Introduction, Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity

Abstract

Introduction, Literary Cybernetics:History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity Heather A. Love (bio) and Lea Pao (bio) In 1948, mit mathematician Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics"—adapted from the Greek word for "steersman" or "governor"—to describe an emerging technology-based discipline focused on the science of "control and communication in the animal and the machine."1 Cyberneticians posited that machines can be programmed to learn from the past, that human brains can be understood as complex computers, and that information can circulate freely along conscious and mechanical channels. Since Wiener's codification of cybernetics as a field of study, the even further-reaching discipline of systems theory has emerged.2 Statistical and probabilistic approaches to communication now permeate our understanding of and engagements with information culture, and terms like "cyberspace" and "cyborg" are part of our everyday parlance. From the start, cybernetics and systems theory saw themselves as intensely interdisciplinary undertakings—the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics that ran from 1946 to 1953, for example, brought together academics and applied scientists working in mathematics, engineering, psychology, anthropology, and more. Even though humanistic ideas (about language, meaning, literature) and scholars (such as I. A. Richards and Yuen Ren Chao) have featured in and shaped these meetings, the humanities and the arts have not often been regarded as an integral part of the cybernetics narrative. However, in recent decades, the work of artists, writers, and literary critics engaging with cybernetics and systems thinking in robust and diverse ways has become more visible. Across several subfields and periods in literary studies, concepts such as recursion, self-reference, self-organization, the feedback loop, entropy, entanglement, and emergence have enabled scholars to frame their objects of study as part of a broader media-technological ecology and to forge interdisciplinary connections between literature and more technical fields. In the Anglo-American sphere, Kathleen Woodward's work has invited us to "think cybernetically" about literature and culture; historians of theory such as Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan and Lydia H. Liu have traced the [End Page 1193] exchange between and among cybernetic discourses, French theory, and literary criticism; literary scholars such as Patricia S. Warrick, David Porush, William R. Paulson and N. Katherine Hayles have analyzed literary and cultural theory at the intersection of society, technology, and science, drawing attention to the (implicit and explicit) collaborations between the humanities and sciences, as have Marjorie Levinson, who suggests that systems-theory concepts, such as self-organization and recursion, can provide a new account of lyric form, and Bruce Clarke, who reengages second-order systems theory with narrative theory to capture complex and "extrascientific" processes like cognition; finally, Donna Haraway's and Cary Wolfe's posthumanism interrogates the shifting constellations between the history of humanist thinking, the human, technology, and the world.3 This ongoing interest in cybernetics and literature intersects with many adjacent disciplinary developments: the rise of digital humanities and humanities-focused university "centers" and "labs," the rapid expansion of computing technologies into more and varied organic and nonorganic systems, the return of formalism, and, perhaps most intriguingly, the "postcritical" turn that has sparked so much discussion. Within this constellation of critical and theoretical paradigms, the last point deserves particular attention, as cybernetic discourse, while offering its own set of complex analytic concepts, does not map simply onto traditional hermeneutic frameworks that pursue the unconscious, the repressed, or the symptomatic. For this reason, cybernetic thinking may offer an additional perspective between critical and postcritical reading, shedding a different light on our practices of reading and interpretation. At the same time, cybernetic theory offers an alternate pathway to thinking computationally, one that is not simply ancestor to the digital humanities but calls for renewed emphasis on the analog and mediated natures of system, communication, and information. That is to say, cybernetics has not been superseded by the digital turn because cybernetics as conceptualization and methodology is not inherently digital but indeed allows us to think about information and computation with reference to genre, materiality, history, and aesthetic and social practices. Because of this growing interest in the relevance of cybernetics to literary and broader humanities-based scholarship, there is still more room for self-reflection on the promise and...