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Title: Chapter 2 - The Cybernetics Hypothesis Author: Tiqqun Language: en
“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 19th 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 19th 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.”