Around 1940, a new discipline emerged: information science. It was the work of mathematicians, logicians, engineers, linguists and biolo-gists. For the most part, these scholars grouped themselves under the theoretical banner of cybernetics, a neologism based on the Greek word κυβερνήτης (kubernétes), meaning ‘one who steers or governs’. Its founder, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener, defined cybernetics as ‘the study of control and communication in the (human) animal and the machine’. The goal of this transdisci-plinary theory was to promote the transmission of information and the control of action.
Cybernetics presents information as the theoretical foundation of the classical disciplines. The transmission of information is a phenomenon that underpins biology, electronics and psychology.
Examples include the biological processes of hormonal regulation within the body and electronic devices ranging from the tube lamp to cutting-edge applications of nanotechnology. Starting in the 1940s, scientists began to redefine certain theoretical areas of their disci-plines using terms borrowed from information science. In addition to a shared vocabulary, cyberneticists also gained a scientific method of analysis that guaranteed precision. This project came with one disqualifying principle: any terms judged to be vague or imprecise
were banished and replaced with univocal information functions. In Wiener’s view, words, like ‘life’, ‘purpose’ and ‘soul’ were essentially useless for scientific thought. This movement towards the refinement of natural language into a new, more precise means of communi-cation was accompanied by a directive to all disciplines: concepts should be expressed in operational terms. ‘Control’, ‘command’,
‘communicate’, ‘move’, ‘act’ and ‘react’ were the verbs favoured by proponents of cybernetics, since they lent themselves to technical schematization. Cybernetics is both theoretical and practical. It was, perhaps, the first intentionally techno-scientific enterprise, where to theorize a phenomenon was to modify it. Wiener’s professional path led him towards this synthesis. He formulated the principles of cybernetics as a result of his research into missile technology. During the Second World War, the American government assigned him the task of developing a device capable of automatically aiming and firing an anti-aircraft missile launcher: the goal was to locate the target aircraft, then aim for a location further along in its trajectory. The device guiding the missile launcher would have to react to the speed and location of the plane and use this information to aim accordingly at its future location, a retroactive process which Wiener successfully developed in 1942, giving it the name of ‘feed-back’. He would later speak of a symmetrical ‘feed-forward’ mechanism.
Cybernetics seemed to be the product of a futuristic imagi-nation. Specialist magazines of the period feature photographs of scientists in white coats, working on communication machines:
railway network control centres, punch card readers, electroencepha-lograms, telephone exchange switchboards, etc. Cybernetics insisted on connections and automatic channels, in which each machine sequences its tasks in response to signals received from the previous machine in the chain. The technical object was no longer alone. Cables and electric wires connected it to an associated environment, also controlled by technology. The evocative power of these photographs
Cybernetics 53 comes, above all, from what they fail to show, because there is no way for them to show it: relay technologies, the alter techno with which the machines communicated; for example, signal switches, elsewhere in the country, whose position could be modified in response to feedback from the input device. The ambience in these photographs is calm, confident. Cybernetics had turned control into a positive attribute. This new concept of control no longer concerned energy, which had fuelled the industries of the nineteenth century, but rather, information. The smoking locomotive, whose arrival at the station had been immortalized, through different media, by Zola and the Lumière brothers, was now succeeded by the image of a railway network dispatching centre. This shift of focus shows that the original technical stakes were no longer in play. The rails had been laid, the trains were running. Cybernetics signalled that progress would now take place in the intimacy of a control room, where the material operators were represented and controlled at a distance.
Simondon was among the first to bring cybernetics to France. He read Wiener’s writings as soon as they were published. Simondon shared Wiener’s enthusiasm for a transdisciplinary theory organized around mutually agreed-upon concepts. He described phenomena using operational terms and adopted the vocabulary of the cyberneti-cists, with recurring references to communication, control, relations, functions, actions and reactions. He was, however, more wary of the social and political aspects of cybernetics. He rejected the myth of the ‘human-machine’ hybrid, the possibility of rationalizing human behaviour, and other oversimplified conceptualizations. Cybernetics is in some ways more notable for the enthusiasm it inspired than for the theoretical results it produced. These results, as we shall see, ultimately did not have a decisive impact. Cybernetics was, for a time, the banner and the face of progress. The epistemological revolution that Simondon attributes to it must be viewed, from a philosophical perspective, as a qualified success. Above all, it provides us with an
excellent pretext to examine the ‘great convergence’ that spans the history of information science.