By Gordon Hull
I made myself wait until I was settled into the summer to read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. It was absolutely worth the wait. Code offers a look into the role of cybernetic theory in the development of postwar French theory, especially structuralism and what Geoghegan calls “crypto-structuralism.” The story starts in the progressive era U.S., with the emergence of technocratic forms of government and expertise “against perceived threats of anarchy and communism” and the “progressive hopes to submit divisive political issues for neutral technical analysis” (25). This governance as depoliticization then generates the postwar emphasis on cybernetics and information theory. Along the way, it picks up and reorganizes psychology and anthropology in figures like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, as the emerging information theory disciplines are given extensive funding by “Robber Baron philanthropies” (and later, covertly of course, by the CIA). This then sets the stage for postwar cybernetic theory and the careful cultivation (again, substantially by philanthropies and the CIA) of intellectuals like Roman Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss.
This is not a story I’d heard before – and I get the impression that almost no one has, at least not in philosophy, which is why this book is so important – and the details are fascinating. It makes a compelling case for the need for those of us who work on the post-war French to get a handle on cybernetic theory in particular, especially because of the link to structuralism (more on that in a moment). It calls to mind some of Katherine Hayles’ work – I’m thinking of How we Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer – that probably needs rereading in this context.
The narrative that most of us in philosophy have learned about postwar French thought goes something like this: existentialism – Sartre and Beauvoir in particular, and probably parts of Fanon – is central in the immediate aftermath of the war. Phenomenology is influential via Merleau Ponty and the reception of Heidegger. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, structuralism emerges in figures like Lévi-Strauss and Lacan. Somewhere around 1968, post-structuralism emerges in people like Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida; post-structuralism takes its cues from a radicalized reading of Heidegger and Nietzsche and attempts a definitive break with both classical phenomenology and existentialism, both of which are too “humanist” and lack a proper sense of historical contingency. Marxism is important and somewhat on the side of this, but the 1960s also sees the emergence of both a Marxist humanism and its rejection by Althusser. Hegel looms over the entire proceedings, though his role is uncertain.
On Geoghagen’s account, this narrative isn’t exactly wrong, but its emphases are somewhat misplaced because it completely ignores the impact of American-influenced communication theory. American communication theory “elaborated on the myth of a self-made American people, erasing ethnic difference to produce an ostensibly unmarked space of unchecked communication” (91). Structuralism – and here the names are Jakobson, Saussure and Lacan – “bound the individual on a course fixed according to impersonal collective relations.” (92). This political resonance was very carefully cultivated, and Geoghegan carefully traces the details of its emergence.
In the case of the French, it is also deeply tied to awareness of the violence of colonialism and the disaster of the war. Geoghegan quotes Derrida for the line that structuralism had a “catastrophic consciousness, simultaneously destroyed and destructive” (95). As Geoghegan glosses, structural methods “seemed to elicit the essential features of a language precisely as it faced liquidation. As violence swept across a land, reducing a culture to fragments, structural methods extracted ‘differential features’ that identified the quintessence without retaining the original material” (94). A bit later, he puts it this way:
“Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ongoing destruction of indigenous populations … heralded the instability of physical indexes in the modern world. Mathematical constructions of reality in computing, atomic physics, operations research, and game theory figured centrally in the unheralded violence of World War II. In the hands of the state, modern science could order or annihilate the human body at scale with relative ease. ‘Structure’ offered a logical category that subtended the physical body” (121).
Structuralism was thus archival without the physical archive. As anyone who has read Adorno knows, this sort of project is deeply and fundamentally fraught, as objects do not fit into their concepts without leaving a remainder (to quote the beginning of Negative Dialectics). Adorno was right, and attempts to ignore the material conditions of thinking, social structures and so forth continue apace. What Geoghegan helped me do was see this particular attempt more sympathetically, as a response to ongoing catastrophe.
Existentialists and Marxists wanted none of it; Geoghegan cites Lefebvre, Beauvoir and Sartre. Part of his objective is to contest the historiography we’ve all inherited of the period, and he cites their objections to underscore the point that “where later Anglophone readers would find in structuralism a new face for Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, early French readers like Sartre found dogmatic scientism in the thrall of depoliticized US social science” (149). Geoghegan has the receipts to show that the existentialists and Marxists were not wrong. That said, they weren’t entirely right either: the influence of Heidegger especially was important (if unfortunate: the story of his unrepentant Nazism gets worse by the day, and has now corrupted substantial parts of the Gesamtausgabe, per Richard Wolin). As Michael Behrent has documented, Foucault’s study of both Nietzsche and of Heidegger’s reading of Kant were important as far back as the 1950s (Foucault is somewhat of a peripheral figure for Geoghegan, which seems right to me, given Foucault’s deep ambivalence about structuralism. But one should note that Foucault was fascinated by “structure” in the mid-1960s as an antidote to a “philosophy of the subject;” he refers in a 1966 interview to “contemporary analytic reason, which we’ve seen born with Russell, [and] which appears in Lévi-Strauss and the linguists.” In 1973, in response to a prompt about “the new type of thought that Foucault proposes,” he cites Nietzsche on the death of God and man, Heidegger’s return to the Greeks, Russel “when he made a logical critique of philosophy, and also … linguists [and] sociologists like Lévi-Strauss). But you'll also notice I've just failed to cite any structuralists, and Geoghegan's point is that they need a genealogical reassessment. My lines from Foucault then illustrate why the reassessment of the structuralists matters for later thinkers.
In many respects the key figures of Code are Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss. The former develops a lot of the intellectual content of structuralism (and is conveniently for the Americans a Russian speaker) and the latter, under Jakobson’s intellectual influence, was instrumental in bringing American communications theory to France. By way of the Rockefeller-funded ELHE (which was meant to be somewhat parallel to the New School’s hosting of émigré German intellectuals), French intellectuals learned to speak the technocratic language of efficiency and were nudged away from emphasis on social equality (116). Lévi-Strauss was central to this effort, even as he became increasingly ambivalent about it. The Savage Mind thus emerges as a key text:
“A first glance, The Savage Mind appeared to reduce all indigenous cultures to a manifestation of recent informatic findings – preserving, as it were, the epistemic and cultural supremacy of the West. Lévi-Strauss, however, suggested the shoe was on the other foot. In an almost euphoric conclusion, he celebrated the great genius of the savage mind to have long ago recognized and understood what Western information theorists had only recently discovered: that the world is organized into signals for our interpretation” (151).
The Savage Mind thus represents a crucial moment in the French reception of communications theory, one also present in Lacan, that both emphasized noise in communications circuits and the instability of the intellectual pretensions of cybernetic theory itself. This moment becomes the basis for crypto-structuralism.
Roland Barthes accordingly becomes a central figure in Geoghegan’s account due to his “unique genius for turning structuralism into crypto-structuralism,” which is based on the idea that “oppression dwelled within the code that enchained the university, commerce, governance, and expertise in the production of an entire social order” (157). Of course, the idea that the university system was oppressive was part of what was behind the protests of May 1968 and the rise of Maoism among left intellectuals. Did any of this this lead Barthes to descend into the streets in May 1968? It did not: it led him to the attempt to “undo the techno-scientific regulation from within its own epistemic factories” (166), from within the university seminar and an attempt to recreate the seminar as an oppositional space (one thinks here, of course, also of Derrida). Geoghegan notes the important roles of Kristeva, Irigaray and Baudrillard to crypto-structuralism. Of Baudrillard, he writes that “what ultimately allied his critique with that of the crypto-structuralists, rather than with that of his advisor Henri Lefebvre, was his insistence on communicative immanence: there was no outside to codes” (167).
One can only assume that the implicit reference to Derrida’s “there is no outside of the text” is deliberate. It’s an important point, and I would add that this aligns Barthes, Baudrillard and Derrida with Foucault (whose Iran writings emphasized that whatever the Iranians were doing, it was not a [Marxist] “revolution” but an “insurrection” (soulèvement)) and Deleuze, who lamented to Negri that:
“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery. What’s so shameful is that we’ve no sure way of maintaining becomings, or still more of arousing them, even within ourselves. How any group will turn out, how it will fall back into history, presents a constant ‘concern’. There’s no longer any image of proletarians around of which it’s just a matter of becoming conscious” (Negotiations, 173; I think this is implicit in Deleuze’s and Derrida’s 1968 writings too).
In other words, whether there’s an outside or not is vitally important to one’s theory of resistance. It turns out that this is tied to cybernetics.
Geoghegan concludes with a brief discussion of contemporary techno-futurism.
Tl;dr: I've not done it justice here, but I hope I've at least communicated that this is an absolutely fascinating book and that I expect to continue to learn from it.
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