Information, Communication, Systems: Cybernetic Aesthetics in 1960s Cultures

In his 1979 global bestseller,La Condition Postmoderne, French philosopher Jean François Lyotard identified in the convergence of linguistics and cybernetics a crucial nexus for the configuration of postmodernism. This perspective implicitly shed a new light on the interpretation of the 1960s not as a decade primarily defined by movements of protest, liberation and emancipation, but as the epochal threshold of an epistemological paradigm shift. Rooted in cybernetics and affecting the hard sciences and the humanities alike, such a shift entailed the decline of epistemologies based on the distinction between a subject of knowledge and an object to be known,