The term ‘New Left’ gained currency in the West at the beginning of the 1960s (Mills 1960). Rather than representing a coherent movement or discrete set of institutions, the New Left is best understood as a historic and contingent political impulse that drew together a loose and dynamic coalition of socialist, Marxist and countercultural elements that together helped shape the liberal race, class and sexual revolutions that define the present. Besides opposition to the cultural status quo, these different tendencies shared a distrust of the incorporated and bureaucratic old left, including the institutions of organized labour, the Western communist parties and the Soviet Union. The New Left was an important contributor to what was called the May ’68 movement or critique in this book’s Introduction. While having lost what coherence it had by the mid-1970s, the irony of the May ’68 movement’s contribution to the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has already been noted. The US counterculture, itself an early fellow-traveller with the New Left, is also implicated here. In particular, it transformed concerns that computers were a new means of corporate control and governance into the embrace and celebration of digital technology (Turner 2006).
While this corporate recoupment is important, a consideration of the New Left in its own right is still warranted. Between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, it was active in developing a critical understanding of what the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse had called ‘technological society’ (Marcuse 1968). Prescient in relation to current concerns regarding the growing hegemony of post-humanism, data behaviourism and algorithmic governmentality (Rouvroy 2012; Halpern 2014a; Stiegler 2016), today such opposition is all but forgotten. This is especially notable given the fact that, for a number of years, the May ’68 critique had a raucous and recalcitrant presence on university campuses in Europe, the USA and Japan (NLR 1968). Of particular interest to us is that the New Left’s view of revolution was predicated on circulation rather than connectivity – or, at least, a connectivity that was subordinate to circulation and ground truth. This critique belongs to a world that is now irretrievably gone. Recreating some characteristics of this world, however, is important because they indicate what has been lost in the rise to dominance of a cybernetic episteme and the consolidation of network capitalism.
This chapter examines the autonomy and openness to the circulation of political practice that furnished the New Left’s transitory conditions of existence. It then considers how both the New Left and cybernetics were part of the same post-World War II questioning of the sovereignty of the subject. Whereas the New Left, through the negative dialectic, saw the possibility of capitalism’s descent into barbarism, for cybernetics the challenge was to avoid entropy. While originally overlapping in terms of their social concerns, it was cybernetics that triumphed, thus helping to create the conditions for network capitalism.
After decades of post-colonial anxiety and inhibition regarding the outside world (Sloterdijk 2013 [2005]), the conventional wisdom that the international arena is now a space of danger, volatility and unknowable risks has been effectively normalized among the liberal intelligentsia (Goodhart 2017). To preface a policy brief on the future of global security, for example, without some incantation regarding ‘uncertainty’ or ‘complexity’ would risk appearing out of touch. So complete is Homo inscius’ disenchantment with the world, it is worth reminding the reader that, even within living memory, this was not always so. From the end of World War II until the mid-1970s, for progressive opinion at least, decolonization was a time when the international was a positive space of political opportunity and revolutionary hope. With the historical agency of the metropolitan working class now dissipated, the possibility of radical renewal – indeed, world revolution – was vested in the colonies and former colonies. During the course of the 1950s, the many socialist-oriented national liberation and anti-colonial struggles had inspired the emergence of the ‘Third World’ as a progressive geopolitical entity (Woodis 1960; Buchanan 1963). Within a couple of decades, however, this term, as well as the emancipatory hopes and revolutionary imaginary associated with it, had effectively disappeared (Duffield 2001: 22–5).
Geographically, the Third World was diverse, ranging from tropical forests and savannah regions to coastal littorals, mountains and deserts. Home to around 2 billion people, then two-thirds of the world’s population, still mostly living in the countryside, it was made up of a mix of independent countries, semi-colonies and colonies at different levels of infrastructural development, with varying political histories and cultural backgrounds. For the New Left, cutting across this diversity was a common legacy of past humiliation inflicted by colonial exploitation, a legacy that bound these countries together ‘in a vast “fellowship of the dispossessed”, a “commonwealth of poverty”’ (Buchanan 1963: 6). Moreover, for most of these countries, independence had not been freely granted. It was won through struggle and violent confrontation with colonial powers often reluctant to relinquish control. Given the agrarian character of many of the liberation movements involved, it became axiomatic for the New Left that, in the changed conditions of the mid twentieth century, the peasantry had become ‘the truly revolutionary class in colonial countries’ (1963: 11). At a time when political violence could still be justified within the academy as a means of promoting progressive social change, the peasantry was praised for its ability, when faced with implacable opponents, to discover quickly ‘that violence, and violence alone, pays off’ (1963: 11). Having no seat at the table, and frequently despised by the educated classes of the town, the peasantry was regarded as having nothing to lose from the sundering of the colonial and neocolonial chains that bound them. Such enthusiasm, however, could also encourage, as Herbert Marcuse cautioned against, an uncritical left romanticism that regarded ‘national liberation movements as the principal, if not the sole revolutionary force’ (Marcuse 1969: 29).1
During the 1950s, in a diverse mix of countries, including China, Vietnam, Cuba, Kenya, Algeria, Brazil, Angola and Egypt, the peasantry had emerged as a driving political force in the struggle for national liberation. Import substitution, land redistribution and policies for national food self-sufficiency were the order of the day (Bush 2007). Importantly, for both the left and right of the political spectrum, the expectation was that this push for social liberation would, during the course of the 1960s, continue to spread in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Southern Asia (Marcuse 1969: 22). Given intellectual coherence by the Truman Doctrine, the USA and its allies launched a range of counterinsurgency interventions that, besides economic embargoes and aid programmes, often involved the covert support of violent military proxies (Bostdorff 2008).2 The aim was to contain and neutralize these struggles, shaping them to Western interests. While the number of international armed conflicts under way in the mid-1950s numbered around fifteen, most of which were externally aggravated civil wars, the incidence of such conflicts would rise steadily until peaking at around fifty by the end of the Cold War (PRIO 2009). By the beginning of the 1970s, however, as decolonization began to draw to a close, the survival of the revolutionary impulse within the Third World was already seen as tenuous – and, with it, the chance of opposing the growing domination of technological society (Marcuse 1972).
The New Left’s foregrounding of the world as a space of political possibility has proven to be a historically contingent proposition. An autonomous peasantry, for example, was a transient phenomenon. During the 1950s, much of the Third World was still largely agrarian. By the 1970s, however, this was changing fast (Hobsbawm 1994). As a result of the expansion of commercial agriculture, land expropriation, conflict and the lifting of colonial restrictions on urbanization, an informalized and precarious world of slums and shanty towns, integrated into the circuits of capitalist dependency, would soon displace ideas of an independent peasantry (Davis 2006). Indeed, by the 1980s, like the ‘Third World’, the term ‘peasantry’, once ubiquitous in area studies, had also disappeared, to be replaced, as we shall see, by contemporary ideas of poverty and ‘the poor’.
In comparison with the present, the period of decolonization was also a time of relative openness to the international circulation of political praxis. For example, anti-colonial networks and national liberation solidarity campaigns were common. Western European countries had been moved to accept permanent immigrants from their colonies and former colonies, together with allowing refugee settlement and recruiting significant numbers of migrant workers. For a while, aspirational white settler colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada also lifted the ‘colour line’ that had earlier applied, especially towards Asian labour migrants (Meyers 2002). Immigration and refugee controls in Europe were only beginning to crystallize in the mid-1960s.3 During the following decade, however, this would rapidly turn towards a programme of restriction, closure and return. Together with an autonomous peasantry, this transitory circulatory window was also a part of the New Left’s contingent existence.
Reflecting the anti-colonial ethos among the intelligentsia – unlike today’s trend of risk aversion and remoteness (Collinson & Duffield 2013) – academics and students from Europe and the USA were a common feature within the universities of newly independent countries.4 Either working full-time, on sabbatical leave or as researchers, most of these academics emulated the progressive Third Worldist ethos of these institutions. Although soon to descend, the cultural curtain that existentially divides what are now the global North and South was still open. It left a window for the flow of radical ideas and political solidarities, as opposed to aid commitments, emotions and ethical postures (Chouliaraki 2013). Academics, however, were not the only ones caught up in this anti-establishment Zeitgeist. As the Vietnam War attests, Western journalists had yet to embed within systems of military accountability (Page 1989). Still in their infancy, satellite TV and video technologies were unencumbered by security restrictions. An independent and grounded media brought the raw and unguarded images of the Vietnam War into people’s homes on a nightly basis. This relative openness and the mode of shared connectivity allowed the political effects of Third World liberation struggles to ripple across the globe. Through anti-war and solidarity campaigns, these ripples interconnected and energized progressive opinion in Europe and the USA – not least among students who, with the expansion of a grant-assisted and debt-free system of higher education at a time of full employment, had the autonomy necessary to develop critical thought and independent action.
While the ending of World War II would unleash a modernist will to rebuild and reconstruct anew, among many it also fostered a sense of pessimism and failure. It was clear, for example, that liberalism, for a long time a beacon of Western civilization, had failed to prevent fascism and the horrors it unleashed. The leap in technological advancement necessary for victory did not assuage such anxieties. Indeed, the atomic bomb raised doubts about the moral compass that political elites were now using. When he was interviewed in 1971, such anxieties were the beginning of what Foucault called the ‘great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject we are witnessing these days in our culture’ (Foucault 2013: 43). While this ‘great questioning’ was shaping cybernetics and neoliberalism, it also inflected the New Left and its break with what C. Wright Mills called ‘Victorian Marxism’ (Mills 1960). Emerging from the questioning and anxieties of the time, the positions adopted by cybernetics and the New Left were different yet strangely resonant. Should political opposition fail, the New Left saw the danger in terms of capitalism’s self-directed descent into ‘barbarism’. For cybernetics, leaving society to itself, as with any other circulatory system, posed the risk of increasing ‘entropy’ or indistinction. The New Left position is examined first.
The philosophy of Herbert Marcuse is remarkably prescient with regard to contemporary concerns regarding the apolitical and atheoretical effects of post-humanism and the computational turn (Galloway 2013). Technological capitalism was now able both to create new needs and, importantly, to satisfy them as never before. The ability to guarantee the young a better life than their parents had been important for the incorporation of the labour movement. The price being paid, however, was significant. At the height of the May ’68 agitation, Marcuse felt that capitalism was already ‘disappearing’, in the sense of a capitalism able to exist with an autonomous social realm distinct and outside of itself. Technological society was synonymous with the increasing primacy of logistical reasoning and the devaluation of the individual. Rights and liberties were ‘losing their rational content’ to the demands of a one-dimensional technological rationality (Marcuse 1968: 19). Independence of thought, autonomy, the right to political opposition and an independent critical function were being lost to the pyscho-social governmentalities made possible by mass consumption. By dint of this capacity, the emerging capitalism ‘may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions, and reduce the opposition to the discussion and promotion of alternative policies within the status quo’ (1968: 19). While Francis Fukuyama (Fukuyama 2002 [1989]) and Bruno Latour (Latour 2008) would eventually celebrate the arrival of just such a society, for Marcuse it would have all the necessary ingredients for the ‘the mass basis of a neo-fascist regime’ (Marcuse 1969: 31). Unless counter-forces could prevent it, one would see an explosion of internal contradictions ‘which would make a re-examination of the concept of revolution a merely abstract and speculative undertaking’ (1969: 33).
This danger of a descent into a designer ‘neo-fascism’ where political hope had died was a consequence of the negative dialectic. Associated with Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School (Buck-Morss 1977), its central motif is that, by the early twentieth century, capitalism had exhausted any emancipatory potential it may once have had, becoming instead the engine of the Enlightenment’s self-destruction (Horkheimer & Adorno 1979). For Marcuse, the negative dialectic involved critically addressing the rationalist, even positivistic, strain in Marx, ‘namely, his belief in the inexorable necessity of a transition to a “higher stage of human development”’ (Marcuse 1969: 33). Although Marx was fully aware of real and possible failures, ‘the alternative “socialism or barbarism” was not integral to his concept of revolution’ (1969: 33). The negative dialectic, Marcuse believed, must become part of the contemporary revolutionary outlook.5 Failure is not simply a lost opportunity. It carries the fateful responsibility of having allowed a deepening political, cultural and spiritual barbarism.6
The negative dialectic means that those wanting a better world can no longer draw spiritual comfort from Hegelian sentiments that humanity will, eventually, fulfil its destiny and society attain a higher moral stage. With autonomy, knowledge, politics and critique being extinguished along the way, left to itself, capitalism will destroy the Earth and everything on it. For Marcuse, barbarism is not limited to acts of violence, cruelty or ignorance. It is a technological barbarism intrinsic to the increasing automation of capitalism and growing dominance of technoscience within society: ‘the subordination of man to the instruments of his labour, to the total, overwhelming apparatus of production and destruction, has reached the point of an all but incontrollable power: objectified, [reified] behind the technological veil, and behind the mobilized national interest, this power seems to be self-propelling, and to carry the indoctrinated and integrated people along’ (emphasis added, Marcuse 1969: 33).
As if struggling against the incoming sea, the negative dialectic gives a sense of urgency to Marcuse’s opposition to corporate capitalism. While Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, would not have been unsympathetic to such New Left anxieties, as discussed further in chapter 5, it would be cybernetics that would ride the waves.
Cybernetics also has its origins in the post-World War II pessimism regarding the human condition. Given the ideological excess of war, from a humanist perspective, cybernetics aspired to furnish a rational mathematical alternative to the irrationality of history. It offered a New World technological solution to the ideological failure of the Old World (Halpern 2014b: 225). In black-boxing human subjectivity – that is, demoting beliefs, intentions and causal reasoning in relation to understanding human behaviour – cybernetics provided an engineered and operational alternative to ideology. Rather than conscious motives or intentions, what was required was a record of past behaviour – the more comprehensive, the better. From this data, the probability of future actions could be mathematically inferred. Cybernetics promised to tame the political unreliability and arbitrariness of subjective beliefs through the objective analysis and management of information. Rather than the barbarism of the negative dialectic, in the work of Norbert Wiener, post-war pessimism expressed itself metaphorically in the thermodynamic concept of entropy.
The new physics to which Wiener subscribed was no longer concerned with what will happen but, given the data and calculative power available in the mid twentieth century, what will probably happen. This probabilistic physics introduced an ‘element of chance in the texture of the universe’ and was close to the St Augustinian tradition of Christianity (Wiener 1954: 10). The element of randomness and incompleteness now allowed within physics ‘is one which … we may consider evil’ (1954: 10). This was not the positive evil of the secretive, devious and calculating demons of the Manicheans, it was the negative or environmental evil of entropy and its associations with randomness, unpredictability and uncertainty. Entropy tends to increase within all closed circulatory systems. Over the long term, systems eventually deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness. They move from the least to the most probable state, and ‘from a state of organisation and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness’ (1954: 12). Having a resonance with contemporary resilience-thinking, for cybernetics, entropy is a measure of a system’s disorganization; the more indistinction and sameness, the greater the entropy.
Working against the long-term tendency for the universe to homogenize, local enclaves of connectivity exist where, on a limited and temporary basis, countervailing forces resisting the entropy of circulation are encountered. The feedback of information between human and nonhuman milieus ‘strives to hold back nature’s tendency toward disorder by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends’ (1954: 27). While the universe will eventually become a vast undifferentiated temperature equilibrium where nothing happens, there are fleeting but nonetheless important enclaves where entropy is being resisted through an increase in human and nonhuman connectivity and inter-organization. It is with this possibility of resisting disorganization ‘that the new science of Cybernetics began its development’ (1954: 27). The physical and environmental interactions between individuals and the communication technology then available were, according to Wiener, analogous in their attempts ‘to control entropy through feedback’ (1954: 28). Cybernetics casts connectivity, or the free and purposive exchange of information between human and nonhuman systems, as the principal means of resisting the entropy of indistinction that circulation, left to itself, will inevitably produce.7
As a governmental ontology, first-order cybernetics is a form of anti-catastrophism. That is, while recognizing that systems have an inbuilt tendency towards dissipation, rather than welcoming this tendency, as resilience and catastrophism will eventually do (Homer-Dixon 2007), in its initial formulation at least, cybernetics opposed this tendency.8 In first-order cybernetics, there is a certain moral overlap with the New Left. As Fred Turner points out, embedded in Wiener’s theory of society as an information system ‘was a deep longing for and even a model of an egalitarian, democratic social order’ (Turner 2006: 24). However, the cybernetic approach to entropy was effectively to eliminate the autonomous rational or sovereign subject, thus paving the way for an eventual liaison with neoliberalism’s Homo inscius (Cooper 2011). The New Left, however, addressed the prospect of barbarism politically by working for an international anti-capitalist alliance based on an appeal to the rational subject. This important difference is explored in the next chapter in relation to structural anthropology. True to the paradox of connectivity, it is sufficient to say here that, while an entropic barbarism now seems closer than ever, and pressing on all sides, the rise to dominance of a cybernetic episteme has been comprehensive, seamless and extraordinarily successful. Indeed, it has evolved into an algorithmic ‘mode of governmentality without negativity’ (Rouvroy 2012: 13) – that is, a mode of governmentality that no longer has to acknowledge that anything of significance exists outside of itself.
As a metascience, cybernetics is a sui generis mode of knowledge that uses methods of analogical transfer to discover equivalent modes of functioning in otherwise different orders of reality. It is a totalizing constitutive ‘technological mentality’ that functions equally across all matter and substances, whether alive or dead, human or nonhuman (Simondon 2009). The rhetoric of first-order cybernetics actively facilitated scientific networking and entrepreneurship. This enabled it to spread across the military-industrial complex and, as resilience would later replicate, it become a ‘universal discipline’ (Turner 2006: 25). Cybernetics would leap across disciplinary boundaries, creating new personal and institutional networks (Hayles 1999: 50–75): ‘If biological principles were at work in machines, then why shouldn’t a physiologist contribute to the work on computers? If “information” was the lifeblood of automatons, human beings and societies alike, why shouldn’t a mechanical engineer become a social critic?’ (Turner 2006: 25).
While the disciplinary domains of biology, psychology, sociology or anthropology, for example, are not usually considered to be machines ontologically, they become so analogically for the convenience of mathematics and their cybernetic reconstitution as technoscientific domains (Halpern 2014a). Cybernetics has authored totalizing constitutive leaps from the emergent and self-ordering tendencies observed in the physical and natural worlds to the human realms of economy, society and the mind, now reconstituted as information processing systems (Hayles 1999; Cooper 2011; Rouvroy 2012). However, since these orders of reality and disciplinary domains are different, understanding them through computational analogy adds little to either grasping their intrinsic differences or conceiving them in terms of inactivity or stasis (Simondon 2009). The technological mentality understands them ecologically, or how they intercommunicate, and, importantly, through the dynamism of their interconnected complex emergence and becoming (Dillon 2007). That is, as so many functionally equivalent orders of cybernetic immanence and possibility.
That capitalism had lost its progressive role in world history was an established theme by the mid twentieth century. The New Left proposed the revolutionary overthrow of technological society. Cybernetics, however, saw the issue in terms of entropy and the development of information-based command and control technologies. Before considering the rise of the cybernetic episteme, the next chapter looks at the academic resistance of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the encroaching empiricism and behaviourism associated with it. Moreover, by way of demonstrating the relative openness to international circulation that existed at the time, it outlines the types of structural analysis and immersive, critical anthropology that were then still possible.