‘French’ Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was one of the most influential scientific books of the twentieth century. This article looks at the early French reception of cybernetics, using texts by Pierre de Latil, Georges-Théodule Guilbaud, and Albert Ducrocq to explore how its themes and ideas were mediated to a French audience. First, it shows how a process of ‘domestication’ took place, in which cybernetics was resituated within a wider French-European history of science, and in which the translation of some of its key terms (‘control’, ‘feedback’) resulted in a relatively more disseminated lexical field in the French language. The article then examines the representation of technology in the three texts, showing how their extensive work of definition, classification, and explanation of machine culture could be said to constitute a distinctively ‘French’ mediation of cybernetics, in many ways more systematic than that of Wiener’s founding texts. While from the point of view of the history of ideas the informational–theoretical strand of cybernetics can be seen to feed directly into structuralism, it is argued that its operational strand, involving the mediation of a new technical culture, made an equally important contribution to subsequent thinking and debate about science and technology in post-war France.