tgiFHI | Sarah Pourciau, German Studies

tgiFHI is a weekly series that gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

On Friday, February 27, 2026, we will host Sarah Pourciau, Associate Professor of German Studies.

"Subsymbolic: the Problem of the Icon"

In 1986, the members of the "Parallel Distributed Processing" research group published a volume dedicated to their new, network-based perspective on artificial and natural intelligence. They called their approach "subsymbolic." The methods described in this publication laid nearly all the foundations for contemporary machine learning practices with one fell swoop; from a technical vantage point, therefore, they are widely known and well understood. These techniques emerged, however, from a set of hypotheses about the nature of symbolic representation that has never, to my knowledge, been systematically analyzed. I will use my talk to unpack the implications of some of these hypotheses, which turn almost exclusively around problems of meaning and interpretation: problems of the icon, in the Peircean sense, as well as of the symbol, in the strong Kantian one. I will argue that the subsymbolic is an attempt to think through the operations of what Kant called the "productive imagination," that the mathematics of vectorial transformation have a parasitic relationship to the categories of the aesthetic, and that a semiotic interpretation of network structure carries important de-fetishizing consequences for our understanding of contemporary models, with their blackboxed depths, their grounding problems, and their quasi-mystical "latent spaces."

Sarah Pourciau is associate professor of German Studies at Duke. She is the author of The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science (Fordham, 2017), which provides a new genealogy and interpretation of structuralist approaches to language and poetics. Her current book project is provisionally entitled Deep Computation: The Mathematics of Metaphor. It explores the emergence of contemporary deep learning techniques and the history of vector space geometries as a series of encounters between mathematics and philosophy, computation and semiotics from the 19th century to the present.

RSVP here