Chapter 3 - Black Box Subjectivity

Summary

Chapter 3 draws on 1950s and 1960s cybernetics-inflected psychology, represented by W. Ross Ashby and Silvan Tomkins. Love examines the theory of language Virginia Woolf employs in The Waves (1931) and more explicitly presents in a 1937 radio talk, contextualizing Woolf’s emphasis on gaps in perception and suggestive linguistic potential in terms of Ashby’s cybernetic “black-box” thought experiment and Tomkins’s cybernetics-based theories of affect. This work illuminates Woolf’s strategy of highlighting the variety of affective responses that specific scenarios can produce for different subjects, even within the most intimate communities. The comparison shows how Woolf’s aesthetic model, through its invocation of radio’s built-in black-box aesthetic of “blindness,” teaches readers about the way cybernetic thinking inflects social and interpersonal contexts: as we attempt to interact with and relate to one another, we must rely on perceptions that are incomplete, partial, and individually inflected. By drawing audiences’ attention to this aspect of our social world, Woolf makes cybernetic thinking affectively motivated and relevant at the level of personal interaction.