Machinism or synergism
Two cybernetic meta-narratives
“First we have the model current among management theorists in industry, with its counterpart in conventional thinking about government in society as a whole. This is the model of a rigid pyramidal hierarchy, with lines of ‘communication and command’ running from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. There is fixed delineation of responsibility, each element has a specified role, and the procedures to be followed at any level are determined within fairly narrow limits, and may only be changed by decisions of elements higher in the hierarchy. The role of the top group of the hierarchy is sometimes supposed to be comparable to the ‘brain’ of the system.
The other model is from the cybernetics of evolving self-organising systems. Here we have a system of large variety, sufficient to cope with a complex unpredictable environment. Its characteristics are changing structure, modifying itself under continual feedback from the environment, exhibiting redundancy of potential command, and involving complex interlocking control structures. Learning and decision-making are distributed throughout the system, denser perhaps in some areas than in others.” (McEwan, 1963)
The unknown quantity of cybernetics
The status of cybernetics in relation to society and politics is a highly contested question, not least because it is viewed in relation to such diametrically opposed histories by its supporters and critics that one side can hardly understand the other. This deep-rooted contestation is detrimental to attempts to assess the possibility of utilising cybernetics towards emancipatory and revolutionary ends.
Here I will name the disjunction between cybernetics’ advocates and detractors and assert a distinction between two predominant interpretations of cybernetics which hold significance within contemporary political discourse. On the one hand, cybernetics is conceived by many to not just be an enemy of emancipatory politics, but the central enemy of it, signifying the technological and governance apparatus which makes revolutionary dissent and constructing a different world near impossible to conceive of. Others understand cybernetics to signify an indispensable methodology, central to the conceptualisation and actualisation of precisely the emancipatory futures which our current state of things obscures from sight. By separating these two perspectives and renaming them as distinct, my hope is that discussions about the potentiality of cybernetics will be less fraught with confusion and both sides might understand what the other means when they refer to cybernetics.
Two cybernetic meta-narratives
When surveying the discourse surrounding the political implications of cybernetics, two overarching categories of interpretation become clear. First, there is what I will here call machinism, the view of cybernetics as the conceptual foundation of the current hegemonic state of interconnected global social control. This machine is the force behind accelerating state power and the accumulation of capital. On the basis of this interpretation, it is obvious that cybernetics should be treated with the utmost enmity: hacked, overloaded, sabotaged or escaped from. But there is a second current within cybernetics which disrupts this purely antagonistic disposition with regards to cybernetics. There are those who see machinism as a perverse abuse of cybernetics, an appropriation of its lessons for the furtherance of thoroughly uncybernetic ends. What I here call synergism is the conception of cybernetics as providing conceptual building blocks to imagine, design and actuate a better world. A world of our own, collaboratively constructed and governed by its members, designed to facilitate self-organisation, autonomy, and organisational synergy.
These two conceptions seem diametrically opposed to one another - and they are - but it remains true that they both in their own way emerged from the same founding building blocks of cybernetic research. They constitute two histories of cybernetics. It is no wonder then that there is such misunderstanding and opposition when discussions are had around the use and abuse of cybernetics. So long as these two histories of cybernetics go without being distinguished it is hard to conceive of mutual understanding emerging between those who want to build better worlds and those who want to oppose the machine imposing accelerating hostility towards life. With this in mind, we should be categorical about the status of these two histories and futures of cybernetics. The former is the enemy of emancipation and of life itself, both human and otherwise. The other, I wager, is an indispensable component of imagining and constructing worlds which offer the possibility of overcoming, or at least providing relief from, that hegemonic machine.
H. “compare a typical first-order cybernetics concept such as “purpose,” (as being the equivalent of “why”) with a second-order question, “What is the purpose of ‘purpose’?” (asking why the notion of “purpose” is used in the first place; i.e. how does it influence discourse, explanations, argumentations, etc.?) One nice feature of this notion is that it relieves one of the need to account for the way things are done which are intended. Every time I tie my shoelaces, or you slip into your pumps, we do it differently. We do it in thousands of unpredictable variations, but the outcome is predictable; my shoelaces are tied, your shoes are on your feet…
Y. Thank you. I feel much better with my shoes on. I see now the purpose of using the notion of purpose. One does not need to know how to get there; one needs only to know the there. This is a very nice feature indeed! Is there a bad feature too?
H. Yes there is. The ugly feature of the notions of “purpose,” “goal,” and “end,” is that they can be used to justify the specific ways of getting there; “The end justified the means.” And as we know now, the means can be very ugly indeed. The question should be, “Do the means justify the end?” (von Foerster & Rey)
Machinism
For most of those interested in radical, anti-capitalist politics, cybernetics is synonymous with the state/capitalist machine, the system which reinforces the status quo and recuperates whatever is outside of it. It is sometimes called the society of control or the war machine, and is easily portrayed as the ultimate antagonist in works by writers like Tiqqun, Delueze & Guitarri, La Fontaine, Lazarotto and elsewhere. These writers articulate a conception of hegemonic cybernetics, of cybernetics as the dominant methodology of concentrating power and capital in ever smaller localities. Cybernetics, when writers like Tiqqun speak of it, constitutes the architecture of technocratic power, in which people are nothing but disordered nodes to be filtered and guided into more convenient patterns so that their behaviour becomes increasingly aligned with the interests of the machine of which they are a part.
While this portrayal of cybernetics conveys only a part of its complex history (and leaves aside everything from cybernetics which might be of aid to our common interests) it is vital that we admit from the outset that these critics of cybernetics are correct in their characterisation of the roots and most apparent consequences of the subject. From its outset, cybernetics emerged from military powers (refining the efficiency with which the military could shoot down enemy jets) and soon became deeply integrated into its complex and machinic approach to governance and military might. Simultaneously, cybernetics was developed among psychiatrists who sought to treat the human mind as a machine and, in their attempts to learn what made the engine tick, destroyed beyond repair patients with a chilling callousness. The roots of cybernetics in the military and psychiatry continued to grow through its history and led to the development and refinement of a philosophy of control which today is so total, in terms not just of war itself but the ordinary functions of the state and capital.
This hegemonic interpretation of cybernetics reduces every system down to a machinic and/or computational metaphor. Cybernetics emerged from the time period in which computers were coming into vogue and the machines of industrialisation had become deeply embedded in the zeitgeist of the time. For some, this led to the realisation that there were correlations and invariances between artificial and living systems (an intuition which is at the base of all cybernetics) while for others this led to a conflation between machines and all other types of systems: a view that all complex systems (including biological, neurological and social systems) are equivalent to machines, or are at least mechanically indistinguishable.1 This subtle but vital mismatch between similarity and equivalence led to a valorisation of the machine/computer as the preeminent explanatory object of all complex systems, and a growing view among those in positions of power, whether in the domain of science, state, military or industry, that populations can be ordered, structured and filtered like scattered data awaiting the wise structuring of a technician or mechanic. This machinic outlook naturally led to the reduction of human life to a measurable, manipulable quantity, impersonal and lacking individuality. All life is reduced to a computational function and all that which resists the machine is to be either incorporated into it or excluded from it, lest it threaten the machine’s progression towards totalisation.
Machinism here instrumentalises both cybernetic theory and life itself towards the consolidatory ends of power and capital. Cybernetics is used as a methodology for extending systematic power consolidation. Its lessons are not seen for what they are - its implications about decentering power, enabling self-organisation and facilitating autonomy are taken with a large grain of salt - absorbed only insofar as they further the aims already established by existing powers. Usually taking the form of a top-down, centralised execution of power over populations (an approach which goes entirely against fundamental lessons of cybernetics) but at other times being happy to enable decentralisation, autonomy and self-management so long as it further consolidates capital and power in the hands of those who already possess it. As it turns out, those principally cybernetic standpoints are more compatible with power consolidation than many of its originators would have expected. Life too is reduced to a mere instrument of power, including human, non-human and ecological life. Biological life is perversely reimagined as a mere bootloader for capital, AI or whatever technological progression summons into being.
All this begs the question: if machinism is the predominant meta-narrative of organised cybernetics, what alternative narrative might provoke a re-evaluation of cybernetics as anything but the enemy against which humans must unite if we want to survive the century? What interpretation of cybernetics would counteract something so totally antithetical to life and the hope of a better world?
Synergism
Identifying the contours of our second meta-narrative of cybernetics is a little less easy to trace, as it is a far more sporadic, distributed and diverse category than the centralised hegemon of state and capital. It is not a single monolithic utilisation of cybernetic ideas, but a diverse array of thinkers and researchers utilising its conceptual toolbox and methodology in the service of human ends.2
The term synergism emerges from two major influences. The first is obvious. Synergy is a central concept in systems thinking and cybernetics, and refers to the internal coherence of a system, the mutual interdependence of its parts and their self-reinforcing interaction. Specifically, synergism is here understood as the maximisation of synergy between both organisational efficiency/coherence and radical participatory organisational principles. Synergism insists on constructing organisations which compromise neither their organisational efficiency nor the principles upon which they are founded. But synergism has another meaning which resonates with our characterisation of cybernetics here. Syngerism in a religious context refers to the necessity for cooperation between human agency and ‘god’ in the attainment of salvation (the latter here being understood as emancipation from the current inhospitable state of things). Understood in a thoroughly Spinozaist sense (“god is nature”) the resonance between synergism and emancipatory cybernetics becomes obvious. Synergistic cybernetics looks towards the world and the complex system which it is comprised of and takes from it whatever contributes to the construction of worlds more aligned with our desires. We do not simply mimic what nature displays, but cooperate with it and take from it whatever might be useful to create a world of our own making.3
Manifestations of synergism take all sorts of forms within cybernetic discourse. It is sometimes called anarchist cybernetics, participatory cybernetics, common cybernetics (c/cyb), or tektology. These approaches are each distinct from one another, but all direct cybernetics towards the articulation and design of better forms of social organisation with the lessons of cybernetics in mind. They are all counter-hegemonic conceptions of cybernetics, which take opposition to the current state of the world as a given and are directed towards the articulation of ways of organising both in line with nature and our desires regarding what kinds of organisation might lead to human flourishing.
While machinism looks to the computer/machine metaphor and projects it onto everything, synergism looks to natural systems altogether - including but not limited to us, our machines and our society - to gain lessons, teachings, implications and models, and to take what is expedient from those examples.4 Unlike machinism, synergism doesn’t prioritise one cybernetic metaphor over others. It drives towards greater synergy within the social organism by whatever means necessary (rather than for greater control within the social machine as it already is). Synergism observes systems, mixes their implications with whatever purposes and desires we might set ourselves, and takes from them whatever might bring our goals into greater proximity with reality. In this sense, synergism refuses the distinction between organisational efficiency and the construction of a society based on high ideals of equality and democracy. We cannot have either efficiency or democracy, but must synergetically maximise both.
Synergism draws on the self-organising properties of nature. It shows both that the natural world and the complex systems which make it up are self-organised, self-managing systems with no single leader, no functional hierarchy, no command-and-control, and are in some sense deeply democratic. In the same breath, however, it allows us to take from nature what is useful to fulfil our ends, to draw out of the world what is emancipatory, what is egalitarian, and what conforms to our ethical and political commitments. Synergism is both descriptive of the world as it is and provokes us to make the world as we want it to become. This orientation pushes synergism towards the exploration and elaboration of concepts like self-governance, self-organisation, conversation, autopoiesis, maximised synergy, Bogdanov’s law of the least,5 the redundancy of potential command, variety engineering, and so on. It takes these ideas from the sciences and systemics and applies them to societal and organisational governance/design, whether actuated or speculative.
Synergism is openly oriented towards the fulfilment of human ends. It does not rest on any imagined objectivity like the cyberneticians of the first generation and directs itself towards the furtherance of self-organisation among people along organisational lines which best serve those people. It refuses the inhuman end of capital or the reinforcement of existing institutions, not least because both are manifestly antithetical to the self-organisation of a world of our own making. The technologies produced by synergism6 are understood as valuable to the extent that they serve the ends of humanity and her world.
Synergism or machinism?
Machinism faces backwards. It has existed for our lifetimes and has absorbed much of cybernetic knowledge into its functioning. It is built on historic crimes. Machinism looks upwards, towards god as machinic authority - feeding that which pulls the strings with another node of power. Machinism sits in existing powers, acting to further consolidate what it has through any means necessary, it looks at the world as it is and seeks to reiterate it.
Synergism is forward facing, though it has a rich history (mostly of failure, partial success and unfinished experiments, ideas, theories, and models) to draw upon to construct a better future for people and world. Synergism looks below, towards god as nature, towards the commons - always already at our feet, awaiting a response to its open invitation. Synergism sits in the absence of power, in a world which is not its own, looking for the threads of flourishing, patiently tying them into knots and patterns.
Cybernetics contains the building blocks of both these central meta-narratives, but it is in essence neither one nor the other. While machinism distorts or ignores many of the most fundamental implications of cybernetics, the ever-present linkages between the development of cybernetics in the military, psychiatry and other shady business from its beginnings should neither be minimised nor denied. Cybernetics is implicated in both the best and worst of human ideas but is reducible to neither. Both have told their own story of cybernetics’ history and future, but they stand as polar opposites which should not be conflated. One is the horizon of enmity which we must organise against, the other provides tools to conceive of and construct better worlds, alternatives to machinism’s cybernetic hegemony.
This machine-oriented viewpoint is central to the conception of cybernetics as it is understood and utilised within a hegemonic context, by state and capital, but it is also central to the popular (mis)apprehension of cybernetics within popular culture as being an extension of a cyberpunk aesthetics of dystopia. So many of our dystopian futures end up looking a lot like our present, only with more machines, machine-human hybrids, and an ever deepening reinforcement of the state/capitalist system in which we already reside. In this sense, the machinic interpretation of cybernetics is hegemonic not only in the political realm of power/capital but also in the cultural realm of aesthetics and imagination. C/cyb’s purpose is to disturb this hegemony.
If I had a more expansive knowledge of Bogdanov’s work, my intuition tells me that the term ‘neo-tektology’ might make for a good name for this category of emancipatory cybernetics, but given my only basic grasp of his complex body of work, I’ll settle for now on another name: synergism.
Both ‘world’ and ‘nature’ here are understood in a deeply open and overarching sense. World/nature includes humans, their ideas, their societies and the technologies within, as well as the birds and the bees. ‘Artificiality’, in this sense, is as natural as the primordial soup.
Despite our own creations constituting aspects of nature from which to draw lessons, it is also true that our inventions amount to counter-examples and cautionary tales more often than not. Biological and ecological systems have remained viable for timescales which are incomparable to our fragile societies and inventions. Even our greatest achievements are closer to momentary and experimental mutations than exemplary of viability.
“The stability of the whole depends on the least relative resistance of all of its parts at any moment of time.” (Bogdanov, Tektology book 1, p219)
Technologies, like ‘nature’, are here understood in their broadest sense and should not be reduced to digital gadgets or modern hardware. Practices, techniques and tools are technologies. Folk knowledge, heuristics and ‘life hacks’ might be forms of technology. Nests constructed by birds, the camouflage of a chameleon and a beaver’s dams are also technologies. Our own bodies are perhaps the greatest technology at our disposal when it is used wisely.
You make a compelling argument that synergism is inherently more efficient than machinism because it violates the rules of organization--this is powerful and naturalistic. But then your lines about ethical commitments come off as completely arbitrary to me. IMO the power of cybernetics is that it obliterates the subject-object distinction, but that sword cuts both ways. The machinists are applauding the death of the subject by its reduction to the machine (largely true, there will never be a more powerful explanatory frame), and meanwhile you are advancing the death of the object by recourse to constructivism, and the nearly mystical reality of the organic and ineffably complex (also true, and likely the most important 'truism' there will ever be). You say you want to work with the God of efficiency, but it sounds more like you want to make a pittance of acknowledgement so that He will allow you to shape the world the way you want it to become. What instead does it look like to treat the situation PURELY on the grounds of nihilistic, organizational laws?