Reflexivity and the Inhuman: Soviet Systems Theory, Second-Order Cybernetics, and Posthumanism’s Historical Blindness

• In Event: Soviet Visions of Intelligence in the Light of Contemporary Socio-Technical Discourses

Abstract

In my presentation, I want to address the relations between reflexivity, action, and sociality as components of what Karl Marx called “the inorganic body.” This question was raised by posthumanists preoccupied with Hegel’s dialectics reframed by cybernetics, cognitive science, and the practical extension of humanism. These views gain an extreme formulation in the “rationalist inhumanism” of Reza Negarestani, Pete Wolfendale, and Daniel Sacilotto. Based on the ideas of the members of the Moscow Methodological Circle, I will show that these approaches undermine the relevance of normativity of action and its collective historical distribution among social systems because of their reductionist view of language and sociality and lack of reflexive dimension. With this, they remain within the simplified view of first-order cybernetics of trivial machines and stay insensitive to a productive reassessment of Marxism in Soviet thought inspired by cybernetics, activity theory, and semiotics.

Author

• Maksym Miroshnychenko, Bauhaus U, Weimar (Germany)