Cybersentics Book Club
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if a government adopted principles of the "study of control and communication" as its operating logic? Would it result in a homogeneous crowd of optimized man-machines? Let's talk about this uncomfortable twist of cybernetics.
This month, we turn to Danielle Carr's essay arguing that cognitivism's triumph over behaviorism as psychology's dominant theory of mind was driven by "cognitive liberalism," a strand of early Cold War political philosophy that placed human freedom in the spontaneous capacities of cognition and language. Along the way, the piece traces how Hannah Arendt's account of totalitarianism framed it as a form of behaviorist control, linking Cold War anti-behaviorism to earlier Progressive-era critiques of industrial labor and to attacks on behaviorism circulating at the time.
Reading:
Carr, D. J. Z. (2020). ‘Ghastly marionettes’ and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and the origins of totalitarianism. History of the Human Sciences, 33(1), 147-174.
Location: 2665 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94110 + online w/RSVP
Danielle Carr is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of neuroscience, her work brings together the critical study of the brain and mind sciences in the twentieth century with the history of politics. At UCLA, she also directs the Material Intelligence as Historical Problem project.