Quantcast
Channel: Poiesis and Prolepsis
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 124

Performance, Performative, Performativity and Neoliberalism

$
0
0
Barry McGee installation, 2005/2012, featuring an animatronic figure

A version of Act 1 of this text appeared in HEAT.

Act 1

The particular use that Lyotard makes of the term ‘performativity’ in The Postmodern Condition, i.e. that it is synonymous with ‘productivity’, does not seem to be a move that can be legitimated by reference to philosophy of language or indeed to cybernetics.

Within the cybernetic context itself, a similar reduction seems to be taking place to that which occurs with performativity-as-productivity. The suggestion is that cybernetics takes ‘control systems’ solely to be ‘systems of control’, with ‘control’ taken to mean ‘command and control’.

As Beatrice Fazi (2011) points out, cyberneticians must themselves be held partly responsible for this reduction. Wiener (1948) defined cybernetics as the study of Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. This definition has stuck, despite its meaning being contested throughout the history of cybernetics. Much of the suspicion towards cybernetics, Fazi continues, seems to derive from this tainted interest in achieving and preserving mechanisms of control.

However, as Fazi notes, Andrew Pickering (2010) examines a varied body of works in cybernetics that allow for a wider range of meanings of the term ‘control’. Thus, while post-war British cyberneticians are interested in control machines, the controlling exerted can be articulated as a means of adaptation, interaction or, in Gordon Pask’s terms, ‘conversation’ (Scott, 2001), i.e. a “form of reciprocally productive and open-ended exchange between two or more parties” (Pickering, 2010: 322).

From this point of view, Pickering claims, cybernetics would favour a sort of Heideggerian ‘revealing’, in contrast to the ‘enframing’ of traditional sciences, which seek to command and control, via knowledge, whatever the world has to offer (Fazi, 2011).

So, although Pickering does not dismiss the political importance of a critique of control, “the dystopian association of cybernetics with Big-Brotheresque agendas or panoptical projects is also refused” (Fazi, 2011), the attacks on cybernetics by some intellectual and artistic avant-gardes in the 1960s, for example, from the Situationist International, could be seen as deriving from the same misplaced understanding of control mechanisms, the validity of which Pickering is challenging. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, may equally be seen to partake in this limited understanding of ‘control’ as ‘command and control’.

For Pickering, cybernetic reality is always new and perpetually in a state of becoming. It is populated by entities that are entangled with the “endless performativity of matter” (Pickering, 2010: 289). Such a reality cannot possibly be captured by the representational capabilities of traditional epistemology, Pickering suggests.

Here is the very sense of ‘performativity’ that Lyotard might have derived from philosophy of language and from cybernetics, i.e. the sense of its being protean, beyond productivity and beyond control (in the narrow sense of command-and-control), while still yet being contextualised and contextualising.

Rather than ‘performativity', the topic of Lyotard’s critique are those modes of discourse and practice that narrow down performativity to productivity and which equate control with command-and-control.

Such discursive practices might go under the name of managerialism or corporatisation, or, more properly, of a managerialism and corporatisation of a particular era, that of post-World war Two Europe and America, which may indeed draw on resources available through philosophy of language and cybernetics, but not in any simple, direct or necessarily legitimate way.

What Lyotard seems to be striving to critique is the (prospective) corporatisation of the university, in which academic practice becomes labour or ‘work’ and therefore productive, and human resource management seeks to increase the productivity of that labour/work (Gulli, 2009: 98).

The language of ‘productivity’ is part of the corporate, managed university. The language of the ‘performative’ arose in the context of the the university as a place of and for learning, perhaps even disinterested learning. The reduction of performativity to productivity is performed, over time, through managerialism as discourse and field of practice (see Cassin and Buttgen (2010) for the beginnings of a discussion of the means by which such managerialism is implemented).

It is then a question of whether, by insisting on a more full (but not whole) sense of performativity and the ‘conversational’ or interactive nature of control, one is engaging in fantasising a Romantic past or indeed engaging in “a useless, if not politically dangerous, nostalgia” (Gulli, 2009: 95); or whether one is engaged in a kind of struggle, which is not simply an academic contest, as defined by Gulli:
“If capital asserts its sovereignty primarily by means of the logic and language of productivity, and if productivity is a central moment of the corporate university, fighting against it – through creative and caring labour – is ending the sovereign claim, the dominance of capital and property over labor and life, outlining a model of social justice.” (Gulli, 2009: 107)
If so, where does this restoration of the creative and caring dimensions of ‘performativity’, of the social bond, take place?

Act 2

Or, is one, by insisting on a fuller understanding of performativity and engaging in a critique of command and control, simply pursuing a neoliberal agenda, a political danger of another kind?

Given that this performative labour, as defined by Gulli, is not taking place within the ‘university without condition’ (Derrida, 2001), is it not open to the claim that it is itself a manifestation of the kind of (language) action and (cybernetic) activity promulgated and practised within neoliberalism?

For example, Philip Mirowski (2012) acknowledges that Pickering in The Cybernetic Brain does indeed paint a different picture of cybernetics compared to the standard one that describes, 
"an American enterprise dominated by military interests, arrayed around the computer and operations research, besotted with command and control, and suspended somewhere between RAND and MIT.”
However, Mirowski sounds a note of caution, when he argues that Pickering's favoured form of cybernetic thought is much more pervasive than Pickering seems to realise. Pickering’s decision to omit the computer from the narrative of The Cybernetic Brain may, indirectly and unintentionally, have served to divert attention from the ways in which cybernetics, although having failed as a science, lives on as a fundamental worldview, audible as the neoliberal background noise of late 20th century and early 21st century culture.

While Mirowski doubts that this is the sort of political takeaway Pickering had in mind, it is a possibility that must be seriously considered. Thus, Mirowski suggests, there is no more prominent social theorist of the "dance of agency" and “performativity”, Pickering’s terms, than Friedrich Hayek. For Hayek, scientific research is not about the production of knowledge. Rather, it is about the freedom of anyone to believe whatever we like in the marketplace of ideas. Furthermore, Mirowski informs us, Hayek's later thought depended directly on the specific cybernetic theoreticians discussed by Pickering, especially Ross Ashby. 

Mirowski outlines the similarities between the modern neoliberal indictment of what it deemed the irrationality of socialism and Pickering’s performativity, for example: 
  • the emphasis on complexity and the inability of any individual to know the phenomenon with any certainty; 
  • the insistence that systems of lesser complexity cannot control those of greater complexity; 
  • the existence of a plan far superior to anything that any individual can devise; 
  • the postulate of a scale-invariance of the information processor from inanimate object to brain to marketplace; and
  • the insistence that there is no such thing as society, by blurring the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. 
The brand of cybernetics advocated by Pickering does live on, Mirowski concludes, but in the sphere of social theory. While Pickering wants to praise a version of cybernetics that has somehow disavowed the will to power of much of modern science, and seeks to redress the critique of cybernetics as a science of control, this belief in lack of control of both social and natural phenomena did in fact find fertile ground among a contemporary cadre not covered in Pickering’s book: the neoliberal thought collective organized around the Mont Pèlerin Society.

References

Cassin, B. and Büttgen, P. (2010). The performative without condition: a university sans appel. Radical Philosophy, (162), pp.31–37. Available at: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-performative-without-condition.

Fazi, M.B. (2011). Cybernetics in action. Computational Culture, (November). Available at:http://computationalculture.net/review/cybernetics-in-action Accessed on 19 October 2013.

Derrida, J. (2001). The Future of the profession or the university without condition (thanks to the “humanities”, what could take place tomorrow). In Jacques Derrida and the humanities: a critical reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 24–57. 

Gullì, B. (2010). Earthly plenitudes: a study on sovereignty and labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mirowski, P. (2012). Minding the cybernetic gap: Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain. etc, (January). Available at: http://www.techculture.org/2012_jan/etc_mirowski.html.

Pickering, A. (2010). The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Scott, B. (2001). Gordon Pask’s conversation theory: a domain independent constructivist model of human knowing. Foundations of Science, 6(4), pp.343–360.

Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 124

Trending Articles