Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
discourses by contrast were largely embedded in a liberal-humanist
enlightenment tradition. Nevertheless there were both similarities
and connections between Structuralism and the other discourses.
All were concerned with systems or structures of relations and
connections that could be examined without reference to the
particular embodied circumstances of the phenomena concerned.
Thus such study could also be put on a rigorously scientific basis.
They also all used mathematics and algebra both as tools and as
exemplary paradigms of formal analysis. In particular the Semiotic
Structuralism promoted by Algirdas Julien Greimas at the beginning
of the
s attempted to construct a version of structuralist analy-
sis that could claim the same rigour as mathematics.
18
There was also
a certain amount of exchange between Structuralism and the other
discourses. Jacques Lacan invoked many of Shannon's insights into
the process of communication,
19
and also devoted part of one of his
famous seminars to the relationship between psychoanalysis and
Cybernetics,
20
while Piaget and Lévi-Strauss both engaged in cyber-
netic models of the processes they were interested in. There was
less traffic the other way, though in the early '
1960
s Roman Jakobson
worked in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT alongside
many of the main proponents of Cybernetics and Information
Theory, as well as the linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle.
50
cybernetics, computing and the cold war
The Second World War that had presented the catalyst for both the
invention of the modern computer and for the development of the
various discourses described above. But the pressures of the post-
war era presented the context in which both the technology and
the discourses were shaped, sustained and developed. International
political tensions presented a set of problems for which computing
and cognate ideas such as Cybernetics offered potential solutions.
Much as nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century capitalism offered
