Cybernetics and mechanical engineering
…Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, are searching from different starting points, in the twilight of academia, for answers to the question: what is it that makes societies be societies? How do these populous, multifaceted, complex entities remain stable? How do they change? What is the “binding substance” of social phenomena? From what material is the field of social relations constituted, with their convergences and divergences, their attractions and repulsions, their regularities and violations, their powers and refusals towards them?
Cyborg#3: The pregnancy of the cyborg
A little before the second world war, during it, and immediately after, the much sought-after answer seems to take shape: communication – exchange of information! This is the historical position from which figures like Wiener announce a new era: cybernetic control, the cybernetic mechanization.
The formulation of cybernetic theories did not occur in a vacuum. In the aftermath between the “energy-centered” and the “information-centered” capitalist models, mass industrial production and the automation capabilities of the production chain in factories were accompanied by the intense emergence of epistemological-philosophical theories regarding the role of machines and the relationships that people develop with them. These theories constitute, from the side of the academic-intelligentsia of capital, an organized effort to envision capitalist development through the objectification of it into specific technical-technological objects and concepts. “Progress” was identified with the development of techno-sciences, at the same time that the intensifying transformation of labor and its real subsumption under capital had already converted it into a living component of the machines of the production chain…
In cybernetics, the synthesis of the human with the mechanical, as mechanization-informatization, can be understood as a “simple” reduction of one element to the other. Wiener, using the concept of entropy and information, attempted to define this synthesis:
It is best to avoid all vague expressions that raise questions, such as “life,” “soul,” “vitalism,” and the like, and to simply say, as far as machines are concerned, 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 operation of a natural organism and some of the new communication machines are exactly analogous, insofar as efforts to control entropy through feedback are concerned.
The re-conceptualization and creation of new evaluations for the two parts of the composition (the human and the mechanical) now had a solid foundation. The cybernetic concepts of entropy, feedback, and information-communication as basic tools for analyzing and re-defining the totality of social relations began to expand and find resonance in both the natural and social sciences.
In 1958, the Frenchman Gilbert Simondon, as part of his doctoral thesis, presented his work titled “Du mode d’ existence des objets techniques” (On the Modes of Existence of Technical Objects). In this work, an evident attempt is made to theoretically overcome the dualism between human and machine, to define through mechanics the ontogenetic genesis of the technical object itself in analogy to the ontology of natural and human objects, through a continuous process of individuation. The utilization of fundamental elements of cybernetic theory occurs alongside a critique of technicism itself. As we shall see, Simondon’s critique is based on the rejection of historical materialism (as a dialectic between capital and labor) and places the ontological evolution of machines and the relations of humans with them at the center of conceptions of “progress”1. The following excerpt is taken from the introduction of “Du mode…”:
The technical object is the final product of an evolution and is something that cannot be considered as a simple tool. The modalities of this generation make it possible to understand the technical object at three levels and the non-dialectical coordination between them over time: the element, the atom, and the whole…
Ultimately, the technical object, considered as an object of value appreciation, can provoke different attitudes, depending on whether we approach it as an element, an individual, or a set. At the level of the element, its improvement does not lead to particular disturbance, as anxiety arising from conflict with acquired habits: it leads to a characteristic 18th-century climate of optimism, since it introduces the idea of continuous and unlimited progress and the steady improvement of the human species. On the other hand, the machine as a technical individual becomes for a period an opponent or competitor of man, and the reason is that man concentrated all technical individuality himself, in an era when there were only tools. The machine takes the place of man, because man as the carrier of the tool was accustomed to do the machine’s work. At this stage corresponds the dramatic and passionate perception of progress as the rape of nature, the conquest of the world, the exploitation of energy. The desire for power finds its expression in the technical and technocratic exaggeration of the thermodynamic era, which took a direction as prophetic as it was catastrophic. Subsequently, at the level of the technical sets of the 20th century, thermodynamic energy-centrism is replaced by information theory, the regulatory content of which is above all regulatory and stabilizing: The development of technique seemed to be a guarantee of stability. The machine, as an element in the technical set, becomes the effective unit that increases the quantity of information, increases negative entropy and opposes the degradation of energy. It resembles life and cooperates with life in its opposition to disorder and in the balancing of all things that tend to deprive the world of the forces of change. The machine is something that fights against the death of the universe; like life, it slows down the degradation of energy and becomes a stabilizer of the world.
The presentation of the evolution of the machine both parallel and extra-historically in relation to social processes – class struggle, relations of production, war, inter-state competition – could be considered a philosophical acrobatics; let alone when ontogenetic characteristics are attributed to the machine. However, it happens that at the time these lines are written, the dominant perceptions regarding technology and new machines coincide, at best, with their historical “neutrality.” It also happens that as regards the approach of new machines, the contemporary “progressive” supposed answer to the (outside of introductory!) conservatism of technophobia is to ascribe metaphysical/ontological characteristics to them. What is often referred to in cyborg-mag as techno-fetishism is not something one-dimensional. It may include both the subjectivism of the hipster-gadget and the heavy theories of “progressive” academics who see in new media the liberation of humanity from the slavery of manual labor or/and the so-called “immaterial” information work as a possibility of social liberation and transcendence of capitalism.
Our purpose is not to deal with Simondon’s philosophy in the separated field of its epistemological approach. On the contrary, we will approach through excerpts a very “small” and specific issue of “Du mode…” taking into account the social/class dynamics of the era.
Technophobia and technolatry as issues of dominant culture
Within the framework of neutralizing the development of technology and their separated ontology, Simondon puts under discussion the issues of alienation, technophobia and technolatry, as cultural and institutional issues, placing machines at the center. For this reason, we believe that a critical reading regarding these matters, necessarily fragmentary here, can contribute to formulating a contemporary labor critique on issues such as alienation and techno-fetishism.
Culture behaves towards the technical object in the same way that a person trapped in a primitive xenophobia behaves towards a foreigner. This kind of half-neoism, directed against machines, does not so much represent hatred towards the new as a refusal to come to terms with an alien reality. However strange this reality may be, it remains human, and a complete culture is one that allows us to discover that this foreigner is indeed human; yet the machine remains for us a foreigner; it is a foreigner in whom everything human is locked inside, unrecognized, materialized and enslaved, but in any case human. The strongest cause of alienation in the world today is based on the misunderstanding of machines. The alienation under examination is not caused by the machine but by the failure to understand the nature and essence of the machine, by the absence of the machine from the world of meanings and by its omission from the table of values and conceptions that constitute an inseparable part of our culture.
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Culture displays an imbalance in that, while it grants recognition to certain objects, for example to aesthetic things, and gives them their due place in the world of meanings, it exiles other objects, particularly technical things, to the undifferentiated world of things that have no meaning, but only utility, a utilitarian function. As they encounter such a remarkable defensive negative stance on the part of culture, people who have knowledge of technical objects and appreciate their significance attempt to justify their judgment by attributing to the technical object the unique status that still today presents some stability, apart from that attributed to aesthetic objects, the status of the sacred. This, of course, causes an unrestrained technicism which is nothing other than idolatry of the machine and, through such idolatry, through identification, leads to a technocratic lust for absolute power. The desire for power confirms the machine as a means to supremacy and transforms it into a modern magic potion. The person who wishes to dominate those around him creates the android machine. He renounces for its sake and invests it with his human characteristics. He tries to construct the machine that thinks and dreams of being able to construct the machine that acts deliberately and the machine that lives, so that he himself can remain behind it, without anxiety, free from every danger and relieved of all feelings of inadequacy, as he enjoys a triumph represented by his invention. In this case, then, as through a fanciful process the machine has been transformed into a robot, a copy of man, but without inwardness, [the machine] evidently and inevitably is nothing other than a purely mythical and fantastic being…
Alienation, as technophobia, is presented as a problem of culture and the dominant culture, which is unable to keep up with its time and to give positive meanings and values to new machines. Similarly, alienation as technolatry, having as its basic element the misconception of new machines as simple automations, creates the false image of the omnipotent machine that will replace man. Note that the positioning of this duality with respect to the neutral machine itself, and not with respect to its role in social relations. (We will return to this, however, later on).
An “alternative” version of human-machine governmental integration
The technical culture, which constitutes a desideratum for Simondon, in order to develop, should seek the solution to the issue of alienation in the evolution of machines. Therefore, the transformation of the relationship between humans and technical objects presupposes the perfection of “technical ensembles”:
Automation and its use in the form of industrial organization, what we call automation, has more economic or social than technical significance. The real perfection of machines, which we can say raises the level of technical skill [as a value of technique itself], has nothing to do with increasing automation but, on the contrary, is related to the fact that the operation of the machine conceals a certain limit of indeterminacy. Such a limit is what allows the machine to exhibit sensitivity to external information. This sensitivity, from the machines’ side, is what makes possible the creation of a technical ensemble, much more so than any increase in automation… A machine of higher technical skill is an open machine, and the ensemble of open machines places man in the position of permanent organizer and living interpreter of the interrelations of machines… In this way, man functions as the permanent inventor and organizer of the machines that surround him. He is among the machines that work with him… Even when the exchange of information between two machines is direct, man intervenes as the entity that regulates the limit of indeterminacy in order to make it adaptable to the greatest possible exchange of information.
The answer to the techno-alienation that appears in relation to the automation of industrial production is here the transformation of industrial “technical ensembles” into information machines. Such a “utopian” vision, however, should include, apart from the evolution of machines, a corresponding transformation of man, so that he is able to function between them and assume the role of their interpreter and orchestrator:
Now then, we can wonder who might achieve an understanding of technical reality and introduce it into our culture. Only with great difficulty could a person, tied to a specific machine by his work and the daily routine of his movements, reach such an understanding; a habitual relationship does not promote such understanding, because doing the same thing over and over again blurs, within the stereotypical nature of acquired movements, any awareness of structures and functions. The process of management or ownership of a business that uses machines offers no better chances for understanding than working with it does; it creates abstract behaviors toward the machine, causing it to be approached not in itself, but in terms of its cost and the results of its operation. Likewise, scientific knowledge, which sees within the technical object the practical application of a theoretical law, is not at the appropriate level of awareness. Rather, it seems that achieving the understanding we desire could be the work of an organizational engineer, who we might say is a sociologist or psychologist of machines, a person who lives within this society of technical objects as their responsible and creative consciousness.
The “machinic organization,” as the bearer of knowledge, structure and function of machines, appears as a prototype of man that overcomes the inability of labor, capital and science to comprehend machines. This form of the cyborg, as a harmonic coexistence of the human with the mechanical, is certainly more “refined” than the version of reducing one element to the other. Human labor, as it is transformed into technical activity, will no longer constitute the “conscious member” of the machine, but rather its very “responsible and creative consciousness.”
Alienation and Technofetishism
The de-politicization of the concept of alienation, which we referred to above, has as its starting point a fundamental reversal. If we accept the evolution of machines in an anti-dialectical, historically and politically neutral, independent way from class struggle, then the latter emerges as a side consequence, due to our inability to understand the stages of the evolution of technical objects:
Man treats the machine as if it were taking the place of a human being, while in reality it is man who temporarily occupied the position of the machine, before technical individuals could be created. Man had learned so well to be a technical being that he reaches the point of believing that the technical individual, as it becomes concrete, mistakenly begins to play the role of man. Ideas such as slavery and freedom are so closely linked with the old idea of man… that they cannot narrate the real problem of the relationship between human and machine. The technical object must be understood in itself if we want the relationship between human and machine to be valid and stable.
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The alienation which, according to Marxists, has its roots in the relationship between the worker and the means of production, in our opinion does not arise from the issue of ownership… Between this juridical and economic relationship with ownership there is a deeper and more fundamental relationship: that of continuity between the human individual and the technical individual or the discontinuity between these two beings… The alienation of man in relation to the machine has not only a social and economic dimension but also a psychological and physiological one: the machine no longer constitutes an extension of the body’s schema for workers nor for owners. The bankers … are as alienated from the machine as the new proletarian class … On either side of the machine, whether from above or below, the man of technical elements, who is the worker, and the man of technical ensembles, who is the boss of industry, overlook the real relationship with the individuated technical object as it exists in the machine. Capital and labor are two ways of existence, equally incomplete in relation to the technical object and the technicality of industrial organization … Labor and capital move backwards in relation to the technical individual who carries the technicality. The technical individual does not belong to the same era as the labor that activates it or the capital that frames it.The dialectic between capital and labor is wrong because it belongs to the past…
If we remove from the center of history the class struggle, the existence of bosses and the working class is transformed from a political issue into a technical one. If “the strongest cause of alienation in the world today is based on the misconception of machines,” this happens because technical objects should be dealt with through their own “independent,” anti-dialectical genealogy. The dialectic of capital-labor is set aside as Marxist economism, while the higher value of technology and the relationship of humans with it is placed at the center of “progress.” In this way, the fact is reversed that the very development of machines and their “modes of existence” in capitalism constitute causes of alienation for their creators and operators.
However, this is not an economic issue, but a political one. Because the processes that accompany the evolution of machines are not politically neutral. It is true that the machine “is no longer an extension of the shape of the body,” but neither is it a simple extension of intellectual activities. This by itself does not mean that machines automatically become “incomprehensible” and “alien.” Alienation arises as the evolution of machines incorporates the division of labor each time. Through this, the analysis, mechanization, and incorporation of human movements/thoughts/knowledge – living labor – into machines takes place. Moreover, the evolution of machines is based on the expropriation of socially produced knowledge and the intellectual capabilities of the working class, which are shaped into separate technosciences. Thus, the entire body of knowledge-labor is separated from its creators, disguised as the inventive capacity of an individual or a company, and incorporated as “dead” knowledge-labor into machines; it becomes capital. In other words, the relations of production expressed through ownership of the means of production, but also through the imposition of the division of labor, its appropriation, its incorporation into machines, and the commodification of its results, remain at the heart of modern alienation as its fundamental causes.
Placing the “machine unconscious” as the cause of alienation, when in reality it is its result, quickly leads to yet another version of technofetishism. In this version, the individual pursuit of knowledge of a technical object, mediated-intensified communication-exchange of information, the mythology of the “alternative” cyborg, and the attribution to new technical media themselves of fetishized capabilities intertwine and create a theory without practice, which does not correspond to the reality of class warfare. On the contrary, we argue that in capitalism, machines and their development have historically constituted and continue to constitute a result, but also a field of class competition.
Within this field, which continues to be violently reconfigured from the bosses’ side, criticism of alienation, technophobia, and technofetishism should be situated.
Mechanical Engineering and Class Competition
(as a brief and, therefore, incomplete reminder of recent history and the current situation)
One year after “Du mode…”, in 1959, in an article by Simondon in the journal “Revue de métaphysique et de morale” titled “Les limites du progrès humain” (The limits of human progress), the following was written, in conclusion:
The transformation of all conditions of human life, the increase in the alternation of causality between what man produces and what he is, real technical progress can be considered to imply human progress when it acquires a network structure, the mesh of which is human reality… For technical progress to become self-regulating, it must be an overall progress; this means that every field of human activity that handles technology must be in representative and regulatory communication with any other field; then progress would be of an organic type and would constitute part of the particular evolution of man.
Although the above can be read today as “prophetic,” in their time they constituted issues of philosophy and metaphysics. The new machines and technologies that accompany capitalist restructuring each time are not introduced simply because someone had a nice idea. After all, there are many examples where ideas and visions precede implementations by several decades. The new machines each time are produced and socially imposed “on order,” according to the needs of the bosses, but also as a “response” of capital to working-class negativity.
The interesting thing, then, about Simondon’s particular “prophecy” was that it shaped “technological progress” as a “network structure”, as the operational model of a universal technical system, a “technical ecosystem” that (would) internalize and (would) shape all the individual fields of human activity (that technically handles means).
At that specific historical moment, at the end of the 1950s, the technical intellectuals of capital had two significant and innovative “tools”: the universal Turing machine and the discovery of the double helix of DNA. However, beyond narrowly defined techno-scientific interests, they had no other motive to imagine societies of complete mechanization; because that was Simondon’s proposal. This motive, and indeed in an extremely pressing way, came a few years later, with the multiple explosions and rejections worldwide, at various (critical) points of social relations, in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of those rejections, against industrial labor, was also “anti-technological”, not like the old Luddism, but as a rejection of every norm, every rule, imposed on human labor by the mechanical complex of Taylorism/Fordism. In the factories (but also in the educational system, in the health system, in the disciplinary system) the individual “gears” of the post-war capitalist machina were deregulated.
From that historical moment onward, the self-regulation of technical progress ceased to be the philosophical enigmatic idea of some Simondon and became the obligatory flight tendency of capital forward, its response to the rebellious proletariat! And, consequently, the “ontology of machines,” and indeed of machines within a universal technical “ecosystem,” became the “ontology” of capital.
Simondon and his ideas thus became politically relevant (from the bosses’ side) in this “metamodern” historical phase of capitalism. The neutralization or any ontological attribution to machines can only serve to further obscure reality. The smoke screen covering the dynamics of the contemporary capitalist crisis/restructuring appears neutrally as the rapid development of technological innovations. Their promotion as a solution-to-the-crisis or even as a possibility for “overcoming” capitalism-as-it-collapses amounts to nothing but crude misdirections. It is no longer a matter of philosophy; whatever can be characterized as contemporary technoculture is already lagging behind the “leaps” of techno-sciences. If the fundamental source of capitalist paradigm change lies in the crisis caused by class struggle, the very machines mobilized as a response—and the rapid increase in labor productivity they caused—have become a fundamental cause of capital’s present structural crisis.
And yet this “ontology” of machines, even as a consumer fantasy, functions successfully from an ideological point of view. While the devaluation of living, human labor is once again becoming massive and violent, the “revaluation” of machines (but how “smart” can they become now?) seems to function soothingly (even paralytically…) within the social factory…
Rorre Margorp
cyborg #05 – 02/2016
Simondon’s work is not limited only to mechanics and the ontological process of generation of technical objects. His doctoral thesis is complemented and completed by two more works: “L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique” (The individual and his physico-biological genesis, published in 1964) and “L’individuation psychique et collective” (Psychical and collective individuation, 1989). The ontological approach of the mechanical-technical, the natural as well as the human (physico-biological, psychical and social-collective) is carried out having the individual and mainly the process of individuation as the common reference point. In 2005, his two works on the individual and individuation were published in French in one volume under the title “L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information” (Individuation in the light of the concepts of form and information). Since then, translation efforts have been underway to introduce them to the Anglo-Saxon bibliography. At the same time, as the themes and concepts dealt with by Simondon (individuation, information, metastability) emerge for many – “radical” and non-radical – academics as answers to the issues arising in shaping the new capitalist paradigm, references to his works are increasing. It is also said that Gilles Deleuze has “relied” on several of the basic concepts of Simondon’s work, while among the so-called post-workerists, Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri have several references/influences in their recent publications.
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