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Article ID: CBB001023660

Purification and Hybridisation of Soviet Cybernetics. The Politics of Scientific Governance in an Authoritarian Regime (2010)

Archiv für Sozialgeschichte
Volume: 50
Pages: 289--310

Publication Date: 2010
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Beiträge zum Rahmenthema “Verwissenschaftlichung von Politik nach 1945””
Language: English

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Authoritarianism; totalitarianism Technocracy Cybernetics Science and government 20th century, late Soviet Union

Egle Rindzeviciute, Purification and Hybridisation of Soviet Cybernetics. The Politics of Scientific Governance in an Authoritarian Regime Focusing on the history of Soviet cybernetics this article analyses the negotiation of the boundaries between techno-science and the political. These relations are analysed with the help of Bruno Latour's concepts of hybridisation and purification. Since its introduction in the Soviet Union cybernetics was hybridised and purified in relation to two notions of the political: first, with regard to the membership in the Communist Party and, second, with regard to the friend-enemy divide. The article questions the predominant view which regards the hybridisation of Soviet politics with cybernetics as a negative phenomenon. It maps out how both purification and hybridisation were used as strategies of survival and critical devices by Soviet scientists and policy-makers. The Soviet government had a strong rationale for espousing the political neutrality of computer-based sciences, because this legitimised the transfer of these technologies from the West. Soviet scientists had a strong rationale for espousing the political neutrality of these sciences, because it aided their construction of professional autonomy.

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Article Kruke, Anja; Woyke, Meik (2010) Editorial. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte (p. 3). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001023660/

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