Cybernetics as Social Control
In both All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and The Cybernetic Hypothesis Adam Curtis and Tiqqun posit that Cybernetics, the theory, within a sociological context, that human society can be organized as a control system, has become the primary form of subjugation within the Postmodern Era. I am curious as to whether or not anyone else agrees with this theory or knows where I could find more information about it.
Postscript:
This, I think, will be my last thread for a while, as I get the feeling like I have become somewhat vexing and should not like to be a bother. I've been thinking my way through to this in past threads, a process that kind of involves rambling, which I should like to apologize for. I figured that, in a show of good faith, I should create a thread on this actual concept within political philosophy and open it to discussion. Having done so, I'll leave this at that unless anyone comments on it. I'll talk to you whenever.
Postscript:
This, I think, will be my last thread for a while, as I get the feeling like I have become somewhat vexing and should not like to be a bother. I've been thinking my way through to this in past threads, a process that kind of involves rambling, which I should like to apologize for. I figured that, in a show of good faith, I should create a thread on this actual concept within political philosophy and open it to discussion. Having done so, I'll leave this at that unless anyone comments on it. I'll talk to you whenever.
Comments (41)
The idea, I think, is that social control is primary to socio-political activity and that it is primarily maintained through the regulation of the rhythm of society. It's, of course, much more complex than that, but that is, perhaps, the best one sentence summary that I can give.
I haven't actually read this text by Giorgio Agamben, the text where this idea is outlined by Michel Foucault, and am somewhat hesitant to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's terminology from the text that I have read, A Thousand Plateaus, but, I am willing to posit that social control is primarily secured and maintained through the utilization of various apparatuses. Agamben defines an apparatus well as "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." You can think of one as an aggregated set of machinations that get people to act in a manner that is beneficial to the set of people who design them. What I am further willing to posit is that much of what is actually happening within both the realms of the political and the social is that such an automated form of control has been attempted to have been put into effect and more or less everyone else is attempting to render it inoperative. Though I would suggest that such ideas are fairly sapient, I would warn against believing in the machine metaphor too directly. There are actually people out there who set in motion the course of events which result in the attempt at subjugation and the attempt at liberation from it. Being said, I also think that there is something to the pathological interpretation of the concept of an apparatus. It is the utilization of such machinations that creates a certain degree of cult pathology within the sets of society who attempt to put them into effect. In a way, they believe in their grand designs. The London Psychogeographical Association was certainly idiosyncratic. Though it was to some extent, it was not entirely absurd. Liberating people from things like the cult pathology of what this or that statue or architectural landmark was supposed to produce in the world, though hazarding a certain degree of cult pathology in its own right, actually made a certain degree of sense, as there just as well might have been biopolitical operations that relied upon established cultural symbols. People often become lost in things like that, though.
Being said, because such forms of protest, through whatever is done in response to them, can so often produce a situation that is, at best, fairly quixotic, I would also warn against believing in only them.
To come back to my original idea, what I am suggesting is at stake, when there ought to be a generally agreed upon assumption that all parties ought to be attempting to bring about as liberal of a society as possible, in both the realm of the political and the social, is control. It is primarily secured and maintained through apparatuses. I stand by what I said before, which is that you can think of one as an aggregated set of machinations that get people to act in a manner that is beneficial to the set of people who design them.
That social relations and politics are predicated upon that social capital is accumulated, maintained, and wielded as a weapon of conquest, however, is precisely what the aforementioned "cult pathology" is. I would also warn against letting my nihilistic assessment of the Postmodern condition become a form of Nihilism. People ought to be so-called "idealists". They ought to think that social relations and politics ought to be predicated on that all parties agree to create as liberal of a society as possible.
In the meantime, however, I would suggest to continue to render apparatuses of social control inoperative.
That is all that I have to say about this for now. Feel free to proceed from there.
Sure. But as I explained to you on the other threads, you've got no chance in a million of achieving that as long as you don't understand what those apparatuses are, how they operate, and who controls them.
Fair enough, but I am just leaving this thread open to a conversation as to what I have highlighted as Cybernetics. As I don't think that anyone else will comment on it, I'll probably just be leaving. Cya later, I guess.
Foucault was often credited for the conception "apparatus", I think. So let's settle on that. What repulsed the readers, if not the scholars, of political philosophy is, the word itself is meant to be a warning, a sinister existence both physical and psychological. We're in a matrix, so to speak. And there is a network or networks of structures in place already planned and designed for you -- you believe you're thinking for yourself, you're a free agent, you plan for the future, the results of your hard work and time spent is all credited to you. But you don't see that there's an apparatus, a machination, running in the background that's already planned your actions and decisions. Look up the docile bodies.
If it sounds like a science fiction, it's because the apparatus narrative hasn't been already brought down to the common people narrative. The philosophy behind this is to blame. It's hard to articulate something that exists both in physical structures and in your psyche (your mind, soul, and spirit -- to borrow a dictionary definition) without sounding like a caricature, or worse, delusional.
Quoting thewonder
This could be unintentional. We can argue that the intent of the apparatuses is to protect the establishment itself. Remember, the machinations relegates humans as subjects, including the ones operating the machines. This is a horrifying thing to say if we actually let this discussion go down that path.
Quoting thewonder
Too late. The machination is in place. I haven't read @Apollodorus post about this. But if he could post it here, that can help.
I follow your posts with interest and confusion, as I do several posters. But it seems to me that the desire to mechanise the human is doomed to frustration. Humans are subject to social control but the social is merely the generalised human. So social control acts like locking the handlebars on a bicycle; the direction is controlled but balance is lost. The human psyche as society can be reduced to the mentality of the dictator, but the mentality of the dictator cannot be stable. Social collapse is inevitable.
Self-control is all about letting go. [quote=Lao Tzu] When nothing is done, then all will be well.[/quote]
I tend to be of the opinion that in order to render social control inoperative it would be necessary to identify what the apparatuses are through which control is exerted, how they operate, and who controls them. I haven't had the time to post anything on this yet. But I shall endeavor to do so at the earliest opportunity provided that there is genuine interest in it.
Habermas calls such "steering media" - money and power for example:
which bypass consensus-oriented communication with a 'symbolic generalisation of rewards and punishments'. After this process the lifeworld "is no longer needed for the coordination of action". This results in humans ('lifeworld actors') losing a sense of responsibility with a chain of negative social consequences. Lifeworld communications lose their purpose becoming irrelevant for the coordination of central life processes. This has the effect of ripping the heart out of social discourse, allowing complex differentiation to occur but at the cost of social pathologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action
Yes, but it isn't entirely clear who or what is ultimately responsible or what the solution might be. And, at the end of the day, it's only a theory. I for one can't see much difference between Habermas and neo-Marxism. But I could be wrong.
There is no "who", the apparatuses are automatic -- like I said, even the actors in it are unaware of the machinations.
I like your description of an apparatus. I've included my warning against believing in the metaphor too directly as I went quite mad a while ago and something that I had done was to have hallucinated machines that I became fixated on destroying. I even wrote a series of texts to create an assemblage for that specific purpose. It turned out to be some of the most arcane political philosophy ever written by that account.
I have chosen machination to describe an apparatus for its double meaning. It's difficult for me to express how it's as if there is an actual psychic machine that has been projected into the world and simultaneously that there are actual people who attempt to set things out so that the world gets controlled in some way or another. I both like and dislike the machine metaphor. It is as if there is a manifest collective psychic phenomenon that, in itself, has secured control. At the same time, I wonder if that doesn't hazard a certain madness. Ultimately, there are people out there who attempt to conscript others as their subjects. We can speak of an apparatus, but what is one, really? I do kind of suspect that it is as if they exist, though.
I don't know that I would say that apparatuses merely protect the establishment itself. They exist within the ultra-Left just as they do in mafias as they do within any system of law. There are establishments who have secured greater control, having been engaged in such things for longer, but it is not just they who either create or let them become created and are either utilized by them or put them to use. Felix Guattari once titled an article, "Everyone wants to be a fascist." In a way, I think that you can think of Fascism as an apparatus in itself. That people believe that everyone can only attempt to organize society so that it is to their liking creates a certain cult pathology in relation to control. I am not speaking of Fascism as it has come to be historically understood. I'm speaking of it more in the abstract. The Wilhelm Reich quote about the "fascist in our head", I think, is all the more terrifying if we can consider Fascism as an apparatus. There's a certain optimism to it as well, however, in that the battle is almost purely psychological. It's just something that I think about from time to time.
What I'm also positing of apparatuses is that, upon discovering their machinations, you necessarily are making an attempt to render them inoperative. A person's mind is the only that they have to live with at all times. You can only seek to liberate it. That's kind of a speculative theory, though.
Yes, but nothing in human society is "automatic", everything is a product of human agency.
Though I am not trying to perplex anyone, I can understand that I might. I'm glad that they generate interest, though.
I think that social deviance kind of gets at what you've gleaned. You couldn't have a film like Scorpio Rising without there being further and further automation over social and political life. People often revel, or even celebrate such cultures, but I feel as if they're kind of a tragic expression of a lack of freedom.
I don't think it's that speculative. As I said, "know thyself" is the start to any attempt to attain true knowledge and freedom. Self-knowledge is the only thing by which you can determine who or what you are, who the others are, and what the relation between yourself and the others is. Situational awareness is invariably based on self-knowledge. Without that you can't get anywhere.
I read some Habermas ages ago, but can't remember any of it as of right now. Maybe I should look back into it?
Situational awareness is definitely key. I know that I often forget that there are conclusions that I have drawn because of the thought I have felt a need to put into certain ideas or events that other people wouldn't have come to just by virtue of not having the same experience.
I'm not sure that I fully agree that everything is a product of human agency, however. There are always, of course, actors, but I will say that it is often as if some other emergent phenomenon is really in control.
You can if you want, but I doubt it's worth it. To me Habermas sounds just like neo-Marxism phrased slightly differently to the usual stuff.
For all of the critiques there are to make of Marxists, it's not as if they never have perceptive ideas.
They may have perceptive ideas but less perceptive practical solutions. All Marxist states have ended up in abject failure.
Could be. Good intuition.
Quoting Apollodorus
Habermas' theory of communicative action is much more anthropological.
Marxist thought seems to have spread to many other fields including anthropology, e.g. social anthropology, making it difficult in many cases to distinguish between one and the other.
It's been common practice since the time of G B Shaw to both criticize and defend Marxism along the lines of "Yes, this or that element of Marxism, e.g., economic theory is bad but its political philosophy or social philosophy is sound, etc." This seems to be Habermas' approach too. So, I wouldn't classify Habermas as too different from Marxism. More like a sub-current of Marxism.
Well I question this automation idea.
Quoting Caldwell
I question the mechanical metaphor.
Consider a river that has a course, and we see that the course changes by the oxbow lakes and so on, but the course is stable over a lifetime, most of the time. But there is a day of revolution when the bank is breached and the meander is short-circuited. There is no who and no apparatus either. The river operates on itself, and the river is the water and the course. A river is never broken.
Machinations are appropriate to political thought because thought is mechanical; but life is not.
I like the general sentiment of what you have expressed, but am not entirely sure that it applies.
In so far that there is social control, something or someone must arbitrate it. It is not as if life is literally automated. It's that various mechanisms are developed so that it becomes in some way or another.
I think that apparatuses arise within networks of influence, through the development of technology, because of legal systems, and even through philosophy in the creation of various ideologies. I think that the idea of an apparatus is that it becomes as if there is something else that comes to be what is in control. A network of social relations comes to create its own codes of conduct, internet access becomes integral to a person's capacity to find their place within the world, the concept of justice become a society of discipline and punishment, or a revolutionary political philosophy becomes a state-sanctioned orthodoxy. There are always still people involved, but I do think that apparatuses exist.
They don't just do so within political life. Consider the various symbolic orders, imagined hierarchies, and particular doctrines within the arts. I wish that what you have said is true, and life were merely to flow as a river, but the Postmodern condition, I think, exists because of cybernetic social control. There are always other ways of life, however.
As much as I should like to believe that people just don't lose their humanity, the sheer number of genocides in the Twentieth Century would feign prove otherwise.
What has been said ought to be true, though. People ought never to become as machines of destruction. We ought to think that someday they won't. We only ought to, though.
That's what I think about this, anyways.
It'd seem that living well outside of however we should like define systems of control will do us better than anything else, as it'd show people what they really want, which is to have the freedom to do so. That's just the trick, though: living well and having the freedom to do so.
I don't have anything else to say for now, and, so, will be off unless anyone comments on this. So long, I guess. 'Til we meet again!
I hesitate, because it is a well misused argument; but indulge me in a crude consideration of evolution. It seems to me that a big brained tool-using social mammal has the advantage of fast (compared to evolutionary time) adaptation to an unstable environment, where such adaptation includes the manipulation of the environment itself. If it turns cold, instead of evolving thicker fur or heading South, clever monkey builds a house and steals the skin of other animals to wear. All this in the name of mammalian temperature control, just like the fur of polar bears.
Monkey likes bananas; clever monkey plants bananas. But clever monkey cannot think in global space, or evolutionary time. So temperature control is local and temporary. The adaptation to climate instability turns out to increase climate instability. There is no control mechanism for the control mechanism. Politics and government ought to, but don't seem to be able to deal with pandemics or climate change. The society that was supposed to allow adaptation has become rigid. That's why, in my previous analogy, they are like the riverbanks in a floodplain - they constrain the river, but arbitrarily and so temporarily. No one is in charge, and nothing is under control. Come back God, all is forgiven!
I like what you have to say about this, but still contend that there are apparatuses of social control. Deleuze and Guattari came up with abstract machines if you'd like to think of imaginary machines in a more positive light.
An aside:
I have a pretty out theory about how dishwashers are abstract machines. A good dishwasher controls the rhythm of the entire establishment. Generating a rhythm for it lets you and everyone else kind of zen out while at work. It's kind of a form of meditation. The dishwasher is, therefore, the last line of defense between common wisdom and ubiquitous false consciousness.
The machine teaches you how to generate the rhythm, though. The machine is the master that the pupil surpasses. In this case, considering an abstract machine as positive, the machine is like a serendipitous liberatory learning device. It's a catcher in the rye. That they exist is something that just keeps the world from being driven mad.
Yeah, well, tell that to Foucault and the likes. Apparently, the apparatus is in all of our lives.
The mountain teaches you how to climb. But it doesn't oblige you to climb.
Quoting Caldwell
They don't talk to me, unfortunately. The apparatus of thought is in all our lives, and thought is mechanical; thought produces that wonderful machine for living, the panopticon, and so on. But if one lives in a machine and according to the machine, one lives a mechanical life - an oxymoronic non-life. But for all its potent impotence, it remains an anological construction and human relations are not mechanical relations except by performance. The scientific urge is to understand and control the world in mechanical terms, but there is nothing mechanical about understanding. The mechanical analogy is so pervasive, it sounds rather 'woo' to question it. But there is no evidence - gotta love the science-speak - that the world operates mechanically; on the contrary, there is much evidence that even machines do not: they breakdown precisely because they lack the caring relation to the world, as does thought.
The analogy to a physical machine is apt, though. As you noted, machines breakdown, and so do political structures. Machines can function like well-oiled, and so can societal systems. After a while, it is self-regulated.
You might think that it is only an analogical construction and human relations are not mechanical. In this regard, the apparatus is working well. It is achieving what it purports to maintain. Because that is what the structures want you to think and behave. That you are not encumbered by rules, and laws, and orders. That there are personal and private lives -- and you can separate the two.
But to someone who is a scholar of social and political systems, the shape of the system reveals itself as something that can literally be explained in a formula. So, human interactions can be designed, controlled, and maintained such that the apparatus is not felt, or known.
Machines that want?
Quoting Caldwell
But I don't think that. Do you?
No they cannot. Psychology operates in the realm of statistical effects, and the power is undeniable. Nevertheless it is the psyche that designs and controls the psycho-social. But this conversation is out of control, because there are no statistics about who will convince whom of what, or what novel idea will perhaps be born of our interaction. Even Google does not know.
No statistics needed. These are observations by the scholars who made it their business to analyze what's happening. I may or may not agree. And again, you are exhibiting the perfect subject syndrome. You are acting exactly how the structures are designed. You are providing your own observation, your own analysis, going against the idea of machinations.
I am responding to you; you are not a machine. This is not a syndrome nor is it subjective.
Analysis is mechanical, but scholars are not, and because of this, their analysis is always out of control, and never complete. Even scholars do not know.