CYBERNETICS–TELEGRAPH

Lacan Builds a Circuit: Cybernetics and the Unconscious

ANNOTATION

|...| James W. Carey
Technology and Ideology. The Case of the Telegraph (1989)

1) The telegraph changed the economy of the signal

2) The telegraph changed the nature of language through; ordering knowledge and changing structures of awareness [modes of attention]

It was “watershed of communication” because transport and communications were separated. The electric telegraph (as opposed to the semaphore systems at sea and on land which had been prevalent at the turn of the 19th century) allowed messages to be separated from the physical movement of objects. [It allowed the message to precede the object, allowing switches to be switched, warning bells to be rung, controlling rolling stock from a distance].

In the United States the telegraph reached the West Coast eight years ahead of rail. After the telegraph business relations were transformed, now impersonal and conducted at a distance and mediated by a growing management structure, which was regulated by the telegraph. (205) [Now we can conceive of the telegraph + rail + management structure as a cybernetic system] “[The] visible hand of management replaced the invisible hand of market forces (Chandler, production and distribution).

[Foucault notes the shift from trade to competition== telegraphy emerged in the 1830s and 40s- the DN of 1800 is preserved in the rhetoric of the ‘electric sublime as theorised by Dewy; Leo Marx and the ritual communications model itself (Dewey/ Carey) ]. The very intangibility of electricity preserved its ‘aura’; its inscrutability and mystery was articulated in the lexicon of philosophy and metaphysics [See Zitram 1982 Q:206). “A swift winged messenger of destruction”. (Rev. Ezra S. Gannett). Rev. Ezra S. Gannett also afforded electricity the powers of a deity “invisible, imponderable”…” We do not truly know what it is which we are dealing with; The Rev. Spring [ disembodies the messenger]:”thought now travels by steam and magnetic wires.” (207) [the technological sublime reframed in the DN 1800 ushers the future in apocalyptic terms: “the annihilation of time and space.” The organic metaphors imparted from idealist philosophy allowed for the electrification of the discourse Network 1800 (800). The telegraph became a channel for idealist definitions of its identity and its possibilities, setting new technologically sublime standards. The bodiless electric energises dumb matter, switching rails, calling orders, ringing distant bells machines now worked to serve information without a body, the “noiseless tenant of the wilderness.”

The telegraph worked tirelessly as an agent of the discourse of liberalism, rebooting the universalism born in the Enlightenment, where the kingdom of God comes to earth in the brotherhood of man, under the skin and beyond a disconnected ignorance, we are all the same [here q: Maverick at length 208] It is in this nexus that Max Weber’s protestant subject emerges [see base p. 209] [research cultures as production sites of ideology, this is one of their tasks. Later Wiener (MIT), Shannon = communications primer (Bell Labs) the ideology of management = Information (IBM); the presence of the representatives of research cultures at worlds fares and Expos. [see Latour, Science in Action]

2) The telegraph changed the nature of language (210)
The standardisation of language into naturalised ‘scientific’, ‘objective’ language. Carey argues that the telegraph, in journalism for instance, separated the observer from the writer. The stringer gathered and relayed information to the staff writer, who narritivised the information in standard prose, this was filtered by the copy editor and proofer. Carey makes clear the degree to which telegraphy wrote news – it separated events, which were reported by a stringer and the writer who would compile the article It also introduced the news cycle and made the news into commodity.

[Note: feedback systems and the cybernetic explanation are not concurrent. Feedback mechanisms were well known and understood as such within their own ‘research networks’.
We can understand the transport, telegraph as a cybernetic system with telegraphy working as the governor (regulator) of the system (211-212). During WW1, the gyroscopic devises onboard battleships in concord with the calculating machines and the men who operated them were fully functioning cybernetic systems in the sense they would be understood today, in which humans, code and machines executed functions and fed information back through the system, the operators did not need to have knowledge of the whole system. The research cultures that produced such systems understood them as such, in fact the gyroscope works on a principle of circular causality, (it is a servomechanism). Similarly, on the proving grounds of Boston, during WWI, in which the young mathematician Norbert Wiener laboured (Dyson), anti-fire systems incorporated circular causality as an organising principle. The engineering principle of feedback working throughout an integrated system was used long before the ‘cybernetic explanation’ (after 1942 ) applied feedback to a broad range of philosophical, scientific, social and political fields. After the cybernetic explanation had been offered it became possible to retrospectively accord past feedback systems as such – in the sense that they provided models for a wider cybernetic explanation, as self-grounding components of a narrative that ontologizes the ‘cybernetic explanation’. This would become a new narration of liberal ideology, continuing the narrative established in the age of telephony, that everything should be connected, that global communication would be possible (a dream articulated by Samuel Morse [cite]). If modernism’s failures were technological, the ‘cybernetic explanation’ promises the fulfilment of that failing dream.]

In the age of telegraphy commercial empires grew like silicon Vally Start-ups. Edison, Carnegie, Seers, to name a few, benefited from the competitive advantage their closeness to the wire accorded them. Jay Gould integrated the telegraph .. The telegraph led to “selective control of information […] allowing for a monopoly of knowledge, via a selective advantage.” Telegraphy also shaped modern gambling and credit business and re-defined mail-order [long before Amazon]

To recap: telephony separated communication from transportation. Although semaphore systems predated telegraphy, the term telegraphy originated with them- electronic telegraphy was a closed system, directed to a particular receiver (located in a radio shack off the railroad) and linked to the circuitry of the transport system. Once information can travel independently of things, it becomes a control mechanism of those things, as well as the control mechanism of the infrastructure (transportation system) it travels on. As early as 1844 in England and 1849 in the United States the telegraph would signal oncoming trains, leading to less accidents. The principle of the integrated system in which all parts are interconnected and interdependent becomes the principle of all systems that followed - from simple servomechanisms to military systems (215) the phrase “encapsulated social nervous system” was used of the rail, telegraphy system a century before cyberneticians would employ the same socio-scientific-organic vocabulary.[ And this nervous system also engendered a state of homeostasis [to coin another term from the cybernetic lexicon] as the system caused the standardisation of prices– price differentials between two cities, which prior to telegraphy would have been markedly different due to different transportation costs found their equilibrium. Ingredients and s=tock were negotiated which led to the growing culture of management. Telegraphy “evens out markets in space” for the purposes of trade every one is in the same place” which is done by “realizing the classical assumption of perfect communication.”

The speculation then begins to shift from “space to time, from arbitrage to futures […] the market shifts from trading between spaces to trading between times” again, to gain competitive advantage – rather than for the end of a mutual trade [see also Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics] The practice of futures trading was instituted as early as 1733, with the East India Company, which issued trading warrants. These allowed ownership without a physical transaction taking place. It was a method of endorsement; warrants, or time contracts, took an evolutionary leap forward with the advent of telegraphy. The separation of communication from matter [its material support, unhooked from the constraints of time] meant that news of crop conditions (yields) would precede the crops coming to market and the nature of ‘time contracts’, or ‘to-arrive’ contracts, changed; telegraphy effectively drew the markets together [see (219) 30 second monopoly of knowledge— telephones banned from the stock exchange floor- drawing markets back to New York].

The three principle effects of moving commodities out of space and time:

a) “future trading de-contextualised the markets” (everywhere markets, anytime markets.)

b) “the commodity was sundered from its representations” The commodity became equivalent (identical) “to the warehouse receipts from the grain-elevators along the railway lines”. There was no expectation of delivery on the part of the user or seller. “the receipts had no intrinsic relation to the real product, and receipts can be bought and sold simultaneously.

c) prices become uniform. In the 1950s, when Marx wrote Grundrisse (1857-61) and das Kapital (1859) these changes to the way the market operated were as current to Marx as sub-prime mortgages and dot com bubbles are to us.

Marx:“The localised movement, the bringing of the product to market which is a necessary condition of its circulation, except when the point of production is itself a market– could more precisely be regarded as the transformation of the product into a commodity” . It is telegraphy that worked as agent for the abstraction of real material to weightless information, the telegraph separated use value from exchange value and allowed Marx to declare: “everything solid melts to air.” To which Carey adds, “along with the progressive divergence between the signifier and the signified”(

In this new statistical market all relations are relations between numbers, a phenomena which Stravinsky called the “statisticization of mind” [which is in a large part due to the cybernetic machinery of telegraphy.]