A Global History of Cybernetics 29
not too far of a stretch. In each of the case studies examined here—War-
ren McCulloch’s heterarchical neural networks, the French evolution of
information theoretic and its turn to postmodern theory, the British Ratio
Club’s emphasis on performative models and agents, the Chilean build-
ing of a socialist national economic network after a model of the nation
as an organized firm, and sundry competing eastern European forces—the
midcentury cybernetic sciences are expressed in the local dialects of an
intellectual milieu and share with cognitive science an impulse to think
with the model of the mind. To a different effect, cyberneticists have been
constructing system analogs to understanding the mind and using such
mind models as analogs for reenvisioning new social, technological, and
organic worlds. The fascination with the mind is not new to cybernetics.
The millennia-long preoccupation with the inner workings of the mind, as
one neuroscientist quipped, may be little more than our own brain’s con-
ceit about itself.^42
Soviet Cybernetics
With the first Soviet test of the atomic bomb in 1949, the cold war conflict
between capitalism and socialism slipped into the nuclear age. Soviet sci-
entists, philosopher-critics, and journalists redoubled their search for real
threats, as well as exciting possibilities, in the rapidly developing sphere
of science and technology, including rumors about a new American field
called cybernetics. Between 1947 (the year Norbert Wiener coined the term
cybernetics at a Macy Conference in New York) and 1953 (the year after
Joseph Stalin died), the state of Stalinist science, having proven itself as
essential to winning the war, enjoyed a complicated improvement in social
status, better funding, and uneven intellectual autonomy.^43 The Soviet
Union stood out as a state that was committed to groundbreaking science.^44
At the same time, certain fields of science, especially genetics in the wake
of the Lysenko debates, experienced acute pressures and censorship.^45 And
although cybernetics was not outright repressed during Stalin’s rule, it was
widely ridiculed in the press and did not flourish until after his death. The
remainder of this chapter shows that even though post-Stalinist cybernetics
seemed poised to remake the Soviet Union as an information society, the
history of Soviet cybernetics, especially during the period of its rehabilita-
tion and adoption, slouches in significant ways toward the normal patterns
of Soviet history. In four overlapping sections below, I show that Soviet sci-
entific discourse rejected, rehabilitated, adopted, and adapted cybernetics
for historically expedient and changing purposes.