디지털 시대의 비평이론: 현재의 문제들과 사이버네틱스

Abstract

This paper introduces recent studies in the humanities that investigate the critical valence of cybernetics in the contemporary world. Tracing the metamorphosis of cybernetics from a war-time computing technology to a dissimulated epistemological frame for the postwar Western world, I argue that cybernetics can provide an insightful theoretical lens onto critical issues associated with the digitization of the contemporary world. The paper first delineates the early history of cybernetics―its inception during the second world war, its basic technical and logical structures, and its evolution into a general theory of all systems―to demonstrate how cybernetics has offered the principal foundations for the technological rearrangement of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Recent studies of cybernetics have focused on the fundamental influences that cybernetics has brought to the intellectual, cultural, and socio-political history of the Western societies since the 1950s. In addition to this critical reevaluation of cybernetics as a cultural logic and existential condition for the digitally reconfigured contemporary world, this paper also discusses how recent critical endeavors to reassess and explain the cultural conundrums of the contemporary world have drawn on cybernetics to enrich the theoretical conversation. Issues such as the seemingly autonomous workings of contemporary capital, the irony of subjects feeling freer and more contained at the same time, and the meaning of subject and existence in the digital age find new critical connotations in recent theoretical research via cybernetics, attesting to the possibility of cybernetics as a new critical model for the digital age.