Control after Cybernetics: Governmentality as Navigation by Homeostasis and Chaos

Cybernetics is hardly new. A theory poised after World War II to unify the sciences, it promised to end the disciplinary divisions of American scientists. As Fred Turner has argued, however, its most enduring impact is to be found in two other places, the military-industrial complex's "freewheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial style of work" and the "New Communalists" of the hippy counter-culture (2006, 4-5). These sources of success have made its legacy significant but ambiguous. The "cyber" prefix has proliferated to the point of meaninglessness. Its concept of information so diffuse as to become the commonsense understanding of media and technology. Moreover, a number of contemporary fields of study including artificial intelligence and non-Freudian psychology owe early support to researchers associated with cybernetics. Perhaps most curiously, a growing number of radicals interested in diagnosing the politics of the twentieth century also turned to cybernetics—not as a solution but as a model for the operations of liberal capitalist governmentality (Tiqqun 2010a).

The significant but diffuse impact of cybernetics has long led researchers to use it as a window into deeper social trends. These inquiries are bookended by N. Katherine Hayles and Seb Franklin. In her How We Became Posthuman (1999), Hayles acts as a pioneer, setting the template for how the humanities should study the legacy of cybernetics—including a careful consideration of the post-World War II world that cybernetician Nortbert Wiener and his colleagues wanted to construct, as well as the unexpected troubling of the liberal notion of the subject it would jumpstart. Franklin's Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015), on the other hand, is the detailed work only possible after a field has matured, as the intellectual history of cybernetics has, confidently establishing how cybernetics played a part in establishing a whole "control episteme" linking "the principles of post-Fordist production, communicative and cognitive capitalism, and neoliberal economism through nested concepts of biology, psychology, markets, and society as self-regulating systems premised on data processing" (2015, 83).

Taking the significant commentary and criticism already written on cybernetics as a backdrop, I use this paper to mine a very specific archive and argue a very narrow claim. The primary materials I discuss are twofold: unpublished texts by Norbert Wiener available in his papers in the MIT archives, and Michel Foucault's recently-published Collège de France lectures. Both sets of materials are work-in-progress ideas never officially published during either's lifetime, which means that they should not be taken as definitive statements by the authors, but rather, elements of a virtual "archival unconscious." If, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would argue, the unconscious is a factory and not a theater, then the archive does not contain secrets of the soul (1983, 23-24). The archive instead contains the hidden abode of production of concepts-in-process broken down into separate "units of production" even more underdetermined than the fully-assembled concept, offering researchers the opportunity to forge even more unexpected connections between otherwise divergent works (24). In this case, elements from each archive point to a convergence between Wiener's social theories of cybernetics and Foucault's genealogy inquiry into the Classical Greek "ship of state."

An additional two-part note on method. First, I approach this material not as a textualist but through a theory of the event. This method treats documents not as expressions of history, e.g. cultural products reflecting the historicity of a given moment, but as images that accompany the arrival of a new problem—a problem so "disharmonious" that it forces the reorganization of the faculties and provokes an experience of the world so novel it is as if one is seeing (hearing, feeling) it for the first time (qtd. in Zourabichvili 2012, 11). Perhaps understood as the radicalization of Gaston Bachelard's concept of the epistemological break by incorporating it into a whole philosophy of time, I draw this method from a formation of scholars who read the work of Gilles Deleuze not as constructing an ontology, but as the invention of problems that...