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we have tO learn tO live On planetary surfaces and bend what we find
there tO Our will.
nAsA AdministRAtoR,
new york tiMes
, 10 december 2006
I want to conclude this chapter by thinking about cybernetics as politics, and
to do so we can pick up a thread that I left hanging in the previous chapter.
There I ran through some of the critiques of cybernetics and indicated lines
of possible response. We are now in a position to consider one final example.
Beyond the specifics of its historical applications, much of the suspicion of
cybernetics seems to center on just one word: “control.” Wiener defined the
field as the science of “control and communication,” the word “control” is
everywhere in the cybernetics literature, and those of us who have a fondness
for human liberty react against that. There are more than enough controls
imposed on us already; we don't want a science to back them up and make
them more effective.
The cyberneticians, especially Stafford Beer, struggled with this moral
and political condemnation of their science, and I can indicate the line of re-
sponse. We need to think about possible meanings of “control.” The objection-
able sense is surely that of control as
domination
—the specter of Big Brother
watching and controlling one's every move—people reduced to automata.
Actually, if this vision of control can be associated with any of the sciences, it
should be the modern ones. Though the word is not much used there, these
are Deleuze and Guattari's royal sciences, aligned with the established order,
that aspire to grasp the inner workings of the world through knowledge and
thus to dominate it and put it entirely at our disposal. Beyond the natural
sciences, an explicit ambition of much U.S. social science throughout the
twentieth century was “social engineering.” Heidegger's (1976 [1954]) under-
standing of the sciences as integral to a project of
enframing
and subjugation
comes to mind. And the point I need to stress is that the cybernetic image of
control was
not like that
.
Just as Laingian psychiatry was sometimes described as antipsychiatry, the
British cyberneticians, at least, might have been rhetorically well advised to
describe themselves as being in the business of
anticontrol
. And to see what
that means, we have only to refer back to the preceding discussion of ontology.
If cybernetics staged an ontology in which the fundamental entities were dy-
namic systems evolving and becoming in unpredictable ways, it could hardly
have been in the business of Big Brother-style domination and enframing. It
follows immediately from this vision of the world that enframing will fail. The
