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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 Paul Schreber suggests, desires, fantasies, and delusions are neither insignificant details nor simple surface effects of a given socioeconomic regime. Rather, they often demonstrate or even pre - figure the underlying dynamics and modes of abstraction that are central to that regime. 13 Hunt’s fantasy exemplifies the synthesis of informatics and economics that would both bolster and revolutionize the “open market” and the systems of “buying and selling” that Wiener impugns in Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine .14 In naming these mechanisms of exchange, Wiener makes clear that he saw them as antithetical both to “human values” and to cybernetic visions of a homeostatic society governed by unimpeded communication. And he raises these concerns specifically in response to the dangers posed to employment by computer-driven automation. But, for all his explicit criti - cism of exchange and automation, both of which appear to put his remarks in concert with Marxian thinkers of many stripes (and particularly those writing in the autonomist tradition), Wiener makes no mention of value — or what Diane Elson calls “the representation of labor under capitalism.” 15 This is where the principal distinction can be found between Hunt’s “cyber - netic enthusiasm” and Wiener’s brief attempts to limit the application of such methods for the analysis and management of social phenomena such as work. For all of the apparent modesty exhibited in his description of his text as a “screed,” Hunt later describes the same piece as elaborating noth - ing less than a technique able to “find the work (in the sense of mental energy) required to solve any task.” 16 This account of mental activity as a form of energy (rather than a set of processes that require energy), along with the telling suggestion that this “energy” can be found (rather than serv - ing as a representational schema for something that has no properly material existence separate from the bodies and social arrangements that produce it) are uncannily similar to the concept of value that Marx identifies and cri - tiques as the foundational principle of both capitalist social organization
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 and bourgeois theories of political economy. But Hunt’s theory of mental energy does not simply double the form of capitalist determinations of value; it promises to extend the scope of both those determinations and the baleful practices they undergird in ways that would not be registered in either, nor in critiques of both, for several decades. And in so doing, it reveals remarkable continuities between fantasies of information without energy and the foundational logic of both classical political economy and those more recent theories that posit value as directly extractable from com - munication, knowledge, affect, and life itself. The scope of Hunt’s project first becomes evident in his claim that: My aim has always been to put metaphysics within the scope of physics—it now is to physics as alchemy was to chemistry. I think I have succeeded, and that I could measure ethical quantities by the method of physical laboratories. Aesthetic qualities like violin tone have been so measured (Helmholtz did it) but not such quantities as beauty, virtue, and happiness. Will-power is another quantity I think I could measure, and by quite a simple servo arrangement. 17 Taken alone, this passage suggests Hunt is primarily concerned with methodological questions. Hunt presents his system of quantification as a response to an ontological (rather than economic) problem, and he suggests that the historical split between physical and aesthetic, affective, or cogni - tive phenomena can be resolved through metaphors drawn from informa - tion theory and its associated hardware. In this respect Hunt’s initial presentation of his work to Haldane (and, he hoped, Wiener) most closely prefigures Gregory Bateson’s damning 1967 précis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s cybernetics-inflected structural anthropology as a project that “assumes the heart has precise algorithms.” 18 However, advancing beyond the (already grand) claims set out in the Haldane letter, what “Two Kinds of Work” really performs is the desire to put such claims about the quantification of thinking, beauty, and happiness in service of a radical theory of labor, value extraction, and prices. Read as a historical register of intersecting bodies of knowledge—and against the grain of its putatively rigorous technical and mathematical documentation and its practical, exploratory tone—the fantasy exemplified in Hunt’s text shows how the social relations of capital in both “classical” and “post- industrial” forms are connected by the fantasy of value as a material essence that can be found in and extracted from social bodies without any material cost to those bodies .19 As such, the manuscript necessitates a return to the historical parame - ters of periodizing concepts such as post-Fordism, as well as the heterodox
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 social and economic formations that such concepts gloss. Twenty-five years before Deleuze and Guattari’s grand diagnosis of the flows and assemblages of desire and capital, thirty-four years before Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s archeology of manual and intellectual labor power, and more than fifty years before the widespread Anglophone reception of theorists such as Lazzarato, Negri, and Paolo Virno was consolidated by Virno and Michael Hardt’s collection Radical Thought in Italy and Hardt and Negri’s Empire , Hunt set out a series of conceptual operations through which cognitive and affective activities can be rendered as work and through which all forms of work become deracinated. 20 Just as Schreber’s delusions prefigured the dreams and anxieties that shape the discursive construction of the network society (as Friedrich Kittler and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun have argued), so might Hunt’s economic- technical manuscript symptomatize the fantasies of value extraction that extend from the so-called Industrial Era to determine the image of a newer technosocial ideal centered on computational concepts. 21 The synthesis of discursive formations that “Two Kinds of Work” effects sug - gests the difference between industrial and postindustrial societies lies not in a fundamental distinction, such as that between manual and intellectual labor, but in a shift in conditions of knowledge that allows fantasies of value extraction to unify the ostensibly different practices such distinctions imply. But, beyond this insight into periodization, Hunt’s text offers a lesson in the formation of real abstractions, or the relationship between conceptual - ization and the concrete imposition of specific (and deleterious) social rela - tions. Since Hunt’s prediction that nobody would ever read it appears mostly to have been accurate, “Two Kinds of Work” cannot be inscribed into the history of the present as a direct but forgotten influence on either systems of capital accumulation or the critics of such systems. Its importance thus lies in its capacity to be read as a kind of time capsule. Lying unseen for decades before the economic transformations whose logical structure it uncannily prefigures ostensibly took place, it shows that the accumulation fantasies associated with postindustrial society do not simply rest on a spe - cific historical break in the 1960s or 1970s. Instead, it demonstrates that such fantasies could emerge—and did, albeit in the minor form of a small body of writing by an unknown and unpublished engineer-philosopher- political economist—through a methodological synthesis of value theory and cybernetics. And it shows that such a synthesis was thinkable at a time in which postwar Keynesianism and its critics dominated economic con - versations and practicing cyberneticians were still wrangling over the meanings of words such as digital and feedback while resisting the unqual - ified application of their methods to social questions. In demonstrating the
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 cybernetic ontology that underscores post-Fordism to first extend to social and subjective life through a synthesis of communications engineering and capitalist principles of value, and by thus demonstrating the epistemological commensurability of these ostensibly separate fields, “Two Kinds of Work” sheds new historical light on the symptomatic character of several recent theoretical paradigms—from the autonomist Marxian concepts of general intellect and mass intellectuality to the object networks that populate cer - tain preoccupations of “materialist” philosophy.
3. Two Kinds of Work Among the works cited in “Two Kinds of Work,” one can find many of the foundational texts in information theory, from James Clerk Maxwell’s Rede Lecture on “The Telephone” (1878) to Herbert Nyquist’s “Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed” of 1924 and Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication” of 1948. Not one work of economic theory appears in Hunt’s list of references, however. But from the opening sen - tences it is obvious that he is as concerned with economic questions as he is with the technological and philosophical ones he raises in his letter to Haldane. Furthermore, these economic concerns are clearly related to and extend those of the bourgeois political economists who, in Marx’s analysis, describe the logical structure of a violent social relation while purporting to describe a natural quality of human life. 22 The introduction to “Two Kinds of Work” immediately reveals that Hunt’s synthesis of cybernetic ontology and value-centric economic theory is centered on his concept of G-energy and the associated categories of G-power and G-work. Hunt writes: The words “work,” “energy,” and “power” are defined in dictionaries. Though the definitions do not explicitly state it, there are two entirely different kinds of work, or energy. Energy definable in units such as the erg or foot-ton is here defined as A-energy. Energy not so definable, but verbally defined in a dictionary, will be defined as G-energy. Absence of any absolute units in which to measure G-energy is the most remarkable hiatus in human knowledge at the present time. By far the greater part of human activity consists in increasing the G-energy of material systems. Monetary conventions are an attempt to provide symbols representing the G-energy of the material systems for which they may be exchanged. All academic studies outside the pure and applied sciences are concerned with assessment of the G-energy of material systems, such as objects of art, or the merit of those who exert power which is not A-power, such as public speakers, military
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 leaders, actors and musical virtuosi. . . . The industrial wage-bill is almost wholly in respect of G-work per - formed by employees. It is a rule of industrial management that a workman shall do a minimum of A-work, for that is more cheaply and readily done by a machine. . . . Having so little occasion to perform A-work, and not being paid for nothing, the workman is evidently paid for G-work done. He does in fact transform material systems from a more to a less probable, and from a less to a more costly condition. This is as true of mathematical systems as of a piece of metal. 23 In Hunt’s system, “G” designates a form of energy that passes from human beings, nonhuman animals, and machinery into “material systems.” In con - trast to what Hunt defines as A-energy—that which takes the form of heat, light, motion, and so on and is subject to the laws of thermodynamics— G-energy transforms a material system “from a more to a less probable con - dition” (iv). According to the terms of “19 th -century physicists,” Hunt writes, G-work is “that which, performed in absence of A-work, could defy the second law of thermodynamics” (9). In short, G-energy is that which gives form to material systems . And this capacity, in Hunt’s account, is sep - arate from but ontologically equivalent to what he calls A-energy. This is where the economic imaginary Hunt expresses departs from that which Rabinbach tracks through nineteenth-century exchanges between physics and political economy. Rabinbach notes how “the image of labor was radically transformed” through its encounter with modern concepts of energy, leading to a concept of “ labor power ” that emphasized “the expen - diture and deployment of energy as opposed to human will, moral purpose, or even technical skill.” 24 Hunt, by contrast, draws on information theory to undo the distinction between value-producing labor and phenomena such as will or moral purpose, which in his theorization belong to an entirely dif - ferent category of energy not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. The differences and equivalences Hunt draws between A-energy and G-energy—“G” is, he insists, as important as but absolutely separate from “A”—functions to establish the former as material and transhistorical, so its entry into the annals of human knowledge rests on its “discovery” rather than its invention. 25 Before this “discovery,” the role of G-energy in deter - mining material situations went unnoticed due to a shortfall in scientific knowledge. Hunt insists on all of this in a historical note toward the start of “Two Kinds of Work,” in which he identifies moments from the histories of philosophy and the natural sciences in which the existence of G-energy was intuited but could not yet be formalized. Lucretius, for example, made “no distinction between A-work and G-work” because he could only intuit them
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 subjectively, “in terms of the sensation of fatigue.” Hunt appears to be refer - ring to a passage in book 4 of On the Nature of the Universe in which Lucretius writes, You see also how much the body is worn How much is drawn from man’s very thews and sinews By a speech that lasts from the first gleam of dawn To the black shades of night, especially If the words are shouted, at the top of the voice. Therefore the voice must be made of bodily stuff, Since much speaking diminishes the body. 26 In Hunt’s interpretation of this passage, Lucretius understands vocal work as that which causes a person to feel tired, and thus he conflates A- and G-energy. While he suggests that it lacks precision in its identification of the difference between them, this conflation of A and G provides Hunt with the image of communication as work that appears to be the principal motiva - tion behind his interest in G-work. “Of all human activities,” he writes, Lucretius implies that “in public speaking a man may work harder than any manual labourer” (2). After the “Middle Ages,” Hunt goes on, the “definition of time in terms of the atom,” the “absolute value” of which depends on the response rate of an observer or measuring device,” provided “half the definition of G-energy,” but the centrality of A-energy to the scientific and industrial revolutions of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries precluded further investigations into the distinction between A and G (4). In surveying this period, Hunt points toward moments at which A and G were (to his mind) erroneously conflated. In these passages Hunt’s familiarity with the history set out in The Human Motor is clearest, although his interest in this history is quite different from Rabinbach’s. He cites Hermann von Helmholtz, but on tone rather than on the conservation of energy. Thomas Young’s definition of energy is important, Hunt states, because it was “not yet entirely divorced from such ideas as the ‘creative’ energy of man” (5). Following this, he makes some tantalizing media-theoretical remarks: “practice, nor theory, was the great expositor of A-work”; consequently, eighteenth-century devel - opments in industrial machinery consolidated the epistemic primacy of A-energy, and because of these developments it became possible to imagine such machines replacing “the power of man, horse, wind, or water” (4). Because of the A-energetic character of these machines, G-energy remained undiscovered. Consequently, it remained impossible to imagine mecha - nization extending to “the power of an orator, singer, or military leader” (4). The development of servomechanisms and digital computers removes this
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 imaginative impediment by making it possible to conceive of concepts and affects as phenomena that can be reproduced by machines, clearing the ground for the “discovery” of G-energy. This “discovery” undergirds the theory of value whose elaboration takes up the majority of Hunt’s osten - sibly historical-technical manuscript. Through a focus on developments in the natural sciences, from Young’s definition of energy to Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone and Wolfgang Wöhler’s contributions to organic chemistry, Hunt’s historical note reveals both the underlying economic principles and the epistemic grounding upon which his concept of G-energy is founded. In sketching this history, Hunt suggests that concepts of energy are shaped by specific technologies and the economic practices they afford. In this respect, his manuscript prefigures Rabinbach’s analysis of conceptual exchanges between thermodynamics and labor in the nineteenth century, while seeking to extend the epistemic implications of this relationship through a version of information theory that, read a certain way (and often against the tentative, speculative, and limited claims of early cyberneticians and information theorists), promised to move beyond the constraints posed by energetic models. In the intro - duction to “Two Kinds of Work,” Hunt explicitly states that he is pursuing an investigation into the character of G-energy to determine exactly what constitutes value: what money represents and what an employer pays for when they purchase labor. Money, in Hunt’s system, functions as a system of representation for the G-energy congealed in a good or service; it repre - sents “an attempt to provide symbols representing the G-energy of the mate - rial systems for which they may be exchanged” (1). Furthermore, his definition of G-energy as that which defies the second law of thermo - dynamics resonates with Marx’s definition of labor as “living, form-giving fire.” 27 The notion of “form-giving” elaborated in this passage anticipates Hunt’s definition of G-energy as that which moves a system to a less proba - ble state. However, overt contradictions constitute Marx’s definition—con - tradictions that Hunt’s account does away with. The notion of form-giving fire implies that the thing that gives form does not need to be itself under - stood as having form. Furthermore, Marx is here writing on simple produc - tion, “leaving aside the valorisation process”; giving form to material “systems,” in this account, does not automatically equate to producing value, since surplus value can be accumulated only through the specific social relations that produce surplus labor. By contrast, Hunt deploys the technical and terminological developments of computation and communi - cation to cement the exact ontological identification between the value extracted from exploited labor (form-giving) and “natural” energetic phe - nomena (such as fire) that Marx seeks to dissolve. This parallel definition
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 of G-energy as both equivalent to and separate from (A) energy makes a formal notion of form-giving fire possible. Tallying Hunt’s periodization with the historical subsumption of specific activities as productive labor under capitalism, one arrives at a remarkable thesis. To understand a given activity as value-producing work, this passage suggests, that practice must be understood as replicable by an actually exist - ing machine. The “discovery” of G-energy thus both posits its object as trans- historical and relies on the twentieth-century development of machines that can be understood to have the potential to replace cognitive and communi - cational actions. In Hunt’s words, where “such early devices as the ‘spin - ning jenny’ displaced men in alarming numbers, but only, it seemed, in respect of mechanical abilities,” computing devices “have invaded the domain of higher intelligence” so that the latter “is now known to be defin - able in terms of an electronic circuit” (4–5). Or, where the spinning jenny intensified the extraction of surplus value from weaving (the process Marx names formal subsumption), computing machines provide the conceptual and organizational frameworks to apply such procedures to activities based on “higher intelligence.” But this formulation is not limited to the category of so-called intellectual work; it does not draw a hard distinction between manual labor that should be understood in terms of mechanisms and intel - lectual labor that should be understood in terms of electronics. Hunt’s theorization posits labor in general as the transfer of a transhistorical force (G) that sometimes appears in the form of “higher intelligence” and at other times appears as the outcome of manual operations. The laboring body becomes subject to a kind of retrospective continuity, under which it becomes intelligible as always having been an electronic circuit. Living, form-giving fire becomes the movement of electrons through a switching circuit or series of logic gates.
4. The Bedator The conceptual schema through which Hunt formulates labor power as a component for G-energy transmission is centered on his neologism bedator . Although it appears to be one of the more idiosyncratic aspects of Hunt’s system, his definition of this term exemplifies the formulation of the human worker as information processor upon which Hunt’s text and, later, the dis - course of post-Fordist production rests. The bedator is inseparable from the definition of G-energy—indeed, it describes “any device [by which he means any biological or mechanical thing] able to perform G-work” (iv). The bedator is the “G-physical analogue of the prime mover of A-Physics” (7). If the analogy with the prime mover is observed, a bedator, whether living or otherwise, is a source that provides a given material system with
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 R.S. Hunt. “List of Symbols and Abbreviations,” in “Two Kinds of Work,” ca. 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 an input that transforms it, giving it intentional pattern or form in defiance of entropy. And in doing so, the bedator transmits value . Returning to his theory of money in a section of the manuscript titled “Criteria for the Existence of G-Work,” Hunt writes, “The money changing hands in any trans - action tends to be a measure of the G-energy in the systems involved” (7). To reiterate, Hunt defines G-work as that which (1) is performed by a bedator, (2) moves a system from a more to a less probable condition, and (3) represents the monetary value crystallized in a given “material system.” From this perspective it appears that G-work is simply labor and the bedator is a laborer. But Hunt also states that a bedator can be biological or mechan - ical. And, in the introduction to “Two Kinds of Work,” he states that the G-worker’s (or bedator’s) transformation of “material systems” from a “more to a less probable, and from a less to a more costly condition” is “as true of mathematical systems as of a piece of metal” (2). This procedure for estab - lishing a system of equivalences—across manual and cognitive, affective, or intellectual labor performed by living workers and machines alike— appears to be the ultimate purpose of the entire conceptual apparatus of bedators and G-energy that Hunt constructs. Since it can be either a living thing or a machine, and since it posits human faculties as equivalent to specific forms of machinery, the bedator promises to revolutionize the labor theory of value that Marx targeted as both the imaginative cornerstone and the ultimate limit of capitalist accumulation and its concomitant systems of political economy. Most important, it posits a wholesale reformulation of the relationship between living labor and dead labor. A bedator can be a machine and thus ought not to produce surplus value. But it can also be a human or a nonhuman animal, since one of his examples is of the sheep-sorting activity of a sheepdog. In every case, the general form of the bedator is clearly defined by Hunt as the source of G- work and thus the source of value in a given system (by which one must assume he means commodity or service). Although Hunt initially theorizes the bedator in general terms, as a source of G-energy (both form and value) that can be either organic or mechanical, he does this to (1) specify the differences between the two types and (2) devise a methodology for quantifying the character of the for - mer’s capacities in terms of the latter’s putative rationality. This process of quantification replaces the unit of clock time as the measure of value extracted, since a single bedator-hour can now represent the crystallized form of multiple “man-hours.” As Hunt writes, “If an x-type bedator has dis - placed n men, then n man-hours = 1 x-bedator-hour” (8). The bedator thus appears to be a synthesis of machinery (or fixed capital) and living labor (variable capital), intelligible in the terms of the former and valorizable in the
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 terms of the latter (at least insofar as it is positioned under capital). This movement rests on a distinction between cleverness and drive . Where drive describes direct transmission of some kind of input without transformation, cleverness “implies a transformation in the mathematical form of the data handled” (8). So, a “sound reproducer” (audio equipment) “may displace a hundred orchestral performers,” but because its “original input was obtained from a living orchestra” and because the “output” has the same form as the input (changes resulting from the production process, such as equalization and compression notwithstanding), “it is credited with drive , ability to transmit data, but has zero cleverness” (8). Hunt goes on to make a basic ontological distinction according to which “The living bedator falls short of the artificial in point of drive, and far surpasses it in cleverness” (8), but the cleverness/drive distinction does not simply cleave to that between organic and artificial. Under Hunt’s schema a telephone system exhibits both characteristics: “its channel-selecting mechanism exhibits cleverness,” while “its ability to transmit data through a selected channel is mere drive” (8). G-work, then, can involve cleverness and drive in different quantities. The former describes the degree of transformation involved in a procedure, while the latter describes the degree of projection . The distinction thus appears directed at the optimal allocation of tasks to living and “dead” bedators. In the example Hunt provides, “A mathematician spends 1 hour setting in data to an electronic computer. In 1 hour thereafter the computer does G-work which it would take the mathematician 6 years to perform unaided” (8). But as Hunt’s analysis develops, it becomes apparent that the commin - gling of living and dead labor in the bedator concept is not simply directed at working out which tasks should be automated and which should not. Rather, the bedator concept is designed to make the faculties of living labor intelligible and measurable according to the new sciences of machines— computer science and information theory—whose capacities, Hunt insists, extend beyond and are entirely separable from the transfer of force. The “discovery” of G-energy and the conceptual apparatus of the bedator thus have two major implications. They make “intellectual” as well as “manual” labor subject to rationalization and quantification, and they make it possible to determine a basis for absolute measurement across “intellectual,” “manual,” biological, and mechanical processes. If Hunt’s conflation of computation and labor is implied in his claim that G is both the “true” content of money and the concern of “all academic studies outside the pure and applied sci - ences,” it becomes fully developed in his classification of bedators in the language of information theory. The bedator, whether organic or mechani - cal, “must have some kind of internal communication system , ICS” (7). Hunt
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 admits that ICS can be defined, for a living bedator, as “CNS (central ner - vous system),” but he is quick to state that in practice “ICS will serve for both” (7). The “basis for absolute measurement” then rests on the insistence that “All non-random behaviour of bedators is due to a flow of data in some channel or channels of the ICS,” so that “performance of bedators may therefore be assessed in terms of channel parameters” (10). From this point onward, “Two Kinds of Work” is taken up with the for - mulation of a series of activities as equations for measuring the capacities of communication channels. Hunt first considers behaviors “interpretable as TS” (telegraph signal). This category includes typing, various forms of marksmanship, radar operation, and the postal service. Following this, Hunt considers behaviors interpretable as a CS (continuous signal), which include handwriting, speech, and servo behavior (26–28). Perhaps the most revealing formulations come in a passage from the TS section titled “G-power of Some Homely Tasks”: The man-made bedator excels in such academic exercises as the eval - uation of functions, but boggles at more homely tasks. No really satis - factory potato-harvester has been devised, and no hop-picker seems to have been contemplated. The hop-picker’s q [ratio of unsuccessful to successful actions] is the number of volume elements within reach of his hand such as might contain a hop, divided by the number that (on the average) do contain a hop. The number of unsuccessful attempts to pick a hop is a measure of p [PFO—probability of false operation], and q [PRF— pulse recurrence frequency] is to be measured in hop/sec. . . . The same considerations apply to potato-harvesting. The humble task of threading a needle puts the bedator on some - thing like full load. . . . PFO is high, about 2/3 (needle threaded at third attempt). q is very high: the number of volume elements in which the thread may lie of which only one is the needle. The trembling of the fingers mainly responsible for PFO is easily identified with r(t) [noise]. (23–24) The theory of productive activity as signal processing is here shown to extend beyond examples drawn either from ballistics or overtly commu - nicative or symbolic labor such as typing, writing, speech, or the produc - tion of artworks. Agriculture and textiles—two of the earliest types of formally subsumed manual labor—become intelligible as symbolic manip - ulation within a shifting field of potential error. The centrality of the PFO to Hunt’s task-specific G-energy calculations points toward one of the most revealing preconditions for “Two Kinds of
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 Work” and the fantasies that it seeks to actualize. “Where a task is neces - sarily performed at constant speed,” as all labor is from the point of view of capital, “G-power loss can only be exhibited as increased PFO” (21). Fatigue appears not as the bodily expression of a contradiction between abstract and concrete labor, but as a decrease in the precision with which selections are made and transmitted. To “prove” this claim, Hunt draws on a single example—that of a computer whose PFO rises from 10 –6 to 10 –3 over six hours of work—while claiming that this calculation is “applicable to any task” (20). Hunt’s ambiguous use of computer , which can in this context refer to a human or a machine, is not insignificant. Framed wholly through a decline in mechanical-intellectual efficiency, the discovery of G-energy affords a radical redefinition of fatigue. “[W]hen a bedator is unfitted by fatigue for an exacting task,” Hunt states, “it will continue to do G-work under slightly less exacting conditions” (20). That is, if “the great discoveries of nineteenth-century physics” led “not only to the assumption of a universal energy,” as Rabinbach writes, “but also to the inevitability of decline, dissolution, and exhaustion,” Hunt’s text suggests information theory might facilitate the assumption of a second uni - versal energy that makes imaginable systems of labor (and thus accumula - tion) without limit. 28 Hunt’s text demonstrates the synthesis of information and work that would come to intensify the nineteenth-century fantasies of labor without fatigue that Rabinbach traces through the epistemic effects of thermodynamic principles. Exhaustion, in the imaginary that Hunt’s text prefigures and exemplifies, is entirely separated from such capitalist social structures as efficiency-optimized working conditions, the system of sub - sistence wages paid in exchange for “free” labor that is fundamentally premised on dispossession and exploitation, and the gendered and racialized logics of unpaid labor upon which the reproduction of both are premised. 29 Instead, it appears as a temporary loss of worker efficiency that, once prop - erly understood, can be resolved through the signature post-Fordist proce - dure of the flexible allocation of tasks. This information-theoretical configuration of both putatively basic man - ual activities and the production of “beauty, virtue, and happiness” exem - plifies the fantasy that all forms of labor can be productively imagined as idealized processes of selection from a set of discrete symbols. The confla - tion of information and work posits all labor as immaterial labor in the sense that Lazzarato defines it—as “work [that] increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making.” 30 In so doing, it neces - sitates a reexamination of the relationship between “classical” Marxian analyses and the dominant characterizations of post-Fordist labor. The latter,
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 in Virno and Hardt’s summary, evidences the transition toward a situation in which labor becomes both “increasingly difficult to quantify in capitalist schemata of valorization” and “less distinct from time outside of work.” 31 The concept of G-work appears designed to resolve this problem of quan - tification—half a decade before it was posed in critical-theoretical terms. As such, it invites questions about the symptomatic (rather than directly analytical) character of immaterial labor and its associated concepts.
5. Cybernetics and Value, or Post-Fordism Hunt’s isolation of a form of energy that makes the activities of “public speakers, military leaders, actors and musical virtuosi” intelligible in terms of the “industrial wage bill” is uncannily close to the theorization of labor exemplified in Virno’s claim that, in the late twentieth century, “the soft - ware technician, the autoworker at Fiat, and the illegal laborer” are united by a common “form and content of socialization, a structure of feeling that shapes their emotional tonalities, their inclinations, their mentalities, and their expectations.” 32 The conceptual lens of cybernetics has been central to many of these accounts of expanded accumulation, but the similarities and differences between Hunt’s synthesis of cybernetics and value theory and the deployment of the former in autonomist Marxist studies of post- Fordism are highly revealing. In the autonomists’ writings the term cybernetic refers either to concrete computer technologies (“cybernetic machines,” “cybernetic and telecom - munications innovations”) or the types of labor that are centered on such technologies (“cybernetic forms of labor” such as information work). 33 In Lazzarato’s essay “Immaterial Labor,” for example, “cybernetics” appears in (but does not bracket) a litany of labor practices that also includes “those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing [and] television.” Cybernetics appears in these texts both as the technical substrate of factory automation and as one example of the kind of work that remains (within the upper ech - elons of the Global North, at least) after automation has driven workers out of the factory. Read in the light of Hunt’s theory of G-energy, the wider conceptual implications of communication , computation , feedback , and information — as terms in a general language applicable to systems of biological actors, objects, and manual and cognitive operations alike—do appear in autono - mist theories of postindustrial labor, but not under the name “cybernetics.” Instead, the communicational-productive universalism that G-energy exem - plifies appears in the form of modified Marxian terms, most obviously general intellect , mass intellectuality , and real subsumption . Curiously, the deployments of these Marxian terms found in Virno, Hardt, and others are
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 far closer—even identical—to the synthesis of value theory and cybernetics set out in Hunt than they are to the meanings of the same terms as they appear in Marx. The first of these concepts is taken from the much-discussed section of the Grundrisse titled “Fixed Capital and the Development of the Productive Forces of Society” (generally dubbed the “Fragment on Machines” by autonomist Marxists). For Hardt and Virno, “general intel - lect” describes the “general social knowledge or collective intelligence of a society at a given historical period,” and with the increasing centrality of “information technologies and cybernetic machines” it becomes the “pri - mary source of social production.” 34 Critically, it produces the related phe - nomenon of “mass intellectuality,” that force which for Virno unifies the software engineer and the “illegal” worker: it “defines to a greater or lesser degree the entire population” as “techno-scientific knowledges and prac - tices are spreading to invest all spheres of life.” 35 In Marx, however, the concept of general intellect describes the quite different (and much more specific) process through which technological development is linked to transformations in social structure. The same slippage recurs in the autonomists’ use of the related term real subsumption , which is exemplified in Hardt and Negri’s claim that “With the real subsumption of society under capital . . . capital has become a world. Use value and all the other references to values and processes of val - orization that were conceived to be outside the capitalist mode of produc - tion have progressively vanished.” 36 This notion of real subsumption as the enclosure of all aspects of social life far exceeds the significance of that term in Marx’s writing, where it functions as a close corollary of his concept of general intellect in describing the restructuring of a given area of produc - tion according to the logic of capitalist rationality, most often through an increase in the proportion of production that is affected by automatic machinery. Weaving, for example, is subject to formal subsumption when it becomes subject to the wage relation and to real subsumption when part (and eventually all) of the production process is rendered maximally effi - cient, which in large part entails an increase in the proportion of the pro - duction process performed by machines rather than living workers. This does not simply entail a leap in profits. In seeking to increase the efficiency of production through automation, real subsumption results in a general decrease in the profit that can be generated within a given production process. 37 As Timothy Brennan notes, “the relevant passage to which Hardt and Negri refer is about the contradiction inherent in the creation of surplus free time by mechanization; Marx points out that this process poses a prob - lem for capitalists who wish to turn free time into surplus labor.” 38 Capital must then locate alternate sources of surplus value, whether by minimizing
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 wages, offshoring production to locations in which living labor remains cheaper than automation, or extracting surplus labor from activities that formerly fell outside the category of subsumable labor, such as communi - cation, reproductive labor, and other services (a broad category that can include jobs in finance, recruitment, hospitality, cleaning, and many other areas). The tendency that Hardt and Negri and others describe as “real sub - sumption” thus reflects the outcome of a demand for new sources of value that emerges in response to the dynamics named by that concept in Marx. How these distinct meanings of real subsumption —Marx’s and the autonomists’—coincide in Hunt’s theory of G-energy is striking. On the one hand, the idea of G promises an optimal division of tasks between human beings and machines and the prospect of communication and cognition as direct sources of value—a prospect that prefigures later responses to the crisis of value extraction that is the structurally determined outcome of automation. On the other hand, according to Hunt’s schema the possibility of arranging a given activity to extract value from it requires understanding that activity as replicable by a machine. So, to make putatively immaterial activities intelligible as surplus-producing labor is also to posit them as automatable. In this respect, Hunt’s fantasy of G is in line with Marx’s the - orization of the movement from formal to real subsumption as a secular feature of capitalist accumulation. Viewed in the light of the linked mystifications of cybernetics and sub - sumption that structure theorizations of post-Fordism, the very existence of Hunt’s manuscript suggests that the productive (or accumulative) relation - ship between the two goes beyond the ways in which cybernetics facilitates the development of new machines to enhance the efficiency of value extrac - tion. Automation increases the efficiency of production, but it also drives down the surplus value that can be congealed in its output. Remarkably, Hunt both identifies this contradiction and posits it as a result of the his - torical inability to properly measure G-energy: uncertainty in G-power estimation is the underlying cause of the indus - trial revolution which has caused so much misery in the past 150 years. To the purchaser of a single article that article may be treated as a TS [telegraph signal] and appear to have high G-energy and money-value; to the mass-producer it may be one spot-sample of a CS [continuous signal] sampled at indefinitely small intervals of G-length. Hence the money-value of a skilled worker’s output-behaviour (the current esti - mate of its G-energy) may suffer catastrophic reduction. (35) Hunt’s “discovery” of G-energy thus promises a solution to the problem of decreasing profit that is a secular feature of the capitalist mode of produc -
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 tion. The limits of the working day create a need for capitalists to increase the efficiency of worked hours, leading to increased automation (increase in the organic composition of capital) and a decline in the surplus value that can be extracted from wage labor. G-energy promises a framework for value extraction under which the labor/capital distinction that determines the problems of exhaustion, automation, and value sketched above might be overcome. Value, in Hunt’s schema, is G-energy held in a material sys - tem; as such, it can simply be extracted from living and dead labor. It does not require the kinds of mediation elaborately detailed by Marx and subse - quent theorists of labor and capital because it is always already in the form of a digital signal. And, because of this, the notion of activity as communi - cation promises an expansion in the range of activities and capacities from which value—here severed from the social relations of surplus labor—can be extracted. “The whole of human experience,” Hunt insists, “can go with - out loss through a communication channel of a scalar time function” (5). As such, Hunt’s manuscript models how cybernetics provides a conceptual framework—that of understanding manual and intellectual activities alike as forms of information processing that are separable from energy—for the new immaterial and biocapitalist forms of “labor” that emerge in response to the linked systemic crises of shrinking surplus value and the decreasing capacity of capital to absorb labor. And it does this not by proffering new techniques or technologies of production but by promising a revolutionary breakthrough in knowledge about what labor really is and how it functions as a set of value-transmitting activities. Crucially, the same formulation—of labor and value as ontological phe - nomena that are captured by capital but which, once identified, can be shown to unite diverse types of workers engaged in a variety of activities— is also central to the autonomists’ analysis of post-Fordist capitalism. But in its G-energetic formulation of hop picking and needle threading, “Two Kinds of Work” also shows how this conceptual shift retroactively defines precomputational forms of labor in terms of some underlying process of informatic exchange. As such, the notion of value as a form of energy that preexists capitalist social relations might be best understood as an appara - tus that is sustained by digital-economic fantasies and by some of the most strident critiques leveled against such fantasies.
6. The Fantasy of Value In this respect, “Two Kinds of Work” not only promises a new mode of pro - duction or a new set of labor practices; it also reveals something essential about the historical conditions under which social activity is formatted as labor. It makes transparent the expansive (and ever-modulating) systems of
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 abstraction that undergird the rendering of social activities as value rela - tions, and it underscores the fact that such rendering processes do not require any specific connection to agricultural labor, weaving, factory pro - duction, or the formulation of material commodities. In so doing, Hunt’s theory of value appears consistent with the processes Elson observed at work behind capitalism’s fundamental protocols. As Elson exhaustively demonstrates in her 1979 essay “The Value Theory of Labor,” Marx’s spe - cific intervention does not turn on a theory of the material transfer of “value” from a living being to an inert commodity. Such a transfer is a mys - tification that Marx describes in accounting for the relationship between capitalist abstraction, the writings of political economists such as Smith and Ricardo, and the concrete formatting of labor by capital. But in so describing it, Elson argues, Marx is not attempting to track the movement of a real substance intelligible as “value” from living bodies to commodi - ties to market prices. He is not “seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour.” 39 Rather, Marx pursues “an under - standing of why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political con - sequences are,” and in so doing he takes the abstract logic of value to task for its determining role in such processes and consequences. 40 Capital oper - ates by disciplining social activity in ways that shape and are shaped by the concept of value. In Elson’s words, value functions as “an historical process of forming what is intrinsically unformed.” 41 Read through this dynamic of form and formlessness, Hunt’s essay rep - resents an intriguing contribution to the integration of abstractions and material practices whose dynamics, Elson reminds us, are central to the capitalist mode of production as Marx mapped and critiqued it. In ostensi - bly seeking to refine (rather than overturn) this mode of production, Hunt’s work reveals a great deal not only about the relationship between industrial and post-Fordist production but also about the continuities between post- Fordism and some of its principal critiques. “Two Kinds of Work” expli - cates the imaginary of capitalist social relations—a world in which all human faculties can be disciplined according to these relations, which also means that they can conceivably be mechanized—while attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of converting this imaginary into a mathematical and technical real. Viewed through Elson’s insistence that the abstract concept (rather than the material phenomenon or essence) of value determines the material orga - nization of labor under capitalism, Hunt’s manuscript represents an early elaboration of an important conceptual shift. It suggests that the conceptu - alization of what can and what cannot produce value is determined by the fantasies arising at the intersection of specific structural demands (other -
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 wise known as crises—such as that of the tendential fall of surplus value sketched above) and new conceptual frameworks for the meeting of these demands. Hunt’s categories of G-energy and G-work, the terms he uses to demarcate a physics of social production, exemplify the way expanded con - cepts of value are naturalized as ontological (rather than epistemological) concerns. Through the language of servomechanisms, transmission capac - ities, and electronic computation, the conceptual operations crystallized in the notion of G posit all purposeful activity as a kind of energy that is onto - logically comparable (but not exactly equivalent) to the “natural” forces with which physics is concerned. By extension, value-producing work is severed from both the energetic basis of human activity and notions of value-production as a set of concrete procedures determined by specific historical conditions. Crucially, Hunt’s separation of G-energy from A-energy also foregrounds (by fully explicating) the limits posed by the ongoing existence and exhaustible materiality of laborers. By synthesizing the general science of cybernetics with the abstractions of value-theoretical political economy, Hunt offers a glimpse of the imaginary that sustains capital—an imaginary that is derived from the specific abstraction of labor power as a natural force distinct from social relations such as the spatial and temporal boundaries of the factory and the clock and the inescapable necessity of reproduction. Under the conceptual frame of G-energy, labor power is configured as a signal that is always already in the form of a discrete, symbolic register, so that the use of discretizing apparatuses such as clocks or money appears to be an unnecessary contrivance resulting from imperfect knowledge. This “discovery” of labor power as digital signal promises to provide a scientific ground for the fantasies of expanded accumulation that Hardt and Negri and others attach to the post-Fordist transition. 42 But it also reveals these fantasies to be less a break from than an extension of the underlying dynam - ics of capitalist accumulation in general. The dialectical rendering of G-energy and A-energy synthesizes (or reveals the continuity between) two other dialectical renderings: that of communication and its material sub - strates, and that of abstract and concrete labor. In each case the latter term is both instrumentalized and disavowed in order that the former be univer - salized. Notions of value and digitality as universal phenomena that exist apart from historically specific forms of determination both exemplify and determine the fantasy of labor as an essence that can be separated from the supposedly nonproductive activities of reproduction—principally those racialized and gendered forms of biological reproduction and care that take place in diverse locations and contexts, and can be both waged and unwaged, but are always devalued, occluded, and abjected. 43 Silvia Federici
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 understands this when she writes of a religious and philosophical “vivi - section of the human body” that took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, separating “bodily powers” into work powers and everything else. 44 Might Hunt’s intervention register the emergence of a new set of philosophical and religious principles—those of cybernetic ontology and self-regulating systems—that would be able to overcome (but really to gran - ulate and intensify) that vivisection? In the end, the most significant and the most baleful connection between Hunt, digital capitalists from Google to Uber, and theorists of immaterial labor is that, in universalizing value as a kind of animating essence, they all occlude the questions of where, in the concrete social reality on which capital mines, the value-producing thing— the bedator, the worker—comes from, and how its capacity to go on trans - mitting value to “material systems” must be maintained. In Federici’s terms, which echo Hunt’s equation of the bedator with G-energy and the prime mover with A-energy, “the Power by which the body is produced appears as a self-subsistent, metaphysical entity, ubiquitous, disconnected from social and economic relations, and as mysterious in its permutations as a godly Prime Mover.” 45
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 Notes 1. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 294–95. 2. Mezzadra and Neilson, 295. On labor as property, see Marx’s observation that “labour- power can appear on the market as a commodity only if, and in so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale or sells it as a commodity. In order that its possessor may sell it as a commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must be the free proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his person . . . the possessor of labour-power, instead of being able to sell commodities in which his labour has been objectified, must rather be compelled to offer for sale as a commodity that very labour-power which exists only in his living body.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 271–72. Also see chapter 26 (“the Secret of Primitive Accumulation”) for an account of the violent preconditions for the formatting of labor power as property. 3. Mezzadra and Neilson, 295 . Mezzadra and Neilson quote from Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1962), 3. 4. The “Manichean sciences” is Peter Galison’s collective term for the disciplines of operations research, cybernetics, and game theory. See Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 232. 5. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). The continuities and differences between the period Rabinbach examines and the later moment addressed here have been thoroughly mapped in relation to economic theory by Philip Mirowski across his books More Heat than Light and Machine Dreams and a series of articles. Mirowski narrates this body of work in the following terms: “The first installment of this history was published in 1989 as More Heat than Light , and was concerned with the period from classical political economy up to the 1930s, stressing the role of physics in the ‘marginalist revolution.’ The second install - ment would comprise a series of papers coauthored over the 1990s with Wade Hands and Roy Weintraub, which traced the story of the rise to dominance of neoclassical price theory in America from early in the century up through the 1960s. The present volume takes up the story from the rise of the cyborg sciences, primarily though not exclusively during World War II in America, and then traces their footprint upon some important postwar develop - ments in economics, such as highbrow neoclassical price theory, game theory, rational expectations theory, theories of institutions and mechanism design, the nascent program of ‘bounded rationality,’ computational economics, ‘artificial economies,’ ‘autonomous agents,’ and experimental economics.” Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8–9. 6. Kevin Floyd, “Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labor and Abstract Life,” Historical Materialism 24, no. 2 (2016): 65–66. On surplus populations see Marx, Capital, 1:785; Karl Marx, Grundrisse , trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993), 399–400; and Aaron Benanav, “Misery and Debt,” Endnotes 2 (2010), 21–51. 7. Floyd, 65. 8. R.S. Hunt to J.B.S Haldane, 30 January 1951, in MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC.0022, box 9, folder 133.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 9. Hunt had spent most of his working life as an engineer, first in the telephone industry and then with “all types of servo- and electronic equipment save for the major computers.” “After the war,” he writes, “I hoped to regularize my position by going to the Massachusetts Inst. of Technology to acquire some sort of degree or diploma. I had not foreseen currency restrictions and certain other obstacles.” “I read four languages,” he goes on to state, “and am prepared to mind babies and fold laundry.” Hunt to Haldane, 30 January 1951. 10. Although Hunt states the manuscript was completed in 1947 and that he had “not tried to revise it,” the bibliography includes texts published in 1948, suggesting either that the bibliography was completed later or that Hunt is mistaken about the date of completion. 11. G.B. Baldwin to R.S. Hunt, 13 February 1952, in MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC.0022, box 10, folder 146. 12. By 1953 Wiener observed that cybernetics had become “so much of a field for certain individuals’ hopes to use it to their own advantage that I am very much put to it how to arrange my own work.” Norbert Wiener to W. Ross Ashby, 8 April 1953, in W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, http://www.rossashby.info/letters/wiener.html. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 297–98. 14. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948; New York: John Wiley and Sons; Paris: Herman et Cie, 1949), 37–38. 15. Diane Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” in Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism , ed. Diane Elson (London: Verso, 2015). 16. Hunt to Haldane, 30 January 1951. Hunt also heralds his technical and mnemonic achievements, stating he “could read morse at 30 words a minute when I was 12 years old, and made a 4-valve radio when I was 14.” 17. Hunt to Haldane, 30 January 1951. 18. Gregory Bateson, “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 139. Bateson first presented this paper at the 1967 Wenner-Gren Conference on Primitive Art in Burg Wartenstein, Austria. On the influence of cybernetics on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work, see Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2011), 96–126. 19. And, as Marx suggests, this fantasy is connected to the shrinking of wages in service of the extraction of absolute surplus value. “[I]n the course of this activity, i.e. labour,” Marx writes, “a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve, brain, etc. is expended, and these things have to be replaced. Since more is expended, more must be received. If the owner of labour- power works today, tomorrow he must again be able to repeat the same process in the same conditions as regards health and strength. His means of subsistence must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a working individual.” Marx, Capital, 1:274–75. 20. See Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, History and Obstinacy , trans. Richard Langston et al. (New York: Zone Books, 2014); and Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus . 21. See Friedrich Kittler, “Flechsig/Schreber/Freud: An Informations [ sic ] Network of 1910,” Qui Parle 2, no. 1 (1988); and Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Callens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990),
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 293–304, 369; and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 31–35, 299–302. 22. “It is only bourgeois obtuseness that encourages the view that capitalist production is production in its absolute form, the unique form of production as prescribed by nature. And only the bourgeoisie can confuse the questions: what is productive labour? and what is a productive worker from the standpoint of capitalism? with the question: what is produc - tive labour as such?” Karl Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” in Capital, 1:1039. 23. R.S. Hunt, “Two Kinds of Work” (unpub., ca. 1947), 1–2, in MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC.0022, box 34B, folder 1000. Page numbers are given in parentheses for all subsequent references. Hunt does not discuss the significance of his selection of A and G to define these types of work. 24. Rabinbach, 4. 25. Compare this to Wiener’s insistence that information has a specific meaning not reducible to energy or matter, but that it is nonetheless reliant on energetic input and pro - ductive of energetic waste. Although “information is information, not matter or energy,” Wiener writes, “a large computing machine, whether in the form of mechanical or electrical apparatus or in the form of the brain itself, uses up a considerable amount of power, all of which is wasted and dissipated in heat.” Wiener, Cybernetics , 155. 26. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe , trans. Ronald Melville (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), lines 535–41. 27. Karl Marx, Grundrisse , trans. Ernst Wangermann, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works , vol. 28 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 286. 28. Rabinbach, 3–4. 29. As Iyko Day describes it, “Concrete labor represents the racial, gendered, and quali - tatively distinct form of actual labor that is rendered abstract as a value expression. Where I locate the principal violence of capitalism is in the very way that it abstracts (or renders homogenous as commensurable units of labor) highly differentiated gendered and racial - ized labor in order to create value .” Iyko Day, Alien Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 9. 30. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics , ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 134. 31. Glossary entry for “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy , 262. 32. Paolo Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” trans. Michael Turits, in Radical Thought in Italy , 19. 33. Glossary entry for “General Intellect,” in Radical Thought in Italy , 242; Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment,” 19; and Michael Hardt, “Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy , 4. 34. “General Intellect,” 242. 35. Glossary entry for “Mass Intellectuality,” in Radical Thought in Italy , 262. 36. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 386. 37. “The real subsumption of labour under capital is developed in all the forms which produce relative, as opposed to absolute, surplus value.” Karl Marx, Economic Manuscript of
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00223 by guest on 01 October 2021 1861–63 , trans. Ben Fowkes, in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 34 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1994), 105–6. 38. Timothy Brennan, “The Empire’s New Clothes,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2003): 348. 39. Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” 123. 40. Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” 123. 41. Elson, “The Value Theory of Labour,” 174. 42. “[I]t is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate the time of production, or work time from leisure time.” Hardt and Negri, 402–3. 43. See Kalindi Vora, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 44. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 140. 45. Federici, 15.
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