Clark, DJ

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UCL Discovery

The British Journal for the History of Sciencehttp://journals.cambridge.org/BJHAdditional services for The British Journal for the History ofScience:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereSLAVA GEROVITCH, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: AHistory of Soviet Cybernetics. Cambridge, MA andLondon: MIT Press, 2002. pp. xiv+369. ISBN 0-262-07232-7.£25.95 (hardback).D. J. CLARKThe British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 39 / Issue 01 / March 2006, pp 146 - 148DOI: 10.1017/S0007087406417891, Published online: 23 February 2006Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0007087406417891How to cite this article:D. J. CLARK (2006). The British Journal for the History of Science, 39, pp 146-148 doi:10.1017/S0007087406417891Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BJH, IP address: 144.82.107.70 on 14 Feb 2014SLAVA GEROVITCH, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. Cambridge,MA and London: MIT Press, 2002. pp. xiv+369. ISBN 0-262-07232-7. £25.95 (hardback).doi:10.1017/S0007087406417891There are many contexts for the emergence of cybernetics: technical and scientiﬁc innovation; aculture of mechanization, automation and computation; the merging of disciplinary boundaries146 Book reviewsfrom mathematics to physics to biology. In this history of cybernetics in the former Soviet Union,Slava Gerovitch considers the fate of the science as a form of political and ideological language.Throughout a sometimes detailed exploration of Soviet academic politics in the Cold War era, theauthor’s experience of the USA, where this research was completed, informs and enhances per-sonal knowledge of his native country.In the West cybernetics is closely associated with Norbert Wiener, who gave it both name andfame when he published Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and theMachine in 1948. But the component concepts – notably mechanical analogues of the nervoussystem and mathematical models of communication – had all been current (if under-marketed)for several decades. Even Wiener’s term was not new; it had ﬁrst been used by Ampe `re in 1843.What brought these elements together into a new science of self-regulating systems was thecommon perception that, to be accounted a mature and ‘complete’ science on a par with nine-teenth-century physics, twentieth-century biology had to forsake mere observation in favour ofmathematical and mechanistic models. Signiﬁcant contributions came from scientists and math-ematicians of Russian origin, among them Markov, Oparin and Rashevsky. Gerovitch introducesus to many more, in a story that moves from perilous dissent under Stalin to decay and desuetudein the Brezhnev years.Taking the long view of Soviet cybernetics, Gerovitch develops a perspective from which itemerges as, appropriately, a self-regulating system. He argues that the ambiguities and accom-modations of the politically nuanced language of newspeak found a natural aﬃnity with cyber-speak. At ﬁrst cybernetics was a code – a cover for mild dissidence, admired as a replacement for,as Gerovitch puts it, ‘the vague and manipulative language of ideological discourse in ﬁelds thatmathematics had not yet reached’ (p. 199). Cybernetics promised a grand and ideologicallyneutral uniﬁcation of human knowledge. But such uniﬁcation had necessarily to engage withpolitical debate and institutional disputes. Cybernetical language thus became political langua-ge – a medium for scientists to criticize the philosophers. This delicate balance was not to last.‘Well trained in newspeak techniques’, Gerovitch comments, ‘some philosophers now adoptedcyberspeak as a new ideological language’ (p. 257). Adopted, adapted, universal but diluted,cybernetics in the Brezhnev years was, he argues, ‘transformed from a vehicle of reform into apillar of the status quo’ (p. 279). By the 1970s it had become unrecognizable to its ﬁrst math-ematically trained proponents, who now felt the need to disown it as a pseudo-science. Thepromised language of truth and objectivity had become the newspeak it had once ridiculed.The story of Soviet cybernetics thus presented was a battle over vocabulary, between scientistswanting a pure, politically free terminology, ideal and mathematical, and ideologists wishinganother kind of universality with nothing left out of politics. Comparisons and contrasts with thefate of cybernetics elsewhere are instructive. In general, though the science had its roots inmathematical formulations, extending the boundaries of precision and logic from the statistics ofthermodynamics into the fuzzy world of communication and behaviour, the mathematical un-derpinnings diluted as the claims broadened. In the West, shorn of its precision, cyberneticsrapidly faded, leaving only a faintly sinister aura – the fear of a world controlled by machines. Inthe USSR, by contrast, it was the initial claim to mathematical verity that ﬁrst aroused suspicion,marking cybernetics as a science of behaviour standing outside ideology. In the post-Stalin era,with the mathematical rigour taken away, what was left proved an ideal vehicle for the ideologyof ‘scientiﬁc socialism’: universal, amenable to pragmatic interpretation, yet with all the cachetof approved words such as ‘rational’, ‘objective’, ‘progressive’ and ‘scientiﬁc’. In the Soviet case,cybernetical language was employed as much as a means of concealment as of precision.Gerovitch describes the contrast in academic language between the USSR and the USA as betweenacceptance of ambiguity and a desire for at least the appearance of precision. Yet, for eachcommunity in its own way, the search for a universal scientiﬁc language – the desire to pinBook reviews 147everything down with ‘precise language’, to reduce the world to the certainties of mathemat-ics – remained central.Derived from a doctoral thesis, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak probably contains more in-formation on cybernetics in the old USSR than anyone will ever need. It is nevertheless a welcomeachievement: scholarly, well researched and unrivalled in the expertise with which it tells a storyof singular interest.D. J. CLARKUniversity College London148 Book reviews

Slava Gerovitch. From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: a history of Soviet cybernetics

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