Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us: The Der Spiegel Interview,” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent, 1981), 45–67.
Writing in the 1980s, Tom LeClair will describe these books as “the systems novel,” whereas David Porush, gathering together a similar pantheon, describes the books as “cybernetic fiction.” Both writers emphasize the connection between self-reflexivity and feedback. Tom LeClair, In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1985). Mark McGurl’s recent book returns to this terrain and dubs it “technomodernism,” producing what is probably the most interesting discussion of feedback and the related concept of “autopoiesis” in relation to post–World War II fiction. Like the earlier writers, McGurl links cybernetics to the emphasis on self- consciousness and self-reflexivity in postwar fiction, from metafictional cleverness to the abundant stories and novels that take the writerly self as object. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 48–49, 80–86.
Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970).
Bernard Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi- Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 123–26.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948).
See Peter Galison for a discussion of the wartime origins of cybernetics. Peter Galison,“The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (October 1994): 228–66.
For an early “social” application of cybernetics, see the essays collected in Gregory Bateson. Cybernetics becomes a robust science of all social systems—the state, the economy, the family, “culture”—with its passage into “second-order cybernetics” and finally, from there, into Niklas Luhmann’s phenomenologically inflected extension of cybernetics, called “systems theory.” Jameson links Luhmann’s systems theory with the ideology of neoliberalism itself and sees it as a naturalization of market relations. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Writing Science) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 283–87; Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 92.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 38.
Quoted in ibid., 38–39.
Michael C. Jackson, Systems Approaches to Management (Berlin: Springer, 2000), 3. For examples of management cybernetics, see Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1994); Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961).
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–34.
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Verso, 2005), 167–217.
Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 7–8.
Douglas McGregor, “The Human Side of Enterprise,” Management Review 46, no. 11 (November 1957): 170–71; Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 73.
Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 46–47.
Hannah Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House (Berkeley, CA: Kenning Editions, 2007), 23.
See Peter Bürger on the double bind of the avant-garde “art into life” thematic. For Bürger, if the avant-garde succeeds in merging art and life, it loses the very critical distance from which it mounted its critique of the abstraction of art from life. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 47–54.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 15.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 95–111.
Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, 57.
John Perreault, “Street Works in Colorado; Libeskind and Kirkland in Outer Space,” Artopia, October 6, 2008, 6.
Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, 57.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid.
Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 527.
Weiner, Hannah Weiner’s Open House, 25.
Ibid., 25.
This text is an excerpt from chapter three of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization by Jasper Bernes, published in May 2017 by Stanford University Press.