A Cultural and Intellectual History of Structuralism, Cybernetics, and the Postwar Political Imagination

FAIN: FZ-287182-22

James Duesterberg
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Research and writing of a book of cultural and intellectual history exploring the relationship between cybernetic and structuralist theory, avant-garde art, and global cyberculture.

My book offers a narrative history of the relationship between philosophy, technology, and art as it shaped the postwar Western political imagination. I focus on three key moments: the emergence of cybernetics, structuralism, and the American avant-garde in wartime New York City; the popularization of post-structuralism and the proliferation of a popular “underground” aesthetic amidst cultural and economic crisis in 1970s-80s New York; and the emergence of global cyberculture in the 1990s, at a time when commentators were declaring the end of competing ideologies and “the end of history.” By tracing the reciprocal influence of subculture, art, and philosophy, and showing how these movements in turn influenced broader social, cultural, and economic shifts, I show how ideas about a “virtual” realm—long confined to discourses of art or philosophical speculation—came increasingly to structure the lived environment of the late-20th and early-21st century Western world.