Panic diaries: Cybernetics, psychiatry, and the technoscientific control of social dis-ease

My research attempts a partial genealogy and critical cultural history of the experience of panic-terror, and its discursive production and control through the 20th century human sciences of social psychology and psychiatry. Shaped by the theoretical methods suggested by Michel Foucault's histories of bodies, institutions, and power, and indebted to the intellectual politics of feminist and postmodernist writings, this project tries to restage the symptomatic terrors of panicked bodies within the context of a profoundly social disease. In particular, I identify the post-World War II emergence of cybernetic science to explain the militarized intelligence driving Cold War models of collective panic, and contemporary notions of individualized panic and mental disorder, as problems in communication and control. The ‘re-adjustment’ of dysfunctional collective or individualized perceptions via the re-engineering of information circuits (in the social system, or in the central nervous system) becomes the treatment technology of choice for ‘normalizing’ these panicky disorders.; This story of panic and its cybernetic control is organized around three historical moments. First, I examine the famous ‘mass hysteria’ reportedly created by Orson Welles' production of The War of the Worlds , broadcast over CBS radio on the eve of World War II. Foregrounding the intersections of academic, state, and corporate interests influencing research on public reactions to the radio drama, I suggest how this ‘panic broadcast’ sets the stage for methodological advances in survey research and public opinion polling achieved in the technoscientific crucible of total war. Second, I took at state-sponsored Cold War anxieties over the threat of nationwide panic in the event of atomic war, and the emergence of an interdisciplinary discourse of ‘cybernetic functionalism’ committed to the technoscientific modelling, and management, of communication disorders in both social and biological bodies.; Finally, I trace the transformations in psychiatric diagnostic language and treatment techniques culminating in the 1980 introduction of ‘panic disorder’ as an individualized mental disease. I argue that the new science of psychiatry—indebted to cybernetic models of the central nervous system as an information-processing device—begins to target evermore specific psychic symptoms with evermore ‘smart’ drugs (i.e. pharmaceutical treatments), aimed at reconfiguring ‘errors’ in the communication system purportedly controlling the human brain and behavior.