Beyond the Regulation Approach
A book by the leading English-language regulationist, Bob Jessp, with co-author Ngai-Ling Sum, focusing on the characterization of Fordism, its breakdown and ways to characterize the period "after Fordism" in its qualitative differences, particularly due to the fully global and therefore, multicivilizational dimensions of the new regime of accumulation.
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back in vienna
hello brian
did you see this message above? it shows that your french provider really does block my email and it is a persistent problem. I have now wtritten to them as well as my own provider in vienna and I hope they do something about it.
but anyway, I am back in vienna and relaunch my working activity after a blissful week in the mountains
best
armin
mail bounce message
brian
It is quite amazing, my email bounced again
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speak after 22nd when I am back
best
armin
Fischer Black and Marvin Minsky
"My initial feeling was that those environments, based on 'software' agents and on Darwinistic assumptions, had incorporated an invisible hand ideology into their very set-up. so those systems were tautological: independent autopieteic systems - software agents - are competing in a 'rugged fitness landcape' to provide evidence that resource allocation works best if independent agents compete in rugged fitness landscapes without a superstructure of rules."
Yeah, exactly, that's exactly it. That's also the conclusion of Philip Mirowski in his horribly long book Machine Dreams, by the way- it ends with exactly those bots you're talking about. Along the same lines, I recently learned that Fischer Black - of the Black-Scholes formula for derivatives - was a student of Marvin Minsky! Worked on artificial intelligence for RAND and everything. This is indeed the direction that the mainstream of the "period style" seems to go in... along with a whole bunch of cognitive science that provides many other applications outside of finance. You're right that Prigogine fits somewhat obliquely into all that and I wish I could characterize how, but I don't have enough knowledge. It may be that the whole "second-order" side, stemming from Varela, is oblique to the mainstream artificial intelligence/cognitive science establishment - oblique but important, because the complexity theories really did become important in the 90s. So anyway, I totally agree, there is a ton left to do, unfortunately most of it is way over my head in terms of math.
Just to push this one point a bit further: in the case of the theory of derivatives as in the case of these darwinistic software agents, what's being proposed is very ambiguous as far as I can tell, it is something like the behaviorist cybernetics I was describing before. Derivatives only make money because a specific formula and software agent is able to beat the odds, and even able to partially restructure the environment on which it is exerting its parasitical force; BUT the whole theory of derivatives rests on the idea of general equilibrium, and the formulas only make sense because they are based on a long run of market statistics that reaches back till just after the Great Depression... ie they are based on a data-set that does not include a major, system-changing downturn. Similarly the price-discovery bots are supposed to prove the existence of the Walrasian auctioneer, which is the (entirely theoretical) key function of general equilibrium theory. And all this Walrasian economics is characteristic of the Fordist period of state planning. It seems that in order to emerge in the economic realm, these kinds of autonomous/antagonistic systems have to refer to older conceptions of a stable totalizing system. I don't know if one would uncover a similarly ambiguous relationship in other realms of second-order cybernetics but it is definitely there in finance.
I will see if you're around on Skype to talk about this seminar plan.
Best, BH
organisational things
Hi Brian
yes, maybe the first email that bounced was sent to your wannado adress but this time not. and yes, lets blame the French, good British habit ;-)
A self organised seminar would be a good thing. I am not sure if we can do it so quickly, I guess it depends if we can match our schedules.
I will be in London from 9th till 27th of January, then in Vienna, till early March, then three weeks in March again (for that I havent booked my flight yet, but I have to be there at a certain time as I am teaching art theory at Goldsmith as a stand-in for my supervisor to earn my fees for the coming year; it will be interesting to see how those media art MFA students will react to 'paradigms et al').
I think also we have a need for data visualisations; my own attempts so far did not get very far; I am sureI would get somewhere in the long term but that would mean weeks and weeks of trying to learn making graphics using PHP and I just dont have that time. So I am trying to get this guy on board who programmed this http://www.logicaland.net/
you can create yourself an account and try it out; it is based on a world simulation from the 1970s, maybe it has to do with Forrester. The person who programmed this is a very nice guy here in Vienna, Michael Aschauer, called ash. I wouldnt want him to do such complex things as on this web project, simple static graphs would be enough, but I like his minimalistic style and he is an interesting character.
The way you mapped out here the 'chaotic' phase is a good start, but it also shows that a lot of stuff is still to be done. For instance, I don't think it is right to say that Prigogine is the culmination of second order cybernetics. As far as I know it is related but came from a different paths, via thermodynamics and with some link to Bertalanffy. So this type of systems theory is very different from, lets say, Luhmann's system theory. What is right to say is that already by the mid to late 1980s 'complexity' was the new buzzword and that by the mid 1990s it became canonical. In that time I also read a lot about it and also organised a conference in Munich. My initial feeling was that those environments, based on 'software' agents and on Darwinistic assumptions, had incorporated an invisible hand ideology into their very set-up. so those systems were tautological: independet autopieteic systems - software agents - are competing in a 'rugged fitness landacape' to provide evidence that resourca allocation works best if independet agents compete in rugged futness landscapes without a superstructure of rules. At the time I was not far enough to develop my gut feeling into a text. N katrin hayles book wasnt out - although it also does not provide all the answers and I think sara kember did some work on software agents, but I think yes, you are right, the relationships that you are pointing at form a major paradigm which at the time looked, for many people, totally convincing. It has lost some of its shine but is not overcome yet. Back then, when I organised this little conf in Munich, we had some of the key artifical life and bottom-up robotics people, such as tom ray and luc steels. They looked at me like I was from Mars when I explained in the introduction that their models were neo-liberal; and nobody spoke to me later at the dinner ;-)
I had another phase of engagement between 2002 and 2004 with a failed text which never got published, but I think it is really worthwhile to show how here ideology and science come together in the leading paradigm of information capitalism.
I agree with you that sadly. a real rethink has not happened yet. However, this paradigm has come to an end and that should make it easier for us to grasp it theoretically.
so much for now, need to turn to some works I have to do before I can go on holiday
best
armin
Chaotic post-Fordism
Armin, your comments here indicate very well what can be added to the Regulation School. Of course I think it is important to reiterate both their work and that of the "technological paradigm" authors, in order to have a more solid understanding than either of us, or, I suppose, any media or art critic has. In fact I am now trying to get a better grip on the details of the Regulation School so as to provide some definitions for the various primary categories that we have established so far (they are sprawling, but as a file system they would be far more ordered than, say, the "resources" registry in my own files, which is just authors' names...). Nonetheless, the originality of the research that people like ourselves could do would clearly lie in the domains of art, media and cultural critique. It would be great if we could find some economists, sociologists or historians of technology who would like to add original elements in those specific domains, but it is certain that much can be gained for cultural critique by the extrapolation of period logics a la Sohn-Rethel, whether in their clean, paradigmatic forms or in the kind of "messy" historical forms that I tried to get at in the post to iDC. In these past weeks I have done two conceptual pieces, Into Information! and the work on the Bauhaus, and I think both give some indications of how much this understanding of a techno-logic can inform cultural critique. I am very curious to see what other people are going to do with this stuff!
If the funding isn't happening then I say let's self-organize a meeting in late January/ early February, eiither in Vienna, London or Paris, depending on what's most practical. By the way, sorry about the email, are you sure you didn't send to my old wanadoo address? I used to have some problems with that one, but maybe I have the same problems with this new one, I think the French servers are not spam-protected in the right ways for some other ASs....
Concerning the chaotic post-Fordism: for a long time, my hypothesis has been that an initial, first-order, command-and-control paradigm of cybernetics was applied widely in the years 1945-70, particularly as a management model for stocks and flows, as in the work of Jay Wright Forrester: Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, World Dynamics (the latter being basis of the famous Club of Rome report, Limits to Growth). All of those are books he wrote developing computer simulation techniques for logistical purposes in the industrial, urban and global-ecological scales. This is the hardcore of the MIT computing complex, in the Cold War period of SAGE, SABRE, etc, which Edwards describes so well in his book Closed World. SAP would be the German offshoot of this kind of stuff. In my hypothesis, this sort of computer-logic provides a basis for understanding the mind-set of the postwar mega-corporation, whether automobiles, nuclear power, Boeing, the World Bank or anything on that level. The strategic domain at this time is obviously dominated by game theory which also proceeds by totalizing computer simulations. The classic political science figure seems to be Karl Deutsch (ha ha, he is of Hungarian origin, emigrated to the US of course). Of course, ALL OF THAT PERSISTS. Deutsch's notion of the security community is still a major concept in international relations, now more than ever. On the industrial level I just met some economists in Paris who are the specialists of JW Forrester's work in France, the guy assured me that in reality, that's all there is, the totality of society is covered by such reasoning and it is applied everywhere. Which is exactly what the claim was....
I don't believe that claim, of course not. From the early seventies onward, under the prime influence of Maturana and Varela, relayed and mathematically formalized by Heinz von Foerster, a new paradigm emerges, called second-order cybernetics. As far as I can tell it culminates theoretically with Stenders and Prigogine's work, but there is a difficult relationship here with the development of cognitive science that I am only just beginning to grasp. Anyway, there is clearly a break and a "period shift" in styles of thinking, beginning around 1970 and leading to the vogue of chaos and complexity theories which reach the business management textbooks in the 1990s and probably apply quite a lot to financial market strategies. Deleuze and Guattari can be read as a marginal and critical current of this much wider development. I tried to sum up the pervasiveness of this second-order thinking and its "period logic" in a couple (very approximate) paragraphs from my text on the Schizoanalytic Cartographies:
--The 1980s were the inaugural decade of neoliberalism, which brought new forms of financialized wealth-creation and motivational management into play, alongside the militaristic technologies of surveillance and control that had been inherited from the Cold War. A vast expansion of the semiotic economy – that is, the economy of images and signs, detached from any referent in reality – gave immense powers to those who could manipulate mathematical models of behavior and shape new environments on the basis of their analyses and simulations. The theories of complexity and chaos were highly productive at the end of the twentieth century. They restructured the terrains that emancipatory movements would have to occupy and radically alter, in order to bring forth singular desires from cracks in the dominant paradigm.
--Here I want to rapidly list some of these theories, just to give an impression of the times, without inquiring into Guattari’s specific knowledge of each development. In 1979 the American economist W. Brian Arthur began a series of investigations that would revolutionize general equilibrium theory, which traditionally held that overproduction would always be corrected by falling prices. He proposed instead that the positive feedback of rising sales could lead to new investment, spiraling growth and increasing returns on production, particularly in industries based on unlimited knowledge rather than on scare material resources.30 In other words, there would be no necessary limit to profitability. Fifteen years later, Arthur and the complexity theorists of the Santa Fe school would become the gurus of the “new economy.” Also in the course of the 1980s, news began filtering back to the USA and Europe of the Japanese kanban or “just in time” production system, which reoriented the automobile industry from the “push” of demand forecasts to the “pull” of actual sales, tabulated at market and relayed instantly back to the factory.31 These information flows would at last begin providing real-time numbers for the computer modeling of feedback loops in industrial production, pioneered in the 1960s by the American engineer Jay Wright Forrester.32 The prestige of Japanese methods was accompanied by the exportation and adaptation of kaizen management techniques, which demanded the active implication of workers as shop-floor inventors and problem-solvers. In the West, this would lead to a new emphasis on “human capital” and to major investments in the analysis and modeling of psychological and relational processes for the improvement of productivity.33 Every aspect of society had to be retooled for quick response to market signals. The subjection of industrial workers to rigid disciplinary models, codified by Frederick Taylor in the early twentieth century, would gradually be replaced by the subjectivation of prosumers seduced into action by the new possibilities of miniaturized, ergonomic technologies.
--The late 1980s were the golden age of junk bonds, which helped inflate the unprecedented stock market bubble of 1987. As in recent times, one could witness the radical constructivism of human beings interacting directly with their own symbolic creations (stocks, bonds, derivatives). During this same period, the fractal geometry of Benoît Mandelbrot with its proportional transitions from micro to macro scales – which had been used to define the expansive characteristics of “smooth space” in A Thousand Plateaus – began to be adopted by traders as a way to chart the contours of turbulence in the computerized financial markets.34 Interpretations of postmodern society multiplied along with “exotic” financial instruments. As the geographer Nigel Thrift has shown in a brilliant essay, chaos and complexity theories began to circulate as a new kind of governmental logic (or governmentality) in the the course of the 1990s.35 Already by 1992, Brian Arthur could write: “Steering an economy with positive feedbacks into the best of its many possible equilibrium states requires good fortune and good timing – a feel for the moments when beneficial change from one pattern to another is most possible. Theory can help identify these states and times, and it can guide policymakers in applying the right amount of effort (not too little but not too much) to dislodge locked-in structures.”36 The most sophisticated versions of chaos theory and second-order cybernetics were immediately applicable to the turbulent developments of the post-industrial economy.
***
Basically what emerges from the 80s onward is the awareness that the world is full of self-generating, "autopoietic" systems, that these are all partially opaque to each other and moreover that their influence on each other means that they all periodically go through phase changes in a more or less chaotic way (certainly, without the full knowledge of inputs and causal chains that could be claimed for totalizing systems). The capacity to react to changes is what makes Just-In-Time so important, it's a whole industrial logic of the short, differentiated series that is at stake. On the strategic level what becomes decisive are the outcomes of crisis, the power that can use a crisis to restructure the game in its favor is the dominant power and that's the history of the US since the end of Bretton Woods. We live in this stuff, we swim in it everyday, and almost no-one understands it, which is a bit tragic. Moreover, I THINK WE'RE ON THE CUSP OF A NEW SHIFT, where the "period logic" will change once again, in a way that has yet to be determined by the input of the people involved (theoretically, all of us, but don't get too excited...). I reckon it will take a while for a real change in thinking to come about, because as far as I can see the speculative economy is gonna be rebooted and we will probably have an even bigger financial crisis in a couple years, so we are gonna have time to work on this, even as the new social struggles unfold and make it all increasingly urgent....
best, warmly, Brian
cybernetic Fordism
Hi,
allowing myself to be contradictory - saying in my earlier comment we should move towards more structure but now adding something here of which I am not quite sure it belongs exactly here - I am starting with this long quote from Brian on IDC:
I agree that this would be a good starting point for looking at the long wave with with an expansionary tendency from ca 1948 till 1971/3, therefore this title of 'Cybernetic Fordism', and trying to elaborate on the fly on this idea by Sohn-Rethel that a certain mode of production, a certain stage of the development of the means of production and the related social relationships together perform a certain synthesis across societies which, for any given period, would allow a 'certain logic' to develop - which S-R means quite literal as in logic as an area of science and which I would like keep as well as open up a bit more, we could ask what comes after that? I think it has a lot to do with chaos theory, itself a child of the early sixties, and then the concurrent development of systems theory (Prigogine) and artificial life and related fields of bottom-up robotics. Thus, a hot-spot for this aspect of the Post-Fordist paradigm would be the Santa Fe institute and the research carried out there into multi-agent systems. One could claim that ruling classes discovered that unlike during Fordism, not everything had to be controlled directly, that atoms could dance more freely at the edges, that they could even combine and link up to form molecules and molecular revolutions but that this freedom at the edges was more than conquered by the centrality of the financial markets which used the same artificial life agents to model financial markets; one of the first sponsors of Santa Fe was Citicorp. So, could we form a nicer term than 'chaotic postFordism' an what would be the research programme for this era: I think Brian has mapped out Cybernetic Fordism already quite well, but this other period from ca 1971 till 1991-93 which was a period of contraction in core countries, or of slow and uneven growth - see Goldstein's updated text which Brian posted - has not yet found such a clear shape while we are already entering a new period. With nano- and biotechnology on the rise, what is the cultural logic developing now? is it one where 'growing' things becomes much more important? will we grow computers rather than manufacture them? what would this 'growing' metaphor mean? I am thinking of initiatives such as http://fo.am/
So much for now
regards
armin
instead of email
Hi Brian
exactly a week ago I wrote a relatively long email in reply to yours. It never got through. It seems your French server did not like the Austrian server through which my email was sent. Just wanted to let you know ...
I agree that it would be good to talk. One main issue now is how we structure the work and how we use this platform. I made a start with this 'book' structure, which quickly became quite sprawling. With many different entries and directory trees it could quickly become difficult to keep any overview or sense of focus.
For the time being, I sense one focus should be the development of the main scheme of periodisation, both the timing and the wording. Once we have this I can - you also can - make a book structure with this wording and we start working into those chapters. As you said somewhere, such a structure at this point can only be provisional and we are likely to have to change it, but that does not matter.
Secondly, some research questions are rearing their heads. For instance, what you write in the comment on Goldstein and Aglietta: "It's important to maintain the tension between an econometric approach like that of Goldstein and the attempt at a holistic approach like the Regulation Theory". What is it that we bring to that which goes beyond Regulation Theory? Yesterday had some emerging fresh ideas while reading Mental and Manual Labour by A Sohn-Rethel, but at this moment it is gone. Reading Sohn-Rethel in german, so it will be hard to write a summary, as the language is very specific, exact and difficult, but I will try. The emerging idea was somehow along the lines that any specific mode of production will 'produce' correlating ways of thinking - which is not a very new thing to say, I am aware - but applied in its specifity in relation to Fordism and Post-Fordism there is something in it. Thus, in general we should maybe try to sum up the 'hottest' research questions somewhere in one document.
I have looked into the issue if our password protected area can be indexed by search engine bots. some drupal people assured me that if everything is configured rightly they should not be able to do so. I made a first try, googling some of the entries we created in the protected area, and could not find them. So that looks good. I suggest we publish things organically as we go along, - not in a hurry, like putting dozens of books online in one hour, but whenever it fits, as you just did. If that does still offend anyone we have to take it on as we go along.
regarding ways of working - now wearing my admin hat - I would like to encourage the use of 'biblio' in drupal, the reference data base. You can enter new references by --> 'create content' --> 'biblio'. Once a reference exists, there are several ways of connecting it to other content. for instance in a longer article you may use the tag "<"bib">"citeky"<"/bib">" to create a footnote with the according reference and a link to the biblio entry itself. Or you can simply add references as I did here http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1227
Thus, by first putting a reference in the database, it can then be crossreferenced within TNL in quite convenient ways.
So, for instance, if you now go to your profile page http://www.thenextlayer.org/user/1018
you have a new button there, 'publications' which shows a list of your publications in the biblio database. http://www.thenextlayer.org/user/1018/biblio
Besides entering single references into biblio by hand there is also a batch upload function
http://www.thenextlayer.org/admin/settings/biblio/import
It is quite convenient but in order to be useful entries need to be tagged by hand afterwards with the right categories anyway to be findable.
Regarding seminars I just had a throwback. My attempts to get something going on labour issues in vienna, a conf/workshop in may and maybe other related events which we discussed, such as a seminar in April, have come to nothing. After having been told for months that a certain level of funding had already been secured, suddenly the wind changed and there is no money after all.
For any conversations to day, tomorrow and friday is good. my skypename is amedosch. On saturday I go on an urgently needed holiday in the countryside, somewhere very twin-peaky with lakes between high mountains, strangely dressed locals with 4-wheel drives and hardly any tourists at all. That will be from this saturday 12th till monday 21st. In this period I will be unlikely to check in on email or TNL. I hope the site does not crash
best
armin