The pregnancy of the cyborg

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Here I want to interject an important element: words like Life, Purpose, and Soul are completely unsuitable in pure scientific thinking. These terms acquired their meaning because we recognize the unity of a specific group of phenomena; and in reality they provide us with no basis suitable for characterizing this unity. Whenever we encounter a new phenomenon that participates to some degree in the nature of those we have already called “phenomena of Life,” but do not conform to all the views that define the term “life,” we face the problem of either broadening the concept of the word “life” to include all these views, or restricting it so as not to include them. We have encountered this problem in the past, examining viruses, which display some properties of life, multiply, organize—yet do not express these properties in a fully developed form. Now that certain behavioral analogies are observed between machines and living organisms, the question of whether the machine lives or not is (for our purposes) a matter of interpretation. And we are free to answer either that the machine lives or that it does not, depending on what suits us. As Humpty Dumpty says about some of his more significant remarks, “I pay them extra and force them to do whatever I want.”
If we wish to use the word “life” to cover all phenomena that locally move contrary to the tendency for entropy to increase, we are free to do so. However, then we would include many astronomical phenomena that bear only a shadowy resemblance to life as we normally know it. Therefore, in my opinion, it is best to avoid all vague expressions that raise questions, such as “life,” “soul,” “vitalism,” and the like, and to simply say, regarding machines, that there is no reason why they should not resemble human beings in representing foci of decreasing entropy within a framework where general entropy tends to increase.
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My position is that the physical functioning of a living organism and some of the newest communication machines are exactly analogous, insofar as efforts to control entropy through feedback are concerned. Both, the living organism and the machine, have sensors as one stage in their operational cycle: that is, in both cases there is a special device (or organ) for collecting information from the external world… and this information is made available to the living organism and/or the machine during their operation. In both cases, these external messages are not received “purely,” but are subject to processing by the internal transformative capabilities of the device, living or not. Any information, then, takes on a new form, usable for the subsequent stages of action. In both the living organism and the machine, the action is such as to affect the external world. And in both, the action that is carried out—and not merely the action programmed to occur—and the results of that action, are referred back to the central regulatory device, whether of the living organism or the machine.
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More than a century (to be exact, 115 years) separates the above excerpts from Andrew Ure’s hymns to the iron man and to machines endowed with the thought, perception, and attention of an experienced craftsman.¹ These are excerpts from a book titled Cybernetics and Society, the human use of human beings, published in 1950 by the American mathematician (and philosopher) Norbert Wiener: the relationships and similarities between human (and generally living) activities and mechanical actions come once again to the center of a technological leap. These are not the machines that Ure hymned. Nor are they the people of the early 19th century, primarily manual workers. Much has changed in these 115 years; capitalism has evolved; machines (have as well).

We observed in the previous issue:

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The construction and use of increasingly efficient steam engines progressed alongside the development of a new (at the time) scientific branch of physics, thermodynamics. Thermal energy was about to become the equivalent of the animal soul, and now the distinction between living beings and machines became insignificant. As it was formulated again and again, the human body and the factory machine are both engines that convert energy into work.
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The reshaping of the idea of man (essentially of the worker…) based on the specifications of machines also changed the repertoire of discipline within factories… The problem of human productivity began to gradually transform into a problem of maintenance and better exploitation of “human energy.” The issue began to take the form of seeking maximum performance with criteria being the energy/work ratio per unit of time.
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The study of energy exchanges (and losses) advanced significantly during the 19th century. The second law of thermodynamics was formulated. A new crucial concept was invented: entropy. From the second law of thermodynamics and entropy, “was born”, like Athena from the head of Zeus, a new concept and a new promising theory, with claims to science: information and information theory. Wiener (and others equally important, such as the mathematician John von Neumann) spoke in 1950, analyzed, correlated and, equally important, propagated this new deity (information) and its machines, standing at the historical threshold between a mature (capitalistically) “energy-centered” world and an emerging (capitalistically) “information-centered” world.² Much has already changed, and even more is about to change. There, towards the middle of the 20th century, the relationship between human and mechanical is rewoven, based on the same fundamental ideas of similarity and substitution, but within a quite different field of applications. The cyborg will not be an improved machorg, but much more.

From a theoretical (even philosophical) perspective, the invention of “information” and a “theory” for it, and mainly, the quest for a theory to control information, appeared there, in the middle of the 20th century, as the antidote to the entropic Apocalypse that the second thermodynamic axiom promised with certainty. Wiener concludes the introduction of his book hoping for some cybernetic order within a universe doomed to head towards chaos:

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As entropy increases, the universe and all closed systems within it tend to degenerate and lose their distinctions, to move from the less to the more probable state, from a possible state of organization and differentiation where distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and uniformity. In Gibbs’ universe³ order is least probable, while chaos is most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if there really is a complete universe, evolves with decreasing progress, there are certain islands where the direction appears to be opposite to that of the universe in general, and where there is a limited and temporary tendency toward increased organization. Life finds refuge in some of these regions. It was precisely this viewpoint that initiated, at its core, the evolution of the new science of Cybernetics.

But there are serious reasons to consider such concerns merely allegories. Not only because “information”, its management, its techno-scientific foundation, and its first machines were created for the military needs of World War II (from espionage and counter-espionage of radio communications between opposing armies to the improvement of anti-aircraft performance). But also because, additionally, before the possibility of the entropic end of the universe, there has been created, at the end of World War II and subsequently, a much more tangible possibility: that of the planet’s destruction by a “hot”, nuclear war.

Consequently, “information” is born as the urgent intermediary for the further improvement of the relationship (the performance) between the operators of certain machines and the machines themselves; however, it is destined to extend its instrumental purpose and functionality throughout the entire breadth and depth of social relations. In a thoroughly totalitarian war, “chaos” must not corrode either the front line (“ours”) or the rear (“ours”). Here, more than ever, the utmost order is needed.

Wiener seems overly prophetic (but he will prove to be no “mad” prophet at all) when early in his book he states:

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The thesis of this book is that society can be understood only through the study of the messages and communication facilities it possesses, and that in the future development of communication facilities between human and machine, between machine and human, and between machines, information will play an increasingly important role.
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Consequently, a substantial shift in perspective occurs regarding mechanization and the relationship between living organisms and new machines; a shift that takes shape during World War II to serve military needs, but which specialists like Wiener quickly recognize as having enormous potential.⁴ The goal of these new (informational) technological interventions is no longer merely to increase the productivity of “narrowly defined” labor and extract more surplus value, but rather to mechanically reproduce and potentially control the entire social field.
From one perspective, we are always already within the “universal fate” of machorg, not only as generally hymned by Ure, but also specifically and practically proposed by another great figure in capitalist history, Frederick W. Taylor, in his seminal The Principles of Scientific Management of 1911, in the introduction to his work:

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I hope it will be clearly understood by readers that the same basic elements [note: of “scientific organization of industrial work”] can be applied to all social activities: in managing our homes; in managing our estates; in managing our commercial establishments, small and large; in our churches, in our charitable institutions, in our universities and in our government services.

The machorg, the disciplined working body-machine, is the open or hidden dream of the upper classes throughout the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th; and it gradually becomes reality at first, and then with increasing speed, just as Marx had predicted: living labor becoming merely the “living component” of machines. The machorg works, works, works (meanwhile acquiring a sense of its collective power, organizing against its “fate,” rising up, rebelling); it fights, fights, fights, and becomes “cannon fodder” in the trenches of the first world war and again “flesh” beneath the caterpillars, bombers, tanks, submarines, and the nuclear fission of the second.
From a different perspective, however, dialectical this one, the early announcement and, subsequently, the formation of the cyborg—that is, the relationship between human and cybernetic/informational machines—remains for decades merely the “dream” of machorg evangelists. And it becomes a promise for a Paradigm Shift only around the middle of the 20th century. Earlier, for some time, various specialists—sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers—search, from different starting points, in the twilight of academia, for answers to the question: What is it that makes societies societies? How do these numerous, multifaceted, complex entities remain stable? How do they change? What is the “binding substance” of social phenomena? From what material is the mysterious field of social relations constituted, with its convergences and divergences, its attractions and repulsions, its regularities and violations, its powers and refusals of them?
A little before the second world war, during it, and immediately after, the long-sought answer seems to take shape: communication—the exchange of information! This is the historical standpoint from which figures like Wiener announce a new era: that of cybernetics, of cybernetic mechanization.

Towards the end of his book, Wiener deems it appropriate to republish the advocacy for this new era by someone “beyond suspicion”: a monk. We republish an excerpt from the relevant pages:

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In the well-known Parisian newspaper Le Monde, in the issue of December 28, 1948, a Dominican monk, Father Dubarle, wrote an extremely insightful review regarding my book “Cybernetics”.⁵ I will mention below one of his ideas, regarding the terrible consequences of the chess-playing machine magnified and surrounded by a panoply:

“Thus, one of the most fascinating prospects that emerge is the possibility of logically regulating human affairs, and more specifically those concerning communities and exhibiting a certain statistical regularity, such as the human phenomena of shaping public opinion.
Can one imagine a machine that would collect any kind of information, such as information regarding production and the market; and then determine what the most likely development of the situation would be, in relation to the average psychology of human beings, and the quantities that can be measured in any given case? Is it possible to conceive of a state machine covering all systems of political decisions, under a regime of many states distributed across the surface of the earth, or under an obviously simpler regime of a government of the entire planet?
At present, nothing prevents us from imagining such a thing. We can dream of the era when a machine à gouverner (machine of governance) will be able to supplement – for better or for worse – the current obvious inability of the human brain when it deals with the ordinary mechanism of politics.

It is unlikely that Brother Durable could have imagined at the end of 1948 the computing machines and special software of modern finance and flash trading. And yet: the trend toward mechanizing everything, not in a linear, strictly deterministic but in a probabilistic way and through analogous processes, a trend like a daydream, this very trend was already born in the middle of the 20th century. Not as the fantasy of a drunken dreamer. But in relation to the possibilities and promises offered by the new communication/information machines, from their very inception.

Technically, the Paradigm Shift will become clear a few decades later, from the late ’70s or early ’80s. Politically?

We have already written (in the previous issue) that in the machorg’s visions, it did not format an individual relationship or a set of individual human-machine relationships. It was the encoding of the general model of the desired capitalist reality, the universal fantasy for the world: generalization floods the thinking of the machorg evangelists, even if this forces them to run (mentally) very fast.

The theoretical, ideological, and technical specifications of the cyborg, that is, of this new synthesis of human/machine upon informational patterns, did not remain within the synthesis of the general (social) from the particular organization of industrial manual labor. On the contrary, they were based on an organic understanding of the social directly, in terms of the “market,” that is, in terms of continuous exchange of symbols, messages; with criteria of ongoing communication. This is the real originality, the real innovation of the new questioning of human/machine before, during, and even more intensely after the Second World War: it did not arise from the generalization of the given factory model, from the generalization, that is, of the use of steel machines with bearings and lubricants on every side of daily life. But rather it would refer to a general, universal, communicational field, an “informational construction site” we would dare to say (society, social relations) within which there are certainly workers, but also doors that open and close and kittens – that – play – with – yarn.⁶

Who conceived social relations as an informational mesh? In an era such as the present, where information and its derivatives (the information economy, cybernetics, cyborgs) are commonplace, one might easily think that information as such has always been “central” to human societies. This seems to happen whenever the central ideas/concepts of a new Paradigm become established and dominant: the dominant rhetoric begins and ends with things were always this way.

Such a belief is wrong. What we know (or think we know) as “information” is a very recent creation, perhaps only from 1948, when Claude Shannon published (in the Bell company’s journal) a report titled A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Before that, the word “information” had extremely limited usage, in state bureaucracies or military espionage. After that, and after the research and conceptual wave that was created, the word and the concept of “information” acquired a completely different content, intended to spread everywhere.

The “information” as defined by Shannon (and as understood since then) is dualistic. On the one hand, it is considered a quantity and as such “objective”; on the other hand, however, it is subject to interpretation, and is therefore subjective.⁷ This dualism is consistent with the fundamental capitalist dualism between value and its measure, money. The quantitative conception of “information” allows for the accumulation (and manipulation) of subjective interpretations.⁸

Consequently, both the invention of “information” as the general equivalent of socially relating, and the process of generalized informatization, constitute a historical process of appropriation. The informed relationship, the relationship that has been reduced to information and information management, returns to its operator (whatever informational) machine as alien with respect to human and intersubjective action, and as such must be “conceived” within a single, predetermined interpretive framework. Or, the (human) subjects recognize themselves in the machine (and in the informational/mechanical process). This is the cyborg.⁹

The Italian autonomists, in the ’70s, spoke analytically about the social factory; and about the real subsumption of societies under capital, in relation to the phase of formal subsumption, the period that is to say when factory capitalism was indeed the dominant “social relation”, but not the only one. The cyborg then was, from a “natural” perspective, a military undertaking, a program of military research, rather separate from the other fields of social reality. But it was a potential; a model in potential.

We are therefore already living not only the real subsumption of social relations under capital, in the broadest sense of the word “capital” (an expansion that Marx perhaps did not imagine), but – inevitably! – the real subsumption of social relations under machines. And this has very significant political (not merely “social”) consequences, which we will examine in detail in future issues.

Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #03 – 06/2015

1. Andrew Ure The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835 – Related reference to CYBORG 2: the piston, the worker, the hook, anatomy of cyborg ancestors. ↩︎
2. In practice, capitalist “energy-centrism” has only just reached an incredible technical point, simultaneously demonstrating absolute monopoly destructiveness: in the discovery and domestication of nuclear energy. ↩︎
3. Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839 – 1903) was an American physicist who, along with Maxwell and Boltzmann, created statistical mechanics, for use in the laws of thermodynamics. ↩︎
4. Let us note this at this point: all of the first-line inventions of the Bioinformatics Paradigm, so far, have a military origin… ↩︎
5. It is the first edition of Wiener’s views, published in 1948, addressed to specialists. ↩︎
6. Reference to one of the first examples of similarity between mechanical and living behavior, with the “axis” being the nervous system, from Wiener’s book. ↩︎
7. A stone in a field can mean different things to a farmer, a geologist, an archaeologist, a shepherd, a child, a builder or someone who is endangered by a snake. There is not one piece of information about this stone, nor however many, given that the meaning that will be attributed to it is not a “choice” between many possibilities. ↩︎
8. It is something like a guilty secret among specialists that what information is, is not sufficiently defined. The political economy of information (let us call it the “new political economy”) is thus theoretically vague but, on the other hand, aggressively operational. This leads us to the hypothesis that insofar as the political economy of information includes, encompasses the political economy of labor, it produces and reproduces there (in labor) a deliberate ambiguity… ↩︎
9. The cyborg can be understood in various ways and, mainly, as an individual organism. But here we mean the encoding of the general model of the new bioinformatics paradigm. The encoding according to which the world is not interlocking gears (that was the previous paradigm) but a network of flows; and the individual (not only when working but almost everywhere and always) is a crossing of these flows, which cannot be “integrated” except through remote controls – without which there is no life worthy of the name. ↩︎