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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY the Cybernetic Apparatus: Media

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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY the Cybernetic Apparatus: Media NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY 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 By Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 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, Lily Woodruff, 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 This dissertation was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a cotutelle Ph. D. co-issued by the Screen Cultures Program of Northwestern University and the Fakultät Medien of Bauhaus-University Weimar. It was prepared in accord with both universities' requirements and defended in Evanston, Illinois before a committee composed of faculty from both universities. 9 Abbreviations ELP Ecole Libre Papers, New School for Social Research
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