I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. I study the idea of artificial intelligence in modern intellectual history and critical social theory.
My dissertation is a history and critique of cybernetics in postwar social thought; it investigates how living processes were refigured as technical systems across the human sciences. I focus on theories of nature and the environment, power and political economy, language and media—tracing how our most fundamental conceptual models for these domains were reformulated in light of systems and information theory. I thus show how life, thought, and history had first to be rendered computational before computers could be figured as living, thinking agents. Alongside these intellectual histories, I develop a philosophical critique of such systems theories of life and reason. Building on recent work in post-Kantian philosophy, I trace the internal contradictions of cybernetic social thought. What results is not only a challenge to notable currents in recent theoretical scholarship, but also—contra the discourse of artificial intelligence—a new picture of the conceptual limits on our interpretation of modern technical systems.
At Berkeley, I am an editor—and former Editor-in-Chief—of Qui Parle, as well as a designated emphasis student in both the Program in Critical Theory and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. During the 2025–2026 academic year, I was the Alpert Lepawsky Dissertation Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. For the 2026–2027 academic year, I am an IvyPlus Exchange Scholar in the department of Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Before arriving at Berkeley, I received my BA in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University, completed graduate coursework in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked in acquisitions at University of California Press.
Publications
‘The Disunity in Genealogy: Foucault’s Anti-Nietzschean Reading of History.’ Theory, Culture & Society 42, no. 5, 2025.
‘‘Language and Image Minus Cognition’: An Interview with Leif Weatherby’, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, June 2025.
Review of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory. History of Social Science 1, no. 1, Winter 2025.
email: robin.manley@berkeley.edu
