Abstract

The article is an examination of the 1930 play Brain. A Play of the Whole Earth, by an obscure early twentieth-century British writer, Lionel Britton, in the light of the writings of Polish Jewish physician and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck and the sociologist Émile Durkheim. A consideration of the notion of collectivity as depicted in the text, its complex representation of a posthuman existence, and the unusual generic characteristics of the play lead to the suggestion that Brain may be regarded as a utopian bildungsroman whose main focus is the life of an idea in society.