Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra Pound's Poetics of Transmission
Fed up with the crowded and cacophonous world of early twentieth century media culture, Ezra Pound makes this grouchy declaration in the early pages of his 1938 Guide to Kulchur.1 As he sees it, the world is becoming ever more saturated with disorganized information, and readers of all persuasions are in desperate need of tools to help them negotiate their social reality. These sentiments underscore Pound's commitment, in both his critical writing and his poetry, to developing communication strategies capable of sifting through and making sense of modernity's "heteroclite mass of undigested information." In the pages to come, I trace how this ambition permeates the infamous Radio Rome broadcasts and finds powerful creative expression in the poetics of the Chinese History Cantos. Most crucially, though, I cast this valence, which is not only an aspect of Pound's writing but also literary modernism more broadly, as an aesthetic counterpart to the technological and scientific discourse of World War II cybernetics. Cybernetics was the brainchild of Norbert Wiener, an MIT mathematician who maintained such a highly fraught influence on the field of twentieth century communication technology that recent biographers have hailed him as the "dark hero of the information age."2 Wiener coined "cybernetics" by adapting the modernism modernity