Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data by Heather A. Love

© 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press

What is it like to write within a fold? Heather A. Love’s engaging new study argues that canonical modernist literature bends into a cybernetic future. Following Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank’s transhistorical notion of the “cybernetic fold,” Love asks us to consider modernism as an art of informatics, data sets, entangled human-machines, and dynamic feedback loops, well before such notions had become self-consciously articulated. Combining both media and information theory, her book expands Bernard Scott’s claim that “cybernetics came into being before it had a name” and that it “was conceived as both an art and science” (Quoted in Love, 108). Love’s ambition is similarly interdisciplinary, extending the history of cybernetics into earlier aesthetic terrain while thickening our account of modernism as a technocultural practice.

“Cybernetics” contained many folds, a multidisciplinary endeavor emerging from World War II military tech and given institutional form in the Macy Conferences of the 1940s and 50s. Broadly speaking, the field studied the production and effects of information as it crosses bodies and technologies. It was, from the beginning, a worldly science, about “control and communication,” as Norbert Wiener put it in the subtitle of his field-defining Cybernetics; but it was also about curiosity and connectivity, pursuing imaginative leaps and unexpected transmissions. Cybernetics saw the world as mediated by complex, entangled informatic webs, including, but not limited to, the expanding media networks of the twentieth century. 

Drawing from this intellectual legacy, Love analyzes major modernist authors as they are situated within their specific informational cultures and traces innovative, transhistorical linkages between cybernetics and modernism. Her primary argument is that modernist literary production, particularly in its engagement with emerging technologies, manifests “an early cultural awareness of the statistics-based prediction and data-processing mechanisms that later technological innovations would develop” (3). Love’s debt to media studies makes this anticipatory relationship between culture and technology firmly materialist, yet not deterministic nor reductively historical. Modernist literature mediates media, thus creating, sorting, forming, shaping, and (re)transmitting information. From this perspective, James Joyce and Wiener, her introductory case studies, share an interest in the complexity of information but also the implications of that complexity for the human. Leopold Bloom, as a reader of modernity’s “dizzying informational matrix” (2) demonstrates how we moderns can navigate the demands of increasingly inhuman information, exceeding our capacities for attention and meaning-making.

This intersection of culture, technology, and pedagogy animates Cybernetic Aesthetics. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the subject of chapter one, initiates an active feedback loop between reader and writer, history and poem. Drawing from Wiener’s formulation of feedback as “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance” (30), Love argues that Pound’s idiosyncratic poetics sought to establish a generative feedback loop between his expansive historical sources and modern society. This logic of “circulating communication” (39) produces spiraling relations between source and poem, readers and text. Crucially, Pound’s literary project departs from Wiener’s computational cybernetics through a commitment to feedback and singularity. Rather than “coding each utterance into the consistent language of data,” as Wiener’s machines would do, Pound’s poetry “preserv[es] and present[s] linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic difference as such” (46). The mediation remains, feelingly, making it new, that signature modernist impulse which is also a pedagogy; it is by integrating feedback that the machine and the human can learn. 

Where Pound’s poetry manifests feedback loops, John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy, the subject of chapter two, embodies the cybernetic distinction between signal and noise. How to derive sense—receive signals—at increasingly complex, diverse, and technologically-mediated scales was a crucial theoretical question for classical cybernetics. Proposing a synthesis between Wiener, who defined information as pattern, and Claude Shannon, who defined it as entropy, Love argues that pattern and randomness dialectically interact in dynamic informational systems. Her literary exemplar of pattern and noise conjoined is Dos Passos’s adaptation of the newsreel. A human-machine hybrid, the newsreel relied on film, camera, projector, and theater, but also camera operator, editor, projectionist, and audience, together splicing noisy events into legible patterns. By adapting the newsreel to his epic novel, Dos Passos shows us that “communication [is] a process or a system that weaves together random luck and entrenched pattern (and also American life and literary form)” (54). The newsreel thus recasts literary naturalism’s interest in causality and chance as informatic categories of pattern and entropy. Dos Passos’s experimental modernism reveals that no system can fully anticipate every fold; instead, we must navigate new signals, adapt to unexpected noises.

While materialist readings of modernism are nothing new, Love’s cybernetic approach is innovative for generating dynamic conceptual abstractions from techno-history. She is less interested in the archive (e.g., the specific newsreels that Dos Passos may have seen) and more concerned with the way new media spawned emergent matrices of informatics that can be deployed to theorize technology, art, and the human. The human, in particular, is the focus of chapter three, through a reading of signal-emitting characters in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Here, the cybernetic fold is the black box. As a method, the black box assumes the opacity of the signal-source; though ultimate knowledge of any transmitting entity is impossible, we can meaningfully explore its surprising patterns. For Silvan Tompkins, the human affect system was also a black box, “governed by contingency, and inaccessible to observers in any direct way,” thus requiring one to “[embrace] blindness, uncertainty, and complexity” (80-81). A literary black box, Love argues, emerged from Woolf’s experiences at BBC radio, a media encounter that prompted the author’s interest in the potential for a “blind,” but thus more affective, experience of language. Language is transmitted by the black box of the radio, but also by real, living people, and, significantly, by literary characters. By reading the cryptic voices of Woolf’s novel as such black boxes, we can experience them as systems of linguistic transmission that, over the course of the text, produce legible patterns without betraying their fundamental opacity. Woolf’s titular “waves” thus take on a new techno-cybernetic-literary-affective dimension; we navigate the novel by attuning to these accumulating, clashing, pattern-making utterances.

Radio waves were not the only technology passing through the modernist sky. Chapter four takes us on an airplane with Gertrude Stein, who wrote herself observing America from the technological wonder of air travel. Stein’s self-reflexivity, Love argues, proleptically anticipates the second-order cybernetic anthropology of Mary Catherine Bateson, which stressed the way an observer must observe itself within the environment that it describes. These acts of observation occur at many divergent and technologically-mediated scales; both anthropology and literature pursue patterns in complex environments, outside and within the writing self. The term Love develops for this praxis, used by both Stein and Bateson, is “composition.” Functioning across text, reader, author, and culture, “composition and its variants—compose, composed, composing—offer rich potential to Bateson and Stein as a lexical touchstone for their self-reflexive, pattern-based theories of culture, identity, aesthetics, and representation” (115). Composition is pattern-seeking and pattern-making at once, a compelling variation on modernism’s constructivist aesthetic that avoids any tendency toward isolation or self-containment. Ultimately, such cybernetic composition offers an aesthetic education for a modern world, attuning us anew to our embedded and technologically-mediated capacities for perception and cognition.

Love concludes her study by folding cybernetics back into the pre-modernist past and forward into our contemporary present. Looking to the nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes exemplifies a proto-cybernetic perceiver of systems and patterns. Bending us into the present with the installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Love finds a cybernetics of fleshly techno-embodiment at the convergence of aesthetic and health care practices. Such leaps across time, genre, and concern constitute a compelling strategic presentism in her methodology. The “pedagogical feedback loops” between “cybernetic theory and modernist textuality” continue to transmit because of their insights into all-too-timely concerns, “with communication, with innovation, with devising ways to navigate modernity, with the human subject’s position within an intricate web of technological interlocutors” (150).

As is often the case with ambitious interdisciplinary projects, Love’s claims can leave us wanting more. While the close readings are engaging, we do not get extended examples of the capacity for cybernetic aesthetics to illuminate the fine texture of modernist textuality. Nor am I convinced, as Love suggests, that the technical side of cybernetics—its coding and engineering—has much to practically learn from modernist aesthetics, even though modernism may provide imaginative or analogic inspiration for technologists. More positively, Love’s study opens promising avenues to think cybernetically about modernism’s relationship to information. A cybernetic approach to the evolution of the stock market, for instance, might ground Love’s media concerns more robustly into global capitalism. Similarly, racialization as informatics could open new genealogies of modernism, ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois’s visualizations of racial data to the activist-philosopher James Boggs’s understanding of Black labor power as embedded within the factory network. These folds, hopefully to be pursued by future scholarship, point to the promise of cybernetics as a literary methodology, where meaning, information, and interpretation all emerge from complex systems—including criticism itself.