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Increasingly rapid and dynamic processing of material flows precipitated the emergence of a crisis of control in the nineteenth century that, for Beniger, found its inaugural gesture in the spectacular violence of the head-on collision. The persistent danger of early railroad transportation in America provided the threat of such violence, and with it, the dis-integration of human organisms trapped inside the dis-integrating body of the train-car. What the rising death tolls ultimately expressed was a failure in the organizational structure of railroad industries to coordinate and control the movement of humans and material goods at the speed of steam power, over increasingly vast expanses of land. Managing the rate and regularity of matter and energy distribution required the introduction of control technologies, just as it would for industries during the crises in production and consumption that followed. Developments in information processing, programming, and communication with feedback maintained order at all levels of the material economy, and thus served to maintain the counter-entropic direction of society as living system. According to Beniger, “all open systems, if they are to postpone for a time their inevitable heat death, must control the extraction and processing of matter, its internal distribution and storage, continuous conversion into energy, and elimination as by-product wastes.”[1]

The extent to which capitalism could function as a sustainable processing system was once again put into question over a century after the crisis in railroad transportation; and once again it arrived in the form of a catastrophic loss of human life. In 1984 the Bhopal disaster likewise constituted a failure of control—the dual imperatives of overproduction and cost reduction led Union Carbide not merely to ignore, but to exacerbate the continuing threat of technological and organizational malfunction. The release of methyl isocyanate from the Carbide facility and the resulting death of thousands while they slept, however, stimulated little in the way of revolution, control or otherwise. What is significant instead is the ease with which the historical event became incorporated into preexisting mechanisms of social control. From its largely symbolic passage through the legal system, to its representation and consumption as news-worthy catastrophe, Bhopal reflects at once an increasing friction between the capitalist world-economy and ecological integrity, and the efficacy of control technologies to adapt to growing public awareness by generating new markets for the production and consumption of “eco-friendly” goods.

Ecological disasters would thus appear to confront the existing system as perturbations, to be resolved according to the internal dynamics of that system. If, however, those dynamics are structurally incapable—if growth under the conditions of the capitalist world-economy is incompatible with the stability of human and non-human ecosystems—then there exists not merely a perturbation but a systemic crisis, defined by Wallerstein as the point at which difficulties “cannot be resolved within the framework of the system, but instead can be overcome only by going outside of and beyond the historical system of which the difficulties are a part.”[2] Despite continuing movement towards information processing, society remains fundamentally dependent on the extraction and processing of material resources to counter entropy within, necessarily “increasing entropy in the matter it consumes”[3] without. The rate of this consumption as determined by capitalism requires the sustained intervention of control technologies, and as the system attempts to resolve under its own terms an increasingly hostile position vis-à-vis living ecosystems, to quote Joel Kovel, it “raises the spectre of a world like a gigantic Potemkin village, where a green and orderly façade conceals and reassures, while accelerated breakdown takes place behind its walls.”[4]

1. James Beniger, The Control Revolution, 37.
2. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 76.
3. Beniger, 55.
4. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature, 24.