group in 1970s Italy can be explained precisely in light of
the advanced cybernetic character of the Italian govern-mentality of the
time. These years were when “consociativism,” which prefigured today’s
citizenism, was developing; the association of parties, unions, and
associations for the distribution and co-management of Power. This
sharing is not the most important thing here; the important thing is
management and control. This mode of government goes far beyond the
Providential State by creating longer chains of interdependence between
citizens and devices, thus extending the principles of control and
management from administrative bureaucracy.
It was T.E. Lawrence that worked out the principles of guerrilla war
from his experience of fighting alongside the Arabs against the Turks in
1916. What does Lawrence tell us? That the battle itself is no longer
the only process involved in war, in the same way as the destruction of
the heart of the enemy is no longer its central objective; a fortiori if
this enemy is faceless, as is the case when dealing with the impersonal
power materialized in the Empire’s cybernetic devices: “The majority of
wars are contact based; two forces struggling to remain close to one
another in order to avoid any tactical surprises. The war of the Arabs
had to be a rupture based war: containing the enemy with the silent
threat of a vast desert unknown to it and only revealing themselves at
the moment of attack.” Deleuze, though he too rigidly opposed guerrilla
war, posed the problem of individuality and war, and that of collective
organization, clarified that it was a question of opening up space as
much as possible, and making prophecies, or rather of “fabricating the
real instead of responding to it.” The invisible revolt and diffuse
guerrilla war do not sanction injustices, they create a possible world.
In the language of the cybernetic hypothesis, I can create invisible
revolt and diffuse guerrilla war on the molecular level in two ways.
First gesture: I fabricate the real, I break things down, and break
myself down by breaking it all down. This is the source of all acts of
sabotage What my act represents at this moment doesn’t exist for the
device breaking down with me. Neither 0 nor 1, I am the absolute
outsider/third party. My orgasm surpasses devices/my joy infuriates
them. Second gesture: I do not respond to the human or mechanical
feedback loops that attempt to encircle me/figure me out; like Bartleby,
I’d “prefer not to.” I keep my distance, I don’t enter into the space of
the flows, I don’t plug in, I stick around. I wield my passivity as a
force against the devices. Neither 0 nor 1, I am absolute nothingness.
Firstly: I cum perversely. Secondly: I hold back. Beyond. Before. Short
Circuiting and Unplugging. In the two cases the feedback does not take
place and a line of flight begins to be drawn. An external line of
flight on the one hand that seems to spread outwards from me; an
internal line of flight that brings me back to myself. All forms of
interference/fog come from these two gestures, external and internal
lines of flight, sabotage and retreat, the search for forms of struggle
and for the assumption of different forms-of-life. Revolution is now
about figuring out how to conjugate those two moments.
Lawrence also tells how it was also a question that it took the Arabs a
long time to resolve when fighting the Turks. Their tactics consisted
basically in “always advancing by making small hits and withdrawing,
neither making big drives, nor striking big blows. The Arab army never
sought to keep or improve their advantage, but to withdraw and go strike
elsewhere. It used the least possible force in the least possible time
and hit the most withdrawn positions.” Primacy was given to attacks
against war supplies, and primarily against communications channels,
rather than against the institutions themselves, like depriving a
section of railway of rail. Revolt only becomes invisible to the extent
that it achieves its objective, which is to “deny all the enemy’s
goals,” to never provide the enemy with easy targets. In this case it
imposes “passive defense” on the enemy, which can be very costly in
materials and men, in energies, and extends into the same movement its
own front, making connections between the foci of attack. Guerrilla
action thus since its invention tends to be diffuse. This kind of
fighting immediately gives rise to new relationships which are very
different than those that exist within traditional armies: “we sought to
attain maximum irregularity and flexibility. Our diversity disoriented
the enemy’s reconnaissance services... If anyone comes to lack
conviction they can stay home. The only contract bonding them together
was honor. Consequently the Arab army did not have discipline in the
sense where discipline restrains and smothers individuality and where it
comprises the smallest common denominator of men.” However, Lawrence did
not idealize the anarchist spirit of his troops, as spontaneists in
general have tended to do. The most important thing is to be able to
count on a sympathetic population which then can become a space for
potential recruitment and for the spread of the struggle. “A rebellion
can be carried out by two percent active elements and 98 percent passive
sympathizers,” but this requires time and propaganda operations.
Reciprocally, all offensives involving an interference with the opposing
lines imply a perfect reconnaissance/intelligence service that “must
allow plans to be worked out in absolute certainty” so as to never give
the enemy any goals. This is precisely the role that an organization now
might take on, in the sense that this term once had in classical
politics; serving a function of reconnaissance/intelligence and the
transmission of accumulated knowledge-powers. Thus the spontaneity of
guerrilleros is not necessarily opposed to organizations as strategic
information collection tanks.
But the important thing is that the practice of interference, as
Burroughs conceived it, and after him as hackers have, is in vain if it
is not accompanied by an organized practice of reconnaissance into
domination. This need is reinforced by the fact that the space where the
invisible revolt can take place is not the desert spoken of by Lawrence.
And the electronic space of the Internet is not the smooth neutral space
that the ideologues of the information age speak of it as either. The
most recent studies confirm, moreover, that the Internet is vulnerable
to targeted and coordinated attacks. The web matrix was designed in such
a way that the network would still function if there were a loss of 99%
of the 10 million routers — the cores of the communications network
where the information is concentrated — destroyed in a random manner, as
the American military had initially imagined. On the other hand, a
selective attack, designed on the basis of precise research into traffic
and aiming at 5% of the most strategic core nodes — the nodes on the big
operators’ high-speed networks, the input points to the transatlantic
lines — would suffice to cause a collapse of the system. Whether virtual
or real, the Empire’s spaces are structured by territories, striated by
the cascades of devices tracing out the frontiers and then erasing them
when they become useless, in a constant scanning sweep comprising the
very motor of the circulation flows. And in such a structured,
territorialized and deterritorialized space, the front lines with the
enemy cannot be as clear as they were in Lawrence’s desert. The floating
character of power and the nomadic dimensions of domination thus require
an increased reconnaissance activity, which means an organization for
the circulation of knowledge-powers. Such was to be the role of the
Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science (SASC).
In Cybernetics and Society, when he foresaw, only too late, that the
political use of cybernetics tends to reinforce the exercise of
domination, Wiener asked himself a similar question, as a prelude to the
mystic crisis that he was in at the end of his life: “All the techniques
of secrecy, interference in messages, and bluffing consist in trying to
make sure that one’s camp can make a more effective use than the other
camp of the forces and operations of communication. In this combative
use of information, it is just as important to leave one’s own
information channels open as it is to obstruct the channels that the
opposing side has at its disposal. An overall confidentiality/secrecy
policy almost always implies the involvement of much more than the
secrets themselves.” The problem of force reformulated as a problem of
invisibility thus becomes a problem of modulation of opening and
closing. It simultaneously requires both organization and spontaneity.
Or, to put it another way, diffuse guerrilla war today requires that two
distinct planes of consistency be established, however meshed they may
be — one to organize opening, transforming the interplay of
lifestyles/forms-of-life into information, and the other to organize
closing, the resistance of lifestyles/forms-of-life to being made into
information. Curcio: “The guerrilla party is the maximum agent of
invisibility and of the exteriorization of the proletariat’s
knowledge-power; invisibility towards the enemy cohabiting with it, on
the highest level of synthesis.” One may here object that this is after
all nothing but one more binary machine, neither better nor worse than
any of those that are at work in cybernetics. But that would be
incorrect, since it means not seeing that at the root of these gestures
is a fundamental distance from the regulated flows, a distance that is
precisely the condition for any experience within the world of devices,
a distance which is a power that I can layer and make a future from. It
would above all be incorrect because it would mean not understanding
that the alternation between sovereignty and unpower cannot be
programmed, that the course that these postures take is a wandering
course, that what places will end up chosen — whether on the body, in
the factory, in urban or peri-urban non-places — is unpredictable.
“The revolution is the movement, but the movement is not the revolution”
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, 1977
“In a world of regulated scenarios,
minutely pre-calculated programs,
impeccable music scores,
well-placed choices and acts,
what puts up any obstacles, what
hangs back, what wobbles?
Wobbliness indicates the body.
Of the body.
This limping/wobbling indicates a weak-heeled man.
A God held onto him there. He was God by the heel. The Gods limp
whenever they aren’t hunchbacked.
The dysfunction is the body. What wobbles, hurts, holds up poorly, the
exhaustion of breath, the miracle of balance. And music holds up no more
than man.
Bodies have still not been properly regulated by the law of commodities.
They don’t work. They suffer. They get worn out. They get it wrong. They
escape.
Too hot, too cold, too near, too far, too fast, too slow.”
Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, “Free Jazz: Out of Program, Out of
Subject, in Out Field”, 2000
People have often insisted — T.E. Lawrence is no exception — on the
kinetic dimensions of politics and war as a strategic counterpoint to a
quantitative concept of relations of force. That’s the typical guerrilla
perspective as opposed to the traditional perspective. It’s been said
that if it can’t be massive, a movement should be fast, faster than
domination. That was how the Situationist International formulated their
program in 1957: “it should be understood that we are going to be seeing
and participating in a race between free artists and the police to
experiment with and develop the new techniques of conditioning. The
police already have a considerable head start. The outcome depends on
the appearance of passionate and liberating environments, or the
reinforcement — scientifically controllable and smooth — of the
environment of the old world of oppression and horror... If control over
these new means is not totally revolutionary, we could be led towards
the police-state ideal of a society organized like a beehive.” In light
of this lattermost image, an explicit but static vision of cybernetics
perfected as the Empire is fleshing it out, the revolution should
consist in a reappropriation of the most modern technological tools, a
reappropriation that should permit contestation of the police on their
own turf, by creating a counter-world with the same means that it uses.
Speed here is understood as one of the important qualities of the
revolutionary political arts. But this strategy implies attacking
sedentary forces. In the Empire, such forces tend to fade as the
impersonal power of devices becomes nomadic and moves around, gradually
imploding all institutions.
Conversely, slowness has been at the core of another section/level of
struggles against Capital. Luddite sabotage should not be interpreted
from a traditional marxist perspective as a simple, primitive rebellion
by the organized proletariat, a protest action by the reactionary
artisans against the progressive expropriation of the means of
production given rise to by industrialization. It is a deliberate slow
down of the flux of commodities and persons, anticipating the central
characteristic of cybernetic capitalism insofar as it is movement
towards movement, a will to potential, generalized acceleration. Taylor
conceived the Scientific Organization of Labor as a technique for
fighting “soldiering/go-slow” phenomena among laborers which represented
an effective obstacle to production. On the physical level, mutations of
the system also depend on a certain slowness, as Prigogine and Stengers
point out: “The faster communications within the system are, the bigger
is the proportion of insignificant fluctuations incapable of
transforming the state of the system: therefore, that state will be all
the more stable.” Slowdown tactics thus have a supplementary potential
in struggles against cybernetic capitalism because they don’t just
attack it in its being but in its process itself. But there’s more:
slowness is also necessary to putting lifestyles/forms-of-life that are
irreducible to simple information exchanges into relation with each
other. It expresses resistance of relations to interaction.
Above and beyond speed and slowness in communications, there is the
space of encounters which allow one to trace out an absolute limit to
the analogy between the social world and the physical world. This is
basically because two particles never encounter one another except where
their rupture phenomena can be deduced from laboratory observations. The
encounter is that durable instant where intensities manifest between the
forms-of-life present in each individual. It is, even above the social
and communications, the territory that actualizes the potentials of
bodies and actualizes itself in the differences of intensity that they
give off and comprise. Encounters are above language, outside of words,
in the virgin lands of the unspoken, in suspended animation, a potential
of the world which is also its negation, its “power to not be.” What is
other people? “Another possible world,” responds Deleuze. The Other
incarnates the possibility that the world has of not being, of being
otherwise. This is why in the so-called “primitive” societies war takes
on the primordial importance of annihilating any other possible world.
It is pointless, however, to think about conflict without also thinking
about enjoyment, to think about war without thinking about love. In each
tumultuous birth of love, the fundamental desire to transform oneself by
transforming the world is reborn. The hate and suspicion that lovers
excite around them is an automatic defensive response to the war they
wage, merely by loving each other, against a world where all passion
must misunderstand itself and die off.
Violence is the first rule of the game of encounters. And it polarizes
the various wanderings of desire that Lyotard invokes the sovereign
freedom of in his book Libidinal Economy. But because he refuses to
admit that enjoyments agree together on a particular territory to
precede them and where forms-of-life can mix and move together; because
he refuses to understand that the neutralization of all intensities is
itself a kind of intensification — that of the Empire, no less — because
he can’t deduce from this that while they are inseparable, life impulses
and death impulses are not neutral relative to a singular Other, Lyotard
in the end cannot go beyond the most cybernetization-compatible
hedonism: relax, let yourself go, let out your desires! Enjoy, enjoy;
there’ll always be something left! There’s no doubt that conduction,
abandon, and mobility in general can heighten the amplification of
deviations from the norm as long as they acknowledge what interrupts
flows within the very heart of circulation itself. In light of the
acceleration that cybernetics gives rise to, speed and nomadism can only
be secondary developments beside the primary slow-down policies.
Speed upholds institutions. Slowness cuts off flows. The kinetic
problem, properly speaking, in politics, thus isn’t about choosing
between two kinds of revolt but about abandoning oneself to a pulsation,
of exploring other intensifications besides those that are commanded by
the temporality of urgency. The cyberneticians’ power has been their
ability to give rhythm to the social body, which tends to prevent all
respiration. Canetti proposes that rhythm’s anthropological genesis is
associated with racing: “Rhythm is at its origin a rhythm of feet; it
produces, intentionally or not, a rhythmic noise.” But this racing is
not predictable as a robot’s would be; “the two feet never land with the
same force. The difference between them might be more or less vast,
depending on personal dispositions and moods. But you can also go faster
or more slowly, run, suddenly stop, jump...” This means that rhythm is
the opposite of a program, that it depends on forms-of-life, and that
speed problems can be dealt with by looking at rhythm issues. All
bodies, insofar as they are wobbly, have a certain rhythm that shows
that it is in their nature to hold untenable/unholdable positions. This
rhythm, which comes from the limping/wobble of bodies, the movement of
feet, Canetti adds, is — furthermore — at the origins of writing, in the
sense that it started with the tracks left by animals in motion, that
is, of History in motion. Events are the appearance of such traces and
making History means improvising in search of a rhythm. Whatever credit
we give to Canetti’s demonstrations, they do indicate — as true fictions
do — that political kinetics can be better understood as the politics of
rhythm. This means, a minima, that the binary techno-rhythm imposed by
cybernetics must be opposed by other rhythms.
But it also means that these other rhythms, as manifestations of
ontological wobbliness, have always had a creative political function.
Canetti himself also discusses how on the one hand “the rapid repetition
by which steps are added onto steps gives the illusion that there’s a
larger number of beings present. They do not move from place to place,
they carry on their dance always in the same location. The noise made by
their steps does not die, it is repeated and echoes out for a long time,
always with the same resonance and the same vivacity. They make up for
their small size in number by their intensity.” On the other hand, “when
their trampling is reinforced, it is as if they had called for backup.
They exercise a force of attraction on everybody in the area, a force
that doesn’t stop as long as they continue their dance.” Searching for
good rhythm, then, opens things up for an intensification of experience
as well as for numerical increase. It is an instrument of aggregation as
well as an exemplary action to be imitated. On the individual scale as
well as on the social scale, bodies themselves lose their sense of unity
in order to grow as potential weapons: “the equivalence of the
participants ramifies out into the equivalency of their members.
Everything mobile about a human body takes on a life of its own, each
leg, each arm lives as if for itself alone.” The politics of rhythm is
thus the search for a reverberation, another state, comparable to trance
on the part of the social body, through the ramification of each body.
Because there are indeed two possible regimes of rhythm in the
cybernetized Empire. The first, which Simondon refers to, is that of the
technician-man, who “ensure the integrative function and prolong
self-regulation outside of each monad of automatism,” technicians whose
“lives are made up of the rhythm of the machines surrounding them, and
that connect them to each other.” The second rhythm aims to undermine
this interconnective function: it is profoundly dis-integrating, rather
than merely noisy. It is a rhythm of disconnection. The collective
conquest of this accurate dissonant tempo must come from a prior abandon
to improvisation.
“Lifting the curtain of words, improvisation becomes gesture,
an act still unspoken,
a form still unnamed, un-normed, un-honored.
To abandon oneself to improvisation
to liberate oneself already — however beautiful they may be -
from the world’s already-present musical narratives.
Already present, already beautiful, already narratives, already a world.
To undo, o Penelope, the musical bandaging that forms
our cocoon of sound,
which is not the world, but is the ritual habit of the world.
Abandoned, it offers itself up to what floats outside and around
meaning,
around words,
around the codes;
it offers itself up to the intensities,
to reserve, to enthusiasm, to energy,
in sum, to the nearly-unnamable.
...Improvisation welcomes threats and transcends them,
it dispossesses them of themselves and records their potential and
risk.”
“It’s the haze, the solar haze, filling space. Rebellion itself is a
gas, a vapor. Haze is the first state of nascent perception and produces
the mirage in which things climb and drop, like the movement of a
piston, and men rise and hover, suspended by a cord. Hazy vision,
blurred vision; a sketch of a kind of hallucinatory perception, a cosmic
gray. The gray splits in two, and gives out black when shadow wins out
or light disappears, but also gives out white when the luminous itself
becomes opaque.”
Gilles Deleuze, “Shame and Glory: T.E. Lawrence,” Critic and Clinic,
1993.
“No one and nothing gives an alternative adventure as a present: there’s
no possible adventure besides that of conquering a fate. You can’t wage
this conquest without starting from that spatio-temporal place where
‘your’ things stamp you as one of theirs.”
Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975
From the cybernetic perspective, threats cannot be welcomed and
transcended a fortiori. They must be absorbed, eliminated. I’ve already
said that the infinitely renewed impossibility of this annihilation of
events is the final certainty that practices of opposition to the
device-governed world can be founded on. Threat, and its generalization
in the form of panic, poses an unsolvable energetic problem for the
holders of the cybernetic hypothesis. Simondon thus explains that
machines with a high information outflow and control their environment
with precision have a weak energetic output. Conversely, machines that
require little energy to carry out their cybernetic mission produce a
poor rendering of reality. The transformation of forms into information
basically contains two opposing imperatives: “information is in one
sense that which brings a series of unpredictable, new states, following
no predefined course at all; it is thus that which requires absolute
availability from an information channel with respect to all the aspects
of modulation that it routes along; the information channel should in
itself have no predetermined form and should not be selective... On the
opposite hand, information is distinct from noise because information
can be assigned a certain code and given a relative uniformization; in
all cases where noise cannot be immediately/directly brought down to
below a certain level, a reduction of the margin of indetermination and
unpredictability in information signals is made.” In other words, for a
physical, biological, or social system to have enough energy to ensure
its reproduction, its control devices must carve into the mass of the
unknown, and slice into the ensemble of possibilities between what is
characterized by pure chance, and has nothing to do with control, and
what can enter into control as hazard risks, immediately susceptible to
a probability calculation. It follows that for any device, as in the
specific case of sound recording devices, “a compromise should be made
that preserves a sufficient information output to meet practical needs,
and an energy output high enough to keep the background noise at a level
that does not disturb the signal levels.” Or take the case of the police
as another example; for it, this would just be a matter of finding the
balance point between repression — the function of which is to decrease
social background noise — and reconnaissance/intelligence — which inform
them about the state of and movements in society by looking at the
signals it gives off.
To provoke panic first of all means extending the background
interference that imposes itself when the feedback loops are triggered,
and which makes the recording of behavioral discrepancies by the
ensemble of cybernetic apparatuses costly. Strategic thinking grasped
the offensive scope of such interference early on. When Clausewitz was
so bold as to say, for example, that “popular resistance is obviously
not fit to strike large-scale blows” but that “like something vaporous
and fluid, it should not condense anywhere.” Or when Lawrence
counterposed traditional armies, which “resemble immobile plants,” and
guerrilla groups, comparable to “an influence, an idea, a kind of
intangible, invulnerable entity, with no front or back, which spreads
everywhere like a gas.” Interference is the prime vector of revolt.
Transplanted into the cybernetic world, the metaphor also makes
reference to the resistance to the tyranny of transparency which control
imposes. Haze disrupts all the typical coordinates of perception. It
makes it indiscernible what is visible and what is invisible, what is
information and what is an event. This is why it represents one of the
conditions for the possibility of events taking place. Fog makes revolt
possible. In a novel called “Love is Blind,” Boris Vian imagined what
the effects of a real fog in existing relations. The inhabitants of a
metropolis wake up one morning filled by a “tidal wave of opacity” that
progressively modifies all their behaviors. The needs imposed by
appearances quickly become useless and the city is taken over by
collective experimentation. Love becomes free, facilitated by a
permanent nudity of all bodies. Orgies spread everywhere. Skin, hands,
flesh; all regain their prerogative, since “the domain of the possible
is extended when one is no longer afraid that the light might be turned
on.” Incapable of prolonging a fog that they did not contribute to the
formation of, they are relieved when “the radio says that experts have
noted that the phenomenon will be returning regularly.” In light of this
everyone decides to put out their own eyes so that life can go on
happily. The passage into destiny: the fog Vian speaks of can be
conquered. It can be conquered by reappropriating violence, a
reappropriation that can even go as far as mutilation. This violence
consists entirely in the clearing away of defenses, in the opening of
throughways, meanings, minds. “Is it never pure?” asks Lyotard. “Is a
dance something true? One could still say yes. But that’s not its
power.” To say that revolt must become foglike means that it should be
dissemination and dissimulation at the same time. In the same way as the
offensive needs to make itself opaque in order to succeed, opacity must
make itself offensive in order to last: that’s the cipher of the
invisible revolt.
But that also means that its first objective must be to resist all
attempts to reduce it away with demands for representation. Fog is a
vital response to the imperative of clarity, transparency, which is the
first imprint of imperial power on bodies. To become foglike means that
I finally take up the part of the shadows that command me and prevent me
from believing all the fictions of direct democracy insofar as they
intend to ritualize the transparency of each person in their own
interests, and of all persons in the interests of all. To become opaque
like fog means recognizing that we don’t represent anything, that we
aren’t identifiable; it means taking on the untotalizable character of
the physical body as a political body; it means opening yourself up to
still-unknown possibilities. It means resisting with all your power any
struggle for recognition. Lyotard: “What you ask of us, theoreticians,
is that we constitute ourselves as identities, as managers. But if
there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that this operation (of exclusion)
is just a cheap show, that incandescences are made by no one, and belong
to no one.” Nevertheless, it won’t be a matter of reorganizing a few
secret societies or conquering conspiracies like free-masonry,
carbonarism, as the avant-gardes of the last century envisioned — I’m
thinking mostly of the College of Sociology. Establishing a zone of
opacity where people can circulate and experiment freely without
bringing in the Empire’s information flows, means producing “anonymous
singularities,” recreating the conditions for a possible experience, an
experience which will not be immediately flattened out by a binary
machine assigning a meaning/direction to it, a dense experience that can
transform desires and the moments where they manifest themselves into
something beyond desire, into a narrative, into a filled-out body. So,
when Toni Negri asked Deleuze about communism, the latter was careful
not to assimilate it into a realized and transparent communication: “you
ask whether societies of control or communication would give rise to
forms of resistance capable of giving a new chance for a communism
conceived as a ‘transverse organization of free individuals.’ I don’t
know; perhaps. But this would be impossible if minorities got back hold
of the megaphone. Maybe words, communication, are rotten. They’re
entirely penetrated by money: not by accident, but by their nature. We
have to detourn/misuse words. Creating has always been something
different from communicating. The important thing is maybe to create
vacuoles of non-communication, interrupters who escape control.” Yes,
the important thing for us is to have opacity zones, opening cavities,
empty intervals, black blocs within the cybernetic matrix of power. The
irregular war waged against the Empire, on the level of a given place, a
fight, a riot, from now on will start with the construction of opaque
and offensive zones. Each of these zones shall be simultaneously a small
group/nucleus starting from which one might experiment without being
perceptible, and a panic-propagating cloud within the ensemble of the
imperial system, the coordinated war machine, and spontaneous subversion
at all levels. The proliferation of these zones of offensive opacity
(ZOO), and the intensification of their interrelations, will give rise
to an irreversible disequilibrium.
As a way of showing the kinds of conditions needed to “create opacity,”
as a weapon and as an interrupter of flows, it is useful to look one
more time to the internal criticisms of the cybernetic paradigm.
Provoking a change of status/state in a physical or social system
requires that disorder, deviations from the norm, be concentrated into a
space, whether real or virtual. In order that behavioral fluctuations
become contagious, it is necessary that they first attain a “critical
mass,” the nature of which is clarified by Prigogine and Stengers: “It
results from the fact that the ‘outside world,’ the environment around
the fluctuating region, always tends to deaden the fluctuation. Critical
mass measures the relationship between the volume, where the reactions
take place, and the contact surface, the place of linkage. Critical mass
is thus determined by a competition between the system’s ‘power of
integration’ and the chemical mechanisms that amplify the fluctuation
within the fluctuating subregion.” This means that all deployment of
fluctuations within a system is doomed to fail if it does not have at
its disposition a local anchor, a place from which the deviations that
arise can move outwards, contaminating the whole system. Lawrence
confirms it, one more time: “The rebellion must have an unassailable
base, a place sheltered not only from attack but from the fear of
attack.” In order for such a place to exist, it has to have “independent
supply lines,” without which no war is conceivable. If the question of
the base is central to all revolt, it is also because of the very
principles on the basis of which systems can attain equilibrium. For
cybernetics, the possibility of a contagion that could topple the system
has to be absorbed/deadened by the most immediate environment around the
autonomous zone where the fluctuations take place. This means that the
effects of control are more powerful in the periphery closest to the
offensive opacity zone that creates itself around the fluctuating
region. The size of the base must consequently grow ever greater as
proximity monitoring is upheld.
These bases must also be as inscribed in the space itself as in people’s
minds: “The Arab revolt,” Lawrence explains, “was to be found in the
ports of the red sea, in the desert, or in the minds of the men who
supported it.” These are territories as much as they are mentalities.
We’ll call them planes of consistency. In order that offensive opacity
zones can form and be reinforced, there need to be planes like that,
which connect deviations together, which work like a lever and fulcrum
to overturn fear. Autonomy, historically — the Italian Autonomia group
of the 1970s for example, and the Autonomy that is possible is none
other than the continual movement of perseverance of planes of
consistency that establish themselves as unrepresentable spaces, as
bases for secession from society. The reappropriation by the critical
cyberneticians of the category of autonomy/self-rule — along with the
ideas deriving from it, self-organization, auto-poïesis, self-reference,
self-production, self-valorization, etc. — is from this point of view
the central ideological maneuver of the last twenty years. Through the
cybernetic prism, giving oneself one’s own laws, producing
subjectivities, in no way contradict the production of the system and
its regulation. By calling for the multiplication of Temporary
Autonomous Zones (TAZ) in the real world and in the virtual world ten
years ago, Hakim Bey became the victim of the idealism of those who
wanted to abolish politics without having thought about it first. He
found himself forced to separate out a place for hedonistic practice
within the TAZ, to separate out a place for the “anarchist” expression
of forms-of-life from the place of political resistance, from the form
of the struggle. If autonomy is here thought of as something temporary,
it is because thinking about its duration would require conceiving of a
struggle that merges with all of life; envisioning for example the
transmission of warrior knowledge. Bey-type Liberal-anarchists are
unaware of the field of intensities in which their sovereignty cries out
to be deployed and their project of a social contract with no State at
root postulates the identity of all beings since in the end it is about
maximizing pleasures in peace until the end of time. On the one hand. On
the one hand the TAZ are defined as “free enclaves,” places whose law is
freedom, good things, the Marvelous. On the other, the secession from
the world that they issue from, the “folds” that they lodge themselves
in between the real and its encoding, would not come into being until
after a succession of “refusals.” This “Californian Ideology,” by posing
autonomy as an attribute of individual or collective subjects,
deliberately confuses two incommensurable planes: the “self-realization”
of persons and the “self-organization” of society. This is because
autonomy, in the history of philosophy, is an ambiguous notion that
simultaneously expresses liberation from all constraints and submission
to higher natural laws, and can serve to feed the hybrid and
restructuring discourses of the “anarcho-capitalist” cyborgs.
The autonomy I’m talking about isn’t temporary nor simply defensive. It
is not a substantial quality of beings, but the very condition of their
becoming/future. It doesn’t leave the supposed unity of the Subject, but
engenders multiplicities. It does not attack merely the sedentary forms
of power, like the State, and then skim over the circulating, “mobile,”
“flexible” forms. It gives itself the means of lasting and of moving
from place to place, means of withdrawing as well as attacking, opening
itself up as well as closing itself off, connecting mute bodies as
bodiless voices. It sees this alternation as the result of an endless
experimentation. “Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are
grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it
alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to
annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that
autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be
amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a
fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become
the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.