Progress or stability? Imperial cybernetic techno-utopia

Text: Zhongzheng Yi Zhiha

Translation:Schale no sensei

Technological utopia is characterized by the reconciliation of administrative bureaucracy and futurist technocracy. In Yuriko Furahata’s analysis of scientists’ participation in urban planning and infrastructure construction at the Osaka World Expo, (anti-)Jacobin scientists and technocrats became the epitome of experimental avant-garde and utopianism, embodied in its top-down approach of municipal corporatism, techno-nationalism (domestic movement of computers) and bureaucratic institutionalization. In her account, the genealogy of this technological avant-garde can be traced back to the industrialist projects of Saint-Simon. Given that Saint-Simon is also considered an important precedent and an important source of reference for Enma's scientific groupism (ソーシャリズム), the possible cohesion of scientific power and the Jacobin cause is not empty talk. We can see a clear continuation of this cohesion in Ilyich's "infamous" formula - "Solidocracy is the Sobet regime plus electrification". Rather, futuristic technocracy has been a symbol of the aestheticization of politics in the Benjaminian sense, both in the service of social progress and as a measure of control over anomalies. From Auguste Comte's vision of a hierarchical society organically united by the positivist power of "human religion" to Nick Rand's call for accelerated social control of "technological economics" and "Retro Dieselpunk" is a dark enlightenment version of the neo-reactionary techno-utopia, all driven by the same technocracy. And even if we talk about the release (リベレート) or the mountain (レフティスト) substitution at the level of non-state control, it is not difficult not to find a way to combine the release technology (テクニック) with the current platform technology (テクノロジー) Aestheticizing politics, like mountain accelerators Alex Williams and Nick Slnicek. Technological power is no longer seen as a tool that the post-Jacobin state must master in order to realize its communalist project, but as the key to a structural transcendence or mountain politics that goes beyond the micro-amelioration of local and autonomous communities. power.

Yet, at first glance, this utopianism appears to have an inherent tension between the two poles it strives to unite: progress and balance. Although the tension between holistic improvement and balanced markets can also be seen in classical and modern economic theory, what distinguishes modernist techno-utopia from roving (リベラリズム) economic theory is its conscious intervention and increased control, to promote planned progress. In other words, the desired equilibrium state of the autonomous market should be achieved through the "invisible hand", but in the interventionist technological utopia, the application of control is not only indispensable for achieving the equilibrium state, but also for the control of everything. It is also crucial to provide improvements to the current situation to higher optimal stages. However, scientific development represents progress, while bureaucratic control represents the status quo and aversion to unstable social mobility. Therefore, on the road to improvement and moving towards the best, there is a gap between bureaucratic inertia and progressive impulse. Tensions. Here, bureaucracy should not be understood simply as a "banal evil" or an "unresponsible system," but as the inertia of a system unwilling to transform quickly.

As long as the technocratic will to allow administrative agencies to carry out their instructions is actually in conflict with the bureaucratic interests of maintaining the status quo and suppressing anomalies, then what reason and purpose can there be between the seemingly infinite scientific momentum of progress and the bureaucracy of inertia and hierarchical obedience? To what extent can they be combined to jointly serve the cause of modernism? Is the nature of modernism’s contradictory combination of progress and inertia rational or irrational? Modern bureaucracy and modern science, which are often regarded as representatives of modern rationality models, are not only deeply connected on the basis of the reality of modern (un)civilization, but also consistent in instrumental rationality and worldview. In Adorno's and Horkheimer's reflective accounts of modern rationality, such a combination can only be seen as the degeneration of Enlightenment rationality into mere instrumental rationality, whose mythological return to the idolization of power and machine distorts what the former enabled progress, and ultimately retreat into authoritarian social self-destruction. However, Adorno and Horkheimer's aversion to the submission of the masses to technology and mass production led them to be dismissive of utopianism in technological utopias, which in fact do more than just maintain the current social culture control.

Again, what this article refers to as bureaucracy lies precisely in its self-perpetuation (see also Adorno) and its reluctance to engage in acute programs of change. In short, I do not want to define bureaucracy as a hyper-rational tool for enforcing the will of Ji Quan (トータリタリアンニズム) or concealing real otherness, but rather want to emphasize its existential dimension of self-preservation in order to maintain the integrity of the system nature, that is, maintaining the status quo and initial balance. Although technotopia is essentially Promethean, the various forms of social dynamism and utopian imagination it envisions are, to use Jameson's words, more than symptomatic of the attempted technological avant-garde. "Boundaries or limits that cannot be transcended by thought", and embodies how to solve problems from different social fields through technological imagination. Rather than denouncing the fetishism of instrumental rationality entrenched in technotopias, I prefer to observe how technocratic conceptions of progress are compatible with conformist bureaucracies.

The early Restauration was most clearly characterized by a series of anxious attempts to devise a reform program that would reconcile the rapid economic growth, the depoliticization and intellectual liberalization of the post-Napoleonic era, and the The political needs of political power and social stability. Against this background, it is no wonder that cybernetic thinking and systems theory are favored to a certain extent in specific policy-making and reform processes. Derived from computational and biological science thinking, cybernetics combines optimal or optimal solutions with homeostasis, and also represents a holistic and comprehensive attempt to understand and organize human beings.

This article aims to explore this paradox through a study of cybernetic projects for the transformation and revitalization of the early post-Napoleonic imperial state. I do not discuss how the combination of scientific reason and bureaucracy materialized at the organizational and corporate levels of the military-cum-military complex, but rather analyze the cybernetic thinking prevalent among post-Napoleonic intellectuals and high-ranking officials, scientists and economists. The tension between promoting rapid and systemic change and envisioning a stable state of development.

In the post-Napoleonic era, cybernetics was seen as a possible option for top-down social and economic reform. In its specific adoption, both intellectuals and officials were involved in various aspects of the cybernetic enterprise, involved in the overall transformation of the imperial state. To a certain extent, it was also a collaboration or partnership between the state bureaucracy and the innovative spirit of the Confucian intellectuals. This article will mainly study Song Dynasty's "Population Control Theory" and Jin Dynasty's Cybernetics Historiography. Show how their techno-utopianism is based on tensions between progress and stability, and how they circumvent these ephemeral tensions by appealing to authoritative mathematical models and deterministic variables. This article hopes to discuss the strange combination between structural bureaucracy and technological avant-gardism in technotopias.

Variability and scientific authority

The first mechanism on which the post-Napoleonic technological utopia relies is the mutual sufficiency and necessity between controllability and observability. In other words, cybernetic loops rely on loops between control and observation or manipulation and information gathering. In order to control, the observable must first be abstracted. This does not simply mean that certain qualities or social beings must be quantified into indices or input/output numbers. In contrast, cybernetic models must first establish a numerical link between changes in an index and the overall state of the system. An index is considered a variable as long as a corresponding numerical change can be identified under the classification of the relevant index. Because changes in this variable affect the entire system, it is named a variable that can explain fluctuations in the system. That is, control variables. Only by extracting the key control variables can the system be observed. In other words, what is controlled is equal to some obvious and corresponding change in what is observed. To complete this circuit, control and observation must be organized in a computationally symmetric way. To achieve this, post-Napoleonic cybernetics was consistent with the use of single control variables for observation and control processes in cybernetic models. In the practice known as "demographic cybernetics," it is the birth rate that is directly related to women. In the history of cybernetics, control variables are both the organizing and anti-organizing forces of social systems.

For population control theory, the key is to transform the problem of optimal population control into the problem of guiding the existing population to the ideal population. To achieve such a transformation, the cybernetic model must first be placed under certain fixed external conditions, which in turn means that the control system must be viewed as an automatically continuous system with basic self-identity and External dynamic closure. In short, the model itself must be isolated. Only in this cybernetic closed loop can the intrinsic character of "natural" population growth be identified. Once population growth was identified as a closed-loop feedback process, birth rates, which are closely linked to women, were identified as control variables. Then, the core of the entire formula and equation is this variable. To bring birth rates into real life, the average birth rate to women was determined as the only control variable and the only demographic feedback indicator .

In Kim Kanto's cybernetic re-examination of imperial history, imperial society was closed off from the outside world, isolated from the outside world, and this ensured its unique status as a specimen of systems theory and cybernetics. As long as an empire is free from external interference, its historical changes and events can be seen as the product of purely internal dynamics. Because of this, it is a good example of King's cybernetics, and the key to cybernetics lies precisely in the isolation, isolation, and self-contained nature of observable objects. The isolated imperial society is a giant system (メガシステム) maintained by the interaction of three subsystems, and each subsystem is organized and connected by the overall power of system integration. Therefore, the study of isolated imperial cases is also expected to contribute to a general systems theory of social evolution and human development. Therefore, for King, studying empire was not only the locus of his political and academic ambitions, but also an excellent testing ground and laboratory for studying the evolution of civilization. The particularity of the empire's isolation from the rest of the world provided an opportunity to study the generalization and universal application of systems theory and cybernetics in history.

Subsequently, King defined the control variable of his historical model as the integrated force belonging to the system itself that organizes and achieves organizational integrity. First of all, this is a powerful control force. Based on this control, the history of the empire becomes the entire process of the various adjustments of integrated forces over a long historical period. That is, it is seen as a chase between systemic power and inert chaotic power, the former embodied in the integrated chain of interests between imperial power, feudal landowners, scholar-bureaucrats, and Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist literati, with the aim of maintaining the day-to-day operations of the empire and Coordinating political and economic certainty, while inert chaotic power is reflected in periodic land annexations and peasant wars; regardless of the specific historical subjects and specific social fields, social forces ranging from politics to ideology, from peasants to emperors Social existence is essentially a system of abstract functional units, empty signifiers without referents. In this way, Kim's reconstruction of imperial history appears to be an abstract model of the diachronic movement of the abstract forces of so-called integration (and its antithesis, anti-integration).

The question then becomes, what specific properties or ways of controlling these variables might lead to desirable growth or steady states?

growth and steady state

In the social atmosphere of the post-Napoleonic era that pursues more comprehensive and rapid socio-economic growth, development and progress, as well as in the process of seeking alternative modernities outside the existing Stalinist system, the two authors are obviously in their respective problematization processes. China responded to growth issues. However, as mentioned in the introduction, the dilemma between progress and system stability in cybernetic technological utopia is also a powerful obstacle encountered by the two authors. In any case, with the help of abstract cybernetic loops between variables, the authors manage to base their growth or stabilization schemes on the control of fundamental variables.

In Song's view, the ideal population growth for mankind is zero. Although an absolute zero-or equilibrium is almost impossible to achieve because mortality is inherently unplannable, Song Jian hopes to achieve population equilibrium by controlling its variable—the birth rate. Apparently, for Song, the latter was not difficult to control, since it was just a matter of a useful uterus, and uteruses grew in the human body. Death is considered unknowable even by science. However, in addition to his radical attitude towards birth control, Song also admitted that the desire of a couple to have at least one child in their lifetime is "human nature", because for him, if such human nature is not satisfied, there is Any number of people can be born at will, and no one is allowed to be born. Such an unbalanced and unequal population policy will be intolerable. Therefore, what needs to be regulated is the general fertility rate of society, which means that all uteruses, as long as they are usable, are regulated equally. However, "zero growth" represents more than just curbing population growth. In Song's theory of population stagnation, the birth rate, median age, generational and gender ratios, and labor force ratios are all balanced or even frozen in proportion to the death rate, thus avoiding any small and subtle changes in the overall nature of the population. . The expected result of this final equilibrium is an increase in social welfare, and the scourge of population growth can no longer affect human well-being.

What is social welfare? A cybernetic demographic survey based on public satisfaction related to fixed industrial infrastructure and production growth rates and natural resource reserves by scientists and the Academy of Social Sciences at that time (but it was not really a satisfaction survey because there was no sampling at all, but is a macro-expectation of likely public acceptance), Song argued that the ideal population size must be determined based on given industrial growth and natural resource constraints. Material social welfare means enjoying the support of industrial civilization and natural endowments. However, Song here is ambivalent about the proportional balance between social welfare growth and population equilibrium. If the ideal population is determined by the growth rate of social welfare, doesn’t it mean that the population can or should grow with the development of productivity? If so, it would contradict Song's zero population growth assumption.

Regardless, Song expected that population homeostasis would facilitate people enjoying the fruits of technological growth, which would also hopefully eliminate imperialism and hegemonism. Considering Soong's desire to achieve global population stagnation by curbing population growth in the Third World, Soong seems to be anticipating a future in which social and technological progress and fully automated luxury will occur automatically as long as humans consciously orchestrate population growth. Advent. In the final analysis, the coordination between the overall growth of social welfare or the progress of human civilization and the enforced population equilibrium depends on the utopian magic of fully developed technology.

Throughout King's approach to combining history, bioevolution, and cybernetic thinking, his historical reconstruction of empire was conceived from a specific systemic and structural perspective. In his discussion, the old imperial system must be understood and examined in a systematic and holistic manner, rather than economic or cultural determinism dominated by paranoid ideology. Only a systematic and structured perspective is a truly scientific perspective. In other words, for King, social analysis should be scientific and positivist in order to overcome ideological dogmatism. Similar to Song's expectation that the power of science would eliminate all social conflicts among human beings, Jin envisioned some form of expert knowledge in which scientific scrutiny triumphed over ideological and religious differences to achieve the ultimate intellectual basis for all societies.

If society as a whole is grasped as a giant system, its functions and operations are determined by the specific combination of the three subsystems: economics, politics, and ideology. Kim demonstrates that in the old imperial system, the special coupling between these subsystems, especially political control and organization, successfully ensured a hyper-stable, self-sustaining system that was resistant to endogenous anarchy and reaction. The entropy of organizational dynamics increases, despite periodic fluctuations such as peasant wars. It literally works at its best through certain connections between the three subsystems. However, these connections can also be grasped in a more abstract way: they are all concrete functions related to control or organizational power. Thus, in King's view, such a hyperstable system achieves permanent adaptability to internal and external counter-organizational dynamics, maintaining the integrity of its underlying structure. Jin's ultra-stable system not only explains the long-term nature of the feudal social stage in the history of the empire, but also exposes its steady backwardness. Such feudal stability and stagnation are destined to be incompatible with the structural evolution that gave birth to modernity. After all, under the pressure of general progress and civilizational convergence, a stable state cannot last forever. The singularity of progress ends in modernity, the final stage of civilizational evolution.

However, King is ambiguous when it comes to the specific effects of control and repression on the evolution of structures. Kim did not attribute backwardness solely to institutional controls, but to periodic active events such as peasant wars, which wiped out new elements of structural evolution. Although the peasant war itself is forced by strong institutional control, the peasant war itself is completely negative, anti-organizational, and anti-system. In the end, it can only fall into the fate of rebuilding the old system by conquering and conquering the country. In King's view, the Sisyphean collapse and rebuilding of empires represented brittle disintegration, whereas Europe's was soft disintegration. In Europe, although there were still revolutionary bloodshed and peasant wars, the disintegration of the political, economic and ideological subsystems took a long time and followed the order of first come first. Therefore, its ultimate social evolution into modernity was successful and groundbreaking. In contrast, the periodic collapse of the old imperial system was rather abrupt and tense. In this case, the collapse of one link leads to the total collapse of society. Since there was not enough buffer time to conceive a new structure, the reconstruction of the old system of the empire had to be instantaneous to avoid social catastrophe, and there was little time to adopt new factors. Thus, in Kim's view, the periodic disintegration of empires ultimately only resulted in the consolidation of ultra-stable institutions, suffocating any elements of progress. In short, Kim's attitude towards "progress" and "stability" is that even the worst "stability" is better than the most drastic change, because fundamentally "progress" and "change" can only be achieved through gradual Fabian regulation improvements are implemented.

fear of spontaneity

It can be seen from the above that whether they prioritize progress or stability, the attempts of the two intellectuals converge on one conclusion, that is, the key to realizing the plan ultimately lies in control or management. Chile's cybernetic experiments were intended to promote and even channel Allende's "Jacobin of Peace", in stark contrast to Chile's cybernetic model under the guidance of Stafford Beale, which was based on the autonomous action and self-organization of workers. In contrast, the cybernetic utopias of the post-Napoleonic era seem to stem from fears of a status quo of autonomy and anarchy, whether leading to extreme stability or entropy. In other words, post-Napoleonic techno-utopia is actually an anxious attempt to prevent an overwhelmingly threatening apocalyptic future that is approaching or even already happening. In this sense, what is posited in their utopian vision is actually an emotional evocation of a possible dystopia. Here, it is particularly important to review the positions of Jin and Song. Therefore, the main task of this section is to understand how the Song and Jin's techno-utopian projects were based on their aversion to dystopias and prophetic futures.

First, in Song's reasoning, how is population growth reduced to a problem that threatens the existence and maintenance of society/state/global system and must be urgently addressed? In other words, how did population growth become a phenomenon that needed to be studied and treated with a scientific scalpel? What poses a threat to the carrying capacity of the natural environment and the capacity of natural resources is the anarchy of population growth. Assembling runaway social production, social reproduction, and population growth, he described population as a completely autonomous social and natural process. However, the balance between society and nature is one of nature over society, because procreation has not yet been planned and organized in a way that obeys the will of all mankind. Population growth must be directed from the "kingdom of necessity" to the "kingdom of freedom" through planning and control. To turn population growth into a completely organized and planned realm, free from natural inevitability while being subject to the general will of the state/humanity. Population growth, if not controlled and organized, is inherently harmful and disturbing to a modern society. Its anarchy is the last barrier preventing man from escaping from his bestial nature. In other words, although population growth is a basic social process, its trajectory is still too close to naturalization. Unless planned and controlled by modern scientific knowledge, the transfer of population growth from the natural to the social realm will be blind.

However, in arguing this point, Song equated the population growth of the First Republic with the same blind and unrestrained process. Clearly, population growth during the Napoleonic period was not so "natural" because of the biopolitical intervention of the state in promoting birth rates. Although Song was implicitly critical of Napoleon's population policies, he seemed to conflate more "natural" population growth with that of intervention and encouragement, defining both as uncontrolled natural population growth. This strange "nature" is an area that population studies and demography have not yet conquered, but that can now be conquered thanks to the advent of modern cybernetic technology. Therefore, "unscientific" and non-cybernetic measures regarding population policy are classified as blind wantonness rather than conscious regulation and planning in accordance with human wishes. In this sense, this "natural" population growth is still a bit too non-human, which means that it has become an object that modern science aims to conquer and control.

In Song's view, the anarchy of the global population has become very serious, so he suggested that consciously controlling the population, especially significantly reducing the birth rate, should be regarded as the historical mission of contemporary mankind. His somewhat fanatical claims underscore his desire to achieve global demographic stability. Regarding the state of the environment, Song believes that the overall scale of population growth is incompatible with the limits of natural resources and environmental capacity, rather than world capitalism. It seems, in his judgment, that environmental problems would automatically be solved or at least contained as long as population growth was consciously ordered and distributed according to human wishes, since it only involved a single, controllable variable - the uterus. No matter whether your surname is Xiu or Feng, as long as you are human, you should be able to control the uterus. In other words, whether it is a utopia or a dystopia, which way to go on the forked road depends entirely on the control of variables.

According to King, the problem of control is exactly the opposite. His concern is how the (im)balance between control and counter-control has preempted evolution in suffocating the possibility of new social structures. However, it is precisely control that plays the role of lawlessness among those who are not controlled, constituting an obstacle to the evolution of social forms. The sustainability of the ultra-stable system of imperial society lies in the specificity of its control. This control organized the political, economic and ideological life of the entire empire's ancien régime, a hyperstable system that acted as a self-sustaining organism that constantly (re)produced and maintained the same without or despite external intervention. Control. Therefore, evolutionarily, this ultra-stable system is an epochal exception that maintains self-identity and autonomy. However, King questioned this self-generated system based on modern history because it was unable to adapt to the progress of social evolution. Because in his view, the historical stagnation of imperial society was caused by this ultra-stability. Systemic controls and automatically generated measures to prevent structural change prevented the Empire from entering the modern civilization that was the evolutionary destiny of all civilizations. The isolation and closure caused by the hyperstability of the system is catastrophic because, in the worst case scenario, even civilization itself can perish. No wonder he repeatedly admonished for tolerance and openness to both external influences that might disrupt the structure and internal factors that deviated from the power of system control and oversight. In short, the doomsday disaster envisioned by Kim lies precisely in the self-preservation will and self-identity of an ultra-stable social system. It’s self-generated stagnation, not chaos.

in conclusion

Through a discussion of the works of these two men who embody the cybernetic technotopia of the post-Napoleonic period, I have provided a preliminary presentation of their technotopian projects in thematic order. In a nutshell, their technological utopia is achieved by manipulating a variable that is the pivot of the entire system, the successful control of which leads to a desired optimal and stable state, and by achieving or destroying this stable state , you can avoid some doomsday. The remaining question here, then, is how their techno-utopias fit back into our discussion of the paradoxical relationship between technological avant-gardism and bureaucratic everydayness.

In their thinking, the best state of the system is achieved precisely in everydayness, in an (in)dynamic that does not require a Jacobin vortex. However, self-identity must be accompanied by progressive reform, innovation, or improvement. The deus ex machina metropolitan latter will ultimately ensure that day-to-day consistency can also produce progressive reform. Given that the cybernetics and systems theory themes of the post-Napoleonic empire were actually deeply embedded in "knowledge production in the geopolitics of the Cold War," rather than saying that the technological utopias they envisioned were avant-garde, avant-garde, and radical, it would be better to say that they Only in the sense of Fabianism, it grasped the balance between production progress and bureaucratic rigidity, and embodied the spirit of the times in the early days of the reform and founding of the People's Republic of China: "touching the gravel to help."

In the general form of techno-utopianism, technocratic progress is not the same as that of bureaucracy, given that the equilibrium point is integral to cybernetics, being both the critical point at which the entire system reaches its optimal state and a key prerequisite for the system's self-sustainment. The connection between the inertia of doctrines is reasonable to a certain extent. The expediency of utopian antinomy lies in the paradoxical futurity of the future or the self-reflexivity of the present. Specifically, pre-designed control and observation take away autonomy and unpredictability from the future. The latter's inferences and reasoning correspond to the current measurement of the best state, which must eliminate the future by extending the endless present backward into the future.

On the other hand, this representation of the endless present turns out to be the permanent self-referentiality of knowledge under modern technical rationality. To the extent that the future is nothing but an extension of the endless present, even utopian fantasies necessarily depend on the secularity of this extension. That is, the boundaries or limits of our imagination of the future can only go back to foreseeable everyday life. Because of this mundane nature of everyday life, the future is destined in a specific, invisible relationship to technological and scientific control. That is, epistemological reflexivity, or the inability to grasp true novelty or futurity, is ontologically flattening and compressing the future into a projected present, subsuming the former into the latter and thereby rendering the future The non-futurity is perpetuated as its ultimate boundary. This never-ending routine enables the cybernetic circuit to self-reflexively approach an optimal future that is the product of its calculations based on current and even past information and feedback. In this sense, the seemingly impossible union between instrumental rationality and the self-sustainability of the system is determined precisely by this everydayness, which relies on the fundamental self-reflection of variables that only exist in isolation and Prediction is possible only in measurable systems. Only when the technological future itself is no longer a real future ontologically speaking, can the technological future be thrown to us as the future and be accepted by us with peace of mind.