Automaton synonym7/22/2023 He often juxtaposes artifacts and ideas that seem unrelated at first glance, in order to draw out themes that cut across the disciplinary boundaries of literary and intellectual history. Watson's work in behavioral psychology, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, theories of post- and trans-humanism, fiction and nonfiction representations of "brainwashing," and cinematic and televisual representations of figurative and literal robots. Selisker analyzes an astounding array of sources in this study, including John B. ![]() Human Programming ultimately expands discussions about the "humanist-posthumanist divide" (p.9) by demonstrating how the idea of automatism has been used to create a human-subhuman divide-one that distinguishes the presumably free-thinking American from the racial, religious, or political Other. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière, and Cary Wolfe. Human Programming also engages more directly with such scholars as Donna Haraway, N. ![]() In its exploration of the entangled concepts of humanness and mechanism, it brings to mind Steve Woolgar's "Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism" from The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (MIT, 2012). Its methodology resembles the scholarship of Leo Marx, Priscilla Wald, and others like myself who blend literary and cultural history. ![]() While this book does not purport to be a history of technology, it will interest cultural historians-especially those who study the ethics of technology and rhetoric. Scott Selisker's Human Programming examines the idea of the human automaton and traces how it has inflected the understanding of freedom and unfreedom in the United States from the 1940s through today.
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