wE ARE aLSo MADe oF PapEr!

Cybernetics, technocracy and politics, in seek of humanity.
ROBOTS ARE ALREADY HERE!

In the aftermath of the tumultuous events of May ‘68, a group of French intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix (G10) formed an interdisciplinary think tank to bridge the gap between science and society. The group, at times, included prominent figures such as André Leroi- Gourhan, Jacques Attali, Henri Laborit, Michel Serres, Edgar Morin, and Jacques Sauvan. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), they reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics.

What made this philosophical school cybernetic, despite the absence of computer scientists, was the tacit elevation of the metaphor as a key concept. Ideas could flow between, over, and across different disciplinary, ontological, and epistemological borders.

The Groupe des dix believed that May ‘68 marked the end of an era where politics, especially mass, democratic politics, could drive societal transformation, which would be led by science and technology. They argued that political transformations of substantial magnitude required a new epistemology. This new approach would use scientific knowledge to navigate politics with an awareness of its own limitations, as opposed to the single-minded, depoliticized logic of technocratic governance or the rigid determinism of structuralist logic. Cybernetics, complexity theory, and other forms of systems thinking introduced unprecedented ways to understand and transform human existence. Their vision was that human mastery of the natural world, achieved by learning and applying natural laws through technology, underscored humans as rational beings in a rational world.

Technocracy, however, had its share of critics from various intellectual, cultural, and artistic circles. In 1965, Jean-Luc Godard released Alphaville to immediate acclaim. This dystopian science fiction film depicted a planet governed by a supercomputer called Alpha 60, where emotions and freedom of thought were banned. Equations like E=mc² adorned buildings as a form of precise, state-sanctioned neon graffiti. In the film’s climax, Alpha 60 decides that Alphaville should declare war on Earth, with its decrees trickling out of a slow dot-matrix printer. These decrees were interpreted by scientists in white coats, though there was no room for interpretation. From a modern perspective, it is both terrifying how quickly the decision is made and absurd how slowly the technology processes decisions of potentially world-changing significance.

Shortly after its release, Alphaville was featured on the cover of Le Nouvel Observateur with the headline, “The Robots are already here!” The framing of the piece was striking, but appropriate, reflecting contemporary French fears about technology, modernization, and urban development. Alphaville was filmed in Paris, and its world was distinctly Parisian. Public executions were staged in iconic bathhouses, while the streets, shot in the 15th arrondissement, emphasized the city’s transformation with its modern, gleaming glass facades.

There were two contemporary French societal facts that Godard successfully parodied in the film: the absolute separation between technicians and other living beings, and a “civilization of derision.” The overwhelming array of useless information, signs, and gestures in Alphaville mirrored the derisory nature of contemporary life. Jean-Luc Godard was committed to showing how to make life, and individual lives, significant by transforming an overwhelming amount of data into something resembling information and creating state apparatuses that are responsive to feedback. His basic, or perhaps simple, humanism revealed his antipathy to technocracy and his dedication to finding a way to integrate science and politics into everyday life. In reality, the indispensable need is for a science of man, an anthropology, capable of identifying those lines that have a political sense. SILVIA MOTTA