How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family members encode and decode informational streams in feedback loops that promote the stability (or “homeostasis”) of the individual as well as the group. Mental illness, in this account, sprang from atypical coding patterns.

This talk examines how technical affordances of mid-twentieth century “new media” such as experimental film and information theory facilitated this production of cybernetic families. It retraces the changing fortunes of the cybernetic family as an inspiration for leftwing antipsychiatric reform (e.g. Félix Guattari) as well as neoliberal mental health policies implemented in the Reagan era. These changes fit within a longer history of “media aesthetics” as a tool for managing aberrant selves from hysterics of the nineteenth-century to the quantified self of today.

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology. He holds an appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Digital Humanities King’s College London and as a co-curator for the Technosphere Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin). His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, and Theory, Culture & Society. He be found online at  www.bernardg.com  and on Twitter at @bernardionysius.