Code: From Information Theory to French TheoryBy Bernard DionysiusGeoghegan, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 258 pp. $26.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1478019008

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan investigates the role of cybernetics in the making of modern critical theory within the intensive Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. This purposeful examination explores how laboratory ideals of governing dynamics were applied to understand society through experimentation with diverse institutions of control and how French theorists engaged with cybernetic networks of informatic governance—both from critical theories of resistance and through often supportive or replicating positions. The introduction frames these cybernetic narratives through histories of the colony, the asylum, and the camp, linking institutional histories to how leaders in society came to imagine more fluid control mechanisms over bodies, minds, and cultures. Following work from Jennifer Light on cybernetics and policy in From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (2003), Geoghegan frames Code's narrative around how concepts of culture were infused with cybernetic thinking in the same manners of control as policy discussions about welfare and warcraft. Code specifically offers that the powerful and wealthy invented and funded informatics to better manifest their influence, rather than simply borrowing already existing mechanisms of control created within an objective academy. Looking at the roots of cybernetics in categories of domination in the colonies, asylums, and camps shows that informatics did not rise as a science from supposedly impartial spaces and was always indebted to governing systems defined by their desire to search out greater control over the masses. Such a repositioning is vital for Geoghegan, as it is meant to critique specific posthumanists who often argue that there is a pathway to utopia within many contemporary patterns of cybernetic thinking. As Geoghegan summarizes through critical opposition, the colony was a test site for organizing people in national settings through the diverse use of demographics; the asylum took that to more controlled environments to think about how the coding of human networks shaped human psychologies in replicable experiments; and the camp stood firm as the supposed warning sign, always to be avoided but with full knowledge that control systems being devised could lead to even greater holocausts than those committed by the Nazis. Also akin to recent work from Seb Franklin and Justin Joque, Code explores the highly incentivized use of cybernetics by the powers that be at its outset, thinking specifically in the frame of historical epistemology to explore the roots of diverse systems of control. As such, Code is about the scholars, policymakers, and theorists who negotiated the proper role of using enormous techniques of manipulation upon unknowing populations. Leaders of academic cybernetics and the powers that funded their research frequently engaged with systems that, if unleashed, could create near total dominance upon human populations. With that threatening background, Code looks at how policy experts came to use and misuse the knowledge provided in the halls of institutions, with the danger always existing that the more society was understood the more it could be mapped and controlled. Throughout the twentieth century, the natural and human sciences were transformed through links with such policy motives that involved reciprocal relations with cybernetic language and predictive theories of human behavior. Many of these policy motives of the 1930s through the 1970s involved making cultural knowledge into code, and consequently defining how specific cultural knowledge could be deployed to create a more efficient society, while always supposedly avoiding the threats of runaway efficiency that could lead to concentration camps. The first chapter looks at the base of this structuralist way of thinking through the lens of robber baron philanthropy at the start of the twentieth century. Focusing on Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, Geoghegan engages with a history of reform movements of the Progressive Era as marked by the early stages of cybernetic technocracy. The chapter continues to look deeper into the expansion-funded cybernetics at the Center for Analysis at MIT and Macy Conferences before and after World War I, as scholars combined into established groups that worked to define cybernetics increasingly as an all-encompassing study of humankind, often through the influential and potent work of Norbert Wiener. The following chapter moves to the colonies, clinics, and suburbs, focusing on Margaret Mead studying Balinese nations through modern ethnography. For cybernetic thinkers, the filmic and photographic evidence of life in Bali set ways of thinking more broadly about ideas of culture, statistics, and influence throughout the human sciences. The chapter also explores the cybernetic links to early Silicon Valley through Gregory Bateson and the Palo Alto Group, later engaged by Stewart Brand. That focus leads to a broader thinking about “datafication” in both global anthropological studies and domestic analysis of diverse psychological diseases and more normalized aspects of family organization in the age of rising suburbanites. Code then proceeds to think about the broader world of theory concerning such knowledge of informatics in specific social settings. Chapter Three discovers the influence of communication theory within the work of Roman Jakobson. That analysis thinks about the making of a structural form of linguistics in diverse global spaces of Jakobson's life, including Moscow in the Russian Revolution, Prague during the interwar years, New York in World War II, and Cambridge, Massachusetts during the height of the Cold War. For modern cybernetic thinkers, structural linguistics is one of many potent systems used to contemplate cultural education, prediction, and control. Following the structural linguistics of Jakobson, and earlier scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure, Chapter Four then focuses on structural forms of anthropology through the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, whose intellectual labors would go on to influence many French theorists within diverse humanistic disciplines in the decades to follow. Burgeoning French theory of the 1950s and 1960s was often receptive to cybernetic thinking, even as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, all in their own ways, critiqued diverse systems of power that manipulated cultural codes. Chapter Five argues that much of French theory from these scholars focuses on the role of the sign for understanding knowledge, and specifically relays how codes, or signs, can be used to influence through diverse aspects of cultural authority. The structuralists of the 1960s and early 1970s were greatly indebted to such thinking, necessitating the move to poststructuralism in the latter twentieth century, a field that often falls prey to such a powerful belief in the manipulatable cultural construction of knowledge that political motivations are often neutered within academic settings. The conclusion to Code takes each of the backgrounds central to the work, of the colony, the asylum, and the camp, into modern discussions of cybernetic influence on the even more powerful internet as the threat of digital humanities positions patterns to possibly remove the human. An often forcefully argued critique of posthumanism and the digital world as much too coded by discourses of domination to ever be useful as a humanist way of understanding the world or living within it, Code stands currently as the premier work for a current academic moment awash in fear of the rising Right that has its own plans about how to code, predict, and map the world through reactionary cybernetics, forceful nudges, and the explicit power of the mainframe now manifesting generative pretrained transformers that chart the structure of language more precisely with each passing keystroke.