Cybernetics And The Penal Colony: A History Of Capital, Machinery, And French Colonial Imprisonment

"Cybernetics and the Penal Colony" is concerned with the history of the French penal colony in French Guiana, as well as the general history of industrial capitalist governance. This thesis asserts that the penal colony appears and functions as an identifiable technology of capitalist production, a function that mirrors the organization of the human-machine relationships in the factory and elsewhere. Readers interested in cybernetic and Marxist theory will find use in the explorations of this thesis. Further, this contributes to a scholarship more directly on the history of imprisonment from France and its Middle East and North African colonies. This thesis employs a principally Marxist framework, with considerations to Foucauldian, postmodern, and cybernetic theory. Cybernetics serves as the historical and theoretical context for the thesis' primary arguments. This paper finds that the penal colony appears as the first and most adequate manifestation of cybernetic governance. Capitalism employs cybernetics in line with its connection with the organization of machinery. The machine mirrors organic systems like the neuron, but it subsumes the human relationships surrounding it, transforming them into organs of capital's domination of human society in Europe and the colonial world.