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Cleverness and Drive, Or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value: RS Hunt's R.S. Hunt. Diagram captioned “Two ‘Caricatures’ of an Electrical Field,” in “Two Kinds of Work,” ca. 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries. 32 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00223 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value: R.S. Hunt’s “Two Kinds of Work” SEB FRANKLIN 1. Introduction In Border as Method Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson define the current socioeconomic conjuncture as one in which “property and property rights have become more and more immaterial and float elusively according to the dynamics of global financial markets.” 1 This description follows the now familiar outline of what is variously called “post-Fordism,” “late capital - ism,” “postindustrial society,” or “empire.” The increasing immateriality of “property”—which includes the labor power that dispossessed workers are “compelled to offer for sale as a commodity” in order to acquire their means of subsistence—represents, in Mezzadra and Neilson’s account, a shift from the seventeenth-century formulation of possessive individualism to a regime of “so-called new enclosures.” 2 Where possessive individualism represented “a theory that imagined society as a web of commercial exchange relations between ‘a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise,’” the accumulative logic of the present “becomes clear if one thinks of capi - tal’s new frontiers, such as the knowledge economy and biocapital.” 3 Mezzadra and Neilson’s account of this transformation exemplifies a shift in emphasis in critical accounts of capitalist accumulation, from a focus on exploitation to a focus on capture . Where the former operates under the sign of the labor theory of value that Karl Marx locates in classical political economists such as Smith and Ricardo, the latter ontologizes value. This transition, which is central to the writing of autonomist Marxists such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Christian Marazzi, and Antonio Negri, among others, appears to rest on a notion of value as a substance that can be directly extracted from bodies, brains, and matter without the mediating function of formally or really subsumed labor. In this article I argue that the “transformation” that Mezzadra and Neilson gloss—and which characterizes the periodizing interventions of Grey Room 68, Summer 2017, pp. 32–59. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 autonomist Marxists such as those listed above—represents less an objec - tive change in the mechanical basis of capitalist accumulation and more a shift in the epistemic conditions determining how labor is imagined and, consequently, how social conditions are organized in relation to capital. I suggest this epistemic shift is centered on the dissemination of principles from information theory and cybernetics. Furthermore, I suggest that the putative movement from exploitation to capture rests on a specific under - standing of the relationship between energy and information in which the latter is posited as separable from the former. 4 That is, I argue that notions of knowledge economies, biocapital, and immaterial production as the basis for a productive economy represent fantasies of accumulation without limit that are grounded in the impossible (but all too easily imaginable) notion of information as separable from energy and, by extension, matter. This image facilitates a reprise of the fantasy of labor without exhaustion that, as Anson Rabinbach notes, emerged with the modern concept of energy but was frustrated by the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics. 5 And, cru - cially, this imagined basis for the “contemporary expansion of new forms of value-producing labor” occurs in what Kevin Floyd identifies, following Marx and the more recent writings of the Endnotes collective, as “an age of stagnant accumulation”—a historical moment in which “what is expanding is not value-producing labor” but both “capital relative to value- producing labor” and, concomitantly, “the global reserve of surplus labor” (or what Marx calls surplus populations). 6 The fantasy of limitless accu - mulation promises to repair, but really functions to intensify and further obfuscate, both a secular decline in capital’s capacity to absorb labor and the conditions of racialized and gendered abjection that have, in one form or another, always functioned to organize and normalize capital’s structural tendency toward the linked production of surplus value and surplus populations. Responding to the materially deleterious return of fantasies of unbounded accumulation through principles of information-without-energy thus neces - sitates a turn away from theories of post-Fordism, immaterial labor, and biopolitical production, all of which are grounded in and thus bolster the same fantasies and misappropriations of cybernetics as the practices they seek to overcome. Instead, such a project necessitates a return to mid - century developments in cybernetics and information theory through the critical lens of Marx’s theorizations of abstraction and violence and Marxist- feminist analyses of the inseparability of production from reproduction that tend to be absent from critical engagements with the so-called post- Fordist economy. My focal point for this intervention is an unpublished manuscript from 34 Grey Room 68 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 1947 titled “Two Kinds of Work.” Its author, R.S. Hunt, sent the manuscript to the Marxist biologist J.B.S. Haldane in January 1951 with the hope that it would earn him an audience with the mathematician and cybernetics pio - neer Norbert Wiener, who was visiting Haldane in London. “Two Kinds of Work” is compelling for the manner in which it prefigures discussions around post-Fordism, immaterial labor, and what Floyd calls the “contem - porary expansion of new forms of value-producing labor.” 7 Perhaps more important, though, are the connections the manuscript explicates between these notions of expanded value and the disciplines of cybernetics and information theory. By explicitly deploying the conceptual frameworks and terminology of these disciplines (both of which were in their infancy at the time Hunt was writing) as the basis for what now appears a common refor - mulation of basic economic questions, “Two Kinds of Work” offers remark - able insights into the fantasies of expanded accumulation that shape contemporary systems of capital accumulation and, by extension, the violent consequences of these systems. 2. “Ethical Quantities” A “screed, typical of many that I have written, which no one has ever read and probably no one ever will, but which at least maybe [ sic ] admitted as evidence of cybernetic enthusiasm.” 8 These are the modest terms in which Hunt—then employed as a technical editor working on “handbooks for fire- control computers”—describes the seventy-page manuscript of “Two Kinds of Work” in the letter to Haldane that accompanied it. Although he writes that “on paper [he had] nothing much to recommend [him],” Hunt claims that he had developed a “generalized theory of automatic devices” that he hoped might lead either to an opportunity to study with Wiener at MIT or to paid employment “of a cybernetic nature.” 9 So on the surface, “Two Kinds of Work”—mostly completed in 1947, four years before Hunt sent it to Haldane—was intended as a portfolio of sorts, an example of its author’s knowledge of and facility with the methods and terminology of information theory. 10 This demonstration of familiarity with information-theoretical concepts does not, however, take the form of a straightforward essay on the meaning and significance of that field’s key terms or methods. Nor is it a survey of specific techniques or technologies. Rather, it is a highly idiosyncratic treatise, wide-ranging and supported with references to the natural sciences, materialist philosophy, and computer science, that seeks to establish an ontological relationship between work, information, and economic value. Haldane did pass the manuscript on, but a return letter from Wiener’s secretary, G.B. Baldwin, indicates Hunt’s modest prediction about the Franklin | Cleverness and Drive, or the Cybernetic Fantasy of Value: R.S. Hunt’s “Two Kinds of Work” 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 impact of his “screed” was largely accurate. Thirteen months after Hunt’s initial contact with Haldane, Wiener had not yet looked at the manuscript, and he would “not have time in the near future to study it.” 11 Furthermore, he was unable to offer any opportunities for employment or study, so Baldwin suggested Hunt direct his inquiries about the latter to the dean of the graduate school at MIT. In any case, Wiener was unlikely to have reacted positively, especially in light of his growing concerns about the motivations behind the explosion of cybernetics-related research in the early 1950s. 12 In both the letter and the manuscript, Hunt’s project reads like a fantasy, if not a delusion, about the extension of cybernetic methods and terminology to cognition, affect, and identity. But, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s analysis of the memoirs of Daniel
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