Technoscience, Neuroscience, and the Subject of Politics

Abstract

Although narrative models have been employed for quite some time in historiography, in sociology, and in certain psychoanalytic theories, the tendency towards narrativization has also become more dominant in reference to the positive sciences. This article presents two postmodern versions of the narrative dissolution of certain modern scientific-metaphysical concepts in the wake of the establishment of technoscience and neuroscience: Vattimo's Heideggerian account of technoscience as immanent pluralization of worlds, and Dennett's cognitivist account of the emergence of the plural self. Both claim not only that former central agencies like the Cartesian cogito can be dismissed as metaphysical but that narrative pluralization entails an (at least implicit) endorsement of liberal democracy as the only viable political model today. Employing arguments put forth by Žižek and Malabou, some of the deficiencies of this affirmative short circuit of technoscience/neuroscience with liberal-democratic politics will be examined.

Notes

Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to both anonymous reviewers of an early version of this essay for their invaluable suggestions and criticisms; moreover, many of the ideas articulated here have had their origin in extensive discussions with Ben Schacht.

1. See Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

2. This is obvious, for instance, in Jurgen Habermas's quite conservative or even reactionary engagement with contemporary neuroscience—an engagement that exhausts itself in the (impossible) task to impose (humanist) limits on neuroscientific research. See Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003).

3. Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 15–27.

4. Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 7.

5. Ibid.

6. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism & Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, & Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 17.

7. Vattimo, Transparent Society, 117.

8. Gianni Vattimo, “Democracy, Reality, and the Media: Educating the Übermensch,” in Democracy and the Arts, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 150.

9. Vattimo, “Democracy, Reality, and the Media,” 154.

10. Vattimo, Nihilism & Emancipation, 83.

11. Ibid., 19.

12. Ibid., 96–97.

13. Vattimo, Transparent Society, 9.

14. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Back Bay Books, 1992), 107; subsequent references are cited in the text.

15. This is how Slavoj Žižek paraphrases this issue: “I see cognitive science as a kind of empirical version of deconstructionism. What is usually associated with deconstructionism is the idea that there is no unique subject, there is a multitude of dispersed processes competing between each other, no self-presence, the structure of différance and so on. And if we take this structure of différance, with its emphasis on deferral, one of the interesting conclusions of cognitive science is that, literally, we do not live in the present time”—see Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 54–55.

16. Slavoj Žižek, “The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 254.

17. Ibid., 255.

18. Ibid., 256.

19. Ibid., 256. Žižek has repeatedly examined narrative as the form of the ideological obfuscation of the subject; see, for instance, his For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991), 203–9; and his The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 10–13.

20. Žižek, “The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater,” 258–59.

21. Ibid., 260.

22. Ibid., 261. Žižek's complex project of rehabilitating the German idealist re-conceptualizations of the Cartesian subject is, of course, at the center of most of his philosophical works, beginning from his early The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), through Tarrying With the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), and The Indivisible Remainder (London: Verso, 1996), to The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999); the last text contains his most obvious defense of the Cartesian subject.

23. Žižek, “The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater,” 265.

24. Ibid.

25. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Foreword by Marc Jeannerod, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 72.

26. Ibid.

27. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 241. Here, Žižek develops his notion of (self-)consciousness as disturbance and short-circuit producing what German Idealism calls “self-relating negativity” via an analysis of the work of Antonio Damasio. In addition to this text, Žižek examines Dennett, and cognitivism in general, in several other texts; see, for instance, Conversations with Žižek, 54–60; Organs Without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004), 11–147. While the relation between cognitivist research and German idealist (and psychoanalytic) notions of the subject as central building blocks for a new theory of dialectical materialism pervades most of Žižek's more recent texts, it is in Adrian Johnston's magnificent Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), that these theoretical strands are forcefully and convincingly systematized; Johnston's work is certainly the most sophisticated and best among current Žižek studies.

28. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 33–38.

29. I draw here extensively on Fredric Jameson's unpublished manuscript entitled “Consciousness Explained Allegorically.”

30. Ibid.

31. Already this reference to meta-habits indicates the distance of Dennettian politics to a militant conception of politics; for a trenchant critique of the notion of habit (and its cognates such as judgment, opinion, consensus), see Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. and with an Introduction by Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005). Žižek fully endorses this critique; see, for instance, his In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 171.

32. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 2001).

33. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 1–2.

34. Ibid., 53.

35. Ibid., 53. Malabou develops the concept of plasticity, that is not so much flexible but rather negative, in her The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. L. During (London: Routledge, 2005).

36. This does not mean, however, that Malabou and Žižek would simply be in full agreement with each other; see Žižek's “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject: On Catherine Malabou's Les nouveaux blessés and Other Autistic Monsters,” accessed from www.soundandsignifier.com/files/ZIZEK-MALABOU.doc; I owe this reference to one of the anonymous reviewers of this essay.

37. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 68–77.

38. Ibid., 45–54.

39. Žižek traces the overdetermination of technoscience in his analyses of cyberspace; see his The Plague of Fantasies, 127–43.

40. See Žižek, The Parallax View, 321.

41. Alain Badiou, Manifesto For Philosophy, trans., ed. and with an Introduction by Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 58.

42. Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 1–2.