Please join us this Thursday at 5:30pm for a Rough Cut talk by Dylan Davidson, entitled “Neurodeterminism; or, the Cybernetic Logic of the Serotonin Meme”.
Register here to receive the Zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYof-mspz8jHdIZp7lg3if8stKQyPAMqlzY
This work in progress examines the conceptual origins and political implications of memes about neurotransmitters on Twitter and Instagram. As a neurologically-inflected self-help discourse has emerged on social media platforms, so too have image-sharing practices which explain, complicate, assent to, or resist the role of “The Brain” in determining the affective contours of our inner lives. By reading these images through the lens offered by the mid-20th-century metascience of cybernetics—an interdisciplinary milieu which shaped the development of both modern computing and the contemporary neurosciences—I identify structural parallels between, on the one hand, a teleological and de-agentializing model of affective experience predicated on neurochemical “messengers” such as dopamine and serotonin; and, on the other, the networked model of communication through which these images are transmitted and circulated. I ask whether the internet meme’s model of identificatory sociality offers an ethos of collectivity across difference that can help unravel the individualizing determinism of neurological self-help discourse, or if these image-sharing practices ultimately reinforce an atomized, neoliberal logic of self.