“Cybernetics as a non linear feedback principle and constant trial over the same was identified seventy years ago by Robert Wiener to dissolve the dichotomy between the mechanic and the organic: there is cyberneticity in animals as much as in machines. Today the cybernetic machine envelops us in a cyberphysical system and its algorithms; James Lovelock understands the entire Earth as a cybernetic system, and Yuk Hui sees in its recursivity a possibility to overcome the end of metaphysics. QPR (Qué Pasa Riachuelo) took the recursivity to politics: the data feedback is not just a valuable instance of popular participation in an information and monitoring platform (and why not, a horintalization of digital surveillance power), but also a new way to see a territory.
Since Alfred Korzybski said in the 30’s that “the map is not the territory”, much postmodernity has passed under the bridge. In the local vulgate, the mapping is always the schematization of some situation while the territory ended up being the “real” instance in society, where one must always ground and in which theories, concepts and even some ethical and juridical principles are suspended before the dirty complexity of social relationships. The territory became territorialism, an ideology of intellectual and political claudication before a reified reality and supposedly unfathomable: a conservative chaos.
If we combine cybernetics and territory we could trace “an organic map, as alive and complex as the territory that constantly feeds it data, and capable of registering that which territorialism ignores: the relationship between humans and non humans. The cybernetic principle permits visualizing in a map networks that no grounding to the territory could see: the multiple relationships that unite each neighbor with another neighbor, with neighbors in another settlement, with the dumpster, the factory, with the river and with the shit that comes and goes. The recursive loop registers those networks and creates new ones by connecting all those actors to an online platform that ends up being one more actor. To political realism is opposed a material realism that ensembles human and non-human objects and makes a new type of community possible: the utopian dimension that territorialism unavoidably denied and that now emerges from an even more “real” approach of the territory. Chaos becomes a promise of community.”
Alejandro Galiano, Territorial cybernetic, material utopianism. About the experience of m7red: 2000-2020.