There is probably no domain of man’s thinking or material activity that Cybernetics will not come to have a role in someday.
the worst nightmares are often of a fable, fables PEOPLE tell their kids to put them to sleep and perfect their moral education.
the new conquerors (the cyberneticians) do not comprise an organized party anymore, but 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 Apollo worshipers.
the Great Legends may indeed be dead, as the postmodern canon often claims, but domination is still comprised of a master-fiction.
such was the case for Fable of the Bees published by Bernard de Mandeville in the first years of the 18th century, contributing to the founding of political economy and to justifying the advances made by Capitalism: prosperity, 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.
thus Mandeville, “the Devil-Man” as PEOPLE called him at the time, founded the Liberal Hypothesis, opposed to the religious spirit of his times, the hypothesis which would later have great influence on Adam Smith.
though regularly reinvoked, this fable is obsolete today: for critical minds, it’s not worth it anymore to even critique liberalism for a new model has taken its place, hiding behind names like “the internet” and “new information and communications technology” and “the new economy” or “genetic engineering.”
liberalism today is an alibi for the everyday crimes committed by Cybernetics.
no matter where one finds themselves in the spectrum of modern political discourse, the “critical minds” hardly appear inclined to take into account the emergence of cybernetics as a new technology of government, which federates and associates both discipline and biopolitics, police and advertising, its predecessors in the development of domination, all too ineffective today.
Cybernetics as a new technology of government is not a separate sphere of the production of information and communication, a virtual subspace superimposed on the planet.
Cybernetics and the cyberspace it creates 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, to form a political sovereignty.
in other words, cybernetics-as-technology-for-governance is 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 the goal of the war machine.
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 then ceases to be the materialization of the war machine, and rather it is the war machine that itself becomes war itself materialized.
that is why it is not enough to critique the Cybernetic Hypothesis either: it has to be fought and defeated — it is just a matter of Time.
the Cybernetic Hypothesis is thus a new fable, that proposes contrary to the Liberal Hypothesis, to conceive biological, physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and reprogrammable.
more precisely, it conceives of each individual behavior as something piloted by the need for the survival of a system that makes the behavior possible, and to which the behavior must contribute.
it is a way of thinking about balance in the context of crisis.
as a result of the beginning of World War I in 1914, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the Nazism of Hitler and the independence of African nations, the liberal concept of a “society” dissolved so that its very possibility became impossible, though we still make use of the term: the emergence of Bloom and totalitarianism completely refuted the Liberal Hypothesis.
the problem posed by the zeitgeist of those years was 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 is a relative not only of totalitarian ideology, but also of all the holisms, mysticisms, and solidarities, like those of Durkheim, the functionalists, or the Marxists — it merely takes over for them, by expressing the desire for certitude and order in the natural and social sciences.
as an ethical position, the Cybernetic Hypothesis is the complement of the humanist pathos that traces back to 1940s, which is nothing more than an attempt to act as if Man could still think itself intact after all these (systemic) genocides, and an attempt to restore the classical metaphysics on the subject in spite of totalitarianism.
this is 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 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.
at the end of the 20th century, the image of piloting society (i.e. governing) became management — it was management which became the cardinal metaphor for describing not only politics but also all human activity: you manage your time, you manage time of others, you have good or poor time management skills.
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 by suggesting the abandonment of the old concept that power had to be sovereign.
through Cybernetics, to govern would become a rational coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body, the veins of which became the internet.
the cybernetic modernization of power and cybernetization of social authorities is the visible production of what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand.”
thus the communications system became the nervous system of societies, the source and destination of all power.
in this sense, the Cybernetic Hypothesis expresses “the politics of the end of politics” and as such it represents at the same time both a paradigm and a technique of government: even its studies show that the police is not just an organ of class power but also a way of thinking.
hence Cybernetics is completing the integration of the techniques of individuation/separation and of totalization:
normalization as anatomopolitics: generating subphenomena like identity politics discourse in academic networks which seeps the social media circuit, and woke/antiwoke clusters;
regulation as biopolitics: leaving to “experts” funded by corporations to define “fully vaccinated”/categories that affect the livelihood of a worker; cvd19 safety regulations for private businesses and public; conflicting information whether deliberate or not; mask/antimask and vax/antivax cluster phenomena that escalated to protests; supply chain complications; etc.
Foucault’s “techniques of separation” → “the police of qualities”
Lukács’s “techniques of totalization” → “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 an insincere 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.”
Abraham Moles, Cybernetics’ most zealous french ideologue, expresses this unparalleled murder impulse that drives cybernetics when he writes,
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.
thus Cybernetics (ordered, accelerated time) is a war against all that lives and all that is lasting, a war against Time (unordered, immanent).