What is the ‘cybernetic’ in the ‘history of cybernetics’? A French case,1968 to the present

‘Surfin’ V-I-E

By his own account, Joël de Rosnay was one of the first three surfers in France. In July of 1957, at age 19, some beach bums passed through town and left him a board behind, and thus did surfing find him. De Rosnay spent much of his life fascinated by the tide, riding it to some very unexpected places, and sometimes suffering from the violence of its unpredictability. In 1958, he was hired as Catherine Deneuve’s surf coach on the Basque Coast (De Rosnay, 2012a). In 1984, de Rosnay’s brother, himself a surfer, disappeared while crossing the Taiwan Strait in a stripped-down sailboat (Neville, 2006). In the interim, de Rosnay became a credentialed scientist, then a fully fledged member of the intellectual elite, completing his PhD under Jacques Monod at the Institute Pasteur before pursuing a research assistantship at MIT in biochemistry and computing. Soon thereafter, de Rosnay started down a path that would span his entire intellectual career: producing slim tomes intended to cover almost absurd amounts of intellectual ground. This tendency followed him through his early written works – which, while still large in their scope, hewed closely to his specialization in molecular biology – into thick works on method, such as The Macroscope.

In 2012, de Rosnay’s interest in surfing and penchant for grand unifying theories merged into a single – and singularly odd – text: Surfer la vie. Comment sur-vivre dans la société fluide (emphasis in original). For a book that could likely have drifted from boardroom to briefcase to corporate beach retreat without ever appearing out of place, Surfer la vie had some lofty aims: De Rosnay attempted at once a summary of the ontological condition of the modern human as living within a ‘fluid society’, and a sort of self-help manual for existing within this brave new world. In using the term ‘fluid society’, de Rosnay had two things in mind. On the one hand, its definition was quixotic and metaphorical, though it ultimately settled into more pragmatic, everyday concerns: A fluid society was one in which individual lives were linked together and affected by semi-predictable, complex movements, much like the vicissitudes of a body of water. In such societies, learning how to live meant learning how to surf:

To surf life is to learn to profit from and to enjoy the moment, to listen to one’s environment and one’s networks, to evaluate in real time the results of one’s action, and to adapt oneself to the unexpected. I hope to furnish everyone with the keys to harmoniously surf one’s life. (De Rosnay, 2012b)

In this register, the ‘fluid society’ gave de Rosnay the conceptual liberty, for better or worse, to dash from self-help to ontology, from the movements of a water droplet to the direction taken by a government in shaping a body politic. To his credit, in aqueous phenomena, de Rosnay seems to have identified a truly inexhaustible resource in the production of metaphors.

On the other hand, when de Rosnay called modern society fluid, he merely ontologized a preexisting body of work often more associated with epistemology than with ontology. I am speaking in particular of a number of new interdisciplinary experiments that emerged in (or found their way to) France beginning in the 1950s, cybernetics chief among them, but also systems thinking, complexity theory, and the sort of political prediction that was called, in Cold War-era America, ‘forecasting’, in France, prévision. Through metaphors, translations, and other modes of comparing phenomena that might have previously been understood as discrete and unrelated, participants in these interdisciplinary fields sought to study complex phenomena – the human organism, the social organism, biological life itself – without overdetermining their objects of study or reducing their complexity. One of the major features that all of these new fields of study shared was an emphasis on the relations between elements of a larger system, as opposed to the elements themselves. Here is where de Rosnay linked his work on surfing one’s life in a fluid society to a longer intellectual history: ‘The coming of this fluid society was inspired notably by the sciences that, for many decades, have explained that connections or interactions are more important than the material elements that constitute our physical or biological world’ (De Rosnay, 2012b).

De Rosnay remains an eccentric intellectual, and likely an unusually well-compensated one. In his principal occupation, he is director of a consulting agency called Biotics, which ‘advocates a systemic approach to education and future trending, especially regarding the Internet and biotechnology’. Whatever he does, exactly, at Biotics – per his website, speeches, Q&As, corporate seminars, and ‘digital di@logues’ seem to be the name of the game – de Rosnay’s clients include several of France’s largest corporations, along with a few international behemoths: GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and National Instruments. ¹

The extent to which one finds de Rosnay’s work intrinsically interesting hinges on how persuasive one finds the metaphor of the wave in describing the ebbs, flows, eddies, cascades, and tidal waves of contemporary lived experience. This said, the work is in fact a near-perfect metaphor for de Rosnay’s idiosyncratic career, and his approach to systems thinking. And this life was, and perhaps continues to be, fundamental in determining the historical development and present status of cybernetics in contemporary France. De Rosnay is no cybernetician himself, but nor is he just a surfer. His career, from the fifties to the present, has oftentimes seemed a mangle of interests: futurism, molecular biology (and, through epigenetics, its social implications), systems theory, surfing, and loose, left-leaning politics, a politics always insisting in its performativity, in public lectures and other pedagogical contexts. The coherence of all these ideas, de Rosnay claimed in a 2012 interview, was ‘to give, to explain to people, to give them ideas to make sense of their lives. I’m a professor, and I’m always in that grand vocation of the prof, as pedagogue, as researcher, and as manager’ (De Rosnay, 2012a). While the cybernetic elements of his thinking may oftentimes be obscured by the epiphenomenal levity of his subject matter, the field has been a constant throughout de Rosnay’s intellectual career.

By the time of this interview, de Rosnay appeared to be riding the wake of earlier waves into calmer seas: living off consulting work on new technology and trend forecasting through Biotics. Nonetheless, his consulting schedule still left time for public engagements. On 12 June 2013, de Rosnay took his surfing schtick to a very different crowd, the Forum to Change the Era (Forum Changer d’Ère, FCE), held in Paris at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie at the behest of a blogger named Véronique Anger. Citing her own personal fascination with a group of intellectuals active in the sixties through the eighties known as the Groupe des dix ² , a group of which de Rosnay had been a member alongside such luminaries as Michel Serres, Edgar Morin, and Henri Laborit, Anger laid out the problems of contemporary life, as she saw them: The ‘digital revolution’ was transforming the world with unimaginable speed, leading to the emergence of a ‘new individual’, a subject for which we had yet to develop a sufficient interpretive paradigm. But the Groupe des dix, she claimed, had ‘paved the way’ for the forum’s ambitious goal to ‘address in a new manner the new challenges that impose themselves upon us and inspire a new model of society’ (Forum Changer d’Ère, 2013: 5). The goal of the FCE, this is to say, was to introduce younger generations to a rapidly aging group of intellectuals whose ideas they had never really come to reckon with.

After Anger’s introduction, de Rosnay took the stage to chair the first roundtable of the FCE, ‘Manager la complexité pour “sur-vivre”’. And once again, he implored his audience to ‘surfer la vie’:

Surfing is connected both to determinism and to liberty. For the surfer, to know nature is to become free: he can either exit or enjoy the wave. But the surfer is constantly in a state of controlled disequilibrium. Life is also this wave, this relation to a dynamic gap. The flux and flow of life, ‘live streaming’ [live streaming] permit us to remain constantly informed and in a state of exchange. But the danger is being taken by the current. Sometimes, we must cling to the shore and draw upon our values. (ibid.: 7–8)

Whether it is good or bad cybernetics, even whether it is cybernetics at all, de Rosnay’s fascination with the metaphor of surfing is, without question, a significant and underexamined legacy of the impact that cybernetics had on French thought and politics in the latter half of the 20th century. This is the case even though the cybernetic element of de Rosnay’s thought and its relevance to better-established narratives of the intellectual history of French cybernetics are more obscure than in other accounts (Geoghegan, 2011; Geroulanos, 2018). Because, and this bears repeating, cybernetics was not French. It bears repeating because France is written into the discipline’s very foundation. Norbert Wiener’s foundational text was first published, in English, by a French press, and it was his French publisher that pushed him to coin the term cybernetics, resurrecting it from André-Marie Ampère’s 1834 Essay on the Philosophy of the Sciences, a philosophical taxonomy of knowledge that also included the first French usage of technologie in its literal sense. ³ But none of the ‘core members’ at the Macy Conferences was French, and there is little documented evidence of any French citizen attending the conferences in less formal capacities. There were few, if any, French cyberneticians of international prominence, even during the discipline’s early-to-mid-Cold War heyday, even in a nation with similar scientific prowess to those that did, in fact, cultivate cybernetics. ⁴

This said, there were a few cyberneticians in France, and there was a French style of cybernetics, however vague. In Ron Kline’s recent intellectual and institutional history of American cybernetics, he describes this French cybernetic style as ‘philosophical’, and indeed French cybernetics was often quite philosophical in its inclinations, particularly in the 1950s and early 1960s (Kline, 2015: 7). Removed from the technical, military-industrial interests and problems that united many Anglo-American cybernetic initiatives, the French case might serve as an example of what it looks like when the discipline is reduced to (or reframed as) an epistemological practice, less a tool of warfare and industry than a license to run free with certain metaphors: systems, feedback, inputs, outputs, information, the similarities and differences between human beings and machines. What was particularly French about this cybernetics was precisely that which rendered this strange, philosophical school with nary a computer scientist in sight cybernetic at all: It was the tacit elevation of the metaphor to a key, epistemic status, a concept that one could ride like the tide between, over, and across different disciplinary, ontological, and epistemological borders.

Speaking of metaphors: Many cybernetic concepts were formative on some of the most important French structuralists and post-structuralists, usually in a loose, metaphorical sense. Thanks to a proliferation of recent scholarship, the English-language literature has now familiarized us with just how far Lévi-Strauss thought cybernetics could take him in framing the study of kinship as a mechanistic, positivist science, a dream that quite possibly would have terrified Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, the anthropologists who actually attended the Macy Conferences (Geoghegan, 2011). We are no longer oblivious to the significant influence of cybernetics upon Lacan’s reading of Poe and his formulation of the Symbolic (Liu, 2010). And, thanks to important work by both French and American scholars, we have become familiar with the seriousness with which Derrida read Wiener (Geroulanos, 2018; Johnson, 1998).

By design and by necessity, these scholarly contributions have done more to enhance our understanding of structuralism and post-structuralism than they have to deepen our knowledge of the history of cybernetics in general, and that of French cybernetics in particular. The papers contained in the present volume originally stemmed from a conference that stated, in no uncertain terms, that the 20th century was the cybernetic century, and asked contributors to grapple with the 20th century as cybernetic. Considering France’s contribution to that supposed century requires a different tack than tracking the influence of cybernetics on these familiar names and schools of thought. Because cybernetics was at its most virile and interesting in France when it was at its least specific, when in the late 1960s, it came into confused and confusing contact with a number of other new epistemologies that attempted to bridge the gap between disciplines and the phenomena that such disciplines were created to research: systems theory, complexity theory, and information theory, for instance. In this context, cybernetics became more or less reduced to a set of concepts that really did serve to facilitate unprecedented conversations between practitioners of a wide range of the human, physical, and life sciences. Viewed from this particular angle, the French case forces us to question whether, in the history of cybernetics, ‘cybernetics’ refers to something very specific, traceable, and material; to a more diffuse way of thinking about the world (and in particular the relationship between human beings and the way they interface with their environments); to a set of concepts; or to some middle ground, some combination thereof.

In this article, I trace French cybernetics as a proliferation of concepts and metaphors by tracking the origins and development of the group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, a diverse network of hard and soft scientists who began to meet in the aftermath of the student protests and general strike of May 1968. While excluded from many narratives of French cybernetics, the members of the Groupe des dix were no intellectual slouches: At times, their number included André Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Attali, Henri Laborit, Michel Serres, Edgar Morin, and Jacques Sauvan, France’s lone proper cybernetician. These thinkers shared geographical proximity and a penchant for long dinner parties, along with a third-way socialist politics that rendered them suspicious of more totalizing ideologies, and a deep-seated humanism. Theirs was an odd humanism that, when articulated from the position of the present, sounds downright strange. The Groupe des dix believed that May ‘68 represented the end of an era where politics – and mass, democratic politics in particular – would serve as a motive force in the transformation of French society. This role, they believed, was henceforth to be played by science and technology. Their argument was not ontological but epistemological: The conceptual vocabulary of cybernetics, complexity theory, and other forms of systems thinking had at once brought a new human into existence and rendered that human legible in unprecedented ways. Cybernetics revealed the new man, and also provided the conceptual means to transform his existence. This new man was ontologically more than he appeared under political ideologies such as Gaullism and Marxism and epistemological systems such as structuralism that sought to reduce his complexity. He also deserved better than the technocratic management that many administrations in postwar France had so enthusiastically embraced. Ultimately, the Groupe des dix created a way of thinking through human existence and social and political life in the late 20th century that was, to their thinking, at once rigorously scientific, thoroughly humanistic, radically non-disciplinary, possibly anti-technocratic, and – to my mind – utterly impractical. These, then, are the questions I hope to raise through the incorporation of this French narrative into the history of cybernetics, a history to which it belongs but which it has yet to inhabit: As a model of or for social organization, is cybernetics merely a new form of technocracy in which cyberneticians are themselves the experts? If this is so, then what are they experts in? How does managing complexity differ from controlling nature as a technoscientific enterprise? Is cybernetics more important as a concrete entity that – whatever its disunity – might be historically studied, or as a fungible set of concepts that travel in confusing and sometimes contradictory ways across national and disciplinary boundaries? As we take cybernetics into our own work, largely though not exclusively as humanists of a certain transdisciplinary stripe ourselves, our performances are in themselves, by a certain definition, cybernetic. I am, with this statement, taking a definite position as regards my last question. While the particulars of cybernetics play themselves out in fascinating ways – many of which other contributors to this issue explicitly highlight – a hypothetical contemporary world without cybernetics does not, to my mind, appear foreign in the same way as one where the metaphors of cybernetics, and indeed the metaphor itself, have lost their epistemological centrality to Western thinking, making, and doing, from the flexible, non-hierarchical organization of some of the most distinctly ‘21st-century’ forms of industry in the developed world, to the centres of study – at once more and less significant than academic departments and their individual disciplines – that scholars of cybernetics and its century find themselves herded into, however nice such spaces may or may not be. The French case, I argue, offers a portrait of cybernetics centred less on what cybernetics was than on the proliferation of concepts and modalities of thinking of which it was part, modes of framing problems across boundaries – disciplinary, cultural, or otherwise – that often occlude an important question that often gets lost in the commotion of the new. The 20th century may have been cybernetic. Should the 21st? Feedback may have an impact in two dozen scholarly disciplines. Should those disciplines unite around this fact, widening the scope and scale of the drift of cybernetic concepts? Or should they, rather, rebel against this world in which cybernetic metaphors have come unhinged, become too useful? When the same concepts can at the same time structure the monotony of the new proletarian flexible economy, and undergird more emancipatory modes of thinking, acting, and being in the world?

To this end, I offer a history of the Groupe des dix and its numerous iterations, culminating in the FCE. While little known and researched, ⁵ the Groupe is at the heart of one of the central and most fraught questions of 20th-century intellectual history in France, as elsewhere, namely that of the relation between politics, science, and technology. Since Descartes, Comte, and Saint-Simon dreamed of mastering the world through science and technology, fantasies of technological utopias and more modest commitments to the purported advantages of technocratic administration have been powerful currents in French thought and ultimately French politics. ⁶ These epistemological commitments go hand in hand with ontological ones. If human beings can master the natural world first through learning the laws of nature and then by applying those laws in the form of technology, it is because humans are rational animals and the world functions according to fixed, natural laws. Technocracy, in this schema, is merely the application of rational law in a rational world, and a famously (and infamously) comfortable bedfellow with structuralism (Dosse, 1997: 101). ⁷ In late 1968, as de Gaulle consolidated his power and commentators occupied themselves with the question of whether the mass student protests and general strike of May had really been all that eventful, French technocrats took to providing a narrative of the events that would allow them to assess the damage, assuage labour, and put the country back to work (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). The Groupe des dix, meanwhile, claimed that in light of the protests, the most pressing question of the day was that of the relation between science and politics. Drawing on advances in the life sciences as well as on emerging theories of cybernetics and complexity, they argued that political transformations of any substantial magnitude required a new epistemology that would use scientific knowledge to negotiate politics in a manner self-aware of its own limitations, as opposed to the single-minded, facetiously depoliticized logic of technocratic governance, or the rigid determinism of structuralist logic. Decades later, however, the terminology the Groupe deployed to challenge technocracy and promote contingency would lay the foundation for a new positivism that was perfectly at home in 21st-century French society. They produced, this is to say, a literal post-structuralism, one not housed in American literature departments but, rather, very much at home in the technoscientific centre of the French state.

‘The robots are already here!’

While many histories of French cybernetics begin much earlier, with Wiener’s original publication of Cybernetics in the 1940s, the history of this strain of the science begins in the heyday of the Gaullist state (see the article by Geoghegan in this issue). Beginning in the late 1950s, the Gaullist administration ramped up governmental spending on scientific research and education, making scientific research into one branch of a greater nationalist paradigm. Based on numbers alone, these interventions were successful: The workforce engaged in research in France grew by almost a third between 1963 and 1968 (Papon, 1978). But the effect of this newly intensified national investment in science was not merely quantitative. Reinvigorating the interpenetration of state and science likewise brought a question that had defined much of Enlightenment thought back to the fore, namely the relation between knowledge and action, or, in this special case, the relation between science and politics (Feenberg and Freedman, 2001). ⁸

Gaullist technocracy had its share of critics: intellectual, cultural, and artistic (Christofferson, 2004). In 1965, one such critic, Jean-Luc Godard, released Alphaville to immediate acclaim. ⁹ Alphaville was a dystopian science fiction film about a planet called Alphaville ruled entirely based on the technocratic governance of a supercomputer called Alpha 60. In Alphaville, emotions are banned, as is freedom of thought. E=Mc ² spackles the walls of buildings like a sort of precise, state-sanctioned, neon graffiti. In the film’s climax, Alpha 60 decides that Alphaville should declare war on Earth. His decrees trickle out of a state-of-the-art (and very slow) dot-matrix printer, where they are interpreted – though there really is no room for interpretation – by scientists in white coats. Seen through contemporary eyes, there is something terrifying about the speed with which the decision is made and something hilarious about the speed – and lack thereof – with which technology is called upon to make decisions of potentially world-historical import.

Shortly after Alphaville’s release, Le Nouvel Observateur published an issue featuring the film as its cover story. Anna Karina’s face ran on the cover below the headline, ‘The Robots are already here!’ The framing of the piece was striking, but entirely appropriate, reflective of contemporary French fears about technology, modernization, and urban development. Alphaville was filmed in Paris, and the world of Alphaville was consummately Parisian. Public executions were staged in iconic public Parisian bathhouses. The streets of Alphaville themselves were filmed in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, and they looked like it: Recent urban development had cloaked the neighbourhood in gleaming glass facades. Alphaville may have been set on another planet, but it was a film about Paris, about the present and future of Parisian culture. It was thus only appropriate that the French press focused on what this abstract, peculiar science fiction film had to say about contemporary France.

This question was at the centre of the lead story of Le Nouvel Observateur, written by Jacques Sauvan, a little-known physicist and, at that time, perhaps one of France’s only proper cyberneticians. Sauvan engaged with the effectiveness of Alphaville as social commentary, with what it had to say about contemporary French society. While cautious in his assessment of the film, Sauvan alluded to two ‘social facts’ of contemporary French society that Godard had successfully parodied in the film. The first was an absolute separation between technicians and ‘other living beings’, a common critique of the Gaullist administration at that historical juncture (Sauvan, 1965). In cybernetic terms: no feedback. The second was what Sauvan described as a ‘civilization of derision’. The streets of Alphaville, like those of contemporary Paris, supported an overwhelming array of useless information, signs, and gestures, and this culture of derision translated to life itself becoming derisory, insignificant. Sauvan applauded the film for rendering these elements of contemporary French culture legible. He also stated his own commitment to making life (and individual lives) meaningful, to rendering an overwhelming amount of data into something resembling information, and to creating state apparatuses responsive to feedback. Sauvan’s basic (could one even say simple?) humanism, antipathy to technocracy, and commitment to finding a more meaningful way to integrate science and politics into quotidian life would soon lead him to a group of fellow travellers invested in similar problems, many of whom would one day come to occupy central roles in the French state administration.

In 1962, Robert Buron – a career politician – resigned his post as minister of public works, transportation, and tourism in protest of de Gaulle’s handling of Algeria, and began to reconnect with Jacques Robin, by that point a renowned rheumatologist and longtime socialist. The two had first met at a 1946 meeting of the Mouvement pour les Etas-Unis socialistes d’Europe, an organization formed to lobby for a socialist version of the United States of Europe Churchill had called for earlier in the same year (Chamak, 1997: Introduction). Continuing a commitment to a socialist third-way politics, Buron, with Robin’s input, set his sights on seating a socialist administration in the next presidential election – which would presumably be held in 1972 – and founded Objectif 72. ¹⁰ While Objectif 72 was first and foremost a political initiative, it was also an intellectual one, publishing a journal that ran from 1968 to 1971 and organizing a number of public workshops and colloquia.

The first public event took place in December of 1968, when Buron and Robin gathered together a number of their friends to discuss the relation between scientific knowledge and politics. These, it must be said, were tense times in the French Republic. After a wave of protests in May led then-President Charles de Gaulle to temporarily flee the country, elections were held, and beginning in June, his party assumed power with a stronger parliamentary mandate than ever before (Bourg, 2007: Introduction). The left found itself in a state of disarray as the technocratic apparatus whirred anew. With their colloquium entitled ‘Sciences de la vie, sciences de l’homme, et politique’, the group surrounding Buron and Robin began to flesh out their own idea of an unaligned left-wing response to ‘68, one that focused on the public dissemination of scientific information as a politically and socially appropriate response to a turbulent political moment. ¹¹ Speaking that day were Henri Laborit, neurobiologist and philosopher; Edgar Morin, best known as a philosopher of complexity, but at that moment technically employed as a sociologist; and Robin. Their contributions were all inspired by cybernetics, and riddled with cybernetic vocabulary, though one of a very particular sort. Of what sort I will return to, after detailing each contribution.

The first lecture of the day, ‘Biology and Politics’, was delivered by Henri Laborit. Laborit argued that insofar as politics was a practice undertaken by biological creatures, biologists, even those more familiar with the microscope than the macroscope, should have something to say about it. ¹² This, then, is what Laborit had to say: Human beings were biologically dependent on the consumption of energy, but this fact of existence need not lead to a society driven by consumption (as, in fact, it had). Within such a society of consumption, Laborit argued, the brain, which contemporary neuroscience had shown to be so flexible and full of possibility, found itself reduced to its rote ‘technicité machinale’, which most directly translates to mechanical engineering but could also be rendered as ‘machine-oriented technicity’. This neuro-orientation, Laborit claimed, was paradoxical, as ‘automation diminishes the need for technicians’. Not only was the society of consumption slowly rendering our brains obsolete, it was also preventing the sort of thoughtful subject that Laborit saw as essential for progress – ‘innovators, inventors, men of progress’ – from emerging. These subjects, and the ‘society of knowledge’ their arrival would portend, would be slow to come – Laborit here used his status as a biologist to remind us that rapid mutations were rarely beneficial – but could be achieved little by little through education:

I ask of you only to imagine a movement toward a society which, instead of seeking to condition the individual blindly to be a cog in the mécanique social, would, from birth, simply make him aware of his determinisms. A society which, instead of speaking of liberty in order to better enslave its subjects, would learn to better recognize our chains in order that we might choose the least heavy. A society lucid in the knowledge of its determinisms, and not blind and ignorant of our determinisms in the bliss of consumption. (Laborit, 1969: 4)

As for many of his fellow travellers, for Laborit, the trick was understanding what, precisely, the limits of determinism in the human organism and body politic in fact were, and learning how to work within or around those constraints.

Next to speak was Edgar Morin. If Laborit had taken the occasion to show the unexpected utility of the biologist in unpacking questions of politics, Morin used his time to viciously undermine his own discipline. Morin’s problem with sociology fused a hostility to expertise with a keen observation on the embeddedness of the practitioner. Who, after all, were these specialists on society, whatever society was in the first place? According to Morin, sociologists were basically historians of the social: adequate at predicting outcomes based on past performance, yet completely incompetent when it came time to direct unforeseen, improvisatory, radical future courses of action. In that moment, notably, professional sociologists had by and large failed to predict either the events of May ‘68 or their repercussions.

In place of such traditional sociology, Morin argued for a certain sort of ‘anthropology’:

One of the significations of the events of May ‘68 is that politics cannot be reduced to a problem of statistics, and that it concerns, rather, the entirety of quotidian life. In reality, the indispensable need is for a science of man, an anthropology, capable of identifying those lines that have a political sense. (Morin, 1969: 7)

Such an anthropology, thoroughly shaped by a heterodox conceptualization of systems thinking, would ultimately inform Morin’s influential works on complexity theory, at once contributing to and participating in the cybernetic century (Morin, 2008b).

Robin saved himself the final word, calling for ‘a civilization guided by the life sciences’. Previous civilizations, Robin argued, had been governed by and developed through the use of scientific programmes that amounted to ‘nothing but a series of accumulated knowledge and a method of conquering nature’. But, well acquainted both personally and professionally with Jacques Monod and François Jacob, ¹³ Robin saw in the contemporary life sciences the possibility of a unified human science that could serve humanity and human progress without reducing its complexity and specificity. ‘The ideology of today and tomorrow’, he claimed, ‘can only be scientific ideology, guided by the life sciences’. Motivated by the life sciences, this new politics would judge every action according to whether or not it was ‘favorable to the evolving survival of the human species’. The new society portended by this politics would, we could say, be technocratic through and through, a techno-biopolitics overseen by biologists as opposed to a managerial class, but it would attempt to construct a scientifically governed society where the human being was the source, object, and aim. The ‘mentality of men’ would be refocused from that of homo faber – herein schematized as ‘he who lives to work and consume’ – toward that of homo sapiens – he who lives to know. Such a society, Robin argued, would lead to development in the ‘neocortex’, that part of our brain responsible for ‘the association of ideas, the imaginative faculties, and creativity’.

How to enact this programme? Robin had two central propositions. First, ‘generalize knowledge and promote a permanent, relativist education’. This style of education would make the question of ‘how to understand and live with Science’ central to all its pedagogical endeavours. Only such a pedagogical system, Robin claimed, could bring about a civilization ‘integrated with science’ as opposed to ‘dominated by science’.

However speculative their papers might have been, Laborit, Morin, and Robin were all serious scholars. Laborit in particular certainly knew his way around a laboratory. But in operating as scientists in the political sphere, the three found themselves tasked with a complicated set of questions: how to speak seriously in public about science; how to communicate the possibility in finding, in recent developments in biochemistry, a new physics; and how to say that science had a role to play in politics, and that that role should be adjudicated, publicly. These questions were speculative in their very nature. They were also by and large licensed by different elements of cybernetics, at least in the form it had been communicated to the three scholars, who had all read Pierre de Latil’s Thinking by Machine with great interest. But de Latil was a journalist, and his work, while rigorous, was not scholarly, nor was it intended to be. It served, rather, as a vulgarization of the budding science, and in particular, of its usefulness. When it came out in English translation in 1957, a year after its first publication, Isaac Asimov wrote the preface, seeing, in de Latil’s reading of cybernetics, a possible solution to a perceived global crisis of overpopulation. It was, in other words, an excellent text for using cybernetics as a conceptual toolbox for navigating enormous ‘what if’ questions. If the constitutive papers of ‘Life Sciences, Human Sciences, and Politics’ were influenced by cybernetics, the cybernetics upon which they drew was a vulgarization of the science. Whether or not this fact makes their work more or less cybernetic, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’ cybernetics, their papers were no less a moment in the development of French cybernetics than were the more widely discussed contributions of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and other structuralists and their followers (Geoghegan, 2011; Geroulanos, 2018).

The Groupe des dix

In light of the positive response to this initial colloquium – attendance was, per Robin’s recollection much later, somewhere around three or four hundred – Robin and Buron assembled a group of like-minded thinkers who began to meet monthly over dinner to discuss the relation between politics and science. Between 1968 and 1976, when this group that eventually came to be known as the Groupe des dix held its final meeting, the G10 expanded its numbers. The original ten, whose most famous members were probably Laborit and Morin, quickly expanded, and soon the economist René Passet, de Rosnay, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan, Michel Serres, and Jacques Attali – soon to be one of Mitterrand’s most trusted advisors – would join (Attali, 2005). At times, the Groupe would invite guests to discuss their work – François Jacob and Jacques Monod among them – and these guests would often drift in and out of the group’s orbit, attending gatherings, contributing to colloquia, and organizing events. After a 1970 conference, the Groupe solidified its mission in an internal and unsigned document entitled ‘Qui sont (et où vont) les “dix”’ originally drafted by Jack Baillet. Here, in that document, is how the dix presented their foundational narrative:

In the waning months of 1968, a moment when the imagination wondered if it was its turn to seize power, and when politicians were still recovering from watching hopelessly as their ‘thing’ so brusquely escaped, certain men met and came to the conclusion that henceforth, if much was going to change or be possible in politics, it would perhaps be the hushed progress of science as opposed to the spontaneous eruption of the masses that would serve as the essential agent. (Groupe des dix, 1972)

It is critical to understand the G10 in the context of the historical torpor from which it emerged. While no core member of the Groupe was directly involved in the protests, the Groupe began to meet in the aftermath of and because of May ‘68, a narrative rearticulated in numerous published and unpublished documents and in more contemporary interviews. ¹⁴ This, it should be mentioned, was and continues to be a highly idiosyncratic reading of the events of May. Many commentators would use the aftermath of the protests to discuss the relative merits and potentialities of different forms of political expression. ¹⁵ Far fewer turned to science as the new site of political possibility. And even fewer did so in the fashion of the Groupe des dix, for whom the revolutionary potential of science was not technological but epistemological. As the group saw it, two revolutions in scientific epistemology were underway in their historical present. The first was that the life sciences had begun to catch up to the physical sciences, providing objective knowledge of living beings on par with objective knowledge of the milieus in which they lived. In ‘Qui sont (et où vont) les “dix”’, probably written by Jack Baillet, it is phrased as such:

This ‘world’ itself is finally beginning, though for the moment only on certain planes, to lose its opacity. While objective knowledge, for so long reduced to considering those physical and chemical phenomena exterior to man, integrates itself with the knowledge that we know the living being in its own field (biology revealing itself as a fundamental science from the moment that it apprehends the elementary biochemical mechanisms underlying the genetic code), a new universe reveals itself, one in which cybernetic regulation and the circulation of information are the decisive factors (2).

The important part about this question is the fact that it was posed as a question. Technocracy, a guiding philosophy in 20th-century governance in France as elsewhere, deliberately attempted to take the magic out of politics through leaving political decision-making in the hands of experts, experts whose right to authority derived from their mastery of particular fields of objective and/or scientific knowledge. ¹⁹ But by necessity and because of their training, such experts failed to grasp human beings and human problems in their full complexity, stuck in reductive frameworks that could neither articulate nor solve questions of violence, of gender, or of property and appropriation, to take three examples that the Groupe would ultimately tackle. And the intellectuals best suited to such endeavours were not expert technocrats but the open-minded and curious – those we might generously describe as aspirationally positivist, or less generously as dilettantish. Apart from vaguely socialist politics, the intellectual trait shared by the dix was a strong antipathy toward Marxism, and a weaker antipathy toward structuralism. There is a telling moment in Chamak’s interview with Robin in which the latter claims that from the fore, ‘our ideology…consisted in believing that science could bring much more to society’. Chamak’s response here, which says an awful lot about contemporary French antipathies toward the relation between science and politics, is, ‘That’s quite a positivist ideology’. Robin’s response is, ‘Yes, maybe. But we perceived an opening toward unarticulated perspectives once we addressed new themes such as the theory of information, the theory of systems, the discoveries of molecular biology and cerebral function’ (Chamak, 1997: 37). This set the proposals and practices of the G10 apart from the Gaullist technocracy. Technocracies were run by experts, and the G10 were not experts, or at least were not functioning in their capacity as such. Savants in their own fields, they were luddites when it came to responding to the sort of large-scale questions raised at meetings of the G10. Moreover, the G10 always strived to function in and for the public. While their meetings were largely over private meals, the group itself emerged from a public colloquium and sponsored, over the course of its existence, a number of other public events, many in partnership with UNESCO.

In a series of colloquia, conferences, and publications, the Groupe des dix brought their epistemological revolution to the greater intellectual community of Paris, hosting broad, transdisciplinary conferences on the era’s most pressing issues. Their favoured model for framing complex phenomena – originally attributed to Edgar Morin, but strongly resonant with Henri Laborit’s so-called ‘three-brain’ model of human psychology ²⁰ – considered human beings through three heuristics: as members of a species, as members of societies, and as individuals in all their psychological peculiarity. A roundtable at UNESCO entitled ‘Vers la dépropriation?’ in February of 1971 led to the publication of the first Cahiers de dix, collectively signed by all the Groupe’s original members, which adhered loosely to this three-tiered form of argumentation. The first section treated dépropriation in ‘biopsychological’ terms: ‘What factors allow us to understand the root of notions of appropriation and property in the biological structures of human beings?’ The second turned to the ‘niveau culturel’ (cultural level): ‘How to explain the singular development of processes of appropriation in our social behaviors and in the regulation of our societies?’ The third raised economic and political questions: ‘Are management and organization in production and business necessarily tied to appropriation and property?’ (Cahiers de dix, 1972: 15).

The first Cahiers broke little new ground, and the answer to its concluding question – ‘Vers la dépropriation…mais jusqu’où’ (toward depropriation…but where?) – seemed to be a resounding shrug, but its most telling moment came at the conclusion of ‘biopsychological’ section, when the dix, several of whom were emphatically hard scientists, left the terrain of positivism. After laying out how questions of territoriality, property, and the contestation thereof functioned in nonhuman animals, the dix concluded that while the ‘study of appropriation’ and the ‘territorial imperative’ in other species of animals could teach us something, it was a vague something, in no way adding up to a justification for a ‘natural right of appropriation among human beings’. They also concluded that the forces that drove the development of notions of property among human beings could not be separated from aggression and sexuality. And this, the dix claimed, was as large a claim as could be made in light of the contemporary state of knowledge. However, they continued, ‘it seem[ed] essential to circulate biological knowledge of these behaviors of appropriation in the public sphere’. Barring this circulation, the dix believed positive political action to be basically impossible, as ‘such awareness constitute[d]…the best and perhaps only way to channel…specific aggression, the major component of appropriation and property’ (Cahiers de dix, 1972: 36).

And so, on the 36th page of a 96-page volume, the dix self-consciously left the terrain of scientific objectivity. This was the moment at which the Groupe’s notion of science as a revolutionary force post-’68 came most clearly into focus. A biological and psychological examination of practices of appropriation among humans and other mammals at once propped up a scientific explanation for property and appropriation in aggression – the Groupe des dix, it should be mentioned, by and large considered psychoanalysis an objective science – and alluded to the possibility of another way of living, should human beings find a way to redirect the aggression that, as they saw it, underlay human institutions of property. Aggression, they claimed, was scientific and necessary; its manifestation in private property was not. To schematize the relation between science and politics was to differentiate between how things were and how things could be. To teach science was to teach contingency.

The G10 did an about-face in their second Cahiers, a double issue entitled ‘Agressivité, violence, et politique’ published in 1972, arguing that there was nothing biologically, physiologically, or psychologically innate about human aggression:

In conclusion, it is well known that man is not ultimately aggressive or peaceful, but rather that his attitude is the result of a complex interaction between an ensemble of biological traits that are largely—though not indefinitely—modified and modeled by the influences of the environment, of culture, and of individual experience. (Cahiers de dix, 1972)

The G10 continued to meet regularly until 1976, when they disbanded for a number of reasons. Many members of the dix began to devote their energy to writing manuscripts, and monthly meetings soon became devoted to critiquing work in progress, a transition that not all members found appealing. ²¹ Different cliques emerged in the group; Annie Robin, Jacques’ wife, apparently found the one formed by Attali, de Rosnay, Atlan, and Serres particularly irritating (Chamak, 1997: 72–3). Robert Buron’s untimely death in 1973 left a hole in the centre of the Groupe, especially as concerned its link to socialist politics. In 1970, the Groupe began a series of meetings with the Club of Rome, the think tank whose 1972 The Limits of Growth sold 12 million copies (Bonneuil and Thomas, 2009: 334–5). When asked in an interview if the Groupe and the Club discussed politics during their meetings, Robin’s answer was telling: yes,

but only…politics of the extant economic system. They proposed reforms, but only to the existing political organization. We were only able to get so far, because, for the representatives of the Club of Rome, the market economy was unavoidable, and the qualitative increase of wealth had to be the final objective of all human society. (Chamak, 1997: 53–5)

Jacques Attali, on the other hand, a professor of economics and close advisor to Presidents Mitterrand and Sarkozy, was seemingly far less averse to realpolitik. Jacques Sauvan, however, left for intellectual reasons. In a scathing letter of 1974, Sauvan criticized the epistemological foundations of the Groupe itself:

I was…sorry…to see a veritable perversion develop within the Group. I wouldn’t call it a logic, but rather a significant tendency toward modalities of structuring facts deemed ‘scientific’ in order to satisfy a priori theses that had nothing to do with objective knowledge. (ibid.: 100–12)

This, Sauvan went on to claim, was ‘bad cybernetics’ (ibid.).

But what was cybernetic about this bad cybernetics? According to Sauvan, it was the focus on questions of determinism. The Groupe had split, he claimed, into one group of ‘predeterminists’ and one group prone to ‘a determinism that left itself open to autonomy, independence, and liberty’. The former group had won out over the latter group, among which Sauvan counted himself, a group that presumably would be equivalent to a ‘good’ cybernetics. In France, cybernetics had become a heterogeneous mode of discussing the limits of human freedom in the poststructuralist era. Whether cybernetic vocabularies are ‘good’ at understanding human limits and horizons remains to be determined, but in France at least, the question endures.

After the dix

While many of the dix went their own ways, others banded together in new satellites with novel missions and unprecedented degrees of institutional backing. Most significant among these was the Centre d’études des systèmes et des technologies avancées (CESTA). Under the highly technocratic Giscard administration, the Institut Auguste Comte had served as a centre for training management personnel. In 1982, sending a strong message about how his administration would deal with knowledge and research, Mitterrand commissioned Jacques Attali to replace the Institut with an institution whose goal would be to research the effects of advanced technologies on society. Attali delegated the task to de Rosnay, and several other members of the Groupe des dix would be involved in the organization, CESTA. ²² CESTA’s mission was to investigate and implement large-scale technological advances in France, and to facilitate cooperative missions in the same direction across Europe. The spirit of radical epistemology and heterodox thinking of the Groupe des dix was largely abandoned as the organization developed into a knotty, complicated bureaucracy, but Yves Stourdzé, the young sociologist who led CESTA through most of its existence, was a strong and public advocate for systems thinking. ²³ The spirit of the Groupe also endured at CESTA through their insistence on the value of broadly themed public colloquia, the records of which fill more than a dozen boxes in the Archives nationales. In the press at the time, representatives of Germany and the UK seemed downright annoyed at the extent to which the French government, acting through CESTA, advocated an endless stream of working groups on technological topics that these other governments thought were better left to private industry (Dickson, 1984).

When Yves Stourdzé died in 1986, and CESTA dissolved a year later, the institution had accomplished much more than the Groupe had ever dreamed of, notably introducing cognitive science into France and implementing EUREKA, originally forwarded by the French as a civilian alternative to the development of advanced technologies when the Reagan administration requested help implementing the Star Wars programme. EUREKA endures to this day as an EU-wide intergovernmental research organization aimed at techno-industrial R&D on a continental scale. From proposing an epistemological revolution that would lead to a society driven by knowledge instead of consumption, this offshoot of the Groupe des dix had transformed into a technoscientific juggernaut, one in which what constituted progress was less a question than it was preordained.

But CESTA was not the only intellectual legacy of the Groupe des dix – indeed, the individual intellectual production of the group’s members was unceasing in the years to come. Some among the group would dedicate monographs to questions relevant to the intersection of politics and science that the Groupe had never devoted public or published attention to, such as Alain Laurent’s Feminin/Masculin (Laurent, 1975). ²⁴ Henri Laborit published a monograph that was literally a continuation of his 1968 lecture: He reused the introduction to his speech of three years prior (Laborit, 1970). Many among the group maintained a fascination with methodology, and in particular with human and social scientific methodologies that were heterodox in their disciplinary leanings, whether inter-, trans-, multi-, or pluridisciplinary (De Rosnay, 1975; Morin, 2008a). While Robin never published an extensive work on method, in 1983 he founded, along with Henri Atlan and Jean-Pierre Dupuy, the Groupe de réflexion interdisiplinaire (GRI). This project would transform, in 1987, into the Groupe de réflexion inter et transdisciplinaires (GRIT), and eventually, led by the theoretical physicist Basarab Nicolescu, the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research and Study (CIRET), which in 1994 drafted its founding charter in Portugal. The signatories were Nicolescu, Edgar Morin, and the Portuguese illustrator Lima de Freitas. Along with René Berger, Nicolescu additionally founded a taskforce on transdisciplinarity at UNESCO in 1992 (Nicolescu, 2002). ²⁵ Crossing the disciplines, it appeared, had become an issue of international cultural and epistemological significance.

The number of projects in which members of the Groupe des dix were involved multiplied over the next quarter-century, as did the number of transnational research initiatives explicitly premised on epistemological principles of inter- or transdisciplinarity, until in 2013, citing a personal fascination with their work, Véronique Anger, journalist and editor of the online publication Les Di@logues Stratégiques, organized the first annual Forum de Changer d’Ère. According to Anger, the ‘digital revolution’ was transforming the world with unimaginable speed, leading to the emergence of a ‘new individual’, a subject for which we had yet to develop a sufficient interpretive paradigm. But the Groupe des dix, she claimed, had ‘paved the way’ for the forum’s ambitious goal to ‘address in a new manner the new challenges that impose themselves upon us and inspire a new model of society’ (Forum Changer d’Ère, 2013: 5).

If the Groupe des dix was insistent on the importance of the relation between science and politics, the FCE turned the focus to the relation between technology and politics, using the power of new technological development to communicate and problem-solve in new ways through new means – Twitter, publishing under novel Creative Commons licensing, various forms of crowdsourcing – that the directors of the FCE thought to be more consistent with ‘participatory democracy’. ²⁶ By the second iteration of the FCE in 2014, the stakes, and solutions, were clear. In a signed introduction to a document entitled ‘Force de proposition’ attributed to the participants of the 2014 FCE, Anger stated that ‘politicians, and elites more generally, have failed. Disconnected from the people and the realities of everyday life, they are outmoded, incapable of leading in this world in full metamorphosis’. The title of her introduction was ‘Toward a Collaborative Society, in Movement’, and alongside the FCE, Anger now runs a ‘group of reflection and action’ called FLOW (Fluidité, liberté, ouverture, Wiki/génération Why) with de Rosnay. Their chief collaborators are mostly entrepreneurs doing innovative things with digital technology. It has become to a certain extent unclear whether technology is the means of revolution or the revolution in and of itself.

There is a historical transformation between the G10 and the FCE, and we would be wise to think about the changes that undergird any apparent tectonic shifts in more global processes of the transformation of labour and capital. Between the G10 and the FCE, for instance, we may observe a shift of which the French case is just that: merely a case. This shift is one away from an epistemological landscape that prioritizes thinking through the contingency of market culture as a form of emancipation, to a world in which rich people doing things with computers are not only patron saints, demigods, and heroes, but also political leaders just as, if not more, likely to find themselves allies to the political left. This said, it is also a world in which non-male, non-white presences have begun to make their presence known. In France especially, this repetition with change can present itself in jarring ways. Ségolène Royal, a prominent member of the French Socialist Party, introduced the 2014 iteration of the FCE, legitimizing what some would call, bluntly, a neoliberal institution with the stamp of left politics.

There are some features of this narrative, however, that strike one as relics – outdated or not – of a different historical era. Both the G10 and the FCE situated themselves in lifeworlds determined by the same phenomena, and in particular, by failure, whether it was the failure of elites and politicians to manage, control, or transform the world, or it was the failure of silly little reductive epistemologies to actually manage to engage with questions with enough reach to be meaningful in the context of everyday life. It bears repeating that these iconoclastic French men were hardly the only people to view the 1970s or the early 2010s as moments of unique political failures and distinct intellectual and moral questions that were too big, too complicated, too much for the disciplines from which they emerged. Within this framework, interdisciplinarity came to the fore as at once an ontological claim that the present was too complex for existing tools of scholarship, and an epistemological claim that by unifying discrete forms of thinking in a manner that allowed them to engage with each other on questions and concepts that were big, and loud, and flexible, this complexity could be in some way understood or managed. Humanists and scientists came together in newly minted centres devoted to the humanistic study of the sciences, the scientific or digital study of the humanities, and in the process, old-guard institutions like the IAS at Princeton lost none of their lustre but much of their unique character. I present this narrative with all the tact and grace of a cybernetic automaton because, as it is all too easy to forget, outside of certain privileged milieus that push back against this flattening of the world, this mode of thinking and organizing our institutions of governing, learning, producing, labouring, and managing is still held up as a reasonably unproblematic, positive development. It is difficult to know what to do with arguments that may quickly come unmoored but should nonetheless be parsed out. Within this loose conceptual framework, the same historical processes and the same epistemological transformations are at play both in the development of truly transgressive intellectual, artistic, and creative production and in the hegemonic rise of the think tank as leader of thought and of politics. The same flexible concepts, and concepts of flexibility, play, crossing borders, and bringing previously underrepresented voices to the table structure the lifeworlds engaged with by social historians in the 1970s and cultural historians in the 1980s and 1990s, and the HR departments of the modern, enlightened, adaptable, malleable corporation.

In this old new world, the vocabulary of systems thinking is alive and well; moreover, it has become accurate: The world has caught up to meet its conceptual ligature with the rise of the Internet and the ever-increasing fluidity of networks of global capital. In this old new world, there are groups of intellectuals who remain foolish, arrogant, and/or brave enough to face the challenges of their unique moment in history in its novelty and complexity. In the process, complex phenomena cede the stage to novel ones. There may be few symbols of the present moment more rhetorically and metaphorically charged than the Internet – itself a network – but there is, it bears repeating, more to this world than the Internet.

What ultimately bridges the gap between the FCE and the Groupe des dix, both historically and epistemologically, is quite simple: hubris. Both groups bit off more than they could chew, and did so deliberately, as a determinative rhetorical gesture and structural feature. These terminological and disciplinary strategies, initially employed to reveal the fallibility of objective knowledge and the contingency of social and political life, have become reincorporated in a new positivism. Complexity can be managed, though one wonders if to manage complexity is to deny it. Life can be surfed. But in their wholehearted embrace of the emancipatory power of technology, one wonders if the FCE has papered over a key question raised by the Groupe des dix, one that should still resonate for the intellectual historian: Under what conditions can epistemology be emancipatory? That one group raised the question of emancipation does not minimize the fact that the forms of thought they performed and engendered are built out of the same conceptual cloth as the institutes they challenged. This should strike us as strange, as something to call into question. It is roughly the equivalent of the World Bank delivering speeches in the same language as Marxian economists, and, moreover, coming to see that they more or less share the same basic values. We need not throw out the entirety of modern experience to be dispositionally suspicious of it, especially those elements presented to us as constitutive of this brave, flexible mangle of a world that we have to manage, to negotiate, to think through.

The FCE represented many things that could easily be subjected to disparagement and invective. It is also the culmination, or at least the continuation, of French cybernetics. As a centralized, highly technological, largely computational approach to the study of the interactions between organic and inorganic systems, the discipline of cybernetics barely got its foot in the door in French academia. As an injunction to think complexity, and to do so via a vocabulary that would actually allow complexity to be thought, the FCE merely shows an alternate history of cybernetics, one preoccupied not with the creation of automata or developments in high computing, but with the acknowledgement that the problems of modern society were too complicated for old heuristics. Here, the 2010s diverge with the 1970s, for the FCE did something that the G10 would never intimate: It saw in the digital frame of the digital world the stuff of liberation itself.

Cybernetics, by now, is long outmoded, perhaps banished to the annals of intellectual history, perhaps resurrected as AI. But the idea that complex problems should be addressed by interdisciplinary groups forged through specialized, shared vocabularies, an intellectual history to which cybernetics no doubt contributed, lives on, both in the think tank and in the academy. Such approaches to complexity are neither good nor bad; they are part and parcel of the way we approach large-scale problems in the 21st century. If nothing else, they deserve to be scrutinized with all the care and nuance that they are supposed to bring to the subjects they themselves consider. The critical gaze may require the use – and engender the abuse – of many of the same concepts that structure institutions of hegemonic political and economic power. This is not a moral determination, but nor does it represent a point at which we could (or should) liberate ourselves from the task of critical thought itself.