Book Review: Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

This book takes the reader on a fascinating journey that begins with the intellectual landscapes of early cybernetics and ends with those of contemporary digital humanities and social media studies. French structuralism and its reception in the US as “French Theory” (Cusset, 2008) is an intermediate step in this journey. This work is an edited version of the doctoral dissertation of its author, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. The text is a successful genealogy of scientific knowledge in the Foucauldian sense, as it examines the influence of economic capital, particularly philanthropic donations from organisations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Macy Foundation, on the origin of cybernetics. The book emphasises the influence of this science on psychiatry, linguistics, and other human sciences in the US and in Europe. In fact, the primary strength of Code lies in its ability to reconstruct the historical connections between cybernetics and structuralism through the mediation of The mathematical theory of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) and information theory. As this latter approach is an essential component of information science’s knowledge base, this book is relevant to anyone interested in information research. The way I have read it, this work is a history of science text with a purpose similar to the classic reference on the topic, The cybernetics group by Heims (1991). However, the specific strength of Geoghegan’s work compared with Heims’s monograph is its exploration of the historical relationship between American and French social science. The trustworthiness of Geoghegan’s analysis is bolstered by Code’s lengthy bibliography, its sheer quantity of sources mentioned in the endnotes, and the choice of archival material discussed and photographically reproduced for the reader’s benefit. Fascinating and novel is the description of a “cultural Marshall Plan” after World War II, through which the French structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss and other European intellectuals received the support of philanthropic organisations on the

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 new media & society 25 (8) 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 itselfputs forward a unique and compelling answer to how communication and media not only transmit, but shape, what it is to know anything at all.