Interwar Imaginings of Collective Cognition

Abstract

Scholarship on interwar understandings of ‘collective cognition’ – experiences of intellectual union with others – tends to focus on its capacity to threaten individuality. I counter this trend by investigating prose works by H.D., Olive Moore, Rebecca West, and H.G. Wells that champion collective cognition for its capacity to compose communities. I argue that these texts point to an underexplored strand that existed in and alongside modernism in which authors turned to collective cognition to imagine radically egalitarian communities that transcend hierarchies based on history, nationality, and species. After the Second World War, the cultural meanings of collective cognition narrowed, and ‘thinking together’ came to be strongly associated with loss of freedom and loss of self. This article shows that collective cognition emitted a powerfully hopeful potential for a significant cluster of interwar authors, who used it to imagine the peaceful and abundant possibilities of collectivity.