From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. (book review)

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Language, Mathematics, and Ideology
November 7, 2002

Book Review
Philip J. Davis

>From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics. By Slava
Gerovitch, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, 369 pages (54 of
which are notes and references; illustrated with numerous photos of
Soviet personalities)

In August 1998, attending the International Congress of Mathematicians
in Berlin, I met a mathematician of fifty or so whom I designate here
as Q.

Q had grown up in East Berlin, and had been educated from childhood
with full exposure to Marxist thought, expressed in the Soviet Marxist
ideological language. He gave me a paper he had written on a historic
subject in mathematics that he believed I would enjoy reading. I have
often thought of mathematics as a unified whole, but on reading his
paper I was plunged into a rhetorical world I did not know-a world
whose vocabulary was different, whose metaphysics or philosophy was
different, whose perception of "what is the case" was different, a
world in which the individual had a different relationship to society.

Marxist prose came to be an official language, often used in the
Soviet Union and in its adherent countries to obscure the true state
of affairs. Language can be used both to clarify and to obscure, and
after a while, the word mist in the Soviet Union became so thick that
it blocked serious thinking. This language was satirized as the
fictional language "Newspeak" by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four, which also gave us the expressions "doublethink" and "big
brother."

A few years later, I met Q again at a much smaller meeting, where I
heard him give a talk. The vocabulary that I had found so irritating
had largely disappeared. I said to myself that Q had been updated in
quite short order, and I was relieved. This experience led me to think
about the perception of Benjamin Whorf, the famous student of
language, that we make our language and other semiotic indicators and,
in simultaneous conjunction, they make us. As the Leningrad-born and
Nobelist poet Joseph Brodsky put it (quoted by Whorf), "It isn't
language that is a tool of the poet, but rather the poet who is a tool
of language."

>From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, written by Slava Gerovitch, a Russian
émigré to the U.S., is a deep, carefully researched and documented,
and informative book. Its discussions of the complex interplay between
theoretical Marxism, political Marxism, and technology will appeal to
sovietologists and historians of science for years to come. They will
undoubtedly attempt to identify the moral essence of this experience.
Readers who wish to follow this line of inquiry may profit from a much
earlier article, by Loren Graham (Science and Ideology in Soviet
Society, George Fischer, ed., 1967).

The reader with a casual interest in the history of technology will
not find From Newspeak to Cyberspeak easy to get through. Part of the
difficulty lies in the fact that the book is an elaborated version of
the author's doctoral dissertation and gives more detail than one can
comfortably handle. The second difficulty (for me at least) is
emotional. We are immediately plunged into a byzantine Stalinist world
of thought and actions, with its exiles, murders, forced and often
simulated conformities and recantations. I and most of my readers have
never personally experienced such happenings, but we read about them
with revulsion. In this book we read about the private language that
was employed to interpret, set goals, and justify actions.

The third difficulty is ethical: How are we to come to grips with the
feeling that some of the Soviet beliefs about cybernetics, though
embedded in Newspeak, come close to what we ourselves believe?
Consider, for example, the author's statement, on the first page:

"Soviet cybernetics was not simply an intellectual trend; it was a
social movement for radical reform in science and in society in
general. Cyberneticians came to believe in the possibility of a
universal method of problem solving, if problems could be formulated
in the right language. They viewed computer simulation as this
universal method, and the language of cybernetics as a language of
objectivity and truth. Soviet cybernetics challenged the existing
order of things not only in the conceptual foundations of science but
also in economics and politics."

On reading this passage, I immediately thought of Leibniz's dream of
the universal language, which he dubbed the "characteristica universalis."

A second example is found in informal remarks made in 1967 to the
Cybernetics Council, a Soviet organization, by Academician Aksel Berg,
a big man in Soviet scientific and administrative circles:

"When the computer enters our home, there will be no need to call a
doctor; the machine will tell you what to do. Students will not have
to go to some place and listen to hideous lectures by old pensioners
who know nothing; programs will be optimized and you will have
connection with a machine, which will come to your home as water and
light did. If someone does not believe it, let him commit suicide.
This is the future, and we will fight for it, and we will weed out
anybody who will interfere."

But Aksel Berg is the also the man who said on Soviet TV that
conservatives who interfere with scientific progress must be "publicly
executed by a firing squad in Red Square." Was this just an instance
of the Newspeak sense of political humor, or was it a strong whiff of
the bloody desire of fundamentalists of all stripes to cleanse the
world of contrary opinions? Yet, aside from the expression of
compulsion, these opinions are not so different from what some
philocybers down the hall have been preaching to me for years and
what, in fact, has been happening in the world.

Here, briefly, is a rundown of the contents of From Newspeak to
Cyberspeak:

Chapter 1. The Cold War in Code Words: The Newspeak of Soviet Science.
Newspeak dominated. It "was used to balance the chief military and
ideological priorities for postwar [World War II] Soviet science."
Ideological disputes in mathematics, linguistics, and physiology are
described.

Chapter 2. Cyberspeak: A Universal Language for Men and Machines. The
rise of cybernetics in the U.S. and Europe is described, along with
the "evolution of Cyberspeak from a narrowly defined technical concept
to a universal language for men and machines."

Chapter 3. "Normal-Pseudo Science." When cybernetics arrived as a
mathematical discipline, it was seen as a threat to established
thinking. The campaign against cybernetics in the early 50s was
"spontaneously generated by the self-perpetuating Cold War propaganda
discourse." Cybernetics was branded as a bourgeois, capitalist doctrine.

Chapter 4. Cybernetics in Rebellion. During the Krushchev "thaw,"
Cyber-speak "openly challenged Newspeak." "The cybernetics movement
was a vehicle for the de-stalinization of soviet science."

Chapter 5. The "Cybernetization" of Soviet Science. Cybernetics in the
Soviet Union became a conceptual framework for all science.
Cybernetics was now seen as the greatest thing since the wheel,
embracing and influencing all aspects of human existence. Cybernetics
was accepted both officially and privately. To many people, it seemed
to offer a clear-minded alternative language, offering new freedom and
precision in describing complex phenomena.

Chapter 6. Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. We read of "the
climb of Soviet cybernetics to the height of official recognition and
its concurrent fall to the depths of intellectual shallowness."
Cybernetics was now philosophically and intellectually superficial.

By way of contrast, what has been the history of cybernetics in the
United States? Norbert Wiener coined the term in his 1948 book
Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine. As we all know, he took the root "cybern" from the Greek for
"governor," and he intended the term to describe the mathematics and
technology related to feedback and control. I remember an initial
flurry of excitement in the succeeding years. People are often willing
to believe that if a new term has appeared, it must refer to something
of deep significance. Wiener's own take on the term can be judged from
his 1949 American Mathematical Society Gibbs Lecture, which dealt with
feedback and control applied to rehabilitation of the disabled through
the development of prosthetic devices.

When, early on, the glitter of exuberance had settled into the dust,
the theoretical mathematics of cybernetics became "dynamical systems,"
the communication aspects morphed into "informatics," prosthetics
expanded into "robotics"; at the same time, computer hardware and
software advanced at an unbelievable clip. There was little
consciousness that it all might be subsumed under the rubric of
cybernetics.

And yet---if Soviet scientists came ultimately to believe that
cybernetics in the grandiose sense was intellectually and
philosophically deficient, the root "cyber" caught the world's popular
imagination and serves now as a prefix and a synonym for all that is
computerized, chipified, webbized, star-war-ized---very modern, very
automated, very cutting-edge, and slightly scary. Cyberspeak is
employed the world over. We all speak it: netiquette, emoticons,
cybertising, e-zines, optimize (meaning not "make optimal" but "make
better"), delay binding (referring to a minor form of
procrastination); the list is endless. As a definitive measure of the
extent to which we are in the cyber age---living in Cyberia according
to some wags---I entered the root "cyber" into the Google search
engine. I received 6,680,000 hits. When I queried Google about
"pizza," that universal substance that nourishes us all, it replied
with only 3,640,000 hits.

In his final chapter, Soviet Cybernetics: Prometheus or Proteus?,
Gerovitch writes that "Now, with the Soviet Union gone, newspeak is no
longer in fashion, but its discursive techniques live on in
cyberspeak. Identifying with the computer as the 'second self,' the
world now expresses its fears and hopes in the language of cybernetics."

Thus, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak cannot fail to raise questions of
considerable social significance:

   1. Does scientific language always embody an ideology?
   2. Can a scientific language achieve universality, or must it be
private, with a limited group and with limited horizons?
   3. Do private languages pose a threat?
   4. Do science and technology prosper better in a democratic regime?

Limiting myself to mathematics, I give the quick answer to (a) that I
received from semioticist Kay O'Halloran (and with which I am in full
agreement):

"Our faith in the mathematizations we have installed, and in the
language in which it is written, lies deep in the heart of our western
culture. It represents the way that we justify and legitimize what
counts as truth. Within the new formulations, religion was eventually
discarded as not necessary. Is the belief in the mathematizations an
ideology? It is a way of thinking that underlies much of contemporary
discourse. In that respect, the answer is yes."

I leave it to readers to formulate their own answers to the other
questions.

Philip J. Davis, professor emeritus of applied mathematics at Brown
University, is an independent writer, scholar, and lecturer. He lives
in Providence, Rhode Island, and can be reached at
philip_davis at brown.edu.

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