Camp Abstract Chantelle Gray
Concepts in the pedagogy of philosophy: Cybernetics, linguistics and synthesizers
Before information theory, communications relied largely on Ferdinand de Saussure’s understanding of semiology as a structure of signification. Accordingly, communication was theorized as the exchange of signs which constituted a “signifier” and “signified.” Importantly, for Saussure, even though meanings become conventional, the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary. As the threat of the Cold War became a reality, communications emerged as a major social, technical and scientific concern. Especially two figures rose to prominence: Claude Shannon, widely known as the “father” of information theory; and Norbert Wiener, a.k.a. the “father” of cybernetics, a term he coined.
Cybernetics came to propose its own ontology of information, which relied on a number of key concepts: (1) information, which replaces meaning; (2) feedback, a way of receiving information, responding to this, and testing actions; (3) control, a functional method for the regulation of feedback mechanisms; and (4) homeostasis, a state of balance or equilibrium. In time, this became a general modelfor understanding the functioning and dynamisms of machines and organisms. Interestingly, the equivalence between language, communication and code was not only articulated in Shannon’s standard transmission model of communication. Noam Chomsky, as David Golumbia argues in The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009), also did so through two theses, the first of which assumes that language develops from an innate system, which he called ‘universal grammar’; and the second of which argues that humans acquire language by storing information in the brain – much like a computer might.
As is well known, Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), take umbrage with the binary logic and biunivocal relationships dominant in information science and Chomskyan linguistics alike. In place of these arboreal systems, they propose that we think of machinic assemblages in terms of synthesizers. As such, they replace (1) information with the rhizome; (2) feedback with force (3); control with continuous variation or becoming; and (4) homeostasis with metastability or the ritornello. In this workshop, we will test Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the value of the synthesizer as a conceptby demonstrating what modular synthesizers do.
Recommeded readings from Compendium (any or all of the following):
- Chapter 4 in ATP: November 20, 1923 – Postulates of Linguistics
- Chapter 11 in ATP: 1837: Of the Refrain
- Chapter 4 from The Cybernetics Moment by Ronald Kline
- Chapter 1 from The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering
- Chapter 2 from The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia
Chantelle Gray is a South African philosopher whose interests span anarchism and anarchist pedagogy; critical algorithm studies; queer theory and gender studies; experimental and exploratory studies in music; and Continental philosophies. The interdisciplinary nature of her work allows her to ask critical questions about how to take care of humans and their ecologies in the digital age. She is the author of Anarchism after Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (2022), and the co-editor of Deleuze and Anarchism (2019).