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Abstract
This essay examines Brain: The World Inside Your Head, a traveling museum exhibit sponsored by Pfizer, to show how the dissemination of psychiatric vocabularies aligns corporate and individual interests. The spatial composition of the museum and its interactive exhibits interpellate visitors as active agents capable of expressing their experiences through the scientific vocabularies of contemporary neuroscience. The gentle and benevolent conditioning to a way of thought and a manner of speaking, rather than a “hard sell” approach, makes pharmaceutical remedy an obvious and desirable mode of self care.
Acknowledgements
She would like to thank Dr Sloop and the anonymous reviewers for their help with this work.
Notes
1. Nikolas Rose, “Neurochemical Selves,” Society (November/December 2003): 46–59.
2. Rose, “Neurochemical Selves,” 46.
3. See Paul Rodriguez, “Talking Brains: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of an Emerging Folk Neuropsychology,” Public Understanding of Science 15 (2006): 301–30; and Wolfgang Wagner, “Vernacular Science Knowledge: Its Role in Everyday Life Communication,” Public Understanding of Science 16 (2007): 7–22.
4. Robert Crawford, “Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life,” International Journal of Health Services 10 (1980), 365–88.
5. Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 283.
6. Monica Greco, “Psychosomatic Subjects and the ‘Duty to be Well’: Personal Agency within Medical Rationality,” Economy and Society 22 (1993): 357–72.
7. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–104.
8. Crawford, “Healthism,” 380–1.
9. As of November 2007, the exhibit continues to tour the United States and is currently at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. It is scheduled for venues around the country through May of 2008. See http://www.pfizer.com/brain/dates.html (accessed 4 November 2007).
10. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 181.
11. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 181.
12. See Christine Harold, Ourspace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) for a discussion of marketing and the society of control from a rhetorical perspective. Other key works on marketing in this context include Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999) and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
13. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript.” See also Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–500.
14. Deleuze, “Postscript,” 179.
15. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000), x.
16. See for example: Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Timothy Luke, Museum Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, New Edition (Verso, 2006); and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
17. Sharon MacDonald, “Supermarket Science? Consumers and ‘The Public Understanding of Science,’” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon MacDonald (New York: Routledge, 1998), 118.
18. See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Exhibitionary Complexes,” in Museum Frictions, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne Kratz, Lynn Szwaja and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 35–45; and in the same volume, Tony Bennett, “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” 46–69.
19. Bennett, “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” 57.
20. Timothy Luke, Museum Politics, 224; MacDonald, “Supermarket Science,” 126.
21. John Durant, “Introduction,” in Museums and the Public Understanding of Science, ed. John Durant (London: Science Museum in Association with the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science, 1992), 8.
22. Houston Health Museum website, http://www.thehealthmuseum.org/OtherDisplay.aspx?PageID=160 (accessed 26 May 2007).
23. Houston Health Museum website, http://www.mhms.org/ (accessed 26 May 2007).
24. Sharon MacDonald, “Supermarket Science? Consumers and ‘The Public Understanding of Science,’” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon MacDonald (New York: Routledge, 1998), 123.
25. Pfizer, Brain: The World Inside Your Head Virtual Tour, http://www.pfizer.com/brain/etour.html (accessed 26 May 2007).
26. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73.
27. Andrew Barry, “On Interactivity: Consumers, Citizens and Culture,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon MacDonald (New York: Routledge, 1998), 100.
28. Evergreen Exhibitions, “Interactives in the Exhibit,” 2005, http://www.evergreenexhibitions.com/en/art/?7 (accessed 26 May 2007).
29. See Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16–49.
30. The success of interactives is contested. For instance, Heath, vom Lehn and Osborne find that the forms of interaction likely to take place are “prescribed by the exhibit” (94) and minimal in effect. Alan Gross argues that so-called interactives reinforce the “passivity” (13) of visitors. Although the impact of interactives is likely overstated by the Brain exhibit's producers, Brain does feature a variety of opportunities for social interaction and encourages activity through its displays and its extensions into the home and school. See Christian Heath, Dirk vom Lehn and Jonathon Osborne, “Interaction and Interactives: Collaboration and Participation with Computer-Based Exhibits,” Public Understanding of Science 14 (2005): 91–101 and Alan Gross, “The Roles of Rhetoric in the Public Understanding of Science,” Public Understanding of Science 3 (1994): 3–23.
31. Jose Bonner, “Changing Strategies in Science Education,” Science 8 (2004): 228.
32. Barry, “On Interactivity,” 102.
33. Monica Greco, “Psychosomatic Subjects and the ‘Duty to be Well’: Personal Agency within Medical Rationality,” Economy and Society 22 (1993): 357–72.
34. Pfizer, Brain: The World Inside Your Head Virtual Tour, http://www.pfizer.com/brain/etour.html (accessed 26 May 2007).
35. Greco, “Psychosomatic Subjects,” 357.
36. Greco, “Psychosomatic Subjects,” 359.
37. See also Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
38. See Steven Shapin, “Cordelia's Love: Credibility and the Social Studies of Science,” Perspectives on Science 3 (1995): 270.
39. Rose, “Neurochemical Selves,” 57.
40. Generally, the interiorization of psychiatric vocabularies produces subjects who think and act differently than subjects conditioned, for example, to a psychological vocabulary. The very nature of subjectivity is transformed: Graham Richards describes how the public uptake of psychotherapeutic vocabularies created people's experiences in very specific ways, channeling them to view and act according to terminologies such as “project, repress, regress.” Shapin writes of the relationship between “the extent to which they [psychological vocabularies] are vernacularized” and “the extent to which they actually come to constitute the phenomenal base to which they refer.” Human science can, he writes, regenerate and recreate “human nature.” See Graham Richards, On Psychological Language and the Physiomorphic Basis of Human Nature (New York: Routledge, 1989), 85; and Shapin, “Cordelia's Love,” 267 (emphasis in original).
41. Rajan uses “patients-in-waiting” to describe the enlargement of “therapeutic markets.” See Rajan, Biocapital, 176.
42. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 26.
43. Rose, Inventing Ourselves, 77.
44. Evergreen Exhibitions, “Sponsor Benefits,” http://www.evergreenexhibitions.com/sponsorship/index.asp (accessed 26 February 2007).
45. James Clifford uses the term “contact zones” for museums to describe their role as a relational space of ongoing contact rather than static collections. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997).
46. “Brain Basics Speaker Series” flyer, “Brain Fun Night” flyer and “Excellent Field Trip Opportunity” flyer retrieved at the Houston Health Museum (11 March 2007).
47. Mike Beirne and Sandra O’ Loughlin, “Field Trips Appeal to Kids and Companies,” Brandweek 47 (15 May 2006): 40.
48. Beirne and O’ Laughlin, “Field Trips Appeal,” 40.
49. Lynn Uyen Tran, “Teaching Science in Museums: The Pedagogy and Goal of Museum Educators,” Science Education 91 (2007): 278.
50. Martin Braund and Michael Reiss, “Towards a More Authentic Science Curriculum: The Contribution of Out-of-School Learning,” International Journal of Science Education 28 (2006): 1373–1388; Doug Knapp, “A Longitudinal Analysis of an Out-of-School Science Experience,” School Science & Mathematics 107 (2007): 44–51.
51. Pfizer, Brain: The World Inside Your Head Teacher's Activity Guide, available by request from Pfizer and at http://www.pfizer.com/brain/teachers.html (accessed 26 May 2007).
52. Pamphlet retrieved at the Houston Health Museum, 11 March 2007. Also available by request from Pfizer and at http://www.pfizer.com/brain/brochure.html (accessed 26 March 2007).
53. In addition to Zoloft, Pfizer markets a number of other psychiatric medications, including Nardil, Xanax and Sinequan.
54. There are other dimensions of governmentality that could be explored, in addition to the focus on pharmaceutical corporations’ profits. In this essay, I am less concerned with exhaustively identifying the particular interests that motivate each of the diverse agencies involved than attending to the museum as a site of coordination and interaction, and examining how individuals are interpellated as active participants in this space. Other scholars have documented the relationships between brain discourses, including the politics of mental health and illness, and various institutional interests (prison, state, education, corporate). For example, in addition to Pfizer's economic interest, the state has an interest in using the politics of mental illness and brain biology as a means of managing subjects and maximizing the efficiency of disciplinary power. For examples, see Robert Castel, “From Dangerousness to Risk,” 281–98; Jacques Donzolet, “Pleasure in Work,” 251–80; and Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” all in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991).