Dear Manuel, your response is not an argument, just a character assassination (of Rousseau’s and mine, by extension, since I mentioned him), I think his point concerning the irreducibility of the social is a valid one.
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Dear @a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_, I dont mean it as a character assasination, and, while I am aware it is an ad-hominem attack on Rousseau, I don’t think it is extended to you. Rousseau’s argument about the irreducibility of the social to a single set of moral or political principles is valid, but we need to include other voices:
Although on principle, “the possibilities offered by automation are politically unaligned”, even though these possibilities are often implied as a powerful tool for enculturation and homogenization into the development paradigm of the west, the very possibilities offered by technology (specially the internet) have came across as social tools for the solution of social ills. Giving and anthropological context to this: The Penan of Sarawak, confronted by logging companies get in touch with the Kayapo people of Brazil, or the Haida, who, having dealt with similar problems, will aid them and give them options or access to supporters helping protect their communities. So on effect, some technology is really emerging as a true social “campfire”.
This is how they are using the internet: http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/penan
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Dear @a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_ , I will focus on the above quote because a close reading of this statement can illuminate the limits of its circular logic. First of all, I don’t think I can agree with the first statement simply because I don;t find the Freudian categories of conscious and unconscious productive beyond psychoanalysis. Not that there isn’t any truth to this statement but that I am not sure about what can be gain from its axiomatic constitution besides reinforcing the classic lefts cynical attitude towards both science & politics. Yes, perhaps every science has a political un/conscious but us on the humanities side of the Sellarsian divide between the scientific and manifest image is to constructively address this unconscious and give our sciences their politics and ethics. For me, historical materialism & dialectics are preliminary and maybe even weak forms of cybernetics (in its broader sense) which unfortunately were never fully developed into a more comprehensive alternative to normative cybernetics coming out of the Macy conferences etc.
Dear Mohammad
“political unconscious” is a term used by Jameson to describe narrative continuities, it has little to do with psychoanalysis.
Cybernetics is a bad example for the point you are trying to make, as a theory its part engineering, part metaphysics (when Shannon was translated into french the editors combed through the text and removed every term they felt was metaphoric, thus unscientific, like entropy for instance, which is an empirical description). its hard to define what cybernetics is as a science: the treatment of feedback as a conceptual abstraction? the treatment of information as a statistical property exacted by the mathematical analyses of a time-series?
I am not sure I know what you mean by “normative” cybernetics? system theory? information theory? what would non-normative cybernetics be? autopoiesis? I am guessing you mean autopoiesis as that would make sense in the context of your post…? anyway, the distinction between manifest and scientific image is hard to sustain and without constant scrutiny science can easily devolve into quackery, pointing this out is not “anti-science,” its rather anti-demagoguery.
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I agree, the internet has huge potential but that potential is not immanent to the medium, it needs to be fought for at every turn.
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@a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_ Yes. Jameson, of course. We all know Jameson, even though I prefer not to refer to him and go straight to the Freudian sources from which the word unconscious entered social sciences and humanities. Unless you are telling me that Jameson’s use of the word unconscious has nothing to do with Freud which I think is really questionable.
And about the term cybernetics, why enter the definition game in which intellectuals battle each other for authority and legitimacy by referring to the knowledge of the known meaning of a term rather than understanding for the purpose of moving forward in the argument. We all have access to Google and can look up history and context of a term. My usage of cybernetics is not so much tied up with a particular definition per say but relates to a living changing & moving concept that for god’s sake should not still be foreign to leftist intellectuals in the 21st century. So instead of stepping into the familiar trap here :), the term Cybernetic revolution, the way I use the term has to do not only with these definitions (First order, second order, third order etc) but the particular history of the development of the practical use of the concept in sciences, military, government and business, of which the internet is only a significant byproduct. I actually am more cynical than you but at the same time consider left’s unwillingness to understand what was at stake in the middle of the 20th century the most important reason as to why we need to fight this losing battle against what you & Julieta have aptly described as the bad internet. Only if we didnt spend a decade poring over Jameson’s definition of postmodernism and really understood it in its original Lyotardian sense as not so much the cultural logic of late capitalism but the cultural response to the decline of industrial production and labour based understanding of our planetary global political economy towards a distributed knowledge economy of exchange in which barriers between what constitutes work & value versus communication & culture were eroding. Only if instead of uselessly regurgitating Debord’s weak image theory in every decade since the 1960s, we read and analyzed Deleuze’s Postscript instead… the contrast between non normative and normative cybernetics can be illuminated by the example of the Chilean Cybersyn versus the Hayek and the Chicago school economic model that forcefully replaced it.
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@DADABASE I also believe that the fight should not be one of resistance but one of intense usage (An idea that I know you back-up and update frequently); while these might be the golden age of the internet (very limited Government control, centralization, etc. ) If we start refusing to embrace its potentialities (and its negatives) we will wind up loosing control over such a powerful tool. I mean, It really is emerging as a fantastic tool for all that is good in culture. Yes…something close to 80% of the internet remains pornography. But there is also Wikileaks, Wikipedia, eflux conversations, Jstor, academia.org
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@DADABASE In the future, the internet will be the only university people will need. The new centre is doing something incredible: Dislocation of geography. I am constantly reminded that I have a friend who is doing his PhD in solving singularity problems with topology, and there is very very few people that can help him. For this reason he is in a dirty and medieval village in Spain. He is not happy. It is the possibilities of connecting with influential intellectuals on a global scale that will fundamentally change the conditions of knowledge aquisition.
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@ManuelCorrea. We try! http://tripleampersand.org/books/what-is-grounding/ I just thought about posting this here for those who don’t know.
The New Centre for Research & Practice is very pleased to announce the the first book release by &&& Publishing.
What is Grounding? is Gilles Deleuze’s first seminar, and is distinguished in that, rather than “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his offspring, yet monstrous”, the work focuses instead on the question of grounding, defined both as “the sufficient reason for concrete entities”, and “the point of departure for philosophy”, in translator Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s terms. Rather than foregrounding method, in which human subjective experience remains primary, here Deleuze affirms the centrality of system, of things and the relations between things.
“Nothing less than the ur-text for Deleuze’s pre-1970s philosophy, an original sketch of his main themes and problems, which are all present in intensely compacted form” – Christian Kerslake (Radical Philosophy)
Please note: we will hold a special members-only book launch event with Arjen Kleinherenbrink on Sunday, June 14 at 1 PM EST. Details to follow shortly.
@a_n_a_t_e_i_x_e_i_r_ I’m late to the conversation, but really engaged by your responses on this thread. I found this lineage of feedback loops, distinguishing broadly between the productive vs entropic sorts of loops (outwards and inwards spirals?):
- Cybernetics: Information | Noise
- Thermodynamics: Work | Waste
- Darwin: Fecundity | Selection
- Malthus: Reproduction | Starvation
- Smith: Supply | Demand
It seems that there’s an implicit distinction between scarcity as the former term and abundance, though in each variation that’s modulated, since obviously scarcity regulates both supply and demand for Smith. I also enjoyed reading your summation of autopoeisis in the Varelan vein. It seems to me that this description of the dynamics internal to cybernetics fully addresses Mohammad’s concerns about your concerns about technology. Since, following Gilbert Simondon, all culture and technology consist in ways of manipulating the environment, the critical choices we have to make are about the kinds of recursivities we want to set.
The constant scrutiny, the fighting at every turn you are reminding us of—I wonder how we could describe it in ways that are less voluntarist, less based on expressions of spontaneous will, because that seems to me a way people get burned out without having impact. I guess that I mean I think there is technology, there is struggle and then there are technologies of struggle (even if it’s just methodologies, institutions, practices).
@dxb [quote=“dxb, post:31, topic:1639”]
Cybernetics: Information | Noise
[/quote]
This is that limited understanding of cybernetics that we need to overcome my definition of non trivial cybernetics is the meta feedback loops that interconnect the systems you mentioned in your list and perhaps more. In fact the legit criticism of cybernetics coming from Ana is predicated on this limited understanding of cybernetics.