Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Jan Overwijk. Cybernetic Capitalism: A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025. 218 pp.

Review by Marc Kohlbry

27 February 2025

As the curtains of 2025 rise to environmental catastrophe, record inequality, and an unbridled far right, how can we make sense of a world order that appears as irrational as it does relentless? What are we to do with that peculiar notion of rationalization when these and similar dynamics seem to have rendered it all but obsolete? In response, Jan Overwijk’s Cybernetic Capitalism: A Critical Theory of the Incommunicable develops a “critical systems theory” with which to demystify our sociopolitical juncture. Against the idea that capitalist modernity since roughly 1970 has definitively shifted from “a logic of social closure to a logic of social openness,” Overwijk’s ornate theoretical framework reveals in this same period “a transformation in the way the persistent tensions that exist between these logics of closure and openness are navigated” (p. 6). While present since the dawn of the capitalist mode of production, he contends, these tensions have differentially manifested in successive “modes of rationalization,” or “historically generalized [strategies] of governing the paradoxes of the social through an immanent organization of power and reason” (p. 7).

Propelled by this insight, Cybernetic Capitalism offers a periodization of two such modes rather than an argument for an entirely novel variant of capitalism. The study’s four chapters ground these dominant forms of rationalization in distinct “technoscientific imaginaries”—first thermodynamic then cybernetic—to nuance concrete strategies of production, political economy, and capitalist extraction (p. 7). Namely, while thermodynamic systems once ventured to subdue their “ecologies” into “perfect communicability,” those of our cybernetic moment “increasingly seek to put ecological incommunicability to work” (pp. 9, 10). Plotting these modes of rationalization across their corresponding historical periods, the author champions the second-order cybernetic concept of “autopoiesis” to articulate how capitalism is “energized by a strange dual logic: a paradoxical dialectic of the technical and the political, communicability and incommunicability, closure and openness” (p. 13).

Overwijk begins this investigation by meticulously synthesizing Max Weber’s foundational analyses of rationalization and bureaucracy, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, and critical theory (chiefly that of the Frankfurt School) to clarify the “ecological dominance” of the economy (p. 11). For a faithful systems theorist, such a task may seem heretical given Luhmann’s explicit rejection of this core Marxist position; however, with invested attention to the German sociologist’s concepts of “‘operational closure’” and “functional differentiation,” Overwijk (leaning on the work of Bob Jessop) navigates this aporia by detailing how the “self-expanding logic of capital valorization pressures ecological systems into structural commensuration,” thus allowing the capitalist economy (as a Luhmannian system) to “[come] out on top” (pp. 32, 31). On this basis, Cybernetic Capitalism convincingly establishes “metrological commensuration” as a window into how thermodynamic rationalization transforms “qualities into quantities, difference into similarity, heterogeneity into homogeneity and, as a result, produces comparability, calculability, and communicability” (p. 70). As a motor for capital accumulation, Overwijk goes on to signal, this mode underpins Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, which “treated the workshop as a combustion engine that needed to be optimized in order to convert the energy from a day’s labor-power into a maximum ‘foot-pounds’ of work” (p. 76). There, thermodynamic rationalization is marked by its “strategy of suppression,” that understands “paradox and openness” as “points of leakage—as inefficiencies” to be controlled (p. 159).

Since the 1970s, however, one reads that this mode has “collapsed” and been succeeded by cybernetic rationalization, itself defined not merely by “openness” (as Donna Haraway, Mark Hansen, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri might have it) but by a “strategy of exploitation” that “provokes” and “respects” “incommunicability” as “an immeasurable source of surplus value” (pp. 160, 154). Citing examples in post-Taylorist management, post-Fordist production, and neoliberal governmental and financial systems, Overwijk smartly unpacks contemporary capitalism’s unique and “incessant struggle to put the incommunicable to work” so as to instil valorization with its own “self-referential purpose” (pp. 160, 149). The speculative balancing act allowed by critical systems theory here sharpens Luhmann’s sociocybernetics by politicizing the “babbling of the ineffable,” a move that also helps to patch the Frankfurt School’s lack of engagement with the science of communication and control.[1]

If this approach is generously broad in scope, the periodizations that orient it check Cybernetic Capitalism’s explanatory range. For instance, the transition from thermodynamic to cybernetic rationalization appeals to somewhat neat breaks between Taylorism/post-Taylorism and Fordism/post-Fordism, nested demarcations that risk papering over other historical and geographic specificities of capitalism (such as how productive and nonproductive labor are and have been unevenly distributed across the Global North and South). To this point, Overwijk’s gloss of scholarship on cybernetics and capitalism misses an opportunity to expand on how the economy exerts its ecological dominance, say, by way of the “ongoing and intertwined” stages of primitive accumulation, formal subsumption, and real subsumption.^[2] Put otherwise, how and where could the thermodynamic “strategy of suppression” still be at work today? And what of logics of accumulation operating before the advent of cybernetics that might appear to traffic in a "strategy of exploitation"?

Overwijk’s epilogue locates in critical systems theory a different function by bringing it to bear on the stakes of conspiratorial thinking in our digital present. Inspired by Theodor Adorno’s critique of astrology, the author interrogates how recent obsessions with the incommunicable (across Instagram, 4chan, Reddit, and YouTube) constitute a “mystical” “social irrationalism” that conjures “distorted ways of navigating” the material immiseration of the neoliberal era (p. 166). By thus lending its voice to urgent conversations around reactionary discursive configurations of technology and politics^[3], Cybernetic Capitalism leaves those energized by its immanent critique with a twofold question of method: Are such ends as far as systems theory can be pushed toward Marxist political economy? Or might it be nudged further still to more fully chart the autopoietic processes of value?

[1] Laurent Dubreuil, Poetry and Mind (New York, 2018), p. v.

[2] Seb Franklin, “The Contexts of Forms,” world picture 11 (Summer 2016): 3.

[3] See Alexander Galloway’s reading of David Golumbia’s Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology (2025) in “The Uses of Disorder,” boundary2, 10 Dec. 2024, www.boundary2.org/2024/12/alexander-r-galloway-the-uses-of-disorder-a-review-of-david-golumbias-cyberlibertarianism/