n 1932, the self-described "fitter, draftsman, engineer, and architect" Jacques Lafitte published a small pamphlet entitled Reflexions sur la science des machines. Summarizing two previous essays of 1911 and 1919, he set out what the historian Jacques Guillerme has described as a biotechnological, evolutionist utopia, integrating the development of machines from buildings to information with that of society, in a complex classification that anticipated cybernetic theory. It was Lafitte's hope that, once brought into a totalizing system of "representation," machines and mankind might someday achieve the utopian unity already sketched in Fourierist and Saint-Simonian tracts of the