Communication: Euphoria, Dysphoria

Remarks on Communication Theory

In L’Utopie de la communication, Philippe Breton traces the origin and development of the notion of communication that began in earnest with the growth of cybernetics during and after World War II. The idea of communication is emphatically not modern, he maintains–it has existed for centuries. The manner in which it has expanded to invade the whole of the intellectual landscape at the end of the twentieth century, however, is a  very new development. Born of attempts to formulate theories of command and control in weapons systems in the context of an all-out effort to win the Second World War, cybernetics provoked a veritable theoretical explosion that led to speculation in domains soon far-removed from the physics of the tracking of projectiles-soon encompassing, in fact, the entire field of the behavior of human systems, as well as other natural and artificial systems.