Since the writing of this book in the summer and fall of 2002, the historical movement it undertakes to unearth with a view to the history of media, culture, and knowledge—the transition from intuitive to symbolic thinking that had been taking place since the various waves of formalization in the nineteenth century and culminated in the information theory and cybernetics of the 1950s and 1960s—has continued to advance. The technical-medial condition of the present, which only barely announced itself ten years ago but whose having-become cannot be grasped without this sea change, has been clarified dramatically by the becoming-environmental of computation. Thus, even though no more than thirteen years have passed since it was first published in German, this book enters into a transformed situation, which calls for a certain recontextualization, given that, despite all its immersion in history, it is also always and perhaps above all concerned with understanding our own genealogy. Only now has it become fully clear—and this, precisely, is what I have since sought to establish in the diagnostic work on the technological condition, the genesis of a new techno-ecological culture of sense, and the definition of the new power formation that is environmentality—not only that information theory and cybernetics represented the high point and the end of the symbolist revolution, in which a certain epochal pathos of the purely symbolic came into its own and forced a redefinition of the matter of thinking, but also that a process of cyberneticization begun in the early nineteenth century took shape in a concrete theory and agenda for the first time here. The implementation dynamic of this process was yet to go far beyond its original institutional conception and reaches all the way to us, indeed reaches its high point only today: as the total cyberneticization of all modes of existence. The cybernetic problem has now proven to be the problem of our age.

This brings out the historical power/knowledge dimension of the great transformation of cyberneticization that not only implements the transition from the intuitive to the symbolic but finally forces the switch to a different situation in the history of sense, a situation this difference, which will have been central to its appearance, can nonetheless no longer suffice to describe.