Daniel Nemenyi: "Cybernetics and Snake Coils"
24. Juni
18:00 Uhr, C40.530
"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 paper 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 that continue to emerge today.
Attendees are asked to read Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on Control Societies' (1990) and the corresponding question and answer from Deleuze's conversation with Toni Negri, 'Control and Becoming' (1990) [download here].
Daniel Nemenyi is a Gastwissenschaftler of the Disruptive Condition research initiative.
Language: English