Volume 036 min read
Cybernetics II
Module I · The Foundation
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand the reversal from which the CCRU derived its entire way of thinking: positive feedback. You know how a system amplifies itself instead of stabilising, what characterises processes far from equilibrium, and why order can arise out of instability. With that you hold the physical and conceptual tool the group later uses to describe capital, technology, and desire as runaway machines.
Exposition
At the end of the last volume stood negative feedback, damping every deviation. Now flip the sign. Positive feedback amplifies the deviation rather than counteracting it. The result of one step increases the swing of the next. The circle closes here too, but it doesn't calm anything, it drives. Small beginnings grow into large effects, and those effects feed their own cause. The system moves ever further from its starting state, with no set point pulling it back.
The familiar images come from everyday life. A microphone in front of its own speaker produces a tone that climbs and climbs until it screams. The microphone picks up the sound, the speaker gives it back amplified, the microphone picks up that amplification again. Every round raises the level. The same pattern sits in the snowball becoming an avalanche, in the rumour that swells through the alarm it causes, in the panic on the exchange where each sale deepens the fall in price that triggers new sales. In every case the deviation is not an error the system corrects. It's the fuel the system feeds on.
Hold on to the decisive difference. Negative feedback serves preservation. It keeps a system with itself. Positive feedback serves intensification. It drives a system beyond itself. One stabilises, the other escalates. Classical cybernetics treated positive feedback mainly as a danger, as what destroys a system when control fails. This is exactly where the revaluation sets in that becomes central for the CCRU. What the engineering tradition feared as a malfunction becomes the object of interest. Not the system that holds, but the system that runs away.
To underpin that revaluation theoretically, the group reached for a second source, the thermodynamics of states far from equilibrium. Its most important name is Ilya Prigogine, a chemist and Nobel laureate. Prigogine studied systems held far from their equilibrium because energy flows through them continuously. Such systems behave differently from the closed systems of classical physics. Where the classical system decays into disorder, the open system far from equilibrium can spontaneously produce new order. Prigogine called these formations dissipative structures.
The term deserves a moment. Dissipation means scattering, the streaming away of energy. A dissipative structure is an order that exists precisely because it continuously consumes and releases energy. It is not a state but a process. A vivid example is the vortex in draining water. It has a clear form, but the form is nothing fixed. It persists only as long as water flows through. Stop the flow and the vortex vanishes. The order lives off the movement, not off rest. Another example is certain chemical reactions that develop rhythmic patterns or colour changes on their own, with nobody keeping time from outside. Structure emerges out of turbulence.
For the CCRU this held a consequential shift in the picture of the world. Classical cybernetics read order as resistance to decay, an island of stability in the current of entropy. Prigogine's perspective inverts the relation. Order arises not against turbulence but out of it. It is not a dam against the current but a pattern within it. Distance from equilibrium is not the exception. It is the place where the new is born. Instability becomes creative.
Now join the two threads. From cybernetics the group took positive feedback, the mechanism of self-amplification. From thermodynamics it took dissipative structures, the idea of an order that lives off throughput and intensification. Together they produce a picture opposed to classical cybernetics. A system need not strive towards equilibrium in order to persist. It can sustain itself precisely in running away, and even grow more complex. Intensification is then not a road to collapse but a mode of existence in its own right.
This is exactly the picture the CCRU transferred to culture. If capital, technology, and desire operate as systems of positive feedback, then they seek no equilibrium but accelerate themselves. They are dissipative structures on a grand scale, orders that live off their own escalation. The question of classical cybernetics was how a system stays stable. The question of the CCRU is where a system runs to when it makes its own instability the drive. Out of that second question the whole of the later thinking grows.
A word on judgement is needed, so that you feel the ambivalence running through this material. A self-amplifying process can liberate or destroy, and often the two are indistinguishable. The same avalanche that sweeps away a frozen order buries whatever lies in its path. The CCRU, especially in its Land phase, refused to resolve that ambivalence prematurely. It held on to the fascination with the runaway even where it turned threatening. That refusal is not an oversight. It's a stance. Note it, because in the volumes on Land and accelerationism it becomes the actual provocation.
Core Claim
Positive feedback amplifies deviations and drives a system beyond itself instead of stabilising it. Together with Prigogine's dissipative structures, in which order arises from the state far from equilibrium, it gave the CCRU its model of a culture living off its own escalation.
The Critic
The decisive step in this volume is also its least secured, and it happens in a single sentence. The image gets transferred to culture. What was said about vortices, reactions, and microphones suddenly holds for capital, technology, and desire. That transfer is an analogy, not a derivation. From the fact that two processes admit similar descriptions it does not follow that they obey the same law. Importing physical models into social theory has a long history, and it is largely a history of the short circuit.
Prigogine also carries less weight than is implied here, and Volume 15 will return to this. His dissipative structures are stable patterns that maintain themselves far from equilibrium, not runaway systems. The vortex doesn't disintegrate, it persists. What makes such structures possible is the interlocking of amplifying and damping feedback, which is to say the opposite of pure intensification. Prigogine is a thinker of order. The CCRU takes his rhetoric and leaves behind the mechanics it came from.
That leaves the refusal to resolve the ambivalence, which this volume presents as a stance. It reads two ways. As intellectual honesty facing a phenomenon without sorting it morally in advance. Or as an evasion that dodges the question of what a process does to people by declaring the question vulgar. The course will have to hold both readings open to the end, because the CCRU itself never separated them.
Bridge to the Next Volume
The physical foundation is in place. But the CCRU was not a natural science, it was a school of continental philosophy. Before feedback can meet capital and desire, you need the second great source: Deleuze and Guattari. Volume 4 introduces their Anti-Oedipus and the concept of the desiring-machine, with which they redefined desire itself as a productive, machinic force. There you leave physics and enter the philosophy from which the group took its language.