Communication & Control: Haraway's investigation of the shift from psychobiology to sociobiology

As part of my ongoing research I have been investigating the interplay of communication and control, or put differently, information transfer and power. I’ve previously attempted to tie this connection through Foucault, Nitzan and Bichler, and Marx (picking up with Warren Weaver’s paradigmatic mathematical move to noise/information and channel capacity) . In a fairly obvious way power is generated by capital, or is a hologram of capital’s effects, and for example, capital is increasingly generated through diffuse markets (securitization of exotic financial instruments, etc.) and the information flows of global capital in Information Communication Technologies such as the Internet. This shift can probably be articulated in a number of ways: in a rough and quick manner I’ve previously tried to articulate the history from a critical economic perspective, and I’ve had my eye on a metaphysical theory for years (perhaps premised on notions of entropy?). As part of the Twitter-based philosophy of technology reading group I’ve spearheaded, our reading of Donna J. Hawaray’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women has led me to think more directly with the post-WWWII shift to communication theory in all its guises. Haraway argues that the shift from psychobiology to sociobiology was due to the “communications revolution”. To wit (at length),

The communications revolution changed the strategy of control from organism to system, from eugenics to population management, from personnel management to organization structures (sociotechnical systems and ergonomics) based on operations research. A communications revolutions means a re-theorizing of natural objects as technological devices properly understood in terms of mechanisms of production, transfer, and storage of information. Changes in the technology of actual communications systems provided part of the material foundation of fundamental scientific reformulations. War and problems of military management encouraged new developments in science. Operations research began with the Second World War and efforts to co-ordinate radar devices and information about enemy position in a total or systems way, which conceived of the human operator and the physical machinery as the unified object of analysis. Statistical models were increasingly applied to problems of simulation and prediction for making key decisions. After the way, the explosive development of electronics industries and communications technology was increasingly tied to strategies of social and military planning to devise and manage stable systems organized around several axes of variation. Knowledge about range of variation and interaction effects among classes of variables replaced concerns for individual states. The computer, a communications machine, both effected and symbolized new strategies of control. … Let us grant that communications means control—-but for what?

Donna J. Haraway,Simians, Cyborgs, and Women(Routledge, 1991).

Comments

[Heresiarch]

Applying sociobiological thinking to human societies is a perilous undertaking. But the sociobiology of the New World Order must be revealed!!