Rise of the Brain: Envisioning Human Potential in 1980s China

Abstract This essay takes the science documentary The Brain Ocean (1989), produced at the Shanghai Science and Education Film Studio, as a point of departure to explore prevailing discourse and imaginary of the brain as a seat of human intelligence, potential, and hierarchy in the late 1980s. Treating cinema as a point of confluence where ideas from various disciplines such as neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and cybernetics, coalesced to create figuration for reform ontologies, the essay analyzes this new centrality of the brain as part of the scientistic cultural formation that reordered the hierarchies between mental and menial labor, subsumed the human subject back into the ontological closedness of systems thinking, and paved way for the technocratic and neoliberal governmentality that were to come in the 1990s and beyond.