====== Cybernetics ======

For Vilém Flusser, the word “cybernetic” has two
meanings: as a technical term, it characterizes
the technological condition of the present; at the
same time, it is a concept of an absolute presence
in the sense of the loss of historical categories of
thought, such as politics, ideology, critique, and
ethics. Cybernetics stands, in the first meaning,
for the “automatic guidance and control of complex
systems to take advantage of improbable
accidents and to generate information” (//Into the
Universe of Technical Images//, 2011, p. 125); in the
second, for the epistemological signature of a
present in which all historicity shrinks to a new,
ahistorical form of the present. \\ 

In various theoretical contexts (image, writing,
work, etc.), cybernetics refers to the third and
final phase of a historical macrostructure. For
example, terminological trinities, such as ontological
– ethical – technical, politics – science
– method, engaged – researching – functioning,
to what end? – why? – how?, commandments –
laws – programs, respectively refer to the periods
classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, the
modern era, and the brief twentieth century.
For Flusser, cybernetics occurred toward the end
of the industrial revolution with the synchronization
and coupling of machines and people
into cybernetic “apparatuses.” In the apparatus,
functioning becomes absolute: it becomes an
end in itself of value-free thinking and action
and hence a “totalitarianism of the apparatus”
(//Nachgeschichte//, 1993, p. 192; translated from the
German)*. Because “how” questions become
dominant as a result, cybernetics reduces every
epistemological interest to methodology. Ontological
or metaphysical questions thus become
questions that are wrongly posed existentially,
because they presume transcendence over the
cybernetic dominance of functioning and systemic
self-control. From the eradication of the
difference of “to be” and “supposed to” associated
with this, the “post-historical” situation of
cybernetics results. \\ 

Flusser was reserved with respect to cybernetic
hopes. For him, the disappearance of historical,
political, and ethical categories also meant the
disappearance of freedom and hence of human
dignity. The cybernetic promise that human beings
would come into their own as those who set
the goals for the cybernetic ensembles, would
be freed up for creative activity, and would establish
an economy of surplus rather than one of
scarcity is deceptive because it is itself still conceived
in historical categories. Instead, Flusser
designs various “post-historical” social types,
such as the functionary, the desperate, the technocrat,
the terrorist, and the environmentalist.
Attempts to resist the dominance of functioning
are systematically discouraged, because they
are integrated cybernetically as new functions
of the apparatus. \\ 

Although Flusser hardly cites any references
at all, it is possible to locate his reflections on
cybernetics within the history of this discourse.
The discussion of //Sachzwang// [objective constraint],
a term coined by Helmut Schelsky,
points to a disillusionment about the pathos of
historical change after 1945. Cybernetics as an
agent of objectivity was supposed to reduce political
decisions and individual actions in favor of
fulfilling functions, and was criticized for “lacking
alternatives” already in the 1960s. Reinhart
Koselleck identied the modern interweaving of
the “space of experience” (past) and the “horizon
of expectation” (future) as a feature of historical
epochs, which Flusser collapses into the
functionality of a present without a horizon. Norbert
Wiener, Max Bense, and others combined
the emergence of cybernetic “slaves” with the
hope for a new economy and a new humanism – a notion that Flusser rejects as “optimism of faith
in progress” based on erroneous basic concepts.
Finally, Niklas Luhmann proposed that stability
should no longer be presumed to be the core
of the essence of beings, but rather placed on
the agenda for nonontological research as a resolvable
problem and embedded in the systemic
categories of purpose. In combination with the
simultaneously “built” systems theories in computer
simulation, this would appear to be the
source of Flusser’s diagnosis of a hegemony of
method. \\ 

* Editorial note: This passage does not exist in the English edition.

//Original article by Claus Pias  in [[flusseriana|Flusseriana]]

{{tag>Flusseriana_glossary Flusser_glossary}}