Code: From Information Theory to French Theory

Code by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan explores how Progressive Era technocracy, industrial democracy, and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists such as Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. It reveals how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing to 1960s Paris, leading to new fields of study and intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 20 January 2023
Publisher: Duke University Press

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan delves into the intricate interplay between Progressive Era technocracy, crises of industrial democracy, and colonialism, as well as the influential theorists of cybernetics and digital media such as Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. Through his comprehensive analysis, Geoghegan sheds light on how media-practical research forged a common epistemic cause, spanning from the 1930s interwar computing at MIT to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization paved the way for the emergence of new fields of study, including structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology, while also establishing enduring intellectual connections between the humanities and informatics.

Geoghegan's work, Code, presents a fresh perspective on French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors that connect interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the midst of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization. By examining the interplay between these various factors, Geoghegan offers a rich and nuanced understanding of the historical and theoretical developments that have shaped our understanding of cybernetics, digital media, and the broader fields of study they encompass.

Weight: 404g
Dimension: 228 x 152 x 27 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478019008