Two Schemes for Thining Knowledge Extraction

Two Schemes for Thinking Knowledge ExtractivismAlongside the debate on techno-feudalism—which contrasts two visions of digital capitalism, between the capture of rent through predation and the intensified exploitation of labor—I would like to foreground two schemes of knowledge or data capture and production across the history of modernity and capitalism.On the one hand, there is “reduction into art (réduction en art)” (Hélène Vérin), which consists in analytically describing trades or activities in order to systematize them and, where possible, mechanize them. The culmination of this process of reduction into art, initiated during the Renaissance and pursued through colonial questionnaires distributed in New Spain in the sixteenth century (the Relaciones Geográficas), is undoubtedly Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Through its multiple figures and descriptions, we find—among many things— an article about pins which provided the model for the division of labor that Adam Smith would later mobilize in The Wealth of Nations. Practices of reduction into art continues with figures such as Babbage, Galton, and Taylor, each of whom systematized, in their own way, techniques for capturing knowledge through reduction into art, with an explicit political and economic agenda: the gathering of knowledge or data is always undertaken in order to secure a position of power or to intensify the rationalization of labor processes through their measurement and the increase of relative surplus value.On the other hand, where reduction into art fails, cybernetics has popularized the technique of “black-boxing”, which involves disregarding the internal details of a person or a system and focusing instead solely on the relationships between inputs and outputs for a given object. At first glance, this appears less as an act of extraction than as an admission of modesty: with the “excessively complex objects” (Stafford Beer) addressed by cybernetics, no knowledge can be extracted in the classical sense, and it is therefore preferable to black-box them. Cyberneticians then ask how such objects can be known and, above all, controlled—a question that leads in particular to the generalized computerization of their environment: in the absence of the ability to know and program individual entities, the aim becomes to master everything that surrounds them.Through these two schemes, whose complementarity rather than opposition we will examine, we will analyze the kinds of knowledge and power at stake between the objects and subjects of cognitive extractivism, as well as their connections to contemporary forms of capitalism.