The essay 'The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems' clearly requires an understanding of Benjamin's 'Artwork' essay. Interestingly as an update so-to-speak, this essay is not simply recast in the age of digital technology or computers but cybernetics. It is within this context that Bill Nichols wishes to test the artwork thesis and its claims for cultural transformation in the present moment as it was then (in 1988).  

This essay begins with a useful description of such cybernetic systems: as 'an array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power' and even 'some quotient of intelligence' but all 'exhibit the capacity to process information and execute actions' (1988: 22). He thus places the computer within a broader definition of cybernetic systems to draw out the particularities and limits of systems that are self-regulating within precise and predetermined or coded parameters. He situates the computer as not merely a part of these processes but also a metaphor for them, and as such the contemporary exemplar of the dialectical relation of what he calls 'the negative dominant tendency towards control and positive latent potential towards collectivity' (1988: 23) - even in the artwork essay, democratic potential is only ever evoked as potential in contrast to rising fascist tendencies. The language of cybernetics, through the regulation of systems and actions, thus dramatically evokes this ideological tension 'between the liberating potential of the cybernetic imagination and the ideological tendency to preserve the existing form of social relations' (1988: 23).

Rather reflecting the times (1980s) when the phrase 'cultural production' had a currency, he significantly focuses on the 'work of culture' rather than 'artwork' as a broader category that would include art of course but also other cultural practices and actions emanating from the mode of production, and the relations of production it supports. In this way, there is a emphasis more on processes, operations and procedures that run in parallel to the cybernetic system.

In the time of Benjamin's essay, industrial processes and mass reproduction suggested fundamental shifts in the nature of art production, perception and relations of production - where the concept of aura, and the linked (alliterative) traditions attached to authenticity, authorship and authority were challenged. In other words, through reproduction, art is radically transformed in both form and function, and reality becomes something that can be re-presented, re-made - as it is revealed to be artificial in the first place. The significance for Benjamin is clear: 'The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice - politics.'

New technologies necessarily hold the potential for revolutionary change but this is why the reverse is often the case, as this dangerous potential is recognised by the overall system. This sense of irony is clearly dialectical in that technology both reveals and enables new social formations and practices, as well as being simultaneously used to bolster old ones - in the name of progress. It seems fair to say that the dynamics of this appear all the more striking at this point in time. The essay raises this through a series of questions such as: '... in what ways is our 'sense of reality' being adjusted by new means of electronic and digital communication?' [...] 'Is it conceivable, for example, that contemporary transformations in the economic structure of capitalism, attended by technological change, institute a less individuated, more communal form of perception similar to that which was attendent upon face-to-face ritual and aura and is now mediated by anonymous circuitry and the simulation of direct encounter' (for example online seminars as part of this MSc programme) [...] and 'does the work of art in the age of postmodernism lead, at least potentially, to apperceptions of the 'deep structure' of post-industrial society comparable to the apperceptive discoveries occasioned by mechanical reproduction in the age of industrial capitalism?' (1988:26). Comparable - of course - but are the tendencies more or less pronounced? For instance, interactive systems extend dialogic structures, continuing to dispute single authorship as well as additionally becoming 'messages-in-circuit' (Nichols quotes Bateson's phrase from 'Steps to an Ecology of the Mind' New York: Ballentine 1972). Is it simply possible to extend this circuitous and interconnected form to issues of authenticity and authority as in the case of the artwork essay. If so, Jameson's statement come to mind - that computer networks 'offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself' (1991:37). Nichols would add that cybernetics simulates social process itself through interaction: 'We can talk to a system [like Eliza] whose responsiveness grants us an awesome feeling of power and control... [but users] are allowed no choices regarding the ultimate values and purposes of the system' (1988:32). More a case of interpassivity perhaps - to use that phrase again. 

The distinction between the industrial mode of production and what some call the late-industrial mode of information is important in revealing certain general tendencies. Broad distinctions are made in this essay for convenience: between entrepreneurial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, and multinational capitalism (largely taken from Mandel's phases of economic expansion and stagnation, quoted in Jameson too - more on this in later discussions) underpinned by corresponding shifts in the technical apparatus: between steam and locomotive power, electric and petro-chemical power, and microelectrics and nuclear power (1988:27). For instance, it is generally agreed that culture has moved from a model of 'product' to 'process', and from representation to simulation, and from being defined in relation to machines to cybernetic systems (we are, after all, already cyborgs according to Haraway et al). In the light of these changes, unquestionably profound as they are, the more general question remains as to whether old theoretical frameworks remain useful for the purposes of criticism. I am reminded of the same dialectical twist, in that one needs to ask new questions of old ones and old questions of new ones, perhaps. 

He ends with reminding the reader that they play a part in a self-regulating system, and that purpose is paramount. This is the cybernetic metaphor that he wishes to employ echoing and quoting Bateson that we are 'part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole' and adds that 'The cybernetic metaphor invites the testing of the purpose and logic of any given system against the goals of the larger eco-system where the unit of survival is the adaptive organism-in-relation-to-its-environment, not the monadic individual or any other part construing itself as autonomous or 'whole' (Nichols quoting Bateson directly or indirectly, 1988: 46).



More notes:

For Benjamin the reminders of the productive apparatus were an essential part of the process: 'The equipment-free aspect of reality here (in films) has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality [such as cameras, lights, workers, sets and so on] has become an orchid in the land of technology' (in Nichols, 1988:33). Awareness of this is obscured but we might add that transparency is the responsibility of the artist/producer. In the words of Benjamin (but from another essay):
'an author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today... will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production. In other words, his [/her] products must possess an organising function besides and before their character as finished works." (Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London: Verso 1992: 98)
Nichols argues that this equipment-free aspect is more pronounced with cybernetic systems, deeply embedded in code and operating systems. It is no longer merely a question of a suspension of disbelief but of our absorption into code; as our interest is diverted from products and objects to process and simulation. Hence, the contemporary artistic preoccupation with software production or an interest in the aesthetics of code itself (as opposed to the dead-end commodity production of art). But this is not new, even the Victorian Zoo according to Nichols exhibits the same logic of a self-regulating system and simulated animal nature and 'natural' environment (1988: 34) (in this case as opposed to the dead-end mausoleum of the museum) - much like the idea of virtual worlds presumes the (real) world as we perceive it to be 'real'. Nichols captures the debate about artificial life through the lens of Benjamin: 'Casting the issue in terms of whether existence within the limits of an artificial life-support system should be considered 'life' obscures the issue in the same way that asking whether film and photography are 'art' does. In each case a presumption is made about a fixed, or ontologically given nature to life or art, rather than recognising how that very presumption has been radically overturned. And from preserving life artificially it is a small step to creating life by the same means.' (1988: 37). 


However, computer-based systems offer the possibility of extending (this destruction of aura) 'the society of the spectacle' to the extreme of replacing reality altogether in 'the society of the simulation' (after all, Baudrillard was merely extending Debord's earlier work on an image saturation): '... by dint of being more real than the real itself, reality is destroyed' (Baudrillard, quoted in Nichols, 1988: 35). Notwithstanding disputes over property rights, copyright even over human DNA, new human-machine assemblages, this is more the stuff of the science fiction imagination - like 'The Matrix' or the writings of Jean Baudrillard (such as 'Simulations'). A happy medium is struck in the image of the cyborg (the cybernetic organism) that merges automata and human biology (studies in cognition are similarly encoded with cybernetic metaphors).


Marx and clockwork:

For Marx, clockwork begins the process the industrialisation - in suggesting ways of applying automatic devices to the production process (note: partly as a result of Vaucanson's experiments - not so much his duck, although the duck says something too about the industrial process and the automated production of shit). From the clock to the mill where the act of work is performed largely without human labour, even if the moving force involved human or animal effort. Interestingly, the industrial period is described in regressive terms (in keeping with a complex understanding of progress):   
'The industrial revolution begins as soon as mechanisms are employed where, from ancient times, the final result has required human labour; hence not where, as with the tools mentioned above, the material actually to be worked up has never been dealt with by the human hand.' (Letter from Marx to Engels, 1863, quoted in Benjamin, 1999: 696)