Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic

by Seb Franklin

An examination of digitality not simply as a technical substrate but also as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity. Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control , Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the “information economy” possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, Franklin names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, Franklin locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.

Genres: Philosophy

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2015

Reviews

[Roger Whitson · Rating 3 out of 5]

See my review here: http://www.rogerwhitson.net/?p=3608

[Arno · Rating 4 out of 5]

exactly something I've been looking for quite some time..

[Ana Peraica]

Departing from classic pieces of post-structuralism, Deleuze's concept of the societies of control, Foucault's biopolitics, but also contemporary writers in information theory, posthumanism, as Alex Galloway, Manuel Castells and others, Franklin proceeds to funding theory of digitality as control itself. To explain what digitality, according to him is, Franklin crosses various academic fields: system philosophy, economics, cybernetics, media studies, visual studies, as well as literary studies, being his main field. Being an episteme of contemporary age, rather than a concept, digitality in Franklin's analysis exemplifies even where there are no computers, as digitality is rather a model, or better a paradigm, of segregation, atomization, and fragmentation of data. As such, digitality exists in systems that are not digital in their nature, as for example biological and social ones. So, biological material is digitized by research in logics of behavior, while labor and collectivity are digitized by economical and social management. Defining digitality as system, Franklin arrives at the concept of control that falls in his main focus. He defines control as "logical basis of a worldview that imbricates literal practice of computation, the organizational and infrastructural concepts these practices facilitate, and metaphors derived from the electronic digital computer and its processes with a system of value production that can produce profit only by exploiting and dispossessing human life" (p. xxiii), connecting emergence binary logical calculus and cybernetics to economic game theories, all emerging around WWII. The origin of cybernetics, as related to war circumstances, itself already carried the discourse of the enemy. Pulse code modulation (PCM), invented around the same time by Bell laboratories, lead to digitalization of analogue to digital signal, i.e. sampling followed by quantizing. Such a system has defined the inner logic of limitation and exclusion. Finally, development of binary logic has lead to computability that is a control of operation. Control systems based on these discoveries have evolved till nowadays, reaching the point of society known as high stadium of capitalism, control era capitalism or information capitalism, in which a quality is exchanged for quantity. Such society is itself information based and in its nature immaterial and cognitive, as following the abstract logic of capital. Digitizing labor, producing discrete and fragmentary line-up in work, society of control organized through self-regulation, distribution, and statistical forecasting, by socioeconomic modeling and bureaucratic management, creates a divided subject, or "dividual." Dividual is a smallest division unit of society of control, being almost an automaton fully controlled by various digitized systems. Imposing logic of computers on human life, as more than a metaphor, and strengthening Marxist argument of alienation, Franklin analyses a tense relationship among computers with social organizations and human behavior, knowledgably fusing different theories and disciplines to underline dangers of contemporary society. Providing enough of historical information and context to understand tight connection of histories of science, technology and culture, in their joined program of strengthening of control, Control—Digitality as Cultural Logic, is, precisely for its introductions with explanations of various theories of control, a good introductory reading to ideas and theories of posthumanism, based on history of cybernetics.
****
This review was originally published with Leonardo
https://www.leonardo.info/review/2016...