Cybernetics, This Thesis Attempts to Derive Anew the Concepts of Internet and Control
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the society of control Daniel NEMENYI April 2019 Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy ii Typeset with LATEX using the Cardo font in GNU Emacs. Distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence. It isn’t June yet, but computer networks are bustin’ out all over. – J. C. R Licklider, 10 May 1967 Abstract By means of a philosophical reading of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, this thesis attempts to derive anew the concepts of internet and control. It develops upon Wiener’s position that every age is reflected by a certain machine, arguing that the internet is that which does so today. Grounded by a critical historiography of the relation between the Cold War and the internet’s invention in 1969 by the ‘network’ of J. C. R. Licklider, it argues for an agonistic concept of internet derived from Wiener’s disjunctive reading of figures including Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon, Benoît Mandelbrot, John von Neumann and above all, his Neo-Kantian inflected reading of Leibniz. It offers a counter-theory of the society of control to those grounded by Spinoza’s ethology, notably that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and attempts to establish a single conceptual vocabulary for depicting the possible modes of conflict through which an internet is determined. v Acknowledgements My first acknowledgement must go to my teachers at the Centre for Researchin Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) – Professors Éric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Howard Caygill, Peter Hallward, Catherine Malabou, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford – each of whose classes, conversations and companionships have been far in excess of conventional pedagogical generosity. Whiling eight whole years ( ! ) among such a crowd has been fundamentally transformational for me; my gratitude to you each will carry. This thesis implicitly presents a certain personal formation with respect to the Centre such that it could not, clichés aside, have been written elsewhere: de facto, it is ‘of ’ CRMEP inasmuch as its ultimate interlocutors are ‘of ’ a certain other research laboratory with a four letter acronym. Howard, my ‘principle supervisor’, teacher and friend, you ‘left the door open’ for me in more ways than I can thank. Alongside countless iridescent insights you gifted me the question at the masthead of this thesis, you always encouraged me to trust and follow my intuition, to explore uncharted waters with a cunning I would not have otherwise owned. This project was funded by the fortuitously-named Techne doctoral scholarship scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who I wish to thank, also for supporting my visit (a pilgrimage of sorts) to MIT, where this project began to come together. There I was greatly assisted by the diligent librarians of the MIT Archive and I met the generous Slava Gerovitch, a right of passage for any researcher of cybernetics; to them I extend my sincere gratitude. For several years I have had the pleasure of editing and coding for the journal Radical Philosophy, an affiliation through which I learned innumerable skills thatfed into the production of this thesis. In the editorial collective I learned the meaning of intellectual activism and camaraderie proper. Together with RP’s editors from CRMEP past and present – Stella, Peter and Peter – I would like to also especially thank David Cunningham and Matthew Charles for their encouragement and unremitting conviction that I would indeed complete this thesis, despite the untoward coincidence of my writing-up year with the relaunch of the journal. For the care, dedication, for no small degree of patience, for the honour of their kinship, emphatically thank you to: Franziska Aigener, Irma Allen, Karin Bage, vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Felicity Suvarna Bowden, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Robert Buckman, Mercedes Bunz, Nick Cassin, Matthew Charles, Krystyna Colburn, Annabel Cohen, Florence Crawley, Joshua Dart, Eve Dickson, Alex Emanuel, Joseph Finlay, Alex Fletcher, Kristján Guðjónsson, Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir, Bjarki Halldórsson, Katie Hastings, Lara Howe, Tal Janner-Klausner, Mijael Jiménez, Charlotte Jobrack, Christopher Jones-Thompson, Niall Kennedy, Helga Kjartansdóttir, Masa Kosugi, Marie Louise Krogh, Janina Anja Lange, Mallika Leuzinger, Jessie Levene, Noa Levin, Edwin Mak, Lara, Susan and John Mancinelli, Jess McArdle, Navid Nouri, Albert Olafare, Simon Pickstone, Hemani Patel, Giorgio Salmistraro, Isy Schulz, Jenny Simm, Francesca Ter-Berg, Georgios Tsagdis, Sigríður Tulinius, Snorri Páll Jónsson Úlfhildarson, Willow Verkerk, Daniel Weizmann, Kim West, Alicia White and Sonia Zafer-Smith. Thanks to the staff at Black Bird Bakery Peckham Rye and Dillons onGower Street for allowing me to practically take up residency in your cafés during my writing-up period and for cheering me to the finishing line. Especially Laura, Gabriel, Prima, Theia, Sarah, Ella, Lettice, Vicky, Laurence, Sean and Christine. And special thank yous must go to: Lucie Kim-Chi Mercier for the conversation that got this project underway and the many which followed. Isabell Dahms for the numerous times you stopped me giving up. Alex Sassmannshausen for introducing me to Free Software, for supporting my development in coding and for all those creative discussions. Daniel Kaldor for actually handing me a computer at the eleventh hour which no longer hissed at the fingers that fed it. Iain Campbell and Matthew Phull for reading over drafts of this thesis and providing generous feedback. And mum, dad, Adam, Georgina, Nigel, Philippe and of course you too Billy for all being there with your affection. Finally, Caz, for proofreading, for being my rock, for breaking through those overcast days with your presence and your joy. For my parents, Sally and Benyamin Nemenyi xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Contents Abstract v Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1 ‘Who invented the internet?’ 9 1.1 J. C. R. Licklider’s artificial-homeostasis ................ 11 1.2 Paul Baran’s Survivability ........................ 15 2 Clocks 23 2.1 Big gods, little gods: Hobbes contra Leibniz .............. 29 2.2 A monster, the Masons .......................... 36 2.3 A prodigious robot ............................ 38 2.4 Wiener’s theodicy ............................ 42 2.5 The Wiener Test ............................. 44 3 Engines 47 3.1 Homeo-stasis/Homo-statics ....................... 51 3.2 Cannon’s social homeostasis ....................... 56 3.3 Canguilhem’s critique of social homeostasis .............. 59 3.4 Second order critiques of homeostasis .................. 62 3.5 Wiener’s critique of social homeostasis ................. 73 4 (Chess) 81 4.1 Structuralist chess ............................. 81 4.2 Cybernetic game theory ......................... 86 4.3 Leibniz’s jest ............................... 91 5 Internets 97 5.1 Back to the Neo-Kantians ........................ 97 5.2 Wiener’s determinations ......................... 105 5.3 Breaking the pyramid .......................... 118 xiii xiv CONTENTS 5.4 Heterarchy ................................ 122 5.5 The rules of the game .......................... 124 5.6 Cyberwar and Netwar .......................... 130 5.7 Leibniz contra Spinoza .......................... 140 5.8 Caught in the web ............................ 145 Conclusion 149 Introduction ‘I wish to turn my time over to William Burroughs, who is here today and I can never waste a minute talking while we could be hearing Burroughs speak!’1 So stepped aside from his joint-panel Michel Foucault, star guest of Semiotext(e)’s Schizo-Culture colloquium at Columbia University in 1975, whose Surveiller et punir was already being rushed through translation. The audience included not only Jean-François Lyotard, Kathy Acker, R. D. Laing, John Rajchman, Arthur Danto and John Cage, but a specialist on Proust and Sacher-Masoch named Gilles Deleuze who would invoke the concept of a ‘rhizome’,2 and Félix Guattari, an ‘unknown quantity’ to Americans but one whose encounter with the event’s organiser Sylvère Lotringer proved the ‘trigger’ for its occasion – another Guattari effect.3 I begin my thesis in the hall of this milestone event in the Anglophone reception – or rather production – of ‘Post-’68 French Philosophy’, and specifically at the moment when Foucault gave priority to an American contemporary’s paper which, Deleuze says, construed his concept of a disciplinary dispositif to be of the past: succeeded by a new apparatus, a ‘new monster’ named ‘control’.4 Reading his paper ‘The Limits of Control’, Burroughs announces: ‘a cultural revolution of unprecedented dimensions has taken place in America during the last thirty years, and since America is now the model for the rest of the Western world, this revolution is worldwide.’5 Three decades of Cold War. Three decades of American Empire. Three decades of cybernetics. The guiding problematic of America’s ‘revolution’, Burroughs says, has been how to exercise control by such covert means as to assure the continuity of power and its interests. ‘Look at America. Who actually controls this country? It is very difficult to say. Certainly the very wealthy are one of the most powerful control groups. … However, it would not be to their advantage to set up or attempt to set up an overtly 1. Sylvère Lotringer and David Morris, eds., Schizo-Culture: The Event, 1975 (Los Angeles: Semio- text(e),