Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, 2023, Duke University Press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/code

Review by Nabeel Siddiqui 

In his work Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan asks us to rethink the historical trajectory of cybernetics, positioning it as an epistemological paradigm born out of World War II’s military-technical nexus. As he makes apparent, we can trace cybernetics’ roots to the 1930s Progressive Era in America when philanthropic organizations funded by robber barons situated scientific innovation and analysis as providing a neutral and objective method for social reform. Theorists in fields as distinct as engineering, physics, anthropology, and linguistics, utilized terms like feedback loops, code, communication, and equilibrium to advocate for what they saw as a new, unified theory. They deployed a cybernetic apparatus consisting of not only devices and instruments for data collection, transmission, and analysis but also a set of alliances meant to meet the turbulence of socio-political exchange brought on by growing industrialization and economic expansion. Geoghegan traces this apparatus to “recover the history of the human sciences, as a test bed for the rise of the communication sciences, as realized in the experimental systems of imperialism, colonialism, and industrial capitalism” (7). Ultimately, his insistence on a nuanced overview of cybernetics’ origins asks us to reconsider the socio-historical impetuses behind contemporary fields like the digital humanities and the supposed divide between technical and theoretical approaches to studying culture.

Geoghegan’s work begins by expounding on the intersection and relationship between cybernetics and philanthropic organization, such as the Rockefeller, Josiah Macy Jr., and Ford Foundations. These foundations saw scientific research as a channel for addressing existing power imbalances and inequities brought on by global capitalism. As a result, “welfare, rather than warfare, provided an impetus for the midcentury rise of communication sciences” (23). In contrast to faith-based charities, these organizations demanded that their funding of philanthropic initiatives adhere to the supposedly scientific principles of empirical and rational inquiry. By rejecting subjective interpretation in favor of objective measurement, they recast civilization as a series of complex interconnected machine-like systems governed by simple patterns of cause and effect.

Pivotal to the development of this cybernetic orientation was the work of Gregory Bateson and his wife Margaret Mead. Mead’s research into Balinese tribes provided a catalyst for apprehending how individuals made meaning through social interactions and the channels different generations used to transfer culture. Against the backdrop of Dutch colonial violence, Mead and her colleagues pushed against psychoanalytic approaches fashionable at the time to foreground the material patterns of everyday life. They relied on technologies like recorded audio and video to situate themselves as outside observers of the family ecology, and their eventual insights gained wide reception during the post-World War II academic climate.

As Geoghegan argues, “the interwar apparatus of visual arts, scientific patronage, and technical research, ingeniously crafted by Mead in the 1930s, became a leading instrument of social-scientific strategy in World War II” (67). Most notably, Bateson and the Palo Alto group utilized Mead’s approach of detached surveillance to interrogate mental illness and the suburban American family. For instance, they saw mental pathologies, such as schizophrenia, as emerging from a “double bind” where contradictory messages left individuals feeling trapped and unable to act freely. They focused their research on understanding and replacing these communication patterns with “healthy” ones and were able to secure massive research funding through governmental agencies and robber baron philanthropies to disseminate their ideas.

A critical component of researchers’ investigations of social deviance during the post-World War II environment were the physical spaces of enclosure that assured data-driven encoding. As Geoghehgan emphasizes, “The demands of scientific analysis inspired special interest in mental patients, prisoners, children, animals, soldiers, and colonized populations as objects for cybernetic study. These subjects did not have the legal rights or expectations of privacy typically afforded to citizens of Western industrial democracies”(59). Consequently, while some scholars have viewed cybernetics as a byproduct of a political war between nation-states, the author shows the cybernetic apparatus often directed its gaze inwards toward vulnerable groups. Through these sites of control, researchers could impose order over perceived social chaos and reduce complex human experiences to measurable data points.

Compared to researchers in the United States, European theorists had a more complicated relationship with cybernetic ideals. Because many had emerged from totalizing and authoritarian political systems, they were more likely to interrogate the underlying individualistic frameworks of technological systems. They grappled with the potential for ubiquitous surveillance and the role of collective action in an increasingly automated and mechanistic world. The boundaries of the nation-state did little to inhibit the circulation of these academic discourses. In contrast to perceived typologies structuring certain theories as “French,” Geoghegan shows that individuals, such as Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi Straus, frequently traveled and worked between a myriad of international locales—often holding a complicated and amorphous relationship with empire and colonialism. By the early 1960s, these “structuralists’ initial enthusiasm for culture as communication gave way…to a more sinister preoccupation with culture as code” (134). In research centers and seminars, European thinkers, as diverse as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault, utilized codes to challenge certain political norms and convictions of humanism. At the same time, however, they embraced a reductionist approach that cast daily experience and communication as mere components in a detached cybernetic system.

Geoghegan’s research asks us to reconsider the supposed boundaries between theoretical and computational approaches to analyzing culture. His revised historical trajectory of cybernetics “offers clues to how traditions conceived as parallel and sequential—informatics and semiotics; critical theory and data driven analysis by Google, Facebook, and Amazon—tend towards the development of transversal, intertwined, and cumulative modes of analysis” (170). Ultimately, through investigating the emergence of these systems, we gain deeper insight into the socio-technical systems permeating our contemporary approaches to culture and their catalysts in settler-colonialism, deviancy, and robber baron philanthropies.

Code: From Information Theory to French Theory is a complex, albeit dense, overview of cybernetic thought in the twentieth century along with its implications. However, while the interdisciplinary approach is appreciated, this complexity comes at a cost as it requires the reader to have a significant background in the history of structuralism, “French theory”, cybernetics, and anthropology along with the socio-cultural dealings of Progressive Era philanthropic efforts and French academic institutions. As Geoghegan notes, few readers will have this foundation: “among today’s practitioners of computational approaches to cultural analysis, research into predecessors in fields like structuralism or even cybernetics often seems thin. Or, more significantly, researchers’ predecessors seem defined too narrowly to grasp the genealogy of their research programs” (171). Geoghegan, however, does little to rectify this as he frequently introduces complex thinkers, organizations, and events with little synopsis or positions them in a cybernetic paradigm significantly different from established overviews. Thus, those who may lack a broad background on the theoretical and historical traditions surveyed may find the prose challenging.

Throughout Geoghegan’s work, his use of concepts and terms, such as code and cybernetics, can be abstruse. As he notes these terms were themselves very unstable, and “efforts to canonize one definition or another usually speak to specific theorists’ desire to monopolize credit or authority and shape specializations in the shifting grounds of postwar universities”(11). Although Geoghegan does lay out specific definitions of terms like cybernetics, information theory, technocracy, and code in the introduction of his work, these terms fluctuate significantly throughout the work. Perhaps this is intentional, as Geoghegan states, defining terms often “obscures the epistemic webs essential to tracing common endeavors from information theory to French theory” (11). However, while the author does a good job of showing direct links to cybernetics for a few thinkers, the obscurity of these terms often makes it unclear if all those that are overviewed were as heavily influenced by cybernetics’ epistemological framework as claimed.

Nonetheless, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory offers a compelling revisionary argument that asks us to reconsider the motivations and contexts surrounding cybernetics’ emergence. By unearthing its roots in philanthropic organizations, Geoghegan foregrounds the implications of scientific research and epistemology on numerous social movements, global capitalism, and imperialism. In doing so, he urges us to reassess the boundaries of intellectual discourse around theoretical and computational approaches to culture and emphasizes how these are often intertwined with broader socio-political forces. While the work may require a significant background understanding, it provides an incisive and profound analysis of the foundations of contemporary cultural analysis.

Nabeel Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Susquehanna University. He is currently completing two manuscripts. The first entitled Cultural Data Analytics in R: A Tidy Approach explores how scholars in the digital humanities and media studies can utilize computational methodologies to study phenomena in cases where close qualitative research is prohibitive or misleading. The second entitled The Computer Comes Home: A Failed Revolution analyzes the personal computer’s domestication in America during the 1970s and 1980.