“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.” - N. Katherine Hayles, author of Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational
“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.” - Lev Manovich, author of Cultural Analytics
“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.” - Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
“Straying away from the familiar itineraries of intellectual history, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan invites us to take a path less trodden: a detour that allows the reader to revisit famous milestones in the development of cybernetics and digital media, and to connect them to scholarly debates stemming from fields of study as distant as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology." - The Duke Reader
"Code: From Information Theory to French Theory offers an unprecedented and timely analysis that captures the interconnected genealogy of cybernetic developments and (post) structuralist reflections, spanning from the US Progressive Era to today’s world of social media." - Ran Deng, The Communication Review
"[Code's] story – how the attempt to describe cultural generativity through science became generative in itself – puts forward a unique and compelling answer to how communication and media not only transmit, but shape, what it is to know anything at all." - Anthony Burton, New Media & Society
"Code: From Information Theory to French Theory offers a compelling revisionary argument that asks us to reconsider the motivations and contexts surrounding cybernetics’ emergence. By unearthing its roots in philanthropic organizations, Geoghegan foregrounds the implications of scientific research and epistemology on numerous social movements, global capitalism, and imperialism." - Nabeel Siddiqui, Media Theory
"The primary strength of Code lies in its ability to reconstruct the historical connections between cybernetics and structuralism through the mediation of The mathematical theory of communication (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) and information theory. As this latter approach is an essential component of information science’s knowledge base, this book is relevant to anyone interested in information research." - Marco Schirone, Information Research
“Bernard Geoghegan’s Code presents a strong history of how the humanities of the 20th century worked in close connection with communication and information sciences … a rich and insightful analysis.”
- Jussi Parikka,
Leonardo Reviews
"Anyone interested in the political and ethical dimensions of cybernetics and contemporary social networking will be fascinated by Geoghegan's rich historical and interpretive account of these important and timely subjects. Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. Students in two-year technical programs." - J. W. Dauben, Choice
"After reading Geoghegan’s book, the prophets are less prescient and we are all less precocious, but the reality he weaves together in this ambitious text is vastly more important than the persistence of flattering illusions. ... [His] work simply cannot be ignored for those who study cybernetics, electronic literature, poststructuralism, or institutional theory."
- Davin Heckman,
Electronic Book Review
"Geoghegan’s rich and surprising account of the common inheritance shared by information theory and French Theory in the era of liberal technocracy, industrial capitalism, and colonial crisis will change how we think about the nature, risks, and possibilities of data analytics, critical theory, and the digital humanities now and for years to come." - Carolyn Pedwell, Theory, Culture & Society
"Geoghegan’s book provides a useful introduction to the intellectual genesis of major theoretical movements of the twentieth century, which, when taken together with biographies and intellectual histories of the people at the center of these waves of change, offers a necessary corrective to more limited understandings of ideas appearing in isolation. Intellectual historians, philosophers, and anthropologists researching the mid to late twentieth-century growth of social theory will find great value in this book." - Douglas Leonard, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews
"[Code] situates the origins of present-day digital analytics in anthropology and French theory, unearthing the complex and previously uncharted historical contingency of intellectual currents that shaped the twentieth and twenty-first century information age." - Ekaterina Babintseva, History of Anthropology Review
"More than anything else, Code eloquently sketches the network of post-war developments that we ordinarily hold separate. . . . What Geoghegan’s book demonstrates is that we are all heirs to 'code,' with all of the powerful inequalities that implies. This means that our critiques of digital capitalism must also involve a reflexive understanding of the ways 'code' has shaped the anthropological project over the past 60 years, and conversely, the ways that information society represents a revanchist anthropology grounded in empire." - Samuel Gerald Collins, History of Anthropology Review
"Questions persist surrounding the governance and control of human socio-technical systems, where interactions and interferences among different subsystems are abundant. How can humans effectively intervene in these systems without introducing new layers of complexity that hinder or obstruct action? Can political action and value systems be encoded as variables dependent on the system, or do these sorts of human institutions possess an element of external influence, if not transcendence, in relation to the system? Code offers insights into each of these issues."
- Perig Pitrou, History of Anthropology Review
"Not prioritizing academicians as the sole producers of knowledge, Code stands out to me in its effort to capture human sciences within a complex network of non-academic intellectuals and technocrats. By discussing how ideas about cybernetics flowed and developed among philanthropists, conference-going scholars, government bodies, and even photographers, Geoghegan writes against the conception that cybernetic research was confined to the ivory tower. He intricately locates cybernetics within the dynamics of postwar global politics and its actors." - Amrina Rosyada, History of Anthropology Review
"This volume will be of interest to scholars, teachers, and students in media and communication studies, anthropology, history of knowledge and ideas, critical data studies, and the humanities more generally. Its lucid style, the focus on personal biographies and relations, as well as the detailed explanation of its use of theoretical and disciplinary concepts in the introduction, make it accessible to the general readership with no prior knowledge of the history of cybernetics." - Tsvetelina Hristova, International Journal of Communication
"Code is an expansive history of cybernetic thinking as it emerged in European and American intellectual work and experimentation. . . . [It] is required reading for those interested in the history of cybernetics, media studies, or critical theory, but deserves attention outside of these literatures for the expansive historical connections that it reveals." - Sam H. Franz, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
"In this insightful, wide-ranging, and dense historical overview of cybernetics and information theory in the twentieth century, Geoghegan demonstrates why researchers from numerous disciplines have turned to the study of 'signs' and cultural codes in an effort to understand the basic tenets governing 'natural and human systems'. . . . Owing to the crisis of fake news and conspiracy theories grounded in hyperreal codes that defines contemporary life, perhaps Geoghegan’s most important contribution is his exploration of this semiotic saturation." - Keith Moser, The French Review
"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." - Andrew Kettler, Journal of American Culture
