Interesting article of intellectual history by Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. On the relationship between linguistics, structuralism, and CIA funded cybernetics.

‘In this paper I examine the history of efforts to reform the human sciences through new media research, with a particular emphasis on the Rockefeller Foundation’s interwoven programs of support for communications research, digital media, and global science from 1930 to 1960. Through archival research and textual analysis I reconstruct how leading scholars and scientific administrators came to conceive of new media technologies as part of an impartial apparatus for transcending cultural, biological, and political difference. I recover the forgotten history of interdisciplinary and transnational programs that conjoined the research of Francophone structuralists to that of American engineers. The result is a new account of 20th century media change and research as inscribed within a project of “global technics” that substituted technological procedures for political decision making.’

Read the full paper here