Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a writer, media theorist, and historian of science. His research explores how digital technology--as an ensemble of instruments, practices, inscriptions, and concepts--shapes science, culture, and the environment. He's also published on topics including the emergence of the computer screen from geopolitical anxieties, the changing conditions of digital interactivity from Cold War vigilance and to anthopocentric globalism, recent German media theory, the technological infrastructures of spiritualism, decolonial HCI, critical interface studies, and the ideology of smart cities. In addition to serving as Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Digital Media in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, Bernard has curated for the Technosphere Project at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

He published his first monograph, "The Cybernetic Apparatus: Media, Liberalism, and the Reform of the Human Sciences" open-access in 2021. A followup work titled "Code: From From Information Theory to French Theory is forthcoming from Duke University Press. It examines how information theory and cybernetics shaped the reform of the human sciences in France and the United States after World War II. He shows how conceptions of communication derived from engineering, allied with technocratic agendas, shape the reorientation of research in fields including linguistics, anthropology, psychotherapy, and semiotics. The book offers a revisionist history of "French Theory" as both the humanities' efforts to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a neglected predecessor of the contemporary digital humanities.

Bernard's current book project, co-authored with Francesco Casetti, argues for the mutual production of screens and environments, exemplified through four key visual technologies (phantasmagoria, cinema, radar, global positioning systems).

Before joining King's Bernard taught at Yale University, Coventry University, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the American University of Paris. He also co-programmed and co-curated the Anthopocene Campus of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, named by Artnet as one of the most influential exhibitions of the last decade. He's held fellowships at a number of institutions, including the IKKM (Weimar), the DCRL (Leuphana University), the Institute for Research and Innovation (Pompidou Center), the Whitney Humanities Center (Yale University) and his research has been funded by the Mellon Fondation, the German Research Foundation, the U. S. Department of Education, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He earned a binational Ph.D. from Northwestern University and Bauhaus University Weimar.​ (2021)

Publications

Monographs

Peer Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters

    • Geoghegan, BD. 作为机器的家庭:美国郊区的电影,基础设施和控制论亲属关系, Cultural Studies [Chinese], under review.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Information: Economy of Signals and the Order of Discourse.” In Articulating Media, edited by Nathaniel Zetter. London: Open Humanities Press, forthcoming.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Nine Pails of Ashes: Social Networks, Genocide, and the Structuralists’ Database of Language,” History of Anthropology Review, forthcoming.
    • Casettin, F and BD Geoghegan. “Screen." In Information Keywords, edited by Jonathan E. Abel, Samuel Frederick, Michele Kennerly, general editor Eric Hayot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Orientalism and Informatics: Alterity from the Chess-Playing Turk to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.” Ex-Position 43, June 2020, pp. 45–90.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Textocracy, or, the Cybernetic Logic of French Theory.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1, 2020, pp. 52–79.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Architectures of Information: A Comparison of Wiener’s and Shannon’s Theories of Information.” Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, ed. by T. Vardouli and O. Touloumi, Routledge, 2019, pp. 135–59.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “An Ecology of Operations: Vigilance, Radar, and the Birth of the Computer Screen.” Representations 147, no. 1, Aug. 2019, pp. 59–95.
    • Geoghegan, BD. 키틀러 이후: 최근 독일 미디어 이론으로서 문화기술학에 관하여, 정찬철문화과학 94, 2018. 236-260
    • Halpern, R, R Mitchell, and BD Geoghegan. “The Smartness Mandate: Notes Towards a Critique.” Grey Room 68 (Summer 2017), 106–129.
    • Åkervall, L, and BD Geoghegan. “I’ll Be Your Screen.” In La galassia Casetti: Lettere di amicizia, stima, provocazione, edited by Eugeni Ruggero and Mariagrazia Fanchi, 3-5. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2017.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “The Family as Machine: Film, Infrastructure, and Cybernetic Kinship in Suburban America.” Grey Room 66 (Winter 2017), 70-101.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Claude Lévi-Strauss et les communications.” In Les Résonances des Structuralismes, edited by Jean-François Bert and Jérôme Lamy, 113–19. Paris: éditions des archives contemporaines, 2016.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Information.” In Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture, edited by Benjamin Peters, 173–83. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
    • Geoghegan, BD. "The Spirit of Media: An Introduction.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 809–14.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Mind the Gap: Spiritualism and the Infrastructural Uncanny.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 899–922.
    • Geoghegan, BD and C. Kassung. “Friedrich A. Kittler, Professor” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 963–77.
    • “Ecologies of Disclosure: On Aesthetic Compositions of Technics and Life.” Spheres 2 (December 2015).
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Occult Communications: On Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology.” Communication +1 4, no. 1 (2015).
    • “Visionäre Informatik: Notizen über Vorführungen von Automaten und Computern, 1769-1962 [Visionary Informatics: Notes on the Exhibitions of Automata and Computers, 1769-1962],” tr. Lisa Åkervall. Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 20, 2015, 177–98.
    • “In Memoriam: Friedrich A. Kittler, 1943-2011.” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 2 (Winter 2015): 484–88.
    • Geoghegan, BD and B Peters. “Cybernetics." In The Johns Hopkins Guide to the Digital Humanities, edited by Lori Emerson, Benjamin Robertson, and Ryan Marie-Laure, 109–12. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
    • ” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 66–82.
    • Hayward, M and BD Geoghegan. “Catching up with Simondon.” SubStance 41, no. 3 (2012): 3–15.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “La Cybernétique « américaine » au sein du Structuralisme « français ».” La Revue d’Anthropologie Des Connaissances 6, no. 3 (2012): 335–51.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus.” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 1 (2011): 96–126.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Agents of History: Autonomous Agents and Crypto-Intelligence.” Interaction Studies 9, no. 3 (2008): 403–14.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “The Historiographic Conception of Information: A Critical Survey.” The IEEE Annals on the History of Computing 30, no. 1 (2008): 66–81.

Encyclopaedia Entries and Brief Texts

    • Geoghegan, BD. “The Radar-Type.” In Dispatches: From the Institute of Incoherent Geography, Vol. 1. Pittsburgh: Flugschriften, 2019, pp. 113-119.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “The Dura-Europos Roman shields.” In Artwork as Screen, edited by Francesco Casetti, Bernard Geoghegan and Karl Regina. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2016.
    • Geoghegan, BD and E. Schüttpelz. “Claude Lévi-Strauss.” In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Jefferson D. Pooley, Robert T. Craig, and Eric W. Rothenbuhler. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
    • Geoghegan, BD and B Peters. “Cybernetics.” In The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Jefferson D. Pooley, Robert T. Craig, and Eric W. Rothenbuhler. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.

White Papers

    • Klingan, K, B Geoghegan, and C. Rosol. “The Technosphere: Signal/Noise Ratios.” Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2015.

Book Reviews

    • Geoghegan, BD. “Toward Liberal Histories of Computing: Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround.” Technology and Culture 56, no. 3 (July 2015): 745–48.
    • Geoghegan, BD. “Untimely Mediations: On Two Recent Contributions to ‘German Media Theory.’” Paragraph 37, no. 3 (2014): 419–25.

Translations

    • Kittler, Friedrich. “Farewell to Sophienstraße.” Tr. Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan and Christian Kassung. Critical Inquiry 42, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 959-62.
    • Stiegler, Bernard. “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means.” In Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, tr. T. Ravindranathan with B Geoghegan, 222–35. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Popular Media and Interviews

Edited Collections• Bateson Dossier. Grey Room 66, ed. B Geoghegan (Winter 2017).

    • The Spirit of Media. Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4, ed. B Geoghegan (Summer 2016).
    • Friedrich Kittler. Special Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4, ed. B Geoghegan (Summer 2016).
    • Occult Communications: Instrumentation, Esotericism, and Epistemology in the Nineteenth-Century. Special Issue of Communication +1 14, no. 1, ed. B Geoghegan (2015).
    • On Gilbert Simondon: Individuation and Technics. Special Issue of SubStance 41, no. 3, Eds. M. Hayward and B Geoghegan.

Curation

    • Forms of Life / Life Forms (with Katrin Klingan and Nicholas Hood). Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2019.
    • 1948 (with Katrin Klingan and Nicholas Hood). Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2017.
    • Artwork as Screen (with Francesco Casetti and Regina Karl). Yale University Art Gallery, 2016.
    • The Technosphere: Signal-Noise Ratios (with Katrin Klingan and Christoph Rosol). Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2015-2018.

Audio-Visual Media

    • 2012-2014, Cultural Technologies: Dialogues on Media, Art and Science. Podcast. Host, producer, editor.
    • 2007, “La modernité sans la modernisation.” Digital video with online distribution platform. Directed by Bernard Stiegler and produced by the Institute for Research and Innovation (Pompidou Center). Produced and edited interviews featuring NK Hayles, Bernard Stiegler, André Green, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kevin McLaughlin, Dominique Lecourt and others.


Links