Excerpt from General Will 2.0 -
Rousseau, Freud, Google by Hiroki Azuma
CHAPTER ONE
First published in
Hon December 2009 issue
Let me tell you about a dream. It is a dream about the society of the
future. It is a dream about the society we will construct in the times ahead,
in the centuries to come.
As with all dreams, my dream, too, is fragmentary, riddled with messy
contradictions and defects. That is why I chose to write this manuscript not as
a scholarly treatise but as an essay.
This choice may appear extremely lackadaisical and unreliable for those
of my readers who are accustomed to excessively defensive articles packed with
footnotes and references. That has been the dominant style in the humanities,
or rather in the world of contemporary thought and criticism, for the past
twenty years.
That is why this book may disappoint some readers and fail to reach
people that it would otherwise have reached. This would be a shame. However, I
felt compelled to talk boldly about dreams precisely in order to overcome such
inconveniences in the field. Footnotes and references stifle dreams. And where
there is no dream, there is neither a future nor thought.
I would like to weave the philosophical basis for people who are creating
the future.
The dream that this book will talk about is formed at the intersection of
two entirely different intellectual desires and contexts.
One of them is a classic among classics in the field of political
philosophy written two and a half centuries ago: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The
Social Contract. This book that advocates the sovereignty of the people and
puts forward the notion of the “general will,” and which is generally believed
to be the origin of modern democracy, is in fact a very mysterious text and has
attracted controversy for a long time. The dream I speak of will begin by
interpreting the statements in this book literally, in an unassuming
manner. Readers will be surprised at how significantly different from the
notions of “popular will” and “public opinion” we vaguely harbor in our minds
the image of the “general will” issuing from the reading will be.
The other is the technological innovation that has fundamentally changed
our economy and society over the past twenty years and continues to do so,
namely the “information technology revolution.” It is not an easy task to
summarize the worldwide trends in the field, with countless buzzwords coming
and going in a matter of years, as we have seen with open source, agile
software development, web 2.0, user generated content, cloud computing, and so
on. If I may be so bold as to attempt this, however, what the “revolution” has
consistently aimed at since the 1990s when personal computers and the internet
became widespread1
has been “to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful,” to use the words from Google’s mission statement.2
In this book, I would like to talk about how the seemingly casual phrase “to
organize the world’s information” resonates with the concept of the “general
will” beyond the two and a half centuries that separate them.
In Rousseau’s times, the general will was an entirely fictive construct,
a hypothesis necessary to proceed with the discussion similar to the “tongues
of poets” in “Essay on the Origin of Languages” and the “savage” in Discourse
on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.3
He probably never dreamed that it would become possible to see and feel the
texture of the “general will.” Yet, two and a half centuries on, we’ve acquired
the possibility of technically “implementing” his hypothesis and doing away
with any trace of mysticism. It is this kind of a dream that I’m about to talk
about.
We live in a modern democratic society. We think about the state, the
government, the public sphere, and citizens only within that framework. What
if, however, a certain “desire” which would overturn such a framework was
etched into the very point of its origin? A desire that was impossible to
achieve and hence destined to be repressed for a long time. And what if after
two and a half centuries this desire is now in the process of becoming manifest
in a different form as a “symptom”?
I wrote earlier that I am going to talk about a dream in this book. The
word “dream” brings to mind Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Freud begins his famous The Interpretation of Dreams by
distinguishing between the “sources” and “materials” of dreams, and between the
“manifest content” and the “latent content” of dreams. According to him, the
words and imagery in dreams should not be accepted directly, and in order to
analyze dreams accurately it is necessary to understand the latent content and
sources of dreams. Borrowing his distinction, this book’s subject might be
described as an attempt to visualize the dream of modernity that the “latent
content” called the general will is beginning to weave using information
technology as its “material.”
This book will talk about a dream. It, however, is by no means a dream
that I harbor individually, but rather a dream that has likely been long
forgotten by modern society.4
Let us, then, lose no time in entering the dream. I would first like to
go over a few basic facts about Jean-Jacques Rousseau before we proceed with
the discussion. Rousseau was born in 1712. He was born in Geneva and was later
active in Paris. He is one of the most representative thinkers of the
Francophone world of the 18th century and is currently most widely known for
the aforementioned book on political philosophy, The Social Contract,
published in 1762. The book is regarded as a classic in social contract theory
following Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government,
and exerted a decisive influence on the French Revolution with its advocacy for
the concept of popular sovereignty. The “general will (volonté générale)”
is Rousseau’s neologism denoting the collective consensus of the people. This
is what we are taught in high school.
However, Rousseau was actually a multitalented individual. In order to
grasp him fully, the rather casual term “writer” may be more appropriate than
“thinker.” Rousseau was not a professional philosopher. His work spans a broad
range of fields including educational philosophy, confession novels, romantic
novels, and even musical composition for operas. Each of those (with the
exception of operas) has had a monumental impact on succeeding generations. For
example, Takeo Kuwabara opens his Ruso Kenkyu [Studies on Rousseau] with
the following words: “The principle that sovereignty resides in the people,
egalitarianism, socialism, romanticism, confession literature, popular art,
humanistic education … Any attempt to fundamentally understand those
concepts by tracing them back to their origins would inevitably lead to a
single point: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” “Those who want to understand modernity
must understand Rousseau.”5
Rousseau’s complexity is immediately apparent from biographical accounts.
His body of thought is generally positioned alongside that of the
“Encyclopedists” such as Diderot and d’Alembert, but in his later years he in
fact detested the Encyclopedists and preferred to indulge in his own thoughts
alone, away from the Parisian salons. Meanwhile, he published the romantic
novel Julie, or the New Heloise in 1761, the year before The Social
Contract was published. This novel was received with feverish excitement,
catapulting him to fame. Julie is said to have been the biggest
bestseller in 18th-century France.
In other words, in his time Rousseau was known more as the author of Julie
than The Social Contract, more as a romantic author of novels than a
hardline political philosopher. We now think of Rousseau first and foremost as
a thinker, but he was seen in a different light at the time. I would urge
readers to bear this in mind.
As we have seen, Rousseau made great achievements in diverse fields. This
means that he may be interpreted from different angles, presenting at times
multiple faces fraught with sharp contradictions.
On rereading his works now, the most important of these contradictions is
the fact that while he may appear as an extreme individualist on one hand, he
also appears as an extreme totalitarian on the other. In a monograph published
in 1932, Ernst Cassirer called this contradiction “the question of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.”6
This “problem” is particularly evident too in his magnum opus The Social
Contract.
Rousseau’s philosophy is generally understood to endorse the unregulated
manifestation of individual freedom and personal emotions. For example, Discourse
on the Sciences and Arts and Discourse on the Origin and Basis of
Inequality Among Men begin with a eulogy for the freedom and happiness of
the “savage” in a state of nature. Furthermore, Emile, or On Education
takes the central pillar of an ideal education to be allowing children to grow
up spontaneously and protecting their spontaneity from the evils of society:
“The first movements of nature are always right … Thus the first education
ought to be purely negative. It consists not at all in teaching virtue or truth
but in securing the heart from vice and the mind from the error.”7
In the meantime, Rousseau is also known to have been the first to
formulate modern love in Julie and the modern “self” in Confessions.
He persistently advocated the value of emotions as opposed to rationality, the
value of individuals as opposed to society, and the value of freedom as opposed
to power. This is why his texts were read throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries, when “subject” and “existence” were the focal points of philosophy.
Cassirer summarizes Rousseau’s position thus: “The specifically and
characteristically new contribution that Rousseau made to his time seems to
have been his act of freeing it from the domination of intellectualism. To the
forces of rationalist understanding, on which rested the culture of the
eighteenth century, he opposed the force of feeling.”8
Reading The Social Contract on the basis of this understanding,
however, will reveal a completely different face of Rousseau, one that, at
least on the surface, gives a fairly jarring impression.
Of course, The Social Contract shares the same views on humanity
and society expounded in the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality
Among Men and Emile. There is no simplistic conversion. Emile
and The Social Contract were, after all, published in the same year.
However, in The Social Contract, Rousseau seems to emphasize the
absolute submission of the individual (particular will) to the whole (general
will), rather than singing the praises of individual freedom. Let us look, for
example, at the following excerpt: “[The social contract consists of] the total
alienation of each associate with all of his rights to the whole
community … Moreover, since the alienation is made without
reservation, the union is as perfect as can be, and no associate has anything
further to claim.”9
According to The Social Contract, the will of the state is equivalent to
the unified will of citizens, and it is infallible by definition.
Rousseau therefore goes as far as to claim that when the state decrees death, a
citizen should unconditionally obey that imperative. Such words gave rise to
terrorism (Robespierre’s dictatorship) in the real world.
From this point of view, The Social Contract could be read as the
original text of a radical totalitarianism and nationalism, let alone
individualism. Indeed, the book has been repeatedly referred to in such
contexts, too, over the last two and a half centuries. The principles of modern
democracy that we believe in today were born out of such a text fraught with
ambivalence and contradictions.
Let us recapitulate. Rousseau was a thinker who advocated liberation from
social restrictions and who valued solitude and freedom. At the same time,
however, he also called for the absolute assimilation of the individual to the
state, the unconditional subsumption of the individual to the whole. These two
characteristics are, based on common sense, completely incompatible. And this
contradiction cannot be neglected given Rousseau’s historical importance.
Therein lies the mystery of Rousseau and of democracy.
What does this contradiction signify? Is it something that we can simply
brush aside as a confused argument?
Philosophers have provided different answers to this question. One of the
most important among them, in terms of the history of thought, is Hegel’s
rather acrobatic interpretation. If I may attempt a summary, although it may
seem slightly confusing, Hegel tried to incorporate into his idiosyncratic
philosophical system the mysterious concept of the general will, which gives
rise to the paradox that we have seen, by interpreting it as a moment where the
conflict between the will of the individual (particular) and the will of the
state (universal) is sublated.10
We will look more carefully at the significance of Hegel’s approach later in
this book.
As declared at the beginning, however, this book will focus not on taking
a retrospective glance on the history of thought, but rather on boldly and
imprudently reading The Social Contract according to associations evoked
outside of the field of philosophy, in order to untangle Rousseau’s
“contradictions.”
This is where I would like to invoke the second context mentioned
earlier, namely the various technologies and ideas that the information
technology revolution gave birth to.
Let me therefore introduce the term “collective intelligence” or the
“wisdom of crowds.”
What is collective intelligence? It is literally intelligence generated
by a group. Although the term may evoke highbrow discussions in such fields as
chaos theories, systems theory, and artificial intelligence research, I urge
readers to understand it as a term with more social and worldly connotations.
It often happens that a good solution is found when thinking about a problem as
a group rather than alone: that is collective intelligence.
Since the publication of Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs in 2002,
collective intelligence has become an enduring and indispensable buzzword for
cutting-edge theories on internet society. Some readers may recall that there
was a section entitled “wisdom of crowds” in Mochio Umeda’s 2006 bestseller Webu
Shinka-ron [On the Evolution of the Web].
Collective intelligence is obtained by employing appropriate mechanisms
to aggregate the diverse opinions of individuals making dispersed and
independent judgments. According to the advocates of the methods of collective
intelligence, a large number of amateurs would in principle make a better
decision than a small number of experts, even regarding a problem that requires
specialist knowledge, as long as certain specific requirements are met. An
example they often cite is the “prediction market.” I will omit a detailed
explanation here, but some experiments have shown that when a certain
aggregation system known as the prediction market is introduced, the results of
the Academy Awards or the presidential election can be predicted with a high
degree of precision, even if each participant does not have any special knowledge.11
Collective intelligence often gives rise to results that go beyond the abilities
of each participant.
As some readers may have realized, this is basically the same story as
the old saying “two heads are better than one.”12
Ordinary people may produce wisdom when together. This notion itself is not
especially new.
There are, however, differences. This is because innovations in
information technology have dramatically increased the number of opinions that
can be collected, while also making the mechanisms of collection increasingly
sophisticated. Rheingold noted the potentialities of cellphones, ubiquitous
computing, and such. The accuracy of search engines is improving by the day,
and new initiatives such as the prediction market have become common. Anyone
who has come into contact with social media services such as Twitter should
know that they are not merely places to exchange opinions, but rather places where
collective intelligence is generated. In other words, whereas only a few people
could “bring their heads together” in the era before the advent of information
technology, we can now share our interests with thousands or even tens of
thousands of others, as well as follow the same topics and gather views. Any
theory related to collective intelligence should therefore be reconsidered
under the premise of entirely different scales and possibilities.
This reconsideration has already generated results. For example, the
American researcher Scott Page employed simulations and methods from game
theory to elicit two theorems. One is the “Diversity Prediction Theorem” and
the other is “The Crowd Beats the Average Law.”13
These theorems prove, in the case of the former, that the more diverse
the predictions of each member of a crowd, the more precise the prediction of
the crowd as a whole (that is to say, the lack of abilities of crowd members
can be compensated with increased diversity), and, in the case of the latter,
that the prediction of a crowd is always more accurate than the average prediction
of crowd members. As Page himself emphasizes with a hint of frustration, this
result is “no mere metaphor or cute empirical anecdote that may or may not be
true ten years from now. It’s a logical truth.”14
Ordinary people become wiser when they come together. There is no mysticism or
trick behind this. Contemporary studies are beginning to assert that this is a
simple mathematical truth.
Collective intelligence has moved beyond the ambiguous experiential
knowledge that “things tend to go well when you listen to what many people have
to say,” and is now becoming a practical mathematical notion supported by solid
proof.
What kind of new perspective would this focus on collective intelligence
provide us with when looking at the aforementioned contradiction in The
Social Contract, namely the conflict between individualism and totalitarianism?
Let us begin the next chapter by rereading Rousseau’s definition of the
“general will.”
1
To be more precise, what emerged in the 1990s is not the internet but the
hypertext system that functions on it, namely the “world wide web.” In this
book, however, priority will be given to the commonly accepted senses of words,
making no distinction between the internet and the web (despite the
inaccuracy).
3
Rousseau opens his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men
thus: “Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect
the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not
to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional
reasonings.” Now, translations may be altered in such cases when I deem it
appropriate to do so upon consulting the original French, but the page numbers
for the original French version will be omitted given that this essay is not
academic. Rousseau’s major works are all openly available on the internet, and
anyone who may be interested in doing so can search for the original.
Bibliographic information for each publication will only be given for their
first appearance. [Translators’ Note: the above rendition into English is from The
Social Contract and Discourses, trans. & intro. G.D.H.Cole (New York:
E.P. Dutton and Company Inc., 1950).]
4
In Noiman no Yume, Kindai no Yokubo [Neumann’s Dream, Modernity’s
Desire] (Kodansha, 1996), Toshiki Sato points out that the image of information
society in contemporary times functions as a “dream” and that because of this,
the message that “information technology will change society” has been repeated
over and over again for a few decades. His point still holds true today. My
attempts in this book too may therefore appear as a mere reiteration of that
phenomenon for a sociologist like Sato (I do, after all, state that I talk
about a “dream” in this book). I do not intend to repudiate such criticism, but
I hold a different view. There is a reason behind a recurring dream. In the
language of psychoanalysis, there is repression and trauma. In order to
eradicate repression, what is repressed must be “worked through.” I am
attempting to re-immerse myself in the dream of an information society, going
back to the origins of modern society to do so, because I believe that by
“working through” it, the subject (society) may truly change.
5
Takeo Kuwabara (ed.), Ruso Kenkyu, Second Edition (Iwanami Shoten,
1968), iii-iv.
6
Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Edition,
trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press), 1989.
7
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (Includes Emile and Sophie, or
the Solitaries), trans. & ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom
(Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010), 225-26.
8
The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 83.
9
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 50.
10
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §258. See also The Encyclopaedia
Logic, §163 Addition 1. Here Hegel criticizes Rousseau while also partially
giving credit to his notions.
11
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the
Few (Abacus, 2005), 17-20.
12
[Translators’ Note] The proverb used in the original Japanese could be
translated as “gathering three people makes Monju’s wisdom,” where Monju is the
Japanese name for the bodhisattva Manjusri associated with transcendental
wisdom.
13
Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups,
Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2007), 197.
