Re: <nettime> The Whole Earth Conference + Turner interview

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 07/26/2013 05:59 AM, Karen O'Rourke wrote:

> Seen from France today, Turner's thesis makes a lot of sense. Many
> people here did not buy into the counterculture, prefering to stick to
> good old-fashioned agonistic politics.

Karen, I lived a long time in France and engaged with collective 
struggles there, so I appreciate where you're coming from. I also grew 
up in the Bay Area in the Seventies with the Whole Earth Catalogue in 
the house - in other words, thoroughly imbued with the Californian 
Ideology - and I think Fred Turner's book is great, it's full of 
fabulously precise and curious history about real people who are more 
commonly and less generously treated as myths. Yet in certain respects, 
his thesis is a bit too pat. As I recall it, his treatment of early 
counterculture/ cyberculture is reminiscent of something like Boltanski 
and Chiapello's treatment of Deleuze & Guattari, or indeed, of "artistic 
critique" in general, in their book "The New Spirit of Capitalism." In 
both of these otherwise impressive works, the authors write as though 
the worm of Neoliberalism were already in the Sixties' fruit, and what 
we mistook for a sweet taste was actually a time-delay poison. Adam 
Curtis adopts a similar strategy in films like "The Trap"; and the list 
could go on. I think life is more complicated and more ambivalent than that.

Certainly in the US, the good old agonistic politics of the 
labor/capital confrontation was dead in the water after WWII, and in 
France - as Boltanski and Chiapello show so well - that kind of politics 
was institutionally paralyzed from the 1968 Grenelle accords onward, 
which used historic salary hikes to split union labor away from the 
student movement and literally buy its acquiescence to the subsequent 
processes of automation, flexibilization and outsourcing that are common 
to all the fully industrialized countries. The structuralization of 
right-left conflict, its neutralization within a far larger and more 
powerful system of bureaucratic management, was a reality of the postwar 
period whose consequences we can still observe around us. The good old 
days were not necessarily better. In fact, they were what so many people 
rebelled against.

Today it is often said that the quest for liberation, expressed in many 
different ways from third-worldism to psychedelia via second-order 
cybernetics, finally amounted to nothing more than the freedom theorized 
by Milton Friedman, the freedom to choose a product on a market, or 
maybe an identity-position in a surveilled and overcoded network. This 
is to argue at once too little, and too much. Too much, because such a 
judgment renders the challenges that the cyberticians and 
counter-culturalists faced entirely unrecognizable: one can no longer 
see, for instance, how figures such as Bateson and Von Foerster, who had 
clearly been complicit with the power structure of the Second World War, 
strove in the Sixties and especially in the Seventies to render 
cybernetics, not just self-reflexive and meta-theoretical, but above 
all, strictly useless for the military, pointing either towards an 
ecological care for the planet (in Bateson's case) or to an ethics of 
respect for the possibilities of the other (in Von Foerster's). One 
could say even more compelling things about the Chilean cyberneticists, 
Maturana and Varela, whose notion of autopoiesis has everything to do 
with the effort to create an autonomous socialist project in a 
hemisphere dominated and overdetermined by the political-economic 
coercion of the United States. Deleuze and Guattari's readings of the 
potentials for subversion lying within the very mainstream of what they 
call "royal science" are a reflection on exactly these threads of 
cybernetic history. The so-called "hippie" version of cybernetics 
springs from an intense epistemologial struggle over the uses of 
high-level technical, scientific and philosophical knowledge; and even 
if none of the cyberneticists was really a hippie, still it's to the 
counter-culture's credit that its participants recognized this struggle 
and tried to embody it in a more popular, daily-life sort of way.

But time passes, all that is far far behind us now, and what has 
actually been wrought by computerized capitalism is far more intense, 
detailed and terrifying than any simple caricature of Friedmanite 
neoliberalism - or Deleuzo-Guattarian nomadism, for that matter - can 
possibly convey. Tarring cybernetics with such brushes is too little. 
Sixties' liberationism was everywhere based on an ontology of authentic 
experience and an openness to, or at least a yearning for, the encounter 
with the wholly other. That was the desire behind the fascination with 
"open systems." In the present, twenty years after the invention of the 
World Wide Web, identity has been fractalized into the rival and 
strictly parcellary functions of hundreds of different companies and 
organizations, all using coded messages and screenic techniques to vie 
for some part of your attention, your energy, your money, your activity, 
your drives, your dreams - whose basic characterstics they have already 
captured by surveillance. The very idea of an "identity position" 
becomes quaint in this context. Post-modern schizophrenia and 
"self-shattering" is no longer the work of a "patient, immense and 
methodical derangement of all the senses" a la Rimbaud. Instead it is 
the calculated result of corporate strategies.

For Bateson, ecology was about "organism plus environment," by which he 
meant the natural environment in all its multifarious interdependencies. 
For the hardliners of military cybernetics - true AI believers like 
Herbert Simon - it sufficed to create the proper environment in order to 
generate the organism of your choice, a theorem which is daily proven by 
human behavior in shopping malls, airports, social networks, war games 
and so-called creative cities. To be sure, for a real determinist there 
is ultimately no separation between the organism and the environment, so 
the former might have to be tweaked a little as well; and why not, if 
you have the power to do it? As Simon wrote in a telltale phrase, "If 
the inner system is properly designed, it will be adapted to the outer 
environment, so that its behavior will be determined in large part by 
the latter, exactly as in the case of 'economic man.'" In that one 
little sentence, the cat comes out of the bag: we see that the great 
neoclassical subject of truck and bartering homo economicus has never 
been 'natural' in the Scottish-enlightenment sense of Adam Smith, but 
instead, always a cultural construct fitting into purpose-built markets. 
Twenty years on into massive immersion in capitalist networks, how far 
have we been redesigned? How well do we now adapt to the outer 
environments that are offered us, whether on the web, in urban spaces, 
in corporations, in universities, at borders or on battlefields?

In my own case, the lucid answer would be: far more than I would like. 
That said, I still agree with what Ted Byfield wrote not long ago on 
this list: "I don't think it's safe, wise, or shrewd to rely on 
nostalgic assumptions about the boundaries of the self." The gender and 
culture-bending struggles for liberation, to which Ted alludes in that 
phrase, have left behind many valuable possibilities in the networks. 
Let's use 'em for a new kinds of political resistance and political 
proposals in the present and for the future.

best, Brian


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