Remarks to the participants of the Incredible Machines 2014 Conference, March 8, 2014
1) The political problem is how to constitute ourselves into a collective agent capable of maximising our individual freedoms by way of its collective freedom. Plato on Justice. For artists: we must construct the state as a work of art.
2) The functional structure of such a collective agent demands differentiation of social roles, or the division of labour. Importantly, this includes a differentiation of cognitive labour. There can be no effective system of collective decision makas technocracy should be interpreted as opposed to meritocracy, which is a form of division of labour that is functionally indifferent to class, even if it isn’t founded upon it. Moreover, I want to suggest that continuing development in information technology will enable us to approach both of these ideals.
4) Heidegger’s important insight about action is that most of what we do is not the result of practical reasoning, but merely the exercise of practical heuristics for coping with our environment that we have either habitually developed or learned more or less implicitly from the behavioural niches that structure the patterns of action and interaction constitutive of the culture we find ourselves in. Put differently: we compensate for limited cognitive resources by solving practical problems through distributed social cognition, producing shared solutions to common practical problems. ing that does not involve both systems of technical specialisation and administrative specialisation, or roles for experts whose special authority corresponds to a responsibility assessed in terms of particular epistemic and practical capacities (normative parity).
3) I want to discuss the intersection of two different political ideals that place constraints upon possible answers to the political problem: the ideal of technocracy and the ideal of classless society. These are usually taken to be incompatible, insofar as technocracy is often interpreted as rule by a class of experts, and thus as opposed in principle both to democracy and to the dissolution of class. I want to argue that not only are they compatible, but that they are mutually supportive, insofar
5) Foucault’s advance on Heidegger is to show how this sort of social cognition is itself socially differentiated. Heidegger simply talks about a single reservoir of practical heuristics or ‘world’, but it’s clear that there can be different overlapping ‘worlds’ belonging to social groups individuated by common practices and lifestyles.
6) Given this, I think we can treat classes as socio-cognitive systems that distributively solve practical problems that are common to, or jointly shared by groups whose economic proximity is sufficient to establish information channels between them, through which patterns of behaviour can be propagated and incrementally adjusted, both implicitly and explicitly. One of the effects of this distributed process is the production of default solutions for various problems, and importantly, a variety of stable lifestyle niches or implicit social roles. To use the Foucauldian term, these are systems of subjectivation through which certain sorts of expertise is transmitted and conserved.
7) The idea is thus that classes are an integral if implicit part of the process through which labour is divided up, though the parameters they work within are set by the relations between classes constitutive of the society as a whole.
This is to say that they enable the generation of more differentiated roles (e.g., shop owner, factory worker, doctor, etc.) within the broader economic niches they occupy (e.g., white collar, blue collar, professional, etc.), as well as the subjectivation of individuals who can fill these roles.
8) In contrast to this, we can also identify explicit aspects of the process of labour division, most obviously centralised political and legal frameworks formalising implicit roles, but also including the professional, pedagogical, and research institutions that engender and assess various forms of expertise (e.g., licensing bodies, schools, and universities). Although it is obvious that these institutions are often integral parts of the class system (e.g., Oxbridge in the UK), and thus reproduce the stratified privileges associated with them, it is only through explicitness that these irrationalities can be overcome.
9) This brings us to the ideal of technocracy. Rather than thinking of technocracy as preserving a privileged place for a pre-constituted class of technicians, we should think of it as prescribing maximal explicitness not only in the process of dividing labour amongst pre-constituted individuals, but also in the processes of subjectivation through which these individuals are constituted as able to occupy these social roles. The latter clause is what sets technocracy apart from meritocracy, which only concerns the optimal division of labour amongst subjects whose capacities are already constituted, making it blind to the structural inefficiencies that class systems inject into the political process. If we view technocracy in this way, then we can see that it coincides with the ideal of classlessness, insofar as it aims to overcome all implicit systems of social differentiation that impede the rationalisation of the functional structure of society.
10 ) So, the final question is what does this have to do with the mechanisation of knowledge production? Well, the loose hypothesis I wish to propose is that the increasing penetration of information technology into everyday life offers us the opportunity to break down the informational barriers that make classes into more or less closed socio-cognitive economies. This is to say that it gives us the resources to move from implicit to explicit forms of social cognition, in which our ability to offer one another options for action increases exponentially. This is something we already see in the proliferation of open source software and creative commons media, but it must be ideally be extended to the whole of human practical endeavour, so that rather than reducing the variation in occupations permissible in an egalitarian society, we remove the cognitive hurdles that make these occupations inaccessible to those of differing socio-economic backgrounds. (SOCIO-COGNITIVE PLATFORMS)