French Theory and Cybernetics

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the relationship between cybernetics and the post-war French philosophies or theories known and embraced as structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Recent research has shown that cybernetics was closely associated with Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, which was the cool of the new French theory, and that poststructuralism or postmodernism was a response to the technologies of control represented by cybernetics. From this perspective, the misconceptions and prejudices surrounding French theory must be confronted with an understanding of the historical context that gave rise to the phenomenon of postmodernism. This paper looks at French theory as an intellectual movement that emerged out of the reflection on cybernetic technologies in the post-war period centred on the Maginot Line and revisits its theoretical context through the keyword cybernetics. This new examination will allow us to rewrite the genealogy of French theories that emerged after 1950 as a response to cybernetics, whether postmodernism is interpreted as a cultural logic of late capitalism, as an extension of modernism, or as a new epistemology inevitably resulting from the decline of modernity. From this perspective, this paper argues that French theory and its effect, postmodernism, should not be buried in the annals of history as relics of a bygone era but should be recognized as a historical legacy shaping our present reality and should be re-examined.