The Power of Networks: Insights from the Political Cybernetics of Karl W. Deutsch

Abstract

This article reconstructs Karl Deutsch’s fearful yet hopeful views about the powers and pathologies of military, and other, national and international network systems. These views presuppose Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetic Interpretive Hypothesis: that ‘society can only be understood through a study of the messages and communication facilities which belong to it’; that the societal trend is towards more computerized communication systems; and that they embody an ‘open vs. closed’ living systems ethos. Drawing on science and technology studies by Edwards and Mirowski, the author suggests how Deutsch’s and Wiener’s prophetic hopes, fears, and insights can also enrich and redefine contemporary debates about the historical-technological development of our national societies, the powers and pathologies of game-theoretically programmed computer networks, the assessment of the life-preserving potential of our partly automated security systems, the major threats from the continued poverty of the less developed world, problems of decentralized governance, and the political, ethical, and religious justifications for our national, international, and civilizational identities and purposes.

Editorial Note

This article was in review when Hayward Alker sadly passed away in 2007 (This article was first published as: Hayward Alker, “The Power of Networks: Insights From the Political Cybernetics of Karl W. Deutsch,” in European Journal of International Relations, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 354–378). Reprinted with the permission of the SAGE permissions team, London, UK, 15 March 2019.). The previous and current editorial teams greatly appreciate the willingness of Thomas Biersteker and J. Ann Tickner to revise the article in light of the referee reports. We are also thankful to James Der Derian for providing an introduction and contextualization to the article.

Note from Thomas Biersteker

The article was edited to respond to the reviewers’ comments and delete some asides. There were places where I had to clarify the prose and correct for stylistic inconsistencies and a few typos. However, the edit was fairly light and I was able to leave the final four pages untouched. One of the most significant additions I made was to construct an Appendix of the interpretive hypotheses that Hayward Alker invoked and then repeatedly referred to in a shorthand manner throughout the text. The Appendix is almost entirely composed of Hayward Alker’s prose copied and pasted from passages in the main text. J. Ann Tickner went over the version I revised and made a few additional corrections.

Appendix: List of Interpretive Hypotheses

Wiener’s Cybernetic Interpretive Hypothesis: ‘[S]ociety can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it… in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.’

IH1::

Cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) were to be found everywhere after World War II and America had become a closed world sleek with dread and heavy with doom—the world of John von Neumann.

IH1a::

Disorder or entropy becomes identical with agonistic strife for Norbert Wiener.

IH1b::

Deception is at work, a thermodynamics of suspicion, of simulation and dissimulation, of surveillance and counter-surveillance has been born.

IH1c::

Closure comes increasingly to resemble a prophylaxis; the language of viruses, worms, and a myriad of creepy-crawlies evoke the closure of a siege mentality, of quarantine, or perhaps the tomb.

IH1d::

A closed world discourse formation describes the language, technologies, and practices that together supported the visions of centrally controlled, automated global power at the heart of American Cold War politics

IH2::

There is a powerful contradiction in the heart of the overlapping discourse formations of cyborg land—a militarist-anti-militarist conflict symbolically linked to an interpretive contrast between von Neumann (the militarist) and Wiener (the anti-militarist).

IH3::

Wiener was increasingly hostile toward economics, game theory, and the social sciences more generally.

IH3a::

Wiener feared that cybernetics would annihilate the Enlightenment individual as the captain of his soul.

IH3b::

He argued that the social sciences should be sequestered off from the natural sciences.

IH4a::

Deutsch’s relevant writings and his mostly unrecorded communications with Wiener may be more deeply interpreted as partly contradicting, more or less consciously, totalizing versions of IH1 and IH3.

IH4b::

These friendly discussions were often focused on the contest between Closed World and Open World cybernetic discourse formations, thus exemplifying IH2. Deutsch is here battling for the ontological ‘soul’ of cyborg land by suggesting a humanistic, ecological, non-militaristic, yet still scientific discourse formation concerning ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ individual, group, governmental, and governance practices.

IH5::

In terms of Karl Mannheim’s hypothesis about the fundamental democratization processes of the 20th century, prolonged periods of increased parochialism and nationalism might occur in many countries (like India) just during the critical early decades of the nuclear age.

IH6::

The international dynamic is weakening.

IH6a::

The nation-state has failed in its basic task of safeguarding its population and its capital in the case of a total, nuclear war, and in its tendencies, increasing with mobilization levels and overall size, toward dangerously nationalistic self closure.

IH6b::

The nation-state is thus in danger of becoming for its people a cognitive trap in times of peace and a death trap in the event of war.

IH6c::

The world is becoming one in a community of threat and fear.

IH7::

Not before the vast poverty of Asia and Africa have been reduced substantially by industrialization, and by gains in living standards and in education—will the age of nationalism and national diversity see the beginning of its end.

IH8::

Deutsch draws on experimental simulations of two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma games to suggest conditions leading both to cooperative and non-cooperative outcomes at the world level.

IH9::

When closed world discourses/practices at or near the heart of American (or any other entity’s) security-seeking command, control, and communication practices evidence strong tendencies in networks of socio-political communication toward lethal forms of self-closure, they are likely symptoms of much more general pathological, destructive forms of extreme ideologies, nationalist, transnationalist, or internationalist.