Rise of the Brain
Envisioning Human Potential in 1980s China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12424250 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ying Qian (0000-0002-4759-9968, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 451-473 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-25 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | positions asia critique (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1067-9847 • E-ISSN: 1527-8271 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10679847-11818950 |
| OpenAlex | W4412717933 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
This essay takes the science documentary The Brain Ocean (1989), produced at the Shanghai Science and Education Film Studio, as a point of departure to explore prevailing discourse and imaginary of the brain as a seat of human intelligence, potential, and hierarchy in the late 1980s. Treating cinema as a point of confluence where ideas from various disciplines such as neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and cybernetics, coalesced to create figuration for reform ontologies, the essay analyzes this new centrality of the brain as part of the scientistic cultural formation that reordered the hierarchies between mental and menial labor, subsumed the human subject back into the ontological closedness of systems thinking, and paved the way for the technocratic and neoliberal governmentality that were to come in the 1990s and beyond
Art · Autopoiesis · Biopower · Centrality · China · Cognitive science · Episteme · Epistemology · Governmentality · Hierarchy · Literature · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Technocracy · The Imaginary · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Science, Research, and Medicine
Just One Child
Age of System
The Exemplary Society
Chinese Cinema's Economic Reform from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s
Information Fantasies
Revolutionary Becomings
Feral children
Simulating Marx
Ex-centric Cinema
Is the Post in Postsocialism the Post in Posthumanism
The Subject of Freedom at the End of History
| Highly cited | No |
|---|