[P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means
Sy
sytaffel at riseup.net
Wed Jun 1 15:26:33 CEST 2011
I've just been blogging about the 2nd part of All Watched Over By
Machines of Loving Grace (Adam Curtis's new documentary)...
http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/the-use-and-abuse-of-cybernetic-concepts-where-part-two-of-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace-went-wrong/
Generally I quite like Adam Curtis's documentaries. I admire the fact
that at a time where expository documentaries presenting wide scale
socio-cultural arguments are hugely out of fashion he makes films which
probe big issues around power, politics and history. I hugely enjoy the
aestheitc of his work, the heavy usage of archival material to visually
illustrate the points the narration makes. In All Watched Over by
Machines of Loving Grace I also particularly enjoyed the soundtrack (it
was mainly a collection of Nine Inch Nails material) which combined
excellently with the visual material to provide an affectively potent
piece of media.
However while I found the argument made in part one of the documentary
to be somewhat partial and lacking, I was immensely disappointed by the
contents of the second part. The central argument the documentary makes
is that from the 1950?s onwards there was a movement which began with
cybernetics and sought to reduce humans to mere nodes in complex
networks of matter and energy rather than following the enlightenment
view that humans were distinct from the rest of the world, and unlike
the determinate automatons of nature, that humans and humans alone
possessed free will. Curtis appears to regard this idea as a dangerous
proposition which de-emphasised the sanctity of individualism, and which
undermines analyses of power and politics presenting instead the notion
that systems can self-organise without a command and control hierarchy
being in place.
Now the first thing which is crucial to point is that the Enlightnement
view of humans as being ontologically distinct from the rest of the
natural world as championed by Curtis is of course complete nonsense. It
is based on on the nature/culture dualism which has roots in
monotheistic theology and has no basis in fact. The notion which stemmed
from the cyberneticists that humans, other living creatures, and
machines could be understood as complex systems governed by circular
causality -- that is, feedback -- is not a dangerous ideological myth,
it is factually correct. The utility of the cybernetics movement, and
indeed the disciplines which grew out of it such as systems biology,
complexity theory, autopoiesis, connectionist AI, cognitive sciences etc
all did so because the basic premises that feedback is a crucial process
in dynamic systems was correct.
One of the places where Curtis goes hopelessly wrong was his definition
of feedback. Curtis explored negative, or self corrective feedback,
which was one of the two types of feedback loop discovered by the
cyberneticists but completely omits positive feedback from the film.
While the majority of the early cybernetics was dominated by issues
around reducing noise through negative feedbacks, positive feedback has
played a crucial role in contemporary understandings of how change
occurs in dynamic systems, particularly within the domains of chaos
theory, complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics. Indeed, current
understandings of open systems, systems which are dynamically balanced
at a point far from equilibrium, and maintain this dynamic balance
through taking in flows of energy (such as food for many living systems)
are largely predicated on knowledge which can be traced back to
cybernetics. Yet Curtis's film fails to mention anything about this.
Probably because it totally undercuts the narrative he portrays. What
makes this ironic is that while claiming that the natural world is too
complex for the analyses derived from cybernetics to provide useful
models, we see images of swarming creatures to illustrate this argument.
Swarming is of course an emergent behaviour which can be simulated and
replicated using just three very simple rules; 1) Keep moving in the
same direction as your neighbours 2) Keep close to your neighbours 3)
Avoid colliding with your neighbours. This is a classic example of the
kind of self-organisation which Curtis is trying to argue does not occur.
Similarly Curtis goes on to argue that unlike humans, who have free will
and so can make choices, machines are purely determinate automatons,
whose every action can be predicted. Which is true of many kinds of
simple, linear and closed machines. But which is clearly not true of
cellular automata, artificial neural networks or other systems which are
based on emergence. Presumably the reason these types of system are not
mentioned is that they would undercut the nature/culture dualism Curtis
seeks to maintain which imbues humans with special properties not found
elsewhere in the universe.
While the majority of the film presenting a very misleading picture of
the legacy of cybernetics, the final section then deals with alleged
examples of contemporary self-organising systems and protest movements.
Which was so utterly woeful that it actually made the rest of the film
appear competent. I was expecting to see the Zapatistas, the alternative
globalisation movement, the Peoples Global Assembly, the World Social
Forum or a range of other organisations who have organised in
non-hierarchical ways to present a political alternative to the
discredited radical politics of Leninist vanguardism, whereby a small
elite violently seizes power in order to then create an egalitarian
democracy. The motivation behind the movements which have used these
types of democratic, grassroots organisation to mobilise pro-democracy
movements has largely been to organise in a way that reflects the kind
of politics a group seeks to achieve, rather than to attempt to create
an egalitarian society via dictatorship.
So what did Curtis have to say about this? Sadly the answer was nothing.
Instead of focussing on the methods of these types of movement we
instead were told that the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine was an
example of self-organisation and a leaderless nonhierarchical movment.
The Orange movement was in fact a movement heavily funded by groups such
as the US State Department, who according to the Guardian had spent $67
million in the Ukraine in the two years before the disputed Presidential
run off. It was a 'leaderless' 'self-organising' movement which was
centred around trying to get one particular corrupt political candidate,
Viktor Yuchenko, elected over a rival, corrupt political candidate,
Viktor Yanukovich. Largely it was a struggle between the western half of
the country, aided by western governments who wanted Yuchenko to prevail
pitted against the eastern half of the country and Russia who wanted
Yanukovich to prevail. In other words it had nothing to do with
spontaneous self-organisation, non-hierarchy or systems thinking. It was
a great example of corrupt politics as usual.
The only reason I can muster for Curtis to use such a ridiculously awful
example to illustrate the point is that using a more relevant example
would have undercut the epic narrative he sought to explicate. Which
ultimately is a big part of why the kind of grand narrative based
expository documentary is so out of fashion, while its easy to make a
compelling argument based on affective manipulation through audiovisual
means, an hour (or even three one hour parts) just isn't enough time to
really explore complex issues in any amount of depth. Which means that
documentary filmmakers end up creating narratives which are hugely
misleading, which is exactly what Curtis does here.
Sy Message: 2 Date: Tue, 31 May 2011 01:23:03 -0400 From: Samuel Rose
<samuel.rose at gmail.com> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] How the 'ecosystem' myth
has been used for sinister means To: Michel Bauwens
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list
<p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>, "Paul B. Hartzog"
<paulbhartzog at gmail.com>, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> Message-ID:
<BANLkTimhtVSc=tymvo=O8f9dORtVBDH3+w at mail.gmail.com> Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 I made it out alive. We lost power for a
couple of days. I just sent a response even before I read this request
that I send a response :) As such, my response was not all that great.
On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 1:40 AM, Michel Bauwens
<michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Sam,
> >
> > I hope you survived the tornado?
> >
> > I hope some of our participants can react to this very interesting challenge
> > from Adam Curtis in the Guardian,
> >
> > Michel
> >
> > On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Kevin Flanagan<kev.flanagan at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> How the 'ecosystem' myth has been used for sinister means - Adam
>> >> Curtis - Guardian
>> >>
>> >> When, in the 1920s, a botanist and a field marshal dreamed up rival
>> >> theories of nature and society, no one could have guessed their ideas
>> >> would influence the worldview of 70s hippies and 21st-century protest
>> >> movements. But their faith in self-regulating systems has a sinister
>> >> history
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/29/adam-curtis-ecosystems-tansley-smuts
>> >>
>> >> Episode 1 of his current documentary is up on youtube
>> >>
>> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5jImWRREc
>> >>
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> P2P Foundation - Mailing list
>> >> http://www.p2pfoundation.net
>> >> https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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> >
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> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
-- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation
Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email:
samuel.rose at gmail.com http://futureforwardinstitute.com
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