Cybernetics and Snake Coils

Hello,

Welcome to my first newsletter.

Next week, Tuesday 24 June, 18:00-20:00 (C40.530, Leuphana University), I’ll be giving a talk about the final sentence from Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ (1990), which reads, ‘A snake's coils are even more intricate than a mole's burrow.’

What have snakes to do with the ‘societies of control’ that define our contemporary era, and the cybernetics upon which they are based?

I’ll be drawing on William Burroughs, Hardt and Negri, Aby Warburg, and especially Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne to explore the association of snakes and the art of controlling ships possessed by the Greek kubernétes (helmsman). As I’ll argue, modern cybernetics not only adopted its name from the latter, but also, at least in Norbert Wiener’s rendition of it, its snakiness. The talk will strive to offer a critical account of snakes and control that precludes the antisemitic trope of a snakish group who controls the world.

I’m afraid this is an in-person only talk, but if you’d like to read a draft of the paper just reply to this message and I’ll gladly share one with you, so long as you swear by the river Styx that it won’t be distributed further as it’s in the works for publication.

Guests are encouraged to read Deleuze’s short ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ for context if they haven’t already, and read the draft paper of the talk if they so wish. Contact me for either.

The colloquium is organised as a cooperation between Leuphana’s Center for Critical Studies (CCS) and the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition. Webpage here.

Wishing you all the best,

Daniel Nemenyi