Cybernetic Explanation as a Theory of Reading

This is the idea of a code: an array of rules and protocols linking one semiotic level to another and thereby regulating the passage between symbolic states or phenomena. Although antecedents for the idea can be found in classical theories of language, widespread use of a terminology of coding seems to date only from the decades following the end of World War Two, when cybernetics first came into its own as a field of research and for a time generated considerable excitement in the human sciences. In literary theory and textually oriented semiotics the single most important channel for the idea and the nomenclature seems to have been the work of Roman Jakobson, who drew upon both cybernetic terminology and the earlier vocabularies of Russian and Czech Formalism.' Whatever its exact provenance, the idea of codes and coding is now integral to a number of otherwise disparate ways of thinking about textual phenomena. Codes are most often invoked as the mechanism connecting the syntactic and semantic levels of some language system (or, in other terminologies, connecting signifiers and signifieds, expressions and contents, and so on). They serve somewhat more metaphorically, but with comparable frequency, to explain the processing of larger units of discourse (the reading of an entire work, for instance), such as when the move from an initial reading to a subsequent, more satisfactory understanding is said to involve recognizing subtler or more comprehensive textual codes, or when the entire act of reading is considered a kind of decoding process. Still more generally, the idea of coding plays a prominent role in textually oriented social theory, where cultural codes are invoked as the means by which action and thought are organized within complex social systems. In spite of the widespread adoption of the idea of codes and coding, however, even advocates of its explanatory force sometimes find the notion as troubling as it is seemingly indispensable.2 As an account of how meanings and effects get produced in a text or textlike cultural formation, codes explain at once too much and too little. They explain away too readily the very regularities we would like to understand

Cognitive science · Cybernetics · Epistemology · Linguistics · Reading (process) · Cognitive Science and Education Research · Language and cultural evolution · Media, Communication, and Education · Philosophy · Psychology

• Complex Thinking, Complex Practice

  Open Access•Haridimos Tsoukas, Mary Jo Hatch•Human Relations•2001

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