Thorstein Veblen & Posthuman Machine Processes

American sociologist Thorstein Veblen is mostly known for originating the concept of “conspicuous consumption”, observing that a “leisure class” of wealthy individuals buy expensive things they don’t need in order to impress other rich people, a behaviour which is emulated in turn by the less wealthy to help them gain status (fake Gucci handbags etc.), and thus allows the wealthy to steer culture.

He is also revered as a pioneer of institutional economics, discussing how institutions shape the use of technology in his book The Theory of Business Enterprise. It is in that same book however that another—much lesser known —side of Veblen’s thought emerges. In chapter two, Veblen advances what might be called a posthumanist theory of machine processes, a discussion of the economic relations between human and machine that turns folk assumptions on their head.

Machine Processes & the Industrial Economy

For Veblen, the phrase “machine process” does not simply mean the sum of machines that serve as tools for humans to produce things; rather, Veblen means something more like a system of productive material factors that interact in various ways. It is not simply the lathe which machines the steel, but the steel which uses the lathe as a means to change form. Power, causal efficacy in the production process, is not unidirectional but reciprocal.

Veblen cautions also that we should not take “machine process” to refer solely to things occurring via complicated apparatuses. For Veblen, any production process that strays away from traditional artisanal craft, that embodies a certain logical system of carefully managed production, is machinic (I should say that Veblen does not use the precise word “machinic” himself). Also, these processes cannot be seen in isolation, but rather “each follows some and precedes other processes in an endless sequence”, meaning that the entire industrial economy is in effect one giant machine.

Further, the industrial economy has brought mass standardisation (weights, measures, product classes), not because consumers demand it, but because such standardisation is more amenable to the continued functioning of the industrial machine. This standardisation ripples through economy and society, enacting various institutions of regularisation. For instance, to ensure that the necessary materials for production arrive on time and reliably, trains must run on a strict schedule, and this includes passenger trains. Thus the lives of human beings must also be regularised for the sake of the machine processes.

To put it rather bluntly, human beings “become like cogs in the machine”. To put it in a more Foucauldian and Deleuzian manner, a process of machinic symbiosis arises, in which humans become dependent on the machinery, and the machinery becomes dependent on us. Machinic power (truly, if we take a materialist approach, then we must admit the machines themselves exercise power) inaugurates a new regime of order in which the flows of human flesh and other resources are coordinated to serve production.

Since the industrial economy is one big machine, a disruption in proceedings at one small part can have knock-on effects for the entire system. Hence, governance conducive to the machine process is not so interested in the details of particular production lines as it is in the system as a whole. And in the modern industrial economy, this governance is for the most part cybernetic self-governance, in which the market price system provides regulation that is at once local and systemic, decentralised and totalising.

Machine Processes Take Flight

Veblen is to be praised for taking a systems perspective on modern capitalism, and emphasising the multidirectional nature of causal relations, allowing all materials—human and non-human—their own agency in the productive network. However, a couple of issues need to be taken with Veblen’s picture of the industrial economy. First, his picture is much too static, or more specifically homeostatic, and second he over-eggs the extent to which capitalism engenders uniformity.

To take the first issue, Veblen seems to see the industrial economy as a system in which disturbances and irregularities are not permitted, or at least not for long. In order for such a complex, interrelated system of economic processes to function, anomalies must be rapidly adjusted away by the price system, much as a thermostat allows certain small oscillations in the temperature of a room, but ultimately keeps these changes bounded, concentrating the range of acceptable temperatures around a strict set point.

This stands in stark contrast to the Schumpeterian focus on “creative destruction” in which capitalism is constantly undergoing upheavals, crises and revolutions as a consequence of innovation and entrepreneurship. Modern liberal/neo-liberal economists do not see capitalism as homeostatic at all, but adhere to a veritable cult of the entrepreneur, in which capitalism thrives on innovation, inebriation with neomania, spurting from young upstart entrepreneurs who “disrupt”, “move fast and break things” and so on.

Rather amusingly, the anti-capitalist left likes to complain about both of these things simultaneously: capitalism is at once too static, grey and uniform, but also too anarchic and reckless. How can it be both? Part of the answer is given by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their mammoth magnum opus Capitalism & Schizophrenia: industrial capitalism oscillates between processes of de- and re-territorialisation, which is a fancy way of saying that capitalism allows a certain degree of novelty to irrupt within it now and then, but not so much that the bourgeois social norms on which it depends are undermined.

But even this does not go far enough: we need to think with at least one more dimension here. It is not simply that capitalism allows for the odd disruption to arise, before rapidly settling things back down to normal again; rather, with each disruption, capitalism ratchets rapidly along a vector towards greater deterritorialisation, and what’s more requires this movement in order to be sustained. Capitalism is thus what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call “antifragile”, a system that is made stronger by its unexpected disruptions. Capitalism does not need to rein in disruptions lest they capsize it, but actively feeds off of them.

Onto the second issue with Veblen’s picture of capitalism: he is certainly right that industrial capitalism has engendered mass standardisation, and machinically regularised human lives to a great extent. But far from killing individuality, diversity, artisanal arts and crafts and the like, modern capitalism has provided a new space for them to flourish. Humans have more free time and opportunities for personal development than ever before. Since Veblen was writing in 1904, it is perhaps excusable that he could not see what wonders capitalism would work.

Over the last century, mass production and standardisation have raised the mass of human beings around the world to a level of wealth that allows them more scope than ever before to engage in individual artisanal activities. Far from consumer choice being a straitjacket (as anti-capitalists like to claim), today virtually any item one can imagine either already exists or can be custom made, and the further proliferation of technologies like 3D printing can only accelerate the democratisation and diversification of production. At the same time, the abundant free time (yes, we really do have more free time) provided by modern Capitalism allows for richer and more varied life experiences.

Machine Processes & Liberal Humanism

But even if we admit that capitalism is not as stultifyingly static or grey and uniformalising as some claim, the vision presented above of humans as flows of resources, used by a system of machinery to further its own ends, probably still seems like a hellish dystopia to most, even if we get a lot out of it. So what are the social and political implications of this posthumanist vision of capitalism? Assuming we can do anything, what human action is to be taken in the face of the machine processes?

Dismantling the machine would be misguided. Primitivism—discarding with the machine in favour of something more “natural”—can be a pleasing fantasy, but would be a life-prohibiting reality to all but the hardiest. Perhaps we want to “control” the machine, to “steer” it in a more human-friendly direction? But this idea springs from a naïve humanism: to think that we can be Capitalism’s little homunculus, directing it from the head, reining it in like a horserider, is to grant an unrealistic degree of agency to human beings.

Human beings can certainly influence the course of history, but only to the same extent that any other flow of materials can have a causative power. Humans cannot steer the industrial economy, and our vain attempts to do so merely gum up its own self-regulatory cybernetic processes. The most we can hope for is a deepened symbiosis. To swallow our horror, and go all in, becoming more machinic, submitting to the machine processes, is our most feasible path.

As we begin to realise our liberal-humanistic fantasies of supreme freedom, agency and control do not align with the flow of real events, our political discourse will have to evolve to accommodate this newfound understanding. Towards the end of The Theory of Business Enterprise, Veblen addresses this eventuality, describing what many might see as a “contradiction” within capitalism: enterprise and the continuation of the machinic process are incompatible he says, since the machine cuts away the liberal-humanist foundations on which enterprise rests.

Does this mean Capitalism, in an instantiation of pure tragedy at a huge scale, will destroy itself by undercutting its ideological foundations? No. This would only follow from an idealist view, in which the causal arrow goes from liberal-humanism to the establishment of industrial capitalism. But a materialist must see it the other way around: industrial capitalism evolved and, as it evolved, ideologies were developed to justify it. These ideologies do help to sustain it in its current form, but become unnecessary when it progresses to its next form.

As the machine processes drive Capitalism towards a new post-human order, in which AI and automation almost entirely dominate, human resources may find deeper symbiosis in a literal fusion of human bodies with machinery. To become cyborgs is perhaps the only way the bulk of humanity can avoid falling out of society altogether. We can continue to prosper within the machine processes, provided we do not attempt to subvert them, provided we allow Capitalism to evolve beyond itself to a more fully automated post-Capitalism, and to take us with it.

As the machine continues to evolve, new ideologies will appear to explain and justify its current order and the place of (post)humanity within it. New political architectures and modes of governance will be orchestrated. Business enterprise will continue, and it will continue in a form not unlike what it takes today, but it will be grounded very differently, and the relationships between business, machinery and humanity will be seen through a much more materialist and systemic lens. We would do well to get a head start: to think a fully machinic Capitalism, think a posthuman subjectivity and reconcile ourselves to the possible roads ahead.