Information as Truth. Cybernetics and the Birth of the Informed Subject

Abstract

What is the specific subjectivity of the computer age? Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles suggested that the spread of computers and the post World War II dis-courses of cybernetics and information theory enabled us to construe subjects as cyborgs or posthumans. This paper offers another perspective that regards subjectivity in relation to the central conceptual innovation cybernetics introduced—information. Cybernetics and information theory first of all enabled a new understanding of humans as informed sub-jects—subjects, for whom the feedback of information is a specific way to manifest truth. By help of Michel Foucault I will conceptualise subjectivity and its relation to information as a specific regime of truth. This regime presently gains enormous momentum as is evi-dent by practices such as self-tracking but also the growing importance of information or data in general.