From Newspeak to Cyberspeak (review)

Slava Gerovitch's fascinating book extends over a variety of themes—the emergence of the science of cybernetics in the West and in the USSR, the development of Soviet computers, the language used in Soviet ideological and scientific debates, and the nature of academic controversies in biology, linguistics, physiology, economics, philosophy, and other fields. All these themes are brought to bear on what Gerovitch describes as the "historical encounter between the language of cybernetics and the Soviet ideological language" (p. 3).

The central story line of the book is the way the discourse in a number of scientific fields and the associated controversies shifted from "newspeak" to "cyberspeak" in the years after Josif Stalin's death. Newspeak refers to the "floating signifiers" such as cosmopolitanism, formalism, idealism, and mechanicism, which were of varying content and at times meaningless. They were employed to wage political and scientific battles in the last couple of decades of the Stalin period. These battles took place between the political and ideological overlords of the system and the scientific community, on the one hand, and within the scientific fields themselves, on the other. Gerovitch proposes the interesting idea that instead of open conflict, Communist Party officials and scientists were often engaged in a symbiotic relationship, each maneuvering and skillfully manipulating whatever campaign was under way.

In the period of greater openness that followed Stalin's death, scientists sought to replace newspeak with a more objective and precise terminology for scientific discourse, drawing from cybernetics. Gerovitch calls this new discourse "cyberspeak," a language involving concepts such as feedback, control, algorithm, machine intelligence, information, and communication. Proponents of the new discourse believed it would become a universal language suitable for conceptualizing and setting the research agenda in all scientific fields. Proponents also saw it as a tool for the de-Stalinization of science and as a social movement for radical reform in science and society at large. The partisans of this shift succeeded in their effort insofar as cyberspeak did indeed come to dominate the discourse in many scientific fields and ultimately began to be adopted in political and social discourse as well. Cyberspeak was employed not just to wrest control of scientific discussion from the hands of Communist Party ideologues, but also to establish a new language of controversy within the scientific community. Ironically, however, as this shift took place, cyberspeak, which was never as precise and comprehensive an idiom as its proponents originally thought, became bastardized and finally turned into another set of "floating signifiers" as protean and meaningless as the original newspeak. Gerovitch aptly describes cyberspeak as an inverted version of newspeak.

A large literature exists on many of these themes, and although Gerovitch's book does not contain a regular bibliography, the footnotes provide an extensive guide to sources that will be very useful to anyone who may know some parts of the story but not others. In addition to drawing on these materials, Gerovitch has made extensive use of previously unexploited archival materials. Whatever may have been said on some of these themes before, Gerovitch's unique achievement is to absorb the many diverse developments and to integrate them around the issue of language.

This is an absorbing story that incorporates numerous side plots in addition to the main dramatic plotline—small potted histories of individual controversies, computer development, actors, and institutions. These are often full of paradox. At the same time that computers were being denounced as tools to support the class interest of the capitalists and irrelevant to socialism and that cybernetics was being denounced as superstition, Soviet leaders were frantically trying to develop computers to support their military programs. But because the military-related program was a secret effort, this Soviet dependence on computers could not serve as an argument against the anti-cyberneticists. But in the final triumph of cyberspeak, scientists engaged in research for military purposes played a vital role. The main ideological scourge of cybernetics in the period of its early vilification—the philosopher Ernest Kolman—was...