The Cybernetic Hypothesis

Abstract

The Cybernetic Hypothesis, by Tiqqun is reviewed.

Review of Tiqqun. 2020. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Cambridge, AAA: MIT Press. 168 pp. US$13.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9781635900927.

Tiqqun is an anonymous collective of political activists in France in the late 1990s that disbanded in 2001 after publishing two issues of a self-titled journal. In The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2020). Tiqqun argues that liberalism has been superseded by the logic of cybernetics. Liberalism stands for the cultivation of the isolated, individualized, and highly supervised forms of subjectivity. The cybernetic project, for Tiqqun, aims to produce a new politics of subjects resting on communication and transparency that conceives of the subjects as stripped from any substance. Subjects are seen as self-disciplined personalities that are each made to function as the locus on an infinite feedback loop that rids itself of kinks, situated within and dominated by interoperable systems of communication and control.

Cybernetics is concerned with getting around the impossibility of determining the position and the behavior of the body at the same time. It is about transforming the problem of uncertainty into a problem of information. The cybernetic project is a historical phenomenon, which originated during the Second World War in the US, referring to a network oriented epistemological regime of new social management. Tiqqun claims that this cybernetic episteme offers a political solution in the societal organization since World War II. They see cybernetics as a new technology of government in a Foucauldian sense that brings together discipline, biopolitics. police, and advertising and answers to a desire for order and certainty. An important part of their claim is that the cybernetic hypothesis could never have acquired its practical hegemony and its ability to reshape the world without having encountered capitalism and state power.

The failure of the liberal experiment is seen by cyberneticians as a problem of information, whereby specific information on the market has always been impure and imperfect. Through the expansion of commodification processes and the free market, communication and problems of social control only increased as capitalism destroyed social bonds within society. It seemed that under capitalism, social order was becoming increasingly impossible to achieve. It is this breach in the liberal discourse that the cybernetic discourse rushed to fill. After the crisis of 1973, the economy made processes of self-regulation dependent on valorization of information. This marked a shift in the organization of capitalism, as the virtues of the markets started favoring an optimal allocation of information in society rather than wealth. This discourse came to be called neoliberal. From then on. value could be extracted as information about information, with present day capitalism resulting in an information economy. So, what is broadly called neoliberalism is, according to Tiqqun. best understood as cybernetic capitalism as information technology aspires to form the sole basis of both value and power.

This explains why "control" is such an essential part of late capitalism. The absoiption of surplus capital, as the source of profit, has shifted from wage exploitation to the sphere of circulation, whereby the capitalist system applied cybernetics in trying to avoid crises. Therefore, to maximize commodity flow volumes while avoiding incidents, barriers, and accidents that might slow them down, control apparamses will need to operate. Cybernetics seeks to reduce the fortuitousness, incommensurabilities, expectations, and obstacles that might get in the way of commodity transactions. It contributes to consolidating the basis on which capitalism's mechanisms can function. This makes insecurity, more than scarcity, the kink in late capitalism. At the summit of this layering of control, the police (legitimized violence) and the law (judicial power), seen as state control, play a role as absolute controllers.

When looking at state power, the prison is being expanded and prolonged with monitoring devices such as the electronic bracelet. Similarly, there are the mutual investments in community policing and technologies of surveillance capable of predictive policing. The mutual use of these two techniques can be explained within the logic of the cybernetic hypothesis. They both aim at warding off all events and at organizing feedback to maximize commodity flows and safeguard private property. Within this logic, disturbances in a given zone can be all the better suppressed. Whereas repression within cybernetic capitalism has the role of warding off events, with prediction as its corollary, it aims to eliminate all uncertainty connected to all possible futures. The further use of new algorithmic technologies by the police only speeds up the cycle of feedback, feeding the system again and again, increasing control while doing it.

Tiqqun proposes certain methods of action, as it is essential to see this text as an active working tool that carries a productive revolutionary force in it. For them, there is hope, as not all forms of life can be loaded into a feedback loop. Disabling the process of cybernetization requires an opening to panic as it represents absolute risk. In this situation of panic, communities detach from the social body conceived as a totality and want to escape from it. Revolt relies on potentiality and experimentation to avoid being captured by capital or the state. They propose diffuse guerilla tactics and an invisible revolt as modes of warfare, whereby they don't want to punish injustice but create possible worlds. They want to oppose the binary rhythm of cybernetics by using different ones. From T.E. Lawrence's writings they borrow the method of becoming haze and opaque while constituting a zone of opacity in which to freely circulate and experiment to stop the annihilation of all autonomy. This "fertile chaos" (167) will for them lead to the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.

More than twenty years later, their hypothesis only got more real. Algorithmic governance and its technologies are only further woven into our everyday life. Tiqqun provides a framework that can help to interpret and change our social world in a positive and productive way. With "surveillance capitalism" being brought to the mainstream by Zuboff. their model can explain the underlying logic she describes. Moreover, today's academic work on policing is also too much focused on the technologies itself. Harms are researched but often as flaws of the systems, such as racial bias. Through Tiqqun's writings it is possible to focus on the consequences of this new episteme and governmentality regarding the processes of subjectivation. Therefore, they called it a "hypothesis," as every governmentality is reversable.

Furthermore, it is interesting how this activist work is being picked up by academia. as I myself have, and is becoming part of a capitalist/statist realism production where anti-capitalist resistance itself has become the commodity. Despite that, their theorization of the "zones of opacity" to recover autonomy from cybernetics is also rather limited. Tiqqun's reconceptualisation of neoliberal capitalism as cybernetic capitalism can be a gateway to the emptied-out concept of neoliberalism; however, they risk losing the concepmalised differences between neoliberalism as a logic of capital accumulation and as a governmentality. Yet the strength of the book is the dense and creative theorization combined with methods of actions. It playfully engages with important critical theory and can be a good start for delving further into key texts. Eventually, it is the reader's task to find out how to deflect capture by capital and the state, how to flee escape as Deleuze asked himself, and how to produce autonomy at last.