Cybernetic Capitalism: A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable

This book offers a conceptual interrogation of how capital navigates its cybernetic environment. Taking an immanent perspective, the book develops a unique synthesis between Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and the critical theory tradition. Overwijk shows how neoliberal capitalism’s version of rationalization depends on the organization and management of society on the basis of cybernetic principles.

Overwijk seeks to update earlier critiques of cybernetic capitalism that stressed the system’s colonization of its environment, its making the entirety of social life communicable. Under today’s cybernetic rationalization, things are radically different. Neoliberal political economy aims to incite the incalculability of the market; platform capitalists venture to capitalize on the unpredictable efforts of their users; and post-Fordist management seeks to encourage the creativity of service workers. As this book uniquely shows, capital no longer aims at total communicability, but instead seeks to provoke and exploit the incommunicability of its environment. In this sense, it offers an ecological theory of capitalism, laying conceptual the groundwork for understanding the extractivist logic of the Anthropocene.

Cybernetic Capitalism shows how the cultural obsession with incommunicability that animates cybernetic rationalization has taken an irrationalist turn, resurfacing in the mysticism of conspiracy theory and radical-right politics. The book offers a novel and compelling materialist interpretation of today’s paradoxical connections between neoliberal rationalism and radical-right irrationalism.

Jan Overwijk is NWO Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.