1. It is quite natural that the need for an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving in general and to planning in particular has long been recognized. Social problems cannot be dissected into well-defined parts corresponding to different disciplines. After all, interdisciplinary research has long been established in the theoretical sphere as well; cybernetics is the best example.

This short note does not concern the interdisciplinary approach as such, but its often neglected corollary—the communication between different disciplines and the general public. The estrangement of different disciplines from each other has resulted as well in the estrangement of these disciplines from the general public, and especially from the political sphere. Interdisciplinary advances in theoretical and practical spheres must be seen in the context of the political sphere. More concretely, these two aspects of the interdisciplinary research, planning, etc., need to be united. This is one of the central tasks of self-government planning, since its objective is not a new technique of planning, but primarily a new planning practice.

2. The establishing of communication channels between professional planners and between the professional planners and the subjects of planning is an inter-related process, that is, these are two aspects of the same process. As Habermas notes:

Cybernetics, which has developed its models on the basis of processes in physiology and communication technology, neurophysiology, and economics, thus connecting findings of the most remote disciplines, is a good example of how important it is to keep communication channels open even if information from one specialist to another has to take the long route of ordinary language and the everyday understanding of the layman. Given high degree of division of labor, the lay public often provides the shortest path of internal understanding between mutually estranged specialists. But this necessity for the translation of scientific information, which grows out of the needs of the research process itself, also benefits the endangered communication between scientists and the general public in the political sphere.[1]

3. This is especially interesting in the context of the search for a “meta-language” (whence the term “meta-disciplinary” approach) that would provide a natural connection on the level of fundaments underlying different disciplines. Mathematics is most often designated as that meta-language. But it should be obvious that this orientation toward interdisciplinary approach implicitly rejects the political aspects of the problem by searching for communication channels that are useful exclusively to the specialists. This does not imply that this level of interconnections is not relevant, but that “ordinary language” already serves the rôle of the true meta-language. In other words, any other level of discourse will necessarily be restrictive and exclusive. Clearly, one of the functions of hermetic languages is precisely to restrict communication.[2]

4. Finally, it should be emphasized that even though the two inter-related processes outlined above are already converging, this convergence is unreflected. Presently the convergence is too slow and too chaotic to be left to itself, and its full realization is hindered by numerous obstacles that must first be removed. Thus, our task is to organize this convergence. This objective must be reflected in the organization of planning tasks. Socialist self-government in its totality provides the only true basis for the full organization of the tasks suggested here, even though their partial realization is possible in other socio-economic frameworks.

Addendum (March 25, 1982)

Cybernetics was rehabilitated, along with a whole series of other bourgeois pseudo-sciences, such as structural linguistics, formal genetics, concrete sociology and so on. The Newspaper published an editorial directive Cybernetics in the Service of the Ism. The Journal published a series of explanatory articles by the leading Ibanskian structuralists, geneticists, cyberneticists. The editorial made some minor allusions to certain errors in evaluation and to some deviations, but made the direct and straightforward statement that the true scientific comprehension of cybernetics was first arrived at by the classic authors of the Ism, who, even though they had never heard of cybernetics, had been able to leave some appropriate quotations for posterity—and for Ibanskian scientists. It was convincingly demonstrated by the articles of the specialists that cybernetics and all the other modern sciences had been first discovered in Ibansk. Soon on every street there blossomed Institutes and Laboratories of Cybernetics and the other new sciences which were now of inestimable value in the development of the Ism.

Thanks to the rehabilitation of cybernetics and the other Ibanskian sciences, the progressive forces were suddenly presented with a means of ideological and organizational unification sanctioned from above. They were offered premises for meetings, platforms for speakers, presses for propaganda. The authorities had swallowed the bait of history, and did not know what was happening. They remained unaware, for instance, that the appearance on the platform of some bespectacled weakling would be seen by his audience as an open protest against the regime. In the past he would simply have been jailed, and deservedly so. Now he was allowed to hunch his way on to the platform, mumble a few words about entropy and information (rather than matter and consciousness), and to write his x’s and y’s on the blackboard just as if so many glorious decades of Ibanskian history had gone by completely unnoticed. And when, to take another example, that stuttering schizophrenic wrote on the blackboard the function of psi from alpha to beta, the assembled intellectuals took it as a call to overthrow repression and win freedom. No one understood the meaning of the function, either because it had none or because its meaning was exclusively a call to freedom.

By virtue of their highly developed Brotherhood instinct, the reactionary forces felt that in Ibansk any new ideas would acquire in their early stages a certain ring of ideology and would become hostile to the Ism. And they gave due warning that this would happen. “I don’t understand a great deal of this,” said Troglodyte, “but I feel that all this does not belong here.” “Just you wait,” said Secretary. “We’ll end up having to send the troops in.” The reactionary forces knew from experience that new ideas begin to bring new support to the Ism once they are hopelessly out of date and have begun to grow boring. But they were howled down by the leaders of the progressive wing of their own camp, and they themselves were obliged to set off full steam towards progress, and indeed to take a leading rôle in the venture. Troglodyte was appointed chairman of the cybernetics committee. Under his experienced leadership the progressive forces immediately proved that the new ideas upheld the truth of the Ism on its new stage of development, and were beginning to overtake the West on the cybernetic front. “He’s not such a bad old stick,” the progressive forces said of Troglodyte. “The main thing is he doesn’t interfere with the work.” “It depends on whose you mean,” said Teacher.

“You must be in clover now,” said Neurasthenic to Teacher. “Nonsense,” said Teacher. “We’re all cyberneticists now. The first thing our progressives did when they took over was to shove me out of the way and accuse me of being an ignorant amateur. It’s almost laughable! The fellow who accused me of that has transcribed an article from a Western review of cybernetics, written by a Western mathematician as the last word on the subject. And all that this Westerner had done was to pirate my ideas that had been published five years ago. Indeed, he referred to me as his main source. It’s only recently that we had no more than five or six cyberneticists, and they were all under secret police surveillance. They’d nearly all done time. Last week we had a symposium and more than a thousand specialists turned up. So there’s not much clover about. Rather the opposite. At least until now I was something out of the ordinary, something negative but at least recognized. Now there isn’t even that. Prospects? Oh, they’re clear enough. We’re moving into a boom. Things’ll be blown up beyond all measure. All manner of rabble will gather round trying to get in on the act. People will write theses, collect titles, decorations, prizes. Some will go off on foreign visits—the highest reward possible for services to our society. And then the boom will begin to blow over. In the meanwhile any scientists worthy of the name will have been eliminated and crushed. Then there’ll be a period of total disillusionment. Every idea of any unifying ideological significance will have been exhausted. All that will remain will be the usual official mass phenomenon with all the official attributes of Ibanskian institutions. And since there can’t be any new ideas on this scale, the progressive forces will disintegrate into social atoms—into isolated individuals with a weird way of behaving. There are not prospects here at all. The opposition must stop decking itself out into alien rags and tatters of science, art and economics. It must speak out in its own name without resorting to camouflage.”

From Alexander Zinoviev’s The Yawning Heights, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, pp. 517-520.

Footnotes

1. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, pp. 77-78.

2. Restricted communication may have very different functions. We may hypothesize, for example, that the use of mathematical formalisms in the discussion of economic issues in the Soviet Union has the function of restricting relatively free discussion of the touchy issues to a narrow circle of high-priests of the “dismal science.” It is thus largely self-imposed. On the other hand, the use of mathematical formalisms may be deployed to prevent democratic discussion of a plan, and to legitimize such a plan as a product of science. As Stephen S. Cohen put it, the institutional core of French planning “uses the formal econometric models of the plan more for the legitimation of reform and production programs than for their determination” (Modern Capitalist Planning: The French Model, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. 130).