Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data 1009387480, 9781009387484

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Imprints page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature
Proliferating Textuality: Modernism's Multivalent Data-Networks
Rethinking Cybernetics' Historical Scope and Disciplinary Reach
Modernist Literature and the ''Cybernetic Fold''
Techno-Modernism: Critical Trends, New Cybernetic Directions
The Modernist Aesthetics of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics
Cybernetic Aesthetics: Orientation and Overview
Chapter 1 Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past: Ezra Pound's Poetics of Transmission
Pound's Poetics of Transformation
Cantos Criticism: Evolving Scholarly Trends, New Analytical Contexts
The Feedback Loop: Idealized Poundian Transmission
Circulation and Dialogue versus Blockage and Obfuscation
Becoming Cybernetic Machines, Reading the Chinese History Cantos
Defying Data: Pound's Aesthetic Cybernetics
Chapter 2 The Cybernetic Information Dialectic: Patterns, Randomness, and Newsreel in John Dos Passos's U.S.A.
''Outa Luck'' in America
Not-Quite-Naturalism: A Starting Point for Dos-Passos-ian Cybernetics
Cybernetics' Competing Theories of Information, Newsreel's Random Patterns
Dos Passos's Literary ''Newsreels'': A Cybernetic Cross-Media Analogy
Beyond the Newsreels: Random Patterns across Dos Passos's Camera-Eye and Characters
Conclusions: History, Fiction, and the Cybernetic Interpretive Impulse
Chapter 3 Black Box Subjectivity: Associative Language, Affect, and Radio Blindness in Virginia Woolf's The Waves
Black-Boxes: An Anecdotal Opening
Complex Black Boxes: Tomkins, Affect, and Contingency
Catching Modern Character: Woolf's Black-Box Literary Subjects
Black-Box Radio Aesthetics: Woolf, Blindness, and the BBC
Words as Black Boxes: Woolf's Wavy Associations
Virginia Woolf and Modernist Media Ecology
Chapter 4 Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Definition by Contrast: Gertrude Stein as Second-Order Cybernetic Anthropologist
Aerial Perspectives and Altered Perceptions
Modernism, Anthropology, Second-Order Cybernetics
Pursuing the ''Patterns of Life'': Culture as ''Composition''
Composing America, Defamiliarizing the Quotidian
Repetition, Comparison, Contrast: Second-Order Cybernetic Pedagogy
Reframing Repetition: Emphasis, Insistence, Spirals, Möbius Strips
Setting Experiences Side-by-Side: Definition by Contrast
Analogy, Large-Scale Data Sets, and Induction: Repetition across Contexts
Second-Order Cybernetics: Urgent Pedagogy for the Modern World
Coda: Retrospective and Prospective Readings of Cybernetic Aesthetics
Looking Backward: Pre-Twentieth-Century Cybernetic Thinking
Looking Forward: Modernist Cybernetics in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

CYBERNETIC AESTHETICS

Cybernetic Aesthetics draws from cybernetics theory and terminology to interpret the communication structures and reading strategies that modernist texts cultivate. In doing so, Heather A. Love shows how cybernetic approaches to communication emerged long before World War II; they flourished in the literature of modernism’s most innovative authors. This book engages a range of literary authors, including Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and cybernetics theorists, such as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Ross Ashby, Silvan Tomkins, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Mary Catherine Bateson. Through comparative analysis, Love uncovers cybernetics’ relevance to modernism and articulates modernism’s role in shaping the cultural conditions that produced not merely technological cybernetics but also the more diffuse notion of cybernetic thinking that still exerts its influence today.  .  is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. Her work on modernist literature and on the cultural and intellectual history of cybernetics has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, The Journal of Modern Literature, Feminist Modernist Studies, and New Literary History, as well as the more tech-focused IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.

CYBERNETIC AESTHETICS Modernist Networks of Information and Data

HEATHER A. LOVE University of Waterloo

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Penang Road, #-/, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Heather A. Love  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published  A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : Love, Heather Allison, author. : Cybernetic aesthetics : modernist networks of information and data / Heather A. Love. : Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : Cybernetics in literature. | Communication in literature. | Literature, Modern–th century–History and criticism. | Literature–Aesthetics. :  .   (print) |  . (ebook) |  .–dc/eng/ LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Introduction: Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature Proliferating Textuality: Modernism’s Multivalent Data-Networks Rethinking Cybernetics’ Historical Scope and Disciplinary Reach Modernist Literature and the “Cybernetic Fold” Techno-Modernism: Critical Trends, New Cybernetic Directions The Modernist Aesthetics of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics Cybernetic Aesthetics: Orientation and Overview

 Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past: Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission Pound’s Poetics of Transformation Cantos Criticism: Evolving Scholarly Trends, New Analytical Contexts The Feedback Loop: Idealized Poundian Transmission Circulation and Dialogue versus Blockage and Obfuscation Becoming Cybernetic Machines, Reading the Chinese History Cantos Defying Data: Pound’s Aesthetic Cybernetics

 The Cybernetic Information Dialectic: Patterns, Randomness, and Newsreel in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.

“Outa Luck” in America Not-Quite-Naturalism: A Starting Point for Dos-Passos-ian Cybernetics Cybernetics’ Competing Theories of Information, Newsreel’s Random Patterns Dos Passos’s Literary “Newsreels”: A Cybernetic Cross-Media Analogy Beyond the Newsreels: Random Patterns across Dos Passos’s Camera-Eye and Characters Conclusions: History, Fiction, and the Cybernetic Interpretive Impulse

 Black Box Subjectivity: Associative Language, Affect, and Radio Blindness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves Black-Boxes: An Anecdotal Opening Complex Black Boxes: Tomkins, Affect, and Contingency

vii



     

      

  

   

  

Contents

viii



Catching Modern Character: Woolf’s Black-Box Literary Subjects Black-Box Radio Aesthetics: Woolf, Blindness, and the BBC Words as Black Boxes: Woolf’s Wavy Associations Virginia Woolf and Modernist Media Ecology

   

Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Definition by Contrast: Gertrude Stein as Second-Order Cybernetic Anthropologist



Aerial Perspectives and Altered Perceptions Modernism, Anthropology, Second-Order Cybernetics Pursuing the “Patterns of Life”: Culture as “Composition” Composing America, Defamiliarizing the Quotidian Repetition, Comparison, Contrast: Second-Order Cybernetic Pedagogy Reframing Repetition: Emphasis, Insistence, Spirals, Möbius Strips Setting Experiences Side-by-Side: Definition by Contrast Analogy, Large-Scale Data Sets, and Induction: Repetition across Contexts Second-Order Cybernetics: Urgent Pedagogy for the Modern World

Coda: Retrospective and Prospective Readings of Cybernetic Aesthetics Looking Backward: Pre-Twentieth-Century Cybernetic Thinking Looking Forward: Modernist Cybernetics in the Twenty-First Century

Notes References Index

      

 

  

  

Acknowledgments

The feedback loops that have shaped and informed this book are many. It is a true privilege to reflect on the past from my current vantage point, and to have the opportunity to articulate my appreciation and gratitude for the teachers, friends, colleagues, and family who have enriched my life, supported my work, and influenced my thinking about this project. Growing up in a rural British Columbia community, I was fortunate to encounter teachers who helped me envision the broader world of literary, linguistic, artistic, and academic pursuits; for these insights, my thanks go especially to Kate Reston and Arne Sahlen, and also to Nancy Ballard, Bruce Childs, Greg Constable, Norm Funnell, and Joe Lucas. At the University of Victoria during my undergraduate studies, I was privileged to work with mentors such as Evelyn Cobley, Stephen Ross, and Christopher Butterfield, who introduced me to the world of theory and criticism and set me on the path to graduate studies; to study piano under the late (great) Robin Wood and May Ling Kwok, who so patiently taught me about artistry, nuance, patience, and persistence through those years; and to kindle friendships with the likes of my fellow English majors, Laura McGavin, Jenn Sleigh, and Jen McFee; my thanks go to each of you. At Queen’s University, I am grateful that Sylvia Söderlind, as grad director, allowed me to enroll in so many modernism classes during my MA. Thank you to Glenn Willmott, Patricia Rae, and Ed Lobb for so expertly leading those courses and remaining mentors for many years after; to Maggie Berg, Leslie Ritchie, Asha Varadharajan, and Tracy Ware for forcing me to expand my scholarly horizons; and to the graduate student crew that included Laura, Heather Cyr, Shannon Smith, Jon Gaboury, Jon McKay, Marc Fortin, Mark Streeter, Jason Bourget, and more – what a rich year in Kingston it was! This project’s central premises and case studies came into being while I was pursuing doctoral research at Indiana University. I am especially grateful for coursework with Judith Brown, who introduced me to the ix

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field of global modernist studies; Shane Vogel, whose cultural studies course brought me back to reading theory; and Bill Rasch and Ed Comentale, whose “Cold Modernisms” class got me thinking in depth about modernism and technology for the first time. For the initial impetus to consider studying literary modernism through the lens of cybernetics theory, thank you, Ed, for persisting with your suggestion to check out Norbert Wiener’s work (despite my initial reluctance). To my committee members, Ed, Judith, Shane, and Josh Kates, thank you for on-point guidance and suggestions as the project’s chapters took shape. Your feedback has continued to influence my work as I have tackled revisions and begun to pursue new research directions. My thanks as well to the department administrators (especially Patricia Ingham, Ellen McKay, and Bev Hankins) who worked logistical magic to minimize the stress of navigating a cancer diagnosis in the middle of a PhD. Making it through the PhD process is, of course, only possible within a community. For support and friendship in so many ways through it all, thanks and love to my irreplaceable “framily,” Amanda Henrichs, April Hennessey, and Aubrey Reynolds, and to the broader circle of friends that made Bloomington home: Bonnie Shishko, Andrew Fippinger, Lindsay Welsch, Harmony Jankowski, Miranda Yaggi, Laura and Corey Sparks, Laura Kasson Fiss and Andy Fiss, Adam Fajardo, Jessie Waggoner, Paul Killinger, and more. I was fortunate to spend the first three years of my post-PhD career at the University of South Dakota among a close-knit community where colleagues became dear friends and on- and off-campus life blended together. To Duncan Barlow, Prentiss Clark, John Dudley, Darlene Farabee, Paul Formisano, Ben Hagen, Sara Lampert, Lea McCormack, Natanya Pulley, Lisa Ann Robertson, and Skip Willman, I am grateful for the thoughtful feedback you provided on various parts of the project during writing group discussions and colloquium Q&A sessions. In addition, thank you to Darlene for such stalwart department leadership and for expanding my early-modern theater knowledge; to Carolina Hotchandani and Mark Munger for hosting “lonely hearts club” write-ins that first year; to Skip, John, Dave Posthumus, and Zoli Filotas for awakening my inner Lucinda Williams during Blue Ruin rehearsals; to Leslie Gerrish, Martin Prendergast, and Ed Gerrish for bringing “The Bean” into existence; to Sara, Lisa Ann, Ben, and Michelle Rogge-Gannon for ongoing writing motivation; to Bailey Quanbeck and Stephanie Laska for developing such insightful thesis projects that were a pleasure to supervise; and to the broader Vermillion community for welcoming me to South Dakota – go Yotes!

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The University of Waterloo, my academic home for the past five years, has in many ways provided the ideal environment for completing this project. I am thankful for the opportunities that have been possible at an institution that promotes cross-disciplinary research and collaboration between the humanities and STEM disciplines. It has been a delight to work with students and colleagues who are pursuing research at the intersections of literary/artistic experimentation and tech culture; to teach alongside experts in media theory, tech ethics, popular culture, communication, and rhetoric; and to be part of several different communities of support that have allowed me to maintain momentum on this project during parental leave, pandemic restrictions, and a climate of constant uncertainty. The list is long (and I am sure I am leaving someone out), but I want to say thank you to: Anders Bergstrom, Kevin Carey, Jen ClaryLemon, Jenny Conroy, Jordie Cox, Bruce Dadey, Jay Dolmage, Dorothy Hadfield, Ken Hirschkop, Shelley Hulan, Andrea Jonahs, Jin Sol Kim, Sarah Klein, Jason Lajoie, George Lamont, Kate Lawson, Kevin McGuirk, Aimée Morrison, Marcel O’Gorman, Alexi Orchard, Zach Pearl, Jerika Sanderson, Megan Selinger, Kate Steiner, and Margaret Ulbrick. I hope to see much more of you in person – and much less of you on screen – during the years to come. Beyond my home institutions, the community of scholars that convenes around Modernist Studies Association events has propelled this project in many ways. Thanks especially to my MSA co-conspirators Aaron Jaffe, Paul Jaussen, and Lisa Mendelman, as well as to the wider networks of scholars I have had the privilege of meeting and working with as part of this research, including Jack Chen, Amanda Golden, Marc Kohlbry, Ro Martinez, Michael Miller, Lea Pao, Avery Slater, Ada Smailbegovič, Charles Tung, Megan Ward, and more. In addition, I have had the good fortune to be part of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology community for nearly a decade now. To Greg Adamson, Clint Andrews, Terri Bookman, Brandiff Caron, Marc Cheong, Joe Herkert, John Impagliazzo, Katina Michael, Jay Pearlman, Jeremy Pitt, Ketra Schmitt, Gopal Tadepalli, and the rest of the SSIT crew, thanks for welcoming into an engineering organization a literary scholar who happened to be working on Ezra Pound and Norbert Wiener. My conversations and collaborations with you over the past eight years have deeply influenced and enriched this project and my wider commitment to the pursuit of interdisciplinary work. For extensive and valuable feedback on this project, I am grateful to the anonymous readers at Cambridge who commented on the full manuscript,

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as well as the reviewers at Modernism/modernity (on Pound) and the Journal of Modern Literature (on Dos Passos); and to my exceedingly generous colleagues Bridget Chalk (Stein expert), Ben Hagen (Woolfian par excellence), and Jason Lajoie (editor extraordinaire). The book is much stronger thanks to your input and insights and I hope to be able to one day repay your kindness. Thanks to Ray Ryan and Edgar Mendez at Cambridge University Press for both your encouragement and your astonishingly speedy email replies; and also to the full publication team (including Hema, Liz, Christian, and Roisin) for your work on this project. For financial support during my graduate studies, my thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences. And for guidance as I returned to research and writing after parental leave, plus weekly ongoing accountability support, thank you to Rebecca Schumann and Lisa Ann Robertson. Last but very farthest from least, thank you to my family, to whom I dedicate this book. To my parents, Willa and Kelly Love, you inspire me to do my best; thank you for wholeheartedly cheering me on since day one and for being there no matter what. To my younger-and-taller sister Erin, thank you for making me laugh, taking me on adventures, and always sending me the very best motivational poetry. To Amber, Holden, and India, thank you for letting me become part of your family (and for putting up with the Canadian household habits and non-tropical travel destinations that were part of the package deal). To Cora and Kinsleigh, thank you for bringing your infectious joy into this world, which is brighter because of you. And to Carter, I love you more than I can say. You are the most brilliant scholar and teacher; you are the most loving father, friend, and partner. Thank you for making this life of ours the wondrous thing that it is. A version of Chapter  first appeared as “Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission” in Modernism/ modernity, vol. , no. , , pp. –. Copyright ©  The Johns Hopkins University Press. A version of Chapter  first appeared as “Newsreels, Novels, and Cybernetics: Reading the Random Patterns of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A” in The Journal of Modern Literature, vol. , no. , , pp. –. Copyright ©  Indiana University Press.

Introduction Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature

Proliferating Textuality: Modernism’s Multivalent Data-Networks In the remarkable closing passage of the “Calypso” episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, having successfully managed to void his bowels, “t[ears] away half of the prize story” he has been reading in “an old number of Tidbits” (the newspaper he earlier snags in the kitchen en route to the outhouse), “and wipe[s] himself with it” (/). Carefully “gird[ing] up his trousers,” he then emerges “forth from the gloom into the air,” wonders “What time is the funeral?” and determines to “find out in the paper” (). This final image – in which Bloom, listening to the “bells of George’s church” as they strike a “quarter to” the hour, heads off in pursuit of a tidbit of scheduling information that can only be found in the latest paper – provides both a fitting punctuation for an episode that has been replete with proliferating textuality and an apt point of entry for this book’s exploration of modernist communication networks. The Dublin of June , , at least insofar as Bloom’s introductory section represents it, is a veritable onslaught of printed information. From a bloody kidney wrapped in newsprint to an envelope containing an illicit letter, from the titillating prose of Paul de Kock’s soft-porn best sellers to the numerous newspapers that Bloom reads as he walks, talks, eats, and defecates, printed texts (along with quotations from and reminders of them) saturate the public and private, professional and domestic, material and mental environments of Joyce’s ad-canvassing hero. These texts appear in countless publicly visible, available, or purchasable forms, and they are also tucked away privately (in envelopes, pockets, armpits, outhouses, memories, and even the imagination). Furthermore, through Joyce’s linguistic play, the already numerous references to physical, printed texts that surround Bloom during his morning ministrations further multiply as the novel deftly (and, often, 



Cybernetic Aesthetics

hilariously) stages the cognitive engagement of one man with modernity’s ubiquitous and disorienting information-culture. Joyce humorously emphasizes this disorienting nature as words slip among multiple associations and contextual registers during Bloom’s morning musings. A network of repeated pronouns confounds the distinction between feline and female (as Bloom bumbles around the kitchen in search of sustenance for his cat and wife, both are simply inscribed as “she” []); the sight of “Boland’s breadvan” spurs a train of thought with syntax that concurrently suggests the Lord’s Prayer and Molly’s idiosyncratic tastes (the van is “delivering with trays our daily but she prefers yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot” []); and when his daughter’s letter prompts Bloom to muse on the “young kisses” that her future may hold, but that also populate his past, Milly’s and Molly’s identities bleed into one another (). Through layered puns, words thus evoke multiple semantic meanings. Molly’s letter signals infidelity. Milly’s letter prompts nostalgia. The correct pronunciation of “voglio” and comprehension of “metempsychosis” constitute markers of education and class (). As these meanings accumulate, they often include numerical and quantifiable layers of reference: from the perspective of “payment at the rate of one guinea a column,” the “prize story” with which Bloom so unceremoniously wipes himself reads as simply “three pounds thirteen and six” (//). Words, thus, equal money (and toilet paper). Similarly, a remembered conversation between “Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom” transforms words into markers of time (not to mention boredom and annoyance): “.. Did Roberts pay you yet? .. What had Gretta Conroy on? .. What possessed me to buy this comb? .. I’m swelled after that cabbage” (). Linguistic meaning, it appears, refuses to be contained by any singular context, and instead revels in slipperiness and suggestions. From the perspective on modernist literary experimentation this book proposes, these multivalent mental translations (words to money, words to minutes, words to different words, etc.) are significant insofar as they constitute, for Bloom and for Joyce, a means of representing and beginning to navigate modernity’s dizzying informational matrix. Bloom’s mental acrobatics respond to the textual, cultural, and semantic patterns he encounters, and he adapts his language and behavior as best he can to maneuver through Dublin’s information barrage. Significantly, though, while Bloom’s attempted responses are often successful (at one point, he “smil[es], pleasing himself” with his abilities []), he just as often comes up cognitively short. As he ponders the economics of discounts on alcohol, for instance, we witness his intellectual limits: “Say he got ten per cent off.

Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature



O more. Ten. Fifteen. . . . Fifty multiplied by. The figures whitened in his mind unsolved: displeased he let them fade” (). These moments illustrate how modernity’s information proliferation challenges the cognitive capacities of individual subjects who dwell among it. In his actions, Bloom rehearses (and stumbles over) several of the moves that will come to define an attitude toward the world that I term “cybernetic thinking.” He demonstrates, that is, an early cultural awareness of the statistics-based prediction and data-processing mechanisms that later technological innovations would develop. If the “Calypso” episode foregrounds these informational encounters within Bloom’s domestic space and individual mental musings, “Aeolus” offers a significant counterpart that instead takes us on a whirlwind tour through Dublin’s public and professional spheres of technologized textuality. Based in the neighborhood surrounding Bloom’s newspaper office, this later episode offers a broader vantage point on modernity’s ubiquitous (and noisy) information networks. Joyce opens with the “clanging ringing” transportation hub of the tram station, proceeds past the “loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels” that move through “the general post office,” and settles his narrative attention on the “papers” that constitute Bloom’s professional life (). And, there are so many papers. Relentlessly confirming the voluminous presence of printed text in circulation, the episode mentions (either directly, or via reference to a prominent publishing figure) at least thirty different publications. They range from conservative to radical, comic to political, long lasting to ephemeral. Amidst the newspaper name-dropping, Bloom also wades through literal paper: advertisement “cutting[s],” “strewn packing paper,” the “Sport’s tissues,” and the Telegraph’s “Saturday pink” paper, to name only a few (//). Passing by the printing room on his way out of the office, he meditates on “the obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels: various uses, thousand and one things” (). These lines resonate with several of the information- and communication-focused motifs that appeared in “Calypso,” as Bloom here showcases a similar fascination with the paper’s astonishing quantity, and also its adaptability to multiple purposes. Furthermore, the passage draws our attention to an additional element of twentieth-century information culture: its mechanical trappings. Bloom’s depiction of paper as an interface for mechanized transmission processes – it slips through the “obedient reel” that endlessly “clank[s]” away – illuminates an essential dimension of modern communication that

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will become crucial to later twentieth-century technology discourse, namely, the blurring of boundaries between human and machine. This preoccupation peppers the “Aeolus” episode, as Joyce’s signature “fleshiness” shares space with technology (e.g., as the professor speaks into the telephone, the “loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock’s wattles” []). Catalyzed by the Aeolian motifs of wind, breath, and speech, the two realms lose their distinction. According to the logic of the Joycean pun, for instance, the idea of a “GREAT DAILY ORGAN” encompasses a set of associations ranging from air-driven musical instrument to breath-centered body part (lung, vocal cords) to full-of-words newspaper publication all at once. The newspaper “ORGAN IS TURNED OUT” by a combination of “machines” (they “clan[k] in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump”) and employees (the “foreman” who “scribble[s] press on a corner of the sheet” and the “typesetter” who “neatly distribute[s] type,” amongst others [/]) (). Moreover, in this textual world, machines become “almost human” in their vocalizations – the “whirr[ing]” telephone, the “creaking” press (/) – and humans become refigured as part of larger professional machines: Bloom is a voice on the telephone (who can be easily told to “go to hell” and hung up on []); the newsboys are a “troop of bare feet . . . pattering up the staircase” and dispersing papers in their wake (). Amidst this tangled world of communicating machines and humans, spoken and written words, ubiquitous and circulating paper, where “everything speaks in its own way,” it is no wonder Bloom ends up “breathless, caught in a whirl wind” at the episode’s conclusion (/). This brief reading of Bloom’s engagements with words, numbers, papers, and machines draws our attention to the multivalent, excessively generative informational milieu that surrounds the twentieth-century subject – an environment that literary scholars like Paul Stephens and James Blackwell Phelan have explored in depth – and defines individuals alongside mechanical devices. Joyce emphasizes the extent to which data both assaults Bloom from the exterior world and permeates his inner thought patterns, as the textual production that surrounds him runs the gamut from the intimate and domestic to the public, professional, and political. This environment places distinct demands on the perceiving individual: to devise a means of navigating its myriad messages, to locate meaning amidst its disorienting cacophony, to identify communication patterns and quickly respond to them. Furthermore, Joyce’s novel also implicates the reader as part of its textual project. Bloom is, after all, a proliferate reader of texts. Wending his way through the Dublin wordiness, he confronts many of the same challenges that readers will face as they embark on the

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daunting task that is reading Ulysses. Bloom, thus, models many of the same strategies that are available for those readers as they engage with the novel’s textual networks and, by extension, their own modern culture. This extra-textual parallel reveals an underlying pedagogical impulse that this book will trace through various modernist texts as I explore how modernism’s narrative data and informational poetics reveal the movement’s larger cultural connections to the mathematical and statistics-based discipline known as cybernetics.

Rethinking Cybernetics’ Historical Scope and Disciplinary Reach Joyce’s “Calypso” and “Aeolus” episodes thus set up a constellation of aesthetic and thematic concerns that circulate around the unique status of information, media, machines, and subjectivity in twentieth-century culture. With these relationships and their shared importance for modernists and cyberneticians in mind, this book sets out to illuminate the interdisciplinary circuits of exchange that characterize the twentieth century’s communication networks. In the chapters ahead, I uncover and explicate relationships between authors, texts, ideas, and communication frameworks that do not always operate according to direct lines of influence. Rather, I invite us to consider and comprehend a much more nebulous – yet no less powerful – network of concerns about and approaches to information that developed during the first half of the twentieth century and that overlap, intersect, and resonate across disciplinary lines. My readings chart a variety of ways in which modernist authors became part of a broader historical phenomenon that was taking shape in the decades leading up to World War II: the emergence of “cybernetic thinking.” These early years of the twentieth century, as W. Boyd Rayward describes them, were “a period in which social and technical developments in the production, consumption, and management of print reached a kind of crescendo of effort and experimentation” (). An influx of media across multiple platforms – print culture, sound reproduction and transmission, cinema, and more – in tandem with a quickly evolving field of communication-technology capabilities required members of the general public to confront and navigate larger quantities of information than ever before. They needed, we can say in retrospect, to think cybernetically. Modernists engaged with and participated in these activities through the experimental aesthetic strategies they developed in response to their increasingly data-saturated world.

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One modernist author in particular had significant intellectual and biographical connections to a central figure in the heritage of technological cybernetics. In December , with World War I gathering momentum, T. S. Eliot, a twenty-six-year-old Oxford student at the time, sat down for “a not too hilarious Christmas dinner” in London with another young American expat, Norbert Wiener (Conway and Siegelman, ). Six years Eliot’s junior, Wiener was also an alumnus of Harvard University who had studied philosophy under Josiah Royce. In , he was (not terribly happily) pursuing postdoctoral studies at Cambridge University under another of Eliot’s former professors, Bertrand Russell. Eliot and Wiener went their separate intellectual ways; they each would eventually produce a publication that secured their status within their own field of disciplinary influence – the  experimental poem, The Waste Land, and the  mathematical treatise, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, respectively. Nonetheless, the conversations and correspondence that took place between Eliot and Wiener during  reveal that the modernist poet and the mathematician who would stake out his career at MIT in fact saw themselves as grappling with shared concerns and questions: the limits of philosophy as a discipline, for instance, as well as the significance of concepts like realism and relativism to their intellectual pursuits. Eliot even commented in a letter that he thought Wiener “seem[ed] to be doing phil[osophy] rather than math[ematics]” (Letters, ). What new lines of affiliation might we discover if we took seriously the suggestion that the core work of these two thinkers – one inclined to literary experimentation and the other to mathematics, probability, and statistics – stems from similar questions? By investigating those areas of overlapping interest, we gain insight into the creative as well as the technical strategies that emerged to help comprehend and grapple with the twentieth and now the twenty-first century’s increasingly daunting networks of information and data. The term Wiener coined in his  treatise – “cybernetics” – came to encompass an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving scholars from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, sociology, biology, physics, and engineering (as we see in the attendance records for the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics during the s and s), and the field of study eventually gave rise to our computer-dominated world. As scholars like Céline Lafontaine point out, however, “no unified definition of cybernetics has been able to impose itself,” a fact that can be said to have “given the informational paradigm the strength to diffuse too widely” (). Andrew Pickering echoes this sentiment when he writes: “there are

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many stories to be told of the evolution, the comings together, and the drifting apart of these threads [of scientific work that is related to cybernetics]. . . . One can almost say that everyone can have their own history of cybernetics” (). Despite these historiographic and definitional challenges, summaries on the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) website helpfully clarify that cybernetics “was adopted in the s at MIT to refer to a way of thinking about how complex systems coordinate themselves in action”; it “was originally formulated as a way of producing mathematical descriptions of systems and machines”; and, it comprises “the study of systems which can be mapped using loops (or more complicated looping structures) in the network defining the flow of information.” Cybernetics 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. By cultivating technologies of large-scale data processing, statistical probability, and feedback response mechanisms, cyberneticists (much like Joyce’s paper-saturated protagonist and his printing press observations) cast human subjectivity and mechanical technology as imbricated in a complex communication matrix. Existing histories of the discipline, such as texts by Pickering, N. Katherine Hayles, and Ronald Kline, typically locate cybernetics’ point of origin at mid-century, noting especially Wiener’s attempts to design an automatic anti-aircraft gun during World War II (which I discuss in more depth in my upcoming analysis of Wiener’s writing alongside modernist literary aesthetics). This understandable focus on the mathematician’s involvement in the war, however, obscures how prominently the cybernetic themes that permeate today’s culture in contexts ranging from military tools to online marketing to bio-technology also underpin the work of authors from the earlier twentieth century – authors like Wiener’s  interlocutor and many other literary modernists. To shed light on the often-absent aesthetic dimensions of the cybernetics story, the chapters in this book range far beyond the serendipitous Christmas dinner-date between the so-called “father of cybernetics” (as Conway and Siegelman label Wiener in their  biography) and the “most influential and authoritative literary arbiter of the twentieth century” – who also happens to be its “most famous poet” (as Craig Raine’s  biography of Eliot describes him). I track how literary modernists Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein creatively negotiated the same issues of human–data informational exchange that cybernetics would later explore. These authors recognize, integrate, and seek ways to process the

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overwhelming amount of information that circulated during the early twentieth century. They therefore engage in creative and productive ways with precisely the types of data-management problems that have come, over the past century, to infuse nearly all aspects of our technological and social lives. By shifting the cybernetics timeline back in time by several decades, this project highlights an important fact: the mid-century projects that marked the beginning of cybernetics’ public prominence did not in fact signify the “beginning” of any one participant’s engagement with the concepts, theories, and problems of twentieth-century information management and communication technology. Rather, events like the Macy Conferences were the product of a much longer history. Wiener had been working with concepts of probability and uncertainty as early as his Harvard college years and postdoctoral work in England; during his – year of study at Cambridge under Russell, for example, he published an essay on relativism that claimed “there is no absolutely certain knowledge at all” (quoted in Conway and Siegelman, ). The conferences’ acknowledged leader, Warren McCulloch, may have achieved most fame for his wartime work with Walter Pitts and his explicitly cybernetic writing from the post-war years; however, as Tara H. Abraham argues, his early laboratory work showcases the longer history of his computer science ideas, and their basis in his neurophysiological studies. To cite just one further example, W. Ross Ashby’s influential s work in cybernetics and psychology (which I discuss in more depth in Chapter ) emerged out of a consistent, life-long intellectual pursuit. As Ashby himself claimed in , “since opening my first note-book on the subject in , I have worked to increase our understanding of the mechanistic element of ‘intelligence’” (quoted in Asaro, ). The ideas that would eventually become the core of cybernetics discourse, these examples indicate, worked themselves out during the same years in which literary modernism flourished. By interrogating and analyzing interdisciplinary connections that bring modernism and cybernetics into contact with one another (and also with the myriad communication technologies that populate their historical environments), this book aims to productively revise and nuance our conception of both discourses. On the one hand, it expands our understanding of literary modernism’s interdisciplinary relevance by showing how early twentieth-century experimental writing conceived of literature as an information-rich communication system and, in doing so, cultivated attitudes toward the world and habits of thinking that would

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eventually inflect developments in data-processing cybernetics technology. In making these arguments, I invite literary scholars to consider these dimensions of modernism’s ongoing cultural legacy and to discover how concepts, terminology, and theories of communication drawn from cybernetics frameworks can illuminate the workings of modernist aesthetic experimentation. On the other, the book reconceives cybernetics historiography by locating a cultural pre-history to cybernetics’ technological innovations in modernist literature’s formal experiments. This argument encourages scholars in science and technology studies to incorporate literary and other humanistic work into their understandings of scientific and mathematical disciplinary history. At its broadest scope, then, I hope that this book will cultivate new interdisciplinary connections as it brings humanities scholarship into conversation with the science and technology communities, showcasing the potential for STEM fields to inform literary study and for literary analysis to alter STEM frameworks.

Modernist Literature and the “Cybernetic Fold” In their introduction to Silvan Tomkins’s cybernetics-influenced theories of affect (which I take up in detail in Chapter , alongside Virginia Woolf’s writing), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank offer a helpful term for framing my approach to the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of cybernetics’ pre-computerized emergence. “The cybernetic fold,” they argue, designates “the moment when scientists’ understanding of the brain and other life processes is marked by the concept, the possibility, the imminence, of powerful computers, but the actual computational muscle of the new computers isn’t available” (). They go on to situate this “moment” as also “a fold between postmodernist and modernist ways of hypothesizing about the brain and mind,” when “the prospect of virtually unlimited computational power gave new appeal to concepts such as feedback” (). The specific timeframe they use to identify the cybernetic fold (i.e., “roughly from the late s to the mid-s” []) reinforces the same historical parameters that most historians of science and interdisciplinary literary scholars who focus on cybernetics outline. Nonetheless, Sedgwick and Frank’s rhetorical emphasis on this moment’s imaginative potential suggests the value of retrospective analysis. An almost ineffable aura of openness and flexibility accrues to the gap in time when disciplinary regulations had not quite yet solidified cybernetic systems of thinking into the rigid frameworks they would eventually adopt:



Cybernetic Aesthetics between the time when it was unthinkable to essay such calculations and the time when it became commonplace to perform them, there intervened a period when they were available to be richly imagined – but were still imagined with a structural elegance, an interest in conceptual economy of means and modeling, that were not destined . . . to survive the introduction of the actual technology. ()

I propose that “the cybernetic fold,” in fact, is the product of an historical moment earlier than Sedgwick and Frank acknowledge, and that we can untether its telos from the techno-centric realm of “powerful computers” in which they locate its imaginative potential. To understand the emergence of these new cybernetic capacities – the ability, as they put it, to recognize the “virtually unlimited” expansion of data transmission circuits, and to “richly imagine” an array of “elegant” systems for information processing and feedback-based communication structures – we must adopt a wider frame of reference. This broader perspective needs to embrace both the far-reaching interdisciplinarity that critics like Pickering, Hayles, and Alex Goody already practice, and also an historical attentiveness to circulating patterns of cultural influence that enable earlier texts and practices to inform later movements, and vice versa. David Trotter’s framing of his most recent monograph as a “book . . . about the ways in which the world got ready to be connected” models the approach I pursue in the chapters ahead, and indeed, I see our intellectual goals as closely aligned; by tracing “the literary elaboration, during the hundred years or so before the advent of electronic digital computing in the early s, of the principle of connectivity,” Trotter articulates a similar type of literary-based cultural lineage to later technology-focused discourses, though his project’s emphases differ in a few key ways from my own (Literature of Connection, ). With an historical timeline that goes back farther than my own (to ), he charts the shift from “Victorian to Modernist” perspectives rather than dwelling exclusively in the space of modernist aesthetics (). Furthermore, by focusing on “the romance of connectivity” on display in various Victorian and modernist-era literary texts, Trotter addresses a different cluster of protocybernetic communication principles (i.e., “signal, medium, interface”) than the concepts I emphasize in my study of feedback-loop, black-box, and self-reflexive structures of information processing in the work of Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein (). The constellation of texts and theories that this book assembles toward these goals reads, in many ways, as akin to the work of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler, whose “discourse network” framework draws on the

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language of cybernetics to conceptualize “culture” as, in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s explanation, “a large-scale information machine which, depending on the way the data inputs, throughputs, and outputs are wired, produces basic notions as to why and to what end this machinery is supposed to function” (). Indeed, John Johnston paraphrases the theorist’s overarching method as one that “treat[s]” literature “as a form of data processing,” which is always implicated in a “larger communication system” (). Furthermore, Kittler’s theories corroborate the overall idea I advance in this book about how work from the decades prior to World War II set the stage for later computational technologies: media development, he posits, “since the Second World War, has transferred the schematic of a typewriter to a technology of predictability per se; Turing’s mathematical definition of computability in  gave future computers their name” (Gramophone, , my emphasis). Finally, Kittler makes specific claims about the media resonances of early-twentieth-century literature that align with a data-oriented approach to modernist experiments. As Saul Ostrow puts it, “everywhere Kittler turns [in his analysis of Discourse Network ] he finds the message of modernism, which is a history of the fragmentation of the data stream and in turn of our selfimage and identity” (xi). These metaphors and analogies bolster the readings I develop in this study; however, while Kittler sets out to track how various literary and theoretical texts register and reveal the technological- and media-systems within which they operate, I am primarily interested in parsing how those authors and their writing participated in and informed the discourse and debate about how those systems were emerging prior to their concrete, technological instantiation. The desire to trace, in modernist literature, what I think of as a cultural pre-history to techno-scientific cybernetics draws inspiration from a type of eclectic media archaeology practiced by theorists like Siegfried Zielinski. The scholarly obsession with the concept of “media,” he argues, is historically rooted in the twentieth century: it was, he posits, “a century that needed media like no other before . . . [given that it] spawned so many violent caesuras, so much destruction, and so many artificial, that is, humanmade catastrophes” (). As we move into the twenty-first century, his readings suggest, media has become “a part of everyday life, like the railways in the nineteenth century or the introduction of electricity into private households in the twentieth” (). Zielinski’s argument helpfully orients us to the similar historical “story” of cybernetics (and the benefits of exploring diverse features of its early emergence). First, the demand for and codification of cybernetics as a technological and scientific field was

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also a product of the violence and catastrophe of twentieth-century war – the drive to develop an innovative means of shooting down World War II enemy planes, for instance, spurred Wiener’s concrete experiments with statistical data-processing mechanisms. Second, cybernetic systems of thinking and information management so ubiquitously permeate the “everyday life” of our twenty-first century world that they often no longer qualify as either urgent or remarkable. Zielinski’s larger project thus establishes a precedent for the type of textually based, historicizing work this book undertakes. The fact of media’s shift to the “everyday,” he posits, makes possible (and even demands) a new kind of retrospective scholarship, a rethinking of genealogy. In terms that echo Sedgwick and Frank’s discussion of the cybernetic fold, he argues that “it is all the more urgent to undertake field research on the constellations that obtained before media became established as a general phenomenon, when concepts of standardization were apparent but not yet firmly entrenched” (). This book undertakes a similar foray backward in time, as I explore a cultural moment when cybernetic communication forms existed as part of the unfolding interest in and reliance on cybernetic thinking among not only technological, but also artistic, textual, and discursive fields of production. At this moment, cybernetics was not yet as entrenched in the discourses of technology, violence, surveillance, and the digital as it is today. By considering modernist literary practice as part of a “cybernetic fold,” or an emerging framework of “cybernetic thinking,” we can begin to understand how early twentieth-century authors both recognized and sought means to creatively negotiate the very issues of human-data exchange and cybernetic thinking that have come, over the past century, to intimately infuse what Jean-François Lyotard theorized as our “postmodern,” and what Hayles labels our “posthuman” condition. The case studies that this project undertakes, therefore, offer rich potential for clarifying not only an historical network of cultural transmissions located in the past, but also the cybernetic systems we inhabit today. Citizens of developed nations – armed with smartphones and laptops, rarely out of reach of a wireless signal or a data network – live in a cybernetic world. We don’t always think of it as such; for various reasons, the term “cybernetics” fell out of style several decades ago. Nonetheless, cybernetic machines, cybernetic information processing, and cybernetic modes of thinking intimately permeate our daily experiences and our ways of engaging with the people and world around us. This fact has received renewed attention in recent years, with various academic and popular histories of cybernetics prompting a resurgence of interest in both the discipline of cybernetics and

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its enduring legacy. Typically, though, literature does not feature prominently in these accounts of the cybernetics story, a fact that Cybernetic Aesthetics seeks to remedy. The chapters in this study argue that modernist aesthetic practice (with its innovative forms and experimental modes of communication) has important strategies to teach us about navigating through, thinking about, and surviving within a cybernetic world. The growth of information networks during the early years of the twentieth-century prompted modernist authors to develop new theories of language, re-think the parameters of human subjectivity, and put into practice literary techniques that could teach readers to expand their own cognitive and perceptual capabilities and to develop means of “coping with abundance.” While it is certainly true that literary texts have always been part of a larger cultural system in which meaning is generated through cross-referential links and a variety of environmental resonances, this specific historical moment gave rise to new forms of literary engagement with information. Modernist authors developed innovative practices that allowed individual texts to engage both explicitly and implicitly with processes related to data management; in doing so, they helped cultivate the cybernetic thinking strategies that paved the way for Wiener’s experiments and that continue to offer valuable communication models today.

Techno-Modernism: Critical Trends, New Cybernetic Directions In staking out these claims, Cybernetic Aesthetics builds from and contributes a new argument to the thriving branch of modernist literary studies that explores modernism’s relationship to technological development. This intersection has received rich and varied attention over the past decades, with scholars explicating modernism’s references to the influence of different communication technologies on writers’ choices of formal technique and topical subject matter; the increasingly networked status of the modern world; different aspects of machine, transportation, and military culture; and more. That the field of “techno-modernism” continues to evolve in new directions is evinced in the recent proliferation of initiatives and publications focused on the more specific framework of modernism and media studies. The argument at the heart of Cybernetic Aesthetics aligns with the more general impetus behind this new media-studies turn: that is, to emphasize a continuous lineage between early twentieth-century culture and the present day (importantly, many media studies frameworks draw from cybernetics theories to establish their approaches). However,

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this book’s focus prompts us to consider the narrower question of how cybernetics itself – with its emphasis on mathematics, probability, statistics, and data management – might function as a key disciplinary interlocutor for modernism’s textual innovations. In some ways, cybernetics might seem a rather counterintuitive point of departure for modernist literary analysis. After all, because most of modernism’s textual experiments predate cybernetics’ official post-World War II instantiation, they don’t include explicit references to cybernetics terminology or technologies. Modernism is not the textual realm of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot , with its meditations on entropy, Maxwell Devices staring characters in the face, and, as Lafontaine describes it, the explicitly “postmodern expression of subjectivity, characterized as flowing and multiple” (). Nonetheless, as more critics are recognizing, the interdisciplinary pairing of cybernetics and modernism offers generative interpretive possibilities. Stephens and Paul Jaussen, for instance, include discussions of modernist authors and texts in their recent monographs that take up cross-disciplinary topics similar to those I explore in this book (i.e., Jaussen includes a chapter on Ezra Pound in his study of the long poem genre’s connections to systems theory; Stephens covers Gertrude Stein and Bob Brown in his investigation of literary engagements with the “information overload” that modern technology brings with it). Due to the broader historical scope of their work, however, modernism occupies a fairly small portion of the overall arguments. By restricting its scope to modernism alone, Cybernetic Aesthetics showcases the variety of strategies that different modernist authors employed as they grappled with early twentieth-century information culture. This book’s sustained investigation of the historical moment immediately prior to the explosion of World War II technical cybernetics therefore thickens the important historiographic argument that Stephens’s and Jaussen’s projects suggest (by including modernist literature in their longer timelines) but don’t fully explore. Looking back further, the earliest critic I have found who explicitly uses cybernetics as an interpretive framework for reading modernist literature is Robert Crawford; his  book The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia and Knowledge since the s (note, once again, the broad historical scope) includes a chapter titled “Modernist Cybernetics and the Poetry of Knowledge.” Crawford traces the biographical points of contact between Eliot and Wiener that I have already mentioned, and he notes that they “shared interests in the foundations of knowledge and in the work of such philosophers as Leibniz, William James, Bradley, and Bergson” (). His readings convincingly explicate the commonalities between Wiener’s

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theories and Eliot’s critical writing, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in particular; Crawford argues that both authors emphasize “the vital part played by the transmission of information in structuring a community” (). To this insightful formulation, I would add that Eliot’s essay offers a cybernetic vision of literary history as an informational system that develops and modulates according to the type of feedback-loop logic that I explore in more depth in Chapter . Within Eliot’s anticipatory– cybernetic framework, authors who approach their craft with a robust knowledge of the literature of the past have the greatest potential to meaningfully and intelligently contribute to its future developments. Crawford also makes general claims for the aptness of reading modernist texts through a cybernetic lens: “Cybernetics emphasizes the transmission of information as crucial, and as constructing both the communities and the relational patterns on which knowledge depends. So does modernist poetry. Its constant use of textual and cultural allusion sets up a potentially endless knowledge and information flow, and seems designed to do so” (). In the service of his chapter’s ultimate rhetorical goal, the term “cybernetics” frequently serves as a conceptual analogy to general notions of computer- or hypertext-based modes of expression. As he explicitly acknowledges, “the cybernetically developed computer systems of postmodernity allow us to comprehend better the poetry of literary modernism . . . [because] they provide analogies that did not exist at the time” (). My readings of modernist texts in the chapters ahead build from Crawford’s analogical use of cybernetic ideas (and play with cybernetics’ distinct attitude toward analogy as a critical tool) but push beyond his primarily unidirectional application of Wiener’s work as a lens for understanding new dimensions of modernism. Crawford is not alone in this general approach. Indeed, Goody has proposed that the “technologization of human culture and existence have had an inevitable impact on the literature of the twentieth century,” and that therefore “literature can fruitfully be considered as a transcription of [the] complex relationship” between humans and machines (, my emphasis). Like Crawford, she helpfully articulates the importance of reading widely for technological resonances in literature: “the indirect influence of technology,” she notes, “is apparent in texts that seem to have no direct investment in the topic” (). While claims that “the effects of technology and its uncanny resonances profoundly alter literature” certainly ring true, my project asks us to consider the inverse premise as well – that literature might also alter the twentieth century’s “technological imaginary” in ways that are both

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implicit and profound (Goody, /). This study adopts a stance akin to that of Sara Danius, who attends to the “multiple causalities” that exist and operate “simultaneously” between modernist literature and its technological contexts, and Catriona Livingstone, who explicates the “resonances” that are “embedded within a dynamic cultural medium” that includes both literary and scientific texts (Danius, ; Livingstone, /). Stephens suggests a similar type of relationship in his argument that “poets have not been passive victims of the proliferation of information, but rather have actively participated in – sometimes benefitting from, sometimes implicitly advocating, sometimes resisting – that proliferation”; his work illustrates how “poetry’s engagement with information technologies constitutes its own emergent textual history” (). The notion of a distinctly modernist cybernetics framework promises particular payoff for our understanding of literary history, given the ways in which the feedback-based, environmentally situated, adaptation-focused modes of reading and writing inherent to the cybernetic communication model – and, as the chapters ahead illustrate, embedded in many modernist texts – exist in tension with more traditional hermeneutic models that prioritize practices of intrinsic or immanent critique. From this perspective, the literary experiments that I read in terms of their affinities with or analogical connections to key cybernetics concepts gain significance as exemplars of the radically constructivist epistemology and antiontological hermeneutic that cybernetics theorists would later articulate (frequently in much more explicitly technological terms). In short, modernism’s emergent cybernetic aesthetics generate interpretive modes that resist the dominant notion of a hermeneutics of the text. Instead, they offer up concepts such as feedback, information, partial perception, and self-reflexivity as generative principles for both readerly and writerly engagement. The presence of these alternatives within a variety of earlytwentieth-century experimental literary texts is particularly salient in light of recent academic debates about the status of critique in literary studies, broadly, and modernist studies in particular. And the diverse paths of connection that yoke the formal features, rhetorical goals, and communicative systems of modernist literary experimentation to those of twentiethcentury cybernetics theory suggest the value of more fully exploring the cultural lineage of cybernetic thinking. Hayles reinforces these ideas of multi-directional channels of influence in more general terms that speak to the ambitions of the chapters ahead: “scientific texts,” she writes, “often reveal, as literature cannot, the foundational assumptions that gave theoretical scope and artifactual efficacy to

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

a particular approach”; inversely, “literary texts often reveal, as scientific work cannot, the complex cultural, social, and representational issues tied up with conceptual shifts and technological innovations” (). From this perspective, an inverted version of Crawford’s analogy is a useful place to begin recasting Wiener’s theories. The aesthetic dimensions of “literary modernism,” we discover, provide equally insightful analogies for comprehending overlooked rhetorical valences of (as Crawford put it) the “cybernetically developed computer systems of postmodernity.” Modernism’s experiments with literary form, in other words, are just as crucial to understanding cybernetics’ cultural significance as any of the later texts and technologies that emerged in the wake of MIT’s wartime experiments.

The Modernist Aesthetics of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics This type of analogical approach is particularly illuminating in the case of Wiener, whose explanation of cybernetics begins from the premise that for humans, “the beginning of the twentieth century marked more than the end of one hundred-year period and the start of another” (HU, ). In singling out the turn of the twentieth century as a pronounced moment of historical separation, the sentence echoes the definitional catchphrase of modernism as a “break with the past.” Wiener’s words even more directly recall Woolf’s oft-cited proclamation, “On or about December  human character changed” (Essays III, ); as the mathematician next puts it, humans experienced “a real change of point of view” (HU, ). The theory he proceeds to articulate is most overtly concerned with the scientific and sociological fields: he emphasizes connections between the new twentieth-century “point of view” and the emerging technologies that increasingly permeate our information transmission and communication systems. However, the phrase’s sensory dimensions – that is, its invocation of perspective and visuality – also suggest Wiener’s affinities with the aesthetic realm of modernism. Pericles Lewis’s definition of modernist aesthetics as a response to a “two-fold” “crisis of representation” (“a crisis in what could be represented and a crisis in how it should be represented”) provides a helpful framework for further illustrating how Wiener’s theories of statistics and prediction align with modernism’s goals (). His technical concepts of transmission and encoding, for example, function as representational strategies, through which the process of encoding serves to represent information as data, enabling it to be transmitted over various media channels. Wiener also



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fairly explicitly positions his theories and experiments as attempting to mitigate a pressing “crisis of representation”: in the wake of new technological developments, he argues, humans must suddenly confront “the limits of communication within and among individuals” (HU, ). We are forced, in the twentieth century, to negotiate a daunting communicational context wherein “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part” (HU, –). Wiener’s work maps the affinity between mechanical and human modes of communication and seeks innovative ways to understand, refine, and regulate their new forms of interaction. If we attend to his writing’s integration of tropes and themes associated with modernism, though, we see how the cybernetician assumes not only a technical, scientific role, but also a stance that valorizes aesthetics as a powerful tool for combatting this new communication crisis. Wiener’s approach to information transmission accrues its most explicit aesthetic dimensions in a late chapter of The Human Uses of Human Beings, where he deploys an extended analogy to artistic value to explicate the processes through which information accrues value. “The problem of the work of art as a commodity,” he begins, “raises a large number of questions important in the theory of information” (HU, ). It soon becomes clear that the work of art’s “importance” for Wiener lies in its distinct relationship to originality and innovation () – touchstones of “MAKE-IT-NEW modernism.” “The informative value of a painting or a piece of literature,” Wiener writes, “cannot be judged without knowing what it contains that is not easily available to the public in contemporary or earlier works” (HU, ). The implications of this statement extend far beyond painting and literature, and in fact encapsulate Wiener’s understanding of all “informative value.” As he next puts it, “a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous stock of information” (HU, ). This unfolding argument, as it circulates among and builds up a range of artistic examples, gradually but persistently establishes the centrality of innovative aesthetic form within all adaptive informational contexts. This fixation on form emerges as Wiener moves through a series of references that solidify his modernist leanings. From a discussion of Picasso (“who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors”), he shifts to discuss the

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

“technique of war” (where “the efficacy of a weapon depends on precisely what other weapons there are to meet it at a given time”), and finally arrives at the sweeping statement that “even in the most material field, production and security are in the long run matters of continued invention and development” (HU, –). In short, he casts the evolution of information as a pan-disciplinary pursuit of “perpetually advancing” formal responsiveness (HU, ). This goal unites the artist, the cyberneticist, and indeed all modern subjects as participants in the “continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and [attempt to] act effectively upon it” (HU, ). We can see a techno-aestheticized version of these notions at work in the kick-start project for Wiener’s theories: a series of attempts, during World War II, to develop an automated anti-aircraft gun that could accurately predict enemy flight patterns based on a mathematically calculated understanding of their likelihood. This cybernetic anti-aircraft machine, Lafontaine notes (citing science historian Peter Galison), constituted “a defining moment in the elaboration of the cybernetic model” (). By constantly adjusting to the “feedback” (a concept I will discuss in more depth in Chapter ) of an ever-accumulating series of data sets about past flight paths, it would alter its behavior to more effectively aim its shells. Modernist aesthetics offers us a new way to read the image of this machine at work, especially if we consider the dynamic elements of innovation that drive modernist experimentation alongside Michael Levenson’s description of literary modernism as the “act of fragmenting unities” (). Through fragmented syntax and linguistic re-patterning, we get the aesthetic utterance of the modernist text. Through fragmented data and its patterned re-interpretation, we get the cybernetic machine’s version of this modernist aesthetic: an arc of bullets, striving for ever-moreaccurate alignment with a plane’s future position. It seems to be Futurism’s fantastical vision of aestheticized warfare come to life, where, to again quote Levenson, “nothing [is] beyond the reach of technical concern” (). Within this technological world of modernist cybernetics, though, the values of flexibility, adaptability, and openness to new data accrue essential status. The goal of the cybernetic anti-aircraft machine, in this scenario, is to process and interpret large quantities of information at fast enough speeds to be effective. In its use of stored-up (“shored”-up, the modernist might say) information from the past to recalibrate and alter future actions, it also engages in aesthetic practices that we usually only associate with human

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ingenuity: interpretation and creativity. As a cognitive “extension of man” (to quote Marshall McLuhan’s popularization of a phrase Wiener also used), the cybernetic machine replicates and adapts these practices to conjure new forms of communication within a realm of data whose quantity and speed exceed human intellectual capabilities. In addition to its technical impressiveness, therefore, the cybernetic machine deploys an aesthetic of innovation that resonates with modernism’s formal and rhetorical goals – with the proliferating meanings inherent in Joyce’s agile puns, and also, as upcoming chapters detail, the looping circuits of nearrepetition that temper Pound’s sprawling epic poetry, the newsreel references that suture Dos Passos’s fiction to its historical contexts, the suggestive, radiophonic language that allows Woolf to depict character through voice alone, and the self-reflexive attentiveness to patterns of repetition and contrast that Stein advocates as a cultural observer. In all of these communication scenarios, participants strive to follow Pound’s dictum and “MAKE [themselves] NEW” by responding to the streams of data that circulate around and through them, becoming part of a literature-based information system that is attentive to, illuminating of, and influential on its surrounding environment. Modernist literary practice thus offers a generative analogy for recasting the technical elements of Wiener’s cybernetic experiments in aesthetic terms and focusing our attention on the moments where he reveals his artistic affinities. “In the arts, the desire to find new things to say and new ways of saying them is the source of all life and interest,” he writes, recalling perhaps Pound’s comment that the best poetry achieves “a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness” (The ABC, ). Wiener’s point, though, is that this drive is also crucial to any “scientific artist” who hopes to actually have something valuable “to communicate” (HU, –). If we read these statements as aligned with the aesthetic discourse of literary modernism, with its experimental techniques that strive to awaken readers to new valences of human perception in the twentieth century, our notion of Wiener’s scientific cybernetics necessarily expands and evolves. Its historical unfolding becomes the product not simply of a series of increasingly complex technological devices, designed to process information at ever-faster rates and ever-larger volumes (as an author like Maurice Trask explains it in The Story of Cybernetics). Instead, cybernetics accrues a new set of cultural feedback loops, which yoke the discourse’s theories and technologies to the imaginative and experimental discursive realm of literary experiments and modernist aesthetics.

Cybernetic Thinking and Modernist Literature



Cybernetic Aesthetics: Orientation and Overview Cybernetic Aesthetics offers four chapter-long case studies that pair individual modernist authors with specific cybernetics concepts (Ezra Pound with the feedback loop, John Dos Passos with information, Virginia Woolf with the black box, and Gertrude Stein with second-order cybernetic selfreflexivity), and a conclusion that explores how literary scholars can productively extend cybernetics’ lineage backward and forward in time. To set up the literary analyses, each chapter offers a fairly detailed overview of one or more specific cybernetics theories and theorists. These include: Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s early work (published in the s and early s); two cybernetics-influenced psychologists working in the s (Ross Ashby) and s (Silvan Tomkins); and anthropologists who pioneered the field of second-order cybernetics in the s (Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson) and then extended its relevance in the s and s (Mary Catherine Bateson). My goal, in adopting this strategy, is to offer readers a basic grounding in the more technical, scientific aspects of cybernetics discourse as a platform for achieving new insights into modernism’s interdisciplinary frameworks and ongoing intellectual legacy. Chapter , “Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past: Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission,” expands this introduction’s brief exploration of Wiener’s theories alongside modernist literary aesthetics to argue that Pound’s Cantos and radio broadcasts employ the logic of the cybernetic feedback loop as a pedagogical model for teaching twentieth-century readers how to negotiate large quantities of data, find meaningful patterns within messages from the past, and adapt their conduct to best achieve their goals. Elucidating arguments that Pound makes in his radio broadcasts and poetry (particularly the Chinese History Cantos) and comparing them to Wiener’s mid-century theories of cybernetic feedback, I challenge the critical tendency to compare Pound’s work to unidirectional radio transmission. Instead, the chapter’s analyses illustrate that Pound champions the principle of circulation and positions his readers as cybernetic machines, inviting them to learn from the feedback loops that circulate throughout history, culture, and language. Chapter  turns to a different aspect of Wiener’s work – his conception of information – and brings in an additional cybernetic theorist: Shannon, who also published a theory of information based on mathematics in . Titled “The Cybernetic Information Dialectic: Patterns, Randomness, and



Cybernetic Aesthetics

Newsreel in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.,” the chapter reads Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy in the context of these two cybernetics theorists’ contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). I argue that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. My reading focuses on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections to illustrate how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the perplexing, interconnected logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, I propose, Dos Passos demonstrates how recognizable and predictable patterns constantly jostle with random chance as key catalysts for change and progress in the United States. Overall, the chapter’s interdisciplinary pairing enables readers to see (a) how cybernetics theories can clarify and help us understand the cultural, communicative, and ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged the development of strategies for cybernetic thinking that would later be developed in more technical fields. Chapter , “Black Box Subjectivity: Associative Language, Affect, and Radio Blindness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves,” moves forward in history to the comparative context of cybernetics-inflected psychology, introduced in the s and developed into the later part of the twentieth century. Here, I examine the theory of language Woolf employs in her  novel and then more explicitly presents in a  radio talk. The argument contextualizes her emphasis on gaps in perception, suggestive linguistic potential, and associative links in terms of Ashby’s cybernetic “black box” thought experiment and Tomkins’s cybernetics-based theories of affect. Tomkins’s writing illuminates Woolf’s strategy of highlighting the variety of affective responses that specific scenarios can produce for different subjects, even within the most intimate communities. This comparison shows how Woolf’s aesthetic model, through its deft invocation of radio’s built-in black box aesthetic of “blindness,” teaches readers about an important dimension of cybernetic thinking: the way it inflects social and interpersonal contexts. As we attempt to interact with and relate to one another, her writing illustrates, we are forced to rely on perceptions that are incomplete, partial, and individually inflected. By drawing readers’ and listeners’ attention to this aspect of our social world, Woolf makes

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

cybernetic thinking affectively motivated and relevant at the level of personal interaction, two principles that merit continued attention within our present-day world. Chapter  builds from the previous chapter’s introduction of secondorder cybernetics principles to explore their adoption within the social sciences as a comparative framework for reading Gertrude Stein’s quasiethnographic writing about American culture. “Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Definition by Contrast: Gertrude Stein as SecondOrder Cybernetic Anthropologist” pairs Stein’s work with writing by prominent second-order cybernetic anthropologists Mead, G. Bateson, and – most extensively – M. C. Bateson. My analysis explores Stein’s and M. C. Bateson’s similar approaches to the term “composition” as a framework for understanding the everyday habits of behavior that constitute cultural identity (American cultural identity in particular), and I illustrate how their interest in both repetitive – or, insistent and spiraling – representational strategies and juxtapositional contexts/encounters serve as platforms for them to cultivate self-reflexive cultural awareness in both themselves and their readers. This perspective, they propose, is increasingly necessary within the technologically complex social, economic, and geographic networks that characterize the twentieth century and require us to respond in creative and flexible ways to our ever-changing circumstances. The chapter positions Stein’s work in dialogue with emergent social scientific strategies for cultural observation and analysis, and therefore as an important precursor to the anthropology-based theories that existed at the forefront of cybernetics’ second-order turn. To close, the book’s Coda presents a series of “Retrospective and Prospective Readings” that push the implications of the Cybernetic Aesthetics argument both backward and forward in time. Here, I read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes as a nineteenth-century precursor to the cybernetic impulses of data-collection and dataprocessing, and I point to the growing body of criticism that is probing the historical parameters of cybernetic thinking even further back in time. I propose that the emerging sense of a literary–critical cybernetic paradigm is particularly significant to scholars of modernism in light of the field’s recent global turn. And, in a final gesture to the book’s implications for twenty-first century culture, I illustrate how the cybernetic reading of modernist formal experimentation can both illuminate and offer aesthetic alternatives to contemporary technological debates surrounding issues like surveillance and privacy. The conclusion to Cybernetic Aesthetics therefore

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drives home the argument that modernist literature can help us understand the longer and more diverse cultural history of our present-day, information-rich world; it also gestures to new possibilities for research and analysis that might push our awareness of cybernetic thinking back even further into earlier cultural moments, movements, genres, and texts.

 

Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Transmission

Pound’s Poetics of Transformation And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, . . . and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

(Cantos, )

From among the wide-ranging pantheon of gods and goddesses who will appear throughout Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the poet chooses to open with Circe. Odysseus is sailing to the underworld thanks to her quasi-prophetic guidance – his destination is “the place / Aforesaid by Circe” (). A meeting with the ghost of Elpenor (a young sailor whose “limbs . . . we left in the house of Circe” []) reminds Odysseus that to dally with the goddess can be treacherous; nonetheless, the Homeric hero will return to her. As Canto  closes, Odysseus “sail[s] . . . outward and away / And unto Circe” (). These repeated references to Circe offer a generative starting point for my investigation of Pound’s poetry and his commitment to transmission processes that enable past knowledge to influence and transform our responses to the present. As readers familiar with the story know, the “trim-coifed goddess” of Pound’s opening Canto possesses the power to magically transform her enemies into animals. When they arrive at Circe’s island, Odysseus’ men become swine for a short time; other sailors fare worse. Her practice of human–animal transfiguration does not appear in Canto ’s narrative content. Nonetheless, this well-known mythical tendency allows Circe to establish one of the Cantos’s central thematic patterns. Transformation and transfiguration quickly emerge as pervasive motifs in the early Cantos, generating a network of images, anecdotes, and terminology that evolve as they accumulate. In Canto , the god Bacchus, who has assumed the guise of a young boy, transforms Acoetes’ ship into a 

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lush bower of ivy and grape vines overrun with panthers and leopards; polymorphous figures such as Dafne, Poseidon, and Proteus flicker in the sidelines (–). Then Canto  gives us the “oak, dryas” and the “apple, maelid,” spirits of the woods who alternate between solid and sprightly form (). Canto  further extends the motif by splicing the nearly parallel hunter-become-hunted stories of Actaeon and Peire Vidal. “Dogs leap on Actaeon” who has been transformed into a stag by the wrathful god Artemis, while the famed troubadour Vidal, who has donned a wolf skin, runs “stumbling along in the wood,” likewise pursued by hunting dogs (–). These accumulating references inflect our interpretations of the poetic images we will encounter as we progress through the Cantos, and each iteration of the transformation theme holds the capacity to trigger slightly different responses and connections, depending on a reader’s existing knowledge of cultural references. For a seasoned reader of Pound, the rich web of reference to transformation extends beyond the Cantos to include several poems from earlier collections. Personae’s “Peire Vidal Old,” for instance, subtly connects the troubadour’s tale of self-transformation to the type of woodsy anthropomorphism more typically seen in Greek legend: “Behold me,” Vidal laments, “shrivelled as an old oak’s trunk/And made men’s mockery in my rotten sadness” (Personae, , my emphasis). Even more obviously, “The Tree” (also from the  collection) invokes transformation as both divine rescue (“Daphne and the laurel bow”), and reward (“that godfeasting couple old/that grew elm-oak amid the wold”) (Personae, ). In Pound’s poetic world, these early instances of transformation set up a pattern that will become ever-more significant as the Cantos unfold. In each case, we witness an alteration of external form that preserves the essential identity of the person or thing being transformed (Circe’s swine are still Odysseus’ men; the ivy-covered vessel is still Acoetes’ ship; Daphne is still present in the laurel). However, neither the individual examples nor our responses to them are ever perfectly identical. Instead, the myriad transformations produce diverse contexts and implications: from punishment to reward, from supernatural intervention to self-imposed alteration, and from immortality to slavery and death. In this sense, the particular insight we gain from each individual instance feeds back into, and inevitably alters our overall understanding of the more general theme. This chapter begins from Pound’s fixation on these processes of transfiguration to argue that his poetry presents a strategy of communication in which meaning emerges at the intersection of recognizable linguistic pattern and evolving readerly – and writerly – response. Fundamentally

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

pedagogical in its ambitions, this poetics of transformative transmission strives for the same goal that Pound articulates (rather grouchily) in the early pages of his  Guide to Kulchur: “I am at best trying to provide the average reader with a few tools for dealing with the heteroclite mass of undigested information hurled at him daily and monthly” (). Fed up with the crowded and cacophonous world of early twentieth-century media culture, Pound sees the world becoming ever more saturated with disorganized information. Readers of all persuasions, he believes, are in desperate need of communication strategies capable of sifting through and making sense of modernity’s information overload. In this chapter, I trace how this ambition permeates the infamous Radio Rome broadcasts and finds powerful creative expression in the poetics of the Chinese History Cantos. Most crucially, I cast this valence of Pound’s writing as an aesthetic counterpart to the technological and scientific discourses of World War II cybernetics, one that is most productively understood through comparison to Norbert Wiener’s concept of the cybernetic feedback loop. This cyclical, adaptive communication structure illuminates the complex pedagogical impetus at work in the Cantos, in which the poems attune us to new ways of reading that are essential for negotiating the information- and datasaturated spaces of modernity. This analysis repositions the cultural significance of the Cantos, which emerge as a set of texts fundamentally linked to and in sync with emergent technological discourses, communications networks, and cybernetic ways of thinking. It also engages with the critical trajectory of Pound scholarship, bringing together various critical perspectives to craft a reading of the poet himself as a figure who is just as cybernetically interpellated by feedback mechanisms as the readers his texts hope to produce.

Cantos Criticism: Evolving Scholarly Trends, New Analytical Contexts We have recently rounded the corner on a century of Cantos criticism: Pound published his initial attempts at a beginning for his epic “poem including history” in the January  pages of “Poetry,” and T. S. Eliot’s first extended critical consideration of his friend’s work – Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry – appeared in print shortly thereafter (Pound, Literary Essays, ). During the century that intervenes between Eliot’s proclamation that the rare reader “who has followed [Pound’s] career intelligently” will be able to recognize his poetry’s “consistency,” and our current critical moment, a vast collection of commentary has accumulated (). Critics

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have tackled the work as a whole, or isolated single poems and groups of poems for scrutiny; they have focused on the Cantos as evidence of Pound’s artistic, political, and personal life-trajectory, or read them as purely aesthetic specimens of modernist formal innovation. Over the century, the prevailing approaches have shifted alongside academic trends, and meta-accounts of Cantos criticism (as part of Pound scholarship more generally) appear regularly in published books and articles as a strategy for orienting readers to new modes of analysis. An overview of the dominant critical arcs that these narratives trace helps to frame my reading of the poetry’s cybernetic communicative structures and pedagogical goals. Scholars often outline a series of distinct phases of Cantos-focused criticism. The first can be loosely grouped under the rubric of New Critical methodologies, beginning with Eliot, culminating in the midcentury figure of Hugh Kenner, and continuing through until roughly the mid-s. These perspectives focus primarily on close readings of the poems, and interpretations emphasize pattern and unity as critics seek to uncover and articulate formal structures that might cohesively organize the poems’ astonishing range of references, languages, images, and characters. What Peter Nicholls labels the “second phase” of Pound scholarship emerged in the s and lasted roughly through to the final years of the twentieth century (“You in the dinghy,” ). Moving away from a conviction in poetic unity and a focus on form, these critics instead emphasize the shifts that occurred in Pound’s poetics as a result of his political affiliations – that is, his increasingly close alignment with Italian fascism. Critical denunciations of (or, occasionally, apologies for) Pound’s ideology become the norm, and the New Critical dictum to root literary interpretation primarily in the text itself gives way to studies that offer “highly critical readings of the poem and its political investments” (Nicholls, “You in the dinghy,” ). In addition, disunity emerges as a key feature of the poems; as Makin summarizes, “Cantos criticism began to decode the language in which Pound had hidden some of his real concerns, and to see how deep were the breaks between the major segments of the poem and how much they were controlled by shifts in the writer’s politics” (). Despite these obvious differences in approach, a shared interest in responsive, adaptable reading strategies threads through the first two phases of Cantos criticism. Nicholls, for example, positions the “phase one” critic as a type of collaborator with Pound – a “participant in [the poems’] ongoing act of intentionality and composition” (“You in the dinghy,” ). He then links the s shift to the fact that critics were responding to changes within Pound’s work, arguing that the later poems’

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

“irascibility” forces readers to confront the author’s fascism in more direct ways, which opens the way for scholars to read Pound more explicitly “against the grain of [his] expressed intentions” (–). This notion of developing ways to read Pound that adapt to account for newly recognized aspects of his poetry’s thematic concerns and aesthetic strategies provides a way to understand the phase of Cantos criticism in which we find ourselves today. Publications from the past two decades showcase an explosion of critical contexts that have enabled scholars to highlight a diverse range of questions and concerns within the Cantos. These range from geographic- and nationality-focused analyses to arguments that track Pound’s interdisciplinary interests and the influence of biographical events or professional roles on his work. Some echo and reframe the predominately formal or ideological concerns of phase one and phase two scholarship. Others combine these approaches or move in new directions that reflect recent interests in media studies, technological frameworks, and digital possibilities for literary analysis. Aided by a variety of infrastructural and institutional supports as well as more easily accessible archival materials, this commitment to contextual plurality continues to grow as scholars look for ways to redefine what it means to study Pound’s work in the twenty-first century. In light of this ongoing expansion, a comment that Ronald Bush makes in reference to the Pisan Cantos also serves to characterize what we might term “phase three” Cantos-criticism much more broadly. Because, he explains, there is now so much data on hand when it comes to interpreting Pound’s poetry (here he quotes Jerome McGann), “‘every part [of the poem] becomes open to invasion from every other part.’ What a given image signifies then may change dramatically from year to year, or . . . [even] from month to month” (/). This statement’s core message – that the Cantos possess a fundamental openness to fluctuation and interpretation – presents a perfect opening for the theoretical context that my work introduces: the cybernetic feedback loop. The discourse of cybernetics constitutes something of an anomaly as a context for Poundian poetic analysis. For one thing, unlike the majority of frameworks that critics have already explored with such rigor, there are no explicit references to cybernetics in Pound’s poetic oeuvre. This type of absence does not necessarily invalidate a particular avenue of interpretation, as scholars who have drawn from contemporary media-studies and digital-technology frameworks to enhance our understanding of Pound’s work have shown. Indeed, I am not the first to propose this specific contextual link: in , Robert Crawford suggested that the Cantos

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

“mark the growth of that modernist poetry so involved with the government of knowledge that it can be called cybernetic.” This general statement offers a starting point for developing a more specific and indepth assessment of cybernetic structures that are part of Pound’s work, and that position his Cantos as part of the twentieth century’s increasingly complex, technologically driven network of (as Wiener puts it) “control and communication” (Cybernetics).

The Feedback Loop: Idealized Poundian Transmission This phrase, a useful starting point for an overview of Pound’s cybernetic proclivities, comes from Wiener’s  technical treatise, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. That book, along with his more sociologically focused  monograph (The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society) outlines a “theory of messages” that Wiener had been developing with a group of scientists over the previous decade (HU, ). At the heart of Wiener’s cybernetics is the notion that “society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it” (HU, ). Since our communication systems are increasingly machine-based within twentieth-century modernity, the interplay between human and machine occupies a central position within Wiener’s discussions, and he stresses the increasing affinity between mechanical and human modes of communication. Their similarity is perhaps best encapsulated in the notion of feedback, which he defines as “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance” (HU, ). For humans, this idea signifies the ability to learn from the messages we receive through our senses and then respond by adapting our behavior toward more effective future actions. In perhaps the most significant technological twist of cybernetics, though, Wiener posits that this adaptive–response capacity can function across the human–machine divide. “It is my thesis,” he writes, “that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback” (HU, ). Within this new world of technologically driven communication, Wiener is saying, machines can learn from experience, just as humans can. In Wiener’s formulation, then, cybernetic learning is a process that spans the human–machine divide and relies on the capacity to adapt (and, ideally, improve) future actions in response to feedback received. For a concrete example of how cybernetics implements processes of

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adaptable responsiveness in mechanical contexts, we can look to the onthe-ground beginnings of the discipline, including Wiener’s World War II attempts to develop an automated anti-aircraft gun. This cybernetic antiaircraft machine, by constantly incorporating the “feedback” it received in the form of ever-accumulating flight path data, would learn to more effectively aim its missiles. The machine deployed statistics, the “science of distribution,” to combat what Wiener recognized (following physicists Josiah Willard Gibbs and Ludwig Boltzmann) as “a fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe itself ” (HU, /). Pilots, as human agents, may be unpredictable; however, various factors (mechanical, psychological, geographical, meteorological) limit their range of possible flight paths. These limitations, posits Wiener, make it possible to find a pattern within the past routes that planes have flown, and therefore organize the available data in order to more accurately predict which route a given plane will likely take this time. The goal of the cybernetic anti-aircraft machine, in this scenario, is to process and interpret large quantities of this fed-back information at fast enough speeds to be effective. To put it in Wiener’s more theoretical terms, the cybernetic device mobilizes the feedback loop to decipher a reliable “form of pattern and organization” that will render an incoming “message” (here, the enemy plane’s flight path) more “predictable” (i.e., legible, comprehensible, and therefore hit-able) (HU, ). These quotations point to a key affinity between Wiener’s cybernetic device and the Poundian reader – in particular, we might recall those phase-one critics who sought poetic structures that could help us organize the “pattern[s]” that permeate the Cantos into a unified and coherent “message.” Indeed, one of the most compelling reasons for undertaking a comparison of Pound’s work to cybernetics is that it enables us to examine the implications of our roles as twentieth- (and now twenty-first-)century readers. Our actions, as we interpret texts and adjust our responses in light of new material (repeated or juxtaposed ideas, themes, or motifs; new contextual frames of references; etc.), are remarkably akin to those of Wiener’s cybernetic machine. Pound’s writing lends itself to this cybernetic comparison thanks to its structural innovations and ambitious poetic and pedagogical scope. Furthermore, this comparison illuminates the extent to which the cybernetic machine’s “thinking” process, as it adjusts and responds to feedback, engages in and improves on the flexible, responsive approach to interpretation that we usually only associate with human readers. The cybernetic machine replicates the practice of human reading but transcends our limitations by mastering a realm of data whose quantity and speed exceed our intellectual capabilities.

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

Pound also constitutes a rich point of departure for tracing modernism’s relationship to cybernetic communication structures thanks to the preoccupations, ambitions, and attitudes that he and Wiener share (despite their vastly disparate political stances). Perhaps most importantly, both interrogate the networks that shape information transmission in the twentieth century. The two men strive, in their respective writings, to lay bare the structures of language, interpretation, and learning that govern communication within their highly wrought, data-saturated culture. Significantly, both do so by envisioning communication as a two-part process of creating aesthetic responses to feedback. This process involves the interplay between, on the one hand, the discernment and articulation of organized patterns, and, on the other, a constant practice of responsive and flexible adaptation to ever-accumulating information. For both the poet and the cybernetician, this interplay is essential to any transmission – poetic, electric, human generated, machine derived – and the project of communicating effective messages will inevitably fall short if either component is missing. Wiener, I have illustrated, stages the cybernetic machine’s approach to this type of communication as a function of feedback – through the feedback loop, statistical pattern finding meets and melds with responsive adaptability, and the machine learns how to improve its future actions. Pound, I propose, offers a literary rendering of this communicative structure, albeit one that requires some interpretive untangling. The concept of the cybernetic feedback loop, in my reading, constitutes an ideal technological schema for exploring and clarifying the strategies of transmission and transformation that Pound espouses and enacts through his formal, thematic, and linguistic techniques. These strategies permeate the Cantos as a whole but are especially evident in the  sequence of poems known as the Chinese History Cantos. Furthermore, the ideas extend beyond his poetry and find a clear voice in his broadcast speeches, solidifying Pound’s status as an early champion of cybernetic thinking. By positing that Pound’s poetic strategies are most richly echoed through cybernetics’ communication technologies, I am also asking us to revise the standard critical accounts of the relationship between Pound’s work and emergent twentieth-century technologies. Although critics have sketched various media connections – for example, to radar or hypertext – we most frequently think of Pound in the technological context of radio. This can be, in large part, attributed to his infamous Radio Rome broadcasts, which defined his later life and career trajectory, as well as much of his critical reception. As Jane Lewty explains it, the broadcasts “intrude themselves insistently into any discussion of [Pound’s]

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achievements. They preclude any praise of Pound or dampen existing arguments for his genius, his generosity, and his status in twentiethcentury poetics” (). Furthermore, radio is often understood, both formally and metaphorically, as a technological counterpart to Pound’s poetry itself. In radio, Lewty writes, “Pound had found the ideal medium for his multitude of voices,” and (here she quotes from Forrest Read) “the apt medium for expressing the kind of modern language he had created” (/). The Cantos, in this context, become “a radio-imbued text” as Lewty productively employs the trope of radio to explore the sonic elements of Pound’s work (). She proposes that “the vast expanse opened up between transmitter and receiver” is central to both Poundian and radiophonic communication practice, and she uses the technological medium to contextualize his notion of the poet-translator as a mediumistic “coherer/writer” who must “transpose the message [received from the past] accurately” (/). Pound and his poetry, this argument would suggest, make most sense when we understand their writerly, textual, political, and formal elements in the context of radio – the disembodied sonic medium that got Pound, in the long run, into so much trouble. Yet, however generative a radiogenic reading of Pound might be on various formal and biographical levels, this context for interpretation elides several of the poet’s convictions about communication: his repeatedly articulated commitment to the ideal (if perhaps not always the practice) of transmission as a flexible process of circulation and response – in short, as a feedback loop. Radio is, after all, formally infamous in twentiethcentury media theory for preventing response, or easily tripping over into authoritarian registers. As Lewty herself remarks, there is a connection between the medium and those “figures in Modernist literature [who] are frequently suspended in stasis and unable to communicate; they act as silent broadcasters fruitlessly emitting signals” (, my emphasis). In addition, she notes, fascism “might be conceived as a radio relay, whereby static is twisted into a formative address heard by listeners who cannot reply” (, my emphasis). The point recalls Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s proclamation that radio’s mass transmissions are bound up in authoritarian politics because they lack any “mechanisms of reply” through which listeners might actively participate in social discourse as subjects, rather than passively receive its dictates (). The fact that radio forecloses the possibility of response from its audience might seem to fit snugly with Pound’s World War II political leanings, and indeed the connection can open up productive avenues of interpretation. However, the idea of such a relationship between poet and medium is

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

undermined by the fact that Pound’s decision to take to the airwaves was necessitated by World War II’s far-reaching blockages of transmission – textual, technological, and financial – rather than any inherent desire on his part to embrace radio. In many senses, Pound turned to radio broadcasting as a last resort. He needed money desperately, since Italy’s allegiance with Germany had cut off his access to American or British-based funds. He was also at a loss for alternate publishing venues. As he put it, radio was “the ONLY medium still open for free (if you can call it free) communication with the outer world” (“Ezra Pound Speaking”, ). This sentence’s brief parenthesis reveals Pound’s ambivalent relationship with the broadcasting medium: its capacities for unhindered transmission remain perpetually suspect, especially insofar as large broadcasting institutions, the BBC in particular, are concerned. The poet’s Rapallo residence didn’t even boast a radio until some “Blasted friends left” one for Pound as a gift on March , . In its social effects, Pound considered the technology a “God damn destructive and dispersive devil of an invention,” which he believed (à la Horkheimer and Adorno) would “further reduc[e] to passivity” a large “mass” of the listening public (Letters, ). He may stake out an aesthetic affinity between the medium’s multi-vocal elements and his own work, claiming that he “anticipated the damn thing in the first third of the Cantos” (Letters, ); however, he also states that he was only “able to do / because I was the last survivin’ monolith who did not have a bloody radio in the ‘ome” (Letters, ). In addition to being a source of auditory annoyance “pok[ing] into every bleedin’ ‘ome and smearing the mind of the peapull,” for Pound, radio also represented a hindrance to the very possibility of artistic production (Letters, ). These biographical anecdotes mirror my larger argument about Pound’s aesthetics: that radio falls short as a technological model for considering the richly interactive and flexible ideals for communication that Pound loudly proclaims on the air, and intricately weaves into his poetics. Yes, we can read the Cantos as replicating radio’s proliferation and juxtaposition of voices; however, when their poet takes to the radio and occupies its rhetorical space of unidirectional transmission, we hear a frustrated Pound. From this perspective, it is perhaps not merely coincidental that, during his broadcasting years, his poetic output dwindled to a near standstill. The rhetorical ambition and communicational attempts of the Cantos, I posit, extend further than the radio’s form allows us to see. The poems deliberately position their voices, utterances, quotations, and textual fragments in relationships that the audience can only understand by

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cultivating an ability to simultaneously recognize patterns and respond to their evolving forms. In doing so, the Cantos foster a set of interpretive and learning strategies particularly fitting to twentieth-century modernity. They obliquely teach readers about the cognitive faculties that are necessary for negotiating large quantities of information – that is, they impart a lesson in cybernetic thinking. From this perspective, the aesthetic dimensions of Wiener’s technological cybernetics, with their statistical data processing and intricate feedback loops, attune us to the complex articulation and operation of these specific valences of communication within Pound’s poetic transmissions.

Circulation and Dialogue versus Blockage and Obfuscation Wiener’s theories of cybernetic communication and feedback-loop learning cast into relief some key aspects of Pound’s own critical and non-poetic writings, which helpfully frame my upcoming discussion of the Chinese History Cantos. Perhaps most importantly, the underlying structure of communication that organizes Wiener’s cybernetics prompts us to reconsider Pound’s vehemently articulated convictions about linguistic transmission. That transmission constitutes a central concern for Pound is a well-established critical truism. As Rainey notes, even Kenner’s midcentury consideration of the poet’s then-extant oeuvre was “deeply aware that transmission (motz) was crucial in the constitution of his work” (). However, the notion of a cybernetic feedback loop enables us to zoom in on and reframe a particular element of Pound’s vision for ideal transmission: circulation. Cybernetic communication absolutely relies on a circular flow of information. As Heinz von Foerster (one of Wiener’s contemporaries) put it, “should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity” (American Society for Cybernetics). Pound, too, holds up “circularity” – often articulated, in his writings, through the trope of “circulation” – as an important cultural, economic, and aesthetic value. Beasley refers to one of Pound’s early invocations of the term when she cites a  essay he published in Poetry. A conviction in what Pound called “the free circulation of thought,” she writes, “had become his chief preoccupation” (). Other critics obliquely echo this sentiment by highlighting the importance of active dialogue – that is, interpersonal interactions that enabled Pound to informally circulate his ideas – to his intellectual and artistic formation. For example, Yao and Coyle posit that Pound developed a “deep attraction to education in the shape of conversations among people who come to

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

know one another personally[.] . . . [H]is education developed through discussions with favoured teachers” (xii). Taking the inverse approach, John Xiros Cooper contends that the increasing “impenetrability” of Pound’s work after the s “was the result of his relative isolation from a vigorous daily dialogue with those who disagreed with him. Without the back and forth of argument, response, and reformulation,” he argues, “Pound’s thought seemed more and more frozen and incomprehensible as the years passed” (). While I would challenge the notion of Pound’s later work as irretrievably “frozen and incomprehensible,” the idea that his mental flexibility suffered when he was cut off from his peers’ feedback is particularly resonant in the context of cybernetics. It implies that Pound – and his poetry – flourished best when he could actively circulate and receive feedback on ideas; his ideal mode of transmission was not unidirectional, but rather embedded in a dynamic loop of feedback and response. Michael North’s earlier reading of Pound in the context of debates about the status of African American dialect within early twentieth-century spoken and written (i.e., literary) English reinforces this idea: against movements that sought “to purify English,” North explains, “Pound maintained that it was the ‘bringing in’ that kept the language alive” (). He quotes one of Pound’s letters, which proclaims that “throughout all history and despite all academies, living language has been inclusive and not exclusive”; from this perspective, Pound’s writings, “with their lashings of black dialect, cockney slang, Greek, Latin, Chinese, and demotic Ezraese, are a model of this inclusivity” – an inclusivity predicated on the availability of various circulating languages (). The fact that Pound embraced a model of transmission predicated on the circulation rather than simply the sending out of information appears in a variety of contexts. Ironically enough, he emphasizes this stance in many of his own radio broadcasts, where he repeatedly denounces institutions and systems that impede the circulation of information and thus foreclose the possibility for cultural feedback and learning. The term “circulation” itself appears here most frequently in the context of economics. To Pound’s thinking (thanks to the influence of C. H. Douglas’s theories of social credit), circulation should be the driving force behind economic systems. Specifically, he valorizes the public circulation of debt-free currency. From his perspective – and articulated with cringe-worthy antiSemitic undertones – America’s financial institutions have been “handed over to VERMIN” who declare that they “‘can not permit the circulation of greenbacks,’ can not permit the circulation of NATIONAL money . . . because [they] cannot control ‘em” (). As a result of this refusal to allow

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currency to properly circulate (so Pound’s argument goes), the country is locked in economic stagnation – usury rules the financial world, and “billions of DEBT” are allowed to accumulate (). Usury appears as a dominant theme throughout the broadcasts (as it does in the later Cantos), frequently in conjunction with the motif of wartime economics. World War II, specifically, becomes one of Pound’s most frequently cited examples of usury-in-action and, by extension, of blocked economic circulation. Pound believes that Europe’s ongoing war is the product of an international conspiracy to control the world by saddling everyone in it with massive amounts of debt, thereby crippling the postwar circulation of currency. The larger lines of this argument nearly always get bogged down in anti-Semitic rhetoric. Despite the virulently offensive nature of so much of their content, however, Pound’s controversial comments also reveal a more benign (albeit politically charged) conviction: in the social and cultural imperative of keeping not only money but also information, news, ideas and art, and language more generally in active circulation. In discussing the war’s negative effects on these latter elements, Pound focuses on the literal blockage of movement and transportation. When mail, books, and newspapers cannot move freely across international borders, people lose access to the types of ideas that are emerging in other countries. So much, at least, Pound proclaims on the air in January : “England was CUT off,” he states, “from the current of European thought during and BY the Napoleonic Wars . . . she never got ketched up again . . . [she is] Always laggin’ behind” (). A few months later ( April ) he bluntly states that “isolations of this kind are BAD for a nation” (). In cybernetic terms, these war-induced isolations thwart the feedback loop of cultural learning that Pound deems essential to human thought. Another important context that provides a frequent point of reference for Pound’s evocations of circulation as a communicative value is public education. Throughout the broadcasts, Pound castigates twentieth-century educational institutions, most frequently due to what he considers their calculatedly patchy approaches to teaching history and economics. Blunt as ever, he proclaims: “My generation was brought up ham ignorant of economics. History was taught with OMISSIONS of the most vital facts” (); “we WERE being taught to forget” (). America’s economic history – the one that Pound considers so riddled with usury – “is NOT in the school books, and that OUGHT to have been in all the public school textbooks for the past  years” (). Pound’s  book Guide to Kulchur presages these indignant broadcast passages. In this earlier text, he already evinces a belief that “whole beams and ropes of real history have been shelved, overclouded

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

and buried,” and that “history as it was written the day before yesterday is unwittingly partial; full of fatal lacunae” (). Despite the conspiracy-theory bent of these claims, the detrimental effects of a “partial” version of history gain particular gravity in light of a cybernetic model of feedback-based communication. That lens clarifies the rationale behind Pound’s emphasis on pedagogical practice in so much of his writing. Feedback, like Pound, operates on the premise that access to information about past behavior is essential to the process of learning. A blockage in the circulation of this information is synonymous with a rift in the cybernetic feedback loop: it can cause irreparable systemic confusion, and thus impede any individual’s ability to effectively think and act within the present. Collectively, all of these statements about the failure of circulation in Pound’s contemporary cultural context (whether through economic channels, wartime governmental tactics, or educational trends) serve to conjure, through negation, the outlines of an idealized poetics of transmission – one that Pound strives to create in the Cantos. In his ideal realm of communication, feedback will play an essential role, and readers (or listeners) will gain full access to the “data” of the past. They will, therefore, be able to continually reorient their relationship to the rich yet ever-shifting stores of information available in the twentieth-century present. The ultimate goals of these cybernetically oriented poetics are, in some senses, less concrete than those of Wiener’s cybernetic projects; each of the latter possesses a readily articulated (and quantifiable) intention: to shoot down an enemy plane, to beat an opponent at chess, to process visual data and transmit it to a blind person, and so forth. Through poetry, though, Pound attempts something rather more intangible: to change his readers’ very ways of interacting with information. We might say that he wants to create a new kind of thinker. Ideally, this thinking subject will intelligently deploy the content and patterns of humankind’s past experiences toward making the present (and future) world a more intellectually, aesthetically, socially, and culturally informed place. In the Cantos, Pound strives to achieve this ideal by combatting what he identifies in his broadcasts as a pervasive cultural tendency to obfuscate. His poetry offers informational access to his readers (by exposing them to a range of historical, cultural, and linguistic content), while simultaneously inciting their informational appetite and providing them with cognitive tools for processing and learning from his informational poetics. The impetus for this ambition appears in a statement Pound makes early in his broadcast career, which clearly reveals the ethical imperative underlying his belief in the importance of literary tradition as a feedback loop:

Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past

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I thought in  and before that a nation’s literature IS important. State of a nation’s literature, is important. Words, means of communication, literature, the most condensed form of communication, communication of the most basic and essential facts, ideas necessary for leading the good life, registered in the best books. And man’s duty, as soon as he is fully a man, is to keep those books, to keep that tradition available. Keep it handy. (“Ezra Pound Speaking”, )

By the time he aired these remarks in April , Pound clearly saw the poet’s mission as more than simply keeping information handy – it needed to be brought back out of obscurity and put into circulation. After all, as he aphoristically put it in the ABC of Reading, “literature is news that STAYS news”; its relevance endures and its importance is sustained across divergent readerly contexts (). A cybernetics-based aesthetic of circulating communication helpfully enables us to read Pound, in his engagement with these complex processes, as attempting to kick-start a specific kind of cybernetic feedback loop – to reintroduce into cultural circulation a whole slew of discourses from the forgotten past that will alter his readers’ perceptions of and ability to think and act within the present. This model of transmission and communication, Pound hopes, will enable his audiences to engage with twentieth-century modernity in productive ways. To do so – that is, to develop strategies for learning from and adapting to the generative feedback loops that emerge in Pound’s carefully configured poetic messages – readers must assume the role of cybernetic machines.

Becoming Cybernetic Machines, Reading the Chinese History Cantos Cybernetics, we have seen, is founded on Wiener’s understanding of twentieth-century culture as a data-saturated space. Within this crowded context it can be difficult to discern the patterns that will allow us to organize and process information. In response, Wiener set to work to create the cybernetic machine, a device that can not only process and make sense of large-scale data sets, but also mobilize the feedback it receives to learn from the past and adjust its future performance. The transmission ideals that Pound negatively articulates in his broadcasts reveal that he, too, valorizes the capacity not simply to discern patterns in the annals of history but, more importantly, to make them useful in the present. This approach to an aesthetics of transmission permeates the Chinese History Cantos, and by tracing its permutations, we gain insight into the particular cybernetic stakes of Pound’s larger body of work. The poems’ inclusion of a sweeping

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

range of data from across the history of China’s dynasties and the way in which those data create linguistic patterns that circulate in relation to one another (and the present) cultivate in readers a distinctly cybernetic set of critical faculties. China’s linguistic, economic, political, and religious traditions, of course, fascinated Pound from his first encounters with Fenollosa’s notebooks, which led to his theory of the poetic ideogram and his early Cathay poem-translations. Within the nine-poem sequence of the Chinese History Cantos, though, Pound further elevates China’s position within his oeuvre by giving it the most sustained, uninterrupted treatment of any global culture that appears in the Cantos: he charts the chronology of China’s dynastic leaders across thirty-five hundred years of history and more than eighty pages of poetry. Published only two years before Pound broadcast his ambition to “keep [tradition] handy,” the sequence epitomizes this communication-centered goal. And, although the poems have received scant critical treatment, they offer a unique, and often startlingly beautiful blending of historical chronology and poetic form that lends itself to a cyberneticinflected reading. Because they structure their subject matter as a lengthy series of legible facts, rather than as spliced fragments of varied, often opaque historical reference (as is the case in many other Cantos), it becomes all the more appropriate to conceive of their details as sequences of inter-related data, which evoke thematic patterns from the past. As scholars from Nicholls to Farahbakhsh and Li have pointed out, perhaps the most pervasive general theme within the Chinese History Cantos circulates around the concept and practice of leadership. Pound’s treatment of this topic offers a compelling case study in the cybernetic dimensions of his modernist poetics. He crafts a complex vision of leadership and (to use a term with more obvious cybernetics affinities) governance through various linguistic motifs and historical anecdotes. These data create overlapping patterns, which feed back into one another as they generate an ever-evolving understanding of not only the qualities necessary for effective political governing in ancient China, but also the human characteristics necessary for effective information processing in the present. The poetic sequence subtly imparts a lesson about the cybernetic nature of learning that takes place in modernity, when all people must confront the types and ranges of information with which past leaders grappled. If we approach the poetry as a cybernetic machine might, we can read its images, languages, and far-ranging examples as part of a complex feedback loop. This loop enables us to perpetually adjust our

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perceptions as we read, since our compendium of poetic “data” constantly accumulates and expands. The specific processes the Chinese History Cantos employ to invite this multi-step, cybernetic approach to interpretation are evident if we look at the varied ways that Pound’s signature phrase “MAKE IT NEW” functions. From one perspective, it encapsulates the core impetus of a central organizational pattern that runs through the Cantos – the very same one that opened the work. After all, what is “making it new” if not structurally synonymous with the transformations we saw enacted by Circe, Bacchus, and even the thrice-translated description of Aphrodite that closes Canto ? The catchiness and wide-ranging applicability of the phrase “MAKE IT NEW” have helped it expand in significance, so that it now often serves as a stand-in for the underlying intentions and ambitions of Pound’s works – or even modernism as a whole – writ large. Indeed, the potential connotations of the three short words are myriad: the verb “make” possesses remarkable flexibility in its far-reaching associations with construction, innovation, and creativity; the pronoun “it” is notable in its utter lack of fixed referent (and consequently limitless potential significations); and the adjective “new” shimmers with the indistinct aura of novelty and progress. As the kernel of a far-reaching poetic pattern (i.e., the “acorn” that will give rise to the “oak” in Pound’s  essay), “MAKE IT NEW” is ideal in its capacity for near infinite replication across a huge spectrum of contexts. From a cybernetic perspective, though, we can also consider the three words as a single “data set” within the complex informational transmission of the Chinese History Cantos (and, by extension, of the Cantos as a whole). As such, their status shifts. Rather than signifying the (singular, fixed, central) core of the sequence’s poetic message (again, singular), they become part of a vast feedback loop that positions readers as cybernetic machines by teaching us about the importance of flexible, responsive interpretation of messages (plural). We encounter multiple re-iterations of the phrase’s underlying structure as the poems unfold, each of which resonates in distinct ways with our prior intellectual experiences and nuances our understanding of the Cantos’s emergent cultural, ethical, and aesthetic principles. For example, immediately after the phrase “MAKE IT NEW” appears (an inscription “on [the emperor Tching’s] bathtub”) during Canto , Pound offers a four-line series of terse images that echo its structure and meaning, yet focus our attention on different valences of emphasis:



Cybernetic Aesthetics Day by day make it new cut underbrush, pile the logs keep it growing. ()

As we see here, each line’s short phrase continues the essential imperative structure of the first “MAKE IT NEW” utterance but adds something to either qualify or elaborate its signification. The first line provides a threeword prefix that specifies the reach of the command: “making it new,” we read, is not meant to be a singular occurrence. Instead, it needs to be a repeated act that happens on a “day by day” basis; it should be part of the pattern of quotidian life, an integral component of our existence and interactions with the world. The subsequent lines shift our attention to the practical application of the “make it new” concept and offer three distinct suggestions for fulfilling its invitation. Through their structural parallels, they extend the phrase’s verbal potential: to “make” becomes linked, in a network of transmissions, with the verbs to “cut,” to “pile,” and to “keep.” Each line also specifies the types of things to which the central “it” of “make it new” might refer (respectively, “underbrush,” “logs,” or a still-somewhat-nebulous something that we at least know has the capacity for “growing”). We acquire new layers of conceptual feedback if we consider each phrase separately. The injunction to “cut underbrush” suggests an act of clearing away, pruning, thinning. Making it new, then, does not always involve positive production; perhaps unsurprisingly, the relentlessly self-edited author of “In a Station of the Metro” reminds us that thoughtful and careful removal can also be a creative act. In “pile the logs” we glean an impetus to organization, as the “new” in “make it new” also comes to signal new arrangements and configurations of existing things. Finally, the deliberate vagueness of “keep it growing” evokes a range of possible images circulating around ideas of maintenance and attention, the desire for longevity, and a commitment to gradual processes of development. We also encounter a more passive valence of “mak[ing] it new,” in which the ability to facilitate one of nature’s most basic processes – “growing” – is valorized. Each of the lines thus elicit particular responses as they feed back into our cognitive network of linguistic understanding; the images prompt us to adjust our interpretation of the poem’s accumulating messages about transformative innovation in all of its variations. Furthermore, an extended feedback loop has already subtly conditioned our understanding of the verb “to make” – and its implications within the

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context of leadership – in advance of its capitalized appearance. During the pages leading up to the bathtub inscription, Pound unleashes a cascade of descriptive images that, in their surface content, chart the accomplishments of different emperors under whom China alternately prospered and struggled. On Canto ’s first page alone, the verb appears four different times: “Chin Nong . . . / made a plough that is used five thousand years”; “Souan yen . . . / made signs out of bird tracks”; “Hoang Ti contrived the making of bricks” and also “had four wives and  males of his making” (, my emphasis). It also enters twice within the eight lines preceding “MAKE IT NEW,” once in reference to “Tching Tang,” who made discs with square holes in their middles and gave these to the people wherewith they might buy grain where there was grain, (, my emphasis)

and once in German: “der im Baluba das Gewitter gemacht hat” (a rough translation would read “who made the storm in Baluba”) (, my emphasis). Through these diverse iterations, Pound imbues his repeated verb with connotations ranging from the agricultural and the architectural through to economics, meteorology, the interpretation of nature, and the reproduction of human beings (this latter also implying the establishment of patriarchal royal lineage). Each appearance of the verb “make” resonates with a core pattern about creativity and innovative production, but invites us to contemplate, firstly, how this central ideal shifts as it transforms across diverse contexts and, secondly, how different leaders have put it into practice. By transmitting poetic images according to the accumulative logic of the feedback loop, Pound conjures a dizzyingly complex vision of the type of information-processing skills that leadership and governing entailed. Thanks to the specific deeds, innovations, and lessons that Pound transcribes (and the various verbs that he uses to do so), the poems become, in many ways, an informational system that offers an elaborate yet oblique treatise on the “making” of a leader. “MAKE IT NEW,” from this pedagogical perspective, constitutes the basic pattern that characterizes successful leadership – it’s what one must do to be “Lord of the four seas of China” (). The sequence thus constitutes something of a “Mirrors of Princes” genre, offering, as Bjorn Weiler puts it, “basic principles of rulerly conduct and of the structure and purpose of secular power,” or, more simply, a “manua[l] of effective governance.” David Moody emphasizes this connection to Confucian “moral histories” that serve as “school books for princes” as they “mirror the conduct of emperors and their officers as to



Cybernetic Aesthetics

make of them examples of wise rule or of misrule for the instruction of their successors” (). Insofar as Pound introduces the concept of “governance” into his poetry, his diverse range of examples from the past confirm, through their plurality, the complex and precarious flexibility that leadership entails. Emperors must be able to assume an active role – this much is clear in Pound’s laudatory references to leaders who have taught concrete skills, invented practical and useful tools, managed large-scale food and finances, and “founded” new cities and familial dynasties (). On the other hand, though, they must also excel at the more passive, yet equally essential, elements of governing: keeping things growing, letting things happen, and even, as an anecdote of Chao-Kong and the “pear-trees” exemplifies, simply sitting still and “deeming justice” (). As a “Mirror of Princes” text, this poetry envisions the ideal leader as a type of cybernetic machine: capable of learning about, understanding the patterns of, and creatively acting within complex informational systems (economics, agriculture, lineage, etc.). However, the implications of this idealized figure shift within the context of the Cantos’s twentieth-century audience, in which every reader has access to the type of informational overload that the erstwhile “prince” might have experienced and must use to “govern” his or her conduct. Information transmitted through the intricate networks of communications media now democratically saturates the world. Audiences confront international radio broadcasts from Allied and Axis sources, widespread advertising campaigns designed to cultivate mass allegiance, and even, one could argue, the uniform curriculum of the public education system that Pound finds so deplorable. For readers situated within this culture of informational excess, the “lesson” of Pound’s historical references to leadership (a lesson that extends, of course, far beyond the bounds of the Chinese History Cantos) becomes part of a feedback loop designed to influence their own perspectives as well. In short, all of Pound’s readers – not only idealized figures of leadership like Confucius, Adams, Mussolini, and Malatesta – must wield the dataprocessing capacity of cybernetic machines. If leaders of the past had to respond to feedback in flexible, adaptive, and productive ways to become effective actors in their ever-unfolding, ever-shifting present, then so, the cybernetic lesson goes, by extension must we. Pound’s poems therefore invoke diverse historical, cultural, and aesthetic references to teach us about productive modes of engagement with large-scale informational transmissions. As we read the Cantos, we enter into the informationprocessing cognitive space of the cybernetic machine as we adapt our understanding of creativity and innovation in the wake of the historical

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feedback Pound sends our way. This aesthetic strategy cultivates readers’ capacity for cybernetic thinking, a feature that aligns Pound’s poetics with the work of the authors I explore in the upcoming chapters.

Defying Data: Pound’s Aesthetic Cybernetics I want to close by briefly parsing the broader implications of this Pound/ Wiener, poetics/cybernetics contextual comparison. We have seen how historical and linguistic patterns organize the myriad messages of the Chinese History Cantos according to the logic of the feedback loop; this principle promotes a constantly evolving recalibration of critical understanding as readers amass and process large quantities of information. This new perspective, which sees Pound’s poetry as a network of pedagogical transmissions that teach us to adopt the learning strategies of cybernetic thinking, opens Pound-specific scholarship to several new avenues of interpretive analysis. However, the overall payoff of the cybernetic reading extends much further: it destabilizes and refigures the definitional boundaries of cybernetics as a whole, and consequently opens modernist criticism to a vast network of unexplored feedback loops. The upcoming chapters of this book will explore several of those feedback loops in depth by analyzing different modernist authors’ aesthetic experiments alongside theories developed by several prominent cyberneticians. Before leaving Pound’s work, though, I want to highlight how his poetics of circular transmission invites us to understand cybernetics theory in new ways. As the Cantos progress, Pound deploys cybernetic structures and modes of communication using tactics that unsettle our widespread assumptions about the privileged position of technology and data in cybernetic discourse. These subtle disruptions occur in places such as the second poem from the  Rock Drill section of the Cantos. Here, Pound enacts a cybernetic plurality of feedback loops as he amasses a compendium of multilingual, multicultural statements that project nearly analogous, but never quite identical messages. Specifically, he uses a string of echoed fragments to emphasize a painful irony of human conflict. One passage includes a loosely translated quotation: “Sono tutti eretici, San Padre, ma non sono cattivi.” “It can’t be all in one language They are all prots YR HOLINESS, but not bad.” ()

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

A few pages later, a sequence of quoted phrases similarly reinforce the message: “We don’t hate anybody.” Quoted Konody, “We fight when our Emperor says so.” (Austrians ) “Decent chaps” (Schwartz’ ) ‘a shame that we have to fight ’em.” “Mais le prussien! Le prussien c’est un chic homme.” ()

In offering up so many examples of a shared sentiment (Why hate/kill our enemies? They may be wearing different uniforms than us, but they’re not so bad when it comes down to it), Canto  might seem a perfect candidate for a Wienerian, technology-based analogy. After all, Wiener’s theories deploy “ultra-rapid computing machines” to find patterns in everaccumulating data sets of nearly identical messages. Is Pound not asking his readers to exercise their capacity to engage in just such an interpretive pattern-seeking act as his repetitive poetic images accrue over multiple lines and myriad references? In some ways (and as my earlier reading of the “MAKE IT NEW” passage corroborates), I would say yes. Readers unquestionably must adopt the thinking patterns of Wiener’s cybernetic machines. However, Pound’s poetic invitation to cybernetic pattern-seeking also runs counter to Wiener’s technological apparatus, which encodes all unique messages as uniform data for automatic, cybernetic processing. “It can’t all be in one language,” Pound writes, between translated scraps of text. This brief yet significant interjection signals the distinct cybernetic mode that he carves for his poetics – a mode in which the generative potential of linguistic patterns exceeds the Wienerian analogy. The poetry’s layers of multilingual fragments enable a cybernetic reading not (as do Wiener’s machines) by coding each utterance into the consistent language of data, but rather by preserving and presenting linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic difference as such. The fragments do not appear to us, as they would to a computer, “all . . . in one language.” Instead, they conjure cybernetic patterns through spliced and accumulating aesthetic encounters. Their informational value thus accrues in much the same way that Canto  staged its commentary on leadership. In this latter, multiple iterations

Feedback Loops and Learning from the Past



of the verb “to make” generated an explosion of semantic feedback, which expanded and enriched readers’ understanding of attributes and skills such as creativity, innovation, and adaptability. The Rock Drill poem makes the generative potential of cross-cultural linguistic feedback even more explicit. Feedback loops between echoed iterations emerge in a myriad of ways: through the contrasting shapes and sounds of words (the rat-a-tat of t’s and i’s in Italian, the rounder o’s, d’s, and b’s of English, French’s frequent double-letters); in the common lilt of nearby phrases (notice how “fight ‘em,” “fight when,” and “prussien” sonically overlap); thanks to the connotations of historical figures (the passing reference to P. G. Konody might conjure a recollection of Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST, where the art critic’s name appears); or the flash of an earlier repetition (the “Sono tutti eretici, Santo Padre” line also appears earlier in the poem, that time alongside a sequence of German references []). Each of these aestheticized feedback loops generates connotative spinoffs as it inflects our understanding of the poetry’s underlying messages. Through the poetry, Pound certainly enacts a cybernetic communication strategy. Its wildly looping linguistic feedback, however, presents an aesthetically excessive alternative to the regulated, statistical pattern-seeking functions of Wiener’s prediction machines. Given their conviction that twentieth-century modernity had surpassed “the limits of communication within and among individuals,” and their imbrication in the urgency of World War II’s combat demands, it is not surprising that Wiener and his colleagues so wholeheartedly pursued technological, data-based solutions to their cybernetic pattern-processing problems (Wiener, HU, ). As I have demonstrated, there is an important aesthetic and creative dimension to these cybernetic technologies. Pound’s work, though, in its oftentimes dazzling feats of multi-linguistic and pancultural reference, represents an even more emphatically aestheticized version of cybernetic thought and learning. As such, it points us to the importance of the arts in cybernetics’ cultural lineage. If, as I have argued, the language of cybernetic feedback provides an insightful cultural analogy for understanding Pound’s poetics, the comparison becomes even richer in light of the aesthetic feedback Pound reinserts into cybernetic discourse. Alongside Pound’s poetry, Wiener’s version of cybernetics accrues new aesthetic dimensions, and its status shifts. The technological, dataprocessing machines of his World War II experiments take their place as part of a longer and more diverse cultural lineage, in which modernist formal experimentation plays a central role. I have sketched the outlines of



Cybernetic Aesthetics

Pound’s specific contributions to an aesthetics-driven cybernetics, in which poetic language provides an essential source of generative feedback. The following chapters locate and trace additional feedback loops that inscribe modernist artistic practice within the pan-disciplinary field of cybernetic communication.

 

The Cybernetic Information Dialectic Patterns, Randomness, and Newsreel in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A.

When you’re outa luck in this man’s country, you certainly are outa luck.

Mac (John Dos Passos, The nd Parallel, )

“Outa Luck” in America Luck, chance, randomness, and unpredictability saturate John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy (The nd Parallel [],  [], and The Big Money []). The prominence of these motifs is rivaled perhaps only by Dos Passos’s equally ubiquitous integration of recognizable, repeated patterns to organize and structure the novels’ expansive framework. Mac’s early statement about “luck” in America underscores this tension between opposites. Luck is, by definition, unpredictable and random; yet, as the repeated iteration of the phrase “outa luck” indicates, the social category of the unlucky, down-and-out vagrant/vagabond is predictable and typical in modern America. Mac and his friend Ike have recently hopped trains westward across the country, filled their pockets with cash during a summer stint in the logging camps, and then fallen prey to a pair of cute girls they meet who get them drunk, steal their money, and leave Ike infected with “a dose” of the clap (nd Parallel, ). Having fallen, as Mac laments, back “outa luck,” the boys assume the same identity as the anonymous vagrant figure who will close the trilogy several hundred pages later. In that three-page segment, titled “Vag,” a young man “wait[s] at the edge of the hissing speeding string of cars,” unable to predict where he’ll end up and hoping for “a hitch, a hundred miles down the road” (Big Money, ). The final vignette reinforces the structures of fate and luck that appear throughout Dos Passos’s trilogy and shape his multi-layered exploration of geographic and economic disparity in twentieth-century America. In keeping with the abrupt shift of status in Mac’s earlier narrative – from 



Cybernetic Aesthetics

high-roller to train-jumper – our glimpse of this final vagrant, whose “head swims” as cars pass by because “hunger has twisted his belly tight,” fractures as we follow his gaze upward to a “plane” that “flashes in the sun and bores its smooth way out of sight” (–). Transported to the plane’s interior, we glimpse (through the language of Dos Passos’s signature word fusions) “the big men with bankaccounts, [and] highlypaid jobs” who “sit pretty” in their seats (). In stark contrast to the dusty vagabond, it is “no matter” when, due to “the bumpy air over the desert ranges toward Las Vegas” a passenger “sickens and vomits into the carton container the steak and mushrooms he ate in New York”; after all, there are “plenty restaurants [sic.] in LA” (). Thanks to this passage’s juxtapositions, the “young man” whose “wants crawl over his skin like ants” as he waits by the road unexpectedly shares narrative space with the “transcontinental passenge[r]” who “thinks contracts, profits, vacationtrips” as he swiftly traverses the “mighty continent between Atlantic and Pacific” (). The two figures – each representative of an economically defined “type” – thus become part of the trilogy’s recognizable patterns of subjectivity and mobility even as the vignette highlights the randomness of their textual encounter. Throughout U.S.A., Dos Passos presents the paradoxical coexistence of pattern and randomness as a constitutive feature of information management, communication, and identity in twentieth-century America. To showcase this relationship, Dos Passos draws on recognizable narrative forms and predictable identity schemas. As I will illustrate in the pages to come, those strategies confirm the trilogy’s tie to American literary naturalism; however, they also revise that genre’s typical tenets in ways that become most significant if we read the novels alongside the information-centered discourses of cybernetics theory and newsreel technology. As I have discussed, cybernetics is understood to have emerged around World War II as a techno-scientific field of study that employed statistics and probability to develop machines capable of high-speed, high-volume data-processing. These machines’ basic goal was to enable the transmission of useful information – that is, to facilitate communication and the ability to incorporate feedback – at rates that exceeded the scope of human cognitive processing. Cyberneticians ushered in the computer age as they radically blurred the boundaries between human and machine. This chapter proposes that Dos Passos’s experiments with narrative form bring his writing into conversation with the later technological field. His novels comprehend such an expansive range of material (fictional, historical,

The Cybernetic Information Dialectic



technological, autobiographical), and present such an excessive quantity of interlaced details, themes, and characters that the trilogy’s literary commentary on twentieth-century communication systems – and the people and technologies that comprise them – becomes statistical in scope and accrues cybernetic dimensions. Central to my argument is the idea that cybernetic informationprocessing strategies are prominently on display in the fragmented “Newsreel” sections that appear throughout Dos Passos’s trilogy. Within these segments, he adopts a literary technique that mimics filmed newsreels’ simultaneous reliance on pattern and randomness. As in filmed newsreel productions, Dos Passos’s literary “Newsreels” blur the lines between history and fiction in order to present information to the public. His technique exposes the interpretive challenges of America’s information-saturated twentieth-century culture and also prompts readers to develop cybernetic strategies for navigating the myriad messages that surround them. This reading mobilizes concepts from cybernetics to provide insights into the experimental literary techniques that structure Dos Passos’s writing. Conversely, his work also enables us to reconceptualize the historical and cultural trajectories of cybernetics itself: the U.S.A. trilogy’s sprawling narrative invites readers to embrace cybernetic thinking as an approach to managing complex communication networks and informational environments. In doing so, the novels illustrate the emerging cybernetic dimensions of early twentieth-century aesthetics and culture, and of modern American identity and subjectivity writ large.

Not-Quite-Naturalism: A Starting Point for Dos-Passos-ian Cybernetics Each novel in U.S.A. covers one decade, so collectively they take us from the “dawn of the century” on page one of The nd Parallel through to the  stock market crash at the end of The Big Money. Despite this straightforward historical trajectory, though, the novels’ formal structure is intricate and complex. They alternate among four distinct narrative styles: () autobiographical “Camera Eye” sections, reminiscent of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique; () idiosyncratic biographies of famous or influential American people ranging from politicians and businessmen such as Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Carnegie, to media figures, socialists, and inventors such as William Randolph Hearst, Isadora Duncan, Eugene Debs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford; () more straightforward narrative sections charting the intermingled lives of twelve

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

fictional characters as they navigate twentieth-century American culture with varying degrees of success (or, as is often the case, of failure); and () a sequence of “Newsreels,” which splice together snippets and fragments Dos Passos copied from hundreds of historical headlines, newspaper copy excerpts, and popular songs. My engagement with the relationships Dos Passos establishes within and among the trilogy’s diverse formal components extends the more typical association of U.S.A. with the tradition of American naturalism. As Donald Pizer defines it, “naturalistic fiction usually unites detailed documentation of the more sensationalist aspects of experience with heavily ideological (often allegorical) themes, the burden of these themes being the demonstration that man is more circumscribed than originally assumed” (Pizer, xi). By and large, critics agree that Dos Passos’s novels exhibit naturalistic tendencies; indeed, in U.S.A., the preoccupation with chance and the circumscribed – or, overdetermined – status of human life is abundant. Characters are forever getting tripped up by unlucky twists of fate, ranging from unwanted pregnancy, alcoholism, and venereal disease, to labor disputes, questionable business dealings, and politics. For those who do succeed (however briefly), chance almost always has something to do with their success. Take, for example, the emphasis that Mac’s statement about being “outa luck” places on chance as a driving force in characters’ lives. This theme appears in countless other narratives in the trilogy. Texas belle Anne Elizabeth Trent – known in the novels as “Daughter” – follows a classic descending arc after she meets Captain Richard Ellsworth Savage, or “Dick,” on the way to Rome after World War I. She begins starry-eyed, then winds up pregnant; he won’t commit; instead of taking him up on the offer of abortion funds, she sets out on a desperate drunken spree through the bars of Paris, which ends when she convinces an equally drunk French flying Ace to take her up in his plane and “loop the loop . . .” (, ). Her final observation is of the plane’s wing silhouetted in the morning sun as it spirals away from her. Being out of luck also extends beyond the fictional character segments into the novels’ historically-based sections. Dos Passos includes a biography of Isadora Duncan, who is accidentally strangled by her own “heavilyfringed scarf ” when it is caught in her vehicle’s axle (Big Money, ); a headline that reads “Girl Steps On Match; Dress Ignites; Dies” (nd Parallel, ); and the news that the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti are condemned to death despite widespread protest from representatives of the labor movement (Big Money, ).

The Cybernetic Information Dialectic

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The novels’ proliferation of unlucky incidents highlights two points about Dos Passos’s particular version of naturalism, which indicate the category’s ability to assume distinct forms in different historical and cultural contexts. The first relates to theme: all of the references I’ve mentioned have something to do with the core naturalistic tenets of determinism, chance, and fate. However, the novels do not always resort to the extreme versions of the ideas that are usually associated with the movement. Yes, Daughter dies in an explosive death and the Sacco and Vanzetti trial ends with their execution. But alternative scenarios appear, in which characters exert a degree of purposefully motivated agency over their lives. “Dick,” for example, deliberately works his way into a strategic position as the right-hand man of public relations powerhouse J. W. Moorehouse; and Margo Dowling, the character who is perhaps the best foil to Daughter, fights her way back from an unwanted pregnancy to eventually make it big in Hollywood. As critics like Pizer and Townsend Ludington argue, this s version of literary naturalism is at least marginally more hopeful than its s predecessor; it “rises beyond the rigid determinism that is the hallmark of the severest sort of naturalism” (Ludington, –). Second, then, is the question of quantity of material. In any discussion of U.S.A. it is difficult to avoid the impulse to list. Among the trilogy’s twelve fictional story lines, almost thirty historical biographies, fifty-one segments of fragmented autobiographical recollection, and close to a hundred spliced “Newsreels,” narrative “items” relentlessly accumulate. As Christopher Breu puts it (in a discussion of the fictional segments), we witness “the prismatic proliferation of narrative voices” as the novels unfold (). This amassing of detail aligns with naturalism and its close relative realism, given those traditions’ dedication to rendering modern life in all its minutiae (think, for example, of Theodore Dreiser’s catalogue of department store items in Sister Carrie, ). However, U.S.A. bombards us with so much information, so many connections, and such complexity of form that it threatens to exceed our interpretive categories and capabilities. The notion that U.S.A. is “not-quite-naturalist,” or “not-a-typicalnaturalist-text” establishes key premises of my reading of Dos Passos as a participant in the emerging twentieth-century discourse of cybernetics. His trilogy plays with questions of control and agency as it interrogates the position of individual subjects in relation to larger socio-cultural forces and communication networks that govern their historical moment. The cybernetic paradigms emerge through what Pizer labels the “interlacing”

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

and “cross-stitching” of rhetorical patterns within the trilogy (). Pizer’s emphasis on the novels’ layered multiplicity highlights their mobilization of large-scale fields of data: “The twelve narratives of U.S.A.,” he writes, “communicate in various interlocking patterns far more subtly and powerfully than any one narrative theme of the failure of American life” (). With this attention to interlocking, layered narratives, and the notion of communication as a process or a system that weaves together random luck and entrenched pattern (and also American life and literary form), Pizer’s naturalistic reading primes us for a leap to cybernetics and newsreel.

Cybernetics’ Competing Theories of Information, Newsreel’s Random Patterns Both cybernetic theorists and newsreel transmissions embrace polarized conceptions of information that are founded on the distinction between statistical pattern and randomness. Within cybernetics discourse, there is a long-standing debate about the nature of information, in particular whether it is affiliated with pattern or randomness. N. Katherine Hayles discusses this opposition in her  monograph How We Became Posthuman. The two figures that she uses to dramatize the debate are Norbert Wiener and his contemporary, Claude Shannon (an engineer at Bell Laboratories). Both theorists, she emphasizes, “th[ink] of information as representing a choice . . . of one message from among a range of possible messages” and therefore conceive of communication as “fundamentally probabilistic” (, –). They agree that the amount of information gained from a message is inversely proportional to a receiver’s expectation about its content: we gain less information from a message that affirms what we expect than from one that announces something we considered extremely unlikely. For Wiener, “the more probable the message, the less information it gives” (HU, ); in Shannon’s terms (as explained by his colleague Warren Weaver), “There is more ‘information’ if you select freely out of a set of fifty standard messages, than if you select freely out of a set of twenty-five” (). Despite this common overall premise, the way in which each thinker defines information’s relationship to pattern and randomness marks their theories’ ultimate incompatibility. For Wiener, Hayles explains, information and “entropy” are “inversely related to each other” (). He therefore represents the “pattern = information” side of the debate. Given the disorganization that characterizes the world around us, he argues, information can only be found in legible, organized patterns – they become

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enclaves of meaning amidst chaos. “Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization,” Wiener writes; “just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization” (HU, ). In this argument, entropy is loosely defined as a “general tendency” for patterns to “run down” and lose their distinct features (HU, ). Therefore, whenever we find a situation in which “entropy does not increase . . . organization and its correlative, information, are being built up” (HU, ; my emphasis). Wiener thus yokes information to organization and sets this pair of terms against entropy (and against this latter’s associations with disorganization, randomness, and dissipation). As Hayles notes, one of the primary tools Wiener employs to establish order (i.e., to convey information) is analogy – the identification of patterns across disparate entities. “As data move across various kinds of interfaces,” she explains, “analogical relationships are the links that allow pattern to be preserved from one modality to another. . . . For Wiener, analogy was communication, and communication was analogy” (–). In other words, it links communication to organized pattern and, therefore, also to information. By contrast, Shannon “identifie[s] information and entropy rather than oppose[s] them” (Hayles, ). As he sees it, patterned messages, because they are organized, are easy to predict; “new” information is only found in randomness – in the unexpected details or choices that challenge our expectations. As Weaver explains in his introduction to Shannon’s theory, if a “situation is highly organized, it is not characterized by a large degree of randomness or of choice – that is to say, the information (or the entropy) is low” (Shannon and Weaver, ). Entropy and information here become synonymous. They exist, for Shannon, as interchangeable terms that signify the degree to which a given message is determined by its author’s “freedom of choice,” that is, by how statistically unpredictable or random the message is (Shannon and Weaver, ). Significantly, Shannon’s theory also argues that entropy comes into play at a message’s point of reception. Here it instead functions as “noise,” an additive component that distorts messages and, therefore, decreases the probability of their accurate comprehension. Noise, though, creates “increased uncertainty”; and “if the uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though the noise were beneficial” (Shannon and Weaver, ). This emphasis on the capacity for noise to add information (statistically speaking) to a message also appears in Hayles’s discussion of the tensions between various cybernetic definitions of information. “Large entropy production,” she posits, holds the generative potential to “drive systems

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to increasing complexity” because the added entropy forces a system to devise methods for overcoming noisy interruptions (). The point I want to emphasize about this opposition in theories of information is that neither side of the pattern–randomness divide stands up on its own. Any theory of cybernetic information needs to dialectically enfold the two: random details can only offer information if they are considered in the context of recognizable patterns; and organized patterns can only provide information if they’re open to adjustment according to random incoming feedback that challenges their validity. And this is where the media form of newsreel – that “historically important and tenacious motion picture attraction” that Raymond Fielding describes as an “influential source of information” during the early decades of the twentieth century () – comes in. Filmed newsreel puts into practice precisely this dialectical, cybernetic approach to information and communication. The medium, therefore, offers a key hinge for connecting cybernetics theory to the “Newsreel” sections of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. In his Complete History of the American Newsreel, R. Fielding writes: “The American newsreel, in case you have already forgotten, was a tenminute potpourri of motion picture news footage, released twice a week to motion picture theaters throughout the country” (). Newsreel information thus offers, in many ways, Wienerian information patterns par excellence. A reel occupied precisely ten minutes of time. It was sent out to theaters twice a week. Furthermore, a newsreel’s “fixed length” allowed it to “fit conveniently into theater programs” (R. Fielding, ). Indeed, newsreels were required to maintain this predictable feature, and the industry tolerated no variation. In F. A. Talbot’s  book Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, a section titled “The Animated Newspaper” addresses the rigidity of these practical production considerations. “The length of the film newspaper,” he explains, “is limited to between  and  feet, and is built up of ten to seventeen subjects which vary in length according to their respective importance” (). R. Fielding also emphasizes the procrustean nature of the editing process that ensured these strict standards, noting that “the most important news stories, if excessive in number and overlong, were abbreviated or omitted altogether to avoid running over the allotted time” (). Formal control thus existed, from the start, as a defining feature – that is, a recognizable pattern – of newsreel transmission. The centrality of recognizable pattern to newsreel’s media-identity extends beyond formal features to content as well. R. Fielding claims that

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“by the year  . . . film producers had presented virtually every type of subject matter that was to characterize the newsreel for the next sixty years” (). These types comprise: “catastrophe, international celebrities, pageantry and ceremony, sports, political and military events, technology, and spectacle and novelty” (). Talbot more generally notes the importance of “diversified . . . contents” in the “‘composition’, or, as it is called, the ‘make-up’ of the animated news film”; as he describes the process, news films must balance “the big items” with “various other features of lesser importance” (). In these commentaries, we again see evidence of the medium’s basis in patterned information. Every newsreel that appears in an American cinema will conform to a set of formal guidelines, and every newsreel story will fit within a previously established narrative schema or category to contribute to a balanced presentation of the week’s notable happenings. If we look closely at this subject matter, however, we see how randomness constitutes an equally crucial element of the newsreel’s mediaidentity. Indeed, most categories of news-story-type rely on a core element of improbability, which is often characterized by disorganization, chance, or chaotic entropy. In order for footage to be “newsworthy,” it needs to fall somehow outside the purview of the quotidian: a catastrophe disrupts, a celebrity sighting is a rare occurrence, new technologies push against the boundaries of possibility, and military, political, and sporting events are exciting because spectators don’t know the results in advance (and violent incidents or outcomes are always possible). As R. Fielding puts it, these latter possess inherent “newsworthiness” because they are “competitive in nature and dramatic in staging” – in short, they are unexpected (). He emphasizes the captivating power of the chaotic when he cites a newspaper commentary about a segment from the inaugural Vitagraph newsreel: the film, apparently, showed a “head-on collision between two giant locomotives going  miles an hour” (). As the writer describes it, “The iron steed of rail clash and tear into each other like two furious combatants. [It was a] sign that surpasses all imagination” (quoted in R. Fielding, ). Here we witness how, in the world of newsreel-based communication, shocking unexpectedness forms an effective transmission tactic. By strategically mobilizing the unpredictability inherent within surprising, thrilling, and often violent events, and integrating an element of random variety into their coverage of a set pattern of topics, newsreel information captures audiences’ attention and even “imagination.” To fully appreciate the cybernetic dimensions of the newsreel industry’s interweaving of randomness and pattern, and their applicability to Dos

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Passos’s writing, we also need to consider the figures who were responsible for gathering, processing, and preparing the footage that was distributed to theaters: the editor and the cameraman. Talbot’s overview of the largescale organization necessary for successful newsreel production emphasizes that the industry relied on carefully regulated relationships between editor and cameraman and also between extensive planning (i.e., pattern) and onthe-spot improvisation (i.e., randomness): The work can be handled successfully only by a firm having an extensive organization, and with better chances of success if it has specialized in the ordinary “topical.” There must be an editor to direct operations and to prepare the film. He must possess a large and scattered staff, so that no part of the world is left uncovered by a cinematograph. His scouts must be active and keen, always on the alert, and ready to secure on the instant a few feet of any incident of importance in their respective localities. In the offices a number of skilled operators must be ready to hurry off at a moment’s notice to any desired spot. ()

This description evokes a productive synergy between editor – whom Talbot later labels “the presiding genius” and who directs operations from the “editorial sanctum” according to a well-established set of protocols () – and his operators, who here appear in a perpetual state of “alert [ness],” eager to rush out and capture newsreel-worthy moments on film. Furthermore, thanks to the dynamic interplay among predictable events, chance occurrences, fast-paced data-processing, and large quantities of footage that govern newsreel production, newsreel’s two key figures become just as embroiled in the pattern-randomness information modality as the medium itself. Their interactions with one another, and with the complex news-generating nexus they simultaneously navigate and create, offer analogies for considering the cybernetic approaches to informationprocessing that Dos Passos presents, and readers must confront, in U.S.A. We can think of the editor as tending toward the Wienerian, patternfocused end of newsreel’s cybernetic-information spectrum. Both Dos Passos and his readers assume quasi-editorial positions while engaging with the material that comprises U.S.A. The editor’s job is all about organization: directing the company’s work force, monitoring, and selecting newsworthy topics, sifting through the footage his employees capture, and assembling each newsreel into a coherent, informative, attention-grabbing whole. As early newsreel cameraman Robert Humfrey recalls, the editor “has a very responsible and arduous job, from which he can seldom relax, and on his ability and vision depend to a great extent the interest and

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appeal of the reel” (–). An anonymous  article titled “Running the Topical Films” likewise notes that “the editor of a news film . . . has to decide, often in a few seconds, not merely whether a thing is worth doing, but whether it can or cannot be done[.] . . . And all day long he is considering and rejecting or accepting subjects suggested to him, and is sending expert operators off to diverse scenes of action” (). While these descriptions present the editor as all-powerful chief, they also belie his dependence on a whole sub-set of agents and elements outside his control and on the more flexible, fluctuating series of feedback loops that bring news ideas to his attention. At the newsreel office, for instance, workers are busy “reading the day’s papers with scissors in their hands. For this is one of the means by which subjects suitable for filming are found[.] . . . At the same time, moreover, letters, telegrams, and telephone messages are constantly arriving from agents and employees in all parts of the world, describing events which have happened or are about to happen” (“Running,” ). Furthermore, “installed in the news editor’s office, are the tape machines of one or more news agencies, which ensure that all the hot news, such as wrecks or train disasters [or ‘air pilots who break records’], may be dealt with at once” (Humfrey, ). Only by navigating and capitalizing on the chaotically and randomly proliferating data circuits of this multivalent, human–machine transmission system can the newsreel editor produce an organized and meaningful media product – a product not dissimilar to a Dos Passos novel. The flip-side of the editorial role (which, as we have seen, emphasizes pattern, but nonetheless operates within chaotic randomness) is that of the cameraman, a position that also finds an analogy in U.S.A. Unlike his office-dwelling counterpart, the camera operator works in an environment of randomness and unpredictability, as he never knows exactly what he will capture on any given day in the field, or whether his work will produce theater-worthy results. Humfrey hints at this aspect of the job when he describes “news-reel work” as “strenuous . . . with a spice of adventure thrown in” (). Talbot similarly foregrounds the formative role of chance in a cameraman’s day: “An operator is rushed to the scene, and there left to his own devices to secure a sensational few feet of film. He may succeed or he may not; it all depends upon the circumstances and conditions” (–, my emphasis). Solidifying the cameraman’s dependence on chance, multiple discussions of early newsreels note the profession’s susceptibility to the whims of the weather. By contrast, there is always the possibility of “A Lucky Accident” (“Running,” ). As one anecdote recalls, a camera operator already in place to film “heavy artillery . . . being

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

brought over a pontoon bridge” happened to capture a rather more eventful sequence when horses and wagon fell in the river, the bridge collapsed, and general mayhem ensued. In this case, “the whole film was secured by sheer luck!” (“Running,” ). Despite the cameraman’s unavoidable reliance on luck and chance, though, certain patterns of behavior, personality, and skill increase his likelihood of success. In Humfrey’s words, “the qualities needed in a newsreel man are a thick skin, indomitable push, and boundless ingenuity[.] . . . [T]he ability to make a quick decision is essential, as also is a certain flair for what is of news interest” (). This description indicates the presence of an underlying method to the madness that otherwise characterizes newsreel filming. Because elaborate and often daredevil antics went into capturing and transporting important footage – hiring airplanes to fly over barricaded cities, rushing at breakneck speeds to meet a boat that could ship the film to the right place, dramatic air-dropping of packages – such actions became the norm as operators persistently attempted to “scoop their rivals” (R. Fielding, ). By competing to “secur[e] the first pictorial representation of [news events] of importance,” cameramen in fact spurred the industry to establish new and more effective operational procedures (Talbot, ). Coupled with the structure of newsreel itself, the rhetorical positions of cameraman and editor solidify the newsreel’s embeddedness in the dialectical communication modality that structures Shannon’s and Wiener’s competing cybernetic definitions of information. Not only does newsreel combine thrilling, chaotic, and unpredictable subject matter with a rigidly defined, topically regulated, recognizable set of formal patterns and accepted standards, but the medium also requires of its producers the ability to work within an environment where the informational possibilities of pattern and randomness are mutually constitutive. Through these production processes, newsreel forges a unique relationship between its audiences and their contemporary social, cultural, and political environments. As historians of the genre profess, newsreel allows viewers to “understand and confront” the world that exists outside their individual experience, and it promises new forms of “participat[ion]” within that broader world; however, because newsreel communication wields the potential to fictionalize – film can “twist, distort, and invent” content, and even present “fraudulent” images (Baechlin and Muller-Strauss, ; R. Fielding, ) – the encounter with newsreel-based information also raises questions of veracity, artifice, and the capacity for discernment. Nicholas Pronay’s  essay on British newsreels foregrounds these issues when he

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argues that “films like newspapers are . . . only of peripheral value” as “sources of primary information about the events which they portrayed” (). Instead, he understands them as “records of what the public was told about the events, the politicians and the policies of the day” – as “a means of communicating, not a means of note-taking” (–). Pronay’s framework, thus, presents newsreel information as not simply a question of film content (“what the public was told”), but equally a matter of the techniques and structures that governed the media’s form (its “means of communicating”). I mark these issues of audience engagement and strategic manipulation of content to signal the ultimate destination of this chapter’s reading of newsreel, Dos Passos, and cybernetic communication. The patterns and randomness that make up newsreel’s structure and content lay a necessary foundation for comprehending Dos Passos’s cybernetic interpellation of his readers – his call for them to “confront” and try to “understand” their positions as “participa[nts]” within the twentiethcentury’s global circuits of transmission, exchange, history, and fiction.

Dos Passos’s Literary “Newsreels”: A Cybernetic Cross-Media Analogy The idea that the newsreel medium connects to cybernetic theories of information – in terms of its form, its transmission mode, and the ways in which its creators navigate their message-rich world – provides a new vantage point from which to consider the significance of Dos Passos’s “Newsreels” and their status in the lineage of cybernetic thought. They present, in condensed form, Dos Passos’s larger argument about American national identity in the twentieth century. In them, historical reality becomes spliced to the fictional artifice of aesthetic production, and the singular voices of individuals exist in tension with the broader patterns that infuse their cultural, political, and economic surroundings. Through the “Newsreels,” we see how publicly circulating information functions and accrues meaning within this complex cultural network, and how modernist fiction can serve as an information system within which readers are prompted to develop strategies for navigating the contingencies and constraints of historical reality and personal experience. As far as their surface content is concerned, the “Newsreel” sections of the U.S.A.trilogy splice a wide variety of newspaper headlines and story segments with lyrics from “over one hundred or so” popular songs (Trombold, ). In a sense, they provide a fragmented series of glimpses into the larger trajectory of American history that runs concurrently with

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

the novels’ more linear sections – i.e., their character-based narratives, autobiographical sketches, and vignettes of famous personages. Aside from the fact that the “Newsreel” content is drawn primarily from news sources, though, the media reference can seem rather perplexing. The sections do not offer complete accounts of news stories, only fragmented snippets (the legibility of which varies greatly – some are immediately clear, others bafflingly confusing); they emphasize the cultural ephemera of song lyrics and the small-scale stories of individual people just as much as the “big headline” news events that a nationally broadcast newsreel would typically feature; their lengths are not strictly regulated (although averaging between a page and a page and a half, the longest “Newsreel” extends to three pages, and the shortest runs to only nine lines). David Seed sums up the gist of this apparent disjunction when he notes that “in spite of Dos Passos’ title, the Newsreels scarcely ever allow any individual item to take on the volume it would need to resemble an item in a newsreel which, however briefly, temporarily fills the whole screen” (–). Nonetheless, I would posit that the “Newsreels” within Dos Passos’s trilogy live up to their title thanks to the ways in which they integrate precisely the cybernetic information-dialectic that we have seen at work in the filmed media and professional practices of the newsreel industry. These literary “Newsreels” also convey information through a combination of oppositional elements: established patterns and analogical frameworks (à la Wienerian cybernetics and newsreel production policy), which readers can easily recognize; unexpected, random, and often violent details (the stuff of a camera operator’s most lucky day in the field), which shock and disorient audiences; and the accumulation of large amounts of discrete messages, selected and organized first by Dos Passos out of a massive bank of data (as he employs his Shannon-esque, editorial capacity for “free choice”), and subsequently by each reader who progresses through the trilogy’s “noisy” plethora of spliced quotations. Furthermore, the “Newsreels” dramatize how public discourse perpetually presents realworld facts in the context of fictional, or at least strategically manipulated, content (e.g., sing-song lyric rhymes juxtapose actual news headlines). As such, an analogical reading of the novelistic “Newsreels” in terms of the technological medium attunes us to the cybernetic dimensions of Dos Passos’s work, both its formal literary innovations and the rhetorical implications his novels hold for readers. Each of the U.S.A. “Newsreels” reads, in at least some sense, as a prose poem whose informational content – names, events, etc. – orients the reader to a particular moment in the novel’s temporal trajectory. The most

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easily legible of these moments are tied to well-known historical events that either affected large numbers of people or seized immediate hold of the public’s imagination. “Newsreel I,” for instance, includes this string of headlines: “CAPITAL CITY’S CENTURY CLOSED/NOISE GREETS NEW CENTURY/LABOR GREETS NEW CENTURY/CHURCHES GREET NEW CENTURY/NATION GREETS CENTURY’S DAWN”; a few lines later, we read a paragraph that proclaims “The twentieth century will be American” (nd Parallel, ). This collection of immediately recognizable references situates us firmly in the United States in the year . A similarly clear temporal grounding is achieved in “Newsreel XI” for  (with repeated invocations of the Titanic) and “Newsreel XIX” for  (when the United States enters World War I). While the idea that the “Newsreels” establish historical context might seem rather obvious, Dos Passos frequently obfuscates the pattern by splicing in lines and fragments that are difficult to place. Headlines like “OUT FOR BULLY GOOD TIME,” “BUGS DRIVE OUT BIOLOGIST,” “Paris Shocked At Last,” and “BEDLAM IN ART” lack any overt temporal context, and add a Shannon-esque element of noise to the “Newsreels’” straightforward declaration of historical fact (nd Parallel, ; ; ; ). Nonetheless, because Dos Passos has so clearly established the connection to history in a few prominent “Newsreels,” even when the references we encounter in others are not as widely recognizable (as is often the case), we anticipate and read for their consistent contextual purpose. Layered onto the “Newsreels’” predictable formal pattern (fragmented texts extracted from historical documents that punctuate the novels’ more straightforward prose sections) and narrative purpose (to orient readers to the trilogy’s forward progress through history), Dos Passos emphasizes the unpredictable, chaotic, and often violent content that is the most common subject matter of filmed newsreel. The bits of text Dos Passos presents to us range from political and military motifs (focused on politicians, elections, battles, wars, and bombs), to economic references (about markets, labor, unions, strikes, and factories), to broad cultural concerns (including sexuality, murder, transportation, and technology). They revel in randomness, and the attempt to make sense of their excessive quantity draws readers back into the realm of the Dos Passosian list. In addition to these observations about content, I want to highlight how Dos Passos’s authorial role in regard to the “Newsreels” accrues cybernetic dimensions in light of an analogy to the complementary roles of cameraman and editor. Critics have analyzed the “reportage” and filmic elements of his peculiar fiction-meets-history narrative techniques. And in a

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 interview with the Paris Review, Dos Passos stated that “the desire to observe, to put down what you see as accurately as possible” is “paramount” in his work, and that he was “really taken with the idea of montage” while writing U.S.A (Sanders). He becomes, then, the “Camera Eye” who observes and collects a multitude of potential newsy details, and also the editorial overseer who excerpts, splices, and assembles them into the patterns they acquire in “Newsreel” form. The proliferating details that Dos Passos serves up in his fragmented, sprawling verbal reels, however, don’t emulate their easy-to-digest film counterparts. Instead, they verge on information overload. Dos Passos confessed, when asked whether U.S.A. was “a trilogy to begin with,” that “it started to be one book, but then there was so much that I wanted to get in that it got to be three books very soon” (Sanders). America’s information content, it turns out, is so vast that it required Dos Passos to develop an experimental literary form that could allow for and even invite this refusal-to-be-contained. Importantly, his novels’ form prompts us to become camera eyes and editors, too, as we navigate modernity’s cybernetic communication systems. “Newsreel III” presents a microcosm of this cybernetic communication strategy at work, analysis of which showcases its demand for a cybernetically oriented reader. Its opening reference to Kansas serial murderer “GEORGE SMITH” is followed by a sequence of wide-ranging historical references to violence: New Jersey anarchists “plot[ing] the death of one of the crowned heads of Europe,” Russian “Workmen . . . With Placards Saying Death To Czar Assassin,” and a “clash” between “Madrid Police” and a group of “ workmen carrying black flags” (nd Parallel, ). Each fragment enters our “camera eye” field of observation and carries its own historical and cultural weight. Throughout the trilogy, “Newsreel” segments often incorporate a similar structure, volleying back and forth between individuals and larger segments of society as they build up recognizable thematic patterns. As “editors,” we can connect these references to each other, to our existing historical knowledge, and to related references that appeared in earlier newsreel excerpts. In doing so, we start to cognitively develop an understanding of various themes – in this case, of violence as a backdrop to twentieth-century American modernity. Each violent event that the “Newsreels” reference, we can observe, is located along a spectrum running from total randomness (i.e., unintentional accident) to entrenched pattern (i.e., intentional or logical consequence). At the one end are chance occurrences that wreak havoc on the denizens of America: volcano eruptions, factory explosions, car crashes,

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shipwrecks, and murders. At the other is violence as a logical outcome in response to or as retaliation for specific triggers: capital punishment (in forms ranging from the electric chair to the firing squad), strategic placement of bombs during local uprisings and international conflicts, mob lynches, and even large game hunting. Layered onto this first opposition is a contrast between the narrowest slices of society (specific individuals who are either perpetrators or victims of violence) and its most vast, generalized populations (whole communities, countries, and even continents that face the violent destruction of war and disaster). When we combine both elements, it becomes possible to categorize and organize the hodge-podge of references to violence in various ways (individuals who experience accidents, large-scale consequences, etc.). Since the theme of violence extends over multiple “Newsreels” and assumes diverse forms, it opens up our reading to broader connections and allows us the free choice to make selective interpretations. Indeed, the sheer quantity of narrative “data” that the novels contain necessitates our adoption of the same cybernetic collecting and editing strategies that both newsreel film creators and Dos Passos (as author) showcase. By focusing on particular clusters of examples and comparing how different individual references, events, and incidents fit into particular categories and patterns, we each create our own unique understanding of the “Newsreel” sequences. As we start to organize the overlapping meaning of the references, though, we also have to confront numerous moments when confusion persists – instances where our ability to make sense of strange juxtapositions and bewildering phrases falters. After working his way through “Newsreel XXXVIII,” for example, Seed remarks, “it is impossible to attach any clear political hope to these details because, if anything, they suggest a general breakdown in order ” (, my emphasis). He goes on to argue that the “sheer variety” of references that populate the “Newsreels” “prevents us from getting a sense of wholeness” out of our reading (). A clearer invocation of cybernetic entropy and noise would be difficult to imagine. This type of disorienting variety appears in the lines that follow the “Newsreel III” reference to “GEORGE SMITH.” Without any visual indication of a shift in topic, Dos Passos crams together a disjointed sequence of spliced quotations: “MARQUIS OF QUEENSBERRY DEAD FLAMES WRECK SPICE PLANT COURT SETS ZOLA FREE” (). Similarly, “Newsreel V” gives us a scattered prose passage: “paralysis stops surgeon’s knife by the stroke of a pen the last absolute monarchy of Europe passes into history miner of Death Valley and freak advertiser of Santa Fe Road may die sent to bridewell for stealing plaster

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

angel” (nd Parallel, ). These jarring lines stymie the interpretive impulse by disrupting and confounding our expectations at the level of the phrase and the sentence. Their seeming randomness, though – in Shannon’s sense of the term, where the statistical rules of language determine the likelihood of particular words following one another in a sentence – offers an opportunity to develop new patterns of legibility and to forge creative connections. What connections can we conjure, the passage in “Newsreel V” seems to ask, between the end of Europe’s tradition of absolute monarchy and the unlikely pair – miner and advertiser – who seem to be in trouble for stealing a plaster angel? How might we create meaning out of the fleeting medical, textual, political, labor-oriented, and aesthetic frameworks that whiz by as we scan the passage, or the song lyrics that end it? A Wienerian perspective might find little or no informational content in these patternevading excerpts. However, such lines epitomize the informational potential that Hayles saw glimmering in the margins of Shannon’s cybernetic theories. Even though they might not seem immediately relevant to one another, the “Newsreel’s” song lyrics – “On the banks of the Wabash far away” – and references to monarchical political structures come into loose affiliation as a reflection of the tensions on display in the “Camera Eye” section that immediately precedes this newsreel (nd Parallel, ). In that vignette, two American children at a British boarding school (and thus “far away” from their home country) nearly fight over their parents’ political differences (whether they support “Roosevelt or Parker”) (). These puzzling yet provocative juxtapositions evoke questions about causality and connection and spur us to create networks of explanatory understanding, even if we are not quite sure how all of the data on display fit together. Seed’s reading arrives at a similar conclusion when he notes that it is “crucial to the Newsreels’ effect that a margin of confusion should be present in the reader’s mind. We are led towards making sense of the different items but ultimately prevented from doing so[.] . . . [T]he reader is both perplexed and left with the uneasy sense that no detail is actually meaning-less” (–). While I agree with Seed’s remarks about how the “Newsreels” function, the cybernetics framework draws out new implications of the opposition. The notion of a newsreel–cybernetic connection helps us understand the crucial relationship Dos Passos sets up in his novels between (aesthetically manipulated) historical fact and (historically contextualized) fictional narrative. Through the seemingly capricious free choice and confounding textual noise that inflect this relationship, Dos Passos offers cybernetic insight to readers as they grapple

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with their own navigation of modern, information-based subjectivity. This literary commentary on publicly circulating information illuminates the modern necessity for individual subjects who are immersed in a constant stream of media messages to navigate “data” much like the newsreel industry’s editors and cameramen had to – and like later cybernetic machines would. That is, they perpetually seek to locate and define patterns even within disorganized collections of information. This process, as Dos Passos stages it in the “Newsreels,” as the newsreel industry’s key players embraced it, and as later cybernetics theorists confirm in their dialectically interactive conceptions of information, involves the constant negotiation and evaluation of individual messages, perspectives, and scenarios in the context of vast and encompassing fields of data. We encounter this logic on multiple valences in the “Newsreels”: we must develop an understanding of each textual fragment based on its relationship to thematic clusters that spread across the novels, to seemingly unrelated fragments that happen to appear nearby, and to the novels’ spliced narrative forms with their mixture of fictional characters, historical figures, and autobiographical vignettes. These cross-genre connections reveal the unique contribution that a hybrid form like the U.S.A. trilogy can make to cybernetic theory and its attempts to make sense of the complex networks of messages that circulate in twentieth-century culture. Dos Passos’s fiction-meets-fact narrative mode becomes a tool for showcasing the myriad means by which individual subjects can start to navigate pathways through the informational excess of America’s historical reality and to understand and formulate their positions as part of broader social, cultural, and political identity categories.

Beyond the Newsreels: Random Patterns across Dos Passos’s Camera-Eye and Characters By reading the relationships that Dos Passos sets up according to a cybernetic logic, we can see how the novels invite readers to adopt a particular approach to modern information networks and to the relationship between factual and fictional material circulating in the public. Immediately following the trilogy’s “Newsreel” that proclaims the arrival of the “NEW CENTURY” with such gusto, Dos Passos presents a series of sections that oscillate between two young boys who will grow up in it: the autobiographical persona who focalizes “The Camera Eye,” and the fictional character Mac who later ends up “outa luck” (nd Parallel, /). The two figures’ geographic and economic situations are as disparate as the

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writing styles that characterize their narratives: the stream-of-consciousness “Camera Eye” focuses on an American expatriate child who travels with his mother through Europe, while the straightforward prose of “Mac” gives us Fainy McCreary, member of a working-class Irish-American family who is born in Connecticut. However, their experiences echo each other in ways that set up the novels’ pattern-randomness dynamic. In the first “Camera Eye,” an “angry” crowd pursues the boy and his mother calling them “Englander[s],” and they have to quickly duck “in[to] the postcard shop” and proclaim their status as Americans (“non nein nicht Englander amerikanisch americain Hoch Amerika Vive l’Amerique”) to be ensured safe haven (). Juxtaposed with this episode is an account, from Mac’s perspective, of the street battles that rage between the children of different groups of poor American immigrants. A gang of “Polak and Bohunk kids” pelt icy snowballs and yell out slurs at him – “Scared cat . . . Shanty Irish . . . Bowlegged Murphy” () – as he traverses their side of town en route to the drugstore to fetch medicine for his mother. Although disconnected in many ways, the two scenes work together to prepare readers for the trilogy’s preoccupation with colliding national identities. In keeping with the newsreel theme I traced in the previous section, we also start to see how those conflicts have the potential to escalate into violence, whether they take place within the context of America’s own diverse immigrant communities or on the broader geopolitical stage. The transition back to “The Camera Eye” perspective at the end of Mac’s first section also involves the introduction of a key theme that will rival politics and national identity in importance throughout the novels and that also reinforces the novels’ dialectic of pattern and randomness: references to transportation technology. Within the first few pages of Mac’s story, his mother dies and his father decides to move the family to Chicago. The narrative pauses at their moment of sudden departure. “With an enormous, shattering, rumble, sludgepuff sludge . . . puff, the train came into the station. They were scooped up and dragged across the platform and through a pipesmokey car and before they knew it the train was moving and the wintery russet Connecticut landscape was clattering by” (–). These lines give way to a rushed, impressionistic “Camera Eye” vignette, in which the young boy, his mother, and an anonymous “He” (almost certainly representative of Dos Passos’s father) are in a desperate “hurry” to catch a train: “and She was saying Oh dolly I hope we won’t be late and Scott was waiting with the tickets and we had to run up the platform of the Seventh Street Depot . . . and the conductor Allaboard lady quick lady” (). Both young boys find themselves swept up in the

The Cybernetic Information Dialectic



disorienting motion of modernity, transported along set paths over which they wield utterly no control. The puffing train that serves as a hinge between these two narrative sections signals mobility’s importance as another randomness-infused influence on the characters, aesthetics, and politics of U.S.A. Thanks to the pervasive presence of trains, automobiles, boats, and airplanes, the figures who populate these novels seem to be perpetually in motion: Mac will go on to traverse the continent (as will Margo Dowling, whose narrative trajectory covers New York, Cuba, Florida, and Hollywood); other characters (J. Ward Moorehouse, Janey, Daughter, Richard Ellsworth Savage, and Charley Anderson, to name a few) will venture to Europe as part of World War I activities; historical biographies of Henry Ford (“TIN LIZZIE ”) and the Wright Brothers (“THE CAMPERS AT KITTY HAWK ”), and “Newsreel LXIII’s” focus on Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight solidify the centrality of the transportation theme. The technological dimensions of mobility come together as a pattern that shapes characters’ movements through the novels; yet those same technologies also highlight how each individual character’s arc (and its connections to other parts of the trilogy’s fragmented structure) is founded on randomness and chance. Who would predict that Mac would end up in Mexico, that Daughter would become the second plane-crash fatality in her family (her brother dies earlier in  while training to be a pilot in World War I), or that Ford would reach the end of his life yearning for “the days of horses and buggies” (Big Money, )? Gradually, these narrative elements accrue information as part of a cybernetic network that links the lives of the U.S.A.’s fictional characters to historical personae. We encounter the linkage on multiple levels as the spliced narrative form challenges us – in ways that mobilize the same kind of feedback-loop learning required when reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos – to develop an understanding of each textual fragment, incident, or character based on its relationship to thematic clusters that spread across the novels. By interspersing fictional character studies with fact-based vignettes, Dos Passos’s work illustrates the role that literature can play in modeling ways to engage the complicated and interconnected reality of twentieth- (and now twenty-first-) century America. Individual, seemingly random events (alongside fictionalized accounts of events), he insists, are the constitutive building blocks of the patterns that undergird American society as it expands its global reach in the early decades of the twentieth century. National and cultural identity, in other words, are revealed through the accumulation, juxtaposition, and navigation of individual

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

experiences. This narrative framework illuminates the necessity for modern subjects who are immersed in a constant stream of media messages to process “data” much like the newsreel industry’s editors and cameramen had to – and like later cybernetic machines would. Dos Passos’s texts turn us into cybernetic readers – on the lookout for the random details that will bring larger cultural patterns into focus and grant us access to the novels’ (and the historical world’s) informational riches.

Conclusions: History, Fiction, and the Cybernetic Interpretive Impulse Within their multi-genre, information-rich, tangled textual world, Dos Passos’s novels align the processes of twentieth-century cultural interpretation with the work of cybernetic thinking. His novels, and we their readers, strive to identify consistent patterns within data sets, and those patterns ground our understanding of the systems that surround us. Concurrently, the outlying, random messages we encounter (which challenge those same patterns) mobilize us to adjust our perspectives. As Wiener’s experiments demonstrate, well-programmed cybernetic machines seek ways to translate randomness into mathematical patterns, and then, ideally, they use this randomness to (as Hayles puts it) reorganize at higher levels of complexity. The alternative, of course, is less appealing. As Wiener shows, if a cybernetic machine is unable to regulate random messages properly, it will burn itself out in data-overload as its mechanisms spin out in ever-more-uncontrollable oscillations. Likewise, as individuals seek ways to organize and orient themselves to the modern world, their task becomes ever more challenging, and it gains ever more potential to overwhelm them in the wake of media technologies, which, like newsreel (and the editor’s ticker-tape machine), stream endless messages to the public. Dos Passos stages this conundrum as a constituent framework of twentieth-century American subjectivity writ large. His novels make manifest a national psyche that must commit to the process of creating patterns out of unlikely and often-fragmented combinations of data, and therefore glean meaningful information out of inescapably random – and daunting – fields of transmissions. The risk, within the message-saturated milieu of modernity, is that the task will become too difficult, that the individual will become swallowed up in the “oscillations” of chaos and entropy, with disastrous and violent consequences (Wiener, HU, ). These different possibilities play out in the lives of Dos Passos’s characters and historical figures. By taking advantage of unexpected professional opportunities and chance encounters, Janey and J. Ward Moorehouse achieve business

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success and global financial power; the J. P. Morgan biography – “THE HOUSE OF MORGAN” – offers an historical complement to the characters’ fictional lives. These figures – both fictive and real – are able to carve out stable, purposeful places for themselves within their fields, though they remain perpetually susceptible to the workings of chance, as we see in Moorehouse’s heart attack at the end of The Big Money. By contrast, we have figures like Daughter and Isadora Duncan (the plane- and automobile-casualties), as well as Charley Anderson (a young World War I pilot and mechanic we meet in The nd Parallel who gets rich in The Big Money as part of the aeronautics industry when he returns to the United States, but becomes an alcoholic and ends up in a near-fatal car crash trying to beat a train to a railway crossing). Those characters, like so many of the violent fatalities reported in the “Newsreel” headlines, get caught up in the extreme contingencies of modern life and demonstrate the probability of a crash-and-burn finish. As (in Matthew Stratton’s terms) “novel” and “news” become braided together in U.S.A., Dos Passos offers us an important argument about the multiple polarities that cybernetic culture includes. To comprehend and critique the information that circulates in the big-data, myriad-message, pattern-rich, persistently random context of American modernity, he seems to be saying, we have to adopt radically flexible interpretive stances: we need to mobilize fictional modes of engaging with historical fact, and recognize the fictionalized status of historical fact within public discourse; we must situate individual events and experiences within broader sociocultural contexts, while simultaneously recognizing that these larger contextual patterns emerge out of those same individual experiences; we can organize our understanding of the world according to recognizable patterns, but we should also attend to the structures of chance and randomness that underpin and complicate those patterns. In this sense, Dos Passos’s trilogy occupies a distinct and significant place in the lineage of cybernetic thinking and communication, and the novels’ aesthetic structures can influence our understanding of the discipline’s later, scientific practitioners. Specifically, his literary version of the cybernetic information dialectic – which recalls the newsreel medium and its industry practices and enfolds pattern and randomness in a single communication mode – illuminates the gaps in each of Wiener’s and Shannon’s theories and, in doing so, offers a means of bringing the two together. Shannon, with his equation of entropy with information, elides the fact that patterns, too, wield communicative value, precisely because they give us what we expect. As the U.S.A. trilogy shows us, the familiarity, legibility, lack of surprise, and conformity to expectations inherent in

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pattern (in short, all of the characteristics that Shannon excludes from his definition of information) enable us to orient ourselves in any given communicative field of exchange. Only from this type of legible framework can we navigate the random, unpredictable messages that come our way (i.e., the messages that Shannon labels as information-bearing). By contrast, Wiener’s version of information, with its relentless pursuit of pattern, diminishes the informational potential of messages that exceed, refuse, or escape the logic of patterned organization. Dos Passos shows us, though, that these persistent moments of randomness are significant precisely because they prove that our communication networks are never fully map-able. Residual randomness solidifies the statistical premise of cybernetics (i.e., its basis in probability rather than certainty) and thus prompts the development of further pattern-finding strategies. Perhaps most important, in a world of coercive and often-violent power structures, the persistence of entropy within the patterns of America’s rigidly regulated transmission networks suggests that randomness will never fully cede its own informational power – that there will always be news to cover. Dos Passos’s dialectical approach to communication at least leaves this possibility glimmering in the margins. Overall, his writing indicates the extent to which the complex nature of information – a topic that so fascinated mid-century cyberneticians and has remained crucial into the present – was already part of the fabric of early twentieth-century communication culture. It found unique expression in the patterned forms and random content, the historical veracity and fictionalized aesthetics of newsreel, literary, and cultural transmissions. Dos Passos’s engagement with these topics highlights the role of macro-systems – geographical, economic, political – as influential factors on individual situations, choices, and lives. In Chapter , I turn to an author whose experimental aesthetics instead invite us to focus on the small-scale possibilities of cybernetic communication models. Like the pattern-seeking skills that Dos Passos’s novels encourage us to cultivate, Virginia Woolf identifies a heightened impulse within the modern individual to identify informational connections within the apparently disjointed world around them: “He is immensely inquisitive. He follows every thought careless where it may lead him[.] . . . And this very freedom and curiosity are perhaps the cause of what appears to be his most marked characteristic – the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind” (Essays IV, ). How, Virginia Woolf asks, do relationships and connections emerge between individual subjects as they navigate the intimate and affective dimensions of their twentieth-century social world?

 

Black Box Subjectivity Associative Language, Affect, and Radio Blindness in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Black-Boxes: An Anecdotal Opening . Norbert Wiener, in his first term as an instructor at MIT, stares out of his office window at the river, watching the waves “whipping across” the basin below (Conway and Siegelman, ). An urge to mathematically map the seemingly random undulations of the water’s movement spurs his research, and the next year he publishes a paper that introduces what we now call the “Wiener Measure” – a statistical model that leaves Newtonian physics in the dust and identifies patterns in the movement of particles that were previously viewed as utterly unpredictable. . Virginia Woolf, seated at the microphone of her local BBC broadcasting office, delivers a speech titled “A Ramble about Words.” In it, she presents a theory of language founded on words’ unpredictable associations and suggestive meaning. Her sly rhetoric offers a takedown of the BBC and its supposed status, under director John Reith, as the “voice of Britain.” It also provides us with a method for interpreting the multiple voices, interpersonal relationships, and fluid models of human subjectivity that circulate in her previous novel, The Waves (). . Silvan Tomkins, in a glorious reprieve from his Princeton psychology post, has just spent a year at the Ford Center in Palo Alto. The fruits of his year’s work include two volumes of Affect Imagery Consciousness, a now-famous tome that frequently chides Freud’s driveobsessed theories and instead bases its understanding of human psychology on the affects. More multifarious, complex, and contingent than drives will ever be, Tomkins’s affects nonetheless exhibit patterns that help us understand the dynamics of human subjectivity and interaction. These anecdotes mark the advent of three theoretical perspectives whose structural similarities gesture toward this chapter’s reading of modernism, psychology, and the cybernetic “black box.” The Wiener Measure, Woolf’s suggestive language, and Tomkins’s affects: each concept or theory 

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champions contingency and blindness against a more restricted mode of thinking – Newtonian physics, the BBC, and Freudian drives, respectively. Each disavows an impulse in the earlier framework to claim a complete, unified, or singular understanding of the world. Instead, each thinker exposes the uncontainable complexity that characterizes his or her respective field (particle physics, language, psychology). At the same time, though, all three seek and identify meaningful patterns that can help navigate these complex, interactive systems. In this shared commitment to comprehension amidst randomness, Wiener, Woolf, and Tomkins showcase the generative possibilities of the black box thought experiment cybernetics made famous. Originally theorized in the nineteenth century by Clerk Maxwell, introduced to cybernetics discourse through the discipline of psychology by W. Ross Ashby in , and mobilized as a cornerstone of “second order cybernetics” in later decades by Ranulph Glanville, the black box offers a model for understanding communication that recognizes the fundamental blindness of any observer to the internal mechanisms at work in its objects of study and external interlocutors (Glanville, “Darkening”/ “Radical Constructivism”). From a black box perspective, however, blindness and ignorance are not reduced to sources of despair. Instead, they become the motivation for developing a systematic approach to understanding input–output reactions – that is, for identifying patterns of communication despite persistent uncertainty. The black box model can be employed across a range of domains encompassing not only the hightech, data-processing, algorithmic contexts with which we most frequently associate the term today but also less explicitly technological areas, such as human psychology and language. Overall, the model operates on the premise that although a particular system may be so complex that its full comprehension is impossible, it is nonetheless useful to seek out patterns that can partially explain (or at least begin to identify patterns within) an otherwise unpredictable framework. In this chapter, I argue that the cybernetic concept of the black box, especially as deployed by Tomkins’s psychology theories, offers a helpful construct for understanding Woolf’s literary explorations of human subjectivity and interpersonal communication. I begin by explicating the cybernetics-based elements of black box logic that undergird Tomkins’s theory of affect in Affect Imagery Consciousness, then use Tomkins’s framework to read Woolf’s approach to rendering human subjectivity in literature. In particular, Tomkins’s implementation of

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Ashby’s black box methods (e.g., time-lapse observation, multiple vantage points, and partial access to information) articulate a theory of affect that illuminates Woolf’s representation of human relationships, affective response, and malleable meaning in The Waves. Both Woolf’s and Tomkins’s studies of human interiority integrate the cybernetic black box construct to illustrate that neither language nor personality can ever be transparent; instead, unpredictable associations and partial perception – thematized explicitly in Woolf’s writing through the trope of blindness – govern all communication systems. The motif of blindness shifts my focus in the second part of the chapter to the technological communication context of radio and allows me to read Woolf’s  BBC talk “A Ramble about Words” as part of her cybernetic communication practice. Here, she explicitly articulates a theory of language that adopts a black box framework in its emphasis on notions of association and suggestion as the basis for linguistic meaning – features of her work that other critics have explored, though not through this particular lens. Woolf strategically filters her argument through the aesthetic of radio transmission as her words strain against the confines of denotation and radiate outward in unpredictable and multi-faceted associations. Her broadcast’s logic both challenges the BBC and connects back to the communication modality that characterizes black box subjectivity and interaction in The Waves. By explicating how Woolf’s understanding of language and sound aligns the novel with her radio speech, I expose a distinguishing feature of her “black box subjectivity”: its mobilization of radio’s inherent aesthetic possibilities. The use of a technological communication medium to radically rethink human subjectivity and language, I conclude, carves out territory that exceeds the scope of Tomkins’s theories. Woolf’s writing – and, I argue, modernism more broadly – therefore assumes an even wider range of significance. It not only prefigures later twentieth-century debates surrounding technological cybernetics, but also more recent discussions by theorists such as Neil Postman, Christine Nystrom, and Carlos A. Scolari about the field of media ecology. By tracing these trans-historical, trans-disciplinary links, my reading of Woolf’s work showcases how modernism’s forecasting of what we can retroactively identify as cybernetic principles resonates beyond the midcentury discipline it most immediately prefigured. Modernist cybernetics also speaks to twenty-first-century media contexts, with their emphasis on issues of subjectivity, information management, and the battle for adaptability within an ever-more-technologized public communication sphere.

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

Complex Black Boxes: Tomkins, Affect, and Contingency Tomkins’s connection to cybernetics discourse is well established. In their “Introduction” to Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank explicitly align his writing with “cybernetics and systems theory” (). Like many cybernetics theorists, they point out, his “understanding of the human being” involves “the highly complex, highly explicit layering of biological and machine models” (). This layering figures in Tomkins’s writing as a fine-tuned attentiveness to varying degrees of “freedom” involved in the complex systems that direct “human motivation” (/). He posits “the affect system” as “the primary motivational system in human beings,” arguing that it is defined by “complexity” and governed by “the varieties of freedom which this complexity makes possible and the consequences of these varying degrees of freedom” (). The individual affects that Tomkins explores include: Interest–Excitement, Enjoyment–Joy, Surprise–Startle, Distress–Anguish, Shame–Humiliation, Contempt– Disgust, Anger-Rage, and Fear–Terror. The paired labels indicate the spectrum of intensity available within each affect category (i.e., interest is a less intense version of excitement). While each unique affect boasts distinct, recognizable characteristics, the ability of multiple affects to interact with one another in a myriad of different patterns, proportions, and layered combinations enables them to motivate the vast spectrum of human behavior, in all its idiosyncratic variety. Tomkins positions his theories in contrast to Freud’s psychological models, particularly what he sees as the latter’s tendency to “confus[e] drives and affects” and therefore “impute to all motives that which properly describes only one of the two systems” (). Affect, according to Tomkins, is a system distinguished from the simpler mechanism of the drives by its potential for “independence from those central assemblies which operate on feedback principles” alone (). The affect system’s “independent variability,” he argues, “enables the emergence of motives more complex than any such a motivational system as the drive system could support” (). He aligns this perspective with “recent developments in the theory of automata” that allow us to see how “two systems may be equally determined, but one be more free [i.e., more complex, able to do more] than the other” (/). Regarding this connection to systems theory, Sedgwick and Frank note that Wiener’s “early papers on cybernetics” were extremely influential to Tomkins’s theoretical work (). Nowhere is this intellectual lineage – and the departure from Freud – more evident

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than in his explorations of (in Sedgwick and Frank’s words) “the alchemy of the contingent” as the basis for human psychology and its study (). The embrace of contingency marks an apt starting point for considering Tomkins’s mobilization of the cybernetic black box as a productive approach for investigating the unpredictable workings of affect. To be clear, I am interested not so much in the black box as an object but more specifically in the methods that cybernetics theorists developed for interacting with and generating insights from/about black boxes. From this perspective, the Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems on the Principia Cybernetica Web provides a helpful starting point; it explains that the “black box method” constitutes “a strategy for investigating a complex object without knowledge or assumptions about its internal make-up, structure, or parts” (Krippendorff, my emphasis). Ashby’s  instructions to aspiring cyberneticians, for example, suggest recording “at each of a sequence of times the states of the box’s various parts, input, and output” (). In this way, he proposes, “every system, fundamentally, is investigated by the collection of a long protocol drawn out in time, showing the sequence of input and output states” (); “when a generous length of record has been obtained, the experimenter will look for regularities, for repetitiveness in the behaviour” (). Ashby claims that this time-lapse observation technique is capable of “represent[ing] anything from the investigation of an electrical network . . . to a psychiatric interview” (). In light of Ashby’s methodical approach, Glanville’s description of the black box as a “radical constructivist machine” that requires an observer to test for patterns based on viability rather than actual knowledge comes more clearly into focus – any information gained from interacting with a black box (machine, human, system) is always grounded in ignorance (“Darkening”). In a  essay titled “Inside Every White Box There Are Two Black Boxes Trying to Get Out,” Glanville explains the processoriented origins of the concept in more detail: Black boxes . . . were invented . . . [to] justify the building of functioning descriptions . . . that accounted for the observed behaviour of some phenomenon when the workings of that phenomenon were not clearly visible. . . . The black box gives us a concept that allows us to handle what is, in effect, an unknown world: it is the statement of ignorance, of our ability to overcome and cope with ignorance, and thus is a primitive of learning and, hence, of science. (, my emphases)

These lines indicate not only the centrality of the observer’s interaction strategies to black box methods but also the wide range of the black box’s

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applicability. As Ashby put it, “The theory of the Black Box” accrues nearly universal scope because it “is merely the theory of real objects or systems, when close attention is given to the question, relating object and observer, about what information comes from the object, and how it is obtained” (). Glanville’s definitions, though, also belie the tenuous balance in black box theory between two seemingly opposite goals: on the one hand, simply “cop[ing]” with contingency by accepting ignorance; on the other, attempting to master or “overcome” it. For all black box thought experiments, including Tomkins’s affect research (and, as we will see, Woolf’s experimental writing and theories of language and subjectivity), the observer must navigate this conundrum. As we seek to create the “functioning descriptions” that will render complex objects more predictable, Glanville argues, we inevitably end up with an “infinite regression of observers” that perpetually displace the possibility of full transparency (“Inside,” ). Tomkins’s work showcases this “regression” in the variety of scales at which black box thinking operates: we can consider each individual affect a black box; or the whole affect system of one human being; or, again, the broader system of a person’s interpersonal relationships, etc. Even if one of these scales of reference seems relatively straightforward, as they become more complex, they refuse the possibility of full comprehension by an observer/interlocutor. Returning to Tomkins’s work, because black box knowledge of complex phenomena (like human psychology) is limited to partial comprehension, his “functioning descriptions” will necessarily not account for every specific affective interaction. Indeed, the four grounding premises, or “General Images” he offers remain exceedingly general in scope: “() Positive affect should be maximized; () Negative affect should be minimized; () Affect inhibition should be minimized; () Power to maximize positive affect, to minimize negative affect, to minimize affect inhibition should be maximized” (). The very generality of these statements affirms Tomkins’s commitment to the complex black box model. Affect may adhere to a few, very general, core impulses, but its value, as an “object” of study, lies in its myriad potential variations on those themes. As Tomkins writes, “part of the power of the human organism and its adaptability lies in the fact that in addition to the innate neurological programs the human being has the capacity to lay down new programs of great complexity . . . designed to deal with contingencies not necessarily universally valid but valid for his individual life” (). Within a theoretical framework that seeks recognizable patterns, Tomkins’s work thus openly acknowledges the prominent position of

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uncertainty. His position as a psychologist means that his “objects” of study (i.e., the human motivation systems he discusses under the rubric of affect) always remain to some extent invisible and therefore not fully knowable. The contingency that consequently underlies his observations seeps into his writing’s grammatical tendencies: he dwells extensively in the conditional, frequently drawing on the modal auxiliary “may.” Through this repeated grammatical refrain, readers come to understand that no affective experience is ever guaranteed to unfold in a particular way. Instead, Tomkins’s theories enumerate the varied possibilities for what “may” happen to different people in diverse situations. Writing about memory, for example, he notes that “the recollection of past affect does not necessarily or even characteristically evoke the same affect” (). Rather, contingency reigns supreme, and possibilities remain open: “affect sensitization . . . desensitization or habituation . . . [or] a combination” all may occur (). Likewise, thanks to “the basic freedom of object of the affect system,” a person can “invest any and every aspect of existence with the magic of excitement and joy or with the dread of fear or shame or distress” (). In keeping with the black box construct, however, this embrace of uncertainty and associative potential does not preclude Tomkins’s attempts to construct “viable” functioning descriptions of the unknown, exceedingly complex “object” that is the human affect system (“Inside,” /). Indeed, his openness to unpredictable associations in fact allows Tomkins to “offe[r] a wealth of sites of productive opacity” and to “valoriz[e] error and blindness as productive of, specifically, structure” (Sedgwick and Frank, ). In his words – which describe his own scientific process just as well as the subjects he studies – “it is because man senses the contingency in his present distress, fear, shame as well as in his present joy and in his excitement that he is sustained by the idea of progress” (). This formulation showcases how the awareness of uncertainty fuels the intellectual drive to understand a black box entity. Within this framework, associative options proliferate, and Tomkins implicitly disavows the impulse to pin down or render predictable the spectrum of human psychological responses. Thanks to this commitment, his formulations offer productive rubrics for considering Woolf’s exploration of modern character and modernist aesthetic form in The Waves. Tomkins’s methods are especially helpful for both setting up a discussion of Woolf’s novel and solidifying a connection to cybernetics discourse. Because his theories build from precisely the type of long-term, sequential observations that Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics outlines for dealing with (human) black boxes, the later psychologist repeatedly

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emphasizes the importance of considering the unfolding progress of human development. In a discussion of joy, for instance, Tomkins moves from a list of potential ways an infant “comes to experience joy” (here, he emphasizes the relationship with the mother) to an exploration of the shifts that occur “as [the child] grows older” and “the nature of social enjoyment changes” to include a broader field of interaction (father, teachers, other children, etc.) (). More generally, he posits that temporal displacement is essential to comprehending the significance of any individual affective scenario. “Early experience,” he argues, “is being transformed by the experience which follows it, just as much as later experience may be transformed in terms of the memory schema of earlier experience” (). This idea of the past being constantly revised in light of future feedback offers at once a reversal, a doubling, and an opening up of the traditional concept of the feedback loop (explored in my earlier reading of Ezra Pound’s Chinese History Cantos), since the lines of influence run simultaneously in multiple temporal directions. It also offers insight into Woolf’s literary deployment of temporality in The Waves. Importantly, for the upcoming discussion of Woolf’s work, these examples highlight the social and self-reflexive elements of the human affect system. As Glanville explains, these two features figure prominently in any black box communication scenario: “there is a reciprocity between the black box and the observer, and . . . the two systems interact” in ways that eventually produce “social knowledge” (“Inside,” /). The significance of sociality and observation (concepts that I take up in relation to Gertrude Stein’s work and second-order cybernetic anthropology in Chapter ) emerge most fully in Tomkins’s work through his emphasis on mimicry, the human face, and linguistic exchange as the sites of human affective conditioning and expression. Furthermore, his writing foregrounds the added complexity of these dimensions in black box systems when the object of study is another human being. In keeping with Ashby’s earliest discussion of black box cybernetics, Tomkins demonstrates that the multiple, interconnected layers that structure human cognition, psychology, affect, and communication require specialized strategies on the part of the observer. In Tomkins’s work, then, we see cybernetics’ general black box method deployed toward creating “functioning descriptions” of the human affective system, a complex “object” that is governed by contingency, and inaccessible to observers in any direct way. Consequently, his approach to psychological study embraces blindness, uncertainty, and complexity, and he focuses on the potential for diverse affective responses in any given

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scenario. This stance works against Freud’s psychological model, with its reliance on the simpler, more limited system of drives to describe human motivation; it also offers new insight into Woolf’s early critical writing and experimental approach to characters in The Waves.

Catching Modern Character: Woolf’s Black-Box Literary Subjects By considering a cluster of Woolf’s essays – “Modern Novels” (), “Character in Fiction” (), and “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” () – in light of Tomkins’s black box framework, we can begin to understand how her conception of character aligns with his theory of affect and cybernetics discourse more broadly. This is especially true insofar as she sets her rhetorical stance against an established model that fails to acknowledge and account for the complex psychology of the modern human subject. That Woolf envisions the novelist’s domain as related to what would become Tomkins’s field of study is clear from the  essay, in which she explicitly articulates her belief that every novelist’s central goal is “to express character” (Essays III, ). To translate the statement into black box terms, authors of fiction, we could say, strive to create “functioning descriptions” of human subjectivity. As Woolf explains it, the impulse to accurately interpellate character in fact underlies all human social behavior (this is true for the cybernetic framework as well); however, it becomes a point of obsession with the novelist (as it does for the cybernetician-psychologist). In terms of the former, she asserts “that every one in this room is a judge of character. Indeed it would be impossible to live for a year without disaster unless one practiced character-reading and had some skill in the art. Our marriages, our friendships depend on it; our business largely depends on it; every day questions arise which can only be solved by its help” (Essays III, ). In our day-to-day engagements with one another, Woolf here argues, we communicate as black boxes – as unknown entities that use character reading as a “means of bridging the gulf between” each other and establishing a “common ground” for communication (Essays III, ). “Poetry, Fiction and the Future” even more explicitly affirms the aptness of the black box analogy when Woolf describes modern character as situated within a “box”: we are cut off from others, she posits, except for “waves of sound which pour through the roof and speak aloud to [us] of battles and murders and strikes and revolutions all over the world” (Essays IV, ). These lines point ahead to my upcoming exploration of Woolf’s radio affinities. For the time being, however, suffice it to say that they reinforce a black box conception of

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character and communication: opaque, yet still open to input–output transmissions. The figure of “Mrs. Brown” comes to stand in for this black box notion of modern character and subjectivity, and the writer’s duty, as Woolf proclaims it, is to “describe beautifully if possible, truthfully at any rate, our Mrs. Brown” (Essays III, ). Woolf’s ideas about how to best approach the project of “beautifully” and “truthfully” describing Mrs. Brown, like Tomkins’s theories of affect, are cast in clearest relief against a prior conceptual framework she sees as restrictive and inaccurate. For Woolf, the opposition lies between her contemporary (Georgian) cultural context and that of the Victorians and Edwardians who preceded her. “On or about December ,” her famous proclamation states, “human character changed” (Essays III, ). As a result, she writes, “the Edwardian [literary] tools are the wrong ones for us to use”; “the tools of one generation are useless to the next,” and, to draw from a phrase she uses in “Modern Novels,” nineteenth-century literary modes constitute “ill-fitting vestments” when they are deployed (as, for example, she claims they are by Arnold Bennett) in the twentiethcentury (Essays III, //). These statements echo the moment in a cybernetic black box scenario when a previously “functioning description” ceases to offer a “viable” explanation of an object’s behavior and, therefore, requires revision. Character, Woolf claims, shifts and morphs in new cultural contexts and its accurate representation therefore demands flexible, innovative literary approaches. The specific aesthetic tactics Woolf targets in her criticism further solidify the black box nature of her modern approach to “catch[ing]” character and confirm Woolf’s status as a contributor to the cultural lineage of cybernetic thinking (Essays III, ). Edwardian writing, Woolf claims, focuses too much on the external world of visible, concrete, material detail. She chides Bennett for “trying to hypnotize us into the belief that, because he has made a house, there must be a person living there,” and she argues that “the Edwardian writers . . . have looked very powerfully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window; at factories; at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at her [Mrs. Brown], never at life, never at human nature” (Essays III, ). By labeling the Edwardians’ tendency toward descriptive external detail “an obstacle and an impediment,” Woolf stakes out space for a new approach to literary form that “will stand further back from life” and concern itself not so much with “fact-recording” as with “the feelings and ideas of the characters” (Essays III, /Essays IV, ). She calls, in short, for writers to embrace a black box literary aesthetic.

Black Box Subjectivity



I am proposing here that, by seeking to represent the invisible, interior world of human character, Woolf is privileging the same realm of complex subjectivity, suggestive associations, and pluralized meaning that Tomkins explores in his affect theories. While these ideas are certainly not new to Woolf studies, the cybernetic notions of data that are embedded in Ashby’s black box construct and Tomkins’s affect theory can reframe our understanding of Woolf’s formal experiments and enrich our sense of their significance within the twentieth century’s information-rich media ecosystem: her interest in characters becomes newly legible according to the logic of input–output transmissions, as this lens highlights the relationships that literary texts establish among characters as well as between reader and character. In Woolf’s words, the most “real” characters are those with “the power to make you think not merely of [the character] itself, but of all sorts of things through its eyes – of religion, of love, of war, of peace, of family life, of balls in country towns, of sunsets, moonrises, the immortality of the soul,” etc. (Essays III, ). Characters, as complex black boxes, wield the social power to both represent and evoke these myriad associations. They become, in Woolf’s ideal world, dynamic and flexible figures capable of interacting differently with each reader. In fact, Woolf’s argument even echoes Glanville’s notion of an “infinite regression” of black boxes when she posits that every character representation is also subject to the individual idiosyncrasies of its author. As she explains it, “you see one thing in character, and I another. You say it means this, and I that. And when it comes to writing each makes a further selection on principles of his own. Thus Mrs. Brown can be treated in an infinite variety of ways, according to the age, country, and temperament of the writer” (Essays III, ). This passage, in what critics have identified as a key through-line to Woolf’s writing, disavows the possibility of any single representation emerging as the “only” or “best” or “definitive” way of reading a character’s personality, and instead posits literature as the medium in which multiple possibilities can jostle and echo with one another. From this perspective, the act of writing novels – of “express[ing] character” – and putting them into circulation conjures an intricate web of social relationships between various black box subjects: author and character, character and reader, and by extension author and reader, not to mention among the characters who share space in any particular novel, and the various authors who read and critique one another’s work. Thanks to the multiple layers of reciprocal, social interactions that fiction enables, literature becomes an ideal venue for an author like Woolf – already

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

dedicated to modern character and innovative form – to explore the human affect system in all its varieties and idiosyncrasies. And, while all of Woolf’s novels ostensibly pursue her core character-based ambitions, the formal experiment she conducts in The Waves creates an exemplary venue for her, her readers, and her characters to observe and participate in the interactive, suggestive affect networks that motivate human black box subjects to engage with the world. The distinct literary mode that Woolf employs in The Waves emphasizes the black box status of the novel’s central characters. She introduces them to us in a series of enigmatic statements utterly devoid of the “obstacles and impediments” that a narrative focused on the “external world” would contain. The lines instead present the subjective sensory perspectives of six children (whom we later deduce are friends attending a day school together). Caught at their moment of awakening, each registers a visual or sonic perception that begins to convey a unique affective relationship to the world: “I see a ring,” said Bernard, “hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.” “I see a slab of pale yellow,” said Susan, “spreading away until it meets a purple stripe.” “I see a globe,” said Neville, “hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill.” “I hear a sound,” said Rhoda, “cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down.” “I see a crimson tassel,” said Jinny, “twisted with gold threads.” “I hear something stamping,” said Louis. “A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.” ()

Throughout the novel, Woolf’s narrative moves around among these individuals’ varied perspectives and their various impressions and thoughts. All we have access to, as readers, is the “data” these quasi-voices lay bare for us; no external narration intervenes to contextualize or explain the novel’s world outside of their utterances. Given this dearth of explicit external context – a significant departure from Woolf’s earlier fiction, though it certainly extends ideas she had been developing in previous work – readers are required to engage in a version of the cybernetic “time-lapse observation” strategy outlined in Ashby’s theories if they want to develop any degree of “functioning descriptions” (that is, become adept at “character reading”) for the figures whose perspectives alternate throughout the book. The novel’s structure in fact

Black Box Subjectivity

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facilitates this temporally oriented reading approach. Nine discrete episodes track the six friends as they progress through their lives. Statements of what they each “said” (as in the previous passage) serve to transmit their individual responses to a series of experiences, both shared and unique. Furthermore, short italicized interludes frame the character segments by describing a rural seaside scene at specific moments in a day, from just before sunrise to the onset of darkness. The day’s progression guides the reader’s perception of the characters’ lives as they move from childhood through adolescence, into adulthood (where their reactions to the death of their mutual friend, Percival, become a central focus of the text), and then finally reach middle- and old-age. The novel’s final episode is transmitted solely by Bernard, who assimilates the experiences of all six characters in a lengthy retelling of their entwined life stories (the details of which at times conflict with the other characters’ earlier perspectives) that readers can infer ends with his death. The way this structure unfolds – with its chronological temporal progression and interlaced expressions of individual experience – emphasizes the same points Tomkins will later make regarding human subjects’ central, affect-driven motivational system. First, the past and present are mutually imbricated in the double-feedback loop Tomkins describes (“early experience is being transformed by the experience which follows it, just as much as later experience may be transformed in terms of the memory schema of earlier experience” []); in the novel, our understanding of any individual character (including our earlier observations of his or her personality) is constantly open to revision based on new transmissions we encounter. Second, affects can accrue to experiences and objects in a multitude of unpredictable ways (in Tomkins’s words, a person can “invest any and every aspect of existence with the magic of excitement and joy or with the dread of fear or shame or distress” []). We witness their individual particularities, broad associative potential, and openness to multiple feedback loops most clearly at moments when Woolf dramatizes characters’ divergent responses to analogous situations. Take, for example, the varied metaphors characters register as they identify the sun. It is, for Bernard “a ring” – the symbol of simple and comforting geometric completeness, and a fitting association for the character whose perspective will bring the novel full “circle”; for Susan, “a slab of pale yellow” – her impression almost sounds like butter, an apt image, given her adult status as the earthy, farm-based mother who will later declare “I think I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees” (); and, for Neville, “a globe” – his perspective infuses the vision with depth and dimension

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

(a characteristic move for the novel’s most intellectual figure) yet also with veiled sexual connotations that prefigure his future closeted desires (it “hang [s] down . . . against the enormous flanks of some hill” []). A few pages later, during the day’s school lesson, we witness how the children’s diverse personalities frame language itself according to particular affective associations, each of which resonates with and expands the significance of that person’s opening lines. For Louis, marked (at least in his own imagination) by his “Australian accent,” words perpetually signal difference and shame (). This link corroborates his earlier register of dread (the “stamping” beast), and words exist in his mind as a source of constant ridicule (“Jinny and Susan, Bernard and Neville,” his lines state, “bind themselves into a thong with which to lash me. They laugh” []). Susan connects words to nature; for her, they are “like stones one picks up by the seashore” – vaguely interesting and enjoyable, but simply part of life (). Bernard, the consummate storyteller, prone to flights of fancy, sees them as a dynamic source of excitement: “they flick their tails right and left as I speak them[;] . . . they move through the air in flocks, now this way, now that way, moving all together, now dividing, now coming together” (). Jinny connects them to fashion (“those are fiery words . . . I should like a fiery dress” []). Neville sees structure and organization in their precision (“Each tense . . . means differently. There is an order in this world” []). Rhoda, for whom words “mean nothing,” simply feels “terror” at her lack of “understanding” (). The various patterns of personality and social delineations that these lines begin to carve out between characters shift or solidify as the novel unfolds. Over time, for example, different configurations come into being and dissolve according to themes such as gender (e.g., boys and girls appear in separate clusters of text in the second episode, indicating their physical separation during their school years), economic status (e.g. Bernard and Neville are together at college, while Louis works in an office), and desire (e.g., Percival’s for Susan, Neville’s for Percival, Louis’s for Englishness, Jinny’s for adoration, Rhoda’s and Louis’s for inclusion – which they sporadically seek from one another, etc.). After the opening episode, though, all six characters only physically “come together” on the novel’s pages twice, at dinner gatherings that punctuate the novel (): at the first, they “say good-bye to Percival, who goes to India” (), and at the second, the now “middle-aged” group meets at “Hampton Court” after Percival’s death (/). These scenes have received considerable critical assessment, and the black box concept helpfully enriches that conversation by illuminating the function of these larger meetings as part of the novel’s

Black Box Subjectivity



efforts to “catch” character. They at once offer readers a chance to observe the group’s evolving transmission styles and social tendencies (and therefore to participate in the novel-long quest to identify either fluid or consistent patterns of behavior) and dramatize the characters’ own vexed attempts to read and understand one another. That the characters engage with one another as black boxes is clear at the latter encounter, where they strive to communicate, despite the persistence of opacity and uncertainty. After dinner, as the group moves outside to the gardens, Louis and Rhoda’s overlapping lines indicate their rapport: Louis’s “we shall perhaps drop a little behind” is immediately followed by Rhoda’s “like conspirators who have something to whisper” (–). However, left together after the other four have “vanish[ed] toward the lake,” the pair’s subsequent observations belie the lingering opacity that characterizes their communicative relationship. Louis fixates on their separateness from the group, and his bafflement at the others’ mode of social interaction: “How shall we put it together,” he wonders, “the confused and composite message that they send back to us” (–)? The lines echo his child- and early adult-hood distress at his inability to fully assimilate with the group, or to assume the status of “an average Englishman,” though they also suggest new hope, in the implied shared identity of the pronoun “we” (). Rhoda’s vision, by contrast, expands to include the entirety of London with its “trams squealing” and “flashes from the electric rails” (). She, it seems, feels so separate from her companions that she is even “divided” from Louis, who, she observes, cannot reach a “sufficient height” to avoid being “disturbed by faint clapping sounds of praise and laughter” that reach them from their friends at the pond (). When the laughing group returns, Bernard’s words – “We have destroyed something by our presence” () – echo the tenuous status of interpersonal understanding that Louis’s and Rhoda’s lines have so poignantly thematized. He recognizes that his arrival has caused a rupture; however, he cannot clearly articulate what, exactly, has been destroyed. This middle-aged version of Bernard may retain his earlier associations with the “ring” of completeness and the delight in words – his next lines involve an imaginative evocation of the “thousands of people” living, breathing, working, and sleeping in the city around him – but new inflections of uncertainty now permeate his affective relationship to the people closest to him (). “We are only bodies jogging side by side,” he reflects, acknowledging the inevitable isolation of human subjects, despite his efforts at social cohesion ().

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

The echoing linguistic and thematic patterns that Woolf uses to represent her characters’ constantly shifting affective relationships with the world and people around them (and to showcase their attempts to understand one another) thus implement the time-lag observational tactics cybernetic black-box thinking champions – or, to frame it from the opposite perspective, the cybernetic black-box construct offers a vocabulary for understanding the significance of Woolf’s communication strategies in this novel. Her literary version of this technique, by layering so many characters’ experiences on top of each other, also brings The Waves into dialogue with a second strategy that Ashby and Tomkins propose for engaging with complex black boxes: the embrace of knowledge gained from multiple perspectives, none of which is assumed to offer a complete vantage point (a point that is especially interesting given the unequal proportion of speaking time between characters in The Waves and the question of whether we are – or are not – meant to prioritize Bernard’s perspective). In this approach, an observer isolates specific components of a complex system for individual analysis, and thus seeks only a “partial” understanding of the whole. The technique is, on the one hand, eminently practical: “the method of studying very large systems by studying only carefully selected aspects of them,” Ashby writes, “is simply what is always done in practice” (). And indeed, the description accurately reflects Tomkins’s methodology in Affect Imagery Consciousness. Despite reminding us repeatedly of the complex and interwoven nature of affects, and of their capacity to “combine with other affects, intensify or modulate them, and suppress or reduce them,” he chooses to isolate and examine each affect in its own chapter (a helpful rhetorical decision for readers) (). On the other hand, though, Ashby’s discussion of partial knowledge belies a more profound conviction about its status, which draws its significance into the aesthetic literary realm of Woolf’s prose. He posits that “knowledge can certainly be partial and yet complete in itself ” (, my emphasis). Even if an observer is blind to part of the picture, he here argues, the available information can be sufficient to produce useful knowledge – especially if we consider it in combination with other partial viewpoints. Explaining this stance further, he writes, “the point of view being taken here is that science (as represented by the observer’s discoveries) is not immediately concerned with discovering what the system ‘really’ is, but with coordinating the various observers’ discoveries, each of which is only a portion, or an aspect, of the whole truth” (). These sentences resonate with Tomkins’s argument in praise of multiple perspectives: “in order to achieve full acquaintance with any object,” the latter proposes,

Black Box Subjectivity

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“one must vary one’s perceptual perspective, look at it now from this, now from that angle, watch as it moves in space, switch from a predominantly perceptual acquaintance to thinking about it, remembering what it was like in the past, what changes seem to have occurred . . . and so on” (). This valorization of multi-faceted observation, in tandem with the notion that each angle of observation only offers a partial view of the whole system, attunes us to additional cybernetic dimensions of Woolf’s approach to rendering modern characters in The Waves.

Black-Box Radio Aesthetics: Woolf, Blindness, and the BBC In her diary, Woolf referred to The Waves as an “eyeless book” (Diary III, ). The phrase, by situating the novel in the realm of blindness and partial – that is, sensory-limited – perception, provides a jumping off point for locating the novel’s rhetorical strategies at the intersection of not just cybernetic but also radiophonic communication aesthetics. Scholars such as Gillian Beer, Kate Whitehead, and Melba Cuddy-Keane, and more recently Claire Davison and Catriona Livingstone have made compelling arguments for reading Woolf’s work and contextualizing her quotidian habits through the lens of radio. Indeed, Woolf’s version of black box subjectivity in The Waves – with its constantly adjusting depictions of multiple characters, their relationships, and their interlaced affective responses – gains heightened significance as part of the lineage of cybernetic thought if we introduce radio transmission as an additional interpretive framework. Tomkins’s work, Sedgwick and Frank argue, “offers a wealth of sites of productive opacity” because it “valorizes error and blindness as productive of, specifically, structure” (). Radio foregrounds similar communicative registers but puts them into practice in the more tangible realm of sonic transmission and technological media. Ultimately, I see The Waves as a novel whose radiophonic black box communication structure brings modernism into dialogue with not just cybernetics and affect theory, but also twenty-first-century discourses of media ecology. To set the stage for this reading, the upcoming pages introduce radio’s distinct aesthetic properties, its broad cultural significance in the early twentieth century, and Woolf’s personal relationship to broadcasting. For an introduction to radio communication’s unique aesthetic potential, I turn to Rudolf Arnheim, a mid-twentieth-century German scholar of media, psychology, and aesthetics. Arnheim is primarily known for his work in the visual arts and psychology fields (his most well-known work is Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye []);

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however, buried under the long list of his more prominent publications is an early treatise on Radio: The Art of Sound, which was written while he resided in Rome in  and published during his subsequent brief sojourn in England. The text dedicates itself to explicating “some of the many extraordinary sensations associated with the broadcasting house and the wireless receiver,” and Anke Birkenmaier attests to the book’s cultural importance, claiming that it was “the only well-known book on radio in its early years” (Arnheim Radio, /Birkenmaier, ). Arnheim opens with an anecdote wherein French and German music, introduced by an English anchorperson and broadcast from London, plays on the radio in a remote Italian fishing village. This brief vignette sets the tone for a book that, unlike the work of many more pessimistic and cynical cultural theorists, will emphasize a sense of awe, wonder, and jubilation in its analysis of the medium of mass auditory transmission. This new ability to disseminate sound across the globe, Arnheim declares, “is the great miracle of wireless!” (). Perhaps the most important formal component of Arnheim’s explication of radio, in terms of his connections to cybernetic black boxes and the concept of partial perception, is his discussion of the fact that wireless communication “for the first time offer[s] . . . the acoustic element alone” (). The book’s most extensive chapter, “In Praise of Blindness,” pursues the implications of radio’s existence in the exclusively acoustic realm and argues for an understanding of radio as a medium that can offer its own full and complete aesthetic rendering of the world. This argument goes against many commonly held assumptions about early wireless; after all, although radio was certainly associated with immediacy and directness (to the point, Sconce argues, of uncanniness), it was equally fixed within popular understanding as a fragmented, a partial, and an incomplete medium because it only granted access to a limited field of sensory experience (Beer, “Wireless”). Arnheim himself acknowledges that “wireless rules out a certain range of senses in a most startling way. It seems much more sensorily defective and incomplete than the other [visually based] arts” (). He posits that radio’s “sin of [visual] omission” is particularly jarring because “the eye alone gives a very complete picture of the world, but the ear alone gives an incomplete one” (). However, he nonetheless proclaims – in a phrase that echoes Ashby’s declaration that knowledge can be simultaneously partial and complete – that within the auditory world of a radio broadcast, “nothing is lacking!” (). A compelling connection between radio’s structure and the cybernetic black box emerges in the oscillating logic of Arnheim’s passages that

Black Box Subjectivity

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theorize the aesthetic potential of this distinct radiophonic “blindness.” Within an ostensibly incomplete transmission, which omits any nonauditory data, “everything essential is there” (). In this declaration, Arnheim radically revises the idea of aesthetic completeness, positing that the isolation of one sensory quality constitutes not only a valid but also a productive means of redirecting and reattuning our perceptual apparatus. On its most basic level, this aesthetic principle is grounded in Arnheim’s claim that radio’s lack of a visually present form of representation is, in fact, its greatest strength. This perspective casts radio as an exemplary locus for a black box communication framework. As Arnheim puts it, “in wireless . . . the natural condition is simply that everything is lacking. It starts from a background of a silent void” (–). Jane Lewty has observed that readers encounter a similar narrative “void” upon opening The Waves, in which nearly all contextual information about character, setting, and scenario “is lacking.” And indeed, Arnheim’s description of radio’s transmission aesthetic encapsulates Woolf’s black box approach to catching modern character. In doing so, his writing illuminates her novel’s distinct version of cybernetic communication: that it relies on a radiophonic aesthetic and, therefore, draws its transmission innovations from one of the twentieth-century’s most important media forms. That radio was frequently on Woolf’s mind while writing The Waves is not difficult to conjecture: On September , , she first registered in her diary the “curious state of mind” that she “guess[ed] may be the impulse behind another book,” and five years later would be published as The Waves (Diary III, ). The height of Woolf’s creative focus on this novel (from  to ) therefore coincides with several of the major developments in wireless technology and changes to the BBC’s wavelength distribution. Woolf herself made one of her three broadcasts during this time (a talk on Beau Brummell in November, ) and Leonard was asked to give a series of six broadcasts on “The Modern State” while she was typing up and revising the manuscript. Radio crops up regularly in her diary during these years, at times in close proximity to The Waves. On December , , for example, Woolf self-identifies as a member of the radio audience (“Vita broadcasting. That bedroom voice, singing Bach, talking of the weather, has come in handy” [Diary III, ]), and the very next entry comprises a short note about “talking to myself over the fire about The Waves” (Diary III, ). A calendar break of a day may separate these two musings; nonetheless, their proximity suggests an inherent (if understated) association between “waves” and “radio” that echoes in her novel’s title.

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

Woolf’s diary remarks about radio, however, also illustrate her longstanding ambivalence about the medium’s role in British culture. She never gets quite as incensed as Ezra Pound but, during events such as the General Strike of , she articulates a wary attitude toward radio transmission as a means of disseminating mass information. On May , when newspaper circulation had ceased and radio was the only public news forum still in operation, Woolf penned the following note: “A voice, rather commonplace & official, yet the only common voice left, wishes us good morning at . This is the voice of Britain, to wh. we can make no reply. The voice is very trivial, & only tells us that the Prince of Wales is coming back (from Biarritz), that the London streets present an unprecedented spectacle” (Diary III, ). Here, Woolf’s uneasiness about the status of the monolithic “voice of Britain,” which asserts a position of uncontested vocalized authority over the events at hand, is palpable. As the unstoppable voice edits its version of the strike down to the most trivial of details, “no reply” is possible. Four days later, Woolf again articulates a distaste for and distrust of the BBC’s voices and their attempts to mitigate the current state of social unrest. “Baldwin broadcast last night,” she writes. In a mocking tone, she comments that “he rolls his rs; tries to put more than mortal strength into his words” to rally his constituents behind his efforts to end the strike (Diary III, ). “Impressive as it is to hear the very voice of the Prime Minister,” she nonetheless “can’t heat up my reverence to the right pitch” (). Instead, Woolf perceives Baldwin’s on-air attempts at authoritative presence as verging on dictatorial: “His self assertiveness becomes a little ridiculous. He becomes megalomaniac” (). She concludes, “No I dont [sic.] trust him: I don’t trust any human being, however loud they bellow & roll their rs” (). Whether it is the Prime Minister, the evening newscaster, or “the solemn broadcaster assuming incredible pomp & gloom & speaking one word to the minute” who comes on the air on the afternoon of May  to “read out [the] Message from  Downing Street,” Woolf’s reactions to the “official” voices of the BBC consistently mix mockery with anxiety (Diary III, –). She demeans them as nothing better than “a little ridiculous,” but (as critics have noted) she also senses something threatening in their assumptions of grandeur and authority. Although regional programming was on the rise in the s, under director John Reith, the BBC had long cast itself as a unifying national force, offering, as Jeffrey Richards explains, a “public service” based on the ideals of “consensus, continuity, culture” (Richards, –/). As is

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evident from Woolf’s reactions to many of the radio voices that infiltrated her own listening spaces, this impetus toward homogeneity inherently grated upon her aesthetic and political sensibilities. Woolf’s diary references to the broadcast she delivered on April ,  echo similar sentiments of frustration with the medium of radio in general, and the BBC in particular. On April , her writing fairly wails with annoyance. “What a mercy to use this page to uncramp in!” she writes, “after squeezing drop by drop into my  minute BBC: wh[ich] is alternatingly  & then  minutes. Curse the BBC” (Diary V, ). One week later, she notes that the “BBC have [sic.] asked L. to do a whole series,” and adamantly proclaims, in disgust, “Never again will I read even one talk . . . Never again never again” (Diary V, ). Nonetheless, when it comes to actually drafting and reading her broadcast, Woolf experiences an opposing undercurrent of excitement and even thrill. Her diary entry from April  reads, “I’ve done, that is scribbled down, my BBC essay – with some exhilaration” (Diary V, ). On April , she likewise allows some positive sentiments to infiltrate her discussion of the broadcasting ordeal, primarily with respect to her own performance: The BBC was moderately successful: that is I got my pecker up & read with ease & emotion; was then checked by the obvious fact that my emotion did not kindle George Barnes[.] . . . But the bright bubble, the fly in the eye, & all the other effects – premonitory shivers & disgusts of that BBC gently subsided & vanished as I walked home through the cold streets alone, & thought that very few people had listened[.] . . . So great was the relief that I was very cordial to Barnes, & would have agreed to do another had he asked me. Remember, however, to refrain from that folly. (Diary V, )

These lines may still convey Woolf’s general annoyance with the BBC and its staff; however, they do not simply stop there. Despite the personal anxiety and broader social concerns that broadcasting so obviously elicits, the disgust “subside[s]” to acknowledge a positive potential in the act of broadcasting her voice and ideas over the airwaves. If we read Woolf’s distaste for the BBC as centrally rooted in her uneasiness with its attempt to present itself as the voice (singular, uniform, regulated, monolithic, absolute) of the country, then her approach to and pleasure about the  broadcast reveals a playful, yet pointed, desire to unravel radio’s pretense from within. Capitalizing on what she understands as the medium’s “true” aesthetic possibilities, she mobilizes the radiovoice’s capacity to conjure multiple and diverse meanings rather than to unify and homogenize a varied listenership. Much like her early essays,

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

which staked ground for modernist literary expression against the existing (and, in her view, restrictive) context of Edwardian and Victorian fiction, this broadcast text crystallizes her distinct theory of linguistic malleability (a theory that we have seen at work in The Waves, with its embrace of contingency, black box subjectivity, and associative suggestion) in contradistinction to the BBC’s attempts at vocal authority. Woolf’s decision to articulate her theory of language “on the air” brings into focus important and unexplored radiophonic dimensions of her previous literary work. This talk provides an interpretive lens for understanding how The Waves’ black box aesthetic deploys the same provocative potential that Arnheim’s work assigned to radio blindness. Woolf’s literary experiments therefore accrue important technology- and media-inflected layers of significance, which open up new interpretive frameworks for modernism and its cybernetic lineage more broadly. To offer a bit of context, Woolf presented her radio talk as part of the BBC’s “Words Fail Me” series, which aired weekly lectures on different aspects of meaning and pronunciation in contemporary English. Her contribution was officially titled “Craftsmanship,” and was published posthumously in its entirety by Leonard Woolf as part of an essay collection, The Death of the Moth (). A nearly eight-minute excerpt of the broadcast itself survives – a remarkable component of the Woolf archives, as the only extant recording of her speaking voice. During the talk, which was clearly designed for oral presentation, Woolf maintains a measured rhythm of speech, pausing to add emphasis to particular words or thoughts. Her tone, although decidedly prim, is rife with wit, puns, and tongue-in-cheek humor (she even works in a sly allusion to the recent abdication of King Edward VIII). She invites listeners to consider the fate of words in contemporary culture and pleads for a more conscientious (as she frames it, accurate and truthful) approach to language usage in both day-to-day communication and the aesthetics of high literature. In terms of content, Woolf offers what amounts to a manifesto on behalf of words, a call for writers and speakers everywhere to “think and feel before they use them,” and to grant words their rightful “liberty” to signify in multiple directions rather than attempt to “pin them down to one meaning” (). The talk thus bids listeners to embrace a relationship to language that Woolf’s own literature, as we saw in The Waves, already puts into practice. However, the distinct intricacies of the radio-based argument emerge through the speech’s twisty, meandering “Ramble,” and its strategic mobilization of radio’s suggestive, blind aesthetic. She discusses her decision to cast off the official title “Craftsmanship,” because

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“craft,” she argues, connotes “useful,” and the term has no place in a talk about words (). Puzzling though this claim may initially seem, Woolf explains that to be “useful” would be “to express one simple statement,” and if “a useful statement is a statement that can mean only one thing,” it is patently ludicrous to employ the idea in the context of words (–). She illustrates words’ incapacity to signify in a singular way through a humorous anecdote that details how a cautionary note posted in a railway carriage – “Do not lean out of the window” – can have disastrous consequences: At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, “Windows, yes windows – casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken neck. ()

In Woolf’s comical argument, windows lead to casements, which lead to Keats, whose poetry spurs foolhardy actions on the part of the defenseless reader, caught at the whim of her imagination’s associative wanderings. “Useful,” therefore, words are not. Rather, they offer up “a thousand possibilities,” and contain “so many sunken meanings” that even “one sentence of the simplest kind rouses the imagination, the memory, the eye and the ear” (/). Given their suggestive capabilities, it is no wonder that, to Woolf’s way of thinking, words are incapable of conveying straightforward facts: they are far too “full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally” (; note how well the final adverb epitomizes her claim with its multi-faceted connotations that range from “of course”/ “obviously” to “in their nature”). The fact that words lack usefulness provides the basis for Woolf’s subsequent, and more central claim: that their “other quality, their positive quality” is “their power to tell the truth” (). Truth, then, is within the realm of words’ power; what exactly Woolf means by “truth,” though, only emerges in the subsequent twists of her meandering, rambling argument about the nature of words themselves. She describes in depth words’ associative nature (they “belong together” and can only have meaning through association with other words, as “part of a sentence” []), and she chides words for their stubborn promiscuity and unteachability. It is impossible, she claims, to define their meaning in straightforward terms, which means that “words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

mind,” where they can shift among the multiple contexts of an active human consciousness (–). The “truth” that Woolf understands as the real potential of words, therefore, exists in direct opposition to concrete facts or use-based forms of expression. Instead, it “is many-sided, flashing this way, then that” (). It is located in “the suggestive power of words,” and her essay’s numerous playful associations constantly reinforce its driving imperative: to embrace the evocative and shifting truths of language, to delight in the unexpectedly promiscuous combinations that words can create, and to strive after truth and beauty (the same values that drive Woolf’s quest to “catch” modern character) in our relationship with the intricacies of language (). Suggestive echoes link these examples to my earlier reading of Woolf’s essays, a cross-text connection that Niklas Cyril Fischer has also recently explored, and also to the cybernetic black box. Indeed, in the “manysided, flashing” logic of Woolf’s radio broadcast, individual words start to function like black boxes in and of themselves. A word, she proclaims, wields complexity in its ability to signify in multiple ways and to shift in connotation depending on different contexts (historical or cultural moments, people speaking, minds processing meaning, etc.). Expressing sentiments similar in generality to Tomkins’s general statements about affect, she writes: “A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on [words]. All we can say about them . . . is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them” (). Next, in a passage directly reminiscent of the line from “Modern Character” that casts character representation at the whim of individual authors, she here notes that words “mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as pikestaff to the next” (–). Through association, words, affects, and character thus layer onto one another thanks to their structural similarities – that is, their unpredictability and uncontainability. Furthermore, the notion of a single word as its own black box gains new traction in the context of radio’s distinct transmission aesthetic. Woolf’s use of the medium resonates with an idea that the first BBC Director of Talks, Hilda Matheson, foregrounds in her  study of Broadcasting. Radio, Matheson argues, . . . is making everybody – throughout the world – more conscious of the sound of language, of pronunciation, cadence, intonation, of larger vocabularies and of larger forms of expression[.] . . . Broadcasting . . . has made several million people conscious, if not of their own speech, at least of the speech of others. By enabling a whole country or continent to listen to a

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disembodied voice, wireless concentrates attention on it . . . bringing out every little trick and peculiarity. (Matheson, –)

The mediation of the human voice by the broadcasting apparatus is here cast as a means of granting “new emphasis and importance” to the spoken word, and therefore enabling a revision of the public’s relationship to language and voice (Matheson, ). Woolf’s talk capitalizes on these provocative possibilities. Rather than present her theory of language as text on a page, she articulates it over a medium whose blindness focuses attention on the sensory, suggestive, inflected nature of vocalized words in ways that a written text simply cannot. She thus mobilizes the aesthetic potential of radio’s built-in transmission structures to bolster and magnify the potential significance of her thesis. This approach subtly draws out other aspects of the radio’s effects on our perception of the words we encounter from other human voices: after all, not only does radio automatically draw its listeners’ attention to speech (as Matheson and Arnheim both point out), but it also epitomizes the notion of suggestively conveyed meaning. Matheson, again, emphasizes this aspect of radio’s more abstract sonic capabilities: “Most voices, like most smells, start an immediate memory or association, which may consciously or unconsciously determine whether they are liked or not” (). From this perspective, the individual sound of a voice – its acoustic texture, timbre, tone, intonation – functions much like an individual word in Woolf’s conception of language. It evokes a range of associations, which are impossible to fully catalogue or define (though they may signal certain class-based, racial, and/or geographic identity markers) as they create unpredictable aesthetic links for particular listeners or readers. While I will not undertake a detailed discussion of the sonic qualities of Woolf’s voice, I invite readers to listen to the recorded excerpt of the talk and ponder the response her speech evokes in its pacing, its accent, and its inflections in volume and tone. As this analysis reveals, Woolf’s talk makes several interlaced arguments. On the one hand, she provides a political statement that challenges the status of the BBC in early twentieth-century British culture: critiquing the organization’s rhetorical ambitions, she adds her voice to the increasingly widespread calls for it to loosen its mandate for nationally coherent and homogenous narratives; instead, the thrust of her argument implies, radio broadcasting should embrace the suggestive richness of the human voice and its capacity for linguistic play. On the other, Woolf articulates a multi-dimensional aesthetic “manifesto” with important implications for



Cybernetic Aesthetics

our understanding of her broader literary oeuvre. The broadcast at once affirms and extends the black box approach to communication we already saw at work in her  novel (illuminating its relevance for even the smallest unit of language – the individual word). The technological transmission medium magnifies the suggestive potential of this writerly tactic, and these connections offer helpful new feedback loops for reconsidering the radiophonic – and cybernetic – dimensions of her earlier work.

Words as Black Boxes: Woolf’s Wavy Associations The six statements that introduce The Waves’ characters, I have argued, immediately establish the novel’s interest in divergent affective responses to objects. If we read these multiple, varied perspectives alongside the notion of partial perception (as emblematized in radio’s “blind,” suggestive, sound-only aesthetic, and embedded in its earlier title “wireless”), the characters’ diverse impressions also showcase the status of individual words as black boxes. The “ring” of sunlight that Bernard says “quivers and hangs in a loop of light” gains a new syntactic valence in Susan’s discovery of “a caterpillar . . . curled in a green ring” (). The “cheep, chirp” of Rhoda’s bird calls (as substanceless as she will become in her own eyes) morphs into Neville’s more piercing vision of “birds’ eyes . . . bright in the tunnels between the leaves” (). And the word “leaves” skips around from character to character, morphing in association with each shift – Susan likens them to “pointed ears,” Jinny observes leaves with “stalks . . . covered with harsh, short hairs,” and Louis, alone behind the hedge, invokes them to express his sense of frozen blindness: “Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing” (/). “Let me be unseen,” he soon implores, willing himself into imagined camouflage: “I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth” (). In the short span of these opening passages, Woolf gives us: leaf ears, leaf eyes, leaf hair; leaves as humans, humans as leaves, leaves as protection from other humans. Through it all, Louis’s ultimate wish at this moment – leave me alone – remains unspoken, yet suggestively emerges as part of the text’s linguistic echoes. In this way, the novel’s repeated iterations of a single word by different voices build up its connotative complexity, and it begins to function like a black box. Through varied nuances and sonic inflections, partial meanings layer upon one another, and at times those individual words can assume a level of complexity rivaling that of even the novel’s characters. A rich example of this proliferating associative potential appears in the novel’s titular term, given the multiplicity of meanings that exist for the

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word “wave”: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) provides eight principal definitions (many with four or five sub-categories), and a list of over  common compounds. The term provides an apt motif for tracking Woolf’s novelistic exploration of linguistic flexibility, which renders single words (as well as human subjects) black boxes worthy of sustained observation and study and incorporates radio’s technological associations and sonic transmission structures. The OED entry begins, unsurprisingly, with what is probably the most common denotation of the word wave, “a movement in the sea or other collection of water” (“Wave”). Woolf also begins from this watery meaning when, in The Waves’ opening vignette, she describes how “the wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously” (). The prominence of the ocean’s waves emerges frequently and insistently within the interludes that frame the novel’s character-based sections. Although Woolf describes a variety of images in these passages, from the way the light hits the ocean’s surface, to metaphors invoking movement of the sun, to detailed accounts of the “trees in the garden” and the birds singing, the rhythmic constant throughout all ten vignettes can be heard in the sound of the waves (). Read in sequence, the accumulation of wave descriptions accrues an evocative and almost hypnotic resonance: “Meanwhile the concussion of the waves breaking fell with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on the shore” (); “The waves drummed on the shore, like turbaned warriors . . .” (); “the waves . . . fell with a regular thud. They fell with the concussion of horses’ hooves on the turf . . . They drew in and out with the energy, the muscularity of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again” (); “The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell . . . The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping” (); “The waves massed themselves, curved their backs and crashed ” (); “But the waves, as they neared the shore, were robbed of light, and fell in one long concussion, like a wall falling, a wall of grey stone, unpierced by any chink of light” (); “The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle” (). The rhythmic pulse of the waves in these passages, whether described as sighing, breaking, falling, massing, or crashing, reinforces what several critics have labeled the central theme of The Waves: the constant processes of ebb and flow, push and pull, coming-together and dissolution, which also shape character’s lives and relationships. However, in reading these multiple invocations of the ocean waves alongside Woolf’s theory of

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

linguistic suggestiveness and association, a different valence of their significance emerges. Even while describing the ocean, Woolf’s language strains away from the correlation of waves and water that the dictionary’s first entry supplies. Perhaps most importantly, in terms of the novel’s radiophonic aesthetic, the ocean wave persistently asserts itself as a sonic motif. It becomes a kind of rhythmic sound-scape or chorus (Woolf herself labeled it a “voice”) that runs throughout the text, substance-less rather than water-bound. Its associations, therefore, by repeatedly emphasizing auditory perception, reinforce the novel’s formal preoccupations with sound and add a nonhuman voice to its cast of central characters. Sonic metaphors also frame the image of the wave – drums, mechanical engines, the human voice, an animal stamping – each evoking connections among multiple nonwatery contexts, whether within the novel (i.e., with Louis, linked to the stamping beast since his first utterance), or transcending its pages (i.e., with the mechanical rhythms of the modern world). Indeed, when we come to the novel’s closing line, “The waves broke on the shore,” the suggestive sonic echoes of previous references magnify an otherwise straightforward declarative sentence, “breaking” the sound-image of the novel’s final ocean waves into multiple associative registers, utterly uncontainable by any singular definition (). The fact that Woolf presents the ocean’s waves as a rhythmic voice (one that is metaphorically evocative and sonically resonant) already suggests a crossing over into additional definitional categories for “wave.” The dictionary’s second entry, which describes “an undulatory movement . . . of something passing over or on a surface or through the air” as well as several scientific contexts, encompasses a range of physics-related fields from meteorology and optics to the electro-magnetic realm familiar to Woolf’s readers as radio waves. Bernard, traipsing through the forest with Susan as a child, most strikingly invokes this latter connotation. “Now we are safe,” he claims; “I hear nothing. That is only the murmur of the waves in the air” (). But Woolf returns time and time again to waves that undulate invisibly: Susan, caught at a moment before sleep, feels “stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths” (/); a late interlude conjures the wave as a substance-less phenomenon (“Through all the flowers the same wave of light passed in a sudden flaunt and flash as if a fin cut the green glass on a lake” []); and waves even become part of night, “As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on . . . Darkness rolled its waves along” (). Through the presentation of waves as both sonic rhythms and invisible transmissions, a radiophonic logic accumulates a pervasive presence in the novel. In her diary, Woolf

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even articulated her narrative goals for the childhood scene in terms that reinforce this media connection: “the unreal world must be all round this – the phantom waves” (Diary III, ). To reiterate the core claim this lexical analysis aims to advance: the word wave, for Woolf, holds the potential to affectively signify in any number of directions for different characters – and readers. Notably, as it operates in various additional “figurative” or “fixed” contexts that bridge from radio back to the realm of affective response, every single one of Tomkins’s affect categories appears (“Wave”). Bernard describes Neville, at the anguished instant when “he gave me his poem . . . like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence – dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul” (). Rhoda’s social terror also finds expression in the wave: I am to be broken. . . . I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens. The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness. ()

Bernard, while approaching his friends at Hampton Court, prepares himself for a startle: “my little boat bobs unsteadily upon the chopped and tossing waves. There is no panacea (let me note) against the shock of meeting” (). Rhoda evokes disgust in response to the rules of fashion and social conformity: therefore we cluster like maggots on the back of something that will carry us on. Decorous, portly – we have white hair waved under our hats; slim shoes; little bags; clean-shaven cheeks; . . . we settle down, like walruses stranded on rocks, like heavy bodies incapable of waddling to the sea, hoping for a wave to lift us, but we are too heavy . . . ()

One of Bernard’s final visions suggests anger, or at least distress: “This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. . . . No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me” (). Neville’s final image of Percival – a figure associated perpetually for him with shame – is of “a wave of his hand” (). At the other end of the spectrum, the fact that Bernard “must go on waving” as he departs for school for the first time is followed by the joy of independence (). To round out the affect catalogue, we encounter interest as Susan, stuck in school, thinks wistfully of home, where “the hay waves over the meadows” ().

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

In terms of affect, then, each iteration of the word “wave” offers a partial perspective on its rich range of meaning, and as readers of Woolf’s intricate black box linguistics, we work – as Ashby explained it – to “coordinat[e] the various . . . discoveries, each of which is only a portion, or an aspect of the whole truth” (). For an audience familiar with Woolf’s childhood habits of moth-hunting and her early working-title for the novel (The Moths), the dictionary’s shortest entry has additional evocative potential: a “Wave” is also the “book name of certain geometrid moths” found in Britain. The connection grants additional significance to the closing lines of the novel’s seventh italicized interlude: “All for a moment wavered and bent in uncertainty and ambiguity, as if a great moth sailing through the room had shadowed the immense solidity of chairs and tables with floating wings” (). This passage suggests that, in the world of Woolf’s suggestive linguistic play, wave and moth are somehow equivalent, recalling a moment in her broadcast speech where the moth analogy extends to words as well. If “we pin [words] down to one meaning,” Woolf states (suggesting the entomologist’s display techniques), “they fold their wings and die” (“Craftsmanship,” ). In numerous ways, the signification of “wave” circulates around the motif of radio and its aesthetic properties – its vocalized transmissions, its suggestive power, and its limited, blind perceptual realm. The definitional contexts that inflect the characters’ affective, sonic, and semantic associations with waves thus exist in perpetual proximity to the “Hertzian waves” that were well known to the early-twentieth century public (“Wave”). Radio becomes a backdrop to Woolf’s novelistic exploration of her linguistic theory as it plays out among the multiple black boxes that populate The Waves. This association with radio distinguishes Woolf’s approach from Tomkins’s theories, and also brings her work into dialogue with the field of media ecology – a disciplinary interlocutor whose cybernetic associations and environmental concerns offer a bridge from the intimate focus of Woolf’s character-centered writing to the broader cultural concerns on display in Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical narratives that I explore in Chapter .

Virginia Woolf and Modernist Media Ecology We gain new insights into the rhetorical ambitions of Woolf’s early essays,  novel, and  radio broadcast, this chapter has argued, by reading them alongside Tomkins’s theories. His implementation of the cybernetic black box construct within his own discipline (psychology) offers a

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framework for reading her literary exploration of human subjectivity: its complex affect system, its social and self-reflexive structure, and its reliance on the dynamic, suggestive power of language for communication. As Tomkins writes, “the world created by words . . . is a world in which affects can be extraordinarily modulated and amplified, enriched and deepened” (). Language thus “enables the expression and evocation of affect,” and linguistic “enjoyment” – especially, he posits, in the form of “speech” – entails “a type of social responsiveness [that] undergoes continuous transformation, reflecting the continuing development of personality” (). Formulations like this, alongside Tomkins’s commitment to maintaining contingency and unpredictability as central to his understanding of human motivation, helpfully illuminate Woolf’s approach to catching modern characters. He draws our attention to the ways in which her literary representations of human relationships and social exchange not only showcase the experiences of characters who strive to comprehend their own and each other’s vastly different affective response patterns but also invite readers to participate in (and hone their abilities to navigate) the dynamic process of modern “character-reading” that Woolf sees at play in so many aspects of our lives. However, the technological valences that I have traced through Woolf’s work – that is, the radiophonic aesthetic that I identify in her repeated invocation of wireless waves, emphasis on sonic appeal, and valorization of partial perception – push beyond the scope of Tomkins’s theory. These distinct techniques allow us to situate her black box framework differently within the twentieth century’s rapidly evolving media networks and emerging ecologically oriented discourses. Woolf’s ideas, we might say, become early examples of a field that would eventually be defined as “media ecology” – “the study of complex communication systems as environments” (Nystrom, ). Early media ecologist Neil Postman’s work implies a connection to cybernetics; as he puts it, “the word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. . . . An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving” (Postman, , my emphasis). And Carlos A. Scolari’s description of the field echoes my reading of Woolf’s interpellation of radio technology: “technologies,” he claims, “in our case, communication technologies, from writing to digital media – create environments that affect the people who use them” (). The increased presence of radio voices in the air during the years Woolf crafted her novel, we could say, helped create the communication environment in which her characters’ lives play out.

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Importantly, though, Scolari also notes that “media ecologists have always defended and promoted a dialectic and transactional approach to media and culture” (). Media ecology, in other words, resists “technological determinism,” and instead traces more complex relationships of influence between science and culture (). This perspective allows us to understand Woolf’s literary production not simply in terms of the formative influence a technology like radio may have had on her aesthetics, but also according to the new feedback loops she adds to technological, cybernetic, and media discourses. If, as Scolari argues, “media ecology tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing or thinking, and why media make us feel and act as we do,” then, in many senses, Woolf’s writing already puts media ecological frameworks into practice (). The Waves (especially when read alongside her broadcast) demonstrates the profound aesthetic capacity for suggestion, association, and unbound affective signification that radiophonic communication technologizes. The novel showcases the radical influence of this approach to communication on human perception, feeling, and behavior, guiding readers to understand the ways in which cybernetic orientations to the world permeate interpersonal communication strategies for subjects living within media-rich environments. Modernist cultural practice, from this perspective, is not merely a site for retrospective media ecological study. As Robert C. MacDougall, Peter Zhang, and Robert K. Logan write, “media ecologists . . . strive to understand the active nature of media as systems. They know . . . that like any medium, a communication medium is a process not a thing” (). This book argues that modernist literature showcases precisely this flexible, process-oriented perspective – in short, that modernist authors are performing the work of media ecology itself. From Ezra Pound’s poetic networks of feedback loops that prompt readers to learn from the past to John Dos Passos’s novelistic mobilization of cybernetic information through the dialectical patterns and randomness that structure newsreel; and from James Joyce’s world of proliferating print and puns to Woolf’s suggestive, affective, radiophonic aesthetic, modernism presents twentiethcentury communication as absolutely an “active . . . process” – one that implicates human subjects as part of a complex discursive web with their surrounding media environments. Chapter  will pursue this environmental dynamic further by exploring how Gertrude Stein’s self-reflexive approach to cultural identity mobilizes many of the strategies that second-order cybernetic anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson would later use (and that also appear in her parents’ – Margaret Mead’s and

Black Box Subjectivity

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Gregory Bateson’s – work). These modernist connections reframe the ambitions of media ecology for distinct aesthetic contexts and draw attention to the complex communication demands readers face within their data-oriented, information-saturated, constantly shifting modern world. This approach to literary production positions modernism as part of the twentieth century’s emerging discourse of cybernetic thought, communication, and technology. Modernism, then, becomes a kind of interface (a literary version of Scolari’s technological “bridge between two devices” []) for exposing the connections that suture cybernetics to media ecology. The modernist lens can help us reinsert some of the language of the former into the latter and enable us to see how cybernetics’ central concepts (high-speed, high-volume data processing; probability, entropy and uncertainty; feedback loops, information, and black boxes; self-reflexivity) inform the later-twentieth and twenty-first century discourse. And to close with a nod to the anecdote with which I opened this chapter, these connections help us start to see how Wiener himself already embraced and drew inspiration from the environmental attentiveness that explicitly grounds media ecology when, back in , he was spurred to create new mathematical formulae after staring out of his window at the waves crashing on the shore.

 

Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Definition by Contrast Gertrude Stein as Second-Order Cybernetic Anthropologist

[An organism’s] present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as in the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible.

(Norbert Wiener, The Human Uses of Human Beings, )

Aerial Perspectives and Altered Perceptions In , the sequel to Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas appeared in print, largely thanks to the fame that she garnered by publishing that  best-seller. It had sold so well, and brought her such a degree of celebrity, that Random House told her they would publish a book of hers per year, and that they would leave the choice of text entirely up to her. Everybody’s Autobiography picks up where Toklas leaves off, and after a couple sections of lead-up and preparation, the book’s longest chapter presents a detailed account of Stein’s  lecture tour in America – the only trip she ever took back to her homeland after leaving for Europe in . During the tour, Stein traverses the North American continent by various modes of transport, and she even gets to experience the novelty of commercial flight. Forced to consider travel by plane thanks to a last-minute opportunity to see Four Saints in Three Acts performed in Chicago (which they would miss if they took the train from New York), Stein and Alice are at first “afraid” since they “never have” flown before (). But upon receiving reassurance that Carl Van Vechten can accompany them, they say “all right” and off they go (). In an almost laughable understatement, Stein’s first comment on her inaugural airplane trip is simply “it was nice”; however, she goes on to describe how there is “nothing more pleasing more soothing more beguiling than the slow hum of the mounting,” to discuss how “inside of the plane . . . the pilots and the stewardess were more like the efficiency of war than either the American or French army had been,” 

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and to ponder the significance of the new perspective on American geography that her aerial view affords (). Stein then remarks that because they “liked” flying so much, “whenever we could we did it” (). As a result, descriptions of plane trips – and the meandering thoughts that occur to Stein while she’s up in the air – crop up regularly in Everybody’s Autobiography. One such instance reads: One of the things in flying over America is the lot of water, there is a lot of land of course there is a lot of land but there is a lot of water. Everywhere of course where there is land there is a lot of water, in France in motoring you are always crossing bridges but then the water is a small lot of water but in America particularly when later we flew over the valley of the Mississippi there was a great deal of water[.] . . . Of course really the most impressive water to fly over is where there is no water and that is over the region before Salt Lake City, there it is the bottom of the ocean and when you have once seen the bottom of the ocean without any water as one sees it there it is a little foolish that the ocean should have water, it would be so much more interesting to look at if it had no water. Rivers are different, rivers are more interesting with water than without water. Well anyway. (–)

This passage, and the larger set of descriptions it represents (in which Stein recounts her experiences of flight and the perspective on America it reveals to her), provides a glimpse of several key themes this chapter explores. At the level of prose, we encounter Stein’s characteristically looping style – thirteen iterations of the word “water” appearing in this -word excerpt alone. In terms of subject matter, we witness how Stein’s encounter with a new twentieth-century technological possibility – commercial flight – has profound implications for her perspective on the world and her ability to move through it. She is able to cover more ground more quickly than ever before, an important fact, given her ambition of capturing the national character of a vast and diverse country like the United States. She is able to articulate the distinctness of what she’s seeing below her by making a comparison between two national contexts (driving through France versus flying across America) and between two viewpoints on the same geographic feature (the reference to the Mississippi valley here is part of a recollection about the “shock” of seeing that “the Mississippi was a little river” in the Midwest compared to its size in New Orleans []). And she is able to adopt a perspective that assumes an enlarged geological and global scale, thanks to the insight that the Salt Lake region’s appearance offers into the contours and likely aesthetic beauty of hidden oceanic topography. These new frames of reference filter into her vision of what is conceptually available for a twentieth-century artist invested in the

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practice of observation. Indeed, her later attitude toward flight indicates how far she has come from her initial fear. At the end of her tour, when she has made it to her home state of California and is about to begin the return journey to New York and then back across the Atlantic to France, she and Alice “happened to be there when the first big airplane was flying off to Honolulu”; she pauses to muse “I would like to go around the world in an airplane, I never did want to do anything and now I want to do that thing” (–). In this statement we can see how the possibilities of air travel have become integrated into Stein’s frame of reference on what constitutes twentieth-century life and experience. In this chapter, I read the underlying patterns that emerge in Stein’s writing about the American continent and its culture as evidence of her contributions to the emergence of cybernetic thinking in the years leading up to that discipline’s official inception. As with earlier chapters’ case studies, my argument builds from ideas that historians of cybernetics like Bernard Scott have articulated: that “cybernetics came into being before it had a name,” and that “from the outset, cybernetics was conceived as both art and science” (/). I invite us to see cybernetic orientations to the world as part of a broader aesthetic discourse that extends beyond the scientific, mathematical, and technological disciplines that cybernetics historiography typically engages. More specifically, I cast Stein’s work as part of an emergent cybernetic aesthetic that adopts what we now label “second-order” tendencies, and that is often associated with social science disciplines, anthropology in particular. The chapter begins with an overview of the entwined disciplinary histories of modernism and anthropology. It then moves to an extended reading of Stein’s self-reflexive theory of cultural “composition” as an early iteration of the second-order cybernetic approaches to the study of human culture on display in the work of anthropologist and linguist Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of renowned anthropologists and cybernetics scholars Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. As she explains in the “Prologue” to Our Own Metaphor: A Personal Account of a [] Conference on the Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation, Bateson’s childhood and early academic career were formatively steeped in the emergent discourse, community, technologies, and methods of cybernetics. She went on to pursue a career in cultural anthropology, conducting several of her own ethnographic projects (that were grounded in second-order cybernetics) from the s through the s. By analyzing Stein’s observations of American culture – on display in her  Lectures in America and later autobiographical account of her lecture tour – in parallel with Bateson’s

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late-twentieth-century autoethnographic accounts of her own life and experiences, I illustrate the two authors’ shared cybernetic, pedagogical drive. They strive to convey to readers the importance of adopting selfreflexive habits of observation that work through reiteration, juxtaposition, and analogy, and that foreground the necessity, within modern culture, of grappling with large-scale data sets. These strategies, they propose, help us become better attuned to the rich patterns of life that comprise our everyday existence (but often go unnoticed) and, by extension, enable us to more strategically and effectively act within our world. The fundamental alignment between Stein’s approach to cultural observation and second-order cybernetic anthropology is perhaps best illustrated through comparison. The following passage comes from Bateson’s  monograph, Peripheral Visions: Learning along the Way. In this text, Bateson echoes Stein’s argument about the ways in which technological developments in vertically oriented mobility (now into outer space) enable new, larger-scale strategies of observation and modes of perception: We [now] have the possibility of borrowing the stained-glass mandala to refer to the living planet of which we are part, setting it beside the actual photograph of the earth [sic] taken from space, making the medieval fascination with circularity a symbol of ecology. No other being that we know of, no generation in our history, is capable of juxtaposing these images or imagining that analogy. We live today with multiple representations, some we call science and some we call art, precise, abstract, vivid, and evocative, each one proposing new connections. ()

In mobilizing the aesthetic possibilities of space travel and the vision of Earth it affords, Bateson offers a late-twentieth-century update to the vision of interconnected North-American river networks and sea-floor topographical contours that Stein can conjure thanks to the aerial perspective of her trans-continental flight. Bateson’s larger argument’s spiraling logic (which operates according to an aesthetic similar to Stein’s repetitive, accumulating insight) invokes some of the same comparative, crossdisciplinary frameworks for understanding the underlying patterns of contemporary culture and communication that Stein draws on. “With the instruments and findings of science,” Bateson proposes, “we can refine a given pattern of perception, but the mental imposition of a pattern of meaning is the only way to encounter the world. Without it we are effectively blind. We move through metaphors and analogies, learning through mistakes” (). Technology – and, more specifically, technology that enables access to a broader scale of perception than was previously

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available – serves, for both of these authors, as a generative source for the metaphors, analogies, and juxtapositions that enable us to construct robust, self-reflexive understandings of our socio-cultural environments and our place within them. Or, as Bateson puts it, “often material objects turn out to be diagrams, cognitive maps, that share our space, teach our children, and argue for ways of organizing experience” ().

Modernism, Anthropology, Second-Order Cybernetics The notion that Stein’s work can be productively read alongside anthropology builds from work by scholars such as Maria Farland, Bridget Chalk, and Johanna Winant, who frame her aesthetic theories in terms of several scientific contexts, such as medicine, and suggest connections to the social sciences. Chalk’s label of Stein as an “ethnographic observer” () and Winant’s comments about Stein’s interest in developing explanations of “groups of people” () are particularly generative in this respect; Robert Volpicelli’s reading of the book alongside the New Deal-era’s “privileged aesthetic form: the documentary” similarly underscores Stein’s ethnographic tendencies (). However, since the main focus of these critics’ arguments lies elsewhere, they do not fully develop the implications of these cross-disciplinary links. While scholarship on Stein’s affinities with the social sciences might be sparse, critics such as Eric Aronoff, Brad Evans, Susan Hegeman, Marc Manganaro, and Marianna Torgovnick have established broader connections between modernist literature and early developments in anthropology. Their work emphasizes the concurrent emergence of the artistic movement and field of social science: “the s,” Aronoff states, was “the period in which literary criticism and anthropology attained their modern disciplinary identities” (). Furthermore, the two disciplines shared a close-knit intellectual community, in which “such anthropologists as Boas, Sapir, Parson, and others were active participants in the broader intellectual, aesthetic, and political circuits that characterized American modernism” (Aronoff, ). Specific readings of modernist literature in conversation with anthropology take various approaches; together, they demonstrate a shared commitment to the idea that early twentiethcentury theories about and definitions of culture played out in an interdisciplinary field of discourse where literary authors and social scientists working in anthropology engaged in meaningful and productive (if not always explicitly acknowledged) ways. Evans sums up two key points that run through this body of scholarship: that “in the modernist period of the s and s, . . . poets and anthropologists seemed to share the same

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project with regard to the elucidation of authentic cultures”; and that “literary studies and anthropology . . . cross-fertilized each other throughout the twentieth century in a protracted debate about the meaning and appropriate analytic apparatus for conceptualizing culture” (). While literary critics working on modernism and anthropology do not explicitly reference cybernetics, the way in which their arguments are so often framed in terms of the concept of culture as pattern opens the door for that disciplinary leap. Hegeman’s Patterns for America (with its echoes of anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s  study Patterns of Culture) is perhaps the most obvious example here, but the motif threads through many arguments. These analyses emphasize how early twentieth-century authors and anthropologists tended to view cultures as “internally cohesive” wholes that are “constituted from ‘meaningful’ ‘forms’ or ‘patterns’” (Aronoff, /). This perspective therefore sets up ready connections to early cybernetic thinking, with its focus on closed systems that can be observed and mapped according to the data they produce. We can align these anthropologists’ ideas about culture, for example, with some of Norbert Wiener’s discussions and observations of Maxwell demons and cybernetic machines: these entities combat entropy as they respond to feedback, since they “produce around [themselves] a local zone of organization in a world whose general tendency is to run down” and thus exhibit predictable – that is, cohesive, meaningful, patterned – behavior (HU, ). Connecting Stein’s writing about culture to first-order cybernetics’ emphasis on pattern-recognition and information-management is similarly straightforward. In her Lectures in America collection, for example, “What is English Literature?” casts humans as akin to information-processing machines in their ability to accumulate and make sense of large amounts of data: “There is a great deal of literature but not so much but that one can know it,” Stein proclaims; “at any moment in one’s life one can know all of it” (, my emphasis). In this passage, the sweeping claim to an “all[-encompassing]” “know[ledge]” of English literature suggests a scale of understanding that operates at cybernetic dimensions. In addition, the lecture develops an argument that resonates with cybernetic theories of feedback, proposing that it is possible to not simply “know” all of literature, but also strategically mobilize that knowledge to generate insight about larger cultural trends. Farland gestures toward this interest in largescale data processing when she reads Stein’s approach to identity in The Making of Americans as “aiming rather grandiosely toward a ‘history of everyone,’” as does Volpicelli when he identifies (in her Everybody’s Autobiography title) Stein’s “impulse to see the American individual

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(autobiography) as part of the American whole (everybody)” (Farland, /Volpicelli, ). And Stein confirms this reading of her work in “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans” lecture when she notes, “I was sure that in a kind of way the enigma of the universe could in this way be solved. That . . . if I went on and on and on enough I could describe every individual human being that could possibly exist” (). As these excerpts indicate, the type of large-scale access to data – and the impressive ability to organize and manage it – that cybernetics emphasizes plays a key role in how Stein conceptualizes her own genius and her capacity to use her observational skills to map the complex dynamics of modern culture, identity, and communication. General concepts drawn from cybernetics discourse therefore have strong potential to illuminate the underlying similarities between Stein’s theories of culture and those of many early twentieth-century anthropologists. As I argue in this chapter, though, we can gain more nuanced insight into the significance of Stein’s experimental strategies for representing culture – and into Stein’s contributions to the lineage of cybernetic thinking – if we instead look to the second-order cybernetics principles that anthropologists like Bateson embraced later in the twentieth-century. Second-order cybernetics emerged in the s as part of a shift away from the first-order cybernetic focus on communication systems as closed, or contained entities toward a new conception of open networks, the study of which must therefore account for the role observers play in shaping the systems they observe. Key ideas that emerge across scholarly accounts of second-order cybernetics include circularity, self-reflexivity, and the notion of “doing science from within” (Umpleby, “Second-Order,” ). Scholars such as Céline Lafontaine, Lydia Liu, and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan have traced the networks of intellectual influence that bring these emergent cybernetics frameworks into contact with poststructuralist and postmodern theory. “Under the new paradigm,” Scott explains, “all knowledge and all knowing is observer (self )-referenced” (). This significant shift in cybernetics discourse is associated with a variety of disciplines, from physics, biology, and psychiatry to engineering, economics, and education. As second-order perspectives gained traction, contributions from social science disciplines like anthropology assumed a more prominent status. These scholars brought cybernetics’ technology-rooted and statistics-based frameworks to bear on their approaches to studying (and extrapolating larger-scale patterns of behavior from) specific human subjects, one-on-one interactions, and individual communities.

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Anthropologists G. Bateson and Mead are typically cited as figures at the vanguard of this transition to second-order cybernetics thanks to work they produced in the late s. In , G. Bateson published a short essay titled “Cybernetic Explanation” in The American Behavioral Scientist. Some aspects of his “explanation” recapitulate ideas from earlier cyberneticians, such as the central role that statistics, probability, mathematical reasoning (e.g., the proof ), and patterns play in cybernetic thinking. However, he shifts into second-order mode when he introduces the significance of context: because cybernetics work is rooted in the study of communication, he contends, and therefore is interested in “sequences which resemble stimulus-and-response rather than cause-and-effect,” it needs to take into account the environment in which interactions occur (). This orientation reconceives the observer as participant, a subject whose position and influence must be considered if we want to accurately map out the informational and interactive dimensions of any given scenario. Bateson encapsulates this key premise of second-order cybernetics in his signature aphoristic style: “without context, there is no communication” (). This idea is crucial to understanding the role of repetition and contrast in both Bateson’s second-order cybernetics-based ethnographic work and Stein’s earlier literary engagements with American culture. Mead’s most oft-cited contribution to the second-order turn is a  keynote address titled “Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” which she delivered at the inaugural meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). Her talk returns us to the theme of technological developments in air travel and their implications for humans’ observational and perceptual capacities. Situated mid-way between Stein’s () vision of America as seen from an airplane window and Bateson’s () meditation on the analogy-generating potential inherent in the image of Earth as seen from outer space, Mead’s cold-war-era keynote deploys the airport as a motif to provide critical commentary on cultural awareness – or, as Krippendorff summarizes the talk’s goal, on “how [cybernetic] systems are changing society in unprecedented ways” (“Cybernetics’ Reflexive Turns,” ). She offers a detailed discussion of the implications of this relatively new infrastructural phenomenon, focusing most specifically on the fact that when you build a new airport, you need to get things right the first time. After all, the scale of influence and potential effect that an airport wields within a nationalized or globalized system of communication/transportation networks means that the consequences of any error in design, construction, and roll-out can be dire. Mead worries about – and invites

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fellow cyberneticians to grapple with – what she perceives as a decreasing “interest in the human components of complex automated and computerized systems,” especially since “we are living in a society where one mistake can dislocate the lives of thousands of people, wreck distribution systems, and distort life-history data, and subsequent career lines” (“Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” ). These observations implore the audience to think about how the twentieth-century’s expanding technological capabilities simultaneously fuel cybernetics work and raise the stakes of that innovation. Given this context, Mead proposes in closing, the cyberneticians who are part of the ASC urgently need to adopt self-reflexive, self-critical orientations to their own pursuits and discipline. Krippendorff’s insightful analysis of the talk emphasizes how “the reflexive turn that Mead advocated . . . calls on cyberneticians to not only attend to how they contribute to the ongoing transformations of society but also be accountable for their effects” – in other words, she encourages “the discourse of cybernetics to embrace the context of its social consequences” (“Cybernetics’ Reflexive Turns,” ). The second-order cybernetics principles of self-reflexivity that Mead and G. Bateson articulate serve a pedagogical purpose in prompting readers to adopt particular approaches to information processing and data management, particularly when engaging with culture and its various contexts. These anthropologists encourage us to pay attention to our roles and positions as observers within specific environments, and also to the various social, geographic, and interpersonal networks within which we find ourselves. As Scott summarizes it, second-order cybernetics stresses the necessity of recognizing how “our observations . . . are constructions based on particular sets of assumptions” (). This cybernetics-based approach to cultural study is deeply embedded in Bateson’s autobiographically inflected ethnographies from the s. It also appeared much earlier in modernism’s engagements with self-referential aesthetics; this cybernetics/ anthropology/literature lineage is particularly evident in Stein’s idiosyncratic  autobiography with its unusual approach to representing the patterns of American culture – or, as she might put it, to “composing” America’s “composition.”

Pursuing the “Patterns of Life”: Culture as “Composition” Bateson’s and Stein’s ethnographic projects both conceive of culture in similar, cybernetically inflected, second-order-oriented ways. This convergence is particularly evident in their shared interest in what Bateson’s

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mother earlier labels the “patterns of life” that characterize individual cultures and societies (Mead, Coming of Age, ). The phrase comes from Mead’s  monograph Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, in which she casts the anthropologist’s task as a quest to understand “these diverse and gracious patterns” through ethnographic research into “the process by which the baby, arrived cultureless upon the human scene, becomes a full-fledged adult member of his or her society” (). By arguing that anthropological observation and analysis are required for achieving conscious knowledge of the common practices, patterns, and structures that constitute our societies, relationships, and identities, Mead sets the stage for a comparison between Stein’s (self-reflexive modernist) and Bateson’s (second-order cybernetic anthropologist) theories of culture. This framework is embedded in a keyword that appears in both authors’ work: “composition.” As the Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED’ s) extended definition makes clear, the term holds incredibly flexible and far-reaching meaning. It covers a wide grammatical range, encompassing “action,” “mode,” and “product.” And its breadth of relevance spans numerous disciplines and contexts: academic connotations (philosophy, logic, mathematics, grammar) rub shoulders with artistic fields (literature, visual arts, music); associations range from the mechanical (printing press) to the embodied and the cognitive (physical and mental constitution), and from the economic to the political to the educational (settling debts, terms of surrender, school and college assignments). In short, the word “composition” and its variants – compose, composed, composing – offer rich potential to Bateson and Stein as a lexical touchstone for their self-reflexive, patternbased theories of culture, identity, aesthetics, and representation. In , Bateson published a monograph titled Composing a Life. In the opening chapter, she describes it as “a book about life as an improvisatory art, about the ways we combine familiar and unfamiliar components in response to new situations, following an underlying grammar and an evolving aesthetic” (). These “act[s] of creation,” as she calls them, make up “the composition of our lives” (Composing, ). Reading her own and four other women’s life experiences in dialogue with one another, Bateson operates on the collective-ethnographic premise that “by setting a number of life histories side by side, we will be enabled to recognize common patterns of creativity that have not been acknowledged or fostered” (Composing, ). This goal is particularly urgent in the twentieth century, she contends, since “the choices and rhythms of lives change” so frequently that they require us to cultivate our capacity for adaptation (Composing, ). Principles of self-reflexive

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second-order cybernetic thinking underpin the argument, since, as she explains, “women today read and write biographies to gain perspective [i.e., through feedback] on their own lives,” and the “self-knowledge” those new perspectives provide “is empowering” (i.e., it prompts adjustments in behavior for more strategic future action) (Composing, ). This self-reflexive interest in tracking how diverse women in varied situations “compose” their lives threads through Bateson’s work, operating on multiple levels to suture her descriptions of the actions that make up women’s everyday experiences to broader questions about language, interpersonal relationships, and identity. In Peripheral Visions, for instance, she continues to reflect on the issues that occupied her thinking in Composing a Life: The weave of continuity and creativity in the ways that individuals “compose” their lives is not unlike the way they put together sentences and other sequences of behavior. In speaking, we follow culturally transmitted rules of grammar, but these allow totally original utterances; most sentences we speak or hear have never before been spoken, and the most profoundly original insights are only intelligible because they are phrased in recognizable form. ()

In this passage’s staging of “rules” against (and alongside) “original[ity],” one of Bateson’s central arguments emerges: that our responses to the world around us are at once free and constrained. The opening anecdote in Peripheral Visions offers a less linguistically focused example of what she’s getting at. The passage centers on Bateson’s memory of watching a sheep being slaughtered for the “Feast of the Sacrifice” in a garden in Tehran soon after her arrival in the city, and of narrating the event to her two-year-old daughter as it was happening. As she reflects on the different ages, genders, nationalities, socioeconomic statuses, and linguistic and religious backgrounds represented in the group of nine people present at the ritual, she argues that “experience is structured in advance by stereotypes and idealizations, blurred by caricatures and diagrams” (). Later in the chapter, during a discussion of cultural stereotypes and how they shape, but don’t necessarily determine our ways of engaging with the world, she muses: “No one can know exactly how he or she will respond, what formulae will be seized, what words improvised. Yet individual responses follow cultural patterns, each experience offering analogies for others” (). Bateson’s writing offers a clear example of second-order cybernetic thinking at work: she is self-consciously reflecting on how she is involved in the scene she is watching, and she is juxtaposing multiple scenarios,

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contexts, and cultures. These accounts of her past observations – of others and of herself, of interactions between others and between herself and others – draw our attention to the ways in which our own acts of composing our lives are inflected by, and indeed are part of, much larger patterns of being, many of which we live within unawares. Thus, she helps readers see how multiple layers of composition are taking place simultaneously during the event thanks to participants’ varied perspectives on their shared environment. An arresting moment later in the book recapitulates some of these ideas through a meditation on how we perceive and comprehend nature’s beauty: “We can match the colors of a coral reef with those of the fish swimming above it, and know they belong to a single composition,” Bateson muses, “but our delight is private” (). We are embedded within patterned environments, she suggests (a fact that comes into focus in distinct ways thanks to twentieth-century technological tools – as evidenced in her anecdote about the new metaphors that emerge once we have seen a photograph of the Earth taken from outer space); yet our experiences of their informational or aesthetic values always take place and accrue meaning from more singular, individual(ized), and, to recall Ashby’s work on the black box from Chapter , “partial” points of reference. In , Stein delivered the lecture “Composition as Explanation” to the Cambridge Literary Club at Oxford University. The talk couches a description of her own evolution in writing to that point (from the techniques she developed in Three Lives through The Making of Americans and up to her literary Portraits) within a broader discussion of her understanding of history, culture, and art as a series of distinct “composition[s]” that are based in “daily life.” The way that Stein articulates these ideas illustrates how her methods and modes of thinking align with the participant–observer ethnographic techniques Bateson adopts, particularly in her focus on the observable features of human behavior. She writes, “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything” (my emphasis). This line repeats and modulates throughout the essay. For instance: “Nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition”; “Each generation has something different at which they are all looking . . . composition is the difference”; “Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted and that authentically speaking is composition.” These iterations eventually evolve to illustrate how Stein’s approach to cultural study is intensely self-reflexive – and

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

modeled on the same ideas that Bateson later articulates. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living in the composition of the time in which they are living” (“Composition as Explanation”). As these looping statements unfold and accumulate, we start to see how the word “composition” signifies for Stein as both an action and a product, and also how it sutures together observation, analysis, and artistic practice. Bergen’s helpful gloss elucidates this capacious denotative capacity, explaining that, for Stein, It is a multivocal term, composition, designating at once the dominant mode of daily life for a given period and also the production of those who represent that mode in art. These are not entirely separate activities, for everyone, whether they make art or war or neither, has no choice but to carry on actively composing their present composition: this is simply a matter of going about one’s daily life. (–)

Variations on this reading appear in scholarship by critics who read Stein’s work through comparative lenses ranging from specific media forms (e.g., cinema and detective fiction) to broader techno-cultural practices and infrastructure (e.g., automation and warfare). Volpicelli’s compelling analysis of the lecture adds an important feedback-related dimension to the conversation: “constituted through [a] fundamental variability,” he notes, “Stein’s ‘composition’ . . . stands in for the spontaneous connection between the viewer and the object viewed, which changes both over time and across individuals” (). These analyses collectively illuminate how, for Stein, “composition” resides in and is revealed through a whole host of artistic, technological, interpersonal, and socio-political contexts. Much like it does for Bateson, then, the concept of a cultural “composition” threads throughout Stein’s work and, as readers, we can develop a clearer sense of her theory as we encounter it in different texts. During her  lecture tour, Stein offered this succinct restatement of her  talk’s core message: “the composition in which we live makes the art which we see and hear” (Lectures, ). Her ideas resonate with the argument at work in Bateson’s theory of individual behavior as characterized by originality, but inexorably linked to broader cultural patterns that can only be identified through the observation and analysis of larger-scale constellations of data points. “Each of us in our own way,” Stein states, gesturing to the uniqueness of each person’s actions, “are bound to express what the world in which we are living is doing” (Lectures, , my emphasis). Across their work, she and Bateson are committed to mobilizing their

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positions as self-declared artistic genius (Stein) and cybernetically trained ethnographer (Bateson) toward exploring, exposing, and explicating the significance of this interplay between culturally conditioned patterns of behavior and individual agency. As part of a second-order cybernetic rhetoric, they reinforce an understated pedagogical imperative as they invite readers like us to adopt self-critical stances and reflect consciously on our own positions within and relationships to our respective cultural environments.

Composing America, Defamiliarizing the Quotidian One specific form that cybernetic self-reflexivity (i.e., self-reflexivity based on access to and analysis of an abundance of data points) takes in Stein’s and Bateson’s study of cultural composition is an intense interest in the patterns that characterize life in their country of origin, the United States. This pursuit of American cultural understanding resonates with a call that Mead makes in her address to the ASC when she proposes that, in addition to observing, recording, and relating the details of exotic or foreign communities, “anthropologists have a second task: to interest themselves in what is happening in their own culture, to stand outside it and look at it as a whole” (“Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” ). The premise of Coming of Age in Samoa is similarly self-referential in its explicit call for readers to apply the knowledge they gain from reading about Samoan female adolescence to themselves; Mead hopes they will mobilize the “contrast” between Samoan and Western orientations to coming-of-age that her book makes visible. As she puts it, “we may be able to turn, made newly and vividly self-conscious and self-critical, to judge anew and perhaps fashion differently the education we give our children” (). For Mead, in this text, the self-referential turn is positioned as a step distinct from the ethnographic work of data collection – while references to the West and the United States frame her argument, the book’s focus is an account of Samoan cultural patterns she observed. Thus, while gesturing to the second-order orientation that she would more fully adopt later in her career, her phrasing (i.e., the idea that an inhabitant of a culture could “stand outside it”) and her emphasis (eleven chapters about Samoa, two about America) remain fairly bound to the first-order notion of a closed, observable system. Within both Bateson’s and Stein’s work, that emphasis is reversed.

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

As my earlier discussion of Bateson’s approach to the term “composition” suggests, much of her writing fully engages with a second-ordercybernetics commitment to self-reflexivity. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this aspect of her work is the way that her discussions of different cultures around the world (Iranian, Israeli, Philippine, etc.) are balanced by anecdotes and comparative case studies rooted in her own experiences of and observations about America. Those elements of the text never read as secondary, and indeed they occupy a central position in publications like Peripheral Visions. Here, the strategy of toggling between her own and more foreign references models an openness to self-reflexive learning that she strives to teach both the students she encounters in various in-person classrooms and the readers who encounter her ideas in print. Most importantly, she wants people to gain awareness of the assumptions and ingrained perspectives they hold. “Seen from a contrasting point of view or seen suddenly through the eyes of an outsider,” she proposes, “one’s own familiar patterns can become accessible to choice and criticism” (). As a case study that illustrates this idea, Bateson describes a lesson she staged in Iran: she invited two mother–baby pairs, first an American then an Iranian, to attend class; students observed how the parent and child interacted with one another and also with the students. She explains, “my purpose was to challenge [my students] to think about the connection between the behavior of the mothers and that of the infants, the unstated assumptions and values the mothers were teaching, invisible bonds stretched in the air” (). Bateson is trying to get her Iranian students to see something about their own cultural conditioning that they would never otherwise notice because it’s too much of a baked-in assumption in their perception of the world. She later refers to this type of awareness as “culture vision, the ability to see the multiple worlds of others” (). In recounting the story as part of her book, she makes the lesson equally available and relevant to a Western – and specifically an American – audience. By understanding how we are implicated within these types of “invisible” systems, she proposes, we can more deliberately and creatively act when we are faced with challenging situations. If Bateson’s work constitutes an extension and intensification of Mead’s earlier ideas about self-reflection and critique, then their vision for secondorder cybernetic anthropology provides a way to understand what Stein is doing in texts where she similarly prompts readers to generate a new and more nuanced awareness of and orientation to American culture and identity by gathering and collating a broader range of data points. Stein’s lifelong interest in (and struggle with) finding ways to represent her

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homeland has received extensive critical attention. Chalk, for example, reads Stein’s literary experiments as part of a long-standing commitment to “construct the American nation” and “define national character” (). “Stein’s ambitions with regard to America,” Chalk proposes, “might be read as no less than a reconstruction of the nation and its inhabitants in literary form, manifested in her various generic experiments” (). Similarly, Conrad notes that “throughout her life Stein had struggled to articulate a distinctive vision of America and the American writer” (). In a line that echoes Bateson’s argument about the benefits of a “contrasting point of view,” he proposes that Stein “had gone to France for that very purpose, choosing Paris as the ‘home town’ through which she could most clearly come into possession of her ‘native land’” (). He helpfully situates this valence of Stein’s artistic goals in the context of her  American lecture tour and the modernized technological landscape in which she found herself (and which proved such a generative source of analogies and metaphors in her writing): “Stein had left an America just awakening from the sleep of the nineteenth century; she would be returning to the America of the automobile, the airplane, the live radio broadcast, the newsreel, the publicity agent, and Hollywood” (). The book that results from this trip is, in Volpicelli’s words, “brimming with so many scenes of everyday life [that] it comprises a veritable panorama of America and its people” (). These descriptions prompt us to recognize Stein’s status as a kind of autobiographical ethnographer who is navigating a complex dynamic between homecoming and displacement as she returns to and travels through s America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the texts that Stein wrote for and about that lecture tour are particularly focused on grappling with and making sense of American cultural identity. Attempts at defining American writing, American behavior, and American perceptions pervade the Lectures in America – even “What is English Literature,” with its discussions of “island daily life,” asks the audience to “think about all persistent American writing” (Lectures, , my emphases). The lecture later equates American behavioral tendencies with series production, proposing that “the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something was the American one” (Lectures, ). And in “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans,” she proposes a distinctly American orientation to time: “It is singularly a sense for combination within a conception of the existence of a given space of time that makes the American thing the American thing, and the sense of this space of time must be within the whole thing as well as in the completed whole thing”

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(Lectures, ). This framework, she contends, appears across a variety of American genres and cultural icons. “Think of anything, of cowboys, or movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving” (Lectures, ). She closes this section of the lecture series by explaining that her novel, The Making of Americans, set out to capture the essence of this American-ness. The purpose of these multiple, accumulating, layered reflections on the question of what makes America America comes into clearer focus against the backdrop of second-order cybernetics ideas. As with Bateson’s work, the self-reflexive elements of Stein’s writing are also part of a larger and more urgent project of defamiliarization designed to provide audiences with access to the unknown, unacknowledged, unnoticed aspects of their modern world. She states in her “Composition as Explanation” lecture that, after life has been conducted in a certain way everybody knows it but nobody knows it, little by little, nobody knows it as long as nobody knows it. Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either, they are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does.

These lines invite listeners and readers to consider how the routine activities, habits of behavior, and ingrained assumptions that are part of our daily life constitute a broader set of patterns; the statement also implicitly prompts us to see those underlying patterns as things that might be worthy of conscious attention and reflection. For Lectures in America and Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein mobilizes this perspective toward a more focused, incisive exploration of – and dialogue about – the characteristics that define her homeland and its inhabitants. Overall, then, Stein’s and Bateson’s American-focused cultural studies share a central goal: to defamiliarize the quotidian – that is, to make everyday, familiar “patterns of life” come into focus as larger-scale structures of social organization in which both they and their readers participate. As Bergen writes, “naturalness makes the contemporary composition difficult to recognize, much less represent” (). Her statement appears in a discussion of the challenges faced by artists like Stein as they try to be cutting edge rather than derivative. The sentiment threads through various critical responses to Stein’s work that emphasize the potential pedagogical dimensions of her defamiliarization strategies. Importantly, though, it

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also applies in the context of anthropological studies that try to generate self-awareness in their audiences – that is, that try to get readers to notice their own culture’s composition, when it’s something that typically fades into the background. Bateson describes the anthropologist’s tasks upon arriving at a “new place” as beginning from “the sense that everything is totally alien” and then gradually, by making and gathering many observations over time (through a method akin to Ashby’s black-box process), seeing how “everything makes sense within a new logic” and working toward a “description of a whole way of life that will convey this internal consistency” (). Both Bateson and Stein seem to be orchestrating this type of “alien[ation]” in their writing about America so that a similar emergence-into-clarity can happen for a deeply familiar culture, and not only a “new place.” For both authors, heightened attention to seemingly mundane – and often repetitive – aspects of everyday life is key to provoking that defamiliarization, since those patterns of everyday existence are the fundamental structures that make up any moment’s and any culture’s “composition.”

Repetition, Comparison, Contrast: Second-Order Cybernetic Pedagogy Unsurprisingly – given her status as author of the signature “rose is a rose is a rose” line – Stein’s work has prompted numerous critical engagements with the theme of repetition. Many of these analyses reinforce the notion of a connection between Stein’s work and cybernetic feedback response mechanisms. For example, several interpretations foreground her use of repetitive structures as tools for exploring subjectivity, as when repetitively accumulating words, phrases, and even grammatical constructions enable readers to access character, identity, emotion, and interiority. And Stein often plays with repetition to defamiliarize accepted concepts or perspectives, such as the association of feminine work and identity with repetitive labor. As Chow and Winant point out, Stein’s repetitive style even works to defamiliarize our understanding of the term repetition itself: rather than indicating that a particular narrative or character is “fixed,” “circular,” or “unitary,” they propose, Stein’s version of repetition instead promotes ideas of “progress,” “learning,” and discontinuous “becoming” – three terms that connote the type of adaptation capacity Wiener poses as central to the cybernetic machine (Winant, /Chow, ). Similarly, Delville proposes that Stein’s positive orientation to repetition distinguishes her from many other canonical modernists: “it is not an expression of the

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alienating ennui and repetitiveness of modern life . . . For Stein, repetition had a liberating effect” (). As this last quotation suggests, although critics don’t always use the term “composition” in their discussions, they often cast the repetitive structures in Stein’s writing as fundamental elements of the twentieth-century cultural context within which she is working. Scholars have found analogues for Stein’s seemingly repetitive aesthetic structures in technological innovations (automation, automobiles, cinema), artistic movements and genres (minimalist music, crime fiction, advertising rhetoric), and various discipline-specific methods that Stein encountered while studying philosophy and medicine (inductive reasoning, anatomical sketching, gathering and processing samples). When considered in concert with each other, these observations affirm the status of repetition as one of the “patterns of life” that defines early twentiethcentury modernity for Stein; in second-order cybernetics terms, repetition serves as a mode of representation with high potential for generating selfreflexive insights thanks to the ways in which it encourages subjects to engage with modernity’s expansive scales of reference. Stein’s attitude toward repetition – as both a significant feature of her culture’s composition and a productive aesthetic strategy for cultivating self-awareness – finds a cross-disciplinary analogue in Bateson’s work, since both authors’ self-reflexive anthropological/aesthetic projects strive to defamiliarize the concept as a means of achieving their pedagogical goals. They do so by prompting readers on one hand to see seemingly repetitive elements in the world around us (and the texts we encounter) as non-identical and, on the other, to recognize seemingly disparate elements of culture as part of repeating patterns. As the following sections demonstrate, each of these approaches draws from and mobilizes different aspects of second-order cybernetic thinking, and they achieve their greatest rhetorical force when they work in combination with one another. Reframing Repetition: Emphasis, Insistence, Spirals, Möbius Strips First, then, we have the paradoxical idea that an apparent repetition (like Stein’s signature phrase) may not, in fact, be repetitive. In her American lecture on “Portraits and Repetition,” Stein is fairly blunt about this: she is “inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition” (Lectures, ). Instead, she proposes that we need to reframe our interpretive attitudes toward reiteration and attend carefully to subtle differences. “There can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you

Cultural Composition, Insistent Spirals, and Contrast

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insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis” (Lectures, ). The point Stein is making here relates to the productive potential of encountering similar versions of the same type of material multiple times – in cybernetic terms, we might think of this as having access to a robust data set. Importantly, as Volpicelli points out in his discussion of the -person cap Stein placed on her lecture audiences, she is committed to “retaining, or protecting, a sense of the individual audience member [i.e., data point], even when speaking to a large group [i.e., when engaging with larger collections of data]” (). But, thanks to the diverse modulations in “insistence” and “emphasis” that come through in multiple singular iterations of atomized data points, these nearrepetitions can foster increasingly nuanced perception and understanding of the larger patterns that characterize/define a given topic, concept, or scenario. One argument that Stein emphasizes multiple times across her published work is that insistence is embedded in domestic spaces, tasks, and relationships; an awareness of insistence’s role in these contexts, she proposes, enables a better understanding of cultural composition. In “Portraits and Repetition,” for example, she conveys this idea through an anecdote about listening to a group of her “very lively little aunts” gossiping in Baltimore when she moved there at age seventeen: If they had to know anything and anybody does they naturally had to say and hear it often, anybody does, and as there were ten and eleven of them they did have to say and hear said whatever was said and any one not hearing what it was they said had to come in to hear what had been said. That inevitably made everything said often. I began then to consciously listen to what anybody was saying and what they did say while they were saying what they were saying. This was not yet the beginning of writing but it was the beginning of knowing what there was that made there be no repetition. No matter how often what happened had happened any time any one told anything there was no repetition. . . . And so I began to find out then by listening the difference between repetition and insisting and it is a very important thing to know. (Lectures, )

This immersion in a scene of women’s domestic discussions, Stein claims, awakens in her a new perspective on reiteration. Thanks to a fairly large and ever-evolving roster of attendees at the gossip sessions (“there were ten or eleven” aunts), statements and stories “inevitably” get recounted numerous times (anyone who misses something has “to come in to hear” it again). That constant exposure to repetition of content prompted Stein to

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

“consciously listen” for more than just surface meaning. She started to realize that her aunts were not merely repeating themselves, but “saying” slightly different things each time – that is, they were “insisting,” or modulating, or inflecting their words in response to the specific people in the room and the specific moment (G. Bateson’s “context”) of the telling. This reading defamiliarizes the scene of gossip, turning the chatty group of relatives into (a) a catalyst for Stein’s aesthetic and intellectual development at the moment of the gossip-session, and also (b) a pedagogical example, in the context of Stein’s later lecture, to teach readers about the difference between repetition and insistence. Critics like Cecire and Delville have explored these types of connection – between domesticity and repetition, aesthetics, and composition – in Stein’s work. For instance, Cecire claims that “household management” in Stein’s writing “is indeed revealed as continually requiring acts of composition,” and that “Stein thus makes literary composition functionally indistinguishable from oikonomia” (/). And Delville frames these issues in terms of “everyday language,” which makes no attempt to “conceal the redundancies, deficiencies, and overlaps that are typical of casual conversation” (). These claims open a channel for comparing Stein’s and Bateson’s approaches to understanding culture, since women’s lived experience – at the nexus of domestic and professional life – occupies a central position in both authors’ theories of culture and creativity. An echo of Stein’s theory of repetition-as-insistence and of her interest in women’s domestic (and artistic or professional) experiences appears in Bateson’s comment that “each of us can tell his or her story with alternative emphases” (). Throughout Peripheral Visions, she showcases a perspective on apparent repetition that is very similar to Stein’s, but that draws from different images and metaphors to communicate a more explicitly self-reflective and cybernetics-inflected argument. “Even what appears to be a repetition is often a return at the next level of a spiral or, more mysteriously, the other side of a Möbius strip,” Bateson states, explaining that “much of my writing consists of taking [and unwinding] ideas that are coiled within one another” (). The spiral and the Möbius strip serve, for Bateson, as geometric and spatial metaphors for introducing readers to the possibility of a new relationship to repetition. As she frames it, this strategy is implicitly linked to the second-order anthropologist’s project of using participant-observation techniques to gain insight about one’s own life. “In recent years,” she writes, “I have been learning not only about improvisation as a mode of participation and observation in the

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present but about the possibility of recycling the past, the flashes of insight that come from going over old memories, especially of events that were ambiguous, mysterious, incomplete” (). She later expands on these thoughts – in ways that resonate with the Poundian feedback loops I explored in Chapter , which wield the capacity to revise our perspective on the past – when she states that “experiences spiral through the life cycle, presenting the same lessons from new angles: parenthood offers a new view of childhood, so does grandparenthood and so also the roles we are sometimes offered in relation to the children of friends” (). Connections to this type of geometrically oriented theory – where experiences retrospectively accrue significance through spiraled rhetorical structures – appear in Delville’s interpretation of Stein’s formal experiments alongside twentieth-century minimalist music. As he explains, “Stein’s celebrated repetition-with-variation technique necessarily implies a ‘returning’ or ‘revisiting’ effect on previous compositional segments” (). To extend Delville’s argument, we can see how this dynamic often appears in her lectures as a recurring motif of “beginning again.” “Composition as Explanation,” for example, positions the phrase as an indication not that someone is about to repeat themselves, but that they are setting up subtle, yet significant, shifts in emphasis and situation: “Beginning again and again is a natural thing even when there is a series. / Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing. / It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition” (my emphasis). In this last sentence, the word “except” allows us to see how an apparent repetition can embed significant difference: because each iteration in a series occupies its own temporal moment, it can illuminate the distinguishing features of a specific cultural and historical composition. In her later American lecture tour, Stein repeatedly performs (and talks about) the gesture of re-starting. It appears near the beginning of “What is English Literature,” when she makes the seemingly paradoxical statement “And so to begin again to go on,” defamiliarizing the idea of a “beginning” as a point of origin by tethering it to a phrase that implies being in a state of ongoing progress (Lectures, ). In “The Making of the Making of Americans,” she reflects on how she often “begin[s] again” part way through her creative process (Lectures, ); a discussion of her artistic techniques in “Portraits and Repetition” affirms this idea, noting that “as always I had once more to begin and I began again” (Lectures, ); and a more general statement that reads much like Bateson’s notion of spiraling knowledge appears in

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“Plays,” when Stein argues that “in order to know one must always go back” (Lectures, ). Part of my point, in providing a (perhaps tedious) list of looping examples here, is to demonstrate how Stein’s repetitively insistent tendencies work: as we make our way through the lectures, we gradually start to notice patterns emerging in the ever-accumulating iterations of nearly identical statements. They amass through these types of repeated references – in this case, references to going back and beginning again (and again and again) – and each iteration applies to a distinct context with its own emphasis. In the  lecture, “beginning again” is about finding ways to understand cultural composition; in some of the  pieces, it’s about her own creative methods; in others, it’s about knowledge acquisition more generally. Critics such as George B. Moore and Sabine Sielke have explored the status of these types of repeated elements in Stein’s writing by examining their resonance with the theories Gilles Deleuze presents in his  work, Difference and Repetition. Moore proposes that we can read Stein’s “emphasis on the term ‘insistence’” as, in fact, evidence of her desire to “to see repetition as a complex relationship between the emphasis of the same and the manifestation of difference, such as suggested by Gilles Deleuze” (); and Sielke makes a similar claim about how “Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition . . . echoes Stein’s insight into the very nature of serial production, her belief that . . . it is this very world of difference – not sameness – which seriality registers and accounts for” (). These claims, along with Sielke’s more general observation that “in privileging difference over repetition, seriality [i.e., the type of accumulative logic on display so often in Stein’s texts] retains distance in approximation,” offer a helpful means of understanding how the various seemingly repetitive moments in Stein’s work complement a more pervasive attitude toward resemblance – to near-repetition – about which she is explicit in the lecture on “Paintings.” She likes when things are almost the same, because then they prompt a sense of “familiarity” without being identical: “one always does like a resemblance. / A resemblance is always a pleasurable sensation” (Lectures, –). By insisting on the aesthetic practice of frequently “beginning again,” Stein cultivates an aesthetic of familiarity and resemblance, but one that demands attentiveness to the subtle shifts in emphasis – or, to couch it in cybernetics terms, the relatively large-scale though understated feedback loops – that near-repetition masks. Nearrepetition, Stein contends, is an indication of something existing below the “surface” of acknowledged perception, something that requires defamiliarization to be brought into an observer’s conscious awareness.

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Bateson’s version of this argument complements Stein’s ideas about the capacity of near-repetitions to produce generative defamiliarization; the anthropologist’s perspective, though, locates their significance more emphatically within the context of a pedagogical ambition to cultivate individual action and responsiveness. She frames the ability to strategically modulate our self-presentation – to improvise creatively within different social and cultural contexts – as key to pursuing our desired goals. This argument accrues a specific urgency in the context of late twentiethcentury labor and employment patterns, which force people, including herself, into “beginning again and again” with their careers (). By presenting repetition as spiraling, defamiliarizing, and improvisatory rather than redundant, staid, and inflexible, Bateson helps to clarify the larger stakes of Stein’s early twentieth-century insistence on insistence. Stein asks us to see that the mere existence of repeated words, phrases, and ideas doesn’t have to indicate stasis, but rather can function as a means to defamiliarize the quotidian. Insistence (sometimes mistaken for repetition) therefore becomes a strategy for accessing not-yet-acknowledged registers of significance within a given narrative, setting, community, relationship, or action. This form of perception requires a commitment to unpacking – or uncoiling – the nuances embedded in apparent repetitions, and to studying the role these types of larger-scale patterns play in shaping cultural “composition.” The payoff is a heightened sense of self-awareness that enables better-informed action. As Bateson puts it, If I recognize my situation today as comparable to but not the same as my situation yesterday, I can translate yesterday’s skills and benefit from yesterday’s learning. I will make the mistake neither of trying to start from scratch nor of simply replicating previous patterns. Reinterpretation and translation, so useful in moving from one culture to another, turn out to be essential skills in moving from year to year even in the same setting. ()

In their very similar theories – where they invite us to approach perceived structures of repetition as coiling spirals, or disorienting Möbius strips, or modulating instances of insistence, or exercises in beginning again – Bateson and Stein are teaching their readers about a form of self-awareness connected to cybernetic principles of data processing, feedback, and adjustment. They invite us to pursue habits of mind and attitudes of perception that will equip us to effectively move through our present-day culture, to understand the patterns that surround us, and to strategically improvise our responses to them.

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Cybernetic Aesthetics Setting Experiences Side-by-Side: Definition by Contrast

The flip side of Stein and Bateson’s shared interest in (near) repetition is their belief that exposure to dramatic contrast is essential for reaching selfawareness. This perspective aligns with Mead’s early convictions about anthropology as a discipline, namely, that its insights emerge thanks to its comparative framework. As she puts it in Coming of Age in Samoa, We know our subtlest perceptions, our highest values, are all based upon contrast[.] . . . And similarly, if we would appreciate our own civilization, this elaborate pattern of life which we have made for ourselves as a people and which we are at such pains to pass on to our children, we must set our civilization over against other very different ones. ()

In the opening chapter of Peripheral Visions, Bateson affirms a connection to the lineage of this type of ethnographic work when she explicitly frames “insight” as a “depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another” (). The narrative structure she adopts throughout the book epitomizes this framework. One chapter places her encounters with the social nature of grieving in the Philippines alongside her experience of youth community-building during a grueling desert trek in Israel, and she uses these examples to open up a conversation about how and why Americans act in culturally conditioned ways (that emphasize privacy and individuality) when they respond to similar challenges. That Stein’s work has affinities with this anthropology-based method is evident in Chalk’s description of Stein’s approach to categorization, which she labels “definition by contrast” (). Stein, Chalk proposes, is “operating consistently in a comparative mode” (). And indeed, her summary of Stein’s perspective reads as equally applicable to Bateson’s (and Mead’s) underlying methods: “To be outside a group or a nation, then, provides clarity” – it enables an observer to see how a particular cultural pattern in which they are immersed is not necessarily universal – because “it is not possible to fully grasp differences among nationalities when the relationships among them are not emphasized” (). Stein herself articulates this idea in more general terms in “Poetry and Repetition” when she states that “the strange thing about the realization of existence is that like a train moving there is no real realization of it moving if it does not move against something and so that is what a generation does it shows that moving is existing” (Lectures, ). These modulated statements reinforce a key principle that underlies Stein’s and Bateson’s approaches to cultural study

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

and individual agency: observers stand to achieve greatest insight if they occupy positions of meaningful contrast compared to the places, people, and relationships they observe. The crux of both Bateson’s and Stein’s methods, therefore, seems to be the idea that not only near repetition but also strategic juxtaposition – cultural, aesthetic – enables an observer to perceive previously unnoticed patterns about others and themselves. The ability to cultivate this form of awareness, they both assert, is essential to achieving the level of selfunderstanding required to act responsively and creatively within one’s own environment. By allowing her Iranian students to observe contrasting examples of the same mother–child biological relationship, Bateson enables them to see the differences in the assumptions, values, and beliefs that underlie the culturally conditioned behavior of both the foreign (in this case, American) and the familiar (Iranian) example of motherhood. This type of move is repeated throughout her work, as she develops insights about culture by bringing the experiences of people from diverse backgrounds, ages, professions, and geographical locations into comparison and conversation with one another. The cybernetic emphasis on the large-scale quantity of information necessary for statistical data-processing here shifts slightly to emphasize the necessity of incorporating contrasting scales of reference into one’s frame of perception as well. Likewise, Stein’s account of her  trip to the United States also sets up numerous comparisons that are designed to increase awareness of American cultural composition by juxtaposing it to other national contexts. Her accounts of driving (and of observing the drivers around her) clearly illustrate this rhetorical strategy. Stein reports being utterly delighted to learn, while staying in Chicago for a couple of weeks during the winter, that she can rent a car: “. . . I hired myself a drive yourself car a Ford car and it was surprisingly cheap to do this . . . The most exciting thing was the drive yourself car” (). As she muses on the topic of driving here and elsewhere in the narrative, Stein invites readers to consider and recognize the idiosyncrasies of American driving culture by contrasting it to the French system: That is one of the things that is very interesting, the different way different countries tell you how to go along. In France it is all done by drawing in America mostly by words and most of them words of one syllable. No left U turns, that took me some time so much so that I did one. The policeman said where do you think you are going, I said I was turning, I guess you are a stranger here he said and I said I was one and he said well go on but you will most likely get killed before you leave town. (–)



Cybernetic Aesthetics I was fascinated with the way everybody did what they should. When I first began driving a car myself in Chicago and in California I was surprised at the slowness of the driving, in France you drive much faster, you are supposed not to have accidents but you drive as fast as you like and in America you drive very slowly forty-five miles an hour is slow, and when lights tell you to stop they all stop and they never pass each other going up a hill or around a curve and yet so many get hurt. It was a puzzle to me. . . . In France you drive fifty-five or sixty miles an hour all the time, I am a very cautious driver from the standpoint of my French friends but I often do and why not, not very often does anybody get killed and in America everybody obeying the law and everybody driving slowly a great many get killed and it was a puzzle to me. ()

As we see starting to come through in these passages, Stein’s perspective as an expatriate allows her to identify and draw her readers’ attention to the American-ness of America in a way that someone who had lived in the country continually might not be able to do. The juxtapositional strategy on display here repeats numerous times throughout her account of the American lecture tour as she develops a series of observations that identify elements of the American composition through comparison to its European equivalents. These observations run the gamut from attitudes toward artists (the French “respect” them while Americans demonstrate “interest” in them []) and male behavior (American men, unlike Europeans, “are so attentive” []), to the relationship between food and climate (American “dry” houses are accompanied by “moist” food; the French “humidity” is paired with “dry” food []), military camouflage (“each nation[’s] was entirely different” []), and automobile and housing design (the “shapes of the trucks were completely different” in France compared to America []; America’s “endless varieties” of “wooden houses . . . excited [Stein]” more than Spain’s “barracks,” whose “flat surface[s]” she nonetheless does seem to like []). Whether or not we fully grasp each of Stein’s comparisons (to me, her remarks about auto and architectural design perfectly crystalize some of my own observations while traveling; however, I’m left rather perplexed by her discussion of “dry” and “moist” food), each example she presents offers its own point of emphasis – its own insistence – that adds to the composite picture she draws of America. She invites readers to see connections across these different contexts as they become vectors to understanding American culture. In doing so, she allows us to experience and practice the attitudes to perception and attentiveness that can awaken us to the everyday objects, habits, and forms that constitute a cultural composition. Her project

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implicitly directs us to recognize something that Bateson states much more overtly: “what we call the familiar,” the anthropologist argues, “is built up in layers to a structure known so deeply that it is taken for granted and virtually impossible to observe without the help of contrast. Encountering familiar issues in a strange setting is like returning on a second circuit of a Möbius strip and coming to the experience from the opposite side” ().

Analogy, Large-Scale Data Sets, and Induction: Repetition across Contexts Stein’s and Bateson’s theories of repetition and contrast attain heightened significance in light of two important ideas from cybernetics, which thread through the previous sections of this chapter and confirm these authors’ status as what we might call second-order cultural cyberneticians. The first relates to the role that analogy plays in their work, and the second pertains to the way the cybernetic principle of large-scale data sets manifests in their approach to collecting and organizing their observations about the people, places, objects, and relationships that constitute various cultures and identities. In an unpublished short essay titled “The Nature of Analogy” (), Norbert Wiener helpfully sets out a framework for connecting Stein’s and Bateson’s combined strategies of near-repetition and juxtaposition back to these two principles from cybernetics discourse. As Wiener notes at the very opening of the piece, the discipline of cybernetics requires “one . . . to compare phenomena in widely different fields which nevertheless show common properties of behaviors” (). “The concept of analogy,” he explains, is useful in situations where cyberneticians are investigating how different phenomena exhibit “essential structural similarity” or “the same pattern of organization, whether there is any resemblance in content or not” (, my emphasis). The last phrase of this sentence constitutes an essential element of both cybernetic thinking and of the type of arguments Stein and Bateson construct through their insistent, spiraling, comparative, juxtapositional narratives. The concept of analogy, from a cybernetics-informed perspective, becomes a way to understand certain forms of contrast as, in fact, repetition across contexts. By identifying structural similarities across diverse examples, it becomes possible to understand and articulate higher-level patterns of organization. Mead frames the inductive project of anthropological research in a similar way, noting that it involves “the intensive analysis of very small, relatively isolated, and intimately known communities which serve as living models from which one can sometimes develop larger, more formal models”

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

(“Cybernetics of Cybernetics,” ). Through a process of detailed analogical thinking, this perspective claims, the significance of various small details can accumulate and provide information about an overarching pattern that would otherwise be inaccessible to observers. In order to achieve this status, though, a sufficiently large number of data points is necessary. As Wiener put it in an earlier essay on analogy (this time in the context of historical research), “the mere similarity of one thing with another in one or two points does not prove its similarity with the other in anything else” (“An Example,” ). Instead, a strong analogical case requires confirmation from a broad range and large quantity of comparative data points. These ideas come together in the type of second-order cybernetics that Stein and Bateson embrace, namely, in an approach to self-reflexive knowledge production that is rooted in inductive reasoning. That form of reasoning is built from the combination of repeated and contrasted (or insistent and juxtapositional) elements that underpin Stein’s and Bateson’s observational methods. That is, it appears prominently in places where they deploy apparent juxtaposition as a form of connection. An illustrative segment appears early in Peripheral Visions, where Bateson muses about how her past encounters with a host of different cultures, individuals, and locations combine to produce common insights in the present. Working in an isolated cabin at an “artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire,” she sits at a desk on which she has placed various objects that she fondly labels “desk friends” and that are meant to “evoke the memories [she] was seeking to connect” (e.g., “a small globe” . . . “a beanbag salamander” . . . “the fossil of a prehistoric mollusk” . . . “a small tribal carpet” . . . “a Philippine Christmas ornament”) (–). By crafting her book’s core argument through a series of anecdotes drawn from diverse personal experiences, Bateson both models and mobilizes a pedagogical practice rooted in analogy. This principle, as well as the way it manifests in Bateson’s writing as a meandering narrative that constellates and drifts among numerous short, analogically connected anecdotes, offers insight into the pedagogical implications of Stein’s similar aesthetic strategies. In a line from “Composition as Explanation” that echoes Bateson’s train of thought in this passage, Stein recalls a phase of her life in which she started “composing anything into one thing.” The implication seems to be that “composition” involves a layering of many things that are going on simultaneously, and this notion links up with several readings that critics have developed that focus on Stein’s interest in induction and large quantities of data. Winant, for instance, sets up a compelling study of the influence Stein’s philosophical background had on her aesthetics to

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illustrate how inductive logic forms the foundation of her “theorization of explanation” (); and Farland crafts a detailed account of abstraction in Stein’s writing, which foregrounds her conviction in repetition’s “vital role in the production of abstract knowledge” (). Indeed, the language these critics use to articulate Stein’s accomplishments places her firmly within a cybernetics-leaning framework that relies on statistics and prediction to manage uncertainty. In Winant’s words, Stein’s version of “explanation is inductive, predictive, powerful,” as well as inherently “contingen[t]” and “subjectiv[e]” (); as Farland puts it, Stein invites us to see how “abstract knowledge . . . shapes itself around concrete data and facts, the repetition of which forms the basis for theoretical knowledge and generalized claims” (). Chalk even links these ideas explicitly to Stein’s work with culture, arguing that “the trivial observations that could be said to simply represent habits of those she encounters become, by virtue of sheer volume, a kind of cultural definition” (–). To see how these types of ideas play out in Stein’s work, I’d like to return to the motif that opened this chapter: aerial perspective. As part of the series of passages that describe the views Stein sees from the windows of airplanes during her American lecture tour, we encounter this account of the unexpected similarities that yoke her new perspective on Midwestern farmland to the aesthetic techniques of post-cubist art: It was then in a kind of way that I really began to know what the ground looked like. Quarter sections make a picture and going over America like that made any one know why the post-cubist painting was what it was. The wandering line of Masson was there the mixed line of Picasso coming and coming again and following itself into a beginning was there, the simple solution of Braque was there and I suppose Léger might be there but I did not see it not over there. Particularly the track of a wagon making a perfect circle and then going back to the corner from where they had come and later in the South as finally we went everywhere by air and always wanted the front seat so I could look down and what is the use, the earth does look like that and even if none of them had seen it and they had not very likely had not but since every one was going to see it they had to see it like that. ()

In this description, Stein models the type of revision of perspective and coming-into-awareness she wants readers to cultivate, in which analogical, cross-context comparison is essential to cultivating awareness of cultural composition. A significant connection emerges, for Stein, between the look of the American landscape as seen from the air and the stylistic characteristics of post-cubist painting. She proposes that, even though the artists she mentions probably hadn’t seen the ground from the air,

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the fact that what they ended up painting did look like what the Earth looks like from the air makes it not only reasonable, but also somehow necessary to see the connection between those two perspectives. In this particular case, juxtaposition enables Stein to achieve enhanced perception of a national and an aesthetic category (America/post-cubist painting), and also of the relationship between what we might call “physical” or “geographical” and literary aesthetics. Examples of this type of relationship, though, accumulate in fairly staggering numbers across her work, creating an insistent pattern for readers to interpret. For instance, Bergen’s reading of Picasso () highlights how Stein outlines a structural analogy between cubist aesthetics and World War I combat tactics to argue for composition as “a family of homologies” (); and elsewhere, as Chow and Levay have discussed, Stein makes similar arguments about the status of cinematic form, automobile engines, and crime fiction as markers of broader cultural patterns that overlap with her approach to artistic experimentation. These disparate manifestations of culture become braided together as part of the composition of the s. Stein invites us to see repetition functioning across different planes of aesthetic, technological, and geographical experience; and her insistence on these types of analogical links signals her conviction in their importance. Like in Bateson’s conception of the spiral learning that takes place when the different objects she has in front of her – and the varied memories of experience they trigger – awaken her to shared structures of behavior and identity, Stein is asking us to see repeating patterns linking vastly separate technological, artistic, interpersonal, and geographic fields. This collection of examples illustrates how Stein and Bateson set up carefully stylized comparisons in order to invite us to perceive differently: to see how things that we might assume to be the same can in fact contain significant differences; and to consider how examples that might seem unrelated can in fact constitute different iterations of a shared pattern. Both Stein and Bateson cast those analogical patterns as the building blocks of our cultures and our identities, and they demonstrate how essential it is for us to cultivate the capacity to recognize them if we want to act in creative ways that can bring us “delight” as we navigate the modern world (Peripheral Visions, ).

Second-Order Cybernetics: Urgent Pedagogy for the Modern World In Stein’s and Bateson’s work, I have argued, “composition” figures as a framework for suturing cultural awareness to creative activity and also as a

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

tool for mobilizing the potential of circular representational strategies (i.e., the seemingly repetitive accumulation of and reflection on large quantities of similar-but-non-identical data points) to produce insight about culture and identity. Their repeated references to terms like “composition” model a process of gradual learning; by forcing readers to experience that process, Bateson and Stein cultivate a form of perception in which progressively more nuanced understanding emerges through encounters with near repetition. In both Stein’s and Bateson’s thinking, observers gain insights through attentiveness to the mundane details of lived experience and by seeking patterns amidst the “data” they gain through observing themselves and their surroundings. Those surroundings include the environments, landscapes, and communities we inhabit; the institutions, buildings, and machines we encounter; and the varied interpersonal relationships we cultivate. By prompting readers to consider these diverse elements and interactions, Stein and Bateson are teaching a second-order cybernetics approach to understanding culture and identity, one that accounts for the role of the self in the “observed” system, and that also considers how the system (the environment, cultural context, historical moment, etc.) shapes individuals. By showing us how their own experiences and self-reflection have enabled them to become aware of these entwined dynamics, they open a path for readers to do the same. By understanding Stein and Bateson as mobilizing similar strategies for (and obsessions with) understanding culture, Stein-the-repetitively-insistent-observer can be recast as Stein-the-second-order-cyberneticist. This repositioning allows us to comprehend that broader discipline as not only a technical, scientific undertaking that emerged in the late-twentieth century but also part of a longer cultural and aesthetic movement with ties to the early-twentieth century and modernist aesthetic experimentation. Conversely, we gain new insight into the cybernetic and anthropological dimensions of Stein’s lifelong commitment to capturing the essence of American culture and identity. Stein’s work from the s and s already adopts the heightened self-reflexivity and attentiveness to matters of scale that mid- to late-twentieth century second-order cybernetics (in anthropology in particular) would champion. Triangulating her perspectives on American culture with those of Bateson helps clarify the extent to which Stein contributed to and participated in the cultural lineage of second-order cybernetic thinking, a framework that continues to offer valuable insights into twenty-first century life and culture. On this last note: the cybernetic strategies of self-reflexive ethnographic observation that Stein and Bateson model for readers throughout their

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writing are techniques they believe “everybody” can and must adopt within twentieth-century modernity. As Bateson puts it in the opening pages of Peripheral Visions, “much of modern life is organized to avoid the awareness of the fine threads of novelty connecting learned behaviors with acknowledged spontaneity”; “this awareness,” she proposes, “is newly necessary today. Men and women . . . are strengthened to meet uncertainty if they can claim a history of improvisation and a habit of reflection” (). She goes on to claim that “participant observation is more than a research methodology. It is a way of being, especially suited to a world of change” (). Both Bateson and Stein are attempting to cultivate this type of collective, self-conscious identity, which they believe is necessary for successfully navigating the modern world. They aren’t simply trying to record the state of affairs they witness; instead, they seek to produce a new attitude toward perception and a heightened awareness of environment and culture – that is, of “composition” – on the part of their readers. This projective, future orientation is a fundamental component of their cybernetic leanings. In many ways, Bateson’s and Stein’s work recapitulates and affirms the pedagogical elements of cybernetic thinking that I’ve explored in previous chapters of this book, while showing how these ideas modulate within the self-reflexive second-order contexts that became the “standard” for later twentieth-century cybernetics. Like Woolf’s theory of linguistic suggestiveness, Bateson’s theory of improvisation as key to successful human interaction also leans on the type of black-box logic theorized by cybernetics-influenced psychologists W. Ross Ashby and Silvan Tomkins. Improvisation, she proposes, helps us see “how human beings make do with partial understandings, invent themselves as they go along, and combine in complex undertakings without full agreement about what they are doing” (). For Bateson, this ability to operate within a space of uncertainty both fosters creativity and produces enjoyment: “learning to savor the vertigo of doing without answers or making shift and making do with fragmentary ones,” she writes, “opens up the pleasures of recognizing and playing with pattern, finding coherence within complexity, sharing within multiplicity” (). A black-box orientation to knowledge also pervades Stein’s attitudes, as Winant confirms in her discussion of the inductive reasoning that underlies Stein’s notion of explanation – explanation, that is, based on the presentation of facts that may not be complete/exhaustive, but nevertheless wield a kind of predictive potential. In Winant’s arresting words: “a half-had explanation teeters on the edge of

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prediction. It is like a weather report that is accurate until the winds shift, and then must be adjusted for another prediction” (). Stein and Bateson also both evince an awareness of the interplay between information’s patterned, predictable forms and its more random, idiosyncratic, or improvisatory manifestations – as theorized by Wiener and Claude Shannon, and as I explored in my reading of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy. For Bateson, it is crucial to recognize that, although we communicate using already-existing systems of language and grammar, our utterances are creative acts; she encourages readers to recognize that “we are largely unaware of speaking, as we do, sentences never spoken before, unaware of choreographing the acts of dressing and sitting and entering a room as depictions of self, of resculpting memory into an appropriate past” (). And for Stein, even if the emphasis lies on the inevitable ways our cultural composition shapes our actions and behavior, there is space for individuality and idiosyncrasy since we each “express” our shared culture “in our own way” (Lectures, , my emphasis). By acknowledging the creativity inherent in our everyday actions and interactions, their remarks both suggest, we have an opportunity to learn and develop more strategic and effective communicative techniques. And, to return to the central concept of my opening chapter, Wiener’s concept of the feedback loop occupies a prominent position in both Stein’s and Bateson’s theories of identity and communication, which rely on multiple iterations of near-identical encounters, and which embrace the same principles of retrospective adjustment to perception on display in Pound’s poetics. As Bateson writes, “We think of the self as a central continuity, yet recognizing that the self is not identical through time is a first step in celebrating it as fluid and variable, shaped and reshaped by learning” (). Later, she states that “I am shaped by other minds . . . repeated encounters” (). Stein’s theory of insistence/emphasis (as a defamiliarization and refiguring of repetition) makes a very similar argument about adaptation and adjustment through encounters that are differently “insistent” even as they retrace and re-present common content. Through the circular, spiraling, self-reflexive feedback loops that Stein and Bateson so deliberately and relentlessly craft in their writings about culture, we see evidence of a claim Scott makes about the “models of great generality” that cybernetics produces: these models and structures of communication, he proposes, “serve as powerful pedagogic and cultural tools for the transmission of key insights and understandings to succeeding generations” (). Stein and Bateson, like the other authors whose work

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forms the core of this book’s case studies, strive to articulate and mobilize ideas that will enhance readers’ abilities to successfully navigate modernity’s informational complexity. Collectively, these modernists articulate significant cross-disciplinary contributions to cybernetic thinking, a paradigm that emerged long before its “official” World War II instantiation, and that continues to evolve and offer pedagogical insights to readers today.

Coda Retrospective and Prospective Readings of Cybernetic Aesthetics

This book has argued that we need to rethink the historical and cultural parameters of cybernetics as a discipline. In doing so, I have extended Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s notion of the “cybernetic fold” back in time, showcasing its relevance to the discursive world of literary modernism. From this vantage point, we can see how modernist authors such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein prefigure, in their approaches to literary experimentation and aesthetic practice, many of cybernetics’ central concepts, frameworks, and structures of communication. Indeed, the distinct ways in which their texts implement these forms (data proliferation, machine–human interfaces, feedback loops, informational patterns and randomness, the black box construct, second-order self-reflexivity) fundamentally alter our understanding of cybernetics itself. By showcasing how cybernetic thinking operates in varied artistic and creative frameworks, modernism’s literary lessons suggest the possibility of cybernetics’ even longer historical lineage and also offer valuable insights into our own twenty-first century communication contexts. In closing, I offer a handful of backward- and forwardoriented glimpses into the potential further implications of this project’s core interdisciplinary pairing. What happens when we look for earlier glimmers of cybernetic thinking within literature from the years that preceded modernism? And how can modernism’s particular versions of cybernetics inflect our engagement with the academic systems in which we work and the technological frameworks that surround us today?

Looking Backward: Pre-Twentieth-Century Cybernetic Thinking Although this study has focused on the early twentieth-century as a particularly rich temporal moment for locating the emergence of cybernetic thinking in experimental literature, the retrospective cybernetic lens does not necessarily need to stop there. Indeed, literary critics and 

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

historians of science have made compelling arguments about the ways in which earlier work addresses themes and information management strategies that we might, in hindsight, label as cybernetic. For example, Megan Ward’s work focuses on the Victorian realist novel and its connection to discourses of artificial intelligence; she “locates the history of information in the realist novel’s pre-imagination of the feedback loops and universal systems of cybernetics” (“Our Posthuman Past,” ). And looking to the other side of the Atlantic, Paul Jaussen proposes that Walt Whitman’s “approach to poetic form anticipates models of the organic pursued by later philosophers interested in emergence and cybernetics” (). More generally speaking, Iwan Rhys Morus’s explanation of the nineteenthcentury shift to engage in “futuristic speculation” illustrates how some of the fundamental aspects of Sedgwick and Frank’s cybernetic fold were already at play a century earlier: “around the beginning of the s,” Morus argues, “new attitudes towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and society, started coming together . . . [and] people started thinking about the future as a different place, or an undiscovered country – an idea that seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually is.” Focusing on the imaginative deployment of electricity in cultural texts, and parsing work by a range of thinkers (from Nicola Tesla and Thomas Edison to H. G. Wells and Mark Twain), Morus showcases the astonishing extent to which nineteenth-century culture already put into practice a central idea of the cybernetic fold: that “between the time when it was unthinkable to [perform the wide array of tasks that today’s technological capabilities allow] and the time when it became commonplace to perform them, there intervened a period when they were available to be richly imagined” (Sedgwick and Frank, ). The nineteenth-century literary figure that stands out most immediately to me as evidence of that earlier cybernetic resonance is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes, whose astonishing information-processing skills reveal his cybernetic connections. In The Story of Cybernetics, Maurice Trask posits that “the characteristics of a computer system can be summarized as: high calculating speed, ability to retain vast amounts of information, ability to make decisions, and ability to do the first and last of these in real time” (). In Holmes, Conan Doyle imaginatively conjures a figure who exemplifies exactly what this computer-esque mind might look like (a connection that is often emphasized or even literalized in film and television adaptations). The “Science of Deduction and Analysis” – Holmes’s self-professed detection strategy of “reasoning backward, analytically” – relies on a subject’s immediate access

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

to a reserve of knowledge that rivals the data-processing capacities of Wiener’s high speed computing machines in its massive scope and minute detail (Doyle, /). In practical terms, at least when it comes to solving mysteries, Holmes mobilizes his knowledge of the patterns that characterize past crime to make sense (and fill in the “unknown” steps) of cases that new clients bring to him – and he does so with the ease of a smoothly functioning statistical machine. “There is a strong family of resemblance about misdeeds,” he proclaims, “and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first” (). As his stories unfold, Holmes perpetually contextualizes his current case-of-study within the spectrum of the past. Blithely explaining his analysis of Enoch Drebber’s murder to Watson, he proclaims: “I came to the conclusion that he had had poison forced upon him. . . . The forcible administration of poison is by no means a new thing in criminal annals. The cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist” (). Any toxicologist, he posits – that is, any person to whom the facts of similar instances of forcible-death-bypoison are common knowledge – should be able to process the data at hand, based on their congruence with prior cases. The skilled detective hereby becomes aligned with the cybernetic machine in his informationprocessing ability. Holmes, though, operates within a cultural and technological context where this quasi-cybernetic approach to data processing inevitably confronts practical limitations. Yes, he can postulate a tantalizing vision of cybernetic potentiality, in which “From a drop of water . . . a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other”; within this idealized realm of cybernetic analytics, it would be clear that “all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it” (). However, he immediately tempers this ideal, remarking that the “Science of Deduction and Analysis” requires of its practitioners a massive amount of work and dedication: “Like all other arts, [it] is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study” (). He acknowledges, furthermore, that “life [is not] long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it” (). Indeed, there are “moral and mental aspects” of this approach that present “the greatest difficulties” to human cognition (). Nonetheless, Holmes – in a move that resonates with modernism’s investment in cybernetic pedagogy – recommends that people practice his “science” in the context of “elementary problems” in order to hone their data observation skills: “learn at a glance,” he writes, “to distinguish the



Cybernetic Aesthetics

history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs . . . [b]y a man’s finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouserknees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs” (). As he enters into this catalogue of observable and interpretable data, Holmes again reveals his affinities with the cybernetic mode of thought that will come to characterize the more general informational outlook of the modernist period. He interprets facts statistically, filtering and contextualizing individual details within a massive store of past data in order to create seemingly instantaneous readings of their current meaning. Holmes’s approach to detective work thus embodies the statistical approach to information and data-processing that will eventually drive cybernetic communication technologies in the twentieth century. His extensive knowledge of so many topics related to his field – the history of crime, the distinguishing features of tobacco ash, the “art of tracing footsteps” () – enables the perpetual circulation of an intricate system of cognitive feedback loops, which instruct and inform his deductions in the present. At his most cybernetic, Holmes even models the future discipline’s predictive ambitions. Not content to merely solve crimes that have already been committed, he also strives to prevent future wrongs by anticipating and foiling criminal action before it can occur. In the “Adventure of the Red Headed League,” for example, his interpretation of Jabez Wilson’s tale of being hired, on account of his fiery red hair, to transcribe the Encyclopaedia Britannica, along with his observations of Wilson’s secretary and neighborhood, lead him to conclude that “A considerable crime is in contemplation” (). He proudly states: “I have every reason to believe that we shall be in time to stop it”; and indeed, the story concludes when he successfully thwarts an elaborate bank heist by the notorious “murderer, thief, smasher, and forger” John Clay (/). Clay’s arrest, we might say, is Holmes’s version of Wiener’s successfully shot-down plane, whose future location has been predicted accurately and early enough to prevent its next violent act. The notion of Holmes as data-processing genius – considered in tandem with the insightful arguments that scholars like Ward, Jaussen, Morus, and Trotter (whose The Literature of Connection: Signal, Medium, Interface covers from –) have made – opens up the potential for tracing cybernetics’ cultural lineage back into the nineteenth century. Indeed, scholars are already starting to push the historical boundaries even further: Marjorie Levinson and Andrew Burkett employ systems thinking and information theory in their analyses of Romantic poetry; Avery Slater reads Cervantes’s seventeenth-century work alongside cyberneticists Humberto

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

Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of autopoiesis; and the  essay collection Literary Information in China: A History (edited by Jack W. Chen et al.) casts its analytical gaze on literary engagements with information management across an astonishing “three millennia of history.” By bringing these historically diverse projects into conversation and considering early cybernetic findings within the same rubric as the modernist texts and ideas this project explores (in addition to later literary examples), it would be possible to collate a kind of “archaeology” of cybernetics across time, open to a broad range of texts and attuned to the idiosyncrasies of information at the hands of various literary, scientific, and other disciplines in a variety of historical moments. I hope that this book inspires readers to engage further in this type of work. Moreover, I hope that this book’s exploration of literary feedback loops, modernist information systems, and self-reflexive communication pedagogy prompts us to reflect in meaningful ways on the changes we have seen (and continue to make) in our own discipline as we develop new strategies for mapping the contours of modernism. The global turn in modernist studies serves as a valuable case in point here, given how much our understanding of what the term “modernism” can mean has been altered by critics such as Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, Eric Hayot and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Alys Moody and Stephen Ross, and the many others who have been part, over the past decade and a half, of what Douglas Mao and Walkowitz labeled modernism’s “spatial expansion” (). By situating writers and texts from a diverse array of previously neglected/elided geographical regions as modernist, this scholarship has introduced new feedback loops that prompt us to reframe and adjust our sense of our own discipline – its parameters, its values, its goals, and its future directions. This work calls into question long-standing assumptions about the literary canon and how we categorize, constellate, and analyze texts. Moody and Ross, for example, provide multiple tables of contents in their anthology, allowing readers to trace both geographic or thematic paths through texts; Hayot and Walkowitz’s list of keywords includes terms both familiar and new to modernist scholars; and Winkiel’s  introduction to Modernism: The Basics explicitly acknowledges the “growing awareness” that “modernism took place in many locations and many forms” rather than existing “strictly [in] the domain of experimental art by white European men, with perhaps a sprinkling of experimental women artists . . . thrown into the mix” (–). By calling attention to the significance of new, globally diverse textual feedback loops that are circulating in modernist studies today, these

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Cybernetic Aesthetics

scholars invite the broader community of critics who study modernism to assume the type of self-reflexive stance that Stein and Bateson champion in their second-order cybernetic ethnographic work, and to thus reorient ourselves to the new academic frameworks that are emerging in the twenty-first century.

Looking Forward: Modernist Cybernetics in the Twenty-First Century To close this study, I’d like to consider the implications that modernism’s engagements with “cybernetic thinking” might hold within contemporary techno-culture. That the technological spin-offs of early cybernetics approaches to information processing and data management now permeate our everyday lives and practices of communication should, by now, come as no surprise. Amazon, Google, Spotify, Netflix, and a host of other apps track our preferences, mathematically anticipate our needs, and recommend (or simply provide) future objects for our consumption. Wristbandand chest-strap-mounted monitors record the bodily movements and energy expenditures of health-conscious citizens more precisely than we ever could on our own, inform us of our progress, and prompt us to alter our behavior (Take the long route home! Make it to , steps!). Mapping apps determine the quickest routes through unfamiliar territory, adjusting their directions and our ETA to accommodate up-to-the-second feedback about traffic jams, construction projects, and even our own wrong turns. These “contemporary extensions of the cybernetic paradigm,” as Céline Lafontaine would describe them (), influence our actions – our consumer habits, approaches to exercise, modes of travel – by mobilizing the ever-adapting, high-speed, high-volume, statistics-based information processing that early cybernetics innovations made possible. As the chapters in this book have argued, modernist authors interrogated and developed many of these same ideas in their literary experiments. In light of these connections, the fluid fields of text and image that programs like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat curate for us become possible venues for comparison with the transmission aesthetics of modernist experimental writing. Modernist cybernetics, though, can offer insight into even broader dimensions of today’s cybernetic culture, particularly if we consider how modernism positions literature as a venue to resist institutions bent on controlling or manipulating public circuits of information transmission. Woolf, we saw, re-purposed the BBC’s sonic technological field to

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

emphasize its suggestive potential and combat a monolithic “voice of Britain.” Likewise, Dos Passos’s spliced narrative form became a venue for social critique (of labor issues, in particular), and Pound mobilized poetry to showcase the importance of “keep[ing history] handy” in the present (“Ezra Pound Speaking”, ). How might these authors’ aesthetic approaches to tackling social problems and creatively navigating powerful institutions, systems, and technological infrastructure offer models for us to engage with the twenty-first-century world? The rise of surveillance culture provides one potentially illustrative example. As cybersecurity experts such as Bruce Schneier and Ron Deibert (among many others) have pointed out, in our age of big-data, a troubling trend has emerged in which security starts to become synonymous with surveillance. The goal of governmental agencies tasked with using technological monitoring systems to track and uncover criminal behavior is no longer, as Deibert puts it, to hunt for a “needle in the haystack.” Instead, “the communication space we inhabit” makes it possible to monitor the “haystack” (that is, society) in its entirety – all data can (and so, the assumption somehow goes, should ) be gathered, stored, and mined for information. Consumers, both authors emphasize, are often complicit in the data-collection industry’s creeping advances into personal life, as the desire for convenience trumps the nagging suspicion that perhaps some information should remain private. The use of data collection for surveillance purposes – often associated with warfare and politically motivated violence – is anything but new and, as Goody notes, “the technologies that counted most in war were technologies of information processing and control rather than visible weapons of destruction” (). Her discussion of “industrial warfare” makes explicit the link between surveillance and cybernetics: “Technologies of mass destruction,” Goody proposes, “are necessarily accompanied by a drive for information gathering”; she traces this impetus at work in the World War II development of “new technologies of observation such as radar and sonar,” and concludes, “the importance of information to both the US and the British war effort led directly to the development of electronic computing and cybernetics” (). As Wiener himself foresaw a half-century ago when he refused to be associated with military- and corporate-funded projects, cybernetic information management is easily co-opt-able for violent ambitions or governing powers. What alternatives to complete withdrawal might be possible, though? If we think of modernism, and experimental literary practice more generally, as already part of these military-driven, security-centered cultural contexts, then perhaps – like Woolf did on the BBC – we can harness and open up multiple layers of



Cybernetic Aesthetics

discursive potential even within seemingly closed rhetorical spaces. One way that a modernist perspective on cybernetics might challenge the assumptions embedded in these more technologically oriented discourses is through the cross-disciplinary connections it illuminates. As this book’s chapters have illustrated, literary experimentation and cybernetics theory approach issues of communication innovation from distinct yet overlapping perspectives. Pound’s epic poetic ambitions encounter Wiener’s theories of feedback-loop learning; Dos Passos’s literary experiments come into contact with Wiener and Shannon’s theories of information and newsreel’s production practice; Woolf’s approach to character and language meets W. Ross Ashby on black boxes, Silvan Tomkins on affect, and Rudolf Arnheim on radio; Stein’s avant-garde observations on culture rub shoulders with Margaret Mead’s, Gregory Bateson’s, and Mary Catherine Bateson’s ethnographic methodologies. The perspective that this comparative interpretive method embraces – characterized most centrally by a willingness to explore connections even across vast disciplinary divisions – also offers rich potential for twenty-first-century cultural analysis and cybernetics-based social critique. To cite only one brief example, cybernetics frameworks can link the otherwise distant worlds of health care and installation art as complementary elements of the twenty-first century’s complex discourse of technology and embodiment. In terms of the former, the almost surreal technological capabilities of contemporary data processing now enable extreme precision in body scanning, diagnostics, and treatment, and statistical formulae enable epidemiologists to predict annual variations in the makeup of the influenza virus and provide targeted immunization to worldwide populations. These same computing technologies, though, also flourish in more playful (and also poignant and political) contexts. For artists and designers, cybernetic interactivity makes possible a world of creative installation work, in which mechanical robots or projected images respond to the visual stimuli of audience movements. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s large-scale, interactive projection installation exhibits – which often communicate powerful political or cultural critiques related to issues of human connection, separation, and migration – exemplify this notion of cybernetics technologies as tools for artistic deployment. “Level of Confidence,” for example, is an “art project to commemorate the mass kidnapping of  students from the Ayotzinapa normalista school in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico” that deploys “biometric surveillance systems . . . typically used by military and police forces” to instead draw attention to the status of a group of victims; as viewers “stand in front of the camera, the system uses algorithms to find

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

which student’s facial features look most like [them] and gives a ‘level of confidence’ on how accurate the match is, in percent.” This type of art resonates – in the ways it enacts a kind of embodied diagnostics that encodes and implicates the viewer – with, say, the actions performed in the sterile tunnel of the PET-CT scan machine (with its whirling cameras, automatic IV dye injection, and soothing female voice instructing each patient to “breathe in . . . hold your breath . . . [then] breathe naturally” as radioactive images are recorded and mapped). Both examples, especially when read alongside one another, call attention to the increasingly blurry lines that characterize the human–technology interface. By capitalizing on cybernetic possibilities, the machines in these vastly disparate scenarios come into alignment as they expose how responsive data-processing technologies increasingly mediate – but also stand to illuminate – our embodied engagements with and relationship to the world. As this “constellation” (in Siegfried Zielinski’s sense of the term) of fairly idiosyncratic examples indicates, the twenty-first century, with its data proliferation and management capabilities, places human subjects in a unique orientation to information: its stakes, limits, and ethical registers are up for grabs as the “ultra-rapid” computing mechanisms that cybernetics scientists inaugurated expand their reach (Wiener, HU, ). Indeed, Deibert characterizes our current information age as the “most profound transformation of communication technology in human history.” Yet, the systems through which our information is controlled become so tightly woven into our quotidian life that their effects often cease to register – owning a smartphone is almost a given; the ability to orient oneself to a new city with a paper map has become almost obsolete. These effects extend far beyond the small sample of contexts that I have outlined and have profound implications for subjectivity, psychology, perception, and communication whether or not we explicitly recognize and question them. Modernist authors were deeply invested in exploring the implications of these types of technological change. For early twentieth-century subjects, though, their position within the “cybernetic fold” meant that phenomena like radio, newsreel, and mechanical feedback were not yet ordinary. Consequently, their perspectives can help attune us to elements of our own technological surroundings that have (like so many of the cultural features Stein and Bateson illuminate in their self-reflexive writing) faded into the background. Modernist studies, I believe, occupies a unique position when it comes to the integration of these frameworks. Because the texts and contexts modernist scholars investigate are rooted in such historical proximity to

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cybernetics’ disciplinary inception, the technological feats that Wiener and his contemporaries accomplished wield more than strictly methodological relevance for us. Thanks not only to their contemporaneity but also to their multiple shared concerns – with communication, with innovation, with devising ways to navigate modernity, with the human subject’s position within an intricate web of technological interlocutors – cybernetic theory and modernist textuality invite sustained comparison. As the chapters in this study begin to illustrate, the interpretive act of bringing together texts and concepts from the two fields produces important pedagogical feedback loops. Pound’s extended poetic forms teach readers to use data from the past to develop strategies for navigating the present; Dos Passos’s novelistic invocation of pattern and randomness imparts a lesson about the necessarily selective nature of interpretation that is part of modern information management; Woolf’s black box approach to representing subjectivity invites readers to both observe and practice characterreading skills that are attuned to the ever-shifting affective and technological associations that motivate human interactions; and Stein’s self-reflexive observational practices cultivate awareness of the underlying patterns of behavior that we can harness to engage with our surrounding environments and cultural contexts. In these diverse ways, modernism showcases the pedagogical potential of artistic engagements with cybernetic thinking. More than simply explaining or theorizing the communication structures at work within modernity, modernist literature teaches readers about the new and creative modes of engagement available (and necessary) within our constantly shifting discursive spaces. As we engage with an increasingly diverse range of modernist authors, texts and media, the insight we gain into the early twentieth century’s newly cybernetic culture also wields trans-historical communicative potential. It can inflect and alter our own modes of thinking in the present as we strive to creatively navigate the twenty-first century’s intricate and expansive information environments.

Notes

Introduction  Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses includes general contextual information for each of the publications referenced (see –).  Like in “Calypso,” this type of linguistic slipperiness and pluralistic meaning frequently add both depth and humor to “Aeolus.” Bloom talks about an ad design based on a crossed set of “keys” for a man named “Keyes” (); the house of “Citron” becomes lexically entangled with Bloom’s “Citronlemon” soap (); and Ireland morphs among a plethora of nicknames, ranging from the Latin “HIBERNIA” () to “ERIN” and even “Old Woman” (// ).  Stephens argues that “many of the central aesthetic and political questions with regard to information overload are addressed or anticipated within twentieth-century avant-garde writing,” and he proposes that although “poetry may seem the most non-technological of literary genres, . . . poets were often obsessed by the changing nature of information and its dissemination in the twentieth century” (xi/xvi). His book “takes modernism as its point of departure because so many of the key concerns surrounding information saturation were first articulated in the late nineteenth century, long before the advent of the computer or the Internet” (). Phelan’s argument about encyclopedic form pertains directly to Ulysses. He argues that, because Joyce is “writing at a time and place in which information overload has become an ordinary part of everyday experience,” he can “dra[w] deeply on the encyclopedic tradition’s resources for managing immensities of information . . . to make his ‘little story of a day (life)’ inexhaustibly big and hospitable to a huge multiplicity of readings” (). In a move that highlights the overlap between his and my own interests in Joyce’s work, Phelan emphasizes how, in this novel, a formal experiment is being used to teach readers about a way to engage with their information-saturated world.  For detailed accounts of the rise and proliferation of various communication media and industries in the early twentieth century, see R. Fielding (newsreel); 



   

    



Notes to pages –

Gunning (film); Willihgnanz and Cohen, Coyle, and Lewty (radio); and Bates (public relations). Conway & Siegelman, pp. –. Wiener discusses his title-term (Cybernetics) and its etymological referents on page . See Claus Pias. For more on cybernetics’ interdisciplinary emergence and influence, see Alex Goody (), Stuart Umpleby, “History” (), and Lafontaine. Wiener initially worked with scientists from a range of fields – including neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, physician and physiologist Auturo Rosenblueth, physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster, sociologist, anthropologist, and linguist Gregory Bateson, and cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead – to create interdisciplinary venues for collaboration and debate. As it evolved, the word “cybernetics” accrued a wide range of associations. The “Definitions” page of the ASC’s current website includes more than forty separate quotations. For Wiener’s earliest exploration of these ideas, see the paper he co-authored with Julian Bigelow and Arturo Rosenblueth in , “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology” (Rosenblueth et al.). See Raine, p. xi. For a fascinating re-telling of the Pitts-McCulloch partnership, see Gefter. These include thinkers such as Hayles (well-known American literary critic and posthumanist theorist), Pickering (British sociologist, physicist, and historian of science), and Goody (modernist scholar of literature and technology). Their work explicates the intricate networks of circulation that bind the scientific and technological aspects of cybernetics to late-twentieth and twenty-first-century cultural discourses in fields as diverse as literature, entertainment, psychiatry, robotics, politics, and even spirituality. Maurice Trask’s  book The Story of Cybernetics (an accessible read, which presents a “revised and extended version” of the text that accompanied an IBMproduced art exhibit on “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London []) is a notable exception to the “World War II point of origin” timeline. Trask traces cybernetics’ mathematical and technological beginnings back to the seventeenth century. His version of cybernetics’ scientific lineage corroborates my ambitions to extend our understanding of the discipline back in time. However, his exclusive focus on cybernetic devices (appropriate, perhaps, for his curatorial purposes) leaves room for additional analysis of cybernetics’ cultural dimensions. As Michael Punt puts it in his review of Deep Time of the Media (in a formulation reminiscent of Kittlerian media studies): “Zielinski’s idea is that media technology today is best understood as an ecology in which no single strand or individual feature can be fully comprehended independently of the rest” (). From this perspective, bringing modernist literature into the web of “strands” that we consider relevant offers the potential to gain new insights into the overall cybernetic media ecology.

Notes to pages –



 For more on the turn away from “cybernetics” as a key term in popular media and public discourse, see Kline’s narrative of “Why We Call Our Age the Information Age.” In a similar vein, Conway and Siegelman (– and –) discuss the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a field that funneled governmental and military funding away from cybernetics in the middle decades of the twentieth century, thus influencing the former’s decline as a dominant conceptual framework for new technology in the popular imaginary. Also note that in explaining “What prevented unity?” for cybernetics practitioners, Umpleby writes (citing doctoral work by Eric Dent): “the various systems fields did not agree on what the key issues were. As a result, each subfield developed its own language, theories, methods, traditions, and results” (“Cybernetics”, ).  As Joseph E. Davis, editor of a The Hedgehog Review issue on the theme “Minding our Minds” notes, “we are surrounded by low-cost communication technologies that increasingly mediate our relationships and greatly expand the amount of information to which we are exposed. We are inundated by images and sounds” (). The task of confronting these issues accrues ethical dimensions, as “the cultural challenge of minding our minds” is cast as “both a matter of reducing the overload and filling an absence – the cultivation of those loves that can order our attention and intensify our connection to the good beyond ourselves” (Davis, ).  In addition to the histories by Pickering () and Kline () that I have already mentioned, see monographs by D. A. Novikov () and Thomas Rid (). The IEEE conference series on “Norbert Wiener in the TwentyFirst Century” offers further indication that technologists and industry professionals are interested in the enduring legacy of cybernetics ideas and frameworks today.  I borrow this phrase from Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who posits that “coping with abundance” is the most central issue facing twenty-first-century scholars as we develop modes of communicating and publishing in an internet-driven world.  E.g., David Trotter (); Cohen, Coyle, and Lewty (); Heather Fielding (); Emily Bloom ().  E.g., Mark Goble (); Wesley Beal (); Stephens (); Trotter ().  E.g., Enda Duffy (); Paul Saint-Amour (); Sean Pryor and David Trotter ().  E.g., Tim Armstrong (); Nicholas Daly (); Daniel Albright (); Julian Murphet (); Susan McCabe (); Ronald Schleifer (); Guy Ortolano (); Paul Peppis (); Andrew Gaedtke (); and Heather Fielding (). These works have expanded the scope of scholarship on modernism’s relationship to technology in important directions, ranging from engagements with quantum physics, statistics, and media studies to psychology, the cinema, and narrative theory.  My account of the entwined emergence of these literary–cybernetic ideas builds upon recent work in modernist scholarship by authors like Mark





  







Notes to pages –

Wollaeger (), Julian Murphet (), Katherine Biers (), and James Purdon (), who link literature to technological innovation and conceptualize early twentieth-century writing as part of a diverse media environment. For additional explicit invocations of media and media studies in modernist scholarship, see Kate Marshall (), Jessica Pressman (), the section on “Modernism’s Media” in Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges (), David Trotter (), and Aaron Jaffe, Michael F. Miller, and Rodrigo Martini (). Scholars have explored intersections between cybernetics and later twentiethcentury literary forms in considerable depth. For early examples: Patricia S. Warrick () looks at science fiction; David Porush () engages extensively with postmodernism; and Hayles () covers both. See also William Rasch and Cary Wolfe (), Bruce Clark (), Patrick Whitmarsh (), and Todd F. Tietchen (). See also Wolfe () on Wallace Stevens, Clark () on Woolf, Andrew Wenaus () on Joyce, and Evan Kindley () on the concept of the “network” in relation to Hugh Kenner’s early writing. In a statement particularly apt to this book’s first chapter, Crawford posits that the “Cantos mark the growth of that modernist poetry so involved with the government of knowledge that it can be called cybernetic” (). As Crawford writes, “the closeness of some elements of [Hugh] MacDiarmid’s late poetry to the cybernetic textures and forms of the modern computer is one of his poetry’s splendours” (); or, “MacDiarmid’s late poetry anticipates and articulates for the first time in English the world of the computer with its databases and hypertext systems” (). Similar to my own approach, Livingstone positions her book as part of a trend that rejects direct-influence arguments that see literature and science as dependent on or determined by one another. “Instead,” she writes, “the most successful recent studies of literature and science have conceived of the two discourses as embedded within a dynamic cultural medium. According to such studies, literature and science, while operating according to different institutional norms, material conditions, and discursive practices, share concerns as a result of occupying a common culture[.] . . . The idea that literary and scientific discourse occupy a shared culture that enables countless mutual interactions and transmissions, both direct and indirect (i.e., via other disciplines) is a foundational assumption of this study” (). As noted, Trotter’s recent work is also aligned with these perspectives. For several of the connections that this paragraph proposes, I am indebted to the contributors who are part of the forthcoming (at time of writing) New Literary History forum on “Literary Cybernetics,” Lea Pao and Jack Chen in particular (vol. , no. , spring ). I am thinking here especially of the debates that emerged following the  publication of Felski’s The Limits of Critique, which gained particular traction among modernist scholars thanks to the September  special issue of Modernism/modernity on “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism” (edited by

Notes to pages –



Paul K. Saint-Amour); the issue spurred a series of “twenty-four pieces by twenty-eight contributors, appearing over seven months,” which were published as five separate response clusters on the journal’s Print+ platform between February and August  (Lavery and Saint-Amour).  See Wiener’s “Preface to the Second Edition” of Cybernetics, xiii. “In the antiaircraft predictors which I described, the linear characteristics of the predictor which is used at any given time depend on a long-time acquaintance with the statistics of the ensemble of time series which we desire to predict.” Also, see Cybernetics, –. The anti-aircraft gun was never successful enough to be put into mass production; the ideas that Wiener used to develop his prototypes, however, became the foundation for his future cybernetics work.  The aesthetic dimensions of Wiener’s cybernetic processing of wartime data suggest F. T. Marinetti as another important cybernetic interlocutor, especially if we consider texts such as his frenzied and violent “allegorical fable” “Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight” ().  The catchphrase from McLuhan’s  monograph appeared previously in Wiener’s Human Uses book. As the latter put it, “the transportation of messages [through technologically assisted means] serves to forward an extension of man’s senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another” ().

Chapter   For additional information about the story of troubadour Peire Vidal (who dressed up in wolf skins and allowed a pack of hunting dogs to chase him, because he was in love with a woman with the name Wolf ), see Cronyn.  Recent additions to this body of Cantos-focused critical collections/monographs include: two volumes of Readings in the Cantos (edited by Richard Parker, , ), and titles by Alec Marsh (), Massimo Bacigalupo (), and Michael Kindellan ().  Mark Kyburz locates the central impetus of this early phase of Pound criticism in “the close study of the formal conventions of [the] poetry” (), and Peter Makin reinforces this text-centered depiction of early Cantos criticism while also emphasizing its quest for uncovering formal patterns that can unify the poems: “put off the scent by Pound’s hints, critics at first found only ‘holistic’ schemes of interpretation, organizing the whole long poem as one coherent work” (). See also Daniel D. Pearlman () and Kenner’s work (, ) that proposes the notion of a “homeomorphic” pattern that operates throughout Pound’s poetics (, ).  See, for example, William M. Chace (), Massimo Bacigalupo (), Alan Durant (), and Robert Casillo (). Michael North’s reading of race and voice in Pound and Eliot includes a more understated version of this argument in its claims that Pound’s partial alignment with the Society for the Preservation of English (SPE) (evident in his desire for writers to use “as many

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Notes to pages –

distinct, specific words as possible”) “exposes a conservative substrate within the insurrectionary shell of the Brer Rabbit pose, a substrate that was to rise to the surface as Pound grew older” (). Makin links this shift in perspective to the increasing availability of archival material: “And now that the whole wealth of manuscript documentation – drafts, letters, local and minor publications – in the archives Pound left has begun to be explored, we have reached a conception [of meaning in The Cantos] so fluid that it scarcely seems possible to talk of coherences” (–). Kyburz’s  monograph highlights a similar dynamic in its focus on “the human context of [Pound’s contemporary] audience” and how it “affected his work” (). Ira B. Nadel’s  collection, Ezra Pound in Context, epitomizes this trend. Its forty-two brief essays each sketch out a different contextual frame through which it is possible to read Pound, his poetry, and his broader position within twentieth-century literary history. An earlier example that signaled the shift to more broadly context-based criticism is Lawrence S. Rainey’s  edited collection A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos. For geographically or nationality-centered studies, see Nadel (), Christopher Bush (), Christine Froula (), Walter Baumann and William Pratt (), Catherine Paul (), Mark Byron (), Bacigalupo (), Andrew Houwen (), and Walter Baumann, John Gery, and Alexander McKnight (). Scholarship focused on interdisciplinary and biographical contexts for Pound’s poetry addresses topics such as economics (see Ralf Lu¨fter and Roxana Preda, ; Jen Hedler Phillis, ; Michael Tratner, ), madness (Daniel Swift, ), linguistics (James Dowthwaite, ), artistic genres (Peter Liebregts, ; Roxana Preda, ), and pedagogical practice (Stephen G. Yao and Michael Coyle, ; Alan Golding, ; Robert Scholes and David Ben-Merre, ). Ideological issues are central in scholarship by Katrin Frisch () and Paul (). Formal approaches are explored in studies by Jo Brantley Berryman () and Elizabeth Pender (). The two types of approaches are combined in work by Rebecca Beasley (), Matthew Feldman (), and David Barnes (). Chungeng Zhu () even returns to the “phase one” theme of poetic unity in an article titled “Ezra Pound: The One-Principle Text.” See Justine T. Kao and Dan Jurafsky (); Aaron Jaffe, “Paleolithic Media” (); Kristin Grogan (); and Edmond Jacobs (). We see, for example, support for book-length publications from Clemson University Press, Bloomsbury, and Cambridge University Press; special issues in publications such as Agenda Magazine (Pound Reconsidered, vol. , no. , ); and the ongoing bibliographic and archival work of The Cantos Project (a truly amazing resource for all Cantos readers and scholars, run by Roxana Preda) and the Ezra Pound Society more broadly.

Notes to pages –



 This statement appears as part of Crawford’s discussion of the connections that bind modernist poetry to academia, in which he focuses primarily on works by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Hugh MacDiarmid.  See Wiener’s “Preface” to The Human Uses of Human Beings for a discussion of the influence of Boltzmann and Gibbs on his theories, particularly in their development of “the idea of a contingent universe” ().  Marshall McLuhan, for example, links Pound’s work to radar. In the “Introduction” to the second edition of Understanding Media, he writes: “The power of the arts to anticipate future social and technological developments, by a generation and more, has long been recognized. In this century Ezra Pound called the artist ‘the antennae of the race.’ Art as radar acts as ‘an early alarm system,’ as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them” (). Robert Crawford makes connections between modernist poetry (singling out Pound and T. S. Eliot) to contemporary computer language, particularly “a hypertext system” ().  Here, Lewty draws from Daniel Tiffany’s argument in Radio Corpse.  For the latter part of this argument, Lewty draws on Timothy Campbell’s Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi.  See, for example, Campbell’s Wireless Writing.  Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Pound discusses how, while living in Italy during World War II, the poet “for the first time since his marriage in  . . . found himself obliged to try and earn a living” (). Because “Italy had entered the war, Dorothy’s income from England had stopped coming through, and her assets there were sequestered . . . for the duration of the hostilities” (). In addition, “such royalties as Ezra was owed by Faber and Faber or any other publisher could not be sent, and Homer’s [his father’s] pension from the USA was only arriving erratically” (). In the end, apparently, “Ezra said he had applied to become a regular broadcaster largely because a German officer at the Rapallo tennis club ‘told me they were paying good money’” (). Carpenter summarizes the situation thus: “Quite apart from ideological considerations, [Pound] had to resume broadcasting now that he had decided to stay [in Italy] to survive financially and help maintain several households” ().  Take, for example, one remark he makes about the British organization: “The BBC never answers. And therein lies its damnation, and the damnation of those who tolerate its continuance. Mostly from sheer laziness” (“Ezra Pound Speaking”, ).  In this statement, Pound’s self-construed relationship to the new technology echoes some of Gertrude Stein’s ideas about the formal affinities between her own writing and the cinema; see Chapter .  Lewty reads the statements Pound makes in this letter as “a mournful acceptance of the new medium and its status in the arts, or the beginning

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Notes to pages –

of Pound’s paradoxical relationship with radio, which saw him recognizing its capacities for creative experiment but also utilizing it as a site of invective – and thus gradually becoming one of the ‘personae’ to which he had so fiercely objected” (). See also Daniel Matore. Ranulph Glanville, past president of the American Society of Cybernetics (who passed away in December ), echoes this sentiment: “cybernetics is essentially about circularity” (American Society for Cybernetics). For more on Pound’s indebtedness to Douglas’s theories of social credit, see Carpenter (–). For example, see Doob’s “Introduction” to “Ezra Pound Speaking”. His ambivalence toward Pound infuses the writing, as he notes that “reproducing Pound’s admittedly controversial speeches over  years later requires justification,” and then ponders, “Why publish this volume? Why have I agreed to function as editor?” (). A more poignant example of war as an enemy of circulation appears in reference to BLAST: “Well, the other war [i.e., WWI] came and prevented its being a periodical or annual publication . . . Gaudier-Brzeska the sculptor havin’ being killed in the interim” (). A counterpart to war’s media-related crimes against circulation (i.e., delaying news, rendering transmissions fuzzy over long distances, and cutting off countries from contemporary thought) appears here as the literal ending of an artist’s life and, with it, the loss of the works of art that they would have created. Not only is blocked informational circulation “BAD” on a national scale but it also stifles the development of thought at the level of the individual. As Pound again complains in spring , although “American news items, and utterances of prominent Americans reach me,” it is “often with lamentable delays”; eventually, he admits, even his “view of Europe is a bit out of date” thanks to the war’s “interruption of communications” (“Ezra Pound Speaking” , ). These statements resonate with the argument that North makes in his reading of Pound’s relationship to race and dialect, particularly in terms of the poet’s opposition to attempts by the Society for the Preservation of English (SPE) to “purify English, especially of those influences it might pick up from Americans or other far-flung speakers” (). In Pound’s feedback-loop-based model of linguistic progress, the intermingling of different cultural and national modes of expression allows writers and readers to recognize the important patterns of continuity across contexts and also to adjust and modify their understanding of and approach to the world around them. Note that partial perception is not always figured as inherently negative within cybernetics discourse. For an alternative take on this motif, see Chapter ’s discussion of Ross Ashby’s black box construct alongside Silvan Tomkins’s theories of affect and Virginal Woolf’s narrative experiment in The Waves. See Wiener’s chapter on “Some Common Machines and Their Future” (HU, –).

Notes to pages –



 Pound edited and published Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry in ; its central ideas became the core of his concept of the ideogram as, according to Huan Saussy, the “basis of a new universal language” (). Pound’s fascination with China has been the subject of considerable critical attention. It was even the topic of the Eighteenth International Ezra Pound Conference (held in Beijing in ), out of which emerged the essay collection Ezra Pound and China (Qian).  Indeed, the poetic quality of the sequence is often called into question. As Daniel D. Pearlman puts it in his chapter on “The Dynastic Cantos,” “All this is meant as no defense of the poetic quality of the dynastic cantos” (). In general, the Chinese History Cantos might garner a sentence of grudging acknowledgement en route to a discussion of the more loudly celebrated Pisan Cantos; extended treatments often deal with cataloguing sources and evaluating historical accuracy rather than with developing in-depth interpretation and analysis of poetic elements (the quintessential example of the latter is John J. Nolde’s Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound, which meticulously charts Pound’s source materials). A few exceptions to these statements include readings by Ira Nadel (who approaches the poems from a book-history perspective that incorporates unpublished archival material – namely, hand-drawn maps that Pound had wanted included alongside the sequence – to argue that Pound’s interest in “visualizing Chinese history” is an “extension of the technique” he uses throughout the Cantos [“Visualizing History,” ]); Hong Sun, Alireza Farahbakhsh, and Qingjun Li (who each explore Pound’s use of Confucian ideals in the sequence); David A. Moody (who emphasizes the poems’ status as a “specialized guide for governors” []); and Akitoshi Nagahata (who analyzes the poems’ “Sinocentric view of world order” the borders of which are “in constant threat” []).  See Nicholls (). In addition, Farahbakhsh argues that “by condemning inefficient Chinese emperors and praising authoritative and competent rulers, Pound, in fact, is voicing his advocacy not only for the Chinese philosopher, but also for Italian fascism” (). Further, Li points out that this interest in leadership extends to the source text (by Zhu Xi) for the translation Pound used, which is presented as “a cautionary tale, designed to instruct emperors and ministers” ().  This sense of the urgency of adopting and mastering cybernetic thinking strategies within modernity appears as a central aspect of my argument in upcoming chapters of this book as well.  “Venerandum / In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite, / Cypri munimenta sortita est . . .” (Cantos, ).  I here refer to “The Serious Artist,” in which Pound writes: the “ideas, or fragments of ideas, the emotion and concomitant emotions of [any] ‘Intellectual and Emotional Complex’ . . . must be in harmony, they must form an organism, they must be an oak sprung from an acorn” ().  Li makes a compelling argument about the status of the mirror as a symbol of this type of feedback-based logic. Their reading also addresses the “Make it

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Notes to pages –

New” passage and concludes that Pound “held up a mirror to China’s long history to show how Confucian values, when appropriated for each new age, may stabilize the political system and allow the individual to flourish” (). The verb “to make” gets even more interesting in its signification when we consider it in translation, since in both German (machen) and French (faire) the word connotes both “to make” and “to do.” A repeated sentence-level pattern emerges as the poem progresses, which is structured as follows: “[name of emperor] + [verb expressing his creative contribution] + [description of his action].” In addition to the phrases already cited, which hinge on the verb “to make,” we find several clusters that highlight slightly different actions. One relates to teaching: “YEOU taught men to break branches/Seu Gin set up the stage and taught barter,/taught the knotting of cords/Fou Hi taught men to grow barley” (, my emphasis). And, a later sequence recalls the passive inflections of “keep it growing” through a repetition of “let”: “To be Lord of the four seas of China/a man must let men make verses/ he must let people play comedies/and historians write down the facts/he must let the poor speak evil of taxes” (, my emphasis). Both Sun’s reading of the overall sequence and Li’s interpretation of the “MAKE IT NEW” passage reinforce this connection to governance. The offering up of examples without critical commentary (i.e., simply presenting them for the reader to explore and learn from) epitomizes Pound’s theories of pedagogy, as he articulated in his  treatise The ABC of Reading. It also resonates with the aesthetics of insistence (often perceived as repetitiveness) that shapes Gertrude Stein’s work, as I explore in Chapter . This complex and multivalent conception of ideal and just leadership finds its ultimate expression, at least insofar as Canto  is concerned, in the figure of “Kung-fu-tseu” – Confucius. His prowess is hailed and described through a series of images that create their own microcosm of feedback: he is the “Taught and the not taught,” able to both learn from others and innovate on his own (); he rises by his own merit from “supervisor of victuals” to “supervisor of cattle” and “inspector of markets” (); he can discern what is “Wrong” and “correct” (); he sings and, like the “cut[ter of] underbrush,” manages to “cut  odes to ” (); and, finally, in a nod to eugenics rhetoric, he comes of mighty “stock,” boasting a father whose strength and leadership are the stuff of legend (). In sum, through these plural iterations of his expert and idealized status, Confucius both exemplifies the complex, creative logic of “MAKE IT NEW” and also cybernetically “makes new” our understanding of what is possible in a person of power. This reading exists in tension with the argument that Nicholls makes in “A Metaphysics of the State,” which instead posits that Pound’s presentation of Chinese history is much more hierarchical and aristocratically minded in scope. Nicholls, for instance, sees Pound depicting the reader as a “passive” receiver of information (). Regardless of Pound’s individual assumptions about his readers’ information processing abilities, I would argue that his poetics makes possible a more democratizing interpretation.

Notes to pages –



 For example, we can trace Pound’s cybernetic affinities to his earliest artistic endeavors, where the ethic of responsive adaptability to feedback that drives cybernetic thinking is remarkably evident. We might think of the heated dialogue of coterie chit-chat, or the collaborative editing projects that influenced authors like T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, not to mention Pound’s tendency to flit from one “–ism” to the next in search of (and in hopes of publishing) new authors and trends at the forefront of literary innovation. Furthermore, Pound’s constantly shifting poetic ambitions during this time illustrate his investment in precisely the approach to transmission that constitutes the basis of feedback-induced learning. As Eliot himself wrote in his  essay on Pound, his friend’s work “demands” a “constant readjustment” on the part of the reader.  Claude Shannon clearly expresses the centrality of this type of repetition to cybernetics technology. In The Mathematical Theory of Communication, he writes: “by repeating the message many times and by a statistical study of the different received versions of the message the probability of errors could be made very small” ().  For a discussion of these concepts in the context of Wiener’s anti-aircraft gun experiments, see Conway and Siegelman (–).  See Terrell ().

Chapter   MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener is credited with coining the term “cybernetics” in his  monograph of the same name. The discipline’s most prominent public venue was the interdisciplinary “Macy Conferences,” held in New York from –. I discuss cybernetics historiography in more detail within the Introduction.  Perhaps the most famous early “cybernetic machine” was Wiener’s automated anti-aircraft gun prototype. See Wiener (HU, –).  In an interview for the Spring  issue of the Paris Review, Dos Passos explained that he “us[ed] the camera eye [sections] as a safety valve for [his] own subjective feelings” (Sanders). James N. Westerhoven’s  article on the “Autobiographical Elements in the Camera Eye” establishes the validity of the autobiographical connection by collating the experiences recounted in those parts of the novel with Dos Passos’s  memoir, biographical work by Melvin Landsberg, Townsend Ludington’s edition of Dos Passos’s letters and diaries, and original archival work at the University of Virginia’s Dos Passos collection. As Westerhoven argues, “once an autobiographical framework has been established, the Camera Eye gains in credibility as the impression not of an invented persona, but of the author himself” ().  Other critical definitions of naturalism also note its emphasis on the “deterministic depiction of humanity as the passive pawns of an indifferent world” (Newlin, ). June Howard corroborates this sentiment, writing: “the

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Notes to pages –

determined world [that naturalism’s often-doomed characters] inhabit is indeed the best-known aspect of the genre” (x). Even critics who don’t explicitly discuss Dos Passos’s connections to literary naturalism remark on these themes. Christopher Breu, for instance, reads the novels as presenting a “conceptual position” that showcases “the immersion of subjects in a larger world of contingency, technology, and constraint” (). His reading (which focuses on connections between Dos Passos and Michel Foucault) cites the trilogy’s “Camera Eye” sections as places that often “emphasize the contingency of meaning” (). As Dick articulates it, the conditions of possibility that lead up to his arrival in post-war Europe, and therefore his encounter with Daughter, are “all a series of accidents” (, , my emphasis). Dick’s individual hard work is bolstered by a backdrop of existing supports: the institutional nepotism that high-profile familial connections produce (initially sent home from Europe in disgrace, the fact that his “mother was the daughter of Major General Ellsworth” secures him a cushy officer’s commission and a return ticket to Paris [, ]); the charisma, charm, and chiseled good looks that help him land a job flitting from one European capital to another and introducing newly arrived officers to France’s finest cuisine, poetry, and sex for sale. In short, “luck” plays no small part in Dick’s success. Howard’s assessment of Dos Passos’s work corroborates this idea. Although she describes Dos Passos as “an inheritor of naturalism,” she posits that the connection remains somewhat “oblique”: his work exhibits “‘naturalistic’ tendencies” but cannot necessarily be classified as full-fledged naturalism (, my emphasis). And Pizer may label the U.S.A. trilogy some of “the best fiction written in the naturalist period during [the s],” but he also describes this later iteration of naturalism in terms distinct from its more widely recognized s formulation (xii). While both evince a conviction “that life place[s] tragic limitations on individual freedom, growth, and happiness,” new possibilities of self-awareness inflect s naturalism with previously unheard of “hope” and the sense that “knowledge,” although “difficult” is nonetheless “achievable” (/). Ludington’s response to Pizer’s reading of U.S.A. foregrounds this new, hopeful dimension by arguing that “John Dos Passos’s literary naturalism” comprises “a broadening out from the strictest sort of determinism” (). The presence of characters who “seem buffeted about by forces beyond their control,” Ludington posits, is offset by “others . . . [who] are able to direct their lives” and even become “forces in a nation moving toward monopoly capitalism, not merely victims of the times” (). David Rando’s account of the trilogy reinforces this idea when he writes: “Practically nothing is represented on a human scale in U.S.A. Instead, characters are seen from Doctorow’s great height, almost as mere side effects of news and history” (). As Pizer writes, the novels illustrate how “our meaning as individuals and as a nation lies in the meaning which arises out of the inseparable unity of individual lives and national character” ().

Notes to pages –



 In his “Introduction” to The Mathematical Theory of Information, Weaver (like Hayles) also explicitly differentiates between Shannon’s and Wiener’s scientific methodologies. He links this divergence to their particular fields of training and expertise: “Shannon has naturally been specially concerned to push the application [of cybernetics] to engineering communication, while Wiener has been more concerned with biological application” (Shannon and Weaver ). Justin Joque echoes this distinction in his  essay on “CyberCatastrophe.”  During the “height” of its popularity, R. Fielding notes, newsreel captured the attention of “more than  million people each week” and, although it could be “shallow, trivial and even fraudulent,” it was also often “wonderful, filled with vivid, unforgettable pictures and sounds of the people, events, wonders and horrors which the free people of this century did their best to understand and confront” (/). These sentiments echo a publication that the United Nations Education Science and Cultural Office (UNESCO) produced several decades earlier. Titled Newsreels across the World this document explains the features and circulation practices of the global newsreel network, and it highlights the technology’s undisputed status as a popular, widely accessible source of information. Most explicitly, the text hails “the importance of news films in enabling men and women to acquire information, as they are entitled to do, and to participate in all the developments of their time” (Baechlin and Muller-Strauss, ).  Different sources provide different length specifications (ranging from about  feet to about , feet); however, they all agree that editors and production teams were very much limited in the amount of space any given newsreel could occupy (see McKernan).  By contrast, during slow months, otherwise boring stories would be embellished into feature-length segments. Overall, the editor and cameramen worked together to manage the alternating influx and dearth of readily usable content. Humfrey notes: “Whereas in the winter months [the editor] was feverishly looking for stunts, [during the summer] he is literally snowed under with material” ().  New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication offers a similar catalogue on its Dead Media Archive page for “Newsreel.” It lists the following “Genres of Segments”: combat, war at home, celebrities, society, oddities, travelogues, fashion, sports, disasters, and celebrations.  This aspect of film communication aligns with Tim Gunning’s notion of a “cinema of attraction” that “aggressively subject[s] the spectator to ‘sensual or psychological impact’,” and aims for an aesthetic of “confrontation” rather than (as is the case in more traditional narrative cinema) “absorption” (). Gunning’s discussion of the “dialectic between spectacle and narrative” that operates in cinema echoes my chapter’s reading of the interplay between randomness and pattern in cybernetic definitions of information and even makes the connection to newsreel explicit (). Newsreel becomes, in his argument, a place where “the variety format in some sense survived in the

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

 

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 

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Notes to pages –

Movie Palaces of the Twenties” but also an indicator of film’s larger movement to blend “direct assault on the spectator” with “a linear narrative continuity” (/). These types of terms, with their invocations of visceral individual response, might most readily conjure associations with affect theory; indeed, the affective dimensions of newsreel transmission – and cybernetic communication more broadly construed – merit sustained inquiry. This project addresses that valence of cybernetics’ implications most fully in Chapter , where I illustrate how Silvan Tomkins’s theories illuminate the affect-charged theory of associative language that Virginia Woolf mobilizes in her  novel The Waves and explicitly articulates in a later radio broadcast. Doubtless, Tomkins’s concepts could also provide insight into Dos Passos’s narrative. However, as various critics remark, Dos Passos’s writing lends itself less readily to explorations of subjective interiority. E. L. Doctorow, for instance, labels the narrative style “reportage from the outside,” and cites the author’s deliberate sequestering of “the subjective” into the “enigmatic interludes” of the semiautobiographical “Camera Eye” sections (vi/x). From this perspective, it becomes all the more appropriate to situate the “Newsreels’” cybernetic connections to randomness in terms of information rather than affect. British cameraman R. Humfrey’s description corroborates this overall picture. In his words, the “capable man” who fills the “news editor” seat must “select suitable news stories and allot them to the cameraman to cover” (). This image of the ticker tape endlessly spewing out potential news topics is a mainstay of early descriptions of newsreel production. As a  article notes, “In [the news editor’s] room a tape machine ticks away the news of the moment, and every now and then this machine is consulted lest anything of value should have escaped attention” (“Running,” ). Talbot notes: “cinematography is depended mainly upon a bright light; thus the success of a film . . . is never certain beforehand[.] . . . The operator may wait for hours to film a subject, or perhaps he makes his exposures in despair, and with a blind trust in luck” (–). “Running the Topical Films” echoes these sentiments: “Many a topical film of importance has been ruined by fog or rain” (). See R. Fielding (). Talbot explains how “competition” among cameramen, in tandem with growing technical, editorial, and circulation efficiency, gradually led to a “more and more up-to-date aspect” of footage in the industry as a whole (). By , he can write: “The organization is perfect so far as the newsfilm collecting, printing, developing, and other technical details are concerned. A complete paper could be turned out in four hours” (). Breu’s reading of the “Newsreels’” media-status falls midway between Seed’s and my assessments. In keeping with my argument, he recognizes an analogical connection to the newsreel itself; but he proposes a more flexible, multipronged role. “Despite their name,” he writes, “the ‘Newsreel’ sections of the trilogy are more accurately described as multimedia collages or assemblages

Notes to pages –

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

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that combine aspects of the technology of the newsreel with that of the newspaper and the popular song. Moreover, they are text-based analogues to each of these technologies” (). This reading advances Breu’s argument about how Dos Passos “emphasizes the polyvalence of discourses and technologies that shape the subject as well as their historical malleability and immanence” (). The nd Parallel ’s “Newsreel XI” includes passages such as: “the Titanic left Southampton on April th on its maiden operation,” “TITANIC LARGEST SHIP IN THE WORLD SINKING,” “The sea was as calm as a pond[.] . . . In the distance the Titanic looked an enormous length,” and “the Titanic slowly tilted straight on end with the stern vertically upward” (–). Later in the same novel, Dos Passos frames “Newsreel XIX” with the headline “U.S. AT WAR” and the song “And we won’t come home/Till it’s over over there” (). Janet Galligani Casey reinforces this argument in her description of how the “Newsreels” function in tandem with the historical biographies and “Camera Eye” vignettes to offer recognizable “‘outside’ information that contextualizes and colors the ‘inner’ reality” of the twelve characters who populate the more typical, narrative sections of the novels (). Examples from The nd Parallel include: “WORLD’S GREATEST SEA BATTLE NEAR” (); “SOLDIERS GUARD CONVENTION” (); “MIDWEST MAY MAKE OR BREAK WILSON” (); “WANT BIG WAR OR NONE” (); “GENERAL WAR NEAR” (); and “WILSON WILL FORCE DRAFT” (). Examples from The nd Parallel include: “VICE PRESIDENT EMPTIES A BANK” (); “LABOR MENACE IN POLITICS” (); “GIVES MILLION IN HOOKWORM WAR” (); “WILSON WILL TAKE ADVICE OF BUSINESS” (); and “BILLIONS FOR ALLIES” (). Examples from The nd Parallel include: “MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER” (); “BIG FOUR TRAIN BLOWN TO PIECES” (); “PLUNGE BY AUTO; DEATH IN RIVER” (); “BOMB NO.  IN LEVEE WAR SPLINTERS WEST SIDE SALOON” (); “SIX UNCLAD BATHING GIRLS BLACK EYES OF HORRID MAN” (); “BROTHERS FIGHT IN DARK” (); and “WOMAN TRAPS HUSBAND WITH GIRL IN HOTEL” (). E. L. Doctorow, for instance, labels the narrative style as that of “reportage from the outside,” and Rando foregrounds the trilogy’s connection to “news discourse” (vi/). Edward Eason’s moving reading of “The Body of an American” episode in  develops an in-depth analysis of the novel’s cinematic elements to advance an argument about Dos Passos’s understanding of World War I within the context of twentieth-century American culture and identity. For a more extended study of Dos Passos’s various artistic and biographical connections to film and the film industry, see Lisa Nanney. In this sense, we might consider Dos Passos’s trilogy a narrative version of what Paul Stephens has labeled “The Poetics of Information Overload” in his  monograph of that title.



Notes to pages –

 Coincidentally, Smith shares a name with the British “Brides in the Bath” serial murderer who, notably (in terms of the novel’s emphasis on informational patterns) was caught and hanged for his crimes when their patterned repetitions revealed their common perpetrator. For additional information about this Smith’s crimes, see Good.  For an example of this type of reading, see Casey’s argument about how “Rape, physical abuse, sexual harassment, and murder of women become increasingly commonplace as the Newsreels progress” (). She demonstrates that the sections evoke, on the one hand, a decidedly “grim vision of female existence,” but that they also “manage to suggest the female’s gradual political and social development,” albeit one that leaves women “still far from enjoying full equality with men” (/).  This strategy of associative and accumulating insight relies on the feedback loop form of learning that I explored in depth in Chapter .  Mark Whalan presents a compelling version of this type of thematically centered analysis in his  article on the U.S.A. trilogy and “The Growth of the Petromodern State” ().  Within The nd Parallel, see “Newsreels” IV, VI, XII, XIV, and XVI.  Within The nd Parallel, see “Newsreels” IV, VI, VIII, X, and XII.  One woman steps on a match and dies when her dress ignites; another is hit in the head with a brick (nd Parallel, /). At the other end of the spectrum, there is “FIGHTING AT TORREON,” “GREEKS IN BATTLE FLEE BEFORE COPS,” and America’s citizens (or, so boasts one headline) “WANT BIG WAR OR NONE” (nd Parallel, /).  For a more in-depth discussion of the connections between the “Camera Eye” segments discussed in this chapter and the corresponding events of Dos Passos’s childhood, see Westerhoven (–).  A variation on this tactic of using similar thematic content to segue between different sections of the novels appears in places where Dos Passos presents the same historical content from multiple characters’ perspectives. Both Breu and Whalan offer compelling readings of this narrative strategy in their analysis of the scenes in  that depict (presumably) the same burning oil tanker from different fictional and autobiographical perspectives.  Early on, Dos Passos foregrounds the role of contingency and unpredictability in shaping the contours of Mac’s experience: “if [a snowball with ice at its core] hit him it drew blood”; only on “some evenings, when Mom felt poorly” does Fainy have to pass by the “Polak and Bohunk kids” (, my emphases). More dramatically, a local mill strike that puts his father out of work unpredictably results in his mother’s death and the family’s immediate “removal to the great and growing city of Chicago” ().  Forced to flee Middletown, Connecticut as a child when his mother’s early illness and death leave the family too poor to pay their bills, Mac comes of age in Chicago as an apprentice at his uncle’s labor-movement-friendly print shop. When union sympathies force his uncle out of business, Mac sets out on the road again, an initially naïve assistant to the traveling book-seller Doc

Notes to pages –



Bingham. Doc’s ill-timed liaison with a country wife (whose husband returns from town a day earlier than anticipated) leaves Mac jobless once again. Hopping trains and picking up a series of temporary jobs – from dishwashing on Mackinac Island, Michigan to back-woods construction camps in the Canadian Rockies – Mac charts a cross-continental course westward. When he and his friend Ike, a fellow vagabond, finally arrive in Vancouver at the end of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s summer season, they are “tanned and toughened” and their pocketbooks are full (). An unfortunate encounter with a pair of cute girls en route to Seattle, though, leaves them both penniless (and Ike with a nasty dose of the clap). Then, when a stumble causes Mac to miss a train jump with Ike, he’s on his own again, and makes his way to San Francisco where he settles for a time: working regular hours at a print shop, dating and eventually marrying the domestically minded Maisie Spencer, reacquainting himself with the labor movement. An argument with Maisie prompts him to slam the door on domesticity and escape to Mexico, where he becomes known as a celebrated “revolucionario internacional” (nd Parallel, –).  This argument resonates with the central premise of Rando’s reading of U.S.A.: that its “narrative mode . . . constantly marks the conflict between literary and news discourse in Dos Passos’s time, a strategic, premeditated, desperate, and cunning negotiation of reportage and experience” ().  We witness this expanding global framework of American influence through the perspectives of characters who travel by sea, like Joe Williams (whose status as the lone American on a ship arriving in England from Buenos Aires during World War I lands him naked in a jail cell, who later experiences a torpedoing event first hand, and who shares Mac’s friend Ike’s fate as the victim of venereal disease), Margo Dowling (who travels in a second class berth from New York to Havana with her Cuban husband, ends up miserable and pregnant in his family’s ramshackle abode, and gives birth to a blind baby thanks to her husband’s – surprise, surprise – venereal disease before she can secure passage back to New York on her own), and even Daughter (whose journey across the Atlantic precipitates her fateful encounter with Dick). America’s association with the automobile reinforces these international associations in references to events such as Isadora Duncan’s axle-twisting death by a “heavilyfringed scarf” (Big Money, ) and to the meandering routes that Dick Savage and the “Camera Eye” narrator chart as World War I ambulance drivers following the shifting lines of the front and dallying with French and Italian locals.  I explore this line of thinking further in Chapter , through a comparison of Gertrude Stein’s work to theories of second-order cybernetics and anthropology. For a similar argument about Dos Passos’s strategies for representing national identity, see Breu’s discussion of the “more materialist understanding of the nation state” that these novels present (as opposed to the more typical strategy in American fiction of emphasizing an “unfolding and teleological national idea”) (–).

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Notes to pages –

 Wiener discusses the danger of feedback-induced oscillations both for mechanical and human systems. Regarding the former, he writes (in an explanation of his early anti-aircraft gun experiments): “To obtain a performance as uniform as possible, it is customary to put into the gun a control feedback element which reads the lag of the gun behind the position it should have according to the orders given it, and which uses this difference to give the gun an extra push. It is true that precautions must be taken so that the push is not too hard, for if it is, the gun will swing past its proper position, and will have to be pulled back in a series of oscillations, which may well become wider and wider, and lead to a disastrous instability” (HU, ).  My conclusions here resonate with Stratton’s argument about the importance of news media and emergent discourses of public relations to Dos Passos’s novels. As Stratton summarizes, early “reviewers recognized the trilogy as both a new form of the novel and as a novel form of news” (). He goes on to remark that “the novel [i.e., the trilogy as a whole] is not only formally marked by its salient invocations of ‘the news’ but is also a novel thoroughly about journalism: the famously fragmented Newsreel sections comprise real and imagined newspaper headlines; several characters in the novel are journalists; and several others routinely influence the press as public relations agents” (). Rando’s proposition that U.S.A. is an “ambitious experiment that imagines what a coherent and sustained novel narrative would look like if it were narrated in the news style” echoes this argument ().

Chapter   Note that citations from Tomkins’s work are from The Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank.  This argument draws inspiration from critics who have read Woolf’s work through the lens of affect theory, such as Anna Jones Abramson (who builds her reading of “shock” and “absorption” in Woolf through engagement with “affect theorists who have argued for the need to look at how history plays out at the level of everyday” []), Lucas Crawford (who read’s Woolf’s depiction of transgender identity as an exploration of affect as “empathy” []), Derek Ryan (who draws extensively on Deleuze and Guattari’s work to develop his analysis of The Waves), and contributors to the Spring/Summer  special issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany on the theme “Mobilizing Emotion, Feeling, and Affect.”  The associative/suggestive elements of Woolf’s writing are often foregrounded in readings that emphasize Woolf’s commitment to multivocality and multiplicity of meaning. See, for example: Abramson (), Judith Allen (), Benjamin Bagocius (), Maureen Chun (), Niklas Cyril Fischer (), Erin Greer (), Molly Hite (); Erin Kay Penner (), Megan Quigley (), Ryan (); and Shilo McGiff and Valérie Favre’s

Notes to pages –

 

  



  

 

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introduction to the special issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany on the theme of “Portmanteau Woolf” (). See also Phil Rose’s discussion of Tomkins as a media ecologist. Tomkins’s emphasis on freedom as a key component of the affect system offers intriguing possibilities for analysis alongside Claude Shannon’s theory of information, given its central premise that a message communicates more information when it is generated from free choice. For more on this theory, see my reading of cybernetic information in Chapter . For a brief overview of Tomkins’s status within broader affect theory discourse, see Figlerowicz, p.. Glanville succinctly summarizes this aspect of Ashby’s argument as follows: “everything we observe is a black box” (“Inside,” ). This structural imperative to balance seemingly opposite perspectives functions similarly to the cybernetic theories of information I explored in Chapter , which must simultaneously integrate both randomness and pattern. In simpler contexts, it may be possible to reach apparent “whiteness,” in the sense that the observer becomes so proficient at predicting the box’s responses that, for all intents and purposes, the “functioning description” fully describes the object’s relationship with the world. However, in more complex scenarios – such as human psychological systems – the black box’s communication patterns exceed the observer’s prediction capacities. These are the behavioral tendencies that Tomkins states are “so high[ly probable] . . . that we may for the most part regard them as inevitable in the development of all human beings” (). As Sedgwick and Frank note, “the powerfully gracious ‘may’ . . . emerges through the volumes as Tomkins’s least dispensable locution” (). The visual marker of enjoyment/joy, for example – which Tomkins argues is produced by the “recognition of the familiar” – is “the smiling response” (). Because we enjoy the “feedback” we receive from another person’s smile, “joy makes it highly probable that man will be a social animal” (). “The acquisition of speech and language” furthers this likelihood, as they “radically transfor[m]” “the entire mode of functioning” (). Most crucially, “because speech enables the expression and evocation of affect, it becomes a prime instrument for the four major affect strategies” (). Eventually published as part of The Common Reader in , the essay first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in April . These essays are often central to critical engagements with Woolf’s strategies of characterization and theories of craft. To cite just two examples among many, James Harker “begin[s] with her essays on modern fiction” to illustrate “how perceptual failure is a resource for the modern author” (); and Ray Monk draws heavily on these essays to illustrate the connections between “Woolf’s views on biography . . . [and] her views on fiction,” noting that “Modern Fiction,” in particular, locates “life . . . not . . . in the material objects

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Notes to pages –

that make up the fabric of external reality, but in the ‘myriad of impressions’ that one finds when one ‘looks within’” (/). Woolf’s larger argument acknowledges writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot for attempting to “break the windows” of the Edwardian houses “in order to breathe” in their fiction, though she is not unequivocal in her praise: Joyce is too “obscene,” and Eliot is too “obscure” (Essays III, ). Yet, they are, she believes, on the right track in their refusal of Edwardian forms. See note  of this chapter. The perplexing status of the “voices” in Woolf’s novel has figured prominently in critical readings of The Waves. Although quotation marks frame what each character “says,” they do not simply indicate that the words represent spoken dialogue within the novel’s fictional world. Rather, as Garrett Stewart explains, “The quoted passages are not spoken really, yet they can still be said to be ‘said,’ as one might say something to oneself rather than declare it. The ‘speeches’ are not whispered or swallowed thoughts either, not uttered at all or even intoned, but somehow inflected – inflected into a zone between verbalization and vocalization, between phrased impression and overheard expression” (). M. Chun’s similar assessment emphasizes the idea that these “unspeakable” soliloquies represent “a consciousness that cannot be isolated or located in any one perspective” (). For extended discussions of the ways in which The Waves is both distinct from and a development of the narrative strategies Woolf employed in her earlier novels, see James Naremore (who argues that, in The Waves, Woolf’s interest in “the suggestion of an underlying unity in life, the use of metaphor, the suppression or abstraction of narrative and dialogue, the choral effect, are utilized to the fullest extent” []; and that “in almost every respect, The Waves represents . . . the purest and most ambitious treatment of those themes which preoccupied [her] in all her earlier fiction” []), and Molly Hite (whose exploration of tone in Woolf’s fiction casts “the withdrawal of narrative authority from passages of emotion and evaluation” as “most extreme in The Waves but also present in The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse” []; Hite offers detailed close readings of each of Woolf’s experimental novels both to highlight their formal differences and to emphasize a sustained interest in cultivating readers’ engagements with ethics and affect). Several readings focus on the significance of Bernard’s eventual role as the “spokesperson” for the group’s collective experience. See, for example, Penner (who connects his position to the “elegiac convention to unify the otherwise divided set of voices as he claims a position as the chief mourner” []) and Ryan (who reads Bernard’s “intra-actions with his environment” as an illustration of Woolf’s theory of life as a series of posthumanist “assemblages” []). As M. Chun articulates this feature of the novel: “the central images of The Waves . . . accumulate mystery with each iteration” (–).

Notes to pages –



 In a beautiful passage that highlights the rich potential for the positive influence of words and art on human behavior, Tomkins writes: “Imagination, aided by words, has created worlds which have completely captured the minds of men, evoking and creating rather than expressing affects, and binding the evoked affects to possibilities which are eventually actualized just because men were inspired to dream and then to act” (). M. Chun’s description of language’s capacity for multiple signification within Woolf’s writing echoes these ideas, “the words of The Waves . . . exist on a spectrum between symbolic function . . . and profound indexical connectedness to the egoless experience of materialized visual emotion” ().  See Tomkins (–) for a discussion of “identification as a mode of communion” that resonates with Louis’s failures to assimilate with his friends.  Penner argues for the significance of these divisions, noting that “in a novel with so little contextual information, the differences in the children’s education loom large” (). She connects the novel’s educational settings to Woolf’s critique of the genre of the elegy.  See, in particular, Greer’s reading of the “flower at the centre of the table” in these episodes ().  Robert O. Richardson foregrounds this element of the novel in his comment that “Woolf’s choice and manipulation of point of view” result in a “proliferation of fictive worlds within the work” (). Greer similarly draws attention to the fact that the novel invites us to recognize that “there are more sides to a person or a flower than any single pair of eyes can see,” and also (here she draws on Hannah Arendt) that a “variety of perspectives” are required for “worldly reality” to emerge (/).  Lisa Marie Lucenti’s reading of the novel emphasizes the importance of blindness to Woolf’s representation of character: “In the attempt to get at Woolf’s subjects . . . we are in the impossible position of reading for what we cannot know: . . . we can only look at what we cannot see” (–). Although her focus on absence as an impossible lack in some ways forecloses the generative reading of blindness that my interpretation instead offers, Lucenti’s discussion of the novel’s interludes as “suggestive and evocative rather than descriptive” corroborates the essential rhetorical mode that I see at work in Woolf’s writing (). For an extended reading of the status of blindness in modernist literature more generally, see Maren Tova Linett’s chapter on “Blindness and Intimacy.” Working from a disability studies perspective, Linett analyzes several “early twentieth century texts [that]. . . view blindness as conducive to intimacy . . . in part because the absence of vision makes way for greater attention to hearing and touch, two senses understood to foster human attachment” ().  In this turn to radio as a productive technological context through which to interpret modernist literature’s formal innovations, I add to an alreadysubstantial corpus of scholarship that has explored the interface between these media. See, for example, book-length studies and edited collections by Todd







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 

Notes to pages –

Avery (); Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle, and Jane Lewty (); Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead, and Erik Tonning (); Melissa Dinsman (); Emily C. Bloom (); and Ian Whittington (). Special issues have also appeared in the journals Modernist Cultures (“Broadcast Traces / Tracing Broadcasting: Modernism and Radio,” edited by Debra Rae Cohen and Michael Coyle, ) and Media History (“Radio Modernisms: Features, Cultures, and the BBC,” edited by Aasiya Lodhi and Amanda Wrigley, ). Arnheim, like so many German Jewish intellectuals, fled his country of origin during the years leading up to World War II. His exile took him to Rome, then (briefly) London, and finally America. While living in the States, he received two fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship, and he taught at Sarah Lawrence College (Yonkers, New York) for twenty-six years and Harvard University from  until his retirement in . He died in  in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Akerman et al.). For example, Theodor W. Adorno, whose  essay “A Social Critique of Radio Music” (as well as numerous other articles and book chapters) questions whether “radio is actually an adequate means of communication,” especially for transmissions of what he identifies as “good” music (in this specific case, Beethoven) (). In the end, he argues that “music under present radio auspices serves to keep listeners from criticizing social realities,” and that “while radio marks a tremendous technical advance, it has proved an impetus to progress neither in music itself nor in musical listening” (). At the end of the book, Arnheim does spend a couple of short chapters dealing with the most anxiety-provoking aspects of radio, particularly when he writes about “Wireless and the Nations” and the possibility of the “passive standardized man” (see various sections between pages  and ). Nonetheless, these chapters, focused on the political and/or potentially oppressive effects of the medium, occupy a separate part of the book from its chapters devoted to exploring radio as a medium imbued with rich formal possibilities. This deliberate cordoning off allows Arnheim to explore the radio form with an often-unabashed delight for the majority of the book. Sconce’s argument emphasizes the illusion of presence, albeit displaced, that electrical media (telegraphy, radio, television) conjure: they “enable an uncanny form of disembodiment, allowing the communicating subject the ability, real or imagined, to leave the body and transport his or her consciousness to a distant destination” (). Beer’s reading of Kipling’s  short story “Wireless” and its “slippage” between the rhetoric of “séance, science, and signs” likewise emphasizes the medium’s haunting presence (“Wireless,” ). Alex Goody’s introduction to Technology, Literature and Culture reinforces this idea in its statement that “radio is fundamentally a blind and invisible medium” (). In the opening paragraph of her contribution to the Broadcasting Modernism collection, Lewty notes that “the idea proposed by Rudolph Arnheim in

Notes to pages –

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

 





 that ‘no external action has to be directly represented’ [] in a radio ‘monologue’ . . . suggest[s] a correlation to the stream of consciousness techniques of Modernist fiction, perhaps best explained by Virginia Woolf, who, in her novel The Waves () sought to ‘do away with exact place and time’ (Writer’s Diary )” (–). Beer, for example, notes that “radio . . . fascinated Woolf” around the time she was writing The Waves (“Physics,” ). For an in-depth study of the prominent role of radio within Woolf’s circle of friends, see Kate Whitehead. Beer also speaks to the wider cultural availability of the medium, noting that “after  . . . radio broadcasts became easy to tune into without interference” (“Wireless,” ). As she argues, “whether or not particular modernist writers believed themselves to be antagonistic to, or ignorant of, scientific developments they were nevertheless imbued with them, often in a slack and popular way. And that way, chagrining though it may be to scientists themselves, is most often the path by which ideas open out their implications in culture” (). On December , , The Times published news of a recent BBC announcement: “as of Sunday, January , , broadcasting stations in Great Britain and Northern Ireland will . . . adopt fresh wave-lengths” (“Broadcasting Change”). As the article explains, growing problems with interference between stations from across Europe had made the immediate reorganization and regulation of wavelength distribution “AN URGENT MATTER.” Only a few months earlier, the BBC’s numerous relay stations around the country had all moved to the same wavelength in order to mitigate internal interference issues. At the end of the following June, another “New International Agreement” went into effect that necessitated additional tuningdial adjustments for British radio listeners. By the end of , with advances in the ability for “double-wave” transmitting rapidly progressing, the BBC’s “Regional Scheme” was up and running (“New British Wave Lengths”/OUR WIRELESS CORRESPONDENT); this meant that each regional transmitter sent out broadcasts on two different wavelengths, offering both a local and a national stream of programming to its area’s listeners. As she writes on Wednesday, June : “He [Leonard] has been asked to give  Broadcast talks in the autumn on politics” (Diary IV, ). Anne Olivier Bell’s footnote clarifies that “his six broadcasts, under the general title ‘The Modern State’, were to be given each Thursday from  October to  November on the National Service of the BBC” (Diary IV, ). See Chapter  for a reading of Pound’s distaste for radio’s unidirectional transmission mode and his often-hilarious denunciations of the BBC. For example, Michele Pridmore-Brown argues that Woolf disliked the BBC’s ability to “bypas[s] the intellect to address nerves and so transform the audience into a machine that could be set in motion by the wave apparatus” (). For a discussion of the BBC’s “commitment to [its] standardizing, neutralizing role . . . as a national institution” in the context of Woolf’s work, see







 

Notes to pages –

Melba Cuddy-Keane’s “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies, and the New Aurality” (). The  date of Woolf’s talk is significant within the arc of the BBC’s history, given the fact that what Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff describe as “the BBC’s policy of cultural centralization” had begun to shift in the mid-s toward greater recognition of the value that “regional broadcasting’s contribution” made to the larger service (/). For a detailed discussion of these changes, see Scannell and Cardiff’s chapters on “The National Culture” and “Local and Regional Broadcasting.” In this sense, Woolf’s engagement with radio confirms (and extends the reach of ) the arguments she makes in her broader oeuvre for (a) valorizing flexibility and multiplicity, and (b) resisting fixity and stasis. For investigations of this aspect of Woolf’s writing, see Abramson (who likens affect, in Woolf, to “a kind of pervasive yet fluctuating weather” []); Bagocius (who tracks Woolf’s project to “reconfigure maleness as an embodiment of change unshackled from merciless categories of gender and sexuality []); M. Chun (who reads The Waves as Woolf’s “attempt to unsettle the ineradicable symbolic function of language” []); L. Crawford (whose reading of Woolf and “transgender affect” invites us to “think of gender as something active and always in the making” []); Greer (who emphasizes Woolf’s interest in conversation as a site for constantly “expanded and remade” worlds []); Hite (whose studies “tonal ambiguity” in Woolf’s fiction [ix]); and Ryan (whose analysis of Woolf’s posthumanist leanings invites us to see how she “refuse[s] any settled concept of human nature” []). On March , , the Times’ broadcasting segment included this short announcement in its overview of “FUTURE TALKS” (“Broadcasting”): “On Thursdays in the series, ‘Words Fail Me,’ words and the change in their meaning and pronunciation will be discussed by Miss Virginia Woolf, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, Lord MacMillan, and Dr. Cyril Burt.” The series eventually ran from April  until June , , although there appears to have been a gap between April  and May ; broadcasts aired between : and :pm. Titles of individual talks included: “The Need for New Words” (April , Allan Ferguson); “Sources of New Words” (April , Logan Pearsall Smith); Woolf’s “Craftsmanship” (April , according to the Times, although Leonard Woolf reports its date as April  in Death of the Moth), “Clichés and Public Discussions” (May , J. D. Woodruff ), “Changes in Pronunciation” (May , H. C. Wyld and Harold Orton), “Have we too many words?” (June , Leonora Lockhart), “The Psychology of Words” (June , Cyril Burt), and finally, in a broadcast that was relayed from American itself, “The Impact of America” (June , and re-broadcast on August , Alistair Cooke). At the time of writing, the recorded segment of the talk is available on YouTube as “The Recorded Voice of Virginia Woolf.” An oblique reference to King Edward’s scandalous liaison with, and proposed marriage to, the American socialite Wallis Simpson is couched in these lines: “And how do [words] live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and

Notes to pages –

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

 



 



mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words. German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, aroving fair maid” (). Woolf’s drawn-out rolled “r’s” in this last sentence are particularly delightful. The “useful” capacity to convey a single meaning Woolf cheekily relegates to the “language of signs,” as “master[ed]” by none other than “that anonymous writer – whether man, woman or disembodied spirit nobody knows – who describes hotels in the Michelin Guide” by rating them “one gable; two gables; three gables” (–). As Fischer notes, the “juxtaposition of the superficiality of functional language and the greater experiential verisimilitude of poetic language, which informs the distinction between useful and literary language in ‘Craftsmanship,’ was an essential feature of Woolf’s aesthetics from as early on as . . . ‘Modern Fiction’” (). Fischer’s analysis of “deictic expression” (i.e., “the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’”) in The Voyage Out offers compelling new insights into the ways in which Woolf’s interest in suggestive language – here figured in terms of certain words’ “indeterminacy” – can foster a sense of “mutual understanding” or a “benign form of intimacy” between the novel’s central characters (/–). Woolf was dismissive of Matheson, ostensibly because she found her too pushy, but likely also because she was one of Vita Sackville-West’s lovers (see Nicolsen and Panken). Elsa Höberg’s analysis of The Waves, which she casts as “Woolf’s jointly aesthetic and ethical realisation of [her lyrically introspective and contemplative] mode of resisting fascism, violence, and war,” mobilizes this dimension of the sonic in its final “reading of the characters’ utterances as vocal and acoustic” (/). Scannell and Cardiff note, in particular, the significant role that Charles Siepmann, the first Director of Regional Relations, played in the BBC’s grudging shift toward recognizing the value of less rigid centralization policies. Although likely appointed to this role because he “advocated a strong centralist line with the regions, . . . [a]fter spending one to three weeks in every station, interviewing all programme staff, inspecting the premises and listening to the evening output of every region, he now declared that centralization was a short-sighted policy”; his report’s “recommendations for greater freedom and diversity in the Regional Programme” were eventually accepted by the BBC’s Board of Governors (). Beer points out that the word “wireless” puts “the emphasis on its freedom and its lack: look, no wires!” (“Wireless,” ). In an echo of this association, Woolf described the sound of birds as “blank song” in drafts of The Waves (The Waves/Draft , ). The earliest reference reads: “And then, rather hurried, some bird pattered out a few irrelevant bars









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 

Notes to pages –

of sound so blank that all meaning seemed emptied out of it” (The Waves/ Draft , ). This reading of the novel’s sonic suggestions corroborates what Stewart labels as a “transegmental drift” that frequently appears in Woolf’s text (). There is, he argues, a “conceptual discord between the graphic and the phonic matter of words” (); it emerges when syllables from the end of one word join with those at the beginning of the next, creating “a phonic hinge between lexemes” that inflects the written text with an additional – sonic – layer of signification (). To cite only a few examples from Stewart’s analysis: the combination of “g” and “q” in “moth-wing quiver of words” sonically gives rise to the more sensual word “wink,” (Stewart, ); or the phrase “my eyes swell,” because acoustically no different from “my eyes well [with tears],” creates a sonic second-text that adds an unwritten, yet inherently heard layer to the lexical meaning of the novel’s scripted words (). Allison Hild’s reading of the word “white” and M. Chun’s reading of the image of the “fin” in the novel demonstrate similar attention to the mutable possibilities of words’ significance for different characters. Chun’s analysis illustrates that “Woolf’s images [are] sensuous entities that cannot be broken down to word and referent, signifier and signified, tenor and vehicle (). Given Woolf’s repeated dictum in her radio broadcast – “words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind” – it may seem counterintuitive to turn to the OED at all. However, the sheer volume of associative potential that her novel’s title evokes makes the dictionary a helpful place to begin, both in terms of organizational guidance, and to demonstrate the extent to which Woolf’s writing exceeds the confines of definitional logic. Hild’s reading of the novel’s “movement” along both linguistic and physical lines is exemplary. “The eternal ebb and flow of language,” she argues, enables the novel’s community of subjects to move into and out of a group identity (). See also Laurie F. Leach (whose exploration of friendship in the novel reads “a tension between . . . the impulse to separate and the impulse to unite” []); Patricia Cramer (whose reading of what she calls the novel’s “lesbian plots” reads the natural rhythms of the “sun cycle” as central to its aesthetic []); Elicia Clements (who compares the novel to Beethoven’s late String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus , and notes that the closing lines “imply the cyclical and never ending undulation of the waves” []); and even Janine Utell (whose seemingly unrelated interpretive focus – “Meals and Mourning” – nonetheless evokes this theme: “meals,” she argues, “act as a sort of series of crests to the waves” []). In diary entries about the novel, Woolf refers to “the voice of the sea,” and the fact that she wants “the waves to be heard all through” the novel (Diary III, /). This reading of the repetitions of “wave” in the novel’s descriptive interludes echoes my interpretation of the verb “to make” in Pound’s Chinese History Cantos. In both cases, a series of feedback loops tempers and inflects the reader’s understanding of the terms’ potential valences of signification.

Notes to pages –



 Pridmore-Brown corroborates this association: “the scientific resonance of Woolf’s title,” she writes, “is not coincidental” (). For an in-depth discussion of the importance of science and physics to Woolf’s later work, including The Waves, see Beer’s essays (“Physics” and “Wireless”).  For an extended reading of the significance that moths (and butterflies) play in Woolf’s work, particularly in relation to her representation of masculinity, see Bagocius.  In an explanation of the field’s emergence, Carlos A. Scolari notes: “the configuration of media ecology in the s and s was part of a broader process of the general application of the ecological metaphor to the social sciences and the humanities in the postwar period” ().  Rose’s reading of “Silvan Tomkins as Media Ecologist” sets the stage for this broader cultural viewpoint. Rose is interested in uncovering “those scholars who make some significant though yet unrecognized contribution to the media ecology perspective,” and he claims that “Tomkins’ work” fits into this rubric, primarily thanks to “the expansion of his thinking into affect-script theory” (/). Rose also points out that Tomkins “attends [explicitly] neither to the ways in which communications media help to configure our sensibilities, nor to the profound role that these technologies play in our socialization” (). This absence sets the psychologist apart from typical media ecologists (such as Marshall McLuhan), who more explicitly interrogate “how our socialization to . . . technological forms contributes to our ideo-affective postures, our aesthetic sensibilities, and the scripts that we employ as we perform the various scenes that comprise our lives” ().  Abramson’s interest in “atmosphere” as a productive frame through which to read The Waves corroborates this idea.  In this combination of theoretical and contextual frames, my reading resonates with Aaron Jaffe’s discussion of Woolf’s work in dialogue with media theorists like Vilém Flusser and Siegfried Zielinski, and their “tentacular” strategies for coping with the fact that “there is no human account of the whole” – a fact that Jaffe casts as “a special problem [of scale] for Woolf and for modernism in general” (“Introduction,” /).  Positioning Woolf’s work as part of a media ecology discourse alters the disciplinary assumptions that often govern the field. While recent work in media ecology has sought to “expand” the discipline’s parameters, scholars typically do not consider literary textual production as part of the field, instead focusing on the hard and social sciences or critical and cultural theorists (see Scolari and MacDougall et al.).

Chapter   See the Publisher’s Note to Everybody’s Autobiography; note that Stein was required to write a sequel autobiography for this offer to stand (viii).



Notes to pages –

 Stein’s trip to the United States coincides with the emergence of widespread commercial airline travel in the United States: “By  there were , miles (, km) of lighted airway in the United States, and airlines were flying passengers coast-to-coast without recourse to overnight train travel” (Grant, ; see – for a detailed account of the various stages and developments of the commercial air industry in the s United States).  All unmarked quotations from Stein’s work cited in this chapter are from Everybody’s Autobiography.  Since Mary Catherine Bateson’s work is much more central to my argument than that of her father, all references to “Bateson” will refer to her writing. I will specify any reference to Gregory Bateson’s texts as “G. Bateson.”  The “Prologue” recounts an “early lesson . . . in cybernetics” that Bateson learned from her father regarding the “homeostasis” and “controlled oscillation” involved in keeping an aquarium at the optimal temperature for fish survival (Our Own Metaphor, ); it touches on the publication of Wiener’s  “book on cybernetics,” which she realizes is “already of central concern to the adults all around me” (Our Own Metaphor, ); and it comments on Bateson’s upbringing amidst the participants of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (Our Own Metaphor, –).  All unmarked quotations from Bateson’s work cited in this chapter are from Peripheral Visions.  Farland argues that Stein’s modernism emerged directly out of her experiences with medical science, and that her early training in that field informs her engagement with emergent debates about the distinction between sex and gender (). Chalk casts Stein’s work in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as “a project of cultural classification that sets itself explicitly against the systemization of national identity by the passport” and instead seeks “authentic cultural identity [that is] rooted in place and experience” (, my emphasis). And, although Winant focuses primarily on the effects that Stein’s training in philosophy had on her writing, she touches on the influence of “the social sciences” as well ().  In Manganaro’s terms, the early decades of the twentieth century, typically identified as the heyday of modernism, also “saw the formation of anthropology as an autonomous discipline” that emphasized “fieldwork methods” of data collection (). Both Aronoff and Manganaro invite us to see parallels between modernist conceptions of poetic form and anthropological conceptions of culture, which were refigured during this historical period as “objects requiring analysis” and approached through analytical categories that emphasized spatial form (Aronoff, ).  See, for example, Marianna Torgovnick’s explication of the tensions between “ethnographic authority” (associated with “scientific or scholarly” fields of study) and more aesthetic responses to the “primitive” that appear in work by the likes of Roger Fry, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence (); Daniel Harney’s discussion of Zora Neale Hurston’s work to bridge “professional and lay audiences” through ethnographic style (); Susan Hegeman’s

Notes to pages –



 

  



monograph-length study of the ways in which the American conception of “culture,” writ large, is “a complexly modernist one, related to other . . . artistic movements of the period” (); Trexler’s reading of T. S. Eliot alongside anthropology (George Frazer in particular) and occultism; and Robichaud’s study of the “ethnographic methods” embedded in work by Scottish poets Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir (). Aronoff’s reading of Lewis Mumford’s literary criticism explicitly makes this argument: “Mumford’s contemplation of culture in his literary criticism decenters anthropology as the prime locus in which theories of culture were being worked out in the period” (). “The problematic of culture was central to the emergence of the Americanist literary canon and literary criticism as well” (). Evans work extends these ideas about the evolution of “culture” as a term or category of varied significance in literary criticism and anthropology but focuses on later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts. His synthesis work is helpful for understanding how the term “culture” has evolved within the two disciplines. For additional examples, see Trexler’s summaries of Frazer and Eliot, and Aronoff’s close reading of Lewis Mumford’s  Herman Melville biography. During the lectures, Stein also enters cybernetics territory when she blurs the line between the human and machine. Chow points out this dimension of Stein’s work in her analysis of “the Ford car as a machine-person” in “Portraits and Repetition” (). For extended discussion of second-order cybernetics’ core concepts, see Bernard Scott (); Ranulph Glanville (); Klaus Krippendorff (); Karl Mueller and Alexander Riegler (); and Stuart Umpleby (). This is not to say that these earlier figures were not interested in ideas like selfreflexivity and circularity; rather, those concepts became central with the turn to second-order cybernetics. In her  article “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’,” Lafontaine charts connections between various cybernetics thinkers (G. Bateson and Wiener in particular) and Roman Jacobsen, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jean François Lyotard. As she summarizes it, “the communications model [exists] at the core of the structuralist project,” and “the mainstream approaches that poststructuralism and postmodernism represent are profoundly influenced by cybernetics” (/). Liu’s chapter on “The Cybernetic Unconscious” in her  monograph The Freudian Robot offers a detailed discussion of the ways in which Lacan “embraced game theory and cybernetics in the s and developed his notion of the symbolic order on that basis” (). More broadly, she argues for a reconceived lineage that attends to “the convoluted linkages between cybernetics and structuralism (or what American literary critics term Poststructuralism) in the s and s” (). Geoghegan’s  article, “Textocracy, or, the Cybernetic Logic of French Theory” looks specifically at how “French [structuralist and poststructuralist] cultural







 

 

Notes to pages –

theorists employed information theories to reflect on the communicative production of economics, politics, and psychology, while often simultaneously reflecting on the economic, political, and cultural constitution of techno-scientific accounts of communications” (). Prominent figures include Heinz von Foerster (a physicist and electrical engineer who worked closely in the s and s with many participants in the original Macy Conferences on Cybernetics), Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (biologists who introduced the theory of “autopoiesis” to describe self-generating organisms), W. Ross Ashby (a psychiatrist who adopted cybernetics approaches to understanding human cognition, and whose “black box” construct is key to my reading of Woolf’s theory of affect), Stafford Beer (who famously applied his theories on cybernetics and operational management to assist with running the Chilean economy in the early s), and Gordon Pask (who incorporated cybernetics ideas into education theory). As scholars who work on modernism and anthropology imply in their historical overviews, the overall field of anthropology shifted in parallel with the arrival of this self-reflexive, second-order cybernetic discourse. Evans, for instance, recounts the “disciplinary crisis” that occurred in anthropology during the s and “shattered the . . . notion of the anthropologist as a benevolently disinterested observer” (). And Manganaro argues that the discipline started to understand its “ultimately discursive nature” as the twentieth century unfolded (); his overview of anthropology’s emergence and evolution as a discipline lines up neatly with the disciplinary history of first- and then second-order cybernetics (see –). Content in this paragraph is drawn from my entry on “Cybernetics” in the Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory (forthcoming, ). In terms that resonate with several of the earlier cybernetic theorists that previous chapters have cited, G. Bateson argues that “communication is the creation of redundancy or patterning” (this perspective aligns with the Wiener side of the Wiener–Shannon debate about the definition of information) and that “a pattern, in fact, is definable as an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree such guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection” (here we see an iteration of Ashby and Tomkins black-box theories) (G. Bateson, –). G. Bateson provides more lengthy discussions of this idea in the essay itself, emphasizing, for instance, that “the nature of ‘meaning,’ pattern, redundancy, information and the like, depends on where we sit” (/, my emphasis). The first section of the OED definition focuses on the actions involved in making larger, composite “units” out of smaller units, which are brought together or combined into new configurations or relationships. Then, the definitions shift to a series of entries that emphasize the various ways in which those combinations, configurations, or relationships are created. And finally, we read a list of the different things that result from those actions and modes of being. In this progression, the definition mirrors the hierarchy of grammatical

Notes to pages –







 

 



forms that Stein espouses (verbs “are more interesting” than nouns and adjectives [Lectures, ]). As Jeremy D. Popkin notes, although “autobiography is usually thought of as a solitary endeavor, like crossing the ocean in a rowboat,” scholars who focus on the genre increasingly “have come to question its ‘illusion of selfdeterminism,’ . . . and to underline the degree to which ‘autobiography is an inherently social act, in that an individual’s narrative depends on other individuals” (). Popkin’s study offers insight into Bateson’s cybernetic work, as he focuses on a sub-genre of the autobiography, where primarilyacademic authors contribute shorter autobiographical essays to “collaborative volumes” focused on specific disciplinary communities (). He emphasizes how many of these endeavors set out to cultivate a more “pluralistic and openended vision of knowledge,” as evidenced by one editor, Raymund Schmidt’s, belief that “collective autobiography was an appropriate response to a world in which intellectual certainty had become unattainable, and in which the recognition of the subjective element in all knowledge had become unavoidable” (Popkin, ). That is, our engagements with the world adhere to the type of patternedrandomness/random-patterns that I explored with Dos Passos in Chapter . They also function within a similar type of loosely constrained rules that Tomkins outlines in his schema of affects (see Chapter ). See Volpicelli for an insightful reading of the ways in which Stein’s preparations for and delivery of this lecture shaped her attitudes toward and understanding of the relationship between audience and speaker and set the stage for her later American lecture tour. The strategies at work here follow several of the principles of “feedback loop learning” that I discussed in Chapter  in the context of Ezra Pound’s work. See, especially, Chow and Conrad’s explorations of Stein’s statement about the twentieth century being “the period of cinema and series production” (Chow, /Conrad, ) – Chow mobilizes this passage as part of an argument about the “brutality” and “violence” inherent in early-twentieth-century American machine culture and labor practices (); Levay’s reading of Stein’s affinity for crime fiction; and Bergen’s discussion of the analogy Stein sets up between art and warfare as practices that enable people to understand the “composition” of their present moment (–). Volpicelli’s discussion of the various technological media through which Stein engaged with her American audiences (newsreel, radio, popular magazines, audio recordings) reinforces many of these connections. Mead’s later studies adopt a more explicitly American-centered perspective; see, for example, And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America () and Continuities in Cultural Evolution (). Manganaro’s mention of Johannes Fabian’s definition of anthropology as “a science of other men in another time” also underscores the fact that both Stein and Bateson are inverting the typical anthropological gaze by seeking to understand their own cultural context ().



Notes to pages –

 As further evidence of this American-centered rhetorical goal, chapter  of Peripheral Visions presents a study of how Americans fare when they are placed within cultural contexts that differ in significant ways from their own.  Chalk provides a helpful catalogue of citations for the “critical work [that] has been done on Stein’s body of work representing America and Americanness” ().  The idea that Stein is tracking the changes in American culture over time also appears as a core thread in Sarah Wilson’s reading of Stein’s  novel Brewsie and Willie as a quasi-ethnographic narrative that offers insight through the comparison and contrast Stein is able to make (as an ex-pat living in France during the two world wars) between two different American armies. As Wilson puts it, “Brewsie and Willie is itself a cultural study, taking its form from the differences that Stein observed between the GIs of  and the doughboys of ” (). The reading offers a synopsis of those differences in terms of the argument Stein makes in Wars I Have Seen (): “Stein explains the difference between the two American armies as one verbal performance. The doughboys would drink silently or tell stories. The American army of  ‘conversed, it talked it listened, and each of them had something to say’” (). Wilson’s reading of Brewsie and Willie also implies that the type of project Stein set out to accomplish in Everybody’s Autobiography extended into her later career – that is, she attempts to convey a portrait of American culture/society: “The conversations do circle uneasily around a central topic (the nature of a postwar U.S.), but they approach this topic from a myriad of different perspectives and never succeed in resolving anything” ().  Chow sees Everybody’s Autobiography as a narrative fixated on precisely this type of cultural, or ethnographic goal, as indicated in her choice to close her argument with a quotation from that book, in which Stein muses on how “Americans do worry about understanding or not understanding something” (Chow, ).  This rhetoric of “urgency” is echoed in Trotter’s discussion of modernist-era engagements with the notion of communication signals that mediate humans’ engagements with their technological surroundings: “. . . signal had begun to diverge from sign long before the outbreak of the First World War, never mind the Second. As the gap continued to widen, during the interwar period, so the need to conceive of the interface – the mutually defining means of communication and control which enables a human user to gain access to and take advantage of the capabilities of a machine, system, network, or medium – became ever more urgent in ever more diverse contexts” (Literature of Connection, ).  Available at: www.poetryfoundation.org/articles//composition-as-expla nation (last accessed May , ).  See, for example, Levay’s reading of Stein’s work alongside crime fiction. “Stein’s enjoyment of detection,” he posits, “arises out of its defamiliarization of everyday life, which is also the central objective of her poetic and fictional

Notes to pages –



 

    





experimentalism” (). Levay also confirms the significance of the everyday to Stein’s broader theory of composition and culture when he notes that a primary reason she likes some detective fiction is that it “grounds its mysteries in the circumstances of everyday life” and illustrates how “even the minutest details can prove crucial in solving the mystery at hand” (). Stein’s remarks about taxi cabs in America resonate with Bateson’s point: “During the war I was interested that the camouflage made by each nation was entirely different from the camouflage made by another nation but I had not expected the cabs and the trucks to look different in America from those in France after all there are lots of American cars in France but they did. The little lights on top made them look different and the shapes of the trucks were completely different and the roadway seemed so different, that is what makes anything foreign, it looks just as you expect it to look but it does not look real. For a moment in America that is the New York streets did not look real ” (, my emphasis). The line literally served as a “signature” for Stein, appearing on her stationery. Note, as well, the resonance with G. Bateson’s aphoristic statement: “information is a difference that makes a difference” (Scott, ). See, for example, Chow, Farland, Delville, and Stephens. The latter even makes explicit connections to cybernetics concepts, arguing that “character, for Stein, is deeply based in habit, which is to say in repeated actions and behaviors. Typically, we understand repeated, habitual activities in pejorative terms. But . . . in information theoretical terms redundancy is necessary to convey meaning” (Stephens, ). See Farland and Cecire. For a discussion of automation, see Cecire. On cinema and automobiles, see Chow. See Delville on the similarities between Steinian repetition and compositional techniques in minimalist music. Levay reads Stein’s writing alongside popular crime fiction. Cecire sketches the connection to advertising. See Winant (on Stein and philosophical inquiry) and Farland (on Stein and medical research). She also denies accusations that her own writing is repetitive: “those that did not really see what it [i.e., what I wrote] was thought it was repetition. If it had been repetition it would not have been exciting but it was exciting and it was not repetition” (). Bennett’s idea of “the gossip as tape recorder” () reinforces a similar reading to the one I am setting up. He argues that “Stein’s ceaseless attention, like that of a ‘tape recording,’ both captures and produces her work’s notable ‘passages’ of ‘quite overt’ queer ‘eroticism’ as they emerge from the background noise of ‘domestic details’ and ‘local gossip’” (; quoting Richard Bridgman). Bennett proposes that Stein’s dramas strive for precisely the type of audience engagement I’m interested in, as they rely on “performative listening, the kind of creative listening that ‘reverberates, / Repeating voices, doubling what it hears’” ().



Notes to pages –

 The longer version of the quotation is worth pondering: “Everyday language is by nature (and by necessity) repetitive, memorizable, and ‘singable’: it is always grounded in the forms and fabric of words and sentences already spoken and does not seek to conceal the redundancies, deficiencies, and overlaps that are typical of casual conversation. Stein’s loop displays a tendency to re-appropriate banal and insignificant details and imbue the simplest shreds of language with a sense of unbalance and unpredictability” (Delville, ).  This passage also resonates with Stein’s notion of history residing in everyday activities, which she discusses in her lecture “The Gradual Making of the Making of Americans” – that is, in people’s “living, in their loving, sitting, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, working, thinking, laughing, as any one sees all of them from their beginning to their ending, sees them when they are little babies or children or young grown men and women or growing older men and women or old men and women . . .” (Lectures, –).  In “Poetry and Repetition” she again explicitly returns to the idea of composition and its relationship to repetition: “The composition we live in changes but essentially what happens does not change. We inside us do not change but our emphasis and the moment in which we live changes. That is it is never the same moment it is never the same emphasis at any successive moment of existing. Then really what is repetition . . .” (Lectures, ).  For both of these critics, a key passage for framing these connections to Stein comes from early in Difference and Repetition: “If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in favour of a more profound and more artistic reality” (Deleuze, –).  The bigger idea Bateson is working toward in Peripheral Visions is that it is advantageous to have the “rules” and “patterns” of more than one culture consciously available to you when you need to be improvising your responses to the world around you. “The real advantage” she feels that she has, as an American anthropologist who has lived and worked in Iran, is “knowing two sets of rules and selectively combining an Iranian behavior with an American one in a way that would not have occurred in either culture” ().  In his discussion of comparison as a methodological tool in the field of anthropology, Manganaro highlights how the first-hand approach that anthropologists like Mead and Ruth Benedict took marked them as distinct from earlier anthropologists like James George Frazer, whose “comparativist discursive form” fell out of favor after Bronislaw Malinowki’s work came out. The later approach developed conclusions about cultures “based on the observations of the writers ‘in the field,’ as opposed to the armchair variety” ().  Because Bateson has seen how “comparing two cultures leads all too readily to regarding one as superior” she always “tr[ies] to compare at least three,

Notes to pages –







 







sometimes drawing on [her] own experience and sometimes drawing on descriptions of others” (). Sandler’s argument echoes this idea in proposing that Stein’s position as an expat allows her to claim the validity of her critique of the United States: “Stein’s contribution to a critique of hegemonic masculinity here relies on her location outside American public discussion (‘no one asks’) and on the anonymity of the men (who might otherwise take offense)” (). Emphasizing similar themes, Bergen explains Stein’s notion of a “hybrid creative genius” as “depend[ent] on” an artist’s “exposure to social and cultural difference,” which can then be mobilized toward “self-reflexive knowledge” (–, my emphasis). Manganaro’s overview of “ethnographic surrealism” provides a connection to these ideas about comparison and juxtaposition. Anthropologists who adopted this method “delighted in the very shock of juxtaposition” and worked with the “collage” as a model for communication (). This approach emerged in France between the wars – that is, right when Everybody’s Autobiography was written – and its goal was “the necessary ‘defamiliarization’ of ‘cultural reality’” (). As she puts it early on in Peripheral Visions, “trusted habits of attention and perception may be acting as blinders” to people who are forced to interact with unexpected, rapidly changing situations (). Instead, “when you are able to attend to something new or to see the familiar in a new way, this is a creative act” (). This unpublished, hand-written essay was written between  and  and is titled “An Example of the Use of Analogy in Historical Research” (Wiener Archives, MIT). Scott makes a similar point in his argument that, although “cybernetics as a lingua franca served – and still serves – to facilitate communication between the discipline areas,” “the fact that models, metaphors and analogies are shared does not legitimise in itself. Other criteria of logical coherence and pragmatic usefulness must also be applied” (). His focus on the pragmatic function of an analogy is important: there needs to be a goal toward which the analogy is being used, and there needs to be a justification for why the analogy makes sense to achieve that goal. Bateson reinforces this argument in the context of temporal displacement when she writes: “I was a schoolgirl when I first went to Israel, a young wife when I went to the Philippines, and a new mother when I went to Iran. The landscape and I were both different at every turn of the spiral, almost decades apart; because it is impossible to step in the same river twice, one can learn from each return” (). Winant’s description of Stein’s concept of “explanation” involves “three principles” (): First, “explaining works inductively” – not by “laws and theories” (); second, “an explanation allows what she calls ‘expectation’ but what we might call prediction” – and therefore, her explanations “refer, obliquely, to the existence of causal laws” and also can be imbricated in



Notes to pages –

oppressive power structures (); and third, “explanations rarely if ever convince anyone beside the explainer” (). This last point is especially salient to my own argument, in light of the emphasis in second-order cybernetics on self-reflexive knowledge and inquiry.  Stein makes a similar argument about a nonintentional repetition in structure across disparate contexts in the following passage from her “Portraits and Repetition” lecture: “in the Making of Americans . . . I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing. . . . / I of course did not think of it in terms of the cinema, in fact I doubt whether at that time I had ever seen a cinema but, and I cannot repeat this too often any one is of one’s period and this our period was undoubtedly the period of the cinema and series production” ().  Bergen highlights this passage from Picasso in her reading: “Really the composition of this war, –, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the center surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism” (quoted in Bergen, , my emphasis).  As Chow explains, “For Stein, the Ford does a work analogous to what she does, which is the work of the motor inside – both a mechanical movement and a creative, generating movement. This is composition, after all, and the car goes in the way composition does by moving mechanically like the hand that moves, but also moving generatively like the mental process of writing” (). Chow sets up a chain of connections that nicely encapsulates this idea of repetition across context: “Via a constellation of tropes that connects the car to ‘going,’ and ‘going’ to America, and America to ‘living,’ and ‘living’ to ‘moving,’ and ‘moving’ to cinema, Stein’s lecture [“Portraits and Repetition”] is as lively as the talking and the listening she speaks of when in conversation with her ‘very lively little aunts’” (). Levay’s reading of Stein’s unusual crime novel – Blood on the Dining Room Floor (; published ) – argues that modernist formal experimentation provides, from her perspective, a kind of analogue to the genre of crime fiction.

Coda  As I discuss in the introduction, Sedgwick and Frank define the “cybernetic fold” as “the moment when scientists’ understanding of the brain and other life processes is marked by the concept, the possibility, the imminence, of powerful computers, but the actual computational muscle of the new computers isn’t available” ().  These comments come from a  keynote address at the Canadian Association of American Studies conference (Banff, AB); Deibert has made

Notes to pages –

















similar arguments elsewhere, including in the  Massy Lectures, which have been published as Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Schneier emphasized these ideas at a  keynote address at the IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the Twenty-First Century, a synopsis of which appeared in the September  issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. In , Wiener published a letter in The Atlantic Monthly titled “A Scientist Rebels.” In the letter, he explicitly states that he will no longer participate in military research. The connections between information technology development and state-sanctioned violence have received extensive critical attention in recent years by authors such as Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks, Cathy O’Neil, Zeynep Tufekci, and Shoshana Zuboff. That the notion of a potential connection between these present-day discourses and earlier literary experimental work is also top of mind in David Trotter’s recent work is evident in his decision to open his study of – “Literature of Connection” with a meditation on “the endless supply of metadata generated by the storage and processing capacities of twenty-first-century digital technologies”; this system, he notes, “has brought about formidable regimes of surveillance, censorship, and political and commercial influencing” as online “platforms conflate automated connectivity with human connectedness in order to claim a social benefit for technical enhancements designed to increase revenue” (). Shannon Vallor (who studies the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technology) and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (who integrates humanities and data science methods to explore issues of equality and social justice in online spaces) emphasize a similar commitment to locating paths forward even amidst seemingly constrained, unjust, and violent social/cultural/technological systems. My thanks to Zach Pearl for introducing me to Lozano-Hemmer’s work by organizing a wonderful special session titled “Powers of Projection: Contemporary Art & Cybernetics” at the  IEEE Conference on Norbert Wiener in the Twenty-First Century. See descriptions of Lozano-Hemmer’s “Border Tuner” (www.bordertuner .net/home) and “A Crack in the Hourglass: A Memorial for the Victims of COVID-” (https://memorialcovid-lozano-hemmer.web.app/?lang=en) for additional projects that mobilize cybernetic technologies to develop interactive, aesthetic, politically motivated communication strategies (www.lozanohemmer.com). For an often more playful approach to interactive, cyberneticsinspired installation art, see Geoffrey Drake-Brockman’s projects (www.drakebrockman.com.au/index.html). As Lafontaine points out in her discussion of Peter Sloterdijk’s work, “biotechnologies . . . result mainly in the ultimate abolition of the frontiers between organisms and machines, or even between organisms born naturally and those produced artificially” (). Ongoing discussions of AI ethics exemplify the idea that data-processing technologies are expanding their reach in ways that hold significant (often dire) ethical consequences. See, for example, Acemoglu.

References

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Index

Abraham, Tara H.,  Adorno, Theodor W.,  Advertising, ,  Aerial Perspective. See Airplanes Affect human affects, general, , ,  specific examples of, in The Waves, –, , – Tomkins’s theory of, –, , , –, , ,  Affect Imagery Consciousness. See Tomkins, Silvan Airplanes, –, , , –, –, –,  Allusion, , –,  American Society for Cybernetics, ,  Analogy. See also Wiener, Norbert, analogy, theories and examples of enabled by new perspectives, –, ,  literature as analogy for technology, , , , , ,  Anthropology connection to cybernetics, , , , ,  connection to modernism, , , – participant-observation methods, , –, , –,  Arnheim, Rudolf, –, , ,  Aronoff, Eric,  Art, Visual, , –, – Ashby, W. Ross, , –, , , , , –, , , , , ,  Associative Language Joyce, examples of, ,  Pound, examples of, , ,  radio voice,  Stein, examples of,  Tomkins, theory of, –, ,  Woolf, examples of, , –, See also Woolf, Virginia, associative language, theory of Automobiles, , , , –, 

Bateson, Gregory, , , , , ,  Bateson, Mary Catherine, , , –, , , , , See also Composition, in Bateson’s work Composing a Life, – Peripheral Visions, –, –, , , –,  BBC, –, , , –, ,  Beasley, Rebecca,  Beer, Gillian,  Benedict, Ruth,  Bennett, Arnold,  Bergen, Kristin, , ,  Birkenmaier, Anke,  Black Box. See also Ashby, W. Ross, See also Glanville, Ranulph cybernetic theory of, –, , –, –, ,  presence in Woolf’s writing, –, –, –, – Blackwell Phelan, James,  Breu, Christopher,  Brown, Bob,  Burkett, Andrew,  Bush, Ronald,  Cars. See Automobiles Cecire, Natalia,  Chalk, Bridget, , , ,  Chance in Bateson’s and Stein’s work,  in Dos Passos’s novels, –, –, , , , –, – in Shannon’s theory of information, , – in Tomkins’s affect theory, , , ,  Chen, Jack W.,  Chow, Juliana, ,  Cinema, , , , ,  Circulation, , , –,  Class, –, 



Index Comparison. See Juxtaposition Composition. See also Stein, Gertrude, cultural composition, theory of in Bateson’s work, –,  definition of,  Conway, Flo,  Cooper, John Xiros,  Coyle, Michael,  Crawford, Robert, –, ,  Creativity. See Innovation Cuddy-Keane, Melba,  Culture American national, , , –, –,  early twentieth-century theories of, –,  as object of study in Bateson and Stein, , , , , , , – Cybernetic Machines readers as, –, , , , –, , –, , , – Wiener’s work on, –, , , , , See also Wiener, Norbert, anti-aircraft gun Cybernetics blurring of human/machine distinction, –, , –, –, , ,  cybernetic fold, –, , ,  cybernetic thinking, ,  definition of, , , , ,  expanded disciplinary scope of, , –, , , , , , – extended history of, –, , , , , –, , , , , , – large-scale information processing, , , , , , , , , , , , ,  nineteenth-century examples of, , – twenty-first-century relevance of, –, , , , , , , – Daily Life everyday experiences, , , , –, , , , ,  feminized/domestic tasks, , – habitual actions,  in Stein’s theory of composition, , – Danius, Sara,  Davison, Claire,  Defamiliarization, , –, , , , ,  Deibert, Ron, ,  Deleuze, Gilles,  Delville, Michel, , , 



Dos Passos, John history and fiction as themes in, , , , , –, –,  juxtaposition in, –, –, , , –,  Naturalism, relationship to, , – pattern and randomness in the novels of, –, –, –, , , , , , See also Newsreel, in Dos Passos’s Novels U.S.A., –, –, –,  Doyle, Laura,  Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, , – Dreiser, Theodore,  Eatough, Matt,  Economics, , –, ,  Education. See Pedagogy Eliot, T. S., , , –,  Entropy, , –, –,  Ethnography. See Anthropology Evans, Brad,  Farahbakhsh, Alireza,  Farland, Maria, , ,  Feedback Loop in cybernetics theory, , , , , , ,  definition of, , – in literature, , , , , –, , , , , , See also Pound, Ezra, feedback loop in Fielding, Raymond, – Film. See Cinema Fischer, Niklas Cyril,  von Foerster, Heinz,  Fragmentation, , –, ,  Frank, Adam, –, , ,  Freud, Sigmund, , –,  Futurism,  Glanville, Ranulph, , –, ,  Goody, Alex, , ,  Hayles, N. Katherine, , , , , , ,  Hayot, Eric,  Hegeman, Susan, ,  Hermeneutics,  History, literary representation of, , –, –, , See also Dos Passos, John, history and fiction as themes in Holmes, Sherlock. See Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan Horkheimer, Max, 



Index

Humfrey, Robert, – Hypertext,  Identity individual, in Dos Passos, , , , ,  individual, in modernist era, ,  individual, in Stein and Bateson, , , ,  individual, in Woolf and Tomkins, , , , ,  national, , , , , , , See also Culture, American national Ideology, –, –, , , , , , ,  Improvisation, , , ,  Inductive Reasoning, – Information cybernetic theories of, –, –, –, , –,  literature as information system, –, , , , , , , ,  proliferation within modernity, description of, , , , , , , , ,  proliferation within modernity, literary representation of, –, –, , , , , , , –,  Innovation, –, , , , , ,  Insistence. See Repetition Internet,  Interpersonal Communication, –, , , , , –, , , ,  Introduction to Cybernetics. See Ashby, W. Ross Jaussen, Paul, ,  Johnston, John,  Joyce, James, –,  Juxtaposition, –, –, , , –, –, See also Stein, Gertrude, juxtaposition in, See also Dos Passos, John, juxtaposition in Kenner, Hugh,  Kittler, Friedrich, – Kline, Ronald,  Krippendorff, Klaus, ,  Lafontaine, Céline, , , , ,  Leadership, , – Levay, Matthew,  Levinson, Marjorie,  Levenson, Michael,  Lewis, Pericles,  Lewty, Jane, –,  Li, Qingjun,  Liu, Lydia, 

Livingstone, Catriona, ,  Logan, Robert K.,  Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael, – Luck. See Chance Ludington, Townsend,  Lyotard, Jean-François,  MacDougall, Robert C.,  Macy Conferences, The, ,  Makin, Peter,  Manganaro, Marc,  Mao, Douglas,  Matheson, Hilda, ,  Maturana, Humberto,  Maxwell, Clerk,  McCulloch, Warren,  McGann, Jerome,  McLuhan, Marshall,  Mead, Margaret, , , ,  “Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, –, ,  Coming of Age in Samoa, –,  Media Ecology, , , ,  Media Studies, ,  Media Theory, – Military. See Warfare Mobility, –, –, , –, –,  Modernism, definition of, ,  Modernist Studies and anthropology, – global turn, , – and technology/media, – Moody, Alys,  Moody, David,  Moore, George B.,  Morus, Iwan Rhys, ,  Multiple Meanings. See Associative Language Naturalism, , – Newsreel cybernetic dimensions of, –, , ,  in Dos Passos’s novels, –, , – history and structure of, – Nicholls, Peter, –,  Noise, , ,  North, Michael,  Nystrom, Christine, ,  Observation in black-box theory, –,  in second order cybernetics, , , ,  Ostrow, Saul, 

Index Pattern in anthropology, , , ,  in black-box and affect theory, ,  in cybernetic theories of information and newsreel, –, , – in Dos Passos’s novels, –, , , , –,  in Pound’s poetics,  Pedagogy Dos Passos’s lessons, navigating informational patterns and randomness, , , –, ,  Holmes’s lessons, discerning detail,  Joyce’s lessons, dealing with information overload, – modernism’s cybernetic pedagogy, , , –,  Pound’s lessons, learning from the past, –, –, –, , –, See also Pound, Ezra, education, beliefs about Stein’s and Bateson’s lessons, self-reflexivity and cultural awareness, , –, –, , , –, –, , , – Woolf’s lessons, operating with partial perception, –,  Perception altered by technology, , ,  new forms required in modernity, , , ,  partial or limited, in black-box and affect theory, –, , , –, , –, , , See also Radio, status as a blind medium partial or limited, in Woolf, –, , , –, ,  Philosophy, , , ,  Picasso, Pablo, , ,  Pickering, Andrew, , ,  Pitts, Walter,  Pizer, Donald, ,  Politics. See Ideology Posthumanism,  Postman, Neil, ,  Postmodernism, , , ,  Pound, Ezra ABC of Reading,  Cantos, The, , –, – Chinese History Cantos, , , – education, beliefs about, , , –, – feedback loop in, , –, –, , , , , ,  Personae,  politics and ideology, , , –



Radio Rome broadcasts and Fascism, , , –, –, –, ,  Rock Drill Cantos,  scholarly engagements with, , –, – transformation and translation as themes, –,  transmission and circulation as values, – usury and economics,  Prediction. See Probability Principia Cybernetica Web,  Print Media, ,  Privacy. See Surveillance Probability, , , , , , , , ,  Pronay, Nicholas,  Psychoanalysis. See Freud, Sigmund Psychology, , –, , , , , ,  Pynchon, Thomas,  Radio black box, relationship to, , – history of, ,  Pound’s beliefs about, , –,  status as a blind medium, –, , –, ,  Woolf’s connections to, –, , ,  Raine, Craig,  Rainey, Lawrence,  Randomness. See Chance Rayward, W. Boyd,  Reith, John, ,  Repetition, , , ,  in Bateson, –, , – in Stein’s work, , , –, See also Stein, Gertrude, repetition in Richards, Jeffrey,  Ross, Stephen,  Royce, Josiah,  Russell, Bertrand, ,  Schneier, Bruce,  Scolari, Carlos A., , –,  Sconce, Jeffrey,  Scott, Bernard, , , ,  Second-Order Cybernetics, , , , –, –, , See also Bateson, Gregory, See also Bateson, Mary Catherine, See also Mead, Margaret, See also Stein, Gertrude, second-order cybernetic anthropologist Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, –, , , ,  Seed, David, , ,  Self-reflexivity, , , , , , –, , – Shannon, Claude, –, , –, , , –, , 



Index

Siegelman, Jim,  Sielke, Sabine,  Slater, Avery,  Social Relationships. See Interpersonal Communication Statistics. See Probability Stein, Gertrude Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The,  biography of, – “Composition as Explanation”, –, , , ,  cultural composition, theory of, , , –, , , , ,  Everybody’s Autobiography, –, – juxtaposition in, , , –, – Lectures in America, , –, –, –, –, ,  repetition in, , , , –,  scholarly engagements with,  second-order cybernetic anthropologist, , , , , , ,  Stephens, Paul, , ,  Stratton, Matthew,  Surveillance, , ,  Talbot, F.A., , , ,  Tomkins, Silvan, , –, , –, , –, –,  Torgovnick, Marianna,  Train, – Transportation. See Mobility Trask, Maurice,  Trotter, David,  Ulysses. See Joyce, James Umpleby, Stuart A.,  Unpredictability, See Chance

Warfare, , , , , See also World War I, See also World War II Weaver, Warren,  Weiler, Bjorn,  Whitehead, Kate,  Wiener, Norbert analogy, theories and examples of, , , – anti-aircraft gun, –, –, –, ,  biography of, , , , , , ,  Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,  feedback loop, theory of, , , –, , , ,  Human Uses of Human Beings, The, –, –, ,  information, theory of, –, –, , , –, ,  Winant, Johanna, , , ,  Winkiel, Laura,  Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey,  Wollaeger, Mark,  Woolf, Leonard, ,  Woolf, Virginia associative language, theory of, –, , –, –, –, , ,  BBC broadcasts, –, , , , –, , , ,  character, theory of, –, ,  Diaries, – Essays, , , –,  radiophonic and black-box aesthetics, –, , , , –, ,  Waves, The, –, –, , –,  World War I, , ,  World War II, , , –, , , –, , , , , , See also Wiener, Norbert, anti-aircraft gun

Van Vechten, Carl,  Varela, Francisco,  Volpicelli, Robert, , , , 

Yao, Stephen G., 

Walkowitz, Rebecca L.,  Ward, Megan, , 

Zhang, Peter,  Zielinski, Siegfried, –, 