NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY The Cybernetic Apparatus

262 Pages·2012·5.83 MB·English

by  Bernard Geoghegan

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
and
BAUHAUS-UNIVERSITÄT WEIMAR
The Cybernetic Apparatus:
Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
for the degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Field of Screen Cultures
and
Fakultät Medien
By
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
EVANSTON, ILLINOIS and WEIMAR, THURINGEN
April 2012
2
© Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
All rights reserved
3
Abstract
The Cybernetic Apparatus:
Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences
examines efforts to reform the human sciences through new forms of technical media. It
demonstrates how nineteenth-century political ideals shaped mid-twentieth-century programs for
cybernetic research and global science sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Through
archival research and textual analysis, it reconstructs how and why new media, especially digital
technologies, were understood as part of a neutral and impartial apparatus for transcending
disciplinary, ethnic, regional, and economic differences. The result is a new account of the role of
new media technologies in facilitating international and interdisciplinary collaboration (and
critique) in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Chapter one examines how political conceptions of communications and technology in
the United States in the nineteenth century conditioned the understanding and deployment of
media in the twentieth century, arguing that American liberals conceived of technical media as
part of a neutral apparatus for overcoming ethnic, geographic, and economic difference in the
rapidly expanding nation. Chapter two examines the development of new media instruments as
technologies for reforming the natural and human sciences from the 1910s through the 1940s,
with particular attention to programs administered by the Rockefeller Foundation. Chapters three
and four examine the rise, in the 1940s and 1950s, of cybernetics and information theory as an
ideal of scientific neutrality and political orderliness. These chapters demonstrate how programs
sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, MIT, and other institutions shaped linguist Roman
Jakobson’s and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to redefine their fields as
communication sciences. Chapter five considers how critics of cybernetics, including Noam
Chomsky, Claude Shannon, and Roland Barthes, critically re-evaluated the claims of cybernetics
to redefine the relations between technical research and the human sciences.
4
Acknowledgments
“Lists of acknowledgments,” Richard Sennett recently observed, “are becoming like
phone directories.”1 This dry comparison between public directories and ever-expanding
inventories of academic acknowledgements points towards a potential impoverishment of the
latter, should indiscriminate recognition obscure the intimacy of dialogue and intellectual
indebtedness. However, I see in these growing lists a laudable multiplication of the varieties of
persons, societies, and impersonal networks acknowledged by contemporary scientific practice.
A few centuries ago, recognition of a sovereign or lord, perhaps the Lord, was enough to satisfy a
savant’s debts. With the rise of experimental sciences, acknowledgement began to change:
Scientific works began to identify not only benefactors and Providence but also colleagues,
witnesses, and professional organizations. These recognitions attested to the multitude of actors
involved in producing reliable knowledge and suggested earthly origins for even the most
ethereal speculations. In time, instruments, laboratories, foundations, and on occasion even the
family pet2 were also accorded due representation. In this regard—and contrary to Sennett—
academic acknowledgements have less in common with phone books than film credits:
1 Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (United States of America: Yale
University Press, 2012), xi.
2 Colin Cherry, On Human Communication: A Review, a Survey, and a Criticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1957).
5
Combining recognition, gratitude, showmanship, and professional duties, their length and
diversity is a tribute to a resolutely modern and collaborative style of production.
I thank my dissertation committee members for their support, suggestions, and guidance.
Samuel Weber taught me the value of reading. I am a better reader, writer, speaker, and thinker
through his influence. Bernhard Siegert intervened when I thought this work was done and—
thankfully—helped me begin again. Jennifer S. Light initiated me into the rigors and delights of
archival research, driving my thoughts down an unpredictable but surer path. I once asked Ken
Alder, “How do I hold so many different problems together?” Characteristically succinct, self-
effacing, and penetrating, he responded, “I use narrative.” The conjunctions, juxtapositions, and
oppositions structuring this work owe much to his advice and his example.
I express my thanks to those individuals and departments that nurtured various stages of
this research, including Lynn Spigel and the Screen Cultures Program of Northwestern
University, David Mindell and the HASTS Program of MIT, Bernard Stiegler and the Institute
for Research and Innovation at the Pompidou Center, Bruno Latour and participants in his
seminars at L’institut d’études politiques, Waddick Doyle and the Department of Global
Communications at the American University of Paris, Friedrich Balke and the Mediale
Historiographien Graduiertenkolleg (Weimar/Erfurt/Jena), and Christian Kassung of the Institute
for Cultural Studies at Humboldt University. Mats Fridlund, Mark B. N. Hansen and Justine
Cassell also provided invaluable counsel.
Among those archivists who expertly guided me through their institutions’ holdings, I
thank Nora Murphy of the MIT Archives, Debbie Douglas of the MIT Museum, Carmen
Hendershot of the libraries at the New School for Social Research, George Kupzak of the AT&T
6
Archives, and the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Tom Rosenbaum and Bethany J. Antos. John
Cook of Gawker.Com kindly furnished me with the FBI files of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which he
had secured through a freedom of information request.
I consulted quite a few communication engineers and linguists in the course of this
research. I especially thank Noam Chomsky, Robert Fano, Bob Gallagher, David Hagelbarger,
Morris Halle, James Massey, the late John McCarthy, and Sergio Verdú for their recollections.
This research was supported by the Jacob K. Javits fellowship program of the U.S.
Department of Education, a graduate fellowship from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
(and administered by the Mediale Historiographien Graduiertenkolleg), the Melvin Kranzberg
Dissertation Fellowship of the Society for the History of Technology, a history fellowship from
the Association for Computing Machinery, and a number of fellowships and grants from the
Graduate School of Northwestern University.
Many of the arguments in this dissertation were hashed out during presentations to
colloquia and workshops, including Pierre Mounier-Kuhn’s Seminaire sur l’histoire de
l’informatique (Paris IV), Wolfgang Ernst’s Medienwissenschaft Kolloquium (Humboldt
University), the New Media Workshop (University of Chicago), the Science-Technology-Culture
Research Group (Nottingham University), the HASTS and Comparative Media Studies
Colloquia (MIT), the Claude Shannon und die Medien Tagung (Museum fur Kommunikation-
Berlin), Philippe Fontaine’s Postwar Social Science workshop (Ecole normale supérieure de
Cachan), and workshops at the Society for the History of Technology and the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts. Thanks to the participants and hosts for their feedback. In
different form, portions of this dissertation appeared as “From Information Theory to French
7
Theory” (Critical Inquiry, Fall 2011) and are forthcoming as “Le développement de la
cybernétique « américaine » au sein du structuralisme « français »” (La revue d'anthropologie
des connaissances).
I also thank Etienne Benson, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Scott Curtis, Alexander Galloway, Orit
Halpern, Michael Graziano, Bridget Hanna, Jayson Harsin, Mark Hayward, Christopher Johnson,
Ron Kline, Paul Michael Kurtz, Alf Ludtke, Bettine Menke, Rob Mitchell, W. J. T. Mitchell,
Micaela Morrissette, Ana Ofak, Ben Peters, John Durham Peters, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger,
Christoph Rosol, Jim Schwoch, David Sittler, Wolfgang Struck, Steven Tester, Fred Turner,
Christina Vagt, Elaine Yuan, and my students at the American University of Paris for reading and
discussing earlier drafts of this research with me. My gratitude extends to Lisa Åkervall for being
my reader, critic, interlocutor, advisor, and inspiration over the past years.
My mother Rhoda Geoghegan, reader and editor of my earliest texts, and father Patrick
Terrence Geoghegan, an information-processing consultant who stocked my boyhood home with
mysterious computing machinery, loom large in this work and in my life. I thank them for their
unwavering support and dedicate this work to them.
8
Abbreviations
ELP Ecole Libre Papers, New School for Social Research Libraries, New York, New
York
RAC Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York
RJP Roman Jakobson Papers, Institute Archives & Special Collections, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
9
Table of Contents
Introduction 11
Part I: The Technologies of Liberalism
Chapter One
Technologies of Liberalism:
The Press, the Railroad and Social Science (ca. 1776–1901) 22
Chapter Two
Science as Communication and the Communication of Science:
The Rockefeller Foundation Initiatives in Order,
Impersonality, and Instrumentation (ca. 1913–1950) 58
Part II: The Cybernetic Apparatus
Chapter Three
Encoding Structuralism:
Roman Jakobson and the Cybernetic Apparatus 96
Chapter Four
The Difficulties of Gift-Giving:
Lévi-Strauss, Cybernetics, and Structuralism-in-the-Making 138
Chapter Five
Tirades in the Trading Zone:
Disarticulating the Cybernetic Apparatus 189
10
Introduction
This project began with the modest goal of understanding why terms associated with the
early history of computing, and especially with the moribund field of research known as
cybernetics, feature prominently in the language of some social and cultural theories. When I
began my graduate studies, it seemed peculiar to me that a number of concepts associated with
communication engineering—e.g., encoding, decoding, signal, message, information, feedback,
and entropy—often appeared in semiotic and poststructuralist texts from the 1960s and 1970s. In
works by authors as varied as engineers Claude E. Shannon and Norbert Wiener, semioticians
Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and cultural theorist
Stuart Hall, all these terms became manifest together, constituting a kind of critical technology
that transformed such diverse phenomena as telephone conversations, artillery-control setups,
press photographs, tribal rituals, and audience responses into analogous systems of data
processing.1 How and why did the narrow terminologies and techniques for improved data
1 See Claude E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell Systems Technical Journal 27
(October 1948): 379–423, 623–656; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine (New York: MIT Press, 1961); Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music,
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–31; Umberto Eco, “Openness, Information,
Communication,” in The Open Work (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44–83;
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966); and Stuart Hall,
Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham, England: Centre for Cultural Studies,
University of Birmingham, 1973).