What is the ‘cybernetic’ in the ‘history of cybernetics’? A French case, 1968 to the present

History of the Human Sciences 33 (1):188-211 (2020)
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Abstract

This article examines the history of cybernetics in France, and the history of French cybernetics in the context of the emergent field of the history of cybernetics. Drawing upon an unfamiliar group of intellectuals and sources, I discuss the way in which French cybernetics was not primarily the hyper-philosophical strain we have come to associate with names such as Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, but an approach to thinking through political and social problems that some on the left would even deign to call pragmatic. In particular, I follow a group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, who, in the aftermath of the tumult of May ‘68, formed an interdisciplinary think tank to try to work out how to bridge the gap between science and society. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), the Groupe reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics. And they did so in a country where cybernetics was not properly represented as a laboratory science. On this last point, this paper makes an addition to the history of cybernetics by offering a portrait not of cybernetics in action, but of cybernetics in vulgarization. Not that the Groupe would not make their own stamp on politics: Several of them still hold significant power in adjudicating the role of science and technology in the public sphere in the French state.

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Citations of this work

Cybernetics in the Republic.Michele Kennerly - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (1):80-102.

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References found in this work

Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.N. Wiener - 1948 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 141:578-580.
The human use of human beings.Norbert Wiener - 1950 - Boston,: Houghton Mifflin.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication.Claude Elwood Shannon - 1948 - Bell System Technical Journal 27 (April 1924):379–423.

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