Chapter 2 reads John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy in the context of cybernetics theorists Norbert Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s contradictory definitions of information (Wiener’s theories align the concept with pattern, while Shannon instead describes it as a measure of randomness). Love argues that Dos Passos’s trilogy integrates both sides of this opposition in ways that are important to our understanding of the cultural and political dimensions of early twentieth-century cybernetic thinking. Focusing on the novels’ “Newsreel” sections, she illustrates how this technology – in both form and content, as well as broader industry practices – epitomizes the logic of cybernetic information. By incorporating a literary version of this media form into his novels, Dos Passos demonstrates how predictable patterns jostle with random chance as catalysts for change and progress in the United States. This interdisciplinary pairing shows (a) how cybernetics theories can help us understand the ideological work that texts like Dos Passos’s novels and newsreel productions undertake, and (b) how modernist literature encouraged readers to develop strategies for cybernetic thinking.

The Introduction opens with a close reading of information proliferation and human–machine interfaces in James Joyce’s Ulysses to establish these themes as central to the book’s exploration of the emergent early-twentieth-century phenomenon Love labels “cybernetic thinking.” She traces biographical and intellectual connections between T. S. Eliot and Norbert Wiener (the “father of cybernetics”), provides an overview of the field of cybernetics and its definitional challenges, and proposes that a reconsideration of cybernetics’s cultural lineage – as evident in experimental modernist texts – will contribute a valuable new dimension to our understanding of both modernism and cybernetics. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s notion of the “cybernetic fold” is redeployed to describe the rich openness to data-processing-possibility that emerges during these decades, when high-speed computing is imaginable but not yet technologically realized. After contextualizing the project within existing media- and modernist-studies conversations, the Introduction culminates with a close reading of Wiener’s cybernetic approach to information that links his perspective on technical innovation to modernist aesthetics.

Chapter 1 expands on the Introduction’s brief exploration of Norbert Wiener’s theories alongside modernist literary aesthetics to argue that Ezra Pound’s Cantos and radio broadcasts employ the logic of cybernetic feedback as a pedagogical model for teaching twentieth-century readers how to negotiate large quantities of data, find meaningful patterns within messages from the past, and adapt their conduct to best achieve their goals. Elucidating arguments that Pound makes in his radio broadcasts and poetry (particularly the Chinese History Cantos) and comparing them to Wiener’s mid-century theories of cybernetic feedback, Love challenges the critical tendency to compare Pound’s work to unidirectional radio transmission. Instead, the chapter’s analyses illustrate that Pound champions the principle of circulation and positions his readers as cybernetic machines, inviting them to learn from the feedback loops that circulate throughout history, culture, and language.

2. With the benefit of hindsight, Serge Moscovici tried to reflect on what had motivated him to develop the theory of social representations. Socio-political and intellectual resources that underlay his thinking were complex. They were determined by events during the War and its aftermath, as well as by his personal and interpersonal experiences. In contrast to social psychological studies in the 1950s which were preoccupied with the study of attitudes and small groups, Moscovici was interested in urgent global issues such as the impact of science and technology on historical changes in society, the role of masses, conflicts, and the construction of social knowledge. He believed that social psychology would be able to respond to these challenges.

The two masters who had a tremendous impact on Moscovici’s career during the first years of his research in Paris were the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache and the philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré. They re-orientated Serge Moscovici’s life and he called them his two fathers.

Moscovici’s choice to study social representations of psychoanalysis was inspired by several intellectual reasons and coincidences. Above all, he thought that psychoanalysis would be suitable subject matter to explore the transformation of ‘scientific’ or professional knowledge into daily knowledge.