![]() Today, it lies at the heart of computer-based digital technology. Initially, the theory was conceived as a military defense system, but it was widely adopted after the war as a scientific basis for the Cold War agenda. Norbert Wiener perfected early mathematical models of mechanisation in his cybernetics theory in the 1940s. The political agenda of subjugating desire and the body to the state like a piece of machinery and making it work in unison - a political agenda that, through the experience of fascism, became a paradigm for managing human capital after World War II. This fact leads to the inference that Foucault’s bio-politics, or body politic, was already built into Enlightenment cybernetics. The purpose of this mechanisation is the automatisation of the state. It is my contention that the process of mechanising human motivation has underpinned almost all liberal theories of the state since the political philosophy of Hobbes. Thus, the formulation of political philosophy is inextricably linked to the totalisation of technology. The imperatives of the social contract were promises made to this imagined community. The call to action of early technology is still true today. The mass media further spread and intensified the cognitive revolution brought about by the development of printing technology. The mass distribution of books through Gutenberg’s printing technology was a crucial medium for unifying the fragmented experiences of individuals into a unit called a nation. Conceptualising this representation as one and all was his life’s work, and, as I mentioned earlier, it was also a question of the technological infrastructure that allowed individuals who could not experience the state to imagine it. The state represented the absolute subject, the artificial mechanisation of individual human power. The state, which he called the “commonwealth”, was a mechanical device that operated according to an algorithm. In this sense, Hobbes was perhaps one of the first political philosophers to theorise the relationship between governance and technological rationality. Hobbes believed that this scientific method could prove the functions of the state that are invisible to the individual. We must formulate a hypothesis, calculate the results, and then compare them to the experimental results to determine the correctness. ![]() In a scientific experiment, we can’t directly see the laws of physics themselves. What was needed were the mathematical calculations that Galileo Galilei used to test physical laws. Not surprisingly, Hobbes’s solution was science. But the question remains: how do we know that the natural law is so? Only with knowledge can we rule through it. The problem was to prove the self-evidence of this social contract, and as is well known, Hobbes found the answer in the natural law of man’s desire to avoid death. In the age of science, when belief in a transcendent being called God had disappeared, the only thing that could bind individuals into a collectivity called a state was, for Hobbes, the promise of a social contract. Convincing individuals of the reality of the state is, therefore, a difficult task. We can never experience the state as an individual. ![]() It was a choice that would not have been possible if productivity had been considered. I was intrigued by the bourgeois desire to invest what would have been a tremendous amount of money at the time in machinery that was less productive than skilled labour. Interestingly then, what caught my eye were the gigantic, inefficient machines that seemed out of place in the rural landscape. The most important energy source for the steam engines that fueled the industrial revolution was waterpower, so the first factories were in rural areas. When I was studying in England, I once visited the site of the Industrial Revolution and was puzzled by it. ![]() Marx’s concept of “formal subsumption” in capital indicates nothing less than the mechanisation of the body, and the concept of “real subsumption” means the voluntary submission of the subject to this mechanisation. Machines were devices that demanded the transformation of the body. In the early days of capitalism, the bourgeois obsession with machines was well known. Of course, from a historical perspective, this push for automation is nothing new. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |