Daniel Belgrad is associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida and author of The Culture of Spontaneity, also published by The University of Chicago Press.
Belgrad offers a valuable reassessment of the American 1970s in this wide-ranging, clearly written account of an ecological 'culture of feedback' whose diverse roots ranged from Norbert Wiener's cybernetics to Gary Snyder's explorations of Native American philosophy, and whose theories of self-organizing coevolutionary development animated such varied endeavors as John Lilly's work with dolphins and Brian Eno's ambient music. Belgrad's superb intellectual history counters the widespread notion that the decade was marked by a narcissistic national decline. --Jeffrey L. Meikle, author of Design in the USA Recommended. . . Belgrad has made a significant contribution to understanding the 1970s. --Choice There's something particularly enjoyable about a volume of intellectual history that deals with serious ideas but also makes some room for their less respectable offspring. --Inside Higher Ed This book is a glittering kaleidoscope, spinning through cybernetic theory, ecofeminism, the music of Brian Eno, and the songs of whales. As important as it is fun, The Culture of Feedback shows us how science and American culture shaped each other in the 1970s and, in the process, shaped our lives today. --Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture