Amid today’s geopolitical turmoil, armed violence, and information warfare, parallels could be drawn to the charged global tension and ideological polarization of the Cold War. Since the advent of the nuclear age, militarized nationalist and (neo-)colonial regimes have rarely relied on ideological agitation alone. Rather, they are characterized by the use of data processing and communication technologies for mobilizing, extracting, analyzing, and manipulating information and collective affects: a form of subjectivation dependent on complex media environments that are neither exclusively civil or military, commercial or public, epistemic or governmental. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore such “ecologies of mind” and their shaping of the psychologized self during the Cold War. 

Responding to the moment of charged geopolitical tensions, ideological polarization, and technocratic rationalities, psychologist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the notion of “ecology of mind” to account for a distributed subjectivity that resists a mechanistic understanding. Drawing on the transdisciplinary language of cybernetics, as well as from anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and information theory, Bateson described cognitive and psychic processes as embedded within—and in constant feedback with —the broader social systems of information exchange. In his 1972 anthology Steps to an Ecology of Mind, he remarked:

Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self.

According to this vision, the organic and inorganic worlds, the tangible and the discursive, the social and the political, as well as the technological and the aesthetic constitute an environment intertwined with the self that expands the mind and decenters the subject. This recursive epistemology foregrounds context instead of atomization, feedback instead of linear causalities.

Upsetting the limited focus on Bateson’s immediate sphere of activity, we welcome research on parallel and intersecting projects across disciplines and political boundaries that share a common orientation toward the subjectivity as distributed, relational, and ecological. Rather than casting Bateson as an anomaly within Cold War rationality, this conference asks how his ecological approach was itself situated within a broader discursive, political, social, and techno-scientific environments. In this way, it invites to decenter Bateson’s inquiry through various related and simultaneous investigations into the environments of the self––namely, the ecologies of mind––in the Cold War.

A detailed Program will follow.