As part of my recent exposure to continental philosophy, I just read Hegel for the first time ever. I am going to try to sketch through a vague idea that I had reading part of the Phenomenology of Spirit (which, by the way, I loved, because and not in spite of its crabbed incomprehensibility). I’ve read a lot of Marx in my life, which definitely made it easier to grasp Hegel’s method and structure — the Phenomenology of Spirit is an incredible, four-dimensional work, the three-dimensional, spiraling aspect of the dialectical method, plus time. In Marx, and in Hegel, the phenomena under investigation are processes, always in motion, developing in accordance with their essential internal tensions and contradictions. There’s really no wonder biologists love both Hegel and Marx so much; there’s something very organic about investigating the “totality” of a given system this way.
One “moment” in Hegel’s dialectical investigation involves the development of self-consciousness, which he posits not as a property that people have or don’t have but as a process of mutual recognition by and of others. These helices of Aufhebung are all over Marx as well, most strikingly (to me anyway) in the concept of value. In Capital, value is a property of commodities that is realized when privately-undertaken production is socially validated through the process of exchange.* (The dialectic never stops, of course; value the resolves the internal tension between the use-value and exchange-value of commodities but further internalizes a contradiction between concrete and absolute labor, which is further resolved… and so on.)
This makes very clear, on a deep level, von Hayek’s insight that markets are mechanisms of transmitting information. Exchange is how you “know” the value of whatever you’re selling. I have mentioned it in this newsletter before, but von Hayek is actually responsible for the idea of the first neural net, which was supposed to approximate the action of a market, not of a human brain. (The brain is the metaphor for the computer, not vice versa.) Which brings us, of course, to cybernetics yet again. We, as a species, keep inventing (or realizing, or manifesting, as with capitalism itself) variations on the cybernetic idea — distributed nodes, self-organization, feedback, control. There is something super seductive about self-organization and homeostasis as a metaphor across distinct disciplines and domains of human social organization. Consider again Hegel and biologists — entelechy, self-organization, dialectical movement and relation of parts to wholes, all much more intuitive and appealing than linear, mechanistic, reductionist explanations.
People are liking this lately, these metaphors referencing the self-organization of nature, and I don’t think that this is without meaningful content. I was going to write a whole big thing about why Emergent Strategy (a self-help book incorporating many of these cybernetic metaphors from nature) is WRONG. But I actually think it’s much more fruitful to explore why these metaphors are so widely appealing. Why do we keep inventing and iterating on this idea, again and again? What if we understood capitalism as the deeply weird psychic thing that it is — yet another manifestation of this cybernetic impulse, arising (emerging) from human social relations at a higher level or organization (planetary, trans-national), this almost God-like (or Geist-like) thing we all participate in making without wanting to. Marx’s mystical language doesn’t seem so silly from this vantage.
I would write about THAT, except somebody already did! A friend of mine recommended a book,Cybernetic Psychology and Mental Health, by Tim Beck, which totally preempted my movement/my idea here! Rather than arguing for a particular attitude towards or interpretation of cybernetic metaphors, Beck instead interrogates their cultural and social meaning particularly within the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, with emphases or cybernetic metaphors and principles as instruments of social organization and social control. I haven’t read much of the book, but will try to report back when I have; it’s very interesting and very good so far!
It’s not just social control, either. In the arena of “wellness,” these cybernetic metaphors are about personal control as well. Emergent Strategy shades into a menstrual-pink hell world of infographics and MLM trainings focused on teaching us, the people of the world, “nervous system regulation” so that we can “show up” as our “authentic selves” to… I dunno, work? Our terrible relationships? A lot of people in this world hold personal political views that are pretty radically left if not explicitly revolutionary in rhetoric; I wonder if anybody involved in this butterfly hug, vagus nerve bullshit has ever considered just how, well, neoliberal it all is. Regulate yourself so the world can self-regulate and self-organize, so the self-directed processes of valorization and accumulation can proceed as frictionlessly as possible. These folks pay lip service to how this stuff is “individual and global,” but it’s not really. It’s a lie in Emergent Strategy that “macro is micro” (or the world is “fractal”). Hegel again — the negation of the negation isn’t an identity, it’s a whole ‘nother thing.
Which… I am not going to stick the landing here, but to bring Hegel back in a weird way that I’m not sure works, what Beck is kind of showing in his book is that Cartesian science and “emergent” cybernetic self-organization are kind of the same… they reflect the internal tension of a higher-order process and their resolution is likely to be found at that higher level. Right?
*Borrowing heavily from Tony Smith’s excellent description here.