Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

In Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code , Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization. 

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, History Of Science, Theory, Computers

272 pages, Hardcover

Published January 20, 2023

Reviews

[John Aitken]

“Today, anyone who has gone through ten or twelve sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy may count themselves as an extended member of the cybernetic family.”

“Psychoanalysis, therefore, took as its object the manner in which a human subject located itself within machinic series. Language, as [Lacan] explained, was not a code, nor was it information. ‘What is redundant as far as information is concerned,’ that is, the repetitive patterns that could be stripped away from a signal to gain industrial economy, ‘is precisely what plays the part of resonance in speech. For the function of language is not to inform but to evoke.’”

“In the present era of mass extinctions, viral exceptions, and the looming Spector of untold climatic migrations, are there any imperatives besides monetization and state surveillance to rationalize today’s far more comprehensive apparatus?”

“As philosopher Martin Heidegger, the onetime National Socialist apparatchik put it, quoting Hölderlin and perhaps explaining away his own collusion, ‘But where the danger lies, also grows the saving power.’”

See review on Benjamin Breen’s “Tripping on Utopia”

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit of a gloss of the history of cybernetic theory with an endgame of showing the roots of French structuralists intertwined with post-WW2 capitalist dreams of social control. I was less interested in the thesis, more into the histories of people like Mead, Bateson, Levi-Straus, and Jakobson.

[Alexander Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a peculiar history of organizational connections that dominated 20th century social sciences as they were connected to cybernetics and structuralism. It offers an analysis of scientistic power, and how government funding is tied to political needs in post war/cold war era "human" sciences. In developing those connections, criticisms and influences are shown to have crept into "french" theory surrounding cybernetic and structuralist arguments. In particular this shows that the Lacanian/Saussurian schools of thought are deeply entrenched in the cybernetic metaphysics of systems, mechanisms, and structures. While these theories still dominate the minds of Information Science (and much of the human sciences) today, Geoghegan suggests that there is a particular amnesia in digital humanities that is creeping back into the scientific discourse that might prove valuable, following from Moretti (and thus Lev Manovich's Cultural Analytics).

One of the few things this book left me wanting was a more careful connection to new materialism. This is not particularly well provided, however that might be the fallout of this particular kind of history. Although, I find it interesting that Mead's anthropological materialism shows no connections to the response of new materialism. Perhaps this is because government funding did not follow this strand of materialism in this history. This is believable once one carefully considers Deleuze's points that most of new materialism dedicates itself to "minor" philosophies (which is probably highly correlated to which theories garner governmental interests and value.) Largely these minor philosophies are considered too metaphysical to be predictive, and thus are criticized as "pseudoscience". In reading this book this way, and noting the exclusion, such a critique suddenly makes pseudoscience sound like a good thing.

[James Zwierzynski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite a fan of this one -- I think that Geoghegan in this book suffers from too many fatal flaws that obscure his purpose and his main argument, to the point that I found it at points somewhat incomprehensible. Geoghegan makes gestures at the beginning of the monograph to materialists, performs an unsatisfying historiographical project, then makes focuses on structuralist and post-structuralist though......albeit through a poststructuralist analysis, IMO?

I found that concepts were not thoroughly fleshed out and that information presented to support arguments in the book was merely caricature, and was picked up and put down immediately; chapters seemed to end abruptly and without cohesive explanations. Perhaps I expected more from this project, but I got very little from it, I think if this book were 2-3x as long, I might have felt more satisfied with the project at hand.

[Angela Sha · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book embarks on a much needed project. It broadens the history of cybernetics to a decade before the war and absorbs institutions- the colony, asylum, and camp, as the introduction lists- often excluded from the history of cybernetics. Yet much of the book falls short in realizing its declared agenda, and it reads like a retelling of the history of critical theory (mostly French) through its cybernetic resonances. Geoghegan probably excavates a history that has been hitherto concealed- of the figures, institutions, and transactions behind the formation of the seemingly neutral field of critical theory (mostly structuralism). But between the chapters that unravel from singular, already-deified figures, his prose that I found to be repetitive and lacking in specificity, and his loose application of loaded terms like ‘technocracy’, one wonders how successful the book is to fulfilling its own promise.

[Roger Whitson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much-needed history of critical theory's complicity with what Geoghegan calls "technocracy." In many ways, "technocracy" adds to theories of control society described by Gilles Deleuze and Seb Franklin. Geoghegan shows the rise of such forms of power through ethnographic studies of children, Norbert Weiner's debates over cybernetics, and the reduction of culture to a series of codes in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and other so-called crypto-structuralists. These, in Geoghegan's view, act to reform various social inequities through the use of scientific and technical problem-solving - all underwritten by robber barons and philanthropy.

[Mynt Marsellus · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a lot of great work here - and as is typical with my readings of historical scholarship, I wanted more judgement and philosophy than historians desire to give

[luisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for Anthropolpgy: Science as Culture in my last year of school and understood probably 50% of it. Still a good read, made me feel smarter haha