Sponsor
German Studies
Co-Sponsor(s)
Dean of Humanities; English; John Hope Franklin Center (JHFC); Literature
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Age of AI
-
In October of 1966---60 years ago---Johns Hopkins held a conference that is now widely seen as the hinge point when structuralism gave way to poststructuralism. Jacques Derrida delivered his paper "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," taking aim at some of the crucial tenets of structuralism with that school's dean, Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the audience. The reception of "theory" in the United States has always been dependent on this event; the transmission of structuralism beyond the confines of linguistics occurred primarily as a necessary condition for the dissemination of a triumphant poststructuralist discourse. This colloquium proposes to re-evaluate the putative break between these two schools in light of the explosion of Al into cultural fields over the last decade.
1966 was still the heyday of the cybernetics craze in philosophy. Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and others at the conference had held longstanding interests in information theory, control theory, and game theory, among other mid-century sciences. Derrida himself would give Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, pride of place in the introduction to Of Grammatology just a few years later, suggesting that science and writing were intertwined in irrevocable ways. By the early 1970s, however, the seemingly twinned fates of French Theory and cybernetics had diverged, giving rise eventually to media theory in the humanities and computer science and cognitive science, elsewhere.
1966 was still the heyday of the cybernetics craze in philosophy. Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and others at the conference had held longstanding interests in information theory, control theory, and game theory, among other mid-century sciences. Derrida himself would give Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, pride of place in the introduction to Of Grammatology just a few years later, suggesting that science and writing were intertwined in irrevocable ways. By the early 1970s, however, the seemingly twinned fates of French Theory and cybernetics had diverged, giving rise eventually to media theory in the humanities and computer science and cognitive science, elsewhere.
