The Human Computer in the Stone Age: Technology, Prehistory, and the Redefinition of the Human after World War II
with Stefanos Geroulanos
New York University
After World War II, new concepts and metaphors of technology helped transform the understanding of human history all the way back to the australopithecines. Using concepts from cybernetics and information theory as much as from ethnology and osteology, scientists and philosophers reorganized the fossil record using a truly global array of fossils, and in the process fundamentally re-conceptualized deep time, nature, and the assemblage that is humanity itself. This paper examines three ways in which technological prehistory, that most distant, speculative, and often just weird field, came to reorganize the ways European and American thinkers and a lay public thought about themselves, their origins, and their future.
About Stefanos Geroulanos
Stefanos Geroulanos is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Transparency in Postwar France (2017), co-author of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (2018), and co-editor of The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (2017). He is also a Co-Executive Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
About the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series
The History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series brings to campus leading humanities scholars working on issues of media transition and technological emergence. The series promotes new, interdisciplinary approaches to questions about the uses, meanings, causes, and effects of rapid or dramatic shifts in techno-infrastructure, information management, and forms of mediated expression. Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media, these events are free and open to the public.
We are pleased to present the following lectures as part of this year's 2018-2019 season:
2018
September 12 | 6:30 — 8:00 PM | 112 Wurster Hall
Architectural Intelligence
Molly Wright Steenson, Carnegie Mellon University
In partnership with the Department of Architecture
October 4 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 310 Moffitt Library
Learning To Interact: Cybernetics and Play
Timothy Stott, Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology
2019
Mar 20 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | 310 Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Safiya Noble, University of California, Los Angeles
Co-sponsored by the CITRIS Policy Lab
Apr 03 | 5:00 — 6:30 PM | BCNM Commons, 340 Moffitt Undergraduate Library
The Human Computer in the Stone Age: Technology, Prehistory, and the Redefinition of the Human after World War II
Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University