The Cybernetic Age
One can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine—with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers to control societies. But the machines don't explain anything, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component.
—Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” (175)
The thought of every age is reflected in its technique.
—Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (38)
This book is about the impact of contemporary technology and new forms of media on cultural life in the present. In this sense it joins a wide variety of other analyses that have drawn our attention to how computing technologies became a pivotal factor in human experience over the past several decades, not only altering forms of communication and the shape of various industries, but also having a more general effect on social life in its entirety, on politics both local and global, and on “nature” as both our ecological environment as well as what we take to be “natural.” However, the central arguments of this book cut against what largely remains the default conception, or critique, of such phenomena within both cultural theory of the humanities and social sciences as well within popular culture as a whole. Rather than presuming that increased centrality of technology and media within culture has led to an increased standardization, “dehumanization,” or homogenization of culture and human experience, this project argues instead that the fundamental logic of contemporary technology and media has been one of an increased “humanization” of social and technical systems of diverse types, one in which increased flexibility, the mimicking of biological systems of feedback and adaptation in mechanical realms, and the microtargeting of the dispositions and desires of increasingly smaller groups of people have become the key drivers of economic and cultural production in the present.
Thus, for instance, advances in flexible specialization and niche marketing make it possible to develop and promote products in response to ever-smaller changes in consumer preference and in pursuit of ever-smaller markets (approaching the servicing of, as announced in the title of a recent popular advertising text, “a market of one”). The arrangement of political campaigning around appeals to proponents of particular parties or identity categories (the “soccer moms” and “Nascar dads” that we heard so much about in the 1990s) are radically refined, in accordance with advanced data-mining and aggregation techniques, into targeted groups based on the cross-indexing of a near-infinity of consumer preferences and “social interest issues.” Bioinfor-matics research in the life sciences, once a key cultural symbol of the acon-textual and potentially dangerously reductionist tendencies of contemporary epistemologies and representational schemas, are transformed, in the “post-genomic” age, toward the production of specialized treatments and preventive procedures based on individual genetic profiles. Educational methods previously dedicated to the transmission of standardized content give way to “adaptive learning environments” in which discrete skills are taught in accordance with a students' particular learning styles and problem areas. In aesthetics, artworks increasingly rely on the active participation of their audiences, and design methods in architecture and manufacturing increasingly make use of “algorithmic” methods for imitating organic forms and “evolutionary” formulas for maintaining structural integrity. The list inexorably goes on.
I argue in this book that such phenomena are the results of a broader shift in the fundamental logic subtending contemporary culture over the past several decades. More specifically, I suggest that such changes are hard for us to directly thematize or account for because they create a fairly radical rearrangement and overlap of two domains that were separated within Western culture nearly six centuries ago: logos (the realm of communication, reason, representation, and the “natural” most generally) and techne (techniques and material technologies that imitate or take the place of natural phenomena). One of the central theses of this book is that this separation has been a remarkably consistent foundation for our understandings of ethics and politics for several centuries, providing the basis for discriminating between “ends” and “means” in moral thought, as well as, in regard to questions of political agency and social transformation, the status of such categories as power and resistance. However, my larger argument is that our reliance on this division and these categories is very much at the heart of a number of a number of ethical and political dilemmas prominent in contemporary culture—from the dif culties of deciding on boundaries for the manipulation of human genetics, to how we might imagine autonomy in a world of increased social and physical connection—and that we may have to think through and beyond such commonplaces in order to develop effective responses to the ways that culture has been altered in the half-century or so during which computing technologies and new media have become increasingly central to social life.
In Chapter 1 of this book, I present a much more detailed periodization of contemporary culture around these changes and their specific relationships to pressing ethical and political questions of the present. Here, in this introduction, however, it is perhaps useful to begin with some crucial background on a few of these contexts and some key terms highlighted in this text's title and pages, as well as to account for why I suggest rhetoric as our primary disciplinary domain and field of praxis for this endeavor.
THE CYBERNETIC AGE
Surviving Greek texts of the late third and early fourth century BCE record the stabilization of two terms that had previously held many indistinctions, logos (
, our root for “logic”) and techne (
, our root for “technical”). Logos would come to denote not only human reason and rationality, but discourse, calculation, and the principles governing matter, energy, and the terrestrial environment, phenomena bound together by their associations with the “true” and the natural. Techne, conversely, would be formalized to refer to technical crafts and aesthetics, as well as cunning, wile, and deception, qualities joined by their “false” or artificial character. In addition to signaling, as numerous classicists have suggested, the end of the significant influence of mythos or mythological thinking as a structuring principle of Greek cultural and intellectual life, the definition of logos over and against techne is repeatedly invoked in Classical Antiquity to found a large number of more specific divisions and associations, categories that continue to cast a long shadow over the present: proto-humanist conceptions of human examplarity based on its distance from irrational animals and lifeless matter, beginning with the ontological positioning of human beings between those of “brute” animals and the divine; the classification of distinct modes of observation and analysis, a sowing of seeds for the increasingly specific domains of the sciences and humanities; the forwarding of the human psyche as, alternately, a “mind” or “soul” that is distinct from, or at least not reducible to, the body; the formal emergence and disidentification of philosophy and rhetoric, two fields competing for recognition as the disciplinary domain for the study and dissemination of wisdom; and the ethical separation between moral and material (that is to say, economic) “value,” and the alliance of ethical ends with ethical means. Given all of these developments, it might not be hyperbolic to suggest this division between logos and techne was one of the most pivotal within the entire history of Western intellectual thought.
It was not always this way. Indeed, in tracing the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and politics in the present moment, this book also in many ways follows a lexigraphic and conceptual overlap of these domains best captured by a concept coeval with the separation of logos and techne, and one that would return to prominence in the mid-twentieth century. The ancient Greek term kybernetes (
) was often used in the fourth century BCE to denote objects (such as the rudder or a ship) or individuals (such as a steersman or pilot) that directed, but did not fully control, some other object or system, often through artificially simulating a natural process or force. Kybernetes would later be the basis for the Latin guberno, and thus our root for “governance.” In 1843, the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere would recover much of the term's original meaning in using cybernetique to describe those operations of government that relied more on manipulating the structures of political economy than on the direct exercise of sovereign power.1 In Plato's Gor-gias, kybernetes is used to define (and indeed coin the proper name for) rhetoric (rhetorike), the study and practice of persuasion (511d–513c). As it often was at the time, in this dialogue kybernetes and rhetoric are both associated with techne, as well as with mechane (artifice and strategic deception), our root for “machine.” For instance, Plato's student Aristotle would later define the “mechanical” and the “rhetorical” as forces that mutually disrupt or invert natural processes in his Rhetoric and Mechanics. In the former, the rhetoric of the sophist Corax is condemned for subverting the natural order of things by “making the worse argument seem the better” (1402a24–25); in the opening pages of the latter, “mechanical skill” is identified as the force that allows us to act “contrary to nature” by creating a situation in which the “less prevails over the greater,” such as in using a lever to move a large weight (847a10–25). However, in the work of Plato, the similarities between techne or mechane and rhetoric would be used to divide all three from another category. In comparing rhetoric and kybernetes, Socrates' condemns the rhetoric practiced by the Greek sophists as an instrumental techne inferior to the pursuit of “true knowledge” (episteme) carried out by philosophy, thus setting the future path for Western metaphysics and reason.
Centuries later, in the early 1940s, the American mathematician Nor-bert Wiener would appropriate this reference to kybernetes in the Gorgias as the title for an emergent interdisciplinary inquiry into “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” an endeavor he would later gloss as encompassing “not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method” (Human 15). Wiener's coining of “cybernetics” may be an accident of history; he had originally wanted to modify angelos, Greek for “messenger,” but did not want the unavoidable association with “angel” (Mathematician 322). If so, however, it was a fortunate one, as the work that went on under the banner of cybernetics in the mid-century may be taken as paradigmatic for not only the subsequent development of computing technologies, biotechnology, and digital media, but the emergence of techne's priority in structuring political, economic, and cultural life today.
The discipline that would later become known as cybernetics formed in a series of conferences sponsored by Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation between 1946 and 1953.2 One of the organizing objectives of the conferences was to encourage discussion between representatives from fields that might not normally be in collaboration; as such, the groups assembled in the ten Macy Conferences, none of which had more than two dozen participants, drew members from such disparate disciplines as engineering, biology, psychology, neurophysiology, sociology, zoology, mathematics, mathematics, anthropology, pharmacology, philosophy, and ethnology. Conference participants that were or would later become luminaries in their respective fields included Norbert Wiener himself, whose wartime research would prefigure the key concepts of the field and who would popularize the movement for non-specialist audiences in such texts as Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950); Wiener's frequent early collaborators, the Chilean physiologist and physician Arturo Rosen-blueth and the electrical engineer Julian Bigelow; the polymath scientist Jon Von Neumann, a principal member of the Manhattan Project who would subsequently pioneer game theory and make important contributions to computer architecture; the neurologist Warren McCulloch, who, in collaboration with the enigmatic prodigy and autodidact Walter Pitts, would produce landmark work in neural network theory; Kurt Lewin, often regarded as the founder of social psychology; J. C. R. Licklider, a computer scientist who made crucial contributions to the Cold War “Semi Automatic Ground Environment” computer-aided defense system and the Internet predecessor ARPANET; Paul Lazarfeld, one of the first prominent sociologists to address the impact of mass media and the founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research; and the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, pivotal figures in the study of (respectively) human sexuality and systems theory and ecology. As one might expect given the disparate disciplines and objects of research (human bodies, social and environmental systems, animals, machines) represented by members of the cybernetics group, their collective work coalesced around a number of principles that cut across these various domains. While there are certainly interesting histories to be written about the legacy of any number of these principles within particularly disciplinary fields, my concern here is in outlining two in particular that I will suggest have transformed over the past few decades from being specialized ways of orienting scientific research to become, through their integration into a variety of new technologies and media, general structuring principles of contemporary culture, communication, and forms of social power.
First and foremost was a radical reconsideration of the ecological interaction between actor and environment seen most clearly in cybernetics' recurrent interest in processes of feedback, equilibrium, and homeostasis. Rosenblueth had been a collaborator of physiologist Walter Cannon, who coined the term “homeostasis” to designate the process through which an organism's internal environment maintained a stable condition in the face of a changing external environment. In extending the mid-nineteenth century work of Claude Bernard, the French physiologist who first hypothesized an “interior environment” [milieu intérieur] regulating the fluid environments inside of organisms, Cannon both provided a more thorough explanation of this process in multicellular life and, in a deliberately provocative epilogue to his 1932 book The Wisdom of the Body , suggested that the regulatory principles of homeostasis might be extended to study the cooperation of individuals within civil society. The work of the cybernetics movement would take up the organic and the social applications of homeostasis but also argue for its relevance in mechanical processes and, perhaps most importantly, for studying the interactions between humans and machines in complex systems. In his wartime research for the U.S. government, Wiener had studied how pilot reaction times, aircraft speeds, and the firing mechanisms of antiaircraft weaponry could be calculated as a single system in designing best practices for aerial combat; the cybernetics movement would expand this approach to both propose more complicated symbiotic or interactive systems and to suggest ways that human physiology and behavior might itself be viewed as evincing qualities more commonly associated with machines. Although the legacy of cybernetics in the popular imagination—perhaps because of the coining of the term “cyborg” for “cybernetic organism” by Manfred Klynes in 1960—became associated with research into the material combination of human bodies and machinery, the focus of the movement and their subsequent impact on the various fields affected by cybernetics research would be more correctly described as the overlapping of “natural” and “artificial” (or biological and mechanical) processes and systems , one that began with the conceptual extension of a organic process (homeostasis) into inorganic realms and then fed backward into a focus on how the increasing complexity of mechanical and technological processes—and their increasing impact on the biological and social—showed these latter two realms to have a logic not altogether different from the technical.
Such a systems-oriented perspective also required a rethinking of the teleological as a concept in the sciences as well as the teleology of science itself: the objectives or ends driving scientific praxis. Indeed, a reconcep-tualization of “ends” was in many ways the starting point of what would later be known as cybernetics: a series of papers by Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow on the concepts of behavior, purpose, and teleology, largely inaugurated the interdisciplinary projects that prompted the Macy gatherings and the development of cybernetics as a recognizable field. In these writings, early members of the cybernetics group argued that assigning “purpose” as an attribute available only to humans was quickly becoming a moribund distinction in the face of technologies designed with defined goals and the ability to flexibly respond to their environment. Here too, the social and technological would meet somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, the agency of purpose was distributed into the technological domain: “if the notion of purpose is applicable to living organisms, it is also applicable to non-living entities when they show the same observable traits of behavior” (Rosenblueth and Wiener 325); on the other, however, the study of how machines might be designed to respond flexibly to changing circumstances while maintaining fidelity to their “purpose” also suggested how one might use the same process to predict the strategic behavior of humans within particular scenarios, an objective von Neumann would later pursue in his pioneering work in game theory.
Redefining purpose as a force that could operate outside of human agency and without a determinate goal other than the maintenance of a system's overall equilibrium was not only immensely salutary for the cyber-neticists' design of “control systems” for automata and machinery, but also for assaying the ways biological and social systems could be robust in form but adaptable over time. In addition to von Neumann's application of game theory to political decision making and international relations, McCulloch and Pitts would hypothesize a propositional logic for analyzing how the brain formed memories and how an individual's previous experience influ-enced their future actions, and Pitts and Wiener would separately theorize how emotional response and affective states were similarly attuned by the conditioning of the nervous system. However, redefining teleology in such a manner was also aligned with an emerging sea change in the purpose of science itself; as Weiner observed, cybernetics was at the forefront of a larger process through which scientific research became less about understanding global questions of how the natural world functioned and more about the strategic investigation of natural, organic, and mechanical processes in the pursuit of particular goals, and thus a breakdown between the control sciences (such as engineering) that were more traditionally associated with such methods and the natural or life sciences. Although the latter, since at least the time of Aristotle, were traditionally driven by the desire to understand the natural state of systems and restricted to therapeutic interventions to restore this state, from mid-century onward they would increasingly become organized around the deliberate manipulation of genetic material and physiological response. Although Wiener emphasized how in the wake of cybernetics “the vocabulary of engineers soon became contaminated with that of the neurophysiologist and psychologist,” the opposite flow of influence has certainly became equally if not more important to the function of scientific praxis today, one written in the very names of such newer fields as bioinformatics, biotechnology, and bioengineering (Cybernetics 15).
Cybernetics enjoyed international prominence in both scientific circles and the popular consciousness well into the early 1970s. In the U.S. it was embraced by numerous American academics, many of which promoted it as a scienza nuova with universal application to diverse fields of research. In mid-century Soviet science and politics, cybernetics moved from being viewed as an imperialist pseudoscience in the 1940s to being embraced by the early ’60s as an approach to science, technology, and sociology particularly well-suited to communist ends. Under the auspices of Salvador Allende, cybernetics management theorist Stafford Beer oversaw the “Cybersin” project of creating a computer-automated “real-time” planned economy in early 1970s Chile (remarkably useful during the Chilean truck driver's strike of October 1972, its control center was destroyed in the coup of the following year).3 In European philosophical thought, Martin Heidegger famously considered whether the advent of cybernetics marked the end of Western metaphysics (a point I return to in Chapter 2), Jacques Lacan devoted an entire seminar to the question of what psychoanalysis might learn from cybernetics, and in his early influential work Of Grammatology , Jacques Derrida would position cybernetics as a conceptual movement that overlapped with his own deconstructionist technique (though one that ultimately fell short in failing to interrogate its own “historico-metaphysi-cal character”) (9).4
By the late 1970s, however, cybernetics would largely disappear as a recognizable discipline or methodological approach within the sciences. This denigration was, at least partially, due to the inability of the cybernetics movement to achieve Weiner's goal of fighting against the grain of the ever-deepening specialization of scientific research. In this sense, cybernetics was in many ways undone by its own success; demonstrating the centrality of feedback systems and networked interaction in various domains suggested the potential of sub-disciplinary foci on these particular sites, thus paving the ways for disciplines specializing in the intersection of previously autonomous areas of study: computer science, neuropharmacology, molecular genetics, ecology.
In an interview near the end of his life, Heinz Von Foerster, one of the youngest members of the cybernetics group and the of cial archivist of the relevant Macy Conferences, was asked to reflect on the decline of cybernetics and its legacy the end of the twentieth century. When queried about why movement never went “mainstream,” Von Foerster suggest that cybernetics has not so much disappeared but disseminated so widely across contemporary culture, science, and technology as to appear invisible (Waters 81). Although cybernetics may be dead as a formalized discipline, Von Foerster suggests that “underneath it's completely alive”; indeed, he goes on to suggest that cybernetics is all the more powerful and influential today for not being explicitly recognized or expressed in all the fields it has intersected, making it both harder to reject and easier for it to function as what he calls an “underground” connecting disparate vectors of scientific praxis and cultural experience. Although cybernetics may not have become mainstream over the past half-century, the mainstream of science, technology, and society had itself become cybernetic.
One of my more overarching arguments might be taken as a radicaliza-tion of Von Foerster's suggestion here: a central thesis to which I continually return throughout these pages is that the most pervasive impact of the age of information technology after cybernetics is not the increasing ubiquity of these material technologies themselves, but the ways in which politics, culture, and economics has increasingly found its operating principles in those processes that find only their most obvious manifestation in physical technology—techniques. In other words, if there is a singular logic that can be used to map the changes in social power that have occurred over the last few decades, the suture point connecting contemporary cultural production, economics, and political and social discourse, it would be what we might call, for lack of a better term, a technologic: forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human “higher reason” and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought.
Another recurrent argument in this book is that such changes make rhetoric a particularly privileged domain for analyzing contemporary culture and for devising concrete ethical and political strategies within this environment. Although, as mentioned above, Wiener likely did not have rhetoric specifically in mind when he chose the name cybernetics for his prototypical inquiry into information technology and the study of social systems, the two perspectives are remarkably similar in a number of ways. Indeed, as prominent theoretical physicist Satosi Watanabe, a key thinker in both quantum mechanics and what would become known as “second order cybernetics” research, Wiener's selection of the term from its context in the Gorgias was prescient for cybernetics' relationship with traditional scientific epistemological frameworks:
[I]t is highly significant that in his mind Plato somehow associated rhetorics and cybernetics. We should notice that these two arts have indeed something in common: They both represent flexible and adaptive methods aiming at utilizing, influencing, controlling, and overcoming the outside world, mental or physical, in order to achieve one's own goal. They are entirely dif erent from primarily disinterested sciences such as geometry or astronomy or from straight technology such as bridge-building or oil pressing. (152)
One of the primary objectives of this book is to analyze how this shared domain of cybernetics and rhetoric has become the dominant logic of contemporary culture. In Chapter 2, I present a brief genealogy of the dominant modes of combining technics and media over several centuries, leading up to what I call the “parametric” present, in which forms of knowledge and representation are not longer primarily based on quantification (measurement) or calculation (prediction and relation), but dynamic processes that work to maintain relationships between a variety of elements. Con-comitantly, whatever we might call social conditioning or social power in this regime works primarily through logics of inclusion rather than exclusion, an attempt to integrate and draw value from as many heterogeneous identities or behaviors as possible. Chapter 3 revisits the early work of key rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke and his own responses to prototypical developments in cybernetics and information technology to argue for how we might account for the ways such developments have fundamentally changed human persuasion, and in particular the role of human affective or precognitive dispositions, in rhetorical processes. Chapter 4 continues this focus on the intersections of rhetoric, information technology, and new media in an effort to rethink and extend Gilles Deleuze's writings on the “control societies” of the present. Finally, in Chapter 5, I return in many ways to the “primal scene” of both the separation of techne and logos as well as of rhetoric and philosophy to argue for how we might rethink ethics in an age of global media, biotechnology, and hypercapitalism.
COMING TO TERMS:
TRANSHUMANISM, RHETORIC, ETHICS
The other major inspiration for this book, and the source of the term tran-shuman, comes from the writings of the prominent mid-century biologist Julian Huxley. Huxley is perhaps best known today for his contributions to what became known as “the modern evolutionary synthesis,” a prominent paradigm in evolutionary biology, and his role in the founding of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as for being the grandson of Darwin's notable contemporary and champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, and the brother of the famous Aldous Huxley. However, from the 1930s onward, Huxley also produced a large and wide-ranging series of writings on the political import of scientific discoveries as well as, in continuation of an interest that occupied his famous grandfather, the more specific question of the role of evolution on historical and contemporary forms of social behavior and ethics.
In the short but prescient essay “Transhumanism,” first published in 1957, Huxley predicted that our abilities to better understand and replicate processes of the natural world, as well as to more directly and more significantly intervene into natural processes, would soon lead to a much greater cross-coupling of, or growing indiscernability between, the natural and the artificial as conceptual categories, and that this would con-comitantly require something of a sea change in human ethics, or at least a significant alteration in the methods, if not the goals, of humanist ethics. Huxley presents two distinct meanings for what he calls an emergent “transhumanism” that might accomplish such an objective. First, Huxley predicts that the energy typically devoted to the scientific exploration of the world and the creation of material technologies is crossing over into the development of techniques for the direct manipulation of the natural environment and the creation of social processes (educational, economic, political) that themselves replicate the complex forms found in natural ecologies and reproduced in mechanical ones. As Huxley writes, now that humans have “pretty well finished the geographical exploration of the earth” and have “pushed the scientific exploration of nature, both lifeless and living, to a point at which it main outlines have become clear” their next step is the integration of such findings into social processes of various types (14). Such a situation also created for humans, and for the doctrine of humanism, what Huxley will refer to as an inevitable ethical burden in regards to the protection of the natural world and the administration of justice within social formations. The very ability of humans to massively alter the natural world, and the withdrawal of recognizable theological and indigenous traditions of ethics, made it impossible for humans to defer to categories of “the natural” or to transcendental values of other types as unquestionable resources for ethical reason and decision making. As Huxley refers to it, the human species has been “appointed managing director” of the “business of evolution,” in both the terrestrial and social environment (13).
Although the term transhumanism hast been used for dif erent purposes in more recent times (of which, more in the next chapter), my use of the term here is heavily indebted to Huxley's thought in this regard. Broadly speaking, Huxley's thesis about the ways in which artificial and social processes would take on the ecologically complex and equilibrium-based logic traditionally aligned with evolution and other biological and natural processes, very much informs my approach to thematizing cultural change after cybernetics. His argument for the unavoidable ethical responsibilities of individuals in a time humans have largely taken over the design and maintenance of such processes “from” nature, on the other hand, provides, as we shall also see in more detail in the next chapter, a framework for analyzing the role and function of rhetoric and ethics in the present.
However, I also expand on Huxley's concept here in reference to four other contemporary phenomena that were absent or only implicit in Huxley's work. Conveniently, for my purposes here, all of them might be arranged under additional terms sharing the prefix “trans.” The first is the entry of the category of “the human” into a state of continuous transition. As several decades of critical work on performativity and social identity have confirmed, consensus of what “is” or can be accepted “as” human— or of what is constitutive of humans as opposed to non-human animals or machines—is a determination that has long undergone processes of negotiation, expansion, and contraction. Yet, over the past several decades, and in response to a variety of advances in our abilities to simulate human behavior in mechanical realms and alter human genetic material, this implicit process becomes an increasingly explicit and urgent concern for a variety of specialized communities—life scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, legislators—as well as within contemporary culture as a whole.
Second, I use the term transference to refer to the particular ways in which generic capacities of humans, non-human animals, and machines become shared or cross-coupled across these domains, a process that occurs between the invention of particular information technologies and biotechnologies and their integration in human praxis and experience. Although the lines drawn between the human, the non-human animal, and the machine are often thought of in terms of identity or ontology— whether such a hybridity or overlap is positively celebrated by Donna Haraway in her paradigmatic presentation of the cyborg as a “political fiction” that eschews the rigid classifications of history in favor of “permanently partial identities” (154), or decried, as in the work of political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, as a dangerous encroachment on an “empirically grounded view of human specificity” that is foundational for liberal democracy (Posthuman 147)—these considerations are themselves largely posterior to the transference of animal and machinic capacities. Thus, the pursuit of artificial intelligence within computing technologies is an attempt to simulate the capacities associated with human thought, and the success or failure of artificial life is evaluated on whether it demonstrates the capacities we associate with organic life (mobility, differentiation, reproduction, etc.). On the opposite end of the scale, biotechnology, as its name itself suggests, finds its vocation in creating ways in which the organic manner of humans and other animals can take on the combinatory and programmatic capacities we associate with machines and mechanical processes. While the transitional state of human identity or ontology has recently returned as a crucial issue in legal and ethical thought, particularly in relation to non-therapeutic manipulations of human genetics (questions I address in Chapters 1 and 5), throughout this book I also pursue the ways that the transferences of capacities has come to structure politics, culture, and communication in a broader sense.
Third, I use the term transactional to describe common processes in technology and political economy that might be taken as the actualization of what the cybernetics group could only theorize in the abstract: procedures that find their identity and coherence through the process of transformation itself or the pursuit of a particular equilibrium rather than a more discrete goal. The variety of computer coding that undergirds information technologies such as computer operation systems and their larger linkages (such as computer networks or the Internet) are perhaps the most visible examples of such transactional processes as well as the ones most indebted to early cybernetic work on this subject. Much like cyberneticists' interest in substitutional and translational grammars for describing and duplicating automated processes—such as McCulloch and Pitts' logical calculus and cyberneticists' broader fascination with “black box” thought experiments in which only inputs and outputs were registered—software coding has no “significance” (no deeper meaning to be revealed), but the lack of such significance is proportional to its overall flexibility for representing, simulating, and categorizing diverse phenomenon. In developing the transactual as a cultural tendency in this text, I am particularly inspired by Foucault's references in some of his later lectures to the “transactional realities” [réali-tés de transaction] that occur at the interfaces as social and technical processes, ones that are not natural in the strictest sense but also not “false” or open to being disproved (Birth 297). As opposed to the “virtual,” a more common term for such phenomena in the context of technology, the transactual has the advantage of emphasizing not only the consideration of a phenomenon as the imitation of an actual process, but also the ways in which it is itself created by the coordination or combination of dynamic processes. I argue that such transactional process have become the dominant logic of a variety of cultural domains in Chapter 3 of this text, and in Chapter 5, I use the term transactional ethics as a descriptor for the question of whether it is possible to consider “value” in the sense of ethics or morals and in its purely economic sense as complimentary (or at least non-oppositional) processes.
Finally, I use the term transversal to refer most broadly to unusual connections between other domains or entities that we may have once kept separate (such as the natural and the artificial, or the human, the non-human animal, and the machine). The transversal is also used here in a strategic sense, one drawn from Félix Guattari's use of the term. In a 1964 essay of the same name, Guattari presents “transversality” [transversalité] as a counterpoint to the psychological concept of therapeutic transference. In the traditional understanding of transference, a patient's feelings for another individual become transferred to their psychotherapist; Guattari's forwarding of the transversal was, on the one hand, an attempt to think through how such transfers of ideational and affective investment might take place in ways that do not follow a traditional hierarchy (the patient subordinate to the therapist) or well-worn sequence, thus avoiding what he codes “the impasse of pure verticality” presumed in such interactions (18). On the other hand, however, Guattari was also equally convinced that the forming of such connections was unavoidable, and thus it is naive to believe that a “mere horizontality” of non-hierarchical relations was possible or that a “natural” or originary subjectivity or identity was waiting to be freed within individuals by their overcoming of extant attachments and relationships. While in later works Guattari would use the term transversal as a general reference to the variety of domains (politics, aesthetics, biology) that shape human identity, my own use of the transversal as a rhetorical strategy here hews back to Guattari's original interest in term to describe the ways that existing affective investments might be redirected in novel ways or connected to dif erent objectives. In particular, I argue throughout this text that our most productive contemporary strategies for intervening in communal relations (ethics) and crafting motivational and persuasive tactics (rhetoric) may have to be premised on the creation of such transversal connections—ones that often work, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, by motivating individuals to do “the right thing for the wrong reason.”
My approach to ethics and rhetoric in this book might also be in need of some explanation, not because these categories have, as with transhuman-ism and cybernetics, short or obscure histories, but for the opposite reason: because they have extraordinarily long histories within Western intellectual thought and are often defined in contradictory ways. At the risk of overly schematizing one of these immensely long histories, we might posit that debates over the proper identity of rhetoric and its appropriate role in analyzing contemporary culture and communication largely take place around and between two contrasting positions; while these two dif erent definitions have certainly taken on new exigencies and meanings in recent history, both might also be read as repetitions of a sort of conflicts in early Greek culture from which rhetoric initially emerged.
The first is the contention that rhetoric is largely a series of techniques or technical practices, usually of a discursive nature, designed to persuade an individual or motivate them toward a particular action. In this defini-tion, rhetoric is largely a pragmatic or even mercenary endeavor. In this sense, rhetorical practices operate largely outside of or after epistemological concerns; even if one is attempting to convince an individual or audience of a particular fact or belief, rhetoric itself is composed of a series of adaptable techniques of expression without epistemological “content” or that are deployed after a particular fact, belief, or action has already been decided on. In his mid-1960s seminar on rhetoric, Roland Barthes gives a concise description of this conception of rhetoric in defining it as a “technique”: “the art of persuasion, a body of rules and recipes whose implementation makes it possible to convince the hearer of the discourse (and later the reader of the work), even if what he is to be convinced of is ‘false’” (13). This variability and adaptability, rhetoric's identity as a series of persuasive techniques, provides what Steven Mailloux has called rhetoric's “contingent universality”: while persuasion may be a universal process in communicative acts of any type, and rhetoric as a discipline has largely been devoted to crafting and refining generic techniques that can be adapted to almost any situation, the contingent nature of both rhetoric and the contexts in which it will be deployed are already built into the process. In other words, while the lion's share of particularly early work in formal rhetoric has been devoted to the identification of techniques that might work in more or less any situation (or any situation of a particular type), the necessity that these techniques be flexible and that a rhetor adapt to particular audiences and situations has equally influenced the design and formalization of such techniques. Rhetoric has a certain “metastability” rather than a more traditionally static systematicity: particular rhetorical techniques have universal application insofar as adaptability and flexibility is a constitutive part of their design.
The notion that it might be considered as separate from any particular epistemological content has long been the source of rhetoric's vast range and adaptability, and in many historical periods, also the factor that justified its place in educational curriculum as a basic and crucial skill. However, this same separation from categories of veridicity or epistemol-ogy—particularly the notion that rhetoric, as Barthes notes, seems equally at home in being used to persuade people of something “false”—has also long been the source for the condemnation of rhetoric or a general mistrust of individuals who appear to be particularly good at persuasion. On the one hand, it is easy to dismiss contemporary rhetoric in the public sphere as dedicated more toward the maintenance of the status quo or at least to find its most apparent uses in the defenses or justifications of already decided-upon principles or conclusions, rather than acts of true deliberation or decision making. J. Michael Sproule gave the name “managerial rhetoric” to persuasive acts of these types, ones that appear to function largely as a way to disseminate and further ingrain existing beliefs and cultural tendencies within respective groups. Perhaps even more problematically, the variability of rhetoric as a technique is largely the inspiration for its appearance as a popular pejorative term, one that describes “empty” communication with no real meaning or merely the secondary, and often duplicitous, way to express the “real message” hidden underneath it. Both of these conceptions have long histories, with the idea that rhetoric is a dangerous pretender to the throne of philosophy or true reason, or that is only a lamentably necessary skill for the dissemination of knowledge into popular contexts, appearing as popular themes in Plato's dialogues. Both, however, also remain recognizable in contemporary culture, particularly within populist political contexts. For instance, the Washington Post 's “Fact Checker” feature, which awards a number of “pinnochios” based on the degree of deception manifested in recent statements by politicians, carries the tag line that it shows “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric.” During their televised debates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, candidate John McCain continually warned viewers to beware of Barack Obama's “eloquence” and use of persuasion, suggesting that is was being used to cover up the real intent behind his campaign promises.
The “technique” conception of rhetoric, particularly during the so-called “linguistic turn” in the humanities and social sciences and the rise of poststructuralist philosophy and postmodern cultural theory, was contrasted with one in which rhetoric was instead positioned as a crucial vector in the shaping of epistemological frameworks, and persuasion, as well as acts of communication and representation more generally, were taken to be in many ways constitutive forces in the production of knowledge. The theoretical position that was sometimes referred to as “Big Rhetoric” held that, insofar as virtually all categories of socially knowledge or belief— from science, to politics, to morals—seemed to be essentially mediated by acts of language and persuasion, then rhetoric appeared to be both the force that creates and subtends knowledge, and thus a privileged domain for analyzing how knowledge is formed and disseminated.5 Though this viewpoint was certainly informed by a variety of contemporary changes in culture, politics, and technology—ones that often went by the proper name postmodernism—this contention is equally apparent (or at least became newly recognizable to modern audiences) in early debates over epistemol-ogy and persuasion in ancient Greek culture.
My own intervention in reference to these positions is to argue in this book for something of a recuperation or retrofitting of the first, technique-based , conception of rhetor ic , but one t hat allows it to maintain much of the importance of it in reference to contemporary ethics and politics that was prevalent during the linguistic turn in cultural theory. More specifically, one of the major arguments of this book is that the power and importance we used to attribute to language and representation in the past few decades is, after the integration of post-cybernetic technologies into contemporary political economy, large carried out by what would more properly be considered as “techniques.” By techniques I mean to refer to flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium. One of the primary arguments of this book is that such techniques have largely taken the place of processes we previously attributed to epistemology or ideology within social life. I take up this issue much more extensively in Chapters 1 and 2, but to anticipate an example in the former, we might consider just-in-time production methods and niche marketing as particularly exemplary instance of this shift. If our traditional conception of consumerism under contemporary capitalism is one in which the producers and sellers of particular goods must work toward convincing a sizable amount of the populace that they should own such goods, then new production and marketing methods developed around information technology and new media have fundamentally altered this process. The ability to produce small batches of goods both cheaply and rapidly, combined with historically unparalleled ways to directly query consumers or obtain massive amounts of data about consumer preferences, creates an economic situation in which the primary goal is not to change a person's mind about the “need” for a particular product or service, but to instead create and produce virtually anything that is already desired, and to convince consumers to buy any thing at all. Insofar as we tend to identify capitalist exchange with forces of social normativity, such a shift also has much broader cultural effects. As Hardt and Negri suggest in Empire , far from being the enforcer of some engine of conformist identity or behavior, contemporary capitalism thrives by discovering that “every dif erence is an opportunity”: “ever more hybrid and dif erentiated populations present a proliferating number of ‘target markets’ that can each be addressed by specific marketing strategies—one for gay Latino males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, another for Chinese-American teenage girls, and so forth” (152). While not entirely reducible to new technologies and media, such shifts, I argue here, are of a piece with a broader series of cultural changes occurring in the wake of cybernetics, ones in which techniques and hybrid categories of “technologics” increasingly play a crucial structuring role in social life.
There are a number of reasons that rhetoric provides the best perspective and best toolbox for analyzing and responding to these shifts beyond its historical linkage with techne and a particular logic of techniques.6 While making those linkages is an objective consistently addressed and performed throughout this book, here we might briefly emphasize two points. One is that rhetoric has long been taken to be a vector of forces or practices that are, much like a variety of central processes in contemporary culture, premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment. As the philosopher Michael Naas has emphasized in tracing its early thematization in ancient Greek intellectual culture, persuasion first emerged as “a mysterious third term that is properly neither overt, physical force nor reasoned, lawful judgment and compromise” (2). While, as alluded to above and suggested by Naas' definition by negation, it has been historically dif cult to conceive of a hybrid space or “third term” between these realms, it is, I take it, this domain that structures a wide number of important processes in contemporary politics and culture, and it is the work of this book to thematize it using rhetorical theory. To put things perhaps a little more simply, we might say that rhetoric is particularly salient domain for analyzing contemporary culture because it, like the dominant processes of culture today, is less concerned with representation, epistemology, or ideology than it is with a spectrum of directly motivational or persuasive forces. As John Muckelbauer suggests, “because of rhetoric's traditional concern with persuasion (rather than communication), it has been intimately involved with questions of force rather than questions of signification or meaning,” and that connection or involvement is perhaps more apparent and more important today than ever before (13).
In taking up ethics as my other primary toolbox here, I am particularly interested in its thematic and methodological overlaps with rhetoric that were most prominent in early Western intellectual culture: the ways that both are subtended by, or otherwise find their most productive strategies through the use of, common customs, investments, and desires. In ethics, emphasizing the “common” as both ordinary and the communal finds its roots in the Greek concept of ethos (“accustomed place” and the “character” of an individual), which preceded more formalized studies of ethics and morality. Thus, as Michael Halloran reminds us, “in contrast to modern notions of the person or self, ethos emphasizes the conventional rather than the idiosyncratic, the public rather than the private” and having effective ethos requires the ability to “manifest the virtues most valued by the culture to and for which one speaks” (60).
This primordial mingling of ethos as both communal custom and individual character persists in the two most prevalent ways that ethics is taken up in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: as (1) the study of human subjectivity or identity and how standards of valuation and judgment are formed and (2) investigation into the (proper) relations or activities between individuals within a given relationship or community. However, while the return of ethics in recent critical thought often begins with a consideration of the commonplace customs of a given community, positive ethics are more typically defined against such practices: ethical subjectivity and ameliorative ethical praxis are suggested to emerge, more often than not, through their dif erence or resistance to dominant communal sentiments and ideational investments. Rhetoric's genetic investment in the “common,” by contrast, can be traced to the study and strategic use of doxa (forms of common belief and opinion). The sophistic commitment to doxa would be the primary source for Plato's condemnation of the Greek sophists and in many ways the linchpin through which rhetoric and philosophy would become, and remain, divided in Western intellectual thought. Thus, though these disciplines may out of necessity have to be central to any study of cultural and political processes, my own sense of rhetoric and ethics is tied to the ways their function emerges from the forms they take in relation to the “common”: the strategic manipulation of the conventions governing both persuasion and our conceptions of justice, moral value, and “the good life.” More specifically, insofar as contemporary forms of social power are increasingly premised on the manipulation of forms of persuasion, manipulation, and intervention rather than the particular content of these operations, it seems to me that it may be necessary to recover “formulaic” or generic senses of rhetoric and ethics in order to do any kind of strategic thinking about these forces. Taken together, such a conception of ethics and rhetoric, as well as their intersection, suggests that our best tools for responding to the present will be those that work via such persuasion to create unexpected linkages between individuals, particularly those who might not otherwise have common cause. Or at least it is of this that I hope to persuade you.