Critique of Productive Reason

This active research project asks how changing scientific paradigms transform the conditions under which productive activity becomes intelligible, measurable and desirable.

It investigates two historical transformations: nineteenth-century thermodynamics and the constitution of energetic efficiency as a measure of productive activity; and twentieth-century information theory and cybernetics and the emergence of informational optimisation as a principle of organisation and control.

The first strand traces energy, work, efficiency and entropy into political economy and industrial thought, through Jevons, Ostwald, Geddes and Soddy. Jevons’s analysis of coal and steam-engine efficiency provides a case for examining why technical efficiency need not reduce resource consumption.

The second strand examines productivity through communication, feedback, information and control. Wiener, Shannon, Hayek, Simon and Beer provide key references, while Project Cybersyn offers a case for examining the political possibilities and tensions of cybernetic organisation.

These histories inform a contemporary question: what are the conditions and limits of productivity when energetic efficiency and informational optimisation are pursued together? AI infrastructures themselves require energy, material resources, labour and institutional coordination. Evaluating their productivity involves asking which dependencies and costs its measures exclude.

The project also examines productivity’s normativity: how does the capacity to produce more become an imperative? Decisions about what to produce, for whom and under what constraints cannot be settled by efficiency measures alone.