Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London.
What People are Saying
What People are Saying About This
The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties - Fred Turner
“Before there was poststructuralism, there was cybernetics. In this comprehensive, highly original history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan weaves the two worlds back together and reveals French Theory’s long-forgotten debt to Cold War America. If you thought Foucault freed us from The Man, this book will make you think again, hard.”
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational - N. Katherine Hayles
“In a wide-ranging recontextualization of cybernetics and related disciplines, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code unearths new and compelling connections between the human sciences and regimes of technocratic control in the United States from the 1930s through the 1970s. This is the kind of book that upends standard intellectual histories, making it essential reading for everyone from deconstructionists to historians of postwar communication theories. Highly recommended.”
Cultural Analytics - Lev Manovich
“After reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan shows how information theory, game theory, and cybernetics developed in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s played a key role in shaping the ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and others who wanted to bring scientific methods to the study of culture. Today, when humanities are again strongly influenced by new techno paradigms (AI, data science), the archeology of ‘techno-humanities’ for the first time revealed in Code is particularly relevant.”
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 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