From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (review)

At one point in time the Soviet Union witnessed a vitrolic attack on cybernetics as the product of Western capitalists seeking to turn their workforce into robots. Some ten years later, in that same Soviet Union, cybernetics was considered the "governor" of the revolutionary state. Wrote Engineer Admiral Aksel'Berg, chairman of the Council on Cybernetics, in 1961: "[Cybernetics] aspires to study all control processes in living nature, in production, and in human society, that is, to embrace practically all human activity." The disjuncture lies at the heart of Slava Gerovitch's well-written From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.

Gerovitch weaves a complex story under three headings: rejection of cybernetics; cybernetics as a revolutionary science within the Russian Academy; and, finally, cybernetics as normal science in the service of the state. Or, as the 1970s joke that Gerovitch recounts has it: "'They told us before that cybernetics was a reactionary pseudoscience. Now we are firmly convinced that it is just the opposite: cybernetics is not reactionary, not pseudo—and not a science'" (p. 5). It is indeed interesting how an ideologically charged science could cross the great divide between capitalism and communism, but, as Gerovitch reminds us, Taylorist scientific management made the very same trek into the Soviet Union.

In telling his story, Gerovitch works at a fairly high level; we really do not find out much about specific cybernetic projects until chapter 6. Up to that point, the main emphasis is on the claims that were made for and against the new interdiscipline and on its institutional organization. The range of sources is most impressive, and their synthesis quite superb. However, the use of "Newspeak" to furnish an overarching frame for the book mitigates against the value of the analysis. The word itself comes from George Orwell's 1984, in which he writes: "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible."

It is a strong claim that all Soviet science was trapped in Newspeak, for this entails the assumption that there were no real scientists who believed in the virtues of dialectical materialism for understanding nature (Loren Graham's work, to my mind, leaves little room for this denial). It is particularly strong when the impression is given that there was no counterpart to Newspeak in the West. The reader comes away from Gerovitch's book with the sense that Western science is occasionally overweening but never particularly ideological. Thus he quotes approvingly David Holloway's description of "quotation mongering" (pulling up random quotes from a major source—in this case Marx) and "label sticking" (calling one's opponents deviant names) as if these were practiced only in the Soviet Union. Yet anyone who has tried to read evolutionary biology will have seen a fair amount of quotation mongering from Darwin; those schooled in the functionalism wars or stuck in a structuralist/poststructuralist/postmodern naming morass will surely acknowledge that label sticking is just as common in the West.

Gerovitch's most striking claim comes toward the end of his book, namely, that "the rise of cybernetics provided a vehicle for undermining the dominant ideological role of philosophers in Soviet science" (p. 188). That is clear, simple, and interesting. I wish that Gerovitch's story in general had been told without the flowery language of Newspeak, the easy contempt for dialectical materialism (never discussed—always assumed to be pure ideology), the asymmetrical flourishes in his comparisons between the West and the Soviet Union, the lack of listening forth to his Russian texts. Gerovitch is a superb historian and so it can be said that despite his rhetoric he has produced a very fine and original history.