Both within and outside of the academy, most commentary treats neural engineering, and the “crisis of agency” it allegedly introduces, as something new. Yet my dissertation shows that technologies to modulate and record brain activity have been (1) a key factor in the creation of the discipline of neuroscience, (2) a central concern in the development of liberal ideologies of personhood and freedom, and (3) a critical feature of the what scholars have recently termed the “data economy” or “surveillance capitalism.” My work makes these arguments by offering the first monograph length scholarly study of neural engineering, documenting the rise, fall, and reappearance of brain implant technology. Techniques to stimulate and record the human brain were at the core of the creation of the discipline of neuroscience, and after 1951, long-term brain implant systems were used for research in dozens of human patients. The public backlash against brain engineering was enormous, allying both conservatives and New Left in the latter half of the 1960s, and by the late 1970s the once thriving research field had disappeared. But brain implants were not gone for good: in 2013, President Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to map the brain with a wireless brain implant called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) hailed as its flagship technology. While brain implants in the 1970s seemed to threaten the existence of an autonomous self on which both the free market and democracy were premised, brain implants in the era of big data promise dazzling economic value. The global brain stimulation market is projected to be worth $6.2 billion by 2022, much of it underwritten by US military funding, with data monopolists like Alphabet and Facebook vying with Elon Musk to establish brain implant labs. In contrast to prevalent commentary that takes brain implants to have introduced a crisis of the agentic human, I argue that neural engineering’s reappearance has been made possible by permutations in liberal ideologies of “freedom” and “the human”; changes which I argue are conditioned by rise of post-industrial or “data” capitalism. As a critical account of the neurosciences, the story my dissertation tells differs from the many accounts of “neurosubjectivity” currently influential in STS, which date changes in liberal conceptions of the human to the ascent of neuroscience in the 1990s. Instead, the work shows how the politics of “freedom” in the latter half of the twentieth century came to be defined against neural engineering as a foil. It documents how debates about brain implants played a central role in constructing key liberal political concerns; among them bioethics, privacy law, and the legal construction of the body as private property. These changes directly undergirded the subsequent development of the neurosciences, chiefly the Reagan-era fusion of the US academy with the biotech industry. In this way, the project shows that the 1970s defeat of neural engineering ramified into the necessary conditions for its re-emergence at the cutting edge of “data capitalism.” Ethnographic research for the project began in 2014, and I spent a total of 34 months in four labs in the US and France developing DBS for psychiatric disorder. 14 of those months were in a lab whose project was funded by DARPA, the experimental sciences branch of the US military. Archival research was conducted at 20 institutions. The dissertation begins in the 1930s by charting the network of neurophysiologists who would constitute the brain as an electrical organ. These neurophysiologists would form the first organization to call its object “neuroscience,” the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), funded by UNESCO in 1958 to bring together Soviet and Western neurophysiologists. IBRO’s aim was to construct a universal science of the brain, one that could resist the deforming hand of the US military state’s control of science. But IBRO would be defeated by the militarization of neuroscience in the late 1960s, and its progressive imagination for neural engineering would become a bête noir for the 1970s politics of freedom. The second section offers an intellectual history of the response to neural engineering 1951-76, from midcentury panics about “totalitarian” mind control to the New Left’s mobilization against “psychiatric technocracy.” I recount the key role of brain implant research in the 1972-76 Congressional hearings that would produce the fields of bioethics and medical privacy law, while causing neural engineering to disappear. The “reinvention” of DBS hinged on its application to movement disorders like Parkinson’s in the 1980s, which allowed scientists to frame the technology as one that restored, rather than violated, individual agency. The final section begins with 2005 research “breakthrough” that began investigating—“for the first time”— brain stimulation for psychiatric disorder. Drawing on my ethnographic work, the last section follows DBS research from clinical trials to biotech startups, mapping emerging conceptions and practices of selfhood, agency, and value production. I show how these practices of scientific experimentation rely on liberal contractual forms: an agentic “self” who “consents” to experimental procedures, even while the data produced by these experiments are reframing key concepts like “decisions,” “agency,” and “ownership.” I argue that this turn toward the data-productive brain does not signal the end of a politics of free will; rather, the new forms of “surveillance” capitalism enabled by brain implant research rely on strategically invoking the agentic liberal subject through legal forms like the contract and bioethical “consent.”

What are political thinkers doing with their words when they write a text, engage in a debate, or give a speech? We propose a "computational political theory", pairing recent breakthroughs in computational linguistics with the hermeneutic practices of intellectual history, as a set of tools for mapping out the political-discursive fields within which ideas circulate. We begin by showing, via a series of historical case studies, how a particular class of computational-linguistic algorithms called word embeddings are able to capture subtle differences in how authors employ certain contested terms (liberty, freedom, sovereignty, etc.) by explicitly modeling both the words and the contexts they're used in across a corpus of texts. We then demonstrate how the results of these embedding models can shed light on important questions in the history of political thought, by performing two in-depth studies of the origins and trajectories of Marxism from the 19th to the 20th century. In the first study, we use these models to trace the construction of Marx's thought out of the raw intellectual materials of 18th and early-19th century philosophy. We combine a new, comprehensive corpus of Marx's complete works from 1835 to 1883 ($N > 1200$) with a large sample ($N = 250$) of prominent 18th and early-19th century texts to measure conceptual distance between Marx's works and various schools of 19th-century thought (political economists, socialists, and Hegelian philosophers) over time. Two key breaks emerge in Marx's writings: (a) they become less Hegelian as he is exposed to Paris' brand of working-class-oriented socialism between 1843 and 1845, then (b) become more focused on issues of political economy over the remainder of his life in London, from 1849 onwards. Our second study turns from the origins to the illocutionary impacts of Marx's published works, assessing his influence on the broader socialist discourse of the 19th century using a corpus of \textit{post}-1850 socialist texts ($N = 200$). We find that Marx's semantic trajectory is mirrored, with a lag, by changes in the semantic trajectory of European socialist thought. This discourse shifts away from moralistic and Hegelian themes and towards a more positivistic political-economic vocabulary, especially after Marx's rise to public prominence in the wake of the 1871 Paris Commune. Our findings thus trace out, within the computationally-inferred ideological field of 19th-century socialist thought, how Marx's unique blend of German philosophy, French socialism, and British political economy defeated would-be competitors and established his thought as the default language of European socialism by the time of Engels' death in 1895. The dissertation thus demonstrates the utility of modern context-sensitive language models as tools for historical research, providing a framework for their use in developing, testing, and revising our understandings of key questions in the history of political thought.

This dissertation is an intransigent probing into the Enlightenment scientific conjectures and theories of the eighteenth century that fantasized into existence a character called ‘Man.’ It explores how the category of the human, particularly at the intersection of certain genres like ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ was elaborated in the scientific thought of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and later re-scripted in contemporary art, literature, and film, both from the Afro-diaspora and otherwise. Working at the nexus of several intersecting threads of scholarship, including comparative literature, black feminist theory, performance studies, slavery studies, memory studies, and the history of science, this dissertation examines how this Enlightenment scientific writing and experimentation on the human turned to people racialized black, specifically young women—their bodies, their children—to construct speculative (and to a large degree, enduring) conceptions of a Western ‘Man’ universalized as the only iteration of the human. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of the human was not a given but a problem, an unfixed nexus of ideas, contested beliefs, and scientific experiment central to the shifting conception of Western ‘Man.’ This dissertation sets out to emphasize both the “performative” and the “speculative” nature of these shifting perceptions as they were played out through the literal commodification of people racialized black and non-white. This commodification within scientific practice of the period not only perpetuated the ideologies of the system of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, but also directly informed the evolution of these competing, scientific theories of the human. The labor these individuals racialized non-white were asked to contribute in the name of eighteenth-century science (via, for instance, their circulation and participation as subjects in experiments) would support the continuation of a scientific empire unapologetically structured around an anthropocentric project of whiteness. This dissertation is structured around three core “Acts,” organized respectively around Denise Ferreira da Silva’s three onto-epistemological pillars of Western ‘Man’—separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. Each Act engages in reading practices in which the eighteenth-century archive is analyzed both through fiction and as a type of fiction. This type of reading helps denaturalize this Enlightenment archive’s performative fictions, pulling to the surface the speculative maneuvers at play in the formation of the category of ‘Man’ that continue, to this day, to present themselves as objective, axiomatic, factual, and universal. Through these cross-temporal analyses, this dissertation seeks to remain attentive to the ways in which the memories, postmemories, afterlives, and current-day lived legacies of this history all speak to a scholarly and artistic need to continue wrestling with the conundrums that this historical and intellectual construction of the human has left in its wake.

This dissertation explores the intellectual and cultural history of natural knowledge at the eighteenth-century court of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r.1782-1799), and the ways in which this knowledge was both a product of Mysore’s local context and its wider global connections. It argues that more attention to Mysore’s sources and perspective is needed in the history of science given the power and productivity of the court before it was conquered by the British East India Company (BEIC) in 1799. After 1799, the BEIC dispersed the Mysore’s court’s library and artifacts, and obscured the court’s contributions to knowledge-making. This dissertation demonstrates that Mysore’s library and gardens were sites of natural science collection, experimentation, and production worthy of study. The extant collection of Tipu Sultan’s manuscripts remains understudied, especially those related to science. This dissertation outlines the surviving library texts related to natural knowledge and provides case studies of particular manuscripts that showcase Tipu Sultan’s interest in collecting, organizing, and producing encyclopedic knowledge of nature and natural processes. It further emphasizes that many (often unnamed) hands and labors enabled the natural sciences to be produced and disseminated in the eighteenth century, through close readings of Persian, French, and English texts and diplomatic records related to Tipu Sultan’s court. It thus seeks to recover both the elite contributions of Tipu Sultan and his courtiers engaged in natural knowledge production as well as the more obscure, but no less vital contributions of unnamed actors.