The Cultural and Political Imaginary of Cybernetic Socialism

Abstract

The Cultural and Political Imaginary of Cybernetic Socialism Clemens Günther (bio) In recent years, we have seen a surge in research on Soviet cybernetics. Drawing on some earlier studies and Slava Gerovitch's seminal From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, researchers have substantiated the role of cybernetics as a key element in late Soviet epistemology.1 During the Thaw, cybernetics became an "intellectual, technical, and institutional resource for innovation and change" and one of the cornerstones of socialist governance.2 Through the computerization of economic planning and the production process, the government hoped to enhance the quality of decision making in various fields. In architecture, cybernetic modeling became one means for planning and designing the new Soviet city.3 In the humanities, cybernetics was a vital component for establishing the "Soviet Empire of Signs" and for the introduction of statistical methods in linguistics, art, and historiography.4 In environmental studies, cybernetic methods were [End Page 321] for the development of Soviet-style "earth system governmentality."5 These examples demonstrate the encompassing character of cybernetics and the interdisciplinarity of the field in which it thrived. Although not all Soviet cybernetics endeavors were successfully implemented, as Benjamin Peters's book about the failure of a Soviet Internet shows, they constituted a paradigm shift for postwar epistemology with consequences for all fields of society.6 Prior to its rise in the second half of the 1950s, cybernetics was condemned as a "science of obscurantists" (nauka mrakobesov) and as a pseudoscience (lzheteoriia) in the Soviet press.7 Cybernetic studies from the West were relegated to libraries and supporters of cybernetics expelled from institutes. The early Stalinist campaign against cybernetics not only exemplified the then obsessive condemnation of international cooperation and exchange but was also triggered by the fuzzy nature of cybernetics itself. In its early stage, cybernetics appeared to herald scientific and social change and implicitly challenged Soviet Marxism and its universalist claims. After Stalin's death, cybernetics became, in Gerovitch's words, "a vehicle of reform" and was officially rehabilitated in the Soviet Union.8 In his portrait of the intelligentsia during the Thaw, Vladislav Zubok holds that "more than any other branch of scientific exploration, cybernetics seemed to offer Soviet optimists a fresh and truly universal intellectual framework."9 The newly emerging discipline with its universalist, rational language provided an alternative to Stalinist dogmatism and rekindled the utopian promises of the early Soviet years that had been discredited during Stalinism. I argue that cybernetics was both a tool for changing and enlarging existing social structures and a means of imagining different social orders.10 [End Page 322] Building on such key principles of cybernetics as information, feedback, and rationality, writers and theoreticians challenged Soviet socialism and proposed "cybernetic socialism" as an alternative.11 The concepts and terms of cybernetics were used as a basis to develop alternative models of socialism and Soviet society. To this end, I want to look first at a play by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Candle in the Wind, which deals with social cybernetics, bio-cybernetics, and the moral obligations imposed by both.12 Next, I shift attention to Valentin Turchin's treatise The Inertia of Fear, a contribution to the political theory of cybernetics, which was published in the West in the late 1970s.13 These examples reveal the conceptual change that occurred in the 1960s and the diversity of the imaginative potential of cybernetic socialism. They stand paradigmatically for the establishment of a political imaginary [End Page 323] that was less concerned with criticizing individual weaknesses of the Soviet system than with the necessity of thinking about political processes against the background of new technologies. Although Solzhenitsyn's piece is a work of fiction and Turchin's a theoretical treatise, both are united by the impulse to create a new idea of the political through the idea of "social cybernetics" (Solzhenitsyn) or "cybernetic socialism" (Turchin). The Political Imaginary of Cybernetics To understand the rise of cybernetics during the Thaw, it is important to note that more than the sober rationality of mathematics and computation made intellectuals embrace cybernetics. Perhaps even more importantly, cybernetics set free an imaginative surplus for utopian fantasies. This may seem paradoxical at first sight, considering...