The Black Box

I feel the need to write about an interesting coincidence in two readings for different classes (Berger & Luckman and Pinch). Both develop a Weberesque thesis of routinization in which (a) society condenses a set of practices or ideas into a practical, epistemological, or symbolic object. The authors call this process "objectivation" or "black-boxing," respectively. I think it might be productive to consider this phenomenon in contemporary society in light of the discipline-to-control transition. [Another take on the same Deleuze essay - without director reference to my prior one.]

The relatively isolated and independent knowledge contained within the black box should give way to the interpenetrating flows of information characteristic of control. Instead of building blocks which can be assembled into a larger structure (which can proceed in the direction of being made into one larger box or of having internal boxes examined individually), we should see chunks of code with unstable boundaries, continually modulating each other's meanings.

The transition from disciplinary institutions to control society is itself a large-scale example. Discipline produces institutions as self-contained objects--the school, the factory--and does the same for its human products--student, worker. Control societies offset the disintegration of these totalizing but regional domains of meaning with the establishment of a larger regime of capital and information. Enclosures of disciplinary sites create distinct but analogous objects; flows of control society subordinate the qualitative to the quantitative, infusing institutional objects with outside forces.

The digital nature of control is essential. Social humans need black boxes to reduce cognitive load and maintain mutual understanding. Human communication requires shared norms of all kinds: a spatial arrangement of the participants that all accept, the use of concepts (let alone a language) that all understand, and general agreement about the goals directing the interaction. Computer communication, although mediated to some extent by programming language, is fundamentally easier, since complete information about all entities within the communicative situation can be made available by design. In a digital system, scanning the ones and zeroes that make up a component provides complete information about its behavior.

This property of computers applies to digitally conceived (or, relatedly, cybernetic) models of society. Control reduces elements of the system, including people, to quantitative measurements and decision points with all possible outcomes given (and probabilities calculated); this ontology decreases the necessity black boxes, since the entire system is available for prediction and control.

It is revealing that the black boxes of computer programmers are subroutines. Subroutines help programmers by allowing them to view their code at abstract, more symbolic levels; in this sense, they resemble the old black boxes. Yet computers generate a system of perfect exchange between the name and content (signifier and signified) of the subroutine; variables in the subroutine take on the values given in the main stream of code. The old black boxes, the black boxes of discipline, were imperfect because the object as molded only approximated the needs of the situation at hand. The processes behind its objectivation contained extraneous --perhaps even counterproductive--elements which were difficult to modify situationally. Control society eliminates this "deep" historical dimension of the object by bringing everything of importance to the surface.

Consider linguistics. Whereas Chomsky employed a semantic black box for words (and ignored the semantic effects of syntactic transformations), contemporary linguistics uses computers to generate semantic probabilities; although this has not yet resulted in a Turing-worthy computer, it has enabled the successful analysis of texts (and their relationship to others) using a completely superficial approach. Instead of building a language out of quantized blocks, digital incursions on semantics will continually produce models which get better and better at approximating (and then surpassing) human capabilities for significations. The question of when computers will achieve a moment of "true" or "knowing" reference is irrelevant because it presumes the elimination of a black box which functionally no longer exists.

In psychology, a similar phenomenon: the downfall of a hegemonic categories like "the mother" or "Oedipus" providing organizing principles for the full spectrum of human activity. Instead: the statistical influence of a particular type of mothering, the probability of voting for the same political party as your father given x, y, and z.

A tendency towards "theory" bringing together useful aspects from a wide range of works, proudly independent of a foundational set of categories to be assumed. "A Marxist analysis of" x built into a larger, more autonomous theoretical edifice... or at least, explained without taking for granted the importance, validity, and common knowledge of the conceptual tools it employs.

[It seems as though I'm cutting down on verbs. I guess I'm tired.]

Political science trapped by its own black boxes. Increasing reliance on statistical analysis with a seemingly ability to peer very deeply into black boxes of "culture" and "institutions. " Result: political science is not on the predictive forefront of the academy.

[That's definitely an overstatement and unnecessarily harsh. I'm losing it.]

Fiction may have anticipated by many decades the move from assembling black boxes to deconstructing them. In this sense, the high modernism of, e.g., Joyce is ahead of the modern disciplinary project. This comforts me... a little.

[[Edit immediately after posting: this is a pretty absurd claim, especially given the arguments made elsewhere in this post about interiority with respect to the human. It may be necessary to elaborate on a distinction between "flat" and "deep" interiority. There's a seeming paradox lurking here: a tension between the flattening of interiority and the invasion of the black box. It's important to keep in mind that the previous "deep" conception of interiority was one that had to be papered over through objectivation. But whereas the black box promises correspondence to a deeper interior, the flows of control seem more indifferent to this core because it does not underpin them--in fact, it is largely irrelevant to them. As before... this is an incomplete exploration!]]

Skipping straight to the heart of the 'hard' sciences... well, the Pinch article is about physics. What's physics like in the control society? I'm really not qualified to me. Does physics recognize and take into account the probabilities of its measuring instruments? How precisely does it replicate the digital system of perfect exchange? *Shrug.* I'm way out of my area here. Time to sleep.