The Human Sciences after the Decade of the Brain (original) (raw)
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Neuroscience and Critique. Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn
Recent years have seen a rapid growth in neuroscientific research, and an expansion beyond basic research to incorporate elements of the arts, humanities and social sciences. It has been suggested that the neurosciences will bring about major transformations in the understanding of ourselves, our culture and our society. In academia one finds debates within psychology, philosophy and literature about the implications of developments within the neurosciences, and the emerging fields of educational neuroscience, neuro-economics, and neuro-aesthetics also bear witness to a ‘neurological turn’ which is currently taking place.
Isis, 2014
Taking the neuro-turn is like becoming the victim of mind parasites. It's unwilled (although there are those who will it at a superficial level for various strategic reasons). You can't see mind parasites; they make you think things without allowing you to know why you think them. Indeed, they generate the cognitive inability to be other than delighted with the circumstances of your affected cognition. It's not as if you can take off your thinking cap and shoo the pests away. You can't see them-or even know that you could want to. You can't stand on the outside looking in at your cognitive processes. But historically speaking, you are also inside a (broadly postmodern) culture and (broadly neoliberal) socioeconomic order that places the legitimacy of the neuro beyond critique. And the neuro-turn does more: it delegitimizes critique itself, at least as we have known it since Marx. This essay briefly explores how we got here, what the "here" is, and what its implications are for historical critique. I T IS ALL TOO EASY, especially for historians of science, to dismiss today's neuroturn in popular and academic culture. If it isn't exactly a repeat performance of nineteenth-century phrenology, with its reductions of mind, ethics, and character to cerebral biology, it's surely much the same old story of lighting up parts of the brain to rationalize and naturalize compulsions to social justice, "bad" parenting, artistic creativity, and so on. "Human nature," once again innate, is made historically transcendent. But it would be wrong to be so lightly dismissive, as if apparent continuities explained anything or contexts didn't matter. With regard to both, it would be an even worse error to think that those in the humanities and social sciences now taking the neuro-turn are simply moving on from prior "turns"-cultural, literary, somatic, visual, spatial, and so on. The fact is, we haven't been here before, and what is new is so new that what's running
This article considers how the brain has become an object and target for governing human beings. How, and to what extent, has governing the conduct of human beings come to require, presuppose and utilize a knowledge of the human brain? How, and with what consequences, are so many aspects of human existence coming to be problematized in terms of the brain? And what role are these new ‘cerebral knowledges’ and technologies coming to play in our contemporary forms of subjectification, and our ways of governing ourselves? After a brief historical excursus, we delineate four pathways through which neuroscience has left the lab and became entangled with the government of the living: psychopharmacology, brain imaging, neuroplasticity and genomics. We conclude by asking whether the ‘psychological complex’ of the twentieth century is giving way to a ‘neurobiological complex’ in the twenty-first, and, if so, how the social and human sciences should respond.
In an intellectual atmosphere still marked by the ideological failures of the twentieth century, the expectations for neuroscience are extremely high, even in fields traditionally sheltered from the seductions of neurobiological explanations, such as political theory, sociology and philosophy. In an attempt to problematize the reception that this neuroscientific vocabulary has received, I provide in this article a cartography of three major lines of philosophical criticism of neuroscience – ‘conceptual’, ‘societal’ and ‘embodied-enactive’ – put forward recently by philosophers of different intellectual traditions. Although these criticisms are important in shedding light on some epistemological inconsistencies of the neuroscientific programme, the need remains to supplement this philosophical work with a different kind of critique, one that could address more directly the social and political relevance of neuroscience as well understand our epoch's urge to ‘turn neurobiological’ previously cultural or sociological phenomena.
This thesis seeks to trace the escalating shift from mind to brain and resulting changes in understandings of care for the self, emergent in part through growing influence of neuroethics and related calls for ‘neuro-enhancement’ of the ethical subject. This study – propelled largely through a critical discourse analysis of recent disciplinary output and public engagement – is particularly interested in observing the increasing confidence of neuroscience-informed perspectives on humanity, with announcements that we are witnessing a so-called ‘Second Enlightenment’. Such calls for a new ontology of ethics, I argue, amounts to overly ‘expansive’ claims funnelled through increasingly ‘intensive’ gazes. Within the rise of neuroscience more broadly, empirical neuroethics proclaims its epistemic privilege with respect to tracing our moral selfhood, in part through its location of measures of the ethical subject within functionally ascribed activity traced at the neurological level. Once elusive properties of conduct and wellbeing are now sought to be registered in the common currency of this synaptic ledger, exclusively overseen by specialists in this new field of expertise. The thesis then explores the subsequent adoption of this new empirical currency by those practicing a ‘hard’ transhumanism. Advocates of this position urge us to embrace methods of cognitive and moral ‘enhancement,’ lest we find ourselves unfit for the future in a world of ever-escalating risk. However, I argue that dominant framings of care of the self within neuroethics tend to be narrowly construed. I suggest that by failing to recognise the socio-historical contingencies of their claims, neuroethicists risk producing rigid, stultifying, and perhaps even self-defeating constructs of the ideal citizen. The personal ethos advanced by these new technologies of the self creates new forms of personal responsibility, which, consistent with neoliberal ideals of progress, involves a perpetual labour upon one's brain as a mode of accumulation strategy. This threatens to become a cruel labour that ultimately jars with our eventual and inevitable neurodegeneration. In response to this emerging ethos, I attempt to go beyond the constraints of a merely critical discourse to enable a more productive, if cautious, engagement with the claims of the new, applied neuro-disciplines. I consider what kind of differently expansive framing of subjectivity might be better suited to the present, compared with the ‘hyper-cognitive’ subject of certain ‘hard’ neuroscientific and neuroethical discourses. Contributing to the growing interest in the social sciences in the broad movement of ‘neurodiversity’, I turn to fictional accounts of dementia to see what might be learned from these literary sources. I argue that these literary explorations of subjectivity open up novel ways of reconceiving our relation to our neurology, and thus may play an important role in reimagining the self in a manner adequate to the complexity, urgency, and promise of our times. Though grounded primarily within the field of the sociology of science and technology, this thesis also draws extensively on related thought in poststructuralist critical and literary theory, while also maintaining an accessibility acutely attuned to the growing importance of interdisciplinary exchange.
Neuroscience as Applied Hermeneutics: Towards a critical neuroscience of political theory
Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory: Thinking the Body Politic., 2012
We apply the perspective of "critical neuroscience" to the field of political theory, inquiring into the prospects and pitfalls of letting political theory take "the neuro turn", and analyzing what this might mean concretely in the first place. We will assess some of the most challenging work in the field of “neuropolitics” – such as William E. Connolly’s 2002 book that goes by this title. We contrast these invocations of the modish prefix “neuro,” that proclaim to break with (allegedly) time-honored, intellectualist positions, with our own account of a critical neuroscience of political theory. While drawing on some of the ideas outlined in John Protevi’s book Political Affect (2009), we develop a two-level critique of hermeneutic elements in neuroscience, opening up new avenues for intervention. On the intra-disciplinary level, we will criticize the neglect, within standard interpretations of neuroscientific results, of the social and political influences upon cognitive development. By using neuroscientific results more strategically, political theory can gain a powerful tool to show how normative systems in different forms of society shape the cognitive and affective make-up of its members. Neuropolitics, as a normative endeavor of assessing varieties of political cohabitation, would then employ brain research instrumentally instead of contributing to an unwarranted inflation of its discursive authority.