Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan: The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences (2012)

“The Cybernetic Apparatus examines efforts to reform the human sciences through new forms of technical media. It demonstrates how 19th-century political ideals shaped mid-20th-century programs for cybernetic research and global science sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Through archival research and textual analysis, it reconstructs how and why new media, especially digital technologies, were understood as part of a neutral and impartial apparatus for transcending disciplinary, ethnic, regional, and economic differences. The result is a new account of the role of new media technologies in facilitating international and interdisciplinary collaboration (and critique) in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Chapter one examines how political conceptions of communications and technology in the United States in the nineteenth century conditioned the understanding and deployment of media in the twentieth century, arguing that American liberals conceived of technical media as part of a neutral apparatus for overcoming ethnic, geographic, and economic difference in the rapidly expanding nation. Chapter two examines the development of new media instruments as technologies for reforming the natural and human sciences from the 1910s through the 1940s, with particular attention to programs administered by the Rockefeller Foundation. Chapters three and four examine the rise, in the 1940s and 1950s, of cybernetics and information theory as an ideal of scientific neutrality and political orderliness. These chapters demonstrate how programs sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, MIT, and other institutions shaped linguist Roman Jakobson’s and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to redefine their fields as communication sciences. Chapter five considers how critics of cybernetics, including Noam Chomsky, Claude Shannon, and Roland Barthes, critically re-evaluated the claims of cybernetics to redefine the relations between technical research and the human sciences.”

PhD dissertation
Northwestern University & Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 2012
262 pages

Author
Related paper by the author: From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus (Critical Inquiry 38, Autumn 2011)

PDF (6 MB, updated on 2021-3-9)
EPUB (2 MB, added on 2021-3-9)

François Dosse: History of Structuralism, 2 vols. (1991–) [German, English]

“Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault—the ideas of this group of French intellectuals who propounded structuralism and poststructuralism have had a profound impact on disciplines ranging from literary theory to sociology, from anthropology to philosophy, from history to psychoanalysis. In this long-awaited translation, History of Structuralism examines the thinkers who made up the movement, providing a fascinating elucidation of a central aspect of postwar intellectual history.

François Dosse tells the story of structuralism from its beginnings in postwar Paris, a city dominated by the towering figure of Jean-Paul Sartre. The work of Saussure became the point of departure for a group of younger scholars, and the outcome was not only the doom of Sartre as intellectual leader but the birth of a movement that would come to reconfigure French intellectual life and would eventually reverberate throughout the Western world.

Dosse provides a readable, intelligible overall account, one that shows the interrelationship among the central currents of structuralism and situates them in context. Dosse illuminates the way developments in what are usually distinct fields came to exert such influence on each other, showing how the early structuralists paved the way for later developments and for recent discourses such as postmodernism. The cast of characters related by Dosse includes those mentioned above as well as Roman Jakobson, Julia Kristeva, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Tzvetan Todorov, and many others. Chapters are devoted to major figures, and Dosse has done extensive interviews with the major and minor figures of the movement, furnishing an intellectual history in which historical players look back at the period.

This first comprehensive history of the structuralist movement is an essential guide to a major moment in the development of twentieth-century thought, one that provides a cogent map to a dizzying array of personalities and their ideas. It will be compelling reading for those interested in philosophy, literary theory, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and psychoanalysis.”

First published in French as Histoire du structuralisme, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 1991, 1992

German edition
Translated by Stefan Barmann
Publisher Junius, Hamburg, 1996, 1997
ISBN 3885062666 & 3885062674
618 & 619 pages

English edition
Translated by Deborah Glassman
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1997
ISBN 0816622418, 9780816622412 & 0816623716, 9780816623716
488 & 534 pages

Publisher (EN)

Geschichte des Strukturalismus, 1: Das Feld des Zeichens, 1945-1966
Geschichte des Strukturalismus, 2: Die Zeichen der Zeit, 1967-1991
History of Structuralism, 1: The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 (via falsedeity)
History of Structuralism, 2: The Sign Sets, 1967-Present
All four volumes (ZIP)

Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style (1947-) [FR, EN, DE, IT, GR, CZ, ES, PT, RU, PL, ALS, RO, UA]

On a crowded bus at midday, Raymond Queneau observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man appropriates it. Later, in another part of town, Queneau sees the man being advised by a friend to sew another button on his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this apparently unexceptional tale ninety- nine times, employing the sonnet and the alexandrine, “Ze Frrench” and “Cockney”, while an “Abusive” chapter heartily deplores the events.

When Exercises in Style first appeared in French in 1947, it led to Queneau’s election to the highly prestigious Académie Goncourt. This virtuoso set of themes and variations is a linguistic rust-remover, a guide to literary forms, a demonstration of the use of imagery and expletive. But it is far too funny to be merely a pedantic thesis.

The late Raymond Queneau, novelist, poet, mathematician and editor, once told Barbara Wright that of all his books, this was the one he most wished to see translated. He rendered her his “heartiest congratulations”, adding: “I have always thought that nothing is untranslatable. Here is new proof. And it is accomplished with all the intended humour. It has not only linguistic knowledge and ingenuity, it has that.”

Wikipedia-EN
Wikipedia-FR

Exercices de style (French, transcript, 1947), HTML.
Exercises in Style (English, trans. Barbara Wright, 1958/2012, EPUB, added 2015-5-25; PDF excerpt)
Stilübungen (German, trans. Ludwig Harig and Eugen Helmlé, 1964), Typographic interpretation by Eike Rupp (2008).
Esercizi di stile (Italian, transcript, trans. Umberto Eco, 1983)
Ασκήσεις ύφους (Greek, trans. Achilleas Kyriakides, 1984)
Stylistická cvičení (Czech, excerpt, transcript, trans. Patrik Ouředník, 1985)
Ejercicios de estilo (Spanish, trans. Antonio Fernández Ferrer, 1989)
Exercicios de estilo (Portuguese, trans. Luiz Resende, 1995)
Упражнения в стиле (Russian, transcript,V.A.Petrov et al., 1998)
Styluebige (Züritüütsch, audio excerpt, trans. Felix E. Wyss, 2004)
Ćwiczenia stylistyczne (Polish, trans. Jan Gondowicz, 2005)
Exerciţii de stil (Romanian, trans. Romulus Bucur, Luminiţa Boază and Irina Grădinariu, 2006)
Вправи зі стилю (Ukrainian, trans. Yurko Pozayak and Yaroslav Koval, 2006, HTML, added on 2014-5-26 via Volodymyr Bilyk)

Feel free to contribute more translations and scans in comments.