Abstract
Recent attempts to discover the starting point for our hyperrational moment have looked at different possible histories: from racial codification and mercantilist space, the Cold War and its rationality to the command-and-control sciences of cybernetics, explanations and histories abound about the Internet age’s fetish for technical rationality and data. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory contributes to these attempts by examining how early cybernetic information theory’s obsession with encoding behaviour set the stage for expanded developments in the social sciences and, in turn, influenced the structuralist movement in Continental thought. Geoghegan argues that contemporary cultural analytics emerged from the belief, pioneered by early cyberneticians attached to the social sciences like Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, that enclosed communicative spaces possess their own ‘codes’ of behaviour for which deciphering meant the production of scientific knowledge. Geoghegan posits a history that moves through midcentury social sciences, their technocratic funding structures, and, in turn, the development of structuralism and its ‘crypto-structuralist’ reactions from the 1960s onwards. As a response to histories of cybernetics that focus on military apparati or early developments of computing as the epistemological ground for rationality’s colonization of thinking through the social, Geoghegan maps out an influence on social theory that argues for the widespread influence of the concept of code on the human desire to know.
Code’s contribution to the question of rational rule responds, in a sense, to a question that Mead – who features prominently in the first part of the book – posed in a chapter of her own anthropological sketch of the United States in 1942, And Keep Your Powder Dry: are the social sciences and democracy compatible? Mead’s answer to the question focuses on the construction and utilization of social science as a means to incentivize, and not enclose, certain behaviours. Her essay was responding to the technoscientific efficiencies of fascism that created a mechanically violent subject in a mechanically violent society. Mead (2000) argued that instead of asking ‘why’, the social sciences must begin to ‘ask instead: How can we organize a society in which war will have no place? And as the scientific question most germane to freedom: What are the conditions in a culture, in its system of education, in its system of inter-personal relationships, which promote a sense of free will?’ (p. 116). Geoghegan’s history is a history of efforts undertaken to answer this question, and how the introduction of ‘code’ – the recursive search for a science that ruled the exchange of information–underlied both scientific and humanistic efforts to answer this question in the middle of the 20th century. While Geoghegan begins with the story of cybernetics as a means to mathematically encode the concept of interparty communication, the book’s major contribution is how it details the attempts to turn cybernetics into a universal science. Anthropologists like Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson’s efforts in anthropology and psychology soon became the root for developments in structural linguistics, psychoanalysis and eventually the school of thought commonly known as post-structuralism that he terms ‘French theory’. The book’s chapters move through this history, first looking to those human scientists who peppered the sidelines of the Macy conferences. These attempts to understand how a social milieu, or a set of behaviours bounded by analytic units such as the family, the nation, or culture, were viewed through the concept of the cybernetic feedback mechanism. While these human scientists presented their own innovations in cultural analytics through this lens, Geoghegan focuses on how these early cybernetic-informed human sciences lead to structuralism writ proper through the epistemic closure given by cybernetic communication theory, the idea that a code can and does apply when understood on a delimited level of a particular structure.
The first part of the book provides a genealogical account of the cybernetic influence on the human sciences. It details how the technical elements of Claude Shannon’s theory of communication appealed to the research agendas and funding dictates of ‘robber baron philanthropists’, like the Rockefeller foundation, who saw cybernetics as a means to control for uncertainty while managing the integrity of the liberal subject amid post-World War II fears of both Nazi and Communist technocratic state management. This ‘single epistemology’, as Gregory Bateson called the cybernetic project in the late 1950s, was designed to cleanse the non-measurable from communication. What remained, according to cyberneticians, is a code. Not solely instruction sets for computers, nor social mores or the behavioural expectations of a social group, this code is something in the middle: the very framework for cultural analysis, emergent from the technical sciences but applicable to the human sciences. This code’s application relied on stripping away the semantics and content of the observational subject in order to reveal ‘elementary’ patterns of interaction whose very circulation illustrated the dynamics of the collective. Cybernetic human sciences thus posited communication (and its potential failure, in the case of Bateson’s studies of schizophrenia) as the problematic to be analysed and optimized-for. Shifting the lens of study away from individual experience within the larger social structures that shape them, it reduces these structures to units of analysis not dissimilar to the individual as a subject of study.
The second part of the book aims at a media-historical interpretation of this cultural analytic through the media objects at the basis of these human sciences’ work. From Mead’s photographs of her ethnographic fieldwork to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s graphs of speech systems, that which media itself captures prefigures the cultural units for analysis, enabling informational distribution to bridge the gap between engineering and culture and, in turn, understanding the ‘threatening other’ that haunted the cybernetic project. Geoghegan then shows how post-structuralism (more specifically, what he calls ‘crypto-structuralism’) was built upon the critique that cybernetic analysis cleaved the group from the larger social or political situation yet still resolved into a technical atomism. The appearance of such a possibility of the media object’s ability to reify and freeze in place becomes an object itself of academic critique. This critique sets the stage for the second half’s exploration of structuralist thinking and French theory, moving from Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology and de Saussure’s structural linguistics to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s ‘symbolic register’ of machinic structure and Roland Barthes’ indexing of communication theory to industrial rationalization. French theory’s own work in antagonistically deconstructing social structures emerges from a reaction to the very enclosures that structuralism imposed through the search for code.
The book’s introduction lays out the stakes of this desire to encode the social: the technocratic impulse to understand things scientifically underlies the contemporary fetish for big data analytics. These stakes reappear in the book’s conclusion, where the seeming ambivalence between them and the rest of the book’s more tempered and pragmatic approach to history come together. Geoghegan expresses a cautious optimism for the role of critique against the century-spanning technocratic agenda the book meticulously details. In dealing so closely with the evolution of a single epistemology, a lesser writer might fall prey to revealing the contingencies of their own. But Geoghegan’s history, and its concluding remarks that tie the desire for code to a basic human desire for knowledge as certainty and safety, underline the collective democratic effort of the book’s subjects. This is reflected in Geoghegan’s call not to do away with the cultural encodings of digital analytics entirely (an order whose idealism would feel out of place), but to have them work together in a manner similar to that described in the book’s earlier parts. This opens up the potential for fields that deal with similar rational analytics, like the digital humanities, to act as points of cross-disciplinary informing instead of reactionary posturing.
Readers looking for a primer on the state of contemporary research on cybernetics, post-structuralism, or technocracy and its discontents might be disappointed, as Geoghegan’s history stays within the bounds of its own narrative. But its story – how the attempt to describe cultural generativity through science became generative in itself–puts forward a unique and compelling answer to how communication and media not only transmit, but shape, what it is to know anything at all.
