International Center for Cultural Studies

側記｜熵人類學的唯物主義：基礎設施、控制論與環境

2025-11-12

日期： 2025年11月12日

地點：Room 106, HC Building 2, Guangfu Campus, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU)

主持人：楊子樵 Lawrence Zi-Qiao Yang, Assistant Professor, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

主講人： Ned Rossiter, Professor, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia

側記作者：Lungani Hlongwa

活動資料：連結

Introduction

On November 12, 2025, Professor Ned Rossiter (Western Sydney University, Australia) delivered a book talk titled Entropological Materialism: Infrastructure, Cybernetics, Environment, organized by the International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS) at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. The talk was delivered ahead of the The Chip Era and Digital Governance workshop, setting the tone for what would be a series of lively academic engagements and exchanges.

The book talk was primarily divided into two parts: the first focusing on the motivations for writing the book and the second part on the book itself. This report will follow the same pattern and conclude with a question or two raised during the talk.

Motivations for the Book

The book talk by Professor Ned Rossiter is based on the upcoming book titled Entropological Materialism: Diagnosing Anxieties of Prediction in the Cybernetic Century, which is co-authored with media theorist Soenke Zehle. The title, according to the authors, captures the contemporary moment, which is characterized by very specific global configurations of technological, political and environmental conditions.

The book brings together years’ worth of collaborative work between Rossiter and Zehle, while also building on ideas developed in earlier works, such as Rossiter’s Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions and Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares. A major theme binding these, and other works which inspired the upcoming book, is an interest in organizational systems, order, the grammar and logic, and the rules through which society manifests and through which subjectivity is constituted. Rossiter emphasizes that the new book also works through some of these themes, albeit on an expanded socio-historical scale to highlight how the modern condition is fractured and differentiated.

Entropological Materialism also draws inspiration from previous work focusing on the geographies of power shaped by digital infrastructure such as data centers and undersea cables – technologies that spatialize the world in while enhancing particular forms of capitalist logics such as those studied by Mezzadra and Neilson. The book is also inspired by projects initiated around the time of COVID-19, namely the geopolitics of automation, focusing on warehousing industries in Malaysia, Germany and Australia. These projects sought to understand how automation technologies operate within warehouses, taking a deeper dive into the geopolitics of such systems beyond traditional frameworks.

Prof. Rossiter also highlights a significant theoretical gap the book aims to fill, particularly in terms of how materialism is understood. Taking a direct aim at Althusser, Rossiter argues that traditional Marxist/materialist understanding of subjectivity are insufficient for explaining what we may call the “algorithmic society” or digital operations more broadly. This is because such conceptions of materialism see subjectivity mainly through institutions such schools, courts, media, and churches, to mention a few. For Rossiter, this institution-centered focus is limited in today’s algorithmic and digital societies where power, control, and subjectivity are exercised through distributed, networked, and algorithmic systems, not just formal institutions.

Entropological Materialism

To frame the direction of the book, Prof. Rossiter began his presentation with a series of quotes, among them a quote by Norman Mailer: “The mark of mediocrity is to look for precedence.” Essentially, Mailer’s quote critiques intellectual timidity where thinking is shaped by existing frameworks and what has come before. The reason given for starting the book talk with this quote is that it goes directly against the idea of contingency which underpins the cybernetic paradigm.

Entropological Materialism: Diagnosing Anxieties of Prediction in the Cybernetic Century, as the subtitles suggest, is an ambitious book which tackles what feels like the core anxiety of our time: the perceived failure to order the world. This anxiety is underscored by several elements, such as the threat of collapse of ecological and social systems, the failure of governance and control, and the future of labor as automation becomes the norm. This is happening within a period the authors call the “cybernetic century,” starting in the 1930s. Rossiter emphasizes that from the very beginning, cybernetic thinking was split into two distinct trajectories, namely the US and French traditions.

Driven by thinkers such Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, the US tradition was primarily concerned with the question of control and communication efficiency. Underlying this thinking was the Second World War where the preoccupations were investigations into ballistics, rockets, and radars. For these thinkers, the focus was on containment and the management of contingency in highly defined environments.

The French tradition of cybernetic thinking differed significantly from US. Some of the main thinkers within this tradition include Georges Canguilhem and Gilbert Simondon who were mainly concerned with the question of life. Georges Canguilhem, for instance, focused his physiological investigations on how organisms regulate their internal environment to their surroundings.

Although the French tradition of cybernetic continued to influence generations of thinkers, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler, it was the US tradition that eventually became globally dominant, particularly in the post-WWII period. The success of the US model was due to several factors, including funding from the military-industrial complex and its universal application and systemic export.

Prof. Rossiter also spoke about how entropological materialism serves as a framework for the ideas they present in the book. This framework helps us understand the main thesis of the book, which is that our modern systems such as financial markets, infrastructure, and political tools, are not designed with stability in mind. Rather, they are designed to “order the world based on the assumption that the absence of order is the norm.” This, of course, flips everything on its head as one would think that efforts of standardization, for example, are designed to maintain order. Entropological materialism argues against this, proposing that disorder is the baseline. In this view, chaos is not a bug but rather a feature.

The entropological perspective, therefore, is a mode of inquiry and analytical perspective that addresses disorder, decay and disintegration in the cybernetic century. It defines the main effort of ordering organization within a disordered environment. To deal with the challenge of studying disorder, the authors introduce the illusive figure of the entropologist. This is not a person one can interview but rather a conceptual persona and conjunctural witness that stands across different historical epochs. This fascinating figure represents “someone” who observes how different systems try to manage disorder and decay.

The idea of the entropologist is borrowed from the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who proposed it during his study of disintegration with his discipline of entropology. Lévi-Strauss developed his entropological concept while lamenting the decline and decimation of cultures and societies during his 1930s fieldwork in Brazil. This is the framework that Entropological Materialism builds on, which while rejecting Lévi-Strauss’s resignation to cultural dissemination, observes decay by focusing mainly on our technological and economic infrastructures and not just cultural artefacts in the cybernetic century.

How, then, is materialism understood within this framework? With materialism, the authors are clear that they mean something much deeper than consumerism. For them, materialism is a very specific analytical tool that looks at the physical, economic, and technological structures that fundamentally determine how we organize our lives and beliefs. The authors posit that materialism requires paying attention to the structural relations that shape the production of ideology, subjectivity, economy and society, while focusing analysis on material conditions such as the climate, social and economic factors.

In his talk, Rossiter highlighted the history of their materialist thinking and traced its intellectual lineage to Louis Althusser’s work, specifically his concept of “aleatory materialism,” which deals with contingency and unpredictability. Althusser developed this concept while he was observing historical disorder which he primarily saw through the lens of class struggle where the working class acted as the core of political action.

Entropological materialism presents a major shift from Althusser’s thinking. It looks beyond the primacy of the working class and instead views labor within the context of highly entropic conditions and decaying environments. As previously mentioned, Entropological materialism sees disorder as the norm and the cybernetic paradigm as a blueprint for managing that disorder. The cybernetic paradigm is designed to take this disorder, the messy reality or entropy, and process it by turning it into manageable feedback loops. One of the most remarkable achievements of cybernetic control, according to Rossiter, is what the authors call the “social factory.” If cybernetics is the blueprint, then the social factory is the architecture it builds.

Essentially, the social factory is described as a widespread, relational infrastructure for ordering society and generating value from it. It doesn’t just produce goods, but also imaginaries and ideas about what production is. One of the core arguments presented in Entropological materialism is that cybernetics provide a blueprint for organizing society and economy as if it were a factory, turning every part of our social life – our communication, free time, and even our learning – into a place where value can be produced and absorbed.

One fascinating feature of the social factory is that it can operate across diverse political and ideological landscapes. It functions almost as a pure operational logic divorced from ideology while remaining capable of shaping any ideology it is paired with. The social factory has, of course, evolved over time and can be seen in operation today in platform economies. It is a useful tool for understanding how companies like Google, Meta, Facebook, and Amazon, to mention a few, operate. The idea of the social factory can also illuminate the performance of work today and its connection with machine labor in what is traditionally called the “gig economy.” Within these systems, acts such as algorithmic optimizations, ratings, clicking, and reviewing become fuel absorbed by these systems to generate and absorb value. These systems often sideline human agency because they are designed to handle disorder by using people’s data to adjust their parameters. The social factory can thus be understood as the organizing mechanism or principle for extracting value from chaos.

The Q&A Session

During the Q&A session, several interesting questions were asked, among them a question about the function of speed within the cybernetic paradigm. Part of Prof. Rossiter’s answer to this question was addressing how the seduction of the logistical imaginary seeks total control through interoperability of different technological systems. This endless quest for interoperability seeks to speed things up and reduce friction while enabling ever greater value extraction.

Another question was related to the subtitle of the book: Diagnosing Anxieties of Prediction in the Cybernetic Century. The question was mainly about the kinds of anxieties the book was addressing. To this question, Prof. Rossiter mentioned that they were dealing with anxiety as a general contemporary social condition. There are many ways of addressing, promoting, and producing this anxiety as a discourse to which we’re obliged to attend. He made an example of how this anxiety is registered through the proliferation of self-help strategies in our contemporary era. Such, he argued, were institutional responses to a society subject to anxiety.