During this summer semester 2020 (April to July/August-September), I will be teaching a seminar class for Master students at the Institute of Musicology and Media Sciences of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The class will be connected to some of the developments coming from my doctoral research on project Cybersyn, and hence it will tackle the concept of Cybernetics of Exchange. This latter notion, Exchange —or rather Exchanging—, has been taken from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, as a methodological strategy and starting point to deploy an archaeo-genealogical analysis on cybernetic thinking in general, and most precisely, on its branch called cybernetics of management.
Even more precisely, this strategy will allow the class to use project Cybersyn as a case study to discuss and reflect on the emergence of a technologically conditioned and somehow autonomously evolving notion of value —of exchanging and/or circulating value—, and hence on the potential scope that such topology, such complex, may have in the past, current and future human situation. Consequently, the class will span from Foucault’s archaeology to Marx’ Fragment on the one hand —going through project Cybersyn and Stafford Beer’s cybernetics of management properly—, and from Nick Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism to Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns’s Algorithmic Governmentality on the other, passing through Foucault’s own governmentality, to end with Galloway and Thacker’s theory of networks, and few brief notes on Simondon’s transindividuation.