Rex Troumbley

The spontaneous emergence of infectious mental disorders and virility of dangerous ideologies has long interested medical physicians and political institutions. Early mental health experts saw the susceptibility of human brains to external coercion as a simultaneous cause of mental illness and possible method of treatment. The famous French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot, for example, developed moral treatments designed to strengthen a patient's " will " to resist external influence while also experimenting with hypnosis as a means of weakening a patient's resistance to his suggestive influence. Similarly, Cold War fears over the possibility of Soviet " brainwashing " techniques imagined individuals and whole populations susceptible to communist ideologies and deployed counter-propaganda messaging through broadcast media. Medical exercises of power over patients and the truth of mental illness have been explored by many critical theorists, most notably Michel Foucault who famously described " psychiatric power " as an institutionalized " battle between patient and doctor. " However, the politics of psychiatric power mediation and the history of psychiatric theories treating human brains as a type of re-writable media have yet to be fully investigated. This course explores the processes by which contagious political thoughts and viral media technologies become the subject of psychiatric knowledge, diagnosis, and treatment. We will start by focusing on the medicalization of mental health using Michel Foucault's lectures on Psychiatric Power. However, we will break with Foucault's dependence on text in the archive by also investigating how mental health experts have employed emerging technologies to discover the causes of mental illness and develop treatments. To get a better understanding of psychiatric media, we will employ Friedrich Kittler's theory of " discourse networks " and Jussi Parikka's method of " media archaeology " on analyze clinical case studies, photographs, films, and web-content addressing the possibility of contagious mental illnesses. The course is organized around four major stages in the development of psychiatric media: the emergence and development of psychiatric writing, the use of image and sound recording technologies for capturing mental illness, the establishment of drug therapies and problem of media addiction, and the viral spread of dangerous ideas and mental disorders by digital networks.

This paper examines how the invention of “keywords” has been used in recent decades to transform words into “information” and form competing regimes of intelligibility or meaning. This paper applies the language and control theories of J. L. Austin, Norbert Wiener, Walter Ong, and Boris Gorys to demonstrate how word-meanings are often presumed as fixed and de-contextual when organizing or searching digital content, producing knowledge about complex subjects, and constructing automatic forms of censorship. Finally, this paper examines how the present culture of word curation is literally re-writing what constitutes correct or dangerous forms expression in electronically mediated discourse.

Cyber-utopian discourses have developed a blind spot in their promotion of the Internet as decentralized, difficult for governments to control, and inherently democratizing. They have ignored the massive control of private companies over our experiences of cyberspace or have championed these companies as vanguards in the fight for online freedom of expression. As a case study, this paper examines the private forms of censorship and control over conditions necessary for free expression online exercised by Google Inc. The paper argues that the scope of Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” represents a new form of geek politics which attempts to essentialize all social conflict to problems which can be solved by a technical fix or filtered out by smart algorithms. The paper concludes by arguing that this form of geek politics, backed by a wealthy Silicon Valley company responsible for the vast majority of Web searches in the Western world, controls the intelligibility of international online expression and hopes to colonize the Internet with American values, morality, and techno-optimism.

To understand the conditions under authorities allow taboos to be performed or censor obscenities, an examination of comedic routine called "The Aristocrats" using the concepts of "carnivalesque" and the "grotesque" body worked out by Mikhail Bakhtin is useful. Obscene comedic performances create a space in which it becomes appropriate to ridicule authority and to denigrate all that is noble or ideal. This paper argues that contemporary comedy temporarily reifies the limits between permitted and prohibited language, overturns and profanes the social hierarchies of everyday life, and operate as resistance to authority where political change can potentially take place.

The Internet has become the new tool of old fashioned colonialism. Digital corporations are organizing the world, extending their control over people and resources of the non-west, using the poor as cheap labor, and deny agency to those who are not white, do not speak English, and do not desire the same things as ‘white geeks.’