Leviathan and Cybernetics
When I returned to Paris after the pandemic, I found something in the famous city had changed, and if I had to summarise the changes in two ways, it would be climate change and automation. The winter rain was pelting down, with temperatures fluctuating all day long. Automated payment machines have replaced clerks who used to check out customers in supermarkets and even bookstores. Instead of clerks, store security guards were escorting customers to pay. This is not an unfamiliar sight for a traveller like me from Asia, but it still felt strange to see it happening in Paris. It’s no wonder why there has been so much discussion about automation in France lately.
Of course, from a historical perspective, this push for automation is nothing new. In the early days of capitalism, the bourgeois obsession with machines was well known. Machines were devices that demanded the transformation of the body. Marx’s concept of “formal subsumption” in capital indicates nothing less than the mechanisation of the body, and the concept of “real subsumption” means the voluntary submission of the subject to this mechanisation. When I was studying in England, I once visited the site of the Industrial Revolution and was puzzled by it. The most important energy source for the steam engines that fueled the industrial revolution was waterpower, so the first factories were in rural areas. Interestingly then, what caught my eye were the gigantic, inefficient machines that seemed out of place in the rural landscape. I was intrigued by the bourgeois desire to invest what would have been a tremendous amount of money at the time in machinery that was less productive than skilled labour. It was a choice that would not have been possible if productivity had been considered.
From these examples, we can see that the bourgeois interest in machines was excessive and not rational. Perhaps it was a matter of conviction, and we cannot overlook the fact that Thomas Hobbes saw mechanisation as a matter of politics, advocating for a “bourgeois commonwealth”. Hobbes’s “Leviathan” is an “artificial man” and an automaton. The belief underlying utilitarianism was also the bourgeois obsession with machinery. For Hobbes, a state is a machine, a collection of forces whose members are represented by a single, absolute master as the maximum of human capabilities.[1] Hobbes wanted to theorise politics based on the achievements of the scientific revolution of his time, and Leviathan was its consequence. It is important to note here that Hobbes uses science, or more precisely, mathematical methodology, to extrapolate a unit, the state, that is beyond individual experience.
