Notices by Kris Kelvin ★ (kris@gerzilla.de), page 26

Can we honestly say that a society that is based on release of the instincts, on gratification, and on a turning away from guilt, at least at the conscious level, is a freer, more just, and more civilized society than the repressive one it replaced?

While the cybernetics movement did not survive, the data, informational, or network-based view of the world gained increasing ground. Turning points include the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, which made it possible to think of biology in terms of informational algorithms; the growth of neuroscience and cognitive psychology in the 1970s, which replaced psychoanalysis in the universities; and the development of the microprocessor in the 1980s, which made small portable computers, screens, and interfaces ubiquitous. Within the polycentric, market-oriented, media-permeated world that developed, ideas of depth and interiority gave way to ideas of network, image, and feedback and of signs, folds, and nets. Gilles Deleuze is probably the most influential single exponent of this shift.

"Today, many—perhaps most—psychiatrists believe that the Freudian turn away from the study of the brain to the study of the unconscious mind was a wasteful detour, and they have returned to the nineteenth-century neurology in which Freud was originally trained."