:<i>Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data</i>

To my mind, where this project is perhaps not entirely gratifying is its turn to the second-order cybernetics of the latter half of the century. In the fourth chapter of the book, Love directs her focus to Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America (1934), suggesting that it can be productively read alongside the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson’s work from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. In both writers, Love sees a cybernetic interest in culture as thoroughly patterned and argues that both can, in part, be understood through their shared commitment to self-reflexivity. Technology here serves a kind of metaphor for Stein and Bateson, allowing them each to analogize “our socio-cultural environments and our place within them” (110). In this chapter, the necessity of cybernetics as a central term feels somewhat attenuated. While Bateson and Stein share a set of common concerns and strategies for thinking about culture, I wonder if their projects are motivated by the same “dizzying informational matrix” that so clearly links modernism and cybernetics in the first half of the century. Given that cybernetics itself is a field that has no unified definition, I find the movement from the first-order cybernetics to second-order cybernetics suggestive but perhaps lacking the narrow focus that makes the early chapters so convincing.