Information Control - The Climax of Fascism

Inigo Wilkins 26/10/04


Information Control
The Climax of Fascism

I am writing in Times New Roman on my computer about the historical developments that brought about the birth of cybernetics. Since this history must have a beginning it will start with the primitive. Primitive societies are characterized by orality. For McLuhan the invention of the phonetic alphabet was one of the most significant turning points in history, though in another sense it marks the inception of history. The interchangeability and uniformity of its parts arranged in a linear succession correspond exactly to the militarized hierarchal organisation of the Romans (1)(UMp90-). For McLuhan the visual is a cool medium, detached, extensive, as opposed to the inclusive, intensive world of orality.

“Among primitive groups the size of the community. . .is restricted by the difficulty of transmitting language. . .the great empire of Rome was possible only because of progress in roadbuilding. . .with the airplane and radio the word of the rulers extends to the ends of the earth”(2)(HuHbp.92)

The twentieth century is characterized by a revolution in communications effected through developments in the use of electricity. Virilio explains that as technologies increased speed (transport and communication), space decreased accordingly(3)(W+Cp.46). One of the first technologies to make its impact felt was the radio, a medium which McLuhan sees as ‘hot’, and thereby connective, tribal, and non-participative. Electricity amplifies the existing technologies. It cannot be seen as merely coincidental that, at this juncture in history, the outbreak of total war occurred in Europe (and soon spread to a global level). In fact Hitler himself made the observation that the conquering of Germany would not have been possible without the loudspeaker(4)(Attali Noise.p.87)

The world wars were different from previous wars in the crucial respect that the entire nation’s resources (including people) were directed towards the effort of engagement(5)(ATP p.421). These were also the first truly industrial wars where techniques of mass production were appropriated (eg the Skoda factory in Poland which was used for the manufacture of tanks) and innovated. Indeed the invention of the assembly line, and the consequent division of labour, has its roots in armaments factories. Production multiplied itself and the existing relations. Deleuze and Guattari note the ‘irresistible character of the capitalist tendency to develop total war’(6)(ATPp421)(7)


This was not just material production however, for along with new hardware came new software (ideology/methodology/programming). Structuralism was the dominant social code of this era, which saw language as a set of internal relations of negativity (signifiers) that corresponded to objects in the world (signified), including abstract objects. The structuralist approach is characterised by binary relations of distinction (man/woman, life/death) which were thought to accurately pinpoint the ontological status of an object. Nothing escapes this net of relations, rooted in literacy and the dominance of the visual, and based on lack and stasis.(8) .

‘“il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, there is nothing outside the text.’(9)(p.14 Lodge, D.)

This was the heyday of scientific and technological progress, there was widespread beleif that as the grid of differentiation became finer and finer, materiality could not resist the epistemological drive to reveal the essential ontology of all things. Despite this general agreement, there were divergent opinions, such as the opposition between essentialism and constructivism and between vitalism and machinism that we will discuss later.

Never before had the nation states been so internally unified. Not without a massive effort on the part of the government to rally support from the masses through the dissemination of propaganda. The distinction between soldier and civilian was broken down. Everyone was enlisted. This was made possible by the acceleration of the technologies of print and distribution, and by the massive social upheaval the invention of radio engendered. Reproduction (both of humans and of print) multiplied itself(10) (EoRp.17). More importantly instant communication (telegraph and radio) across long distances was suddenly possible.

Hitherto commands had been delivered directly or by courier (a hierarchal chain of command from the top down in a pyramidal structure), with the introduction of telegraph and radio(11)(Susan J. Douglas. “The Navy Adopts the Radio, 1899-1919” in M.R. Smith, Military Enterprise, p.28) however, messages were broadcast on the open airwaves (flattening of the pyramid) and consequently a whole industry of codification and code-breaking emerged. The acceleration of communication entailed the amplification of secrecy(12) (HUp112). This need was to be directly responsible for the first true computers (Turin and Von Neumann) and the birth of a new science - cybernetics. It was Wiener who coined this term following the wartime work he did in improving armaments systems, largely ballistics or guided missiles (the analogy of sender and receiver should be obvious here)(13)(WitAoIMp.40-43). It’s founding principle is the introduction of feedback into the homeostatic system.

‘feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. . .if. . .the information which proceeds backwards from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may be called learning.’(14)

Homeostasis is the principle that organic bodies are in a state of balance, and that their interreaction with the inorganic causes imbalance or tension (charge) which must be released (discharge) to regain equilibrium. This was primarily a theory of physics however Freud appropriated it as central to his psychology. In Freud’s understanding the inorganic corresponds to death and chaos. He argues that, contiguous with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all closed systems tend towards entropy (chaos)(15), all bodies eventually become imbalanced and thus return to the inorganic (ie die through internal causes) Freud called this the pleasure principle.

‘In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and destroy the meaningful’(16)(HUp17)

This was offset against the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. For Freud this was the postponement of unpleasure through controlled discharge (only in a womb) leading to reproduction (filiative pleasure). He called this the reality principle. This is a male approach to sexuality, based on climactic fullfillment, which is now widely considered homoerotic and mysogynistic. Women were problematic for Freud since they did not succumb to the ascendency of these principles but constantly evaded them. They represent the uncontrolled flow (hysteria), the leaking of fluids, which he identifies with the inorganic, and beleives must be warded off.

It is thus a fundamental aspect of consciousness to ward off the onset of entropy through controlled discharge. In Freudian terms this is the function of the ego (the unconcious being entropic), in terms of the (mechanical/electronic) system it is the progammed control mechanisms. In politics it is the state.

‘Overcoding is the essence of the State. . .:the dread of flows of desire that would resist coding, but also the establishment of a new inscription that overcodes, and that makes desire into the property of the sovereign, even though he be the death instinct himself’(17)(AOp.199)

Never before had the state monopolization of violence been so efficient, so industrial. With the emergence of fascist and communist dictatorships state control had never been so total. Censorship and propaganda (control of information flow) were a part of everyday life. The new technology of film, it’s ability to create simulacra (18)(WIAMp188), and the immersive audio-visual space it offered was enthusiastically put to use. The ideal of fascism was racial purity (selective control of ‘fluid’ resources), superiority of the dominant (conservation of patriarchal lineage and hierarchy), discipline and self-control (homeostasis).

Shannon and Weaver’s work on information theory demonstrated a correlation between neural functioning and information exchange which transcended the contemporary dualism of materiality and information. Culture and information can then not be seen as mediating between power and nature, and the binary oppositions of essentialism and constructivism, machinism and vitalism, break down. Weiner agreed that information should be seen as a signal that was differentiated from other signals by probability, and not as a representation of fixed meaning. This was consolidated by the work of Gibbs who stated that the uncertainty of initial conditions implies the uncertainty of their outcome. Information then came to be viewed as a pattern distinguishable from its opposite - entropy, or noise. The ability to transfer information was then calculable on the basis of a signal to noise ratio.

While In Europe and the East the despotic control of information prevailed the West championed democracy and freedom of information. These correspond, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to the two poles of capture of the state - the despot and the jurist. Never before had the two poles resonated at such an intensity.

The theory of hegemony invented by marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci while incarcerated under the regime of mussolini? recognised that the repression of the masses was effected not just by the state but through the masses themselves and their willing complicity in the capitalist structures of power. Louis Althusser explains this by the concept of interpellation, which is the subjects entering into the space of the first person pronoun ‘I’, and the consequent entering into of the hierarchal relations of language with the consequent alienation that this entails, Althusser saw no way out of this (it has been argued that the resulting tension caused him to murder his wife). Deleuze and Guattari call this subjectification, and see it as one of the principle forces of stratification(19)(ATPp.130). Subjectification is not an essential characteristic of language, only one assemblage of it, moreover they make the radical assertion that the state precedes language(20)(ATPp429). Stratification is the crystallisation of flows of desire, their assemblage into arborescent structures of hierarchal power relations.

‘The principle strata binding human beings are the organism, signifiance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection.’(21)(ATPp.134)

As I mentioned earlier this period was marked by the ascendency of science, (if we apply McLuhan’s tetradic analysis we could say that science obsolesced religion and, later, went into reversal with chaos theory and quantum physics, retreiving holistic spiritualism)(22)(GVp.10) a term which Freud insisted should be applied to psychology. Science would here mean a system which pinpoints the truth of mattter in a grid-like manner analogous to the structuralist dogma. This view of science, which D+G call royal science, is predicated on the homogenous time of the clock, and the homogenous space of the metric standard.

‘The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous time’(23)(EoRp.21)

Isabelle Stengers on the other hand had a much more dynamic conception of the scientific process, whereby scientific code did not signify or represent materiality in a one way process but actively explored and fabricated it in a movement of constant change. She called this the enculturation of science.

Maxwell showed that the movement towards entropy could be indefinitely postponed through what he called negentropic forces. Both Weiner and Freud conceived of organic life as islands of negentropy amid a sea of chaos and death(24)(HUp.21). Weiner applied this principle to language also, speech being ‘a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion’(25)(HUp92) Shannon opposed this by arguing that the more unexpected a message was, the more information it conveyed. Information is thus probabilistic and entropic, not the reverse. In this case entropy is a positive force of production, not the death engine but the flow of continual self-organisation. The indeterminacy of language then becomes a productive force, as is recognised by poststucturalists such as Derrida.

For Foucault power does not repress but produces relations, it is rather the body which self-regulates in order to ward off the entropy of the excluded. The apparatus of control (such as the school or church, both of which enforce submission to a rigid code of temporality)(26)(Zerzan J.p13) is a hegemonic system of self regulation based on the repression of uncertainty, the dread of death. The fascist dread of flow leads to the production of death(27)(PEFp62). We produce our own repression by reproducing the power mechanisms that crush desire and perpetuate fear of flow (28)(PEFix).

‘To code desire - and the fear, the anguish of decoded flows - is the business of the socius,’(29)(AOp.139)

Theweleit’s critique of Freudian assumptions demonstrates that the homeostatic model of fascistic desire is just one configuration of what D+G would call desiring assemblages. Theweleit maintains that fascistic desire is not simply a historical occurrence, but rather is immanent in all relations. Pleasure is seen as a biocultural assemblage directed against the productive force of desire, such that the pleasure of murder (Althusser’s discharge) is the satisfaction of the interrupted leak.

D+G fundamentally oppose the oedipalisation of the world that Freud effected, they see it as another manifestation of the biunivocal relations that place the subject in a double-bind and crush desiring production.(30)(AOp.116) Points of deterritorialization and lines of flight are the means by which desire escapes this repression (eg. masochism)(31) (AOp.115). Instead of Marxist resistance to the structures of power (which is complicit in the macropolitical arborescence) D+G encourage a micro-politics of desire, they call for a desiring-revolution which rejects ‘anthropomorphic molar representation’(32)(AOp295) and favour becoming ‘n sexes’(33) (AOp295).

This is consistent with Stengers notion of biocultural mutation (34)(Order Out of Chaos p.14) and with Bateson’s critique of the homeostatic model. He demonstrates that the body itself is a vector of entropy, and suggests a dynamic of environmental exchange and self-production on the microscopic level which he calls reflexive. This defines the movement from homeostasis to autopoiesis. The movement of time is irreversible yet through it we pass thresholds where a mutation occurs in the biocultural formation(35)(PEFp.215). Time is not linear and progressive however, since the past, obviously, exists within the present (times new roman), the present acts back on the past (altering our perception of it), and the future acts back on the present (by anticipation or reverse causality). Time is a plane of consistency, composed of haeccicities or singularities and becomings, such as the event 1923, or yesterday (36)(Foucault concurrs with this). These coexist in a patchwork of relations in the abstract machine, composed of a thousand plateaus.

‘All history does is to translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession’(37) (ATPp.430)

‘Desire does not “want” revolution, it is revolutionary in its own right, as though involuntarily, by wanting what it wants’(38)(AOp.116)



References

(1)‘Understanding Media’. p,90. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1964.
(2)Weiner, N. ‘The Human Use of Human Beings’.p92. Da Capo Press. 1950.
(3)Virilio, P. ‘War and Cinema’. p46. Verso 1989.
(4)Attali, J. ‘Noise’.p.87. University of Minnesota Press 2003.
(5)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.421. Athlone Press 2003.
(6)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.421. Athlone Press 2003.
(7)“mass reproduction is the reproduction of the masses, or the mass man. Mass production with its standardaized, interchangeable parts constitutes a fascism of everyday life” (Zerzan, J. Elements of Refusal.p.17. Left Bank Books.)
(8)“Freud in his ‘Notes on the Mystic Writing Pad’, comes increasingly to use the metaphors of a writing machine and text to explain the apparatus of the human psyche”(Derrida, J. ‘Writing and Difference’. p.199. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London. 1981)
(9)(p.14 Lodge, D.)
(10) Zerzan, J. ‘Elements of Refusal’p.17. Left Bank Books.)
(11)(Susan J. Douglas. “The Navy Adopts the Radio, 1899-1919” in M.R. Smith, Military Enterprise, p.28)
(12)‘The Human Use of Human Beings’.p112. Da Capo Press. 1950.
(13)De Landa, M. ‘War in the Age of intelligent Machines’.p40-43. Zone Books 1993.
(14) “It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analagous attempts to control entropy through feedback.”(Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.26.Da Capo Press. 1950)
(15) “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to destroy the meaningful; the tendency as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.”(Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.17 Da Capo Press. 1950)
(16)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.17 Da Capo Press. 1950
(17)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.199. Athlone Press
(18)De Landa, M. ‘War in the Age of intelligent Machines’.p188. Zone Books 1993.
(19)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.130. Athlone Press 2003.
(20)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.429. Athlone Press 2003.
(21)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.134. Athlone Press 2003.
(22)McLuhan, M. & Powers, B. ‘The Global Village’ p.10. Oxford University Press. 1992.
(23) Zerzan, J.
(24)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.21 Da Capo Press. 1950
(25)Weiner, N. ‘Human Use of Human Beings’ p.92 Da Capo Press. 1950
(26)Zerzan J. ‘Elements of Refusal’ p.13. Left Bank Books.
(27)Agamben, G. in ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’ ed. Massumi, B. p62. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(28)Massumi, B. ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’. xi. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(29)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.139. Athlone Press
(30)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.116. Athlone Press
(31)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.115. Athlone Press
(32)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.295. Athlone Press
(34)Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos [New York: Bantam, 1984], p.14
(35)Virilio, P.in ‘The Politics of Everyday Fear’ ed. Massumi, B. p215. University of Minnesota Press.1993.
(36)(Foucault concurrs with this - Foucault, M. et al. Dream and Existence. Humanities Press International, Inc. p.23)
(37)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ p.430. Athlone Press 2003.
(38)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ p.116. Athlone Press