Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard Geoghegan (review)

Reviewed by: Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by Bernard Geoghegan Keith Moser Geoghegan, Bernard. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. Duke UP, 2023. ISBN 978-1-4780-1636-6. Pp. 272. In this insightful, wide-ranging, and dense historical overview of cybernetics and information theory in the twentieth century, Geoghegan demonstrates why researchers from numerous disciplines have turned to the study of "signs" and cultural codes in an effort to understand the basic tenets governing "natural and human systems" (18). Although the author himself describes Code as a "somewhat classical exercise of critical theory" (4), he covers a lot of ground weaving meaningful connections between the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences while focusing on the time period from 1930 to 1970 in his trans-disciplinary analysis. Geoghegan traces the historical roots of contemporary information theory back to the so-called Progressive Era in the 1930s when philanthropic associations such as the Rockefeller Foundation financed by robber barons professed their faith in science and technology as a vehicle for social reform. During this time period, Geoghegan reveals that "many liberal Americans came to believe in science, expertise, and technology as neutral means for redressing the shortcomings of global capitalism" (24). After highlighting the role of robber barons in the promulgation of cybernetic approaches throughout academia, Geoghegan directs his attention to the theoretical framework developed by the Palo Alto Group related to "how social and institutional structures produce pathology" that resulted in "a communicative theory of the family" (55). Geoghegan persuasively posits that the research of Margaret Mead devoted to Balinese society examining semiotic channels for transmitting culture led to crucial insights about the importance of codes in quotidian life. After probing the significance of the "bridges among communication, psychiatry, and anthropology" (77) that would help shape information theory in its current form, Geoghegan discusses Roman Jakobson's reworking of "language as a cybernetic system" that would influence linguists, semioticians, biosemioticians, and critical theorists (99). Before exclusively delving into the nuances, paradoxes, and aporias of French theory from the twentieth century, including the work of the postmodernists and their ideas regarding the ubiquity and cultural value of signs, Geoghegan illustrates how Lévi-Strauss "elicited from cybernetics, information theory, and game theory an epistemology in harmony with UNESCO's depoliticized globalism" (124). Although the book is strong throughout, it is in the final main chapter and the conclusion in which Geoghegan most convincingly paints a rending portrait of what it means to live in a world perfused with signs accosting the postmodern subject from all sides. Geoghegan elucidates how the advent of late-stage capitalism and the omnipresent ideology of consumerism that sustains it fostered a brave new world in which we are immersed at nearly every waking moment in simulacra bearing little to no connection to concrete reality. In [End Page 115] the age of (dis-)information, this extreme proliferation of signs has manufactured all-encompassing, parallel universes of simulation that have eclipsed the real from which there sometimes appears to be no escape or "no outside to codes" (167). Owing to the crisis of fake news and conspiracy theories grounded in hyperreal codes that defines contemporary life, perhaps Geoghegan's most important contribution is his exploration of this semiotic saturation. [End Page 116] Keith Moser Mississippi State University Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French