History of the Human Sciences is delighted to announce Danielle Judith Zola Carr (Columbia University) as the winner of the journal’s first Early Career Essay Prize for her essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Katie Joice (Birkbeck, University of London) was awarded a commendation for her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother, 1945-67’. Congratulations to both scholars.
‘Ghastly Marionettes’ was included in our Special Issue on Cybernetics, published in February 2020, guest edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby. We spoke to the author about the essay, Hannah Arendt, Cold War liberalism and the place of intellectual history within the history of the human sciences.
HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Can you tell us a bit about the piece?
DC: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to publish with the journal. The essay actually originated as an early 2017 post-Trump piece, when I think everyone was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was my first time reading it, and I was struck by how infused the book is– especially in its last third–with a castigation of the Pavolovian imaginary of the human, and how that imaginary of a human determined by stimulus and response was equivocated with this new Cold War concept of totalitarianism. So I started looking into that realised that nobody seemed to have written about that specifically in relation to Arendt
I think Arendt is a good figure to think with, because she encapsulates this emerging Cold War common sense– what many scholars now are starting to think about as Cold War liberalism. One of the questions in thinking about Cold War political ideology is this: What is this liberalism that happens in the postwar period going into the Cold War and how is it distinct from early twentiety-century liberalism? In the early twentieth century, there is a lot of space for thinking about technocracy, technologies and human engineering in relation to the Progressive-Era emergence of social science, largely funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. There are critiques of the idea of engineering the human, but they are coming from the religious right and the labor left, not the liberals. What’s really distinctive about postwar liberalism is that this friendly relationship to social engineering disappears. Suddenly, Cold War liberals are thinking about the human as being something distinct from technology, as a being not determined by the same sort of push-button responses that you can use to control machines.
I thought that that gave an interesting vantage on to a question that is relevant to the history of cybernetics: why did cybernetics fail, while cognitivism was successfully taken up as a scientific movement? Many times, when we are thinking about information theory in the history of science, it’s easy to say that cybernetics is the basis of contemporary information sciences. Cerrtainly in some ways that’s true – particularly if we are thinking about the role of cybernetics in developing information theory and influencing the computerisation of many scientific fields. But equally, there’s something key about cybernetics that fails to take hold. What my essay tries to do is to show that there’s something going on in what we could call Cold War liberalism that makes that political project incompatible with cybernetics, but that makes it form the conditioning ground for cognitivism.
The approach that I take in the essay is part of my overarching method, which is to treat the history of science as intellectual history. The goal is not just to read the history of science alongside intellectual history, but to say we can do intellectual history within the sciences. This makes sense as an approach, because this is a moment when science has been popularised for mass consumption: the cybernetics conferences are being covered by major newspapers, for example, and you have this efflorescence of popular writing in the postwar period as ordinary people become interested in technology. The atomic bomb is this huge moment in American consciousness. You have a spate of high profile technologies that emerged through the infusion of federal funding into the sciences driven by the war. With the rapid ascent of the sciences, suddenly everyone is reading Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, and there is an exploding popular market for writing about science. This is also a moment of profound interdisciplinary fusion between the social and physical sciences, as Jamie Cohen-Cole has shown. So Origins of Totalitarianism—and liberal political thought in general—is happening in a moment in which the political thinkers are reading the scientists and the scientists are reading the political thinkers. It makes sense to take an historical approach which thinks of these groups as literally talking to each other, because they were.
HHS: Before I ask you more about the essay itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD dissertation project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly.
DC: My dissertation is about a weird historical stutter: brain implants for a psychiatric disorder are invented for permanent intercerebral use in humans in the 1950s, then disappear after the 1970s, only to reemerge again in the early 2000s with no reference to their Cold War past. You have to understand, brain stimulation for psychiatric research and treatment was not a fringe technology in the fifties. The people who were working on it were going to conferences with all the other neurophysiologists; they were leaders in the field. This goes on into the 1970s, as people try to find the neurological basis for hunger, sex pleasure, aggression, and so on. As you go into the 1970s, this becomes explicitly political, as people are trying to find things like the neurological basis of race riots. For instance, here in LA, there was a collaboration between the justice department and the neurophysiologists who wanted to start a research centre to find the neurological basis of aggression, which is of course, a racialised aggression. And so in the 1970s, the question of neurological control becomes a political problem. There were literally congressional hearings about this specific technology, which then disappears and then comes back in the early 2000s with no reference to its contested history.
What the PhD thesis asks is this: why is that brain implants for psychiatric states—a technology that was technologically possible since the 1950s– politically impossible, politically incompatible with what we want to think of as liberalism. And why, moreover, is it now compatible with regnant political ideologies of the subject once again? This essay tells a little piece of that story, the part that has to do with what’s happening in the 1950s around ideas of determinism, mechanism, language, and freedom. It lays out how it came to be the case that, by the 1970s, this technology is seen as the limit case of Big Brother government, as technocratic overreach. It was like the apotheosis of what the antipsychiatry movement was going against. In its current revivification, the people behind it are data capitalists and DARPA, the science branch of the US military. And I think that tells us something about how political ideology has accomodated and conditioned itself to changes in the value production from liberalism to neoliberalism—or however you want to periodize the 1970s to the present.
HHS: When you were introducing the essay, you were talking about this moment where behaviourism is dominant and then briefly challenged by cybernetics, but cybernetics doesn’t really succeed and cognitivism eventually ‘wins’, so to speak. You are clear that Arendt was not (and could not have been) a cognitivist but nonetheless suggest that she could be understood as a kind of proto-cognitivist in some sense.
DC: One of the axes that I wanted to grind is this paper was to more clearly elucidate the relationship between behaviourism and cybernetics. It’s not just that cybernetics goes against behaviourism, displaces it, and wins. It’s that cybernetics tries to replace behaviourism and fails, because it tries to replace the wrong thing– that’s what dooms it. Metaphysically– and this is really an essay about political metaphysics – cybernetics stays in the thrall of what it is about behaviourism that’s going to be nixed by cognitivism. And that’s an metaphysics that does not particularly allow for freedom. Of course, freedom and creativity are the things that dog cybernetics as the problem that it’s going to have to solve in order to be compatible with Cold War liberalism. What cybernetics shares with behaviourism is that it is premised on a metaphysics without transcendence.
Arendt is in many ways a good bellwether for what is shared in common by many postwar liberals. She is specifically saying that you have to have an outside to the world of mechanistic cause and effect; you have to have a space of non-determinism. That “outside” to the ordinary world is where we’re going to locate politics. So for Arendt, that space of the “outside” is going to be language, and language is not going to work mechanistically. I’m not saying that Arendt is a cognitivist, but I am saying that the pieces for cognitivism to succeed are already in place by the 1950s, by the time that she publishes The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cognitivism is taken up because it solves precisely the problems that she’s laying out.
HHS: Almost like it’s waiting in the wings.
DC: Exactly. There are two bad ways of doing the history of scienced. The first one—one that we all already know is wrong, is to look at a period of scientific contestation say, ‘Well, the scientific truth succeeded and the good guys won.’ But the second mistake—one that isn’t as clearly bad but that can be pernicious—is to solely focus on scientific practice, looking at what happens in the lab and identifying alliances between groups of people, instruments and object (blah blah blah, Latour). And I want to say that there is a way to let politics as such back in. It’s not that there is not a determining relation between political ideology and scientific thought, but there is a conditioning role between political ideology and scientific practice. This is especially true when we’re talking about the history of the human sciences that are asking questions like ‘what is the human?’
HHS: From reading your essay it seems that language is central to Arendt’s understanding of freedom. Could you explain why language had this significance for her and how it relates to her valorisation of spontaneity?
DC: As an anthropologist, I know this history best in terms of what happens with structuralism in the midcentury. There’s a move away from physicality and the material—this is the decline of functionalism– and the rise of the idea that what’s human about the human has very little to do with the body or the physical environment. In French structuralism, particularly French structuralism, the human is comprised of symbolic systems. The subject is comprised in language. So you have a general movement away from the material and into what I call “linguistic idealism.” Arendt is part of that intellectual movement to say that what is human about the human is not tool use, it’s language.
Your question is also picking up on something that I was trying to do, which is to connect this fixation on language as a non-deterministic space with the resurgence of postwar vitalism. For midcentury liberals, there’s something about life, language and the cognitive subject that does not operate according to mechanism. And the fact that it isn’t determined by material laws has a political valence of “good,” basically. Language is key in all of these kinds of different sites as being the place where this political metaphysics is going to ratchet open a metaphysical space for the kind of freedom that’s central to Cold War liberalism.
HHS: What did Arendt mean when she spoke of the ‘psychic life of totalitarianism’? Or would it make more sense to say that she understood totalitarianism as the absence of psychic life or the negation of the psyche? You mention other contemporaneous projects that sought to understand totalitarianism from a psychological perspective – how was The Origins of Totalitarianism distinct from these?
DC: For Arendt, there is no psychic life of totalitarianism because it is the operation of totalitarianism to destroy what she would recognise as the psyche. And the way this idea of the mind as the zone of freedom comes together will be crucial in shaping the next thirty years of political common sense in the United States. Something interesting happens from the fifties to the seventies: this idea that totalitarianism relies on an evacuated mind—one that is overdetermined by external forces– becomes key what will become the kind of antibureaucratic, proto-libertarian movement, that, by the 1970s becomes Silicon Valley ideology. There’s a wonderful book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture that charts this development. You can also see it in, for instance, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and the critique of the bureaucratised, mass consumptive subject that happens in the Frankfurt School.
What you see happening is a kind of dialectical formation, such that, by the time you get to the seventies, the antipsychiatry movement– which is basically libertarian– is able to make strange bedfellows with the residue of this Cold War liberal discourse. One of the reasons that I picked Arendt to be my interlocutor here is not because she’s saying anything particularly fringy, but that she’s really giving voice to this ambient common sense: to think is the opposite of totalitarianism because for the behaviourist there is no such thing as the thinking subject, there’s no inside, there’s no mind. So the very presence of mind is a political presence.
HHS: I was intrigued by the term the ‘laboratory of behaviourism’ in the essay and wondered if you could define that or talk about how Arendt defined it.
DC: One of the craziest things that shakes out of doing close reading of Origins of Totalitarianism is that when Arendt talks about the camps as being a laboratory, it’s not a metaphor. She’s not saying the camps are like the behaviourist’s laboratory, she’s saying the camps are the behaviourist laboratory. This connects with stuff that will begin happening in psychology in the early 1960s, where people look at, for instance, Stanley Milgram’s experiments and say “You’re not showing us anything about totalitarianism; what you’re doing is totalitarianism.” This is where a lot of what will, by the 1980s, become bioethics begins to come from. It’s the idea that science is not necessarily telling us something about the world occurring elsewhere outside of the lab; politics and the creation of a certain form of human subject is occurring in the laboratory. One of the things I wanted to do was to connect what will become bioethics in the US with Arendt saying that the camps are a laboratory.
HHS: This also made me think of antipsychiatric discourse and its obsession with institutions and the question of how institutions relate to society or are metonyms for society.
DC: Completely! You see an anxiety about the possibility of creating a new form of the human in discourses like, for instance, Goffman’s idea of “total institutions.” This idea that there’s something fundamentally artificial about these institutions and that can be connected with what is happening in the 1920s and 1930s. Rebecca Lemov’s book World as Laboratory is really excellent on this, where you begin from the scientists end to say, we can use the world as a laboratory. We can run experiments on an entire town. The world itself becomes an experiment.
HHS: You cite Arendt discussing Pavlov’s dogs and I wondered if it’s significant for her that this is the dominant paradigm in the Soviet Union.
DC: Definitely. One of the crucial features of The Origin of Totalitarianism– and Cold War liberalism generally– is this formation of the concept of totalitarianism, specifically as a way of making equivalent the Soviets and the Nazis. The revisions to her book made just before it goes to publication show that she quickly added a lot of stuff about the Soviet Union in order to underline this equivocation. You have to remember, Pavlov is one of the leading scientists of the Soviet Union, and one of their claims to an illustrious scientifi heritage, and this matters in the scientific and ideological race with the Soviets.
HHS: At the beginning of this interview you said this originated as a post-Trump essay. I was wondering about parallels or analogies (or indeed the lack of them) that you see between the historical moment you’re analysing and the present moment. You talk about the collapse of liberalism and its postwar resuscitation, but you also have spoken about how Cold War liberalism was distinctive and I wondered how this relates to liberalism today.
DC: I think liberalism has a fundamental contradiction at its core. There is the idea that the body is something that’s common to all humans; this common body is going to be the basis of common knowledge and by implication also freedom and choiceboth epistemic democracy (like science) and political equivalence (like human rights). There’s an idea that a common body equals a common humanity. But the problem is that once you start taking the body seriously as something that can be governed and known through science, the question of whether the human is actually free emerges. The fundamental contradiction of liberalism continually reasserts itself and has to be solved: Foucault calls it the tension between discipline and ideologies of freedom. I want to suggest that this tension relates to the fact that liberalism is a political ideology that is perpetually collapsing.
What we’re seeing in the current moment is yet another implosion of liberalism. It is not identical, to but certainly has features that are in common with, earlier collapses of liberalism. My essay charts one attempt to recover liberalism from an earlier collapse, in this case Cold War liberalism’s attempt to salvage the wreckage of the failure of early 20th century liberalism. We are facing a similar problem today, one that should cause us to seriously reckon with whether liberalism is something we even want to attempt to reconstruct.
You have to hand it to Cold War liberals, at least they understood that something had gone fundamentally wrong, and there was going to have to be a metaphysical recalibration in the heart of what liberalism was in order to fix it. Our problem now is that for current liberals, all their answers to this crisis are nostalgic. Liberals today don’t understand that the crisis is structural, fundamental and integral. They don’t understand that what liberalism is is going to have to be reconstituted. There’s a general failure of liberals to apprehend the magnitude of the failure that Trump represents.
There’s a lot of talk now about QAnon and conspiracy theories and this almost mystical side of American fascism. I think that we have to think about that as being a response to the evacuated technocratic forms of governance that marked liberal governance from Clinton to Obama. It’s a form of governance in which you have this ascent of elite technocratic knowledge that says “There’s no need for politics here, experts will decide everything because the technocrats know best.” And as is always the case with technocracy, it has produced a hunger for politics as such. So I would say that it is possible to make sense of the present moment as a rupture of political theology—that is, of metaphysics.
In my view we have to accept that there is a resurgence of the political and directly incorporate it into our work. What this looks like for historians of the human sciences is not just a fixation on infrastructure studies or actor network theory, both of which are ways of trying to get ‘reality’ back into the humanistic inquiry that has been dominated by exactly the sort of linguistic idealism that I discuss in the paper. There’s no way out except to directly reckon with politics. So, in short, we need to become historical materialists.
HHS: That seems like a great place to conclude – thank you!
(Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor)
