Brain power: cruel optimism and neuro-liberalism in the work of Catherine Malabou

ABSTRACT

One of the under-theorised aspects of Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? is the overtly political project that underpins her discussion of a renewed conception of subjectivity. Malabou's political project is framed in radical and emancipatory terms, and yet the possibilities and limitations that stem from of a neurobiological account of politics have been left under-explored. Can we really locate in the brain a progressive politics, especially in the context of debates around mental illness, when so many groups and individuals are resistant to understanding themselves as their brains? Or is this affirmation of scientific materialism at risk of obscuring the realities and complexities of the materiality of cultural practice? In order to pursue the political consequences of her work, this paper looks to stage an encounter between Malabou's account of neuroplasticity and Lauren Berlant's notion of cruel optimism. This is done in order to ask: do Malabou’s own critiques of neoliberal flexibility run the risk of embracing a neuro-liberalism, in which an optimism regarding plasticity, individual liberty, and compromise between the humanities and life-sciences obscures the political limitations of neuroscience as a site for political-philosophy?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Francis Russell is the coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts Honours course at Curtin University. He has a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Curtin University, and researches the political and philosophical implications of mental illness, alongside conducting broader research into neo-liberal culture. He has published in Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Space and Culture, Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Cultural Studies Review, and Somatechnics. Along with the artist David Attwood, he is the co-editor of the essay collection, The Art of Laziness: Contemporary Art and Post-Work Politics, published by Art + Australia in 2020.

Notes

1 (Bataille 1985: 15)

2 While this debate is too vast for this paper to discuss, it is worth noting that there is much compelling literature from within psychiatry that seeks to critique precisely the therapeutic power of conventional pharmacotherapies for mental illness. See for example (Healy 2002; Moncrieff 2009, 2013)

3 Such a statement can give the appearance that Malabou holds Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Agamben to maintain a similar, if not identical, account of the transcendental. This is not the case, since Malabou’s account of the relation between the transcendental conditions of knowledge, and contemporary continental philosophy is more complicated than this. For clarification, see: (Malabou, 2014b).

4 For example, Berlant’s account of cruel optimism has been drawn on in gender studies (Ruti 2015), international relations (Zembylas 2016), and education studies (Lipton 2017).

5 This criticism is shared by Norman MacLeod (2016) and Susanne Lettow (2017).

6 Indeed, Malabou goes so far as to argue that a genealogical critique, one that might attempt to uncover the power relations through which the neuronal understanding of the human being has gained such discursive prominence, would already be ‘derived from one of the powers that it examines: that of cerebral organisation’, insofar as ‘this model of the field of forces and counterforces is precisely what is at work in cerebral functioning. It is time to recognise that, for at least half a century, the form of political critique largely follows the very neuronal model that it sometimes attempts to deconstitute’ (2012: 205).

7 Indeed, while Malabou’s most recent work has updated and critiqued her earlier stance on Artificial Intelligence and cybernetics—so as to include the possibility of plasticity at a computational level—a recent text like Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains has shown Malabou’s continued commitment to a liberal model of politics centred around rational debate and deliberative democracy (2019: 161). Malabou argues that the threat posed to democracy by big-data and artificial intelligence requires us to embrace ‘systemic consultation with cybercitizens’ in order to produce a ‘participatory digital democracy’ (2019: 161). For Malabou, the effects of advanced artificial computation on human life will require a ‘change in intersubjectivity based on the new legal, ethical, and social frameworks indispensable to the construction of chains of virtual mutual assistance that must become instances of true decision making’ (2019: 162). Again, Malabou appears to be committed to a vision of politics in which specific forms of rationality can truly facilitate deliberation and dialogue. The question this inevitably poses is how knowledge of the brain and neuroplasticity can function to produce a collective desire for political transformation, given the material reality of cultural and political antagonisms—relations of power that inhibit the capacity for deliberative democracy to truly expose itself to the heterogenous character of existing social formations. For more on the critique of deliberative democracy in relation to political antagonism see: Mouffe (1999).

8 Given Malabou’s commitment to scientific materialism, it might seem deeply counterintuitive to associate her work with any notion of idealism. Indeed, Malabou’s commitment to a certain form of scientific materialism is so unwavering, that she has had to preempt and contradict claims that she is a crude materialist, or that she views the brain as being reducible to its molecular instantiation (Johnston & Malabou 2013: 29-30). This charge of idealism, however, is not intended to suggest that Malabou views the brain as somehow independent from the reality of social practices—as if social reality is simply a product of or projection from the brain. Instead, the question of idealism in relation to Malabou’s work emerges through the status she grants to philosophical knowledge concerning the brain and the brain sciences. Without paying attention to the existing conflicts and alliances that exist within society, through which political movements and identities are formed, Malabou’s emphasis on a self-knowledge regarding plasticity suggests an idealist commitment to knowledge as metaphysically prior to social practice.