Plastic Publics

My dissertation offers an intellectual history of the various technological, aesthetic, affective, and overtly political encounters that modulate people—not so much as individuals but as connected and controllable social groups, as well as processes of locating and then reconfiguring ourselves within networks. This is what I have come to refer to as plastic publics, keeping in mind the double-meaning of plasticity—that it is at once about altering and holding form. I propose ‘rethinking’ cultural shifts in behavioral determinism (the shaping of people) over the last 150 years, tying them to relations with technology and developments in neuroscience, to understand the governance of plastic publics. What emerges is an understanding of control that extends beyond coercion and instead relies on the brain’s mechanisms for learning, understanding, building habits, and making decisions to program and compose publics. New technologies have allowed an intimacy of control that has been absent since humans self-organized in small social groups. This, I will argue, is the “dark side” of McLuhan’s global village. Developments that have taken place as part of industrial capitalism’s shift into consumer capitalism, a framework driven by mass consumption that peaked in the twentieth century, signaled a trend of denoetization, or the loss of the ability to think critically that foregrounds the affective, contagious, and, in this sense, mimetic techniques at work/play in administering publics under the conditions of neurocapitalism. Digital networked technologies have altered the way information flows and how people communicate, but also the shape and composition of publics, in which we deem ourselves and become not subjects, but projects, always modulating. What has been emerging is a new form of social control that is conceptualized here as “incontinence.” We now have a neuroscientific framework that recognizes and seeks to understand the changes that occur when we plug into the rapid feedback mechanisms in networked culture, but we have yet to come to terms with the implications on a scale beyond the individual. If we want to reimagine the story of control, what we really want to do is reimagine the story of feedback.