Category: ECR Prize

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize – winners!

Congratulations to the joint winners of this year’s Early Career Prize, Liana Glew (Penn State) for the essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’ and Simon Torracinta (Yale) for the essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’. Congratulations also to Erik Baker (Harvard) who received a commendation for the essay ‘The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’.

All three scholars will be invited to submit their pieces for publication in the journal and will be interviewed about their work for the website soon.

Thank you to everyone who submitted essays for consideration for the prize – the editors were very impressed by the high quality of submissions and inspired by the new research early career scholars are currently conducting.

‘Mothering in the Frame’ – an interview with Katie Joice

Katie Joice (Birkbeck) was awarded a special commendation in the History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Prize. We spoke to her about her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67’, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

HHS: Congratulations on your History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize commendation for your essay ‘Mothering in the Frame. To begin with I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it.

Katie Joice: Thank you. The essay introduces readers to the different ways in which film was used by anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study mother infant interaction in the post-war period. Historians have recently become interested in the concept of the pathogenic mother, but my specific focus is on how cinematic frame analysis, or microanalysis, enabled clinicians to classify and quantify mother-love. The essay begins with a discussion of how mothers’ ‘small behaviours’, the everyday, repetitive acts that no-one notices, coalesce into a new and influential causal model for mental illness. I then go on to discuss four case studies: Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in Bali, Ray Birdwhistell’s body language research, Rene Spitz’s studies of institutionalised babies, and Sylvia Brody’s classification of mothering styles. All four of them used forms of microanalysis, but in different styles, and for their own ends.

In terms of inspiration, I got interested in films about mothers and babies when I first joined the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck. I was researching the visual history of psychosis and came across Spitz’s film, Grief, about the devastating effects of maternal deprivation. At that time memories of my own son’s infancy were fresh in my mind, and I’d already done a lot of thinking about the invisible work that goes into creating subjects or ‘making people’. I realised that our humanity is not a given; it’s something that is constantly being constructed in early childhood, usually by women.

HHS: Would you be able to say a little about your PhD thesis project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly?

KJ: The title of my PhD is The Empty Frame: Child Analysis and its Visual Cultures, 1932-67. It examines the visual methodologies that were used in the post-war period to interpret the pre-verbal mind. The first part is on film, and is a much expanded version of this essay. Another part looks at play therapy, particularly the work of psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld. I also discuss the use of art and film in the post-war period to access the mind of children with autism. What I’m most interested in is the cultural history of these methodologies; how the ‘psy’ disciplines became entangled with all sorts of other practices, like film history, art history, philosophy and anthropology.

HHS: You write that ‘In this period, mother-love became a new scientific object, subject to new forms of description and empirical analysis’. How was mothering conceptualised in a distinct way within the social sciences in the post-war period? At the beginning of the essay you state that ‘maternal ‘presence’… became an ontological question for post-war social science’ – could you also expand on that?

KJ:  Anthropology, psychiatry and cybernetics were then enmeshed in ways that’s hard to imagine now. Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science, partly because of the continued influence of the Culture and Personality school within anthropology, which claimed that child-rearing techniques form distinctive national characters. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict argued that mothers set certain patterns of behaviour in motion, which were then written into every aspect of that culture. Also of crucial influence within psychiatry was a new psychoanalytic focus on the ‘micro-traumas’ that occurred in the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood. Harry Stack Sullivan in the US, and the English analysts Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott were theorists interested in this pre-verbal zone of experience, and its role in triggering psychosis. As the cine-camera became more portable and more accessible to amateurs, film came to offer a new evidential basis for these theories, a means of observing damage as it happened, rather than retrospectively in the therapist’s office.

I think this ‘search for origins’ also chimed with the need for a historical ‘blank slate’ after the war. There was a hope that the calibration of mothering would create a new generation of compassionate and pacifist democratic subjects.

On the question of presence… I’m talking there about how the quality and the reliability of a mother’s responses – actions or messages that might take place in a split second – came to be seen as constitutive, not only of the child’s personality, but also cultural and social habits. Though actually it was mothers’ emotional absence, rather than presence, that became the biggest preoccupation of the thinkers I look at in this essay. The effects of affectlessness, if you like. And the aesthetic and technical questions of how emotional absence might be captured on the screen. I’m intrigued by how these ineffable categories – presence, absence, mother-love, ‘maternal surround’, get translated into codes, scales and statistics.

HHS: Why was film deemed to be the most appropriate medium for capturing the ‘small behaviours’ of the mother? And why was this form of microobservation so central to the analysis of mothering?

KJ: Mother-infant interaction was only one field in which film was being experimented with as a diagnostic and documentary tool in this period. Film was seen more generally as a utopian technology that might reveal the hidden truths of behaviour. It was used extensively within animal studies, psychiatry and cybernetics research, to break behaviour into units which then could be analysed by the researcher, and sometimes used curatively by patients as well. Film could be slowed down, reduced to stills, re-watched and cross-analysed by a number of observers, and could bring the intimacy of conversation or breastfeeding into a lecture hall. And it encouraged particular forms of reflection: Rene Spitz and Sylvia Brody both said that they felt the cameras shielded them from the intensity of the emotions that they were observing. Film also allowed child analysts to think about different qualities of time: fleeting movements could be identified and counted, or particular thresholds in development ratified. A whole childhood could be compressed into a single film. The relationship between the analytic potential of film and the temporalities of early development is what compelled these thinkers.

HHS: Why do you think that the non-verbal was accorded such significance in this period?

KJ: I think it emerged out of the anthropological and psychoanalytic trends that I’ve already mentioned, as well as a new interest within linguistics in the secret codes of gesture and dance. There was a peculiar paradox at work in non-verbal communication research – on the one hand it was anti-humanist, in that it focused on free-floating ‘cybernetic’ codes which moved through an animal-human-machine continuum. But it was also an expression of pan-humanism, of a desire to create a universal behavioural science which transcended language barriers. That desire was fuelled by the tensions of the Cold War. For example, Edward Hall who invented proxemics, theories about how humans use space to communicate, was secretly funded by the CIA. There was a lot of political potential in non-verbal communication research.

HHS: Returning to something you just mentioned, could you say something more about the specific temporalities of early infancy and motherhood and how you see this as relating to the specific temporalities associated with film? Is the temporality of the former as historically contingent as the latter? By which I mean: is there a clash here between something understood to be universal, on the one hand, and a novel technology that ushered in new ways of thinking about or representing time, on the other?

KJ: It’s true that films such as Spitz’s transformed professional and public perceptions of infant experience and infant suffering: the documentary and diagnostic power of the technology enabled people to ‘see’ something that had in fact always been there. We might see this as part of the civilising process, a relatively recent extension of humanity to the pre-verbal child. On the other hand, we can never truly disentangle our biological parameters from environmental influence or our changing norms of selfhood. There is no universal infant. Balinese or American middle-class mothering-styles, like the institutionalisation of babies, are all products of history. What we can say is that practitioners of microanalysis assumed, and still assume today, that in infancy ‘small behaviours’ have potentially enormous effects. So in that sense, the microanalytic method matches the model of mind that is being advanced.

As for the temporalities of motherhood, I think mothers’ experiences were generally brushed under the carpet by these maternalist thinkers. They were much more interested in defending the infant against the mother, rather than delving into the social causes of maternal anguish. But the point I wanted to underline is that someone has to do the imaginative and emotional work of creating subjects. And I think that often scares the hell out of people. It’s something that’s rarely talked about. As a society we talk a lot about the practical problems of childcare, but not the existential ones.

HHS: Your first case study is Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s work in Bali. You claim they were the first to put ‘mothering in the frame’ and argue that their work was foundational for infant psychiatry – could you summarise the significance of their work for the phenomenon you’re analysing?

KJ: Mead and Bateson’s work was funded by an influential interwar funding body called the Committee for Research into Dementia Praecox, which was a pre-war term for schizophrenia.

This committee was looking for big answers to the problem of mental illness and institutionalisation. Mead and Bateson set out to make ambitious claims about what the small behaviours of mothering might mean, arguing that Balinese culture was essentially schizoid, but that it was saved from collective madness by ritual and trance. Mead made tendentious comparisons between the tiny finger movements of Balinese babies or Balinese mothers’ blank expressions, and institutionalised schizophrenics in the West. But the very exuberance of her claims threw down the gauntlet to a generation of researchers and clinicians that were interested in the significance of mothering styles. The books that emerged from their research in Bali, Balinese Character and Growth and Culture were also aesthetically compelling: peculiar juxtapositions of art, gesture, and expressions. Mead was suggesting that academic research could be presented non-discursively as well, that it could rely on a language or grammar of images.

HHS: Your next case study focuses on Ray Birdwhistell – what do you see as the impetus for his attempts to quantify affect and notate emotion through ‘kinesis’? How does this compare to what you describe later in the essay as Sylvia Brody’s ‘Taylorism of mothering’?

KJ: Birdwhistell was an anthropologist who was hugely influenced by linguistics, particularly the work of Edward Sapir. He wanted to reveal a hidden dimension of communication –kinesics or body language, that often ran counter to verbal communication. He created an immensely complex notation system based on the fine slicing of films of interpersonal behaviour. Mothers interested him because like Mead and Bateson he thought that their small behaviours were potentially pathogenic to young children. But he ended up mired in his methodology, splitting cinematic images into ever smaller temporal and spatial units.

In contrast, Sylvia Brody was a practicing psychologist and a pragmatist. She used film to count and evaluate the actions of mothering – such as touching, looking, speaking – with the aim of categorising mothers into a small number of types, some of which were pathogenic and in need of treatment. I use the term ‘Taylorism of mothering’ because efficiency, which we associate with Taylorism, was one of her ideal mother’s qualities. Paradoxically, it’s a model of efficiency that has to be underpinned by right feeling. The observer can count and dissect mothers’ movements, but a mother who who treats feeding mechanically becomes inefficient at satisfying her baby. Like Taylor and Gilbreth’s time and motion studies, the clock is prominent in Brody’s film footage; it splices the action.

HHS: Finally, I was wondering about overlaps between the kinds of social scientific applications of film you’re considering and film’s more artistic uses. I thought, for example, of the artist Maya Deren’s films shot in Haiti and her involvement with Bateson and other anthropologists. In your analysis of Rene Spitz’s films, for example, you discuss the angles from which the films were shot that excluded the institutional context to focus entirely on the child, emphasising this as an aesthetic decision. I was wondering how you think about these more aesthetic questions both in terms of how the films were composed and in terms of your own methodological approach to analysising them and how that relates to you claim in the conclusion that film in these studies became an ‘arbiter of authenticity’.

KJ: As I expand on this essay in my thesis I’ve been asking myself how these films resonate with the visual cultures of their times. And notions of authenticity were central to those visual cultures. This was the time of cinema verité in France, Free Cinema in Britain and Direct Cinema in the US, promising new access to ‘raw’ psychological states and to overlooked aspects of social life. In the course of working on a longer piece on Rene Spitz, I discovered that his film was shown at a New York avant-garde cinema club called Cinema 16, headed by film curator Amos Vogel. Much like Maya Deren, Vogel believed cinema should offer the viewer an altered state or conversion process, rather than entertainment, and Spitz’s film fitted into this manifesto.

What’s interesting about many of these film-makers, like Mead and Bateson, Spitz and also James Robertson in Britain, who made A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital and Young Children in Brief Separation, is that they were ‘auteurs’ in a sense. Their films were artful, singular and idiosyncratic. What happens in the era of Sylvia Brody and Mary Ainsworth is that cinematic studies of mothers and babies become much more laboratory based, and more standardised and static. Conventions emerge and settle over time, but their pre-history is often surprisingly heterogenous.

I’ve also been thinking about how to present my own research in visual form. I am collaborating with my colleague Ian Magor from the Hidden Persuaders project on a short teaching film which incorporates footage from the films discussed here. We’re hoping it will be published on the Hidden Persuaders website in the autumn and act as a visual accompaniment to my essay.

HHS: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ – interview with Danielle Judith Zola Carr, winner of History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Essay Prize

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)