Cybernetics and Snake Coils

• 24. Jun., 6:00 pm
• C40.530
• The event is a cooperation between the Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and the research

"A snake's coils are even more intricate than a mole's burrow." This talk will offer a new reading of the concluding sentence from Gilles Deleuze's 'Postscript on Societies of Control' (1990), a short text which established for many the basis for theorising power in what today might be called the 'digital age'. It will touch on Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's reading of Deleuze's notoriously cryptic remark, before suggesting a structuralist account of the relation between snakes and the ancient Greek kybernetes, the helmsman after which cybernetics was named by Norbert Wiener. Far from being a throwaway line, as has been claimed, this talk hopes to demonstrate Deleuze's sensitivity to the classical snakiness of cybernetics, especially according to Wiener's account of it, and of modes of governing and resistance that continue to emerge today.

Dr. Daniel Nemenyi is a Guest Scientist on The Disruptive Condition research project at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, having recently completed a fellowship at the Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS). He works on the philosophy of Norbert Wiener and is currently researching the kybernetes of ancient Greece, the pilot of ships, after whom Wiener named cybernetics. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University in 2019.