Description
Book SynopsisIn
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
Trade Review“Straying away from the familiar itineraries of intellectual history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan invites us to take a path less trodden: a detour that allows the reader to revisit famous milestones in the development of cybernetics and digital media, and to connect them to scholarly debates stemming from fields of study as distant as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology." * The Duke Reader *
“Bernard Geoghegan’s Code presents a strong history of how the humanities of the 20th century worked in close connection with communication and information sciences … a rich and insightful analysis.”
-- Jussi Parikka * Leonardo Reviews *
"Anyone interested in the political and ethical dimensions of cybernetics and contemporary social networking will be fascinated by Geoghegan's rich historical and interpretive account of these important and timely subjects. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. Students in two-year technical programs." -- J. W. Dauben * Choice *
"Geoghegan’s rich and surprising account of the common inheritance shared by information theory and French Theory in the era of liberal technocracy, industrial capitalism, and colonial crisis will change how we think about the nature, risks, and possibilities of data analytics, critical theory, and the digital humanities now and for years to come." -- Carolyn Pedwell * Theory, Culture & Society *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Codification 1
1. Foundations for Informatics: Technocracy, Philanthropy, and Communications Sciences 21
2. Pattern Recognition: Data Capture in Colonies, Clinics, and Suburbs 53
3. Poeticizing Cybernetics: An Informatic Infrastructure for Structural Linguistics 85
4. Theory for Administrators: The Ambivalent Technocracy of Claude Lévi-Strauss 107
5. Learning to Code: Cybernetics and French Theory 133
Conclusion. Coding Today: Toward an Analysis of Cultural Analytics 169
Notes 181
Bibliography 221
Index 245
