Bomberg, The Mud Bath

Twins. Capitalism is nihilism, an endless betrayal of production in favor of an infinite — imaginary — debt or Void, which implies the transcendental equivalence of all processes, their essential or characteristic meaninglessness. Indeed the hostility towards life evinced in the machinations of capitalism are strictly correlate to the heterogeneous means by which nihilism achieves its destructive victory: through a generalized deterritorialization which can barely halt before its radically external, schizophrenic limit.

Firestorm. Heidegger reminds us that despite our apparent control over the machines we create, that in fact we do not even control the desire within us which causes us to create, to use them, or to extend our control over the world through the conception and production of new machines. To this problem, indeed, there is no solution, and very likely there will never be any solutions. The mystery, the secret truth of desire, lies within the machine.

Who’s in Control?

Heidegger and Technology

We have for a very long time presumed to be in control of machines. We have claimed to be the masters, and pretended to “govern” technology. So Heidegger is more poignant than usual when he reminds us (in the 1969 Der Spiegel interview) that we do not even control that within us which drives us towards technicity. We are not masters of the secret desire which compels us to encircle more and more of the world within our productive networks.

For better or for worse, Heidegger is one of the first to honestly assess the strangeness of this phenomena — the machinic turn in our relationship to the earth and to being. In the ’69 interview, he was asked what the problem with technology was — after all, aren’t we better off than ever? Heidegger declared it was precisely the pure functionality of the machine which terrified him. The machine is problematic as such; but even more so is the static regime of inhuman operativity which the development of modern technology inaugurates.

In this absolute functioning of the machine we discover a surprising, pure and uncanny kind of nothingness. Heidegger reminds us of this in order to pose a challenge about our relation to the earth. Is it possibility that behind the beneficent face of advanced technology is the same noise and turbulence revealed and concealed at once by the ancients as pure ideas — a nonsensical self-annihilation co-extensive with an absolute determination of beings — a “reality” where all life, all possibility, all energy is merely (or finally) standing-reserve for “our” use? But who are we?

We do not master the machine by our own power. It has taken us a long time to realize that a machine is like a science. It functions in a certain way, and there is nothing else. Functioning propels everything towards further functioning; technology dislodges man, uproots us from an authentic relation to the earth. But what is this noise, this nothing else which keeps interrupting us…?

As ever it is the parasite which interrupts the relation, and in doing so, founds “relationality” itself. Machines conduct existence, they drive life — both into and away from itself. We can no longer “be” here, we are no longer masters even of our imaginations, of our desires. (Parts of us are disappearing all the time.) Machines dig into the earth, rivening it, transforming it and everything related to it — maybe even seeding, in a way, the entire cosmos, for new and alien revolutions.

What is the machine? A corporeal and an incorporeal transformation, welded together. In terms of the form of the machine itself, or its function, it may not make much sense anymore to ask: who is in control? A machine functions and nothing else. But what is this ‘nothing’?

Control is thus the object of the most urgent critical question — posed here as an opening question — pointing towards (and possibly beyond) the deterritorialization of the planet, and the un-worlding of the world by the machine. Face to face with the machine — the day is likely not far off. Is Heidegger’s horror justifiable? Are we witnessing the beginning of a departure of Being from the earth — or on the contrary an opening onto multiplicity?

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes:

“Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing. Therefore we must take the challenging that sets upon man to order the actual as standing-reserve in accordance with the way it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the actual as standing-reserve… We can now name the challenging claim that gathers man with a view to ordering the self-revealing as standing-serve: enframing.”

Technology is alienating at its core, a gathering which challenges us in return to order the actual in accordance to itself. The machine reveals an inhuman order — we are always discovering machines encircling noisy abysses of pure energy — so in some way technology mediates, supplants and erases “eidos,” the outward aspect of sensibility, the essence which is presented through flux — so the essence of technology is not human, or even  technological. The machine is inhuman speed, “pure” operation — an acceleration of the essence of beings — un-grounding that which in everything and in each thing is present enduringly.

Heidegger admits his usage of “enframing” [Ge-stell] here will thoroughly unfamiliar. It will be even stranger for English readers; it is helpful that Ge-stell can also be used to refer, as he notes, any kind of ‘apparatus’ generally (a bookshelf, for example.) But the usage Heidegger requires is uncommon, and seems eerie even to him — “Can anything be more strange” than the meaning of this way of revealing the uncanny stability in the essence of technicity? (Enframing [Ge-stellen] is a “challenging,” but is closely related to “production” and “presentation” [Her-stellen and Dar-stellen].)

Finally, enframing relates in an essential and uncanny way to poesis itself. We find an enframing in all revealing, even in that which first allows presences to come forth into unconcealmeant, the “originary” production that brings forth… Heidegger writes:

“In enframing, the unconcealment propriates in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the actual as standing-reserve. This work is therefore neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity. The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is therefore in principle untenable…. [But] it remains true nonetheless that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. Such revealing concerns nature…”

Despite our material prosperity, is an uncanny horror slowly but surely awakening around us, through the multifaceted vector of biotechnology? Or are we just suddenly and surprisingly aware that, rising from beneath the earth, an even larger ungrounding was already always occurring — one which opens onto a smooth space, a “world” without horizons (a cosmos…) ?

Is this difference, this distance (only) philosophical? But our world is already made up of these distances or differences, and we are just scratching the surface. The essence questioning us in technology relates to the meaning of being, that is, to life, to reality, to the world, to possibilities — to unspoken potentials which can be activated through questioning. So we will let the question stand as unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable): who is in control?

(Matt Dixon)

Thinking Cybernetics:
Mapping the Intersections between Metaphysics, Technology, Biopolitics

(abstract for panel)

The purpose of this panel is to gather together ideas, perspectives, and questions from a diverse variety of thinkers and disciplines relating to the theory and practice of cybernetics. Our goal is to raise a series of critical questions concerning the intersection between biopolitics, metaphysics, and technology.

While each paper is devoted to a specific author or authors and is generally focused on a particular theme or aspect of cybernetics, all of us in some way are arguing for a larger transformation of philosophical, political, social, and technological categories. There are many urgent questions posed by cybernetics; and moreover, its development has so far tended to furnish many other fields of investigation with new tools for studying new problems. As St-Exupery wrote in 1939: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature, but plunges him more deeply into them.” What does philosophy have to tell us today about our relationship to technology? What does cybernetics imply for metaphysics, ethics and epistemology — or even for the future of writing?

Finally, how do we think the relationship between cybernetics and bio-politics? Perhaps the most troubling question raised by cybernetics concerns the relationship between autonomy and authority. It would appear that everything hinges on the inflection placed upon the word “control”! Cybernetics is derived from a Greek word meaning “governance,” from which an apparently simple question arises: Are we controlling — or controlled by — the systems of machines “we” have built?

When Einstein wrote that it has become “appallingly obvious” our technology “has exceeded our humanity,” he was voicing his concern about the disastrous effects of unimpeded technological growth without a corresponding growth in social responsibility. Certainly, at the very least, technology plays more than a purely mediatory role in society.

Thus another important problem brought to the fore by cybernetics is the role of language itself as a socio-political machine. We assert that thinking our relationship to language and technology today demands a wholesale reformulation of old ways of thinking, in order to explore new cybernetic and philosophical problems. The point is that we need more than a new philosophy of cybernetics, we need a “cybernetic philosophy” (though this also requires a transformative reading of the contemporary philosophy of technology.)

Our first hope is that by gathering together concepts which allow a new understanding of our relationship to technology, we can trace original lines of questioning and resistance. Our second hope is that, through these intersections, there may perhaps result new methods of traversing and escaping systems of control. As B.F. Skinner wrote in Contingencies of Reinforcement in 1969, “The real problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.”

Panel Members: Joseph Weissman, Taylor

If we listen closely to the breath of the spirit as well as to the word of being, an entirely new kind of history may become possible.

Disclosing a lethal truth (into) power, organization trembles before the disorganized generativity of decentralized multiplicity.

Are we transmitting history backwards through time? Are languages transforming themselves through us?

Is it by nature that we are socially-oriented creatures? Or does “humanity” on the contrary mark with precision a moment of originary disarticulation of (biological) organization — is a “human” a swarm?

The machine precedes the apparatus and the model just as noise precedes the relation, swarms precede the face, and an absolute nothingness precedes the other. The grinding of war machines, the art and engineering of multiplicity, networked disciplinary techniques — all these emerge long before the complex “legal” apparatus like tribes, states and religions.

How do we become world-oriented? How do we open onto manifold processes of becoming?

Segmented procedures carefully separate of bodies from capabilities — the social articulation of the “human,” the technologization of the body. Segment-rules inscribe society upon itself, through the operation of collective assemblages of enunciation.

Mass confinement of bodies and minds within the illusory ‘certainty’ of a segmented social process. A false naturalization of the organism upon which follows the miraculation of pure operativity — war, religion, capital, psychoanalysis, cybernetics. A natural history of celerity.

Multiplicity does not exist in a substantive but an operative sense. The “being” of a network (an ensemble of interdependent elements including their relationships) is a very nearly nonsensical question, for it unites the fertile middle ground between universals and particulars — intensity.

Does spirit, force, intensity, or “breath” in fact name a machinic phylum underlying reason, nature, even life itself — as the very process of production?

We must catch multiplicity operating in a field of intensities.

(notes for an abstract)

If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts — including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory — which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, written mark, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

[...[E]ven before being determined as human… or nonhuman, the gramme — or the grapheme — would thus name the element. An element without simplicity. An element, whether it is understood as the medium or irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions in metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general.]

(Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 9)

Norbert Weiner introduced the neologism ‘cybernetics’ — in connection with the ancient Greek root meaning ‘governance’ — to denote a new science of systems of control. Cybernetics studies real complex systems and their automatic management, but it is also a rigorous science of energetics and pure information. The most essential expression of cybernetics itself and its own working ontology can perhaps be traced to Von Neumann, who conceived of a swarm of networked machines which could also function together as a kind of generic factory, and so would be able to reproduce all of its own component elements (and hence itself.) In this image we perhaps witness a glimpse of an “adult” cybernetics — the closure of metaphysics, the end of writing, the convergence of biology and cybernetics — a “transubstantiation” of flesh into the virtual.

This image is not without its poignancy. Is cybernetics a symptom, even of the horizon of a metaphysical — and not only a historical — era? A new dawn which has not even struck the horizon: we catch glimpses, a blurring of boundaries, an impression of lightening. Interfaces become depths while automation whirrs smoothly. Computational ease produces enormous, vivid and completely new spaces for thought. Cybernetics in its fuller historical sense has revolutionized not only production but the way we process information itself — in many ways transforming the face of the earth — and promises only to accelerate this bizarre interpenetration of systems of control.

This is perhaps the reason why the question of cybernetics is such an uncanny one: it questions us in return. Cybernetics is deconstruction, an historical equivalent. We experience this revolution simultaneously as integration and decentralization, a dramatic leap in both intelligence and automatization.
In a profound sense we experience cybernetics only in anticipation — that is neither as a subject or an object, but as a pure interface, producing various integrated systems of control. In this sense we can speak of a cybernetics which itself is in control of a system of metaphors and can therefore be taken apart and re-assembled; such a re-assembly is underway and must even be pushed forward. This science of information, of managing non-linear systems, is an anticipation of a historical and metaphysical era which has not yet arrived, and which still depends on the intensification of writing to a new plateau of celerity.

Today the question of cybernetics has begun to pose itself with some urgency. How do we “decentralize” and “reintegrate” a science of control driven by a virtual presence — an exterior or futural presence — and which opens itself up in terms of a new dimension of time, an immanent rupture of history?

Other Possible Paper Titles for Cybernetics Panel:

“Transforming Technology: Simondon and Deleuze”

“Noise, Interface, Information: Serres and Levinas on Communication”

“The Software of Desiring-Machines: Guattari, Cybernetics and Politics”

The modern break with the authority of the past begins with critical history and the possibility of an empirical investigation into reality. A clinical eye belongs to the properly empirical, trans-historical observer — the one who is provocatively “unpersuaded” by traditional interpretations, metaphysical narratives of becoming, who is skeptical of all foundation myths. Through empirical investigation one discovers the curious historical double-articulation of religion and philosophy, i.e., spiritual or psychic forms and collective authority or wisdom. Truly historical science replaces past tradition with present custom as the proper object of study, and thus by thoughtful prediction, such an inquiry opens the possibility of a non-linear relation between history and the future.

In other words, what empiricism finally rediscovers is that the future is just as deep and infinite as the past. This symmetry is the flash-point of the unravelling of hierarchical social organizations, authority, tradition, religion, etc. In critical theory, that is to the clinical eye, all forms of social asymmetry are isomorphic, but none explain themselves, none are automatic. The past and future are neither absolute nor transcendent. What matters is the present, praxis, the transcendence of history through immediate activity. The project of critical liberation expresses itself through revolutionary social progress: (1) it undoes foundations in order to unfetter potential (singular) becomings, (2) it coordinates energy collectively to produce (new) subjectivities, and perhaps most importantly, (3) it socially plans (different) forms of society.

Empiricism annuls the logic of exchangability in order to allow the subject to awaken to itself, to constitute a world. It strives towards a phenomenology of the given, of the gift. Thus the empirical tradition is liberatory science, that is to say, a science of form, which follows a self-conscious method for creating new formations. On the one hand, the subject is distanced, with a clinical, transhuman eye. Science dehumanizes reality in order to possess, to overcome, to dominate, to control. The clinical eye “images;” it is a camera and an imagination, a project and not a theatre of cruelty. Empirical science is therefore vulnerable to teleologies, to a sort of hyper-self-referential ‘scientism’ which inverts nature into culture.

But there is really no difference: yes, empiricism is a state science of geometrizing difference, re-interpreting distinctions as topological discontinuities. But empirical science is also creative, a nomad science of experimentation, of imagination and doubt and becoming, a sorcery of the void and the abstraction of truth via imaginative induction. Science is half-real, half-imaginary, like a dream; we do not know how the rules of the game work, we must find them out by experimenting, imagining, exploring. We must struggle to become aware, to awaken to ourselves. Science is learning to trust our senses, to critically observe without shame or resentment, to dehumanize the world in order to positively intervene in the flow of events — and dominate.

The goal of science is a true description of Energy, that is to say, of Power. Social science is standing upon its head, trying to explain power in terms of social forces. We must understand social forces in terms of power, that is, pre-social energy, pre-individual fluxes. The singular force of differentiation proceeds from multiple energy sources, arranging and weaving them creatively together. Combining forces produces more than the same forces in isolation; collectivism is the lure of empirical science, some form of global consensus, a universal body of information. The dream of total surveillance is ultimately a dream of becoming invisible, to oneself and to all others; but it combines this relatively benign neurosis with a psychotic desire to be everywhere at once, to accelerate and intensify becomings beyond their limit of degeneration, ultimately the suicidal sacrifice of life for the void.

Fascism succumbs in the end to metaphysical suicide. There is beyond the joy of returning to health and self-consciousness even a certain sorrow in this. It is that we know we ought to always accelerate the destruction of imperialism, of capitalism, of fascism in every form. But we lose our ability to evaluate clinically when these formations look familiar to us, and seem benign or boring. The constantly clinical eye becomes paranoid; it possesses double-vision for every social gesture or political group; it has an evil eye for the decay and degeneration lurking beneath every rosy facade. Fortunately we do not have to choose between boredom and hyper-cynicism; this is more or less precisely the clinical illusion, the dream of radical critique: hygenic utopia. The secret fascist dream of every architect. It is critical piece of the false reality which we must overcome: a love for smooth spaces is also a love for the power of creating them, molding them, segmenting them.

Science is a projective engagement with the real, a clinical investigation into a transactional or segmented space. Empirical involvement discovers in the interactivity of components the possibility of accelerating specific positive becomings locally, and by imagination, globally. If liberation is possible for myself, it is possible for everyone. A vacuous truth, in a sense, but one which is here intended not only to be read and spoken. It is a truth which has not yet become, which must be realized in the present: it is the liberal dream of empirical science. Freedom is not painlessness; this dream is not about religion, but precisely about recuperation, from psychic and social sickness. The most passionate desire of modern science is a better thought of health, that is, of power; it demands a truly clinical conception of strength expanding beyond the ‘normal’ and the ‘sick.’ Liberal thought understands that mutation is always critical, always reframes history — no matter how tiny the deviation. A thousand minimal acts of deviance can disrupt and overthrow even the most complex and entrenched of social mechanisms. A liberatory science is also a science of capture, an inclusion of the beyond within the calculable; by our concession this is made real in hierarchical social organizations founded on exchange. We can escape from the marketplace of ideas only by hermetic sealing our ideas off from the body of society, and even then critique, the clinical gaze, is always parasitic to some degree upon the texts/bodies it exploits. A liberated science is freed from theater, and is able to strive for greatness in thought and in deeds. A noble science, at once static and dynamic, a sensitive feedback assemblage as well as a creative imagination for bridging the inductive gaps. Imagination is transduction, the exclusion of the future by induction which exposes secret lines of flight in the present moment. Praxis is dependent upon perspective; we must be made aware in order to struggle, we need a light to see the light. Ethics is the name of the underlying social principle of differentiation, that the whole transcends the components.

The abstract One of the ethical deed cannot be isolated from a singular process of becoming, without thereby becoming false; we cannot produce a generic ethic without fascism. There can only be ethics, but ethics — ethics is an optics… We must learn to see with inhuman eyes, to act with pure clinical compassion, to think critically without fascination or parasitism. Modern science opens the way onto radical transdisciplinary convergences; we already must learn to speak many languages, we must all learn to be language-creators, too. The modern is only the idiosyncratic, the peculiar mythology of the present. But in the ley lines of the sorcerer’s tome we can read the deep secrets of the future and the past. The social must be dreamed; but only when reality truly disappears does dreaming emerge with a fresh urgency. We desire new futures to escape the dangerous present, without realizing the future we seek will exponentially exceed ours in danger and irresponsibility as well as insight and moral clarity. The first is the price we always pay for the latter; knowledge is always disillusionment. The price of freedom is choice itself; the critical must displace, the clinical must intervene. Empiricism produces a general awakening of innovation, an acceleration of institutionalization, industrialization, individualization. Revolution in the abstract is just imaginative intervention; history tells us that once people realize they have been made fools, they no longer tend to do as they are told. This is when the realization of full humanity becomes possible — at the very moment it has been transcended.