scholarly journals On ‘modified human agents’: John Lilly and the paranoid style in American neuroscience

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Charlie Williams
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Future Application ◽  
Push Button ◽  
Behavioural Modification ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Control ◽  
Paranoid Style ◽  
Sensory Isolation

The personal papers of the neurophysiologist John C. Lilly at Stanford University hold a classified paper he wrote in the late 1950s on the behavioural modification and control of ‘human agents’. The paper provides an unnerving prognosis of the future application of Lilly’s research, then being carried out at the National Institute of Mental Health. Lilly claimed that the use of sensory isolation, electrostimulation of the brain, and the recording and mapping of brain activity could be used to gain ‘push-button’ control over motivation and behaviour. This research, wrote Lilly, could eventually lead to ‘master-slave controls directly of one brain over another’. The paper is an explicit example of Lilly’s preparedness to align his research towards Cold War military aims. It is not, however, the research for which Lilly is best known. During the 1960s and 1970s, Lilly developed cult status as a far-out guru of consciousness exploration, promoting the use of psychedelics and sensory isolation tanks. Lilly argued that, rather than being used as tools of brainwashing, these techniques could be employed by the individual to regain control of their own mind and retain a sense of agency over their thoughts and actions. This article examines the scientific, intellectual, and cultural relationship between the sciences of brainwashing and psychedelic mind alteration. Through an analysis of Lilly’s autobiographical writings, I also show how paranoid ideas about brainwashing and mind control provide an important lens for understanding the trajectory of Lilly’s research.

Michel Foucault and Western Medicine

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-81
Keyword(s):  
Western Medicine ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Social Medicine ◽  
Western Society ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The Veil ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The 19Th Century

The article analyzes Michel Foucault’s philosophical ideas on Western medicine and delves into three main insights that the French philosopher developed to expose the presence of power behind the veil of the conventional experience of medicine. These insights probe the power-disciplining function of psychiatry, the administrative function of medical institutions, and the role of social medicine in the administrative and political system of Western society. Foucault arrived at theses insights by way of his intense interest in three elements of the medical system that arose almost simultaneously at the end of the 18th century - psychiatry as “medicine for mental illness”, the hospital as the First and most well-known type of medical institution, and social medicine as a type of medical knowledge focused more on the protection of society and far less on caring for the individual. All the issues Foucault wrote about stemmed from his personal and professional sensitivity to the problems of power and were a part of the “medical turn” in the social and human sciences that occurred in the West in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the emergence of medical humanities. The article argues that Foucault’s stories about the power of medical knowledge were philosophical stories about Western medicine. Foucault always used facts, dates, and names in an attempt to identify some of the general tendencies and patterns in the development of Western medicine and to reveal usually undisclosed mechanisms for managing individuals and populations. Those mechanisms underlie the practice of providing assistance, be it the “moral treatment” practiced by psychiatrists before the advent of effective medication, or treating patients as “clinical cases” in hospitals, or hospitalization campaigns that were considered an effective “technological safe-guard ” in the 18th and most of the 19th century.

Workplace Discrimination, Equal Pay, and Sexual Harassment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen Boris ◽  
Allison Louise Elias
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Workplace Discrimination ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Women In The Workplace ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Racialized Gender

This chapter traces the changing status of women in the workplace by focusing on the individual and collective battles of the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in legal protections for working women. It considers new names for old problems—like sexual harassment—as well as new remedies for workplace discrimination that drew on equal employment law, unionization, and other organizational forms. Race, motherhood, age, and citizenship status distinguished women’s experiences in paid work, and thus this chapter takes an intersectional approach to understanding workplace developments based on women’s diverse identities. Anti-discrimination law has generated single-axis frameworks, which fail to address harms experienced by women of color that stem from their racialized gender and their holding low-paying, sex segregated jobs excluded from many labor standards. After providing an overview of these developments, the chapter ends with some directions for future research.

Design as aesthetic education: On the politics and aesthetics of learning environments

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Christina Vagt
Keyword(s):  
Learning Environments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media History ◽  
Political Aesthetics ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Political Technology ◽  
Design Of Learning Environments ◽  
The Impact

The article, speaking from the double perspective of media history and political aesthetics, discusses the impact of behaviourism and early computer technology on the design of learning environments in the United States after the Second World War. By revisiting B. F. Skinner’s approaches to behavioural techniques and cultural engineering, and by showing how these principles were applied first at US design departments, and later to prison education, it argues that cybernetic and behavioural techniques merged in the common field of design and education. Behavioural design of the 1960s and 1970s furthered the cybernetic dream of total control over the world by addressing the learning environment rather than the individual, and operated within a space of possibility that was governed equally by technology and aesthetics. Behavioural design can therefore be understood as a political technology.

scholarly journals Fear of Falling Behind and the Medicalization of Computer Attitudes in Cold War USA (1960s–1980s)/Angst vor dem Zurückbleiben. „Computerphobia“ in den USA während des Kalten Krieges (1960er bis 1980er Jahre)

2019 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Ginevra Sanvitale
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Fear Of Falling ◽  
Computer Anxiety ◽  
Computer Attitudes ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Large Computer ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

This article explores the multifaceted ways in which fear has informed US computer narratives during the Cold War, by analyzing the relationship be­ tween “fear of falling behind” and the medicalization of “computer attitudes”, “computer anxiety” and “computerphobia” (CAAP). The article focuses on the historical unfolding of this medicalization process from the 1960s to the 1980s, drawing upon the parallel developments of debates about computers in education and the formalization of CAAP as a research topic in the Behav­ ioral Sciences. These developments are presented through official reports, conference proceedings, and academic articles of the period. Large computer projects by the US military­industrial complex, such as SAGE or SDI, were justified by narratives of the fearful consequences of falling behind in the Cold War. From the 1960s onwards, resistance to computers was described as an individual “anxiety” or “phobia” in a number of reports and studies. These negative feelings allegedly hindered personal and professional success as well as endangered the future of the country. In this way, the Cold War “fear of falling behind” was translated into a concern which was rooted in the individual sphere. Furthermore, CAAP definitions were informed by Cold War ambitions of building a technologically advanced capitalist society. As a result, the medicalization of CAAP marginalized competing perspectives on computers and their social significance, particularly those originating in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Fitting In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanee Gupta-Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
South Asian Women ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fitting In ◽  
Racial Ethnic

This chapter describes the experiences of four South Asian women who grew up in Muncie, Indiana, in the 1960s and 1970s, and of the author’s relationship with them. It situates their experiences within the scholarship on race and ethnicity. Through auto-ethnography, it analyzes how a marking of foreign-ness upon the individual women’s bodies created a consciousness that served at varying times as a source of pride, of shame, protection, and/or confusion. It proposes re-imagining the American landscape as not browner and less Christian than in the past but rather as a space where racial, ethnic, and religious differences were always already embedded.

Best Laid Plans: An Archaeology of Architectural Anomalies in Bronze Age Crete

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Built Form ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Scholarly Discourse ◽  
Air Circulation ◽  
The Town

Approaches to Minoan architecture (Graham 1962; Preziosi 1983; Hitchcock 2000; Shaw 2009, 2015; Letesson 2009; McEnroe 2010) have focused on its positive qualities, and since Evans’s excavations in the early years of the twentieth century the perceived modernity of Minoan architecture has been manifest both in scholarly discourse (Farnoux 1993; Schoep 2010: 222) and in popular representations in various media. Sophisticated, delightful, and above all planned—for while bull-leaping, labyrinths, and even kingship have all come under sceptical scrutiny, the existence of a Daedalus, at least as the personification of the creative genius of Minoan architecture, has been tacitly accepted. Any argument over the idea that Minoan architecture was designed, and furthermore designed with goals well appreciated today (e.g. maximizing light and air circulation, controlling for privacy, providing aesthetic pleasure) tends to be over the degree to which such planning can be demonstrated or proven from the existing evidence. That the goal itself, designed or planned building, was likely to have been desirable or effective is not usually questioned. Likewise, there are signs of civic or town planning, to the extent of a conceptual order imposed on the built form, implying an abstract higher level authority controlling private or lower level space, or at least the needs of the town superseding those of the individual structures within (Cunningham 2001; Buell 2014; see also chapter 9). And again, while we may disagree over the extent or penetration of such authority, or the appropriateness of the terminology, the idea that town planning might have had a deleterious effect on social bonding is rarely, if ever, considered. This is interesting, since in studies of architecture and town planning in modern times, at least since the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly clear that planning towns and buildings is extremely hard and that even the best intentioned, most competent, and well-supported efforts not only often fail but regularly have the opposite effect as was intended.

A Return to the Magic Bullet?

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Cueto
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Temperate Climate ◽  
Magic Bullet ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Steady Growth ◽  
General Decline ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
And Control

This chapter examines the recent cycle of malaria elimination and control efforts and to raise some questions about the future of global health. It discusses policy changes that occurred against the background of the slow but steady growth of a killer that is second in its global impact only to tuberculosis. Despite a general decline in malaria morbidity during the 1960s and 1970s, especially in semitropical and temperate climate zones, the number of cases and deaths increased in the following years. Among the social factors that explain malaria's increase in the developing world were floods of refugees fleeing civil wars and famine, the marked precariousness of medical systems during a period of structural adjustment, and the growing number of unemployed rural people moving to previously uncultivated lands where infection rates were higher and medical care was scarce.

United States Relations with Southern Rhodesia during the UDI Era

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddie Michel
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
White House ◽  
Unilateral Declaration ◽  
The Us ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) era, a 14-year period from 1965 to 1979, posed an exceptional and challenging policy dilemma for four separate US presidential administrations. Presidents’ Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, and Jimmy Carter were all confronted by the presence of the internationally unrecognized pariah state in southern Africa. The shifting patterns in the US approach toward Salisbury ranging from empathy to open hostility were reflective not only of the individual viewpoints of the occupants of the Oval Office but represented the larger diverse pressures, global and domestic, shaping foreign policy during the 1960s and 1970s. The Cold War, economic interest, the need for strategic minerals, race relations, and human rights all guided White House decision making regarding Salisbury. Across the presidential administrations, the case of Rhodesia, further exposes the tension and interaction between pragmatism and morality in US foreign relations during the 1960s and 1970s. The US approach toward the UDI state not only reveals broad patterns of conflict between realpolitik and moral justice but also depicts times when pragmatism and ethical considerations aligned together to achieve mutually compatible goals. The differing polices adopted by the occupants of the Oval Office demonstrated the competing visions within Washington itself of what constituted pragmatism or morality during the decolonization era.

scholarly journals Personal Experiences in Post-Shoah Greece: The Case of Isaak Menahem Rousso

HISTOREIN ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Droumpouki
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Process ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Post Traumatic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Jewish Survivors

In December 1971, twelve years after his first letter to the West German government, 73-year-old Isaak Menahem Rousso exclaimed: “I ask you, what did I do to you for you to destroy my wealth, my shops? You killed my parents, and now you want to pay me a pittance”? The article focuses on the individual struggle of a Jewish survivor to receive compensation from the Federal Republic of Germany, as can be traced in the personal archive of Isaak Menahem Rousso. It examines the numerous letters he sent to German officials during the 1960s and 1970s, documents and contextualises his feelings of despair, fear and anger, and elucidates upon them. These feelings are typical for the Greek Jewish survivors that sought compensation. Survivors complained that the claims evaluation process constituted an unpleasant and inhumane experience. Many found it very difficult to return to the past and remember their suffering, as some of them already felt guilt or shame for having survived, not to mention the pain that reliving these traumatic experiences incurred. Many victims suffered from post-traumatic disorders and it was not easy to revive these experiences. Through Isaak Menahems’ story, I want to explore the survivors’ feelings in their search for recognition and compensation.

scholarly journals The Individual and Contemporary in Yuliy Raizman's Late Work

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 144-153
Author(s):  
Artyom Olegovich Sopin
Keyword(s):  
Late Work ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Made In

The article examines the films made in the 1960s and 1970s by the filmmakers who became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Some particular aspects of their adaptation to the new means of artistic expressiveness and adherence to certain themes are analyzed as exemplified by the work of Yuliy Raizman who collaborated with screenwriter Ye. I. Gabrilovich, namely, by their mutual films Your Contemporary (1967), A Strange Woman (1977) and Raizman's Courtesy Call (1972).

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