Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Institut für Musik­wissen­schaft und Medien­wissen­schaft | Medienwissenschaft |  ↳ Medientheorien | Kolloquium | Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan: »From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus«

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan: »From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus«

  • Was Kolloquium “MEDIA SOUP”
  • Wann 06.07.2011 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo Sophienstraße 22a, R. 0.01 (Medientheater)
  • iCal

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a fellow in the Graduiertenkolleg „Mediale Historiographien“ at Bauhaus Universität Weimar.

In this paper I examine the history of efforts to reform the human sciences through new media research, with a particular emphasis on the Rockefeller Foundation's interwoven programs of support for communications research, digital media, and global science from 1930 to 1960. Through archival research and textual analysis I reconstruct how leading scholars and scientific administrators came to conceive of new media technologies as part of an impartial apparatus for transcending cultural, biological, and political difference. I recover the forgotten history of interdisciplinary and transnational programs that conjoined the research of Francophone structuralists to that of American engineers. The result is a new account of 20th century media change and research as inscribed within a project of “global technics” that substituted technological procedures for political decision making.

The talk and discussion will be in English.

Videomitschnitt

http://youtu.be/6vv2EMiLqTs