Foreword

I chose the topic of my contribution to our workshop after I discovered, first with amazement, then with wonder, N. Katherine Hayles’s beautiful book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics¹. Amazement because she and I worked on the same fairly confidential corpus, in particular the proceedings of the Macy conferences, which were the birthplace of cybernetics and, I have claimed, of cognitive science, we celebrate the same heroes, in particular Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster and Francisco Varela, and, in spite of these shared interests and passions, we apparently never heard of each other. She and I live and work worlds and languages apart. The world is still far from being a close-knit village. Wonder at realizing how from the same corpus we could arrive at interpretations that, although compatible or even complementary, are so richly diverse or even divergent.

My book on the Macy conferences and the origins of cybernetics and cognitive science, Sur l’origine des sciences cognitives, was first published in French in 1985²; a second and completely revised edition followed in 1994³; the first English-language edition, an extensively revised and amplified version of the latter, came out in 2000⁴. It is with shame that I acknowledge that during all this time, I never came across Ms. Hayles’ work, published in book form in 1999. It is with great sadness that I realize that there is no longer any way that I could ask my two great friends, Heinz von Foerster and Francisco Varela, two men of communication, why they never put us in touch. The Chilean neurophilosopher, Francisco Varela, was the cofounder of the theory of autopoietic systems; he chose to come to France and work in my research institution after he was expelled from his country. Heinz von Foerster, a Viennese Jewish immigrant to the United States, after serving as secretary to the Macy Conferences, went on to found what was to be called second-order cybernetics. Francisco and Heinz play important roles in the story that I tell in my book. The former passed away in 2000; the latter in 2002. I miss them both terribly.

My book seeks to disabuse readers of a number of ideas that I consider mistaken. Cybernetics calls to mind a series of familiar images that turn out on closer inspection to be highly doubtful. As the etymology of the word suggests, cybernetics is meant to signify control, mastery, governance—in short, the philosophical project associated with Descartes, who assigned mankind the mission of exercising dominion over the world, and over mankind itself. Within the cybernetics movement, this view was championed by Norbert Wiener—unsurprisingly, perhaps, since it was Wiener who gave it its name. But this gives only a very partial, if not superficial idea of what cybernetics was about, notwithstanding that even a philosopher of such penetrating insight as Heidegger was taken in by it.

In my work, I have relied on the notion, due to Karl Popper, of a metaphysical research program, which is to say a set of presuppositions about the structure of the world that are neither testable nor empirically falsifiable, but without which no science would be possible. For there is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction. To borrow a term that has been applied to the structuralist movement in the human sciences, cybernetics constituted a decisive step in the rise of antihumanism. Consider, for example, the way in which cybernetics conceived the relationship between man and machine. The philosophers of consciousness were not alone in being caught up in the trap set by a question such as “Will it be possible one day to design a machine that thinks?” The cybernetician’s answer, rather in the spirit of Molière, was: “Madame, you pride yourself so on thinking. And yet, you are only a machine!” The aim of cognitive science always was—and still is today—the mechanization of the mind, not the humanization of the machine.

“Continental” political philosophy has yet to acknowledge the notion of posthumanism. On the other hand, the notion of antihumanism has been debated for at least four decades. My contribution will bear on the latter only. My hope is that our workshop will enable us to explore the possible connections between the two notions and, beyond, perhaps, bridge the gap between two cultural worlds so far apart.

1. Heidegger’s Error

I will start with a classic question: can the idea that we have of the human person, which is to say of ourselves, survive the forward march of scientific discovery? It is a commonplace that from Copernicus to molecular biology, and from Marx to Freud along the way, we have had steadily to abandon our proud view of ourselves as occupying a special place in the universe, and to admit that we are at the mercy of determinisms that leave little room for what we have been accustomed to consider our freedom and our reason. Is not cognitive science now in the process of completing this process of disillusionment and demystification by showing us that just where we believe we sense the workings of a mind, there is only the firing of neural networks, no different in principle than an ordinary electric circuit? The task in which I have joined with many others, faced with reductive interpretations of scientific advance of this sort, has been to defend the values proper to the human person, or, to put it more bluntly, to defend humanism against the excesses of science and technology.

Heidegger completely inverted this way of posing the problem. For him it was no longer a question of defending humanism but rather of indicting it. As for science and technology, or rather "technoscience" (an expression meant to signify that science is subordinated to the practical ambition of achieving mastery over the world through technology), far from threatening human values, they are on Heidegger's view the most striking manifestation of them. This dual reversal is so remarkable that it deserves to be considered in some detail, even—or above all—in a reflection on the place of cybernetics in the history of ideas, for it is precisely cybernetics that found itself to be the principal object of Heidegger's attack.

In those places where Heideggerian thought has been influential, it became impossible to defend human values against the claims of science. This was particularly true in France, where structuralism—and then poststructuralism—reigned supreme over the intellectual landscape for several decades before taking refuge in the literature departments of American universities. Anchored in the thought of the three great Germanic "masters of suspicion"—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—against a common background of Heideggerianism, the human sciences à la française made antihumanism their watchword⁵, loudly celebrating exactly what humanists dread: the death of man. This unfortunate creature, or rather a certain image that man created of himself, was reproached for being "metaphysical." With Heidegger, "metaphysics" acquired a new and quite special sense, opposite to its usual meaning. For positivists ever since Comte, the progress of science had been seen as forcing the retreat of metaphysics; for Heidegger, by contrast, technoscience represented the culmination of metaphysics. And the height of metaphysics was nothing other than cybernetics.

Let us try to unravel this tangled skein. For Heidegger, metaphysics is the search for an ultimate foundation for all reality, for a "primary being" in relation to which all other beings find their place and purpose. Where traditional metaphysics ("onto-theology") had placed God, modern metaphysics substituted man. This is why modern metaphysics is fundamentally humanist, and humanism fundamentally metaphysical. Man is a subject endowed with consciousness and will: his features were described at the dawn of modernity in the philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz. As a conscious being, he is present and transparent to himself; as a willing being, he causes things to happen as he intends. Subjectivity, both as theoretical presence to oneself and as practical mastery over the world, occupies center stage in this scheme—whence the Cartesian promise to make man "master and possessor of nature." In the metaphysical conception of the world, Heidegger holds, everything that exists is a slave to the purposes of man; everything becomes an object of his will, fashionable as a function of his ends and desires. The value of things depends solely on their capacity to help man realize his essence, which is to achieve mastery over being. It thus becomes clear why technoscience, and cybernetics in particular, may be said to represent the completion of metaphysics. To contemplative thought—thought that poses the question of meaning and of Being, understood as the sudden appearance of things, which escapes all attempts at grasping it—Heidegger opposes "calculating" thought. This latter type is characteristic of all forms of planning that seek to attain ends by taking circumstances into account. Technoscience, insofar as it constructs mathematical models to better establish its mastery over the causal organization of the world, knows only calculating thought. Cybernetics is precisely that which calculates—computes—in order to govern, in the nautical sense (Wiener coined the term from the Greek xvbepvntns, meaning "steersman"): it is indeed the height of metaphysics.

Heidegger anticipated the objection that would be brought against him: "Because we are speaking against humanism people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more logical than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity?"⁶ Heidegger defended himself by attacking. Barbarism is not to be found where one usually looks for it. The true barbarians are the ones who are supposed to be humanists, who, in the name of the dignity that man accords himself, leave behind them a world devastated by technology, a desert in which no one can truly be said to dwell.

Let us for the sake of argument grant the justice of Heidegger's position. At once an additional enigma presents itself. If for him cybernetics really represented the apotheosis of metaphysical humanism, how are we to explain the fact that the human sciences in France, whose postwar development I have just said can be understood only against the background of Heidegger's philosophy, availed themselves of the conceptual toolkit of cybernetics in order to deconstruct the metaphysics of subjectivity? How is it that these sciences, in their utter determination to put man as subject to death, each seeking to outdo the other's radicalism, should have found in cybernetics the weapons for their assaults?

From the beginning of the 1950s—which is to say, from the end of the first cybernetics—through the 1960s and 1970s, when the second cybernetics was investigating theories of self-organization and cognitivism was on the rise, the enterprise of mechanizing the human world underwent a parallel development on each side of the Atlantic. This common destiny was rarely noticed, perhaps because the thought of any similarity seemed almost absurd: whereas cognitive science claimed to be the avant-garde of modern science, structuralism—followed by poststructuralism—covered itself in a pretentious and often incomprehensible philosophical jargon. What is more, it was too tempting to accuse French deconstructionists of a fascination with mathematical concepts and models that they hardly understood. But even if this way of looking at the matter is not entirely unjustified, it only scratches the surface. There were very good reasons, in fact, why the deconstruction of metaphysical humanism found in cybernetics an ally of the first order.

At the beginning of the 1940s, a philosopher of consciousness such as Sartre could write: "The inhuman is merely . . . the mechanical."⁷. Structuralists hastened to adopt this definition as their own, while reversing the value assigned to its terms. Doing Heidegger one better, they made a great show of championing the inhuman—which is to say the mechanical⁸. Cybernetics, as it happened, was ready to hand, having come along at just the right moment to demystify the voluntary and conscious subject. The will? All its manifestations could apparently be simulated, and therefore duplicated, by a simple negative feedback mechanism. Consciousness? The “Cybernetics Group”⁹ had examined the Freudian unconscious, whose existence was defended by one of its members, Lawrence Kubie, and found it chimerical. If Kubie often found himself the butt of his colleagues' jokes, it was not because he was thought to be an enemy of human dignity. It was rather because the postulation of a hidden entity, located in the substructure of a purportedly conscious subject, manifesting itself only through symptoms while yet being endowed with the essential attributes of the subject (intentionality, desires, beliefs, presence to oneself, and so on), seemed to the cyberneticians nothing more than a poor conjuring trick aimed at keeping the structure of subjectivity intact.

It is remarkable that a few years later the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, along with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (one of the founders of structuralism), should have adopted the same critical attitude toward Freud as cybernetics. The father of psychoanalysis had been led to postulate an improbable "death wish"—"beyond the pleasure principle," as he put it—as if the subject actually desired the very thing that made him suffer, by voluntarily and repeatedly placing himself in situations from which he could only emerge battered and hurt. This compulsion (Zwang) to repeat failure Freud called Wiederholungszwang, an expression translated by Lacan as "automatisme de répétition," which is to say the automatism of repetition. In so doing he replaced the supposed unconscious death wish with the senseless functioning of a machine, the unconscious henceforth being identified with a cybernetic automaton. The alliance of psychoanalysis and cybernetics was neither anecdotal nor fortuitous: it corresponded to a radicalization of the critique of metaphysical humanism.

There was a deeper reason for the encounter between the French sciences de l'homme and cybernetics, however. What structuralism sought to conceive—in the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, for example, and particularly in his study of systems of exchange in traditional societies—was a subjectless cognition, indeed cognition without mental content. Whence the project of making "symbolic thought" a mechanism peculiar not to individual brains but to "unconscious" linguistic structures that automatically operate behind the back, as it were, of unfortunate human "subjects," who are no more than a sort of afterthought. "It thinks" was destined to take the place once and for all of the Cartesian cogito. Now cognition without a subject was exactly the unlikely configuration that cybernetics seemed to have succeeded in conceiving. Here again, the encounter between cybernetics and structuralism was in no way accidental. It grew out of a new intellectual necessity whose sudden emergence appears in retrospect as an exceptional moment in the history of ideas.

2. The Self-Mechanized Mind

It is time to come back to our enigma, which now may be formulated as a paradox. Was cybernetics the height of metaphysical humanism, as Heidegger maintained, or was it the height of its deconstruction, as certain of Heidegger's followers believe? To this question I believe it is necessary to reply that cybernetics was both things at once, and that this is what made it not only the root of cognitive science, which finds itself faced with the same paradox, but also a turning point in the history of human conceptions of humanity. The title I have given to this section—the self-mechanized mind—appears to have the form of a self-referential statement, not unlike those strange loops the cyberneticians were so crazy about, especially the cyberneticians of the second phase. But this is only an appearance: the mind that carries out the mechanization and the one that is the object of it are two distinct (albeit closely related) entities, like the two ends of a seesaw, the one rising ever higher in the heavens of metaphysical humanism as the other descends further into the depths of its deconstruction. In mechanizing the mind, in treating it as an artifact, the mind presumes to exercise power over this artifact to a degree that no psychology claiming to be scientific has ever dreamed of attaining. The mind can now hope not only to manipulate this mechanized version of itself at will, but even to reproduce and manufacture it in accordance with its own wishes and intentions. Accordingly, the technologies of the mind, present and future, open up a vast continent upon which man now has to impose norms if he wishes to give them meaning and purpose. The human subject will therefore need to have recourse to a supplementary endowment of will and conscience in order to determine, not what he can do, but what he ought to do—or, rather, what he ought not to do. These new technologies will require a whole ethics to be elaborated, an ethics not less demanding than the one that is slowly being devised today in order to control the rapid development and unforeseen consequences of new biotechnologies. But to speak of ethics, conscience, the will—is this not to speak of the triumph of the subject?

The connection between the mechanization of life and the mechanization of the mind is plain. Even if the Cybernetics Group snubbed biology, to the great displeasure of John von Neumann, it was of course a cybernetic metaphor that enabled molecular biology to formulate its central dogma: the genome operates like a computer program. This metaphor is surely not less false than the analogous metaphor that structures the cognitivist paradigm. The theory of biological self-organization, first opposed to the cybernetic paradigm during the Macy Conferences before later being adopted by the second cybernetics as its principal model, furnished then—and still furnishes today—decisive arguments against the legitimacy of identifying DNA with a "genetic program." Nonetheless—and this is the crucial point—even though this identification is profoundly illegitimate from both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, its technological consequences have been considerable. Today, as a result, man may be inclined to believe that he is the master of his own genome. Never, one is tempted to say, has he been so near to realizing the Cartesian promise: he has become—or is close to becoming—the master and possessor of all of nature, up to and including himself.

Must we then salute this as yet another masterpiece of metaphysical humanism? It seems at first altogether astonishing, though after a moment's reflection perfectly comprehensible, that a German philosopher following in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, should have recently come forward, determined to take issue with the liberal humanism of his country's philosophical establishment, and boldly affirmed that the new biotechnologies sound the death knell for the era of humanism. Unleashing a debate the like of which is hardly imaginable in any other country, this philosopher ventured to assert: "The domestication of man by man is the great unimagined prospect in the face of which humanism has looked the other way from antiquity until the present day." And to prophesy:

It suffices to clearly understand that the next long periods of history will be periods of choice as far as the [human] species is concerned. Then it will be seen if humanity, or at least its cultural elites, will succeed in establishing effective procedures for self-domestication. It will be necessary, in the future, to forthrightly address the issue and formulate a code governing anthropological technologies. Such a code would modify, a posteriori, the meaning of classical humanism, for it would show that humanitas consists not only in the friendship of man with man, but that it also implies . . . , in increasingly obvious ways, that man represents the supreme power for man.¹⁰

But why should this "superhuman" power of man over himself be seen, in Nietzschean fashion, as representing the death of humanism rather than its apotheosis? For man to be able, as subject, to exercise a power of this sort over himself, it is first necessary that he be reduced to the rank of