Was Michel Foucault a cybernetician?

A heretical thought popped in my head as I was reading, in parallel, two very different literatures: 1) Cybernetics, including Norbert Wiener’s excellent The Human Use of Human Beings, and 2) Michel Foucault’s genealogical writings on power and knowledge, including Discipline and Punish, the History of Sexuality, the Birth of Biopolitics, as well as his quasi-liberal late essays, including '“the Subject and Power” and “the Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.”

Are there not interesting parallels between the two literatures? Could we not even say that Foucault was a cybernetician? And could we not apply cybernetic language to Foucauldian themes? Yes, yes, and yes!

But what exactly is the connection? Is there any real link between cybernetics - defined by Wiener as “the study of control and communication” - and Foucauldian genealogy - defined as the study of historical “power-knowledge”? There are some obvious similarities: they both embody and inscribe anti-humanistic or post-humanistic languages that nonetheless betray, more often than not, barely concealed normative commitments for human values, social amelioration, and freedom. They both emphasize the complex relation between system and agency, understood in process-terms as the coupling, co-evolving, and network-formation between subjects, societies, and environments. Both Foucault and cybernetics emphasize not merely the communicative and the signifying, but also the regulative (i.e. controlling) function of knowledge, information, and wisdom. So, epistemic processes, ethical processes, and political processes are part of the same continuum of power-knowledge relations.

Indeed, one can draw a striking parallel between their core concepts:

Power — Control

Knowledge — Information

Subjectification — Agency

Surveillance — Monitoring & feedback

Discipline — Regulation

It may odd to appropriate Foucault as a pioneer of cybernetic thinking. Did he not only rarely refer to cybernetic theory? And did not the fellow French postmodernist Gilles Deleuze - an enthusiastic follower of systems theory and cybernetics - famously chastise Foucault in his 1992 paper, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” for not having paid sufficient attention to the rise of the post-disciplinary, cybernetic mechanisms of control? Yes, all of this is true. Foucault was certainly not the most cybernetic thinker or philosopher of the last century, at least not explicitly.

Nonetheless, this does not take away from Foucault’s many, many cybernetic echoes. And it definitely does not take away from Foucault’s imminent usefulness as a theorist of the power relations and ethical dimensions of cybernetic social systems. In light of this, it seems plausible to me to say that much of what Foucault was writing about had strong cybernetic components (whether intentional or not!). Consider the key Foucauldian concept of discipline. It can be analyzed as the set of cybernetic mechanisms whereby power is exercised over obedient bodies. Discipline…

• Regulates bodies: Discipline controls how people move, stand, and sit.

• Regulates time: Discipline organizes time into schedules and segments.

• Regulates space: Discipline organizes space through architecture, separation of private and public spaces, coordinated passages from school to home, etc.

This is very similar to how a cybernetic regulator, as defined by Wiener, Ashby, or Beer - or any of the other cyberneticians - operates. It sets the bounds of an equilibrium (a system’s target state) - against which abnormalities or deviations are measured through sensory monitoring, positive and negative feedback, and adaptation. The pertinent Foucauldian concept, here, is that of adaptive normalization: the establishment of principles of rectitude and rectification - whether on the level of the individual (as in ethical practices and micro-disciplinary practices), the group (as in disciplinary practices), or the population (as in biopower and population management) - that turn discourses into techniques of power (and vice versa). The emerging behaviour-discipline-normalization loop explains how “power-knowledge” relies on cybernetic feedback that permeates the whole social body - a very Foucauldian theme!

Nor is discipline the only aspect of Foucault’s work pertinent to cybernetic analysis. Consider his late career turn to the “care of the self.” Here, too, we see cybernetic dimensions. Again, what fascinated Foucault about self-care was how its ethical formulations (whether in antiquity, liberalism, military, communism, BDSM clubs, or spiritual traditions) sought to transforms the relationship between the agent, their desires, and their actions through rigorous practices of self-denial, self-correction, and self-improvement (what the Greeks called ascetic practices). In cybernetic terms, the ethics of self-care is dependent upon a subject-environment feedback loop. This feedback forms a self-reinforcing informational pathway, and thus self-regulatory mechanism, between one’s ideals and one’s actual behaviours (desires, preferences, etc.). This generates a reflexive self-self (bio)feedback loop. Failures to achieve one’s goals act as signals for self-correction and self-improvement, while the holistic ideal of a “good life” acts as a general organizing principle for one’s life. Self-care, thus - similar to discipline, pastoral power, biopower, etc. - exemplifies system regulation.

In all of this, Foucault shares the cyberneticians’ understanding of agency as the capacity to exercise one’s power as an underdetermined agent in the control-feedback loop (control mechanism) between the agent, other people, and one’s environment. The freedom of the individual becomes modelled, post-humanly, as the capacity (and willingness!) to play creative games within one’s networks, and thus to engage in the redistribution and transformation of power-knowledge in the society. Strikingly, for Foucault, just like for the cyberneticists, freedom is a regulatory concept; not something that stands in opposition to power, but as something that is both the effect of power and its cause. (In a line of argument that Spinoza and Nietzsche can approve of.) Since people are endowed with certain powers, they are never purely obedient; instead, they can be, and sometimes must be, deviant, experimental, dissident, and creative.

Finally, consider the following biographical facts unearthed by Vincent August:

• Foucault explicitly uses cybernetic concepts as early as the 1966 essay “Message or Noise?” that deals with the interpretation of disease symptoms by doctors.

• In the 60’s and 70’s, he continues to use cybernetic language, as when he argues that “the social” can be analyzed as “an assembly of codes and information”; or when he defines his methodology as the study of the “discontinuity and transformation” of “discourses” (aka., organized systems of code).

• He was directly inspired by the structuralists, as well as Canguilhem, whom were inspired by cybernetics. Via that indirect conduit, Foucault inherited many cybernetic notions, including those of “system” and “coding.”

• As Vincent August writes: “According to Foucault, the importance of Canguilhem’s work for a new generation of French researchers derived from him introducing this cybernetic vocabulary and, with it, a new perspective on the humanities and their history. Instead of viewing history as linear progress, and instead of attributing this knowledge to a sovereign subject, information theory helped to understand evolution and the history of knowledge as a contingent ‘game of codes and of decoding’.”

• Consider this passaged from Foucault: “Power functions, power is exercised [s’exerce] as a network, and in this network, individuals do not only circulate, they are always in a position in which they experience power as well as they exercise this power; […] they are always their relays.”

• In general, “Foucault argued for introducing cybernetic concepts of networks and systems, information, codes and communication into the analysis of language and discourse.” This strengthens the point that Foucault was methodologically a proto-cybernetician, or perhaps part-time crypto-cybernetician.

For more information, see: August, V. (2022). Network concepts in social theory: Foucault and cybernetics. European Journal of Social Theory, 25(2), 271-291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431021991046