Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)

Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)

Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes. In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Episoder(2227)

Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)

Eivind Røssaak, "The Cory Arcangel Hack: Digital Culture and Aesthetic Practice" (MIT Press, 2025)

The first in-depth exploration of the work of artist Cory Arcangel, a pioneer of DIY-new media art whose influential “hacks” subvert the confines of Big Tech. Cory Arcangel (b. 1978)—perhaps best kno...

4 Apr 43min

Amir Saemi, "Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Amir Saemi, "Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Amir Saemi’s exciting book Morality and Revelation in Islamic Thought and Beyond: A New Problem of Evil (Oxford UP, 2024) is a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking study that challenges how we thi...

4 Apr 1h 29min

Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)

Daniel Rachel, "This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich" (Akashic Books, 2026)

Over the last seven decades, some of rock 'n' roll's most celebrated figureheads have flirted with the imagery and theater of the Third Reich. From Keith Moon and Vivian Stanshall kitting themselves o...

4 Apr 57min

Pre-Reading

Pre-Reading

In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in...

30 Mar 20min

Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mark Pennington, "Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom by Mark Pennington This highly original and innovative book is the first to comprehensively engage the ideas of the French social...

30 Mar 58min

Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)

Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagi...

30 Mar 1h 2min

Emmanuel Ofuasia, "Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics" (Springer, 2024)

Emmanuel Ofuasia, "Ìwà: the Process-Relational Dimension to African Metaphysics" (Springer, 2024)

Correction: In the interview, the host mistakenly mentioned that Prof. Ofuasia is teaching the University of Pretoria. In reality, Prof Ofuasia is currently a decoloniality research associate at the U...

29 Mar 1h 31min

Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta eds., "Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Thomas Hegghammer and Diego Gambetta eds., "Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Time spent and words spent—what does each signal? Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which on...

28 Mar 1h 5min

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